Pauline won Liberal pre-selection for a safe federal Labor seat called Oxley before the 1996 election. It doesn't really matter who represents you if you have no chance of winning, so pre-selection in those seats is not a hard thing to do.
However Pauline made herself unpopular by saying politically incorrect things about Aborigines, so the Liberal Party dropped her. To many people's surprise however, she won her seat in the house of representatives - as an independent.
She gave an interesting maiden speech in which she said that
Importantly she tapped into a vein of anger in the Australian population. Things which had been said quietly over working-class dinner tables, but wasn't being said in the universities, the parliament or the mass-media. Overnight she became the pariah of the elites, and the darling of the rednecks.
The mass-media immediately branded her as extreme-right, which had become media-speak for "stuff that we don't like". While it was the anti-political correctness which made her popular, her economic policies were hard-left. She was anti globalization, anti free trade, and pro protectionism. In fact her economic policies were very similar to the Australian Democrats.
She formed a group of people called One Nation.