Pauline Hanson’s greatest achievement is not being elected to the Senate. It is her role in normalising racist hatred.

Hanson is regarded by most people as an ideological fringe dweller. Yet for months, she has been paid to appear on the Seven network’s Sunrise, the country’s top rating breakfast TV show, with a daily audience of more than half a million viewers.

The program has been rightly criticised for giving a platform for Hanson’s reactionary opinions. But the reality is that the Australian establishment mainstream speaks almost as one with her on a number of issues. She would not be out of place in a Liberal Party caucus.

It isn’t just that you could envisage her as an addition to the Liberal lunar right alongside Cory Bernardi, a conspiracist anti-halal campaigner, and George Christensen, an anti-Islam MP who has rubbed shoulders with the fascist right at the heart of the failed Reclaim Australia movement.

It’s that the Liberal consensus on “border protection”, accepted and promoted by all its parliamentary members, including the so-called “moderates” (not to mention the parliamentary ALP), is extremist. Indeed, the Liberal Party took the wind out of Hanson’s proto-fascist sails when she first appeared in the late 1990s because prime minister John Howard encouraged her anti-immigrant rhetoric and implemented a number of her policy proposals in order to win the hearts and votes of her supporters.

Today, Australian policy is lauded by European fascists. It is so reactionary that German neo-Nazis have copied Department of Immigration propaganda in their own anti-immigrant posters and leaflets. Why wouldn’t they? If you asked a neo-Nazi to devise a “border protection regime”, there aren’t many steps left between what Australia has implemented and “just shoot them”.

Similarly on Aboriginal affairs. Short of calling for outright extermination, what more could Hanson, or a neo-Nazi, have come up with beyond sending in the military to occupy their communities, stopping government funding to their remote homelands, dismantling their inner-city ghettos and dispersing them in the suburbs, taking their children away and forcing them to assimilate. These are 21st century government policies.

Nor would Hanson today be out of place as a commentator in NewsCorp newspapers. The country’s largest circulation dailies already print hysterical Islamophobic bile week after week. Andrew Bolt, the most widely read and promoted conservative writer in the country, has for months been campaigning to end all Muslim immigration. On 16 July he wrote in Melbourne’s Herald Sun that if far right vigilante groups took up arms against Muslims, well, who could blame them? If Hanson were offered a regular column, her political advisers might decline, reasoning that Bolt is already, and probably more effectively, communicating the ideas she seeks to promote.

The rants of fascists and would-be fascists are routinely published in the letters pages of NewsCorp papers as concerned Joe Publics backing up the bigotry of the paid columnists. They are not called out for what they are because they are now considered part of the legitimate political to-and-fro. 

US author James Waterman Wise reportedly said that if fascism came, it would be “wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution”.

That should be eerily familiar to anyone following contemporary political debate in Australia. True, we are not close to fascism. But we can hear what it sounds like: established, respectable opinion in which today’s mainstream echoes yesterday’s far right fringe and adapts to its proposals. It is the normalisation of reaction that is one of Hanson and the far right’s greatest victories – something that she doesn’t hesitate to point out. This is, in a sense, more terrifying than the implausible and distant prospect of a fascist seizure of power, precisely because of its immediacy and the casual deployment of horror that is enabled by it.

One of the biggest obstacles to a fascist movement in Australia in recent times has been a Liberal Party capable of assuaging, through repeated displays of inhumanity, the racial anxieties of that section of the population receptive to the far right.

 Now, that might have changed. Each step to the right anticipates another and only strengthens the claims of those who push for ever more reactionary policies and fervour. Perhaps all it took for Hanson to break out again in Queensland was having Turnbull take the Liberal helm – still overseeing the torture of refugees, but not reminding us of it every three minutes.

That One Nation might gain three representatives in the Senate portends an ugly situation. A more disciplined and focused group of hate preachers in the national spotlight could drag political debate further to the right. Potentially, they will give succour to the, at this point, very small and embryonic fascist street movement, whose aim is to grow and unleash violence against immigrants. Certainly, the most viciously racist and reactionary sections of the Australian population will be encouraged by Hanson’s success. Encouraged to do what, we can only speculate on with foreboding.

It is imperative that Hanson be disrupted in order that her poisonous message is interrupted and her supporters left deflated, rather than emboldened. That won’t be done by anyone currently in the parliament, or by any of the respectable opinion makers in the media. It will only be achieved by mobilisations of people on the street and at her events.

Racism needs to be shut up. Otherwise it will only shout louder.