The Patron and Populist.

There is a particular kind of political loyalty that does not require consistency, only sincerity, or at least the convincing performance of it. Pauline Hanson has understood this for thirty years, which is longer than most of her critics have been paying attention, and considerably longer than most of her supporters have needed her to be right about anything in particular.

Last month she accepted a private aircraft,a Cirrus SR22 G7, the kind of plane that costs between one and two million dollars and does not suggest austerity in any configuration, donated via a company linked to Gina Rinehart, who is, by every available measure, the wealthiest person in Australia and a figure not typically associated with the interests of the overlooked. Hanson called the plane sexy. She said it would help her reach regional communities. She noted it would annoy the Guardian, which it did.

Her voters were unbothered. Polling moved in the customary direction: upward.

This is the part of the story that rewards attention, because it is genuinely strange. One Nation's entire proposition, the thing it has sold, election after election, to people for whom the system has not, by any observable measure, been working, is that the major parties serve the powerful and ignore everyone else. That the system is captured. That money talks and ordinary Australians don't have any. Hanson has made a career, and a considerable personal brand, from standing at the edge of that grievance and pointing inward.

She is now pointing from a Cirrus SR22.

What her voters appear to have concluded is that the performance of defiance is the product, and they have paid for it in the only currency available to them, which is votes. The funding arrangements are someone else's business. The disclosure rules, obligingly, make it easy to treat them as such, donations at the federal level require no public accounting until they clear a threshold that a Cirrus SR22 clears without effort, and even then, not until well after anyone is paying attention. That the someone else is Gina Rinehart is, for the base, not an irony worth dwelling on.

It is a tidy system, when you look at it whole. The voters supply the mandate. The billionaire supplies the aircraft. And the woman in the middle, who has always had an instinct for where the wind is coming from, supplies the outrage - reliably, on schedule, and at a range that is considerably extended by the upgrade.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.