Pauline Hanson still does not like Mardi Gras. Asked why twice, she had no answer.
Her party's new recruit Barnaby Joyce had called One Nation one of the gayest parties in Australia three days earlier.
Pauline Hanson was asked on Sunday whether she still believed what she said about the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in 1996.
She said the world had changed, that same-sex marriage was now legal, and that she had no problem with it.
Then she said she still does not like the Mardi Gras.
Asked why, the One Nation leader could not say.
"That's my opinion," she said.
Pressed again, she said: "I just don't like the gay Mardi Gras."
She went on to say that sexuality "should be kept ... behind closed doors" and that it was "no one's business to do it out there with the gay Mardi Gras".
The 1996 remark was made to 60 Minutes, and it defined her for a generation.
"I don't like it because it's promoting something ... that is not natural," she said then.
Drag performer Pauline Pantsdown cut the line into a dance track that reached the Triple J Hottest 100 in 1998, and the Mardi Gras parade built her a giant papier-mâché head.
What makes this week different is who she was answering.
Federal New England MP Barnaby Joyce, who left the Nationals for One Nation, spent Wednesday distancing the party from a former Western Australian candidate, Parminder Singh, who described homosexuality as a mental illness in an online interview and blamed it on parents being "too busy".
Mr Singh was third on One Nation's upper house ticket at the 2025 state election.
His page came off the party's website.
He apologised this week, saying he was repeating something he had heard on social media and should not have presented it as fact.
Asked about it on ABC television, Mr Joyce said the comments were highly offensive and that Mr Singh did not know the party.
"I don't want to say it but I think we're one of the gayest parties in Australia," he said.
Senator Hanson would not endorse that on Sunday.
"That's Barnaby, and Barnaby is Barnaby," she said, adding that gay people work for One Nation and got their jobs on merit.
The party's record is a harder read than Joyce's line suggests.
Two of its senators voted against marriage equality in 2017 and two others did not vote.
Its South Australian leader, Cory Bernardi, is the former senator who told parliament in 2012 that legalising same-sex marriage could lead to unions between people and animals.
The Mardi Gras is the largest LGBTQ+ festival in the country and brings almost $40 million into the New South Wales economy each year.
Senator Hanson was asked twice to name one thing wrong with it.
She could not.