Australia is currently undergoing a strange period without a government. A neck-and-neck federal election has meant neither the ruling Liberal or opposition Labor party has yet been able to declare victory.

At least one thing is certain, however. We have elected the most famous racist in Australian history into our parliament.

Pauline Hanson, who heads up the One Nation party, ran the 2016 election on an anti-immigration, anti-Islamic platform. Much to the surprise of millions of Australians, she gained a staggering 9 percent of the vote in her home state of Queensland to enter the Senate.

In 1996, Hanson become a member of the House of Representatives for her Brisbane-based seat of Oxley. In her now-infamous maiden speech, she warned of Australia being “swamped by Asians.”

After a stint in jail in 2002, Hanson ran unsuccessfully in the national, Queensland (her home state) and neighboring New South Wales elections in 2003, 2004, 2007, 2009, 2013, and her request to become a candidate for the conservative Liberal Party in 2010 fell on deaf ears.

Undeterred by repeated, humiliating failure, she returned in 2016 to exploit xenophobic and anti-Islamic hysteria amongst elements of the Australian population.

Like right-wing populists in the United States and Britain, Hanson opposes gay marriage and Halal food certification, thinks the United Nations is a conspiracy and denies the existence of climate change.

Since being re-elected a week ago, Hanson has made inflammatory comments about the Asian population in south Sydney suburb Hurstville and has called for a royal commission into Islam. She claims to speak up for "real Aussies," whatever that means.

The irony is: Australia is a country built on migration. For the past forty years, particularly Asian migration

Only Aboriginal Australians, who make up around 2 percent of the population, can deny having migrant heritage.

At least one in four Australians was born overseas. Three out of the top five source countries of migration to Australia are in Asia. Immigrants from China, India and Vietnam, combined with those from Britain and New Zealand, make up around half of all people who entered Australia at the 2011 census.

My family are migrants from Latvia who came as refugees during World War II. Three-quarters of the (Australian) students at my high school came from Asian ethnic backgrounds.

Vietnamese is the second spoken language in the suburb I grew up. Where my family lives now, one in ten people speaks Vietnamese at home. Accordingly, Hanson’s out-of-touch views have been discredited and rejected across the political mainstream.

Prior to the election, conservative Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that: “Pauline Hanson is, as far as we are concerned, not a welcome presence in the Australian political scene.”

On the other side of politics, former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr said she is an embarrassment to Australia in Asia. Newly-elected Labor MP Linda Burney, herself from an Aboriginal background and my local member in the southern Sydney seat of Barton, slammed Hanson’s views saying that “you cannot excuse stupidity for ignorance and that's what is being displayed."

Our Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, promptly warned against the “doing anything to compromise the remarkable success story of Australian multiculturalism.” He said Hanson’s views should be treated with respect and invited her to debate her points of view, so as to explain “why we disagree.

The Israel-Australia and Jewish Affairs Council has spoken out against Hanson’s views on Asian and Muslim migration. One of the most-read newspapers in Australia, Melbourne’s The Age, published an opinion piece from its editorial team, stating that while it values free speech, “we disagree with the incoming senator from Queensland.”

At the end of Ramadan, 50,000 people turned out to Sydney’s biggest mosque to celebrate Eid al-Fitr. The president of the Lebanese Muslim Association, Samier Dandan, asserted that “their bigotry will not install hatred in us. We Australians are better than that.”

These are but a handful of widespread and very public opposition to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

It is increasingly accepted by the mainstream that Australia is part of Asia, not Europe. Business and government have long known this to be the case.

This is reflected in our desperate attempts to join the Asian Football Confederation since the 1960s, finally being accepted in 2006. Australia hosted, and won, the 2015 Asia Cup. My team, the Western Sydney Wanderers, won the Asian Champions League in 2014 against Saudi Arabia’s Al-Hilal FC.

More importantly, Australia has long pushed to become a member of Asean. It was the first dialogue partner of Asean some forty years ago, and continues to maintain close ties with the region.

If anything, we are desperate to be Asian more than Asia will accept us. In 2002, Australia applied to have a seat at the annual summit of the 10 Asean leaders, yet was rejected due to strong opposition from Malaysia's then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.

Middle Australia is already as Asian as it is European. A huge portion of us were born in Asia, many millions of us choose to travel, work and find love in Asia, and just about everybody regularly eats Asian food.

Like the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) in Indonesia, Pauline Hanson has a democratic right to say what she wants no matter how divisive or unpopular. But like them, does not speak for the mainstream.

Most Australians know we are moving into the Asian century and want to be a part of it. We look forward to leaving the Pauline Hansons of the world behind.