You'd be hard pressed to find an Australian who doesn't recognise Pauline Hanson.

From the "Oxley moron" fish and chip shop owner, to the heart of Australian politics, she's been ridiculed, dismissed and shut out for three decades.

But she's outlasted her critics and now presides over a resurgent One Nation. She's the original anti-politician politician and wields a political power few ever anticipated.

So who really is Pauline Hanson? And how has One Nation survived, and thrived?

Anna Broinowski first met Hanson in 2014 over a lunch of fish and chips to pitch her documentary, 'Pauline Hanson: Please Explain!'.

"I can remember saying to her in that first meeting:

It worked: Broinowski was in and the research began.

Hanson was born the youngest of five children and was a "firecracker" from early on.

In primary school back then, children used to have to drink milk as part of a government health initiative. Broinowski says while filming at her farm in Queensland, Hanson shared a telling story.

"Little Pauline didn't like the milk because her school couldn't afford refrigerators, and by the time it was served to her, it was warm. And so she started to just take the milk and then hide it under a little bench."

"It got to the point where there was a whole line of mouldy milk bottles that little Hanson had stacked under the bench. The principal summoned the entire school and said 'which of you children has not been drinking your milk?' There was dead silence."

"At the back of the hall, little Pauline put up her hand and said, it's me. I don't like it and it's not fair."

For Broinowski, the memory reveals the three traits that define Hanson:

1. The politics of grievance; "it's not fair"

2. The politics of the outsider

3. The politician who will stand up; "she'll say what she feels her supporters are thinking, but are too scared to say out loud and bugger the consequences."

Her alliance with LNP quickly soured: she made racist remarks about Indigenous people and she was disendorsed just a few weeks out from the ballot.

It didn't stop her. "She said, well, okay, I'll run as an independent for Oxley," explains Broinowski.

"No one in the mainstream media thought Hanson had a chance in hell. They started to call her the 'Oxley moron'. But lo and behold come election day, Pauline Hanson was rocketed into parliament with one of the biggest swings against the sitting Labor member ever recorded."

Just months later, the progressive 90s seemed to come to a screeching halt.

"The parliament switchboard went into meltdown. What immediately galvinised the mainstream media and the two major parties into action was that a lot of the calls were supportive. At the same time thousands of demonstrators marched in protest."

Pauline Hanson had no real idea how politics worked. But she was genuine and unafraid.

She was ridiculed for her lack of education, fashion sense and her humble beginnings. Documentarian Anna Broinowski says she was also treated with a level of misogyny that some women in politics still encounter today.

Hanson made racist and derogatory remarks that shocked and divided Australia.

In a 60 Minutes interview she was asked directly: "are you xenophobic?"

Queue the widespread derision.

"I think that that was a really big mistake. The more she was criticised, the more people quietly came out of the woodwork to support her."

They didn't know what xenophobia meant either.

Riding the popular wave, she joined forces with some more experienced political operators and One Nation the party was born.

The fall of Pauline Hanson

While John Howard and the Coalition publicly sneered at Hanson, they were also threatened.

In the 1998 election, One Nation fielded 139 candidates, contesting almost every seat in the country.

It wasn't to be. Through a concerted smear campaign from the LNP (and a bit of help from an electoral boundary redistribution), Pauline Hanson lost her seat, and only a single One Nation candidate was elected – they eventually had their win overturned due to holding, ironically, foreign citizenship.

Unsatisfied with a simple election loss, Tony Abbott, then a key minister in the Howard cabinet, worked with a group of LNP supporters to set up a legal fund to support a case for electoral fraud against Hanson.

On August 20 2003, Pauline Hanson was sent to jail.

While filming the documentary with Hanson, Broinowski took Pauline to the courtroom where she was found guilty.

"She cried and she took me aside and talked about how that was the absolute rock bottom moment of her life because she had always prided herself on being an honest, upstanding and law abiding Australian citizen. And suddenly the court had found her guilty of fraud."

Hanson shared her prison diary with Broinowski. "It was a glimpse of the humiliation and the sense of despair Pauline felt. She spent the first nights in prison on suicide watch."

After 11 weeks inside, her conviction was overturned and Pauline Hanson was released from prison.

But the time in jail had given her a steely edge; she emerged with a resolve that wasn't there before.

"It gave her the kind of backbone and real politic mentality that has enabled her to survive and thrive," says Broinowski.

Hanson certainly needed it: after her election loss in 1998 she ran for parliament nine times, and failed nine times.

And then came the tenth.

Pauline 2.0

The whirlwind 2016 "Fed Up" election campaign to which Anna had front-row seats marked a new kind of Pauline Hanson.

She's back to stoking the politics of grievance, armed with her trademark underdog spirit and an instinct for Australia's racist underbelly. She's still willing to say what some Australians, she believes, are too scared to say out loud.

But these days Senator Hanson's brand of racism targets Muslims, not Asians.

Hanson 1.0 was the politically clueless, firebrand xenophobe.

But Hanson 2.0 is a serious, strategic, experienced, battle hardened political operator.

The "svengalis and masterminds", as Broinowski terms them, who'd often been accused of being Hanson's puppeteers are gone.

She's teamed up with her pilot, James Ashby, a strategic operator schooled in conservative politics.

"Hanson 2.0 is much more dangerous. Not only does she understand how politics works and she makes her own decisions, she also has a far more strategic and supportive right hand man in James Ashby," explains Broinowski.

"He doesn't compete with Hanson for the limelight, and instead supports her in getting her message out there."

"Hanson and Ashby together are one of the reasons One Nation is surging today."

Interviewed

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