The improbability of her comeback stems from the fact that Ms Hanson has never delivered anything of substance for her constituency. She is embarrassingly inarticulate and but for the influence of clever advisers like John Pasquarelli, David Ettridge and David Oldfield would have disappeared in 1998 never to be heard from again.

The party she founded while the accidental federal member for Oxley from 1996-98, One Nation, won 11 of 89 seats in the Queensland Parliament in 1997, and a federal Senate seat in 1998. However, the party collapsed amidst acrimony almost as soon as it had risen to prominence, leaving little in the way of a legislative record.

Ms Hanson tried unsuccessfully to resurrect her political career in the Queensland and NSW Parliaments, and was jailed briefly in 2003 after being found guilty of electoral fraud, a conviction later quashed on appeal. For voters to have concluded in 2016 that she was worthy of a six-year Senate term after such a chequered career is inexplicable to some, but then that's the nature of democracy.

Ms Hanson's prominent public profile undoubtedly helped her Senate campaign, as did the fact that this double-dissolution election halved the quota needed for election. What was undeniably of greater influence was the electorate's discontent with the major parties, reflected in primary votes for Labor and the Coalition on Saturday of 35 per cent and 41 per cent respectively.

Dissatisfaction with politicians seen as out of touch or unresponsive to the demands of ordinary voters has been a much-dissected aspect of this year's US presidential primaries and of last month's Brexit referendum. That voters would start to exhibit similar tendencies here, even though Australia has largely avoided the economic downturn experienced in the US and Britain, was always to be expected.

The obsession of the major parties with issues regarded by mainstream voters as peripheral to their interests – race, multiculturalism, human rights, and same-sex marriage – has added to their weariness.

Too much can be made about the emergence of politicians like Pauline Hanson. Australia's electoral system has always thrown up mavericks, some of them sensible and reasoned, others incompetent or eccentric. The worst possible reaction is to accuse those who support them of stupidity.

A robust democracy like Australia's should be able to accommodate a plurality of views without participants becoming breathless with indignation at the idiocy, so-called, of those who cleave to unfashionable or ill-educated arguments.

For the politics of discontent not to take wider root, the established parties must begin explaining why dealing with social and economic problems is never clear-cut or easy, and in a way that respects voters' intelligence. Saturday's election result suggests they have much work to do.