There are two kinds of political figure who cannot be effectively satirised. One is the kind of leader who makes the satirising of leadership a crime carrying such severe penalties that nobody dares crack a disrespectful joke, let alone commit it to screen or paper. From Genghis Khan to Stalin, history’s most successful despots have always sought new ways to ensure the obedience of their subjects, but as far as I know, none has ever relied on self-deprecating humour or welcomed ridicule. There are still plenty of places where cocking a snook at authority can get you arrested, of course, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there are more ski instructors than cartoonists in Saudi Arabia and North Korea.

But having free speech as a cornerstone of your constitution doesn’t always make the satirist’s job easier. Because as well as protecting the right of all citizens to diss their head of state, most Western democracies also protect the right of even their most educationally unburdened sons and daughters to run for office, and the right of even their most knuckle-dragging compatriots to vote for them.

The upside of this is that safe and tolerant countries like Australia will always be home to parties which, while hopefully always falling short of government, maintain enough of a profile to add spice and colour to our news diet. The downside is that some of their figureheads have a tendency to gazump the best efforts of cartoonists and comedians with the kind of own goals which they would deem too implausible to invent. In Australia we are blessed with two such parties, but only one leader who can be relied upon to say something hilarious and self-harming on a regular basis, and as such should be considered a national treasure rather than a threat to our social fabric and economic health. So no, I’m not talking about Richard di Natale, who is about as funny as a parking fine and would do serious damage if he could.But I should have known better than to decide, as I did last week, to make One Nation’s alleged US fund-fishing expedition the subject of this column. My premise was going to be that the whole thing was the result of a simple communication failure between Pauline Hanson and two of her senior staff. I was going to start by suggesting that it would have been odd for Senator Hanson to ask them to hit up an offshore organisation for cash less than a year after she herself had called for the banning of all such donations. And remind readers that shortly before taking that stand, One Nation had found itself the subject of an Australian Electoral Commission inquiry into a different funding matter; namely who had paid for the private plane Senator Hanson had been using to get around her diasporic regional base. And that one outcome of that inquiry had been her decision to give the plane the flick and go back to cars. I would then have revealed that she subsequently told her chief of staff that, given the long distances she would have to cover and the state of many country roads, it might be a good idea if they joined… But before I could write my punchline, Pauline actually said it. During the same press conference where she accused the Qatari government of interfering with Australian politics she uttered the very words I was going to put into her mouth. And now it’s official. One Nation has never asked any of her staff to solicit donations ‘from the NRMA’.

Whether you believe Ashby’s and Dickson’s denials or not, their boss at least seemed genuinely surprised by the allegations made in the films aired by the ABC last week. So knowing her as we do, let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume that, perhaps while still on the medication she’d been given for that nasty tick bite, she saw the word Jazeera on the TV page of the Courier Mail and tuned into the national broadcaster expecting to watch a documentary all about the American music scene of the 1940s.