Australia's federal politicians in Canberra are running scared. The Prime Minister, John Howard, has admitted that the 23 per cent vote for the right-wing One Nation Party in the Queensland state election last month was much higher than he expected. The Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the National Party, whose vote was eaten into by One Nation, has warned bluntly that One Nation's success was not just a protest vote.
Their fears were reinforced by an opinion poll published in the Bulle- tin magazine which suggested that One Nation could repeat its Queensland success across Australia if an election for both houses of the federal parliament were held within the next couple of months - a prospect that has diminished since Mr Howard won key Senate support this week for a Bill limiting aboriginal rights.
But an election will come one day and the Bulletin poll suggested that were it held now, One Nation could win between 10 and 12 Senate seats, taking almost all of them from the ruling conservative Liberal-National Party coalition. According to this scenario, the opposition Labor Party would win easily - but One Nation would hold the balance of power in the Senate.
Pauline Hanson is 44, the divorced mother of three sons and a daughter, the eldest 27, the youngest 15. Ms Hanson, nee Seccombe, is one of seven children. She was educated at Buranda Girls' School and Coorparoo State High School in Brisbane.
Like many Australian teenagers, she was active in the sporting arena. Her official potted biography makes no mention of state teams or medals. She left school at 15.
But she makes no apology for her lack of tertiary education, demanding sharply "Please explain" when sophisticated television interviewers use words she does not understand.
In a nation where only 30 per cent of students go from high school to university, despite a huge increase in university places over the past decade, Ms Hanson has thus turned her lack of paper qualifications into a major political asset, identifying herself strongly with "ordinary Australians".
In the words of one fan describing her 45-minute speech at the South Australian launch of the One Nation Party in Adelaide last year: "Australians have had plenty of slick, smooth-talking politicians with the gift of the gab. Pauline is different - she is one of us."
Her career reinforces this ordinary Australian image. She has worked as a clerk, waitress, barmaid and hotel receptionist and as a partner in a plumbing business. She owned and ran a fish-and-chip shop for nearly nine years, selling it shortly after she became a federal MP.
Her political career has been short, if dramatic. She was elected as a city councillor in Ipswich, a railway and mining town just west of the Queensland capital, Brisbane, in 1994. Expelled from the Liberal Party, not least for her racist comments, she stood as an independent in the 1996 federal election in Oxley, the part-rural, part-industrial constituency centred on Ipswich. It had long been a safe Labor seat. She romped in with a near-23 per cent swing in her favour.
Her maiden speech to the federal parliament that year hit most of the buttons that have switched on her support ever since:
Anger over youth unemployment.
Scathing disregard for the politically correct.
Outright opposition to globalisation of the economy and the sale of state assets to private enterprise and overseas interests.
Trenchant criticism of the Canberra bureaucracy.
A sustained attack on the politically correct "Aboriginal industry" while pointing out that hundreds of millions of dollars are poured into special schemes reserved exclusively for Aborigines, yet a large proportion of the country's 330,000 Aborigines see little or no benefit from the money.
Utter contempt for the current conventional wisdom in economics. ("I may be only `a fish-and-chipshop lady', but some of these economists need to get their heads out of the textbooks and get a job in the real world. I would not even let one of them handle my grocery shopping.")
Most controversially, she demands an immediate halt to immigration until the unemployment problem is solved, warning that "Australia is in danger of being swamped by Asians".
Not all these views can be classed in Australia as right wing.
Ms Hanson's unhappiness with youth unemployment, the sale of state assets, the globalisation of the economy and the reliance on international finance is shared in varying degrees by the mainstream Australian Labor Party, the trade union movement, and the far Left - which may help to explain her success in Labor's heartland of Oxley and her party's defeat of several Labor MPs in the Queensland state election.
Yet when the politicians and media responded in fury to the 1996 Hanson speech they focused almost entirely on her comments on Asians and Aborigines. Forty per cent of Australia's 18 million people were born overseas and despite the severe disadvantage suffered by many Aborigines, the country has a strong claim to be the most harmonious, stable, multicultural society in the world.
In addition, the Asian region dominates Australia's trade, with at least 40 per cent of merchandise exports going to Japan and other Asian countries. It is not surprising, therefore, that she was pilloried in print and on television and radio. Her response was to form her own party, One Nation, in April last year.
Accusations of racism appear to have done nothing to slow Ms Hanson's rise. If anything, they have served merely to put racism on the agenda as a political option. Her supporters brush off such attacks as political correctness or self-interested attempts by politicians and their "lapdogs", the mainstream media, to defend privileged positions. Some of this can be dismissed as conspiracy theory stuff. But not all of it.
Recently it emerged that Australia's national airline, Qantas, which screens programmes from the television Channel Nine on its domestic and international flights, had written to the station requesting that it avoid One Nation stories on its news bulletins which might offend Asian passengers. Channel Nine refused to censor its news.
When the story hit the newspapers, Ms Hanson was quick to claim another example of political correctness attempting to stifle the democratic will of the people.
The anti-Hanson camp had scored another own goal.