On election night in May, as Labor basked in the glow of a thumping victory, another story simmered beneath the headlines. A story that, in its own way, may prove more consequential for Australia’s political future.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation posted its strongest national performance in nearly three decades, doubling its Senate representation and lifting its vote to 6.2 per cent. For a party once dismissed as a historical curiosity, an angry footnote to the Howard years, the result was a shock. For Hanson, it was vindication.

The 71-year-old declared the resurgence was the product of Coalition “fence-sitting”, a line delivered with the satisfaction of someone who has spent almost 30 years building a career out of telling her supporters that the so-called mainstream parties can’t be trusted. As always with Hanson, it wasn’t just local grievances that mattered; it was the global mood. A wave of right-wing populism was gathering pace across the democratic world, and Hanson, ever the opportunist, had managed to ride it back to relevance.

Whether she can stay atop that wave is one of the most important questions in Australian politics. Barnaby Joyce, one of the most influential figures in conservative politics of the past two decades, is clearly betting they can.

As the former Nationals leader quit the party after two decades in parliament on Thursday, he was asked whether he feared for the future of the Coalition. Joyce replied that politics was “changing everywhere”, and singled out right-wing populist figures internationally, including Nigel Farage in the UK, Marine Le Pen in France, and the “MAGA movement within the Republican Party”.

“The world is changing, and I think Australia is actually last to it. It’s just that with compulsory voting it’s a little more sticky here,” Joyce said. “And it’s changing because how people get their information is changing.”

In the months since the election, One Nation claims its membership base across the country has doubled (although it does not reveal actual numbers). But beyond doubt is that voters’ intentions have shifted.

The party surged to a record 18 per cent in a Redbridge and Accent Research poll for The Australian Financial Review this month, while in Newspoll, published by The Australian, One Nation was up four points to a high-water mark of 15 per cent. The party’s vote was also 15 per cent in the Essential poll.

In this masthead’s Resolve Political Monitor, One Nation has sat on a 12 per cent primary vote for the past few months, again a record high.

“Just as Labor’s base was eroded on the left flank by the Greens some years ago, so One Nation has done that to the Coalition to the right,” says Resolve director Jim Reed, adding it was too early to tell if this is a permanent change or if One Nation can win seats in its own right.

Reed says Hanson has tapped into a rich vein of disenchantment with the major parties on tackling major issues, like living costs and housing. “Immigration and emissions reduction are often blamed as root causes, so her stances on those points are quite appealing,” he says.

Hanson’s story is one of reinvention, a series of comebacks stitched together by political drama, internal bust-ups, prison (a conviction that was later quashed), teary press conferences, and a loyal band of voters who see in her the chaos of their own frustrations. She arrived in Canberra in 1996 like a rogue comet – unexpected, incandescent, unmissable – and was treated as such: feared, derided, and, for a time, dismissed as an aberration. Most political figures are shaped by their party; Hanson reshaped hers, and at times nearly destroyed it.

That brand – messy, emotive, unapologetic – has proved unusually durable. Even in her wilderness years in the 2000s, Hanson never quite vanished. She lingered like a dissonant note in Australian politics, popping up in Senate races, state contests, and on reality TV. She was always the outsider, the outcast – roles she weaponised with growing sophistication.

“Like any populist who styles themselves as an anti-politician politician – and you know, you can include [US President Donald] Trump in that – she specialises in talking the vernacular of her people,” says Anna Broinowski, a documentary filmmaker, academic and author who traced the 2016 federal campaign which saw Hanson return from the political wilderness.

“You know, she doesn’t like weasel words. She doesn’t like corporate speak. She prides herself on her honesty and expects others to be honest with her.”

Broinowski, who is at pains to point out she fundamentally disagrees with Hanson’s political views on just about everything, says the Queenslander is a prime example of “horseshoe politics”, a political theory that suggests the political far-left and far-right are closer to each other than they are to the political centre, curving towards each other like the ends of a horseshoe.

“She’s very responsive and instinctive in the way she processes thoughts and then puts them out there,” she says. “And Pauline’s grievances are populist grievances that could swing either left or right, and they are grievances that people on the left also share. And it’s a build-up of loss of income, culture, lifestyle and community, generated by neoglobalism, neoliberalism, all those kinds of privatisation projects that kicked in in the ’90s.

“I do think she could just have easily been a [US Democrat senator] Bernie Sanders-type figure. In some ways, that’s the tragedy of Hanson.”

By 2016, when Hanson posed outside parliament with champagne to toast Trump’s shock win, it was clear that she understood the new terrain better than many of her opponents. Social media hadn’t yet reshaped democracy, but it had begun eroding the authority of traditional news. She didn’t need journalists; she had her people.

Her Senate return after 18 years in the political wilderness was the first sign that the populist forces ignited around the world were finding new relevance in Australia. Like Trump, she was derided as a clown, a racist, a symbol of resentment politics. And like Trump, she turned every insult into a recruitment drive.

“He is like me,” she insisted after his first victory, bristling at the suggestion she was Australia’s Trump. What she really meant was that they were tapping into the same vein of disaffection, one that the political establishment had ignored for too long.

The decade since has only sharpened her methods. For the 2025 campaign, she traded her old-style rants for digital theatre: South Park-inspired animations mocking climate activists, nonbinary “snowflakes”, and imagined UN conspirators. The clips regularly drew hundreds of thousands of views and an Australian Electoral Commission penalty for circulating falsehoods, a badge of honour in the attention economy.

It was politics as entertainment, and it worked. In a 24/7 media environment saturated with outrage, simplicity beats complexity every time. Hanson understood the algorithm before most politicians knew it existed. She dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Halloween gala last month – railing against conspiratorial forces, basking in the applause of the American far right. She calls UK Reform leader and Brexit mastermind Nigel Farage a friend.

This week, she rushed out a performative burqa ban performance in the Senate, which led to a suspension and another round of outrage from her opponents. When a screening of a new movie-length film of the Please Explain cartoon series was banned from being screened at Parliament House on the grounds it might “cause offence” to members of the public, it was again manna from heaven for Hanson’s message that your enemies will shut you down.

Hanson’s movement first surged at the 1998 Queensland state election, where One Nation captured 22.7 per cent of the vote – more than either the Liberals or Nationals – and 11 seats. But the party splintered almost immediately under the weight of its own contradictions. Hanson’s central challenge has always been that her success attracts candidates and personalities who are, like her, combustible. Once elected, many don’t last.

But the 2025 federal election changed the calculus. For the first time at a half-Senate contest, One Nation won seats outside Queensland. Coalition preferences flowed heavily – three-quarters of them – to One Nation in some states, delivering victories in NSW and WA. In raw numbers, Hanson’s party has never been so electorally successful.

Major party strategists say her appeal is powerful but narrow. Her policies resonate in regional Australia but repel younger and multicultural voters, whose electoral influence is only growing. And despite her strong Senate position, she remains politically isolated. No major party wants to formally align with her. At least not yet.

While Joyce prepares to become the biggest name to join the party since former Labor leader Mark Latham, and the Coalition conservative rump pushes Hanson-like attacks on net zero and immigration, former Queensland premier Rob Borbidge, who lost government amid peak One Nation popularity in 1998, warned against chasing Hanson voters.

“I fear we haven’t learned lessons that any association with One Nation is absolutely toxic, particularly in places like south-east Queensland, and in the cities,” he said.

Borbidge says the One Nation boost in the polls is a clear response to the cost-of-living crisis, where voters blame their woes on issues such as immigration.

“When times are tough and people are unhappy, that’s always a time when you get a drift to the protest parties. One Nation is always a party of protest. It doesn’t even pretend to be a party of government because it knows it will never be there,” he says.

“The simple reality in Australia is that politics is won in the middle ground, and that the fringe parties of the left or the right that come and go, yelling from the sidelines ... And if Barnaby goes down this track, I think it’s sad.”

But the implications for a future Coalition government are obvious: more three-cornered contests, more reliance on Labor preferences, more fragmentation. Hanson, who did not grant this masthead an interview before deadline, told radio 3AW on Friday she does want Barnaby to join.

“I think we’ll be a great team together,” she said. “He’s got a lot to offer parliament.

“I think he’s going to be a perfect One Nation fit.”

But Joyce’s defection might also trigger something deeper – the collapse of a coherent conservative movement in Australia. With the Liberals and Nationals split between moderates, economic rationalists, culture-war crusaders and existential anxiety about the teal independent movement, the right has become a vacuum. One Nation wants to step into that void.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.