Hanson says she hasn’t changed – Australia just caught up with her. But she’s not sold on leading it

Pauline Hanson says she is not sure if she will pitch herself for prime minister at the next election, downplaying the notion after saying she could do the job as she admitted One Nation had shut down party branches she said were “infiltrated by extremists”.

The 72-year-old, whose rise in the polls has sent shudders through Canberra, seemed to open the door to a long-term alliance with the Coalition parties in a wide-ranging interview with this masthead’s Inside Politics podcast. Hanson insisted she would not be swayed by her most powerful backer, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, despite adopting one of Rinehart’s key policies, and opened up on her thinking about moving to the lower house.

After two polls showed One Nation’s first-preference vote above Labor for the first time, the populist leader claimed vindication for her long-held views, rebuffing the arguments of Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce, who have both said her political persona has evolved since she was first elected 30 years ago.

“Have I really changed?” she said on this masthead’s Inside Politics podcast. “No, because the rest of the country’s caught up with me.”

“I’ve been consistent with what I’ve been saying over years, and although it was looked at as politically incorrect to say those things at that time by saying ‘swamped by Asians’.”

Hanson shocked the nation in 1996 when she claimed Australia was “swamped by Asians” in her first parliamentary speech as the independent MP for Oxley after she was disendorsed mid-campaign by the Liberals.

She has since shifted focus to campaigning against Muslim migration.

Six months after Hanson was suspended from parliament for wearing a burqa in the Senate – condemned as a racist provocation – and four months after she was censured by all federal parties for questioning if there were any “good Muslims”, she insisted that “Muslim immigration is totally different to Asian immigration”.

She says it’s about embracing the Australian way of life. “We’ve had people from all different cultural backgrounds that have come on board to be Australians… They say, ‘Pauline, you are right’. We don’t want this country to become like the place that we left, and neither do I.”

Her party’s primary vote grew from 6.4 per cent at the election in May to about 15 per cent before the Bondi massacre, which accelerated the debates about migration and multiculturalism.

Now, One Nation is up to around 30 per cent in the YouGov and Redbridge polls, in front of Labor and pulling some support from the government, but considerably more from the Coalition. This masthead’s Reso