Pauline Hanson wants to run the country. She spent her holiday with a convicted criminal and a billionaire.

There is a version of Pauline Hanson that exists only in her own advertising.

Battler. Fish and chip shop. One of us, fighting the elites who fly over your head.

Then there is the Pauline Hanson of this week, photographed at a Dolce & Gabbana show in Sicily in a floor-length embroidered gown, holidaying at a luxury Italian resort with Gina Rinehart, the richest person in the country.

The same Gina Rinehart whose company gifted One Nation a $2.1 million plane in April, alongside $2 million in donations. Two of those came from executives inside the Hancock empire, half a million each.

“I wouldn't be surprised if Gina picks up some of the tab for the accommodation,” One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce said of the resort.

“If two people are mates and they go on a holiday together, who cares, really?”

Nobody would, if she were a real estate agent from Ipswich.

She wants to be Prime Minister.

Before Sicily, Hanson spent the better part of an hour in the UK being interviewed by Tommy Robinson.

Robinson founded the English Defence League, has convictions including assault, fraud, stalking and contempt of court, and has called for people to “make war” on Islam.

Australia refused him a visa in 2018 on character grounds and hasn't let him in since.

A senator flew to another country to sit with a man her own government won't admit.

What she said there is worse than who she said it to.

Robinson asked how Australia ended up with “Pakistanis, Somalis, all of these African problems with violent Africans”.

Hanson didn't flinch at the framing. She answered it.

The problem started when Australia abandoned the White Australia Policy, she said.

The postwar migrants were different.

They “really assimilated” and they “learned to speak English”.

She said migrants were often coming to Australia “purely for the welfare system”, and claimed Australian Muslims were having children because the Quran taught “Allah will provide”.

Then she turned to the NDIS, claiming “a lot” of the scheme's nearly 800,000 participants came from “Muslim areas”.

“A lot of them are ripping the system off ... a lot from the Muslim areas and they're getting on the scheme, but there's a lot of Aussies too,” she said.

“So I'm not just going to pick them out, but it is quite known that in the Muslim streets you've got quite a lot in that street who are on the NDIS scheme.”

She offered no evidence, because there isn't any.

Mark Butler, the minister who runs the scheme, has never seen a breakdown of participants by religion or nationality. No such breakdown exists.

“I'm not sure where Ms Hanson is getting her figures from,” he said.

“I suspect they don't exist.”

A senator went on the podcast of a man Australia won't admit and accused 800,000 disabled Australians of harbouring fraudsters, based on nothing.

The symmetry isn't subtle. Both built careers on Islam. Both have been to prison — his convictions stand, hers was quashed on appeal in 2003 after 11 weeks inside. Both sell the same product: your life is worse, and the reason has a name and a religion.

And both are now a destination for fading Australian celebrities.

Karl Stefanovic put Robinson on his podcast and said he admired his courage. The episode was pulled within a day and Nine cut him loose, two decades on Today over. Hanson reposted it to her channel with CANCELLED in the title, then offered him a job.

Two months earlier Dave Hughes was on Instagram calling the NDIS “a cash machine for criminals”.

By June he was ranting about migrants and housing.

They aren't converts. They're men whose relevance was fading, who found a market that pays attention.

Hanson found it first. Thirty years in, it has never once made her less comfortable.

The gown was floor-length. The plane was sexy. The billionaire picked up the tab.

The elites, apparently, are somebody else.