This is not the first time Pauline Hanson has been portrayed on talkback radio as the martyr, persecuted by vested interests and the big end of town for daring to be different.
There is a neat parallel between the popular outrage at her jailing this week on electoral fraud charges and the Liberal Party's decision in February of 1996 to disendorse her for making offensive remarks about Aborigines.
Back then, Jim Barron was the Liberal Party's state director in Queensland. It was his decision to dump her. He vividly remembers driving to work the next morning and receiving a call from a Brisbane radio station. A straw poll of listeners found that 99 out of 100 callers disagreed with the move, believing the party machine had stomped on a woman who simply said what she believed.
"Here we go," Barron remembers thinking to himself at the time. "She's got a ready-made media juggernaut waiting to carry her as far as she wants to go."
But there is one big difference this time, aside from the magnitude of the penalty. This time, even some of Hanson's harsher critics consider she has been hard done by.
John Howard describes the three-year sentence as "very long and very severe". Gary Gray, who was Labor's national secretary when Hansonism was born, calls it "highly inappropriate". Tony Abbott, the minister who encouraged the civil action against Hanson and One Nation, says he is surprised by the conviction and shocked by the sentence.
But there is another difference, too. Most politicians do not believe public sympathy for the one-time fish-and-chips lady from Ipswich will translate into a revival of her political cause.
Why? Because Hanson, who wears martyrdom as comfortably as an eye-catching skirt, is now seen almost universally as a shooting star.
At first she burned brightly, raising expectations that Pauline Hanson's One Nation would become a mainstream force. Then she fizzled out, exposed by her own lack of substance, the loopiness of her policy prescriptions - especially on tax - and, ultimately, by the dodgy nature of the political organisation constructed around her.
She was, says Lynton Crosby, the Liberal Party's federal director when Hansonism peaked in 1998, "the accidental tourist of Australian politics".
"She happened to be in the right place at the right time, when a lot of people felt they had been disenfranchised by Labor. The fact that she wasn't the world's most articulate person didn't matter a toss to them because they related to her. Her lack of confidence made her even more endearing."
That analysis is broadly shared by Gray, Labor's national campaign director in 1996 and 1998. "Hansonism was a political reaction to the feeling among a very large voter demographic that they'd been ignored," he told The Age.
Gray's firm view is that Howard established a dialogue with this constituency (dubbing them the "Howard battlers") before the 1996 election, Hanson interrupted it for a period, then Howard restored the link.
This is a fair summary, but the story is more complex - particulary the Liberal Party's role in her downfall, where Howard, Peter Costello and Abbott all played different roles.
While Barron knew the decision to disendorse Hanson in 1996 would give her national prominence, he had no choice, having warned her after her first controversial remarks about black welfare that it would be "three strikes and you're out".
First, Hanson had claimed that handouts to Aborigines "no matter how minute the indigenous blood is that flows through their veins" were causing racism. Then, she told Brisbane's Courier-Mail that Aborigines were the main instigators of crime and violence and could walk into any job.
"It was the right thing and the principled thing (to disendorse her), but it certainly gave her momentum," says Barron.
Hanson won the Labor-held seat of Oxley as an independent with a swing of more than 23 per cent.
More than six months later, Hanson delivered her infamous maiden speech, railing against indigenous welfare and multiculturalism and warning that Australia risked being "swamped by Asians".
Howard chose not to respond, rationalising later that to do so would have been to give her an even higher profile. Critics were less charitable, suggesting Howard did not wish to antagonise her supporters.
Twelve days after the speech, the Prime Minister told the Queensland Liberal Party a "pall of censorship" had been lifted with the removal of the Keating government, adding that the "newfound" freedom of speech carried with it the duty to avoid "insensitive language".
When I interviewed him in November 1996, Howard predicted Hanson would not make an enduring impression. He conceded she had "novelty value", but said he would be surprised if those around her succeeded in forming a party capable of winning Senate seats. He was wrong, at least in the short term.
In May of 1998, Costello became the first senior Liberal figure to declare that One Nation, formed in February of 1997, would be last on his how-to-vote card at the next election.
Howard responded by stepping up his own rhetoric against Hanson's more "deranged" views, but defended the Queensland Liberal Party's decision to allow candidates to put One Nation ahead of Labor.
Barron had ceased to be the party's state director in 1997, but still considered the party was "shooting itself in the foot" with this decision. Assisted by Liberal preferences, One Nation won 11 seats in the Queensland election, recording 23 per cent of the vote.
Within a fortnight of the election, after One Nation's national support peaked at 13 per cent in Newspoll, Abbott launched the first of several parliamentary attacks on the new party's structure.
It was not a political party, he said, but a business. It did not have thousands of members; it had just three directors: Hanson, David Oldfield and David Ettridge. Of every dollar donated to the party, he said, 12.5 cents went into the pocket of Ettridge.
Abbott's motivation was simple. Privately, he described Hanson's movement as a threat to "the best conservative government since Menzies". As he explained to a colleague much later: "We looked into the mirror and saw a distorted version of ourselves and thought, 'Yuk, we don't want to be like that!'."
But Abbott felt additional responsibility because Oldfield had been on his payroll as a staffer while actively advising Hanson and preparing for the birth of One Nation. Abbott had been made to look like a mug.
Methodically over almost two weeks, Abbott laid out in Parliament the legal case against One Nation that would ultimately see Hanson and Ettridge convicted and sentenced to three years in prison.
To support his case, he quoted a fax from former One Nation candidate Terry Sharples, the man he later convinced to initiate civil court proceedings. (After Sharples sacked two sets of lawyers Abbott arranged on a pro bono basis, the litigant and the minister parted company. Abbott also tried to persuade Hanson's former personal assistant, Barbara Hazelton, to take the party to court, but she resisted.)
In Parliament, Abbott declared: "One Nation, as registered in Queensland, does not have 500 members, it is not a validly-registered political party and it cannot receive any public funding." As such, it was not entitled to the $500,000 it claimed in public funding after the Queensland election result.
Back in June of 1998, Hanson rejected Abbott's claims, boasting the party could withstand any scrutiny. "In fact, we are subject to audit at any time by the AEC (Australian Electoral Commission) and our books are kept in a continual state of readiness."
But well before this week's court decision, Hanson's political appeal had begun to evaporate. In the 1998 federal election she passed up the prospect of winning a Senate seat to contest the lower-house seat of Blair. By then, both sides had resolved to put One Nation last on preferences, making it virtually impossible for her to stay in Parliament.
The journalist Margo Kingston followed Hanson's campaign and wrote in her book Off The Rails: "Hansonites were a bunch of hare-brained amateurs without cash, talent or experience surrounded by a marauding media."
By the end of 1999, social researcher Hugh Mackay said the electorate had changed their minds about Hanson. The view that she could one day be a prime minister was considered silly, rather than dangerous.
Her transition to being "just another politician" was cemented when she contested, and narrowly lost, a seat in this year's NSW election. "Now she's seen as a kind of curiosity, politically leapfrogged by Howard," says Mackay. "I think people now feel a bit embarrassed about how seriously they took her."
Did she change the political landscape? No, insists Crosby. "She was a creature of the political landscape. I don't want to sound arrogantly dismissive, but I don't think she had an enduring effect on the way people thought or the way political parties behaved."
Gary Gray agrees, arguing it was not Howard's hard line on refugees with the Tampa that brought Hanson's supporters back to the Liberal fold, but his consistency and lack of hubris.
Others are not so emphatic. Barron, now in the private sector, says Hanson's legacy is that subjects that were previously off-limits because of the danger of inciting racial intolerance remain up for discussion.
Mackay says Hanson's legacy is that she moved mainstream politics, and especially the Coalition, very significantly to the right. "She really showed them that a greater degree of intolerance and the unleashing of prejudice would travel well. I think they learned that lesson from her while they were discrediting her."
Rod Cameron, the veteran pollster, agrees. "I think Howard probably felt it easier to take such a hard-line position on boat people and refugees because of the foundation work that was done by Pauline Hanson," he said. "Tactically she hurt the conservative side, but she benefited Howard much more because she allowed him to have his wedge political strategy. She was the loud voice and Howard was a soft voice and he was the ultimate beneficiary."
Mackay draws another conclusion from the Hanson experience. He says it demonstrates that national politics "is still ripe for being hijacked by any figure who has a populist punch". Howard comes close, he says, but the Prime Minister's personal style evokes grudging respect for his persistence rather than strong feelings of affection.
"I think what Hanson showed all of us is that if you're a colourful figure with an earthy style, in touch with concerns at the grassroots level, then you can make a real impact.
"Probably the closest thing we have to Hanson on the federal stage at the moment - not in terms of political philosophy, but in terms of ability to engage with voters in an unpretentious way - is Mark Latham."
Latham, of course, was one of the few national figures to suggest Hanson deserved what she got. "She's just been a candidate in the recent NSW election campaigning for tougher penalties. Now she's got one," he said. Cameron is not big on sympathy for Hanson either, though he considers the sentence "bizarre and over-the-top". He does not expect any political comeback by Hanson, but believes the prison sentence will resurrect her celebrity status. "If she can whittle the time down to six months, as I'd imagine she will, then it might well be seen as a very good investment in a future career."
But not in politics.
Michael Gordon is The Age national editor