Support for Ms Pauline Hanson's One Nation party has started to slide since Australia's media switched its focus to claims that she is being manipulated by her advisers, new polls revealed yesterday.
Three weeks after its spectacular debut in the Queensland state election, a poll to be published by the Bulletin magazine this week shows One Nation's support down from 14.5 per cent to 12 per cent nationally.
At the same time, polling by the Liberal Party of the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, reportedly shows the increasingly unflattering media focus on One Nation's internal workings, and on claims that Ms Hanson is a puppet, are biting.
An analysis by the Australian of its own polls for the last three months also shows that while One Nation took 23 per cent of the vote and 11 seats in Queensland's election, only 11 per cent of Queensland voters would support the party in a federal election.
Its support is far less in the other five states - and only five or six per cent in the most populous states of Victoria and New South Wales.
One Nation was thought likely to win up to 12 Senate seats in a double dissolution election threatened by Mr Howard before he settled Australia's long-running native landrights dispute last week.
But a normal election would be different. To win a Senate seat in a normal election, under Australia's complex preferential voting system, a candidate requires 14.3 per cent of the statewide vote - double the quota required for a double dissolution poll.
This means One Nation would not even be guaranteed to win a seat in its Queensland stronghold.
Recent polls and studies have suggested that while One Nation has sub-groups of hardcore bigots, most of its supporters are poorly-educated, insecure blue collar men aged over 50.
The polls show they are ill-informed and uninterested in the political process, making them vulnerable to a party which plays on fears of job losses and makes Asian immigrants the scapegoats for their own lack of success.
But they would have had to be blind to miss the torrent of negative publicity generated in recent weeks by defectors from One Nation.
Ms Hanson's private secretary left her job in protest against what she said was the dominating and manipulative influence of Ms Hanson's chief political adviser, Mr David Oldfield.
A suggestion by One Nation's chief administrator and fund raiser, Mr David Ettridge, that the government print money to fund low interest loans was ridiculed in blanket news coverage.
The Federal Liberal MP, Mr Tony Abbott, said One Nation was a company run as a business by its three directors - Ms Hanson, Mr Oldfield and Mr Ettridge - rather than a political party with a democratic structure.
Although Ms Hanson denounces tax avoidance, she has refused to answer questions about Mr Ettridge's use of a company in the Pacific tax haven of Vanuatu - allegedly to minimise his tax liabilities.