Look, I’ll just put this out there as what ought to be the conclusive answer to the most burning question in Australian politics.  It comes from Senate estimates, May  24,2017.

Senator Hanson: It has been brought to my attention that under halal certification, these cattle are actually still alive when their throats are slit, so can you explain then in halal certification what happens with the cow?

Public Servant 1: All cattle halal slaughtered in Australia are stunned prior to slaughter.

Senator Hanson: Well, I have been advised that is not the case. In one of the slaughterhouses, the cow is still alive when its throat is slit.

Public Servant 1: That is not my understanding.

Senator Hanson: So that is why I’m just asking, you know, about an investigation into these slaughterhouses.

Public Servant 2: Senator Hanson, the other point to make is that animals are alive when they’ve been stunned, it’s just that they’re unconscious. So animals will be slaughtered when they’re alive, but they will have been stunned first. So they’re not like you and I at the moment, they’re like you and I when we’ve been knocked out.

Senator Hanson: No, it’s come from people working in the slaughter …

Public Servant 2: OK.

This was Pauline Hanson’s first attendance at a Senate estimates hearing, having failed to turn up to any previous hearings since her election. At least we now know what she’d been spending that time doing. Research! She’s basically blown the lid on probably the biggest global scandal since … no actually, ever.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been one of the many neo-Marxist apologists for the religion of Islam, consistently asserting that Muslims are people too and that their faith has as much logical substance to it as all the others. I’ve been naively doubtful that halal certification is a front for a worldwide conspiracy to redirect the proceeds of Cadbury chocolate sales to Islamic State’s weapons procurement program.

[Australia’s cash isn’t vegan but might be halal]

As Hanson says she always says, she really says it like it is. And here she is, saying exactly what we’ve all been thinking, or suspecting with ill-concealed dread: the horrible, unspeakable (but totally sayable) truth that — wait for it — Muslims kill cows that aren’t already dead.

We knew already that political correctness had gone mad. I mean, you know the lefty thought police have really taken over the building when you can’t even use a terrorist attack on children as the platform for an extremely funny joke about blowing up the ABC studios. The media’s incapacity to understand the difference between high-intellect irony of the Quadrant kind and the low-brow disgraceful treason Yassmin Abdel-Magied tried to pass off as pointed political commentary is exactly why the public now trusts journalists less than it does One Nation chiefs of staff.

But that’s all just froth and bubble compared to what’s really being going on under our patriotic noses. We’ve been warned for some time about the halal thing, but it’s struggled to capture the public imagination in quite the same way as kiddie-fiddling priests and Scout masters tend to do. As any unemployed former tabloid editor can tell you, it’s sex and blood what sells.

Which is exactly why Senator Hanson hit the jackpot in estimates, as she deftly traced the dangling entrails of the Islam-is-not-a-religion-it’s-a-political-ideology-and-I-don’t-like-it construct all the way back up the chain of conspiracy theory hyperlinks to the stinking carcass of a recently murdered cow. The trail of blood is unmistakable, and it leads directly to the halaliphate.

[Rundle: why Jews (and everyone) need to stand up for halal]

A grateful nation has only now to put the full stop at the end of the sentence which the Senator has so eloquently sketched. The only mystery is why nobody has ever picked up on this before. Halal executioners have been killing live cows for years. The death toll must be in the millions, not to speak of the suffering these poor cows endure, compared to their lucky sisters who find their way into Christian abattoirs where they may be slaughtered only if they’re already dead.

Case closed on the halalification scandal. Let’s hope Hanson moves quickly on to other questions we really need to clear up, like whether our live sheep exports have been including animals that aren’t dead.

The burning question might be thought in faux-intellectual circles to be that of whether the Hanson IQ is lower than today’s temperature, and the smirking denizens of the left may point to her bovine-centric questions as proof positive that she shares more with the average cow than a concern that they don’t die before they’re dead.