A confronting thought hit me this week as I watched the Greens walk out on Pauline Hanson's speech to the Senate: "Everybody wins". I can still hear the tone of my internal monologue, too. Neither despair, nor game show-host exuberance. Not anger, either. Just resignation. Like everything was following a pre-determined script there was no point even evaluating. Like I'd become a mere spectator to some dreary inevitability. A bit like watching a game of footy you've recorded when you already know the result. Except this time the teams are playing different games, and looking at different scoreboards where they're always in front.

Hanson wins. She wins because there can hardly be a better look for her than having the Greens perform their rejection so publicly. That, in a sense, is her reason for being there. She's the outsider giving voice to the left behind: those who have no place in progressive culture. She needs to be unapologetic, scandalous, in your face. And what better way to demonstrate her bona fides than to outrage the party that, more than any other, symbolises everything her voters are railing against, to be a victim in that cause? I won't go on about this at length, partly because plenty of others have made this point, but also because it's only half of the story.

That's because the Greens win, too. There's a reason Green senators were tweeting and firing off emails about their walkout almost immediately. This was choreography for an audience it understands especially well. This party works by selling a message of moral conviction the major parties simply cannot. It's unashamedly pro-diversity, pro-equality, pro-tolerance, pro-refugee and anti-privilege. Indeed, it is conspicuously so, which is why nothing can look better for it than to make as demonstrative a protest against someone like Hanson as possible.

Now it's the party who stood up to Hanson in a way no one else did. Have the Greens ever had a better foil? Hanson's a kind of perpetual motion machine churning out all the things they delight in whacking. It's a little simplistic to dismiss the Greens as a "party of protest" as Julia Gillard once did, but even so, protest works best when there's something stupendously obvious to protest against. "We're in danger of being swamped by Muslims" is that.