Listen to Red Harrison's report

Just two weeks ago, I would not - could not - have broadcast this story. It would have been laughed away as silly - the reportage of absurdity.

Two weeks ago, Pauline Hanson, leader of a rump extremist party called One Nation, was a political irrelevance. Today, along with every political analyst in the country, and especially the correspondents who report for South-east Asian newspapers, Australians are confronted by the spectacle of Pauline Hanson rocketing to political power.

BBC Sydney correspondent Red Harrison

Commentators write in disbelief: It cannot be happening. People cannot be so dumb. No matter that Pauline Hanson is reviled and abused as racist, anti-Asian, anti-aboriginal and anti-Semitic, the polls are consistent - support for her party is a solid 15% and rising. Such loyalty on election day, could give One Nation candidates the balance of power in the next Queensland State government.

Many people are worried that such a victory might adorn Pauline Hanson with the political weight and respectability to win one or two seats in the Senate, the upper house of the Australian parliament, later this year and then, perhaps hold the balance of power over the Australian national government, too.

It might never happen, but this prospect - even the possibility of this prospect - is alarming commentators and politicians alike. They are afraid it could damage Australia's relations with its neighbours in South-east Asia - where Pauline Hanson's views on Asian immigrants have been reported extensively.

"I believe, she says, that Australia is in danger of being swamped by Asians." That statement brought ferocious personal attacks from newspapers and broadcasters, many of whom like to be thought of as politically correct. But letters to newspapers made clear many more people agreed with her.

More attacks - a veritable tidal wave of vilification - followed her call for the government to treat all Australians equally.

In other words, and Pauline Hanson spelt it out again this week - why should money be spent on aborigines that is not spent on other Australians? Why should people be given handouts of taxpayers' money for claims based on race and not merit?

Mrs Hanson was abused, threatened and spat upon in public. One of her supporters was badly beaten. The Prime Minister, John Howard, says now she is deranged.

Pauline Hanson is 44, twice divorced, and the mother of four children. She has no obvious advantages of birth or education, she reads speeches awkwardly and struggles in interviews over abstract ideas and words like xenophobia. She used to own a shop selling seafood and newspapers seldom let anyone forget that: they describe her as that fish-and-chip woman, the fishwife.

This week, I telephoned her office in Parliament House for a copy of the party manifesto. No such document existed, I was told, and the office had nothing to offer about taxation, national health, education or foreign policy.

So what is the attraction? It is normal in most democratic countries that voters turn to minority movements when they are dissatisfied or disillusioned with the major political parties, but Paul Sheehan, a Sydney journalist and academic, identifies another reason for Mrs Hanson's popularity.

Her real strength, he says, is her readiness to speak out on issues that governments of the last few years have deliberately submerged - multiculturalism, racism, white guilt over the treatment of aborigines, crime and censorship.

Paul Sheehan has just published a book, an instant, runaway best-seller, by the way, in which he says Australian journalists are still scared of the "thought police" set up by previous Labour Party governments. And Pauline Hanson is not scared. What she is doing, he writes, is challenging the official silences, asking questions that political heavyweights have been ducking for years.

His book identifies a growing government power to suppress and constrain freedom of expression as the most sinister of all Australia's political problems. And community anger, he says, at being patronised and ignored is driving voters into Pauline Hanson's arms.