Almost three decades after she first became one of Australia’s most divisive public figures, Pauline Hanson is finally on trial for an offence detractors have long levelled at the Queensland senator: that she is a white supremacist masquerading as a right-wing populist.

On Tuesday afternoon, for an hour and a half, Senator Hanson was forced to listen in a witness box as her long history of anti-immigrant provocations was played and read out in the Sydney Federal Court.