Dictatorship. Personal fiefdom. All about power.

The faces may have changed, but the complaints over One Nation’s power structure remain the same.

It’s been said before, and it’ll be said again, for the allegories over her red hair and the instant explosion her political arrival caused, but Pauline Hanson arrived on the Australian political scene like a firecracker.

From the moment she delivered her then closest adviser John Pasquarelli’s words as her maiden speech in September 1996, Hanson became a political flashpoint.

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Pasquarelli was sacked by December that year.

It was one of the first signs of what would become a repeated story.

The hair may now be helped along by cosmetic chemistry, and the names and faces have mostly changed. But when Brian Burston, the man known as Hanson’s loyalist within the party, who helped bring her back from the political wilderness, accused his former long-term friend and party leader of running a “dictatorship”, there was a murmuring of agreement from those who had come before.

Burston was one of those – he had been thrown out of the party in 2000, and last year he said that was because of “internal issues”.

But having polled at a little less than 23% in the 1998 Queensland state election, where 11 MPs were elected under a party banner that had not existed 18 months before, One Nation was expected to last.

Hanson had tapped into the old Country party vote – the percentage of voters who hated change, and wanted subsidies and nationalised help, but under their own terms.

She found the outsiders and brought them inside, promising a new dawn. But once inside the tent, they discovered the revolution was to be led solely by Hanson, and those she anointed. It was once David Ettridge and David Oldfield. James Ashby, and to a lesser extent, Malcolm Roberts, fill those roles now.

In One Nation, like in fashion, you are either in or out. And everything old is new again.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pauline Hanson with Mal Charlwood (centre) and former mentor John Pasquarelli in Townsville during the 2017 Queensland election campaign. Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP

More than 70% of state or federal members of parliament elected under the One Nation banner have either left by choice or by force before their parliamentary term expired.

Less well known are those who left the party before their names were printed on ballots, such as:

Angela Micallef, who was sacked as a party candidate in 2001 after admitting to using marijuana to help treat a medical issue, something Hanson now strongly advocates for. “All Pauline Hanson wants are good-looking puppets, anyone who has their own opinion and are willing to stand up for themselves don’t go far in One Nation,” she told the Australian in February 2001.

New South Wales state director John Cantwell, who was sacked in October 2000. He told the Canberra Times: “It is my belief Pauline Hanson follows the 3D principle – dominate and dictate or destroy.”

The three vice-presidents of One Nation in South Australia – John Abbott, Gareth Jones and John Williams – who were reported in the Courier Mail in February 1999 as saying they had quit because of the “bully boy tactics” of the national executive.

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Sacked Queensland staffer Debbie Bevan, who told the Australian in September 1998 that the people running the party “are totally self-absorbed, infiltrated by the most incredible kinds of people, different factions … I mean the people that are there are all the dregs that have been kicked out by all the other parties, the right wing extremists”.

The former Brisbane branch president Brendan Bogle, who was quoted in Queensland’s Courier Mail in August 1998 as saying the party had the “backing of neo-Nazis”. He accused the party leadership of “doing exactly what it claimed the other parties were doing: not listening and it’s breaking more than a few hearts along the way.”

The West Australian branch members who were expelled in June 1998, because they broke party rules by attempting to have the branches talk to each other, contravening party policy designed to stop “infiltration”.

Peter Hayden, a former Queensland branch president, who told the Australian in 1998 that he was quitting the party because it was “undemocratic and not listening to its members”.

Those complaints are close to two decades old. And yet, most could have been made last week when Burston quit the party. Again.

The Griffith University political scientist Paul Williams had seen One Nation implode during its first incarnation. He says he is now watching it all play out, almost like clockwork, again.

“I’ve used this analogy before, but it’s as if they wanted to build a house and they started with the roof and then tried to build the rest later,” he says.

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“When starting a political party, usually there are genuine roots in the community. Labor, the Country party, even the Liberals, they all started out as grassroots movements, which carved out a political niche.

“One Nation doesn’t have those roots. It’s a wobbly tower with a giant head and barely any foundations, which, as any kid with building blocks knows, means the tower will fall.

“But there are three things which are wrong with One Nation. Its structure, with it all being about Pauline Hanson’s personality at the head, and never mind the rest; its constitution, which is, at best, peculiar, where in the way it reads, it is not at all democratic and gives all the power to the elites; and Hanson’s personality itself, where she has built this whole party around her own wishes and demands.

“Having one of those things wrong in any party is a problem. But all three of them? It’s unsustainable. The party is doomed.”

Play Video 0:57 Pauline Hanson close to tears over party troubles – video

Williams says he does not believe Hanson has learned enough from her first attempt as party leader.

He says Burston’s complaints that he found himself in a dictatorship, where under the constitution Hanson has made herself president for life, means that despite appearing more media savvy in her latest incarnation, she has not learnt how to manage her own people.

“It’s the same problem as last time, where you had two or three people with all the power, and then the rest of the party basically set up as a Pauline Hanson fan club,” Williams says.

“And that divides her constituency. You’ll always have the 12 to 13% of voters who will stick with her, particularly in rural and regional Queensland and maybe NSW, no matter what. They love her strong leadership style. But then anyone else, the other half of her constituency, who were attracted to some of her ideas, and outspokenness, hate the infighting, and the instability, and turn away.

“I think Hanson is going to struggle to win her seat back in another three years or so. I really do. I think she’ll really struggle to get back any of her other Senate seats in the next half election, and then she’ll find holding her own seat really, really difficult.”