Pauline Hanson is on track to return to federal parliament two decades, a quashed conviction and eight lost elections after she first won a lower house seat.
With 20% of the vote counted on Saturday night, One Nation had won at least 10% of the Senate vote in Queensland, enough for at least one and possibly two seats in the upper house.
It would be an extraordinary return to influence for Hanson after 18 years in the political wilderness that included four runs at the federal Senate, one failed defence of her federal lower house seat, two at the New South Wales state upper house and one campaign for a Queensland state seat.
The resurgence of her party, One Nation, would also reflect the uneven progress of race relations in Australia, coming in the same election that delivered the lower house’s first Indigenous woman in Linda Burney, and possibly parliament’s first Muslim woman, Anne Aly, still in a close fight for the West Australian seat of Cowan on Saturday night.
Carrying a sign that read, “Malcolm, your office or mine?”, Hanson told the Nine Network she would stand up for “grassroots Australians”, listing infrastructure, reining in the debt and “pulling the country together” as her key priorities.
“I know what the people are thinking and how they are feeling,” she said.
One Nation’s lower-house candidates too appeared to benefit from voter dissatisfaction with the major parties, winning more than 15% of the primary vote in safe Liberals seats such as Flynn, Hinkler and Wide Bay, and more than 20% in Wright in south-east Queensland.
One Nation candidates also appeared to be an outside chance of picking up Senate seats in New South Wales and Western Australia.
Hanson won the Queensland seat of Oxley in 1996 as an independent after being disendorsed by the Liberal party for her intemperate language about government assistance towards Indigenous Australians.
She railed against multiculturalism, Indigenous people and Asian-Australians during her two-year stint in the lower house, but as the political temperature around these issues cooled, and concerns around Islam came to the fore, Hanson evolved.
She told Labor senator Sam Dastyari on Saturday night – in response to a lighthearted offer to join him eating a halal snack pack – that she was “not interested in halal [and doesn’t] believe in halal certification”.
Hanson has called for a ban on Muslim immigration and a royal commission into Islam.
She said on Saturday that if elected she would be determined to avoid the in-fighting that marred her first stint in parliament and led to the destruction of her party.
“I’ve got 20 years’ experience now in politics, I’m not the new kid on the block as I was back then,” she said.
“I am so determined to make this work ... the [former senior adviser] David Oldfields are not there any longer. People infiltrated my party in the first place. And the Liberal, Labor and National parties destroyed it.
“It’s not going to happen this time, I won’t allow it to happen. Total control,” she said.