But in the media's rush to commemorate September 11, we risk overlooking another anniversary, one that arguably softened the ground for the radical retreat from tolerance that was to explode around the world five years later.

On Tuesday September 10, 1996, Pauline Hanson's maiden speech sent shockwaves through Australia. The new member for Oxley had been disendorsed by the Liberal Party for comments she made to an Ipswich paper about "race-based welfare", but won the hearts of those voters now known as Howard's battlers to sweep into Parliament as an independent.

But looking back at Hanson's polarising words that day a decade ago, it's hard to find any that would see her dropped by John Howard's Liberal Party in 2006. In fact, some of her boldest statements now read like favourite sound grabs from the Howard Government playbook.

See if this sounds familiar: "If I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country."

Or this: "I am calling for ATSIC to be abolished. It is a failed, hypocritical and discriminatory organisation that has failed dismally the people it was meant to serve." Equal credit must go to Mark Latham for picking up on that one.

Hanson complained about immigrants who maintained "their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate". She was speaking about Asians, of course, who must now be hugely relieved that they have been replaced as the enemy at our gates by Muslim Australians.

The member for Oxley promised "to find out how many treaties we have signed with the UN, have them exposed and then call for their repudiation". She warned us of "unskilled migrants not fluent in the English language" adding to our dole queues — an alert now being sounded by the Opposition, while the Government bullies migrants to learn English at the same time as slashing more than $11 million from its English-language tuition services in the last financial year alone.

And she called for the complete abolition of the policy of multiculturalism, to "allow those from ethnic backgrounds to join mainstream Australia, paving the way to a strong, united country".

All sounds like terribly standard stuff now, doesn't it? So how did the sort of comments that once saw Hanson dropped like a hot potato from the Liberal Party become the bread-and-butter rhetoric of 21st century Australia?

In short, because Hanson and her subsequent political outfit, One Nation, proved to be the Trojan Horse by which Howard and his fellow reactionaries, the driest of the Liberal dries, smuggled their decades-old prejudices and grievances into the national consciousness.

They invaded the space opened up by the too-fast-too-soon leadership of Paul Keating and his fellow radical-centre progressives, and exploited the fear and uncertainty of people who had traditionally voted Labor. The balance of electoral power now rests with these voters, rather than with the ethnic communities, young creatives and small-l liberals who had been the most fought-over constituencies of the previous 20 years.

Howard had to wait a decade after his 1986 proclamation that "the times will suit me" before his flame-haired messiah arrived on the scene to do the dirty work for him. Hanson's ingenuous image enabled her to thrust into the centre of Australian politics the sort of racial demonisation and social division that Howard had been pedalling unsuccessfully throughout his career.

For the first five years of his prime ministership, Howard retained a respectful distance from the work being done, unwittingly, on his behalf by Hanson. He has admitted himself that he did not hit his stride until his third term.

In this context, September 11 can be seen as bringing international endorsement and, some would say, vindication of the sort of divisive politics Howard has relied on all along. It is only this confluence of external factors, and his willingness to exploit them to the full, that gives Howard the illusion of being a skilful and canny politician.

In fact, rather than pursue a coherent vision for the nation through the application of its own ideals through public policy, Howard's Government has done little but slyly introduce a series of measures based on the resentful ranting of a woman once deemed to be unworthy of its own endorsement. It has done so by ruthlessly and opportunistically exploiting people's fear in the face of an international "war on terror" that has still failed to actually reach our shores.

That is the truth, and the tragedy, of Australia five years after September 11 and 10 years after Hanson.

How far we've come.

*Emma Dawson is a Fellow at OzProspect