Pauline Lee Hanson, the fiery redhead senator with a tenacity and temperament to match, turns 70 this year.

Hanson will be 74 when her current Senate term ends, which will almost certainly be her last. With Hanson arguably the only One Nation name Australians can identify, what does the future hold for this once dynamic party?

First, some history.

The year 1998 saw a new political force pierce the Australian political consciousness in the form of one Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (PHON). By then, the name Pauline Hanson was known to even the most casual political observer after the awkwardly spoken firebrand surfed into the safe Queensland Labor seat of Oxley in 1996 on a wave of blue-collar dissent.

Hanson, soon warning Australia was in danger of being “swamped by Asians”, was quickly assisted in the setting up of a new party. At its first electoral outing, in Queensland in 1998, PHON produced gasps in the Brisbane tally room that night, winning 11 seats from both the Labor and National parties in a 22.7% swing.

It seemed nothing in Australian politics would be the same again.

But soon enough it was. In 1998, Hanson switched to the neighbouring seat of Blair and was defeated, despite PHON winning 8.4% of the House vote and seeing one senator elected. But the gloss soon faded. By late 1999, all 11 Queensland MPs had resigned in........

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