Former insiders and political observers alike think Queensland election result signals bell is tolling for volatile but doggedly resilient movement
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“When Pauline Hanson left One Nation, the party did it tough,” recalls Jim Savage, who spent 11 years running the entity that had been founded in her flame-haired, firebrand image.
Hanson, from Queensland, burned her personal brand of rightwing populism into the Australian political psyche in the late 1990s. Her party won 11 seats at the 1998 Queensland election but within a few years it had all but collapsed. Hanson resigned in 2002 amid an electoral fraud scandal, was sent to jail (later acquitted on appeal) and then vanished from public life.