On Wednesday, 20 August 2003, Pauline Hanson was convicted of electoral fraud in the Brisbane District Court. She was handcuffed, strip searched and sent to a women’s prison. It was a brutal and violent way for the state to treat an Australian who loved her country, worked hard, and challenged the political establishment.

The political party she founded was ordered to repay around $500,000 in funding.

Just eleven weeks later, the Queensland Court of Appeal overturned the conviction and set her free. Pauline Hanson was innocent. Yet to this day, she has never been compensated for her wrongful imprisonment, and the money seized by the Queensland Government has never been returned to One Nation.

That history matters, especially given the way Anthony Albanese now tries to label Pauline Hanson and One Nation as a “party of grievance” on the ABC over the weekend. The claim is not only outrageously false, but it also goes a long way towards cementing in the public’s mind just how mendacious Albanese might be.

There is currently a renewed focus on Pauline Hanson as a person. For the first time in decades, social media and long-form interviews are cutting through years of hostile framing and media distortion. Australians are seeing the woman, not the caricature.

Recently, Karl Stefanovic launched a podcast and chose Pauline Hanson as his first guest. He raised her jailing during the interview, and Pauline became emotional. She was vulnerable, because as she openly said, it was one of the bleakest periods of her life.

But what stands out across that conversation, and others like it, is this. Pauline Hanson does not live off grievance.

She does not wear the badge of victimhood. She does not demand perpetual apologies, taxpayer-funded compensation, or political reverence. She does not weaponise her suffering to extract moral authority over the country.

Being jailed as an innocent person is one of the most extreme abuses a government can inflict on an individual. If anyone in Australian politics had grounds to build a career on grievance, it was Pauline Hanson.

She chose not to.

Instead, she rebuilt. She turned up. She worked. She drafted fresh policies. She rebuilt her political legacy brick by brick. She did not sit in the corner and sulk. She did not demand homage. She moved forward.

In fact, she took her grainy prison mugshot, reworked it, and slapped it on a coffee mug to sell. She owned the humiliation and turned it back on the elites who thought they had broken her.

That is the opposite of grievance politics.

On the Kyle and Jackie O program last week, Pauline Hanson had a tense but cordial interaction with Anthony Mundine, where she made exactly this point. When Mundine advocated for January 26 to be a day of mourning for what happened to Aboriginal Australians generations ago, Pauline Hanson responded that it would never stop, and noted that she does not ask for a special day on August 20 to recognise her wrongful imprisonment.

Contrast that with Anthony Albanese and the modern Labor Party. Think Albo and his “houso” upbringing.  Labor governs by grievance. It encourages Australians to live in the past, to inherit resentments, and to define themselves by historical wrongs stretching back not just decades, but centuries. In many cases, to a time before Australia even existed.

Worse still, Labor does not just talk about grievance. Through mechanisms like treaty legislation in Victoria, it forces taxpayers to bankroll it. Grievance is no longer rhetorical. It is legislated, bureaucratised, and invoiced.

Australians are only now getting to know the real Pauline Hanson after years of media trashing her reputation and twisting her views. And at this point, many are angry. Not because they were wrong once, but because they were misled for so long.

Pauline Hanson does not live off grievance, but on good grace and manners. She has shown generosity and restraint, even forgiving both her jailers and the political figures involved in her imprisonment who later sought forgiveness, including Tony Abbott.

The image of this act of forgiveness brings back memories of St John Paul II visiting Mehmet Ali Ağca in prison after he shot him, to offer forgiveness.

The public mood now resembles that of a child caught in a bitter separation, where one parent has poisoned them against the other out of spite rather than genuine character flaws. As that child matures and finally reaches out for themselves, they discover the story they were told never matched reality. Sometimes things were never that bad at all. Sometimes the truth turns out to be the complete opposite.

When that happens, families are shaken, trust collapses, and years of resentment unravel.

That is exactly what is happening in Australia now, and how most feel about what they've told about Pauline Lee Hanson.