Can you talk a bit to that, like why you think the laws rig the system?

Well, I think the fact that the government and the opposition colluded to put it through literally on the last day of the 47th Parliament says a lot.

I didn't see them co-operate on much during the time that I was in the Parliament, yet right at the back end, they didn't put it to a proper Senate inquiry.

I think after a lot of pressure, they enabled one day of hearings to consider the legislation and then forced it through because they had the numbers.

But basically what it does is tilt the playing field in favour of the major parties.

Each MP in the lower house, for example, would be capped at a spend of $800,000 per seat, but the major parties can spend up to $90 million nationally.

So that's just one element of it, but it's a simple example I think that people can understand where in an electorate like Goldstein where I was sitting, which is a hyper-marginal seat, the second most marginal seat in the country with a margin of 88 votes between myself and the sitting Liberal member, the Liberal Party could plaster the entire electorate with Vote Liberal, and also the member could spend up to $800,000 on name-based advertising for himself, whereas an independent candidate would be capped at $800,000 full stop.

Has your legal counsel given you any sense of your sort of prospects, your sense of, you know, how confident you are you might succeed or not?

How reminiscent

is this? Trump has done an extraordinary job of turning himself into the everyman as a person who grew up with immense wealth who was absolutely not the everyman.

Yet I spent four years running around the US trying to understand why people who were driven by disappointment in leadership, grievance, felt that their communities had been pulled backwards by things like migration and globalisation, why they were gravitating to Trump.

thinking that he was their person.

And at the end of the day, many of them were able to park their reservations about him for the sake of having someone who they felt would speak out for them without reservation, who would call it as he saw it.

exactly the same kind of persona that Pauline Hanson has managed to develop where she still harks back to and in many people's minds she's still the fish and chip shop owner from the mid-90s and she's in effect spent the intervening 30 years in politics and in some form of sort of celebrity orbit and has not been the average person running a fish and chip shop.

And I think Coz has written in his columns that people... view Pauline Hanson, those who support her, view her on a first-name basis as their friend.

Zoe, what's your assessment, what's your analysis of how the major parties have handled this, of what they could be doing or should be doing? And from what you've seen in America, is it going to make any difference?