Letter from Sydney Pádraig CollinsThe One Nation party's support in Australia has risen from a statistically irrelevant low to 2 per cent since its co-founder Pauline Hanson was jailed for electoral fraud two weeks ago.
The same survey also found that 70 per cent of Australians believe the three-year sentence is too severe. More than half feel it is much too severe.
Prime Minister John Howard said that "like many other people I find the sentence certainly very long and very severe". His Liberal colleague, MP Bronwyn Bishop, called Hanson a "political prisoner". Even Bob Carr, the Labor premier of New South Wales, said she should have been given community service rather than a prison sentence.
Among all the political crocodile tears there were very few voices of dissent. One of those was Labor's economic spokesman, the pithy Mark Latham. "She's just been a candidate in the recent NSW election campaigning for tougher penalties," he said. "Now she's got one."
Peter Beattie, Queensland's Labor premier, was more heartfelt and corrosive in his reaction to the Hanson sympathisers.
"I have never seen so many gutless wimps in my life running around like scalded cats trying to position themselves for political gain," he said. "I just simply say to everybody... have some respect for the courts. The courts have gone through this process and they've found an outcome."
Hanson's crime was creative accounting when it came to Queensland's rules on political party registration. As One Nation's party president in 1998 she got $500,000 in public funding after success at the Queensland state election.
To get the funds a party has to have at least one elected MP and 500 legitimate members. It turned out that most of these 500 One Nation people were supporters rather than members, under the terms of the relevant act.
Despite Hanson returning the money in December 2000, and pleading not guilty, she is now serving three years in Wacol women's prison. An unfortunate choice perhaps - Wacol's inmates are predominantly Asian and Aboriginal.
Hanson's inaugural speech to Australia's federal parliament on September 10th, 1996 said that Australians "are in danger of being swamped by Asians", that Asians in Australia "form ghettos and do not assimilate" and that Aborigines might take the land of non-Aborigines. For good measure she also queried whether Aborigines truly were disadvantaged.
Hanson exposed an ugly underbelly in Australian politics and society and has had a remarkable influence on political life for someone who spent only two years and seven months as an elected representative.
When she was elected as a federal MP in March 1996, the ballot papers listed her as the candidate of the Liberal Party. John Howard had expelled her a couple of weeks before the election but it was too late to change the ballot papers. She was defeated in the next general election in 1998.
In 2001 she ran for a Queensland Senate seat and lost that too. Hanson became a three-time loser when she was defeated in the NSW state election last March.
Hanson was so sure she would not be jailed last month that she mocked press photographers on her way into court by taking their picture. She will not be developing that film for some time yet.