The shockwaves of the Herald’s Resolve Political Monitor will echo around the parliamentary corridors in Canberra, as voters are not just backing One Nation as the top party in Australia, but for the first time they are also backing Pauline Hanson as preferred prime minister.
One Nation is now the first choice of most Australian voters, attracting a primary vote of 29 per cent of respondents to the latest poll, a five percentage point rise since the last poll. Labor recorded a primary vote of 28 per cent while the Coalition is trailing with a record low primary vote of just 20 per cent.
For the first time, voters were given a choice of three candidates as their preferred prime minister: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor and One Nation leader Hanson. In an extraordinary result, Hanson took the top spot: 33 per cent of voters picked her as preferred prime minister, while 29 per cent nominated Albanese and just 16 per cent of voters backed Taylor. Showing just how volatile the new electoral reality is, 22 per cent were undecided.
The Resolve poll, conducted from June 8 to 13, confirms the rise and rise of both One Nation and its polarising leader. Hanson has in the past been dismissed by the political classes as a joke, a provocateur and an irrelevance – deservedly so, given her simplistic populism, her questionable stunts and her divisive rhetoric. But this latest result, coming on top of a series of polls confirming the party’s steady rise, shows that the electorate is mad as hell, and both the opposition and the Labor Party are on the nose.
Clearly, One Nation is a party that must be taken seriously. It cannot be written off as a marginal voice appealing to a narrow group of discontents. Both Albanese and Taylor need to take the threat of One Nation deadly seriously – if they don’t, voters will punish them both at the next election.
It’s worthwhile to put what’s happening in Australia in an international context. Right-wing populist parties are on the rise in Britain and across Europe. And in the US, the Democrats are still recovering from the catastrophe of the 2016 election, when Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton infamously dismissed half of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables”.
She learnt the hard way that you attack the electorate at your own political peril. Trump bagged an unlikely election win after he mobilised the working class vote in a number of states that had traditionally skewed Democrat.
The parallels with Australia are stark. The opposition has been bleeding supporters to One Nation, which, despite its lack of candidates and policies, is tapping into electoral anger and disillusionment with both parties.
Interestingly, the latest poll shows us who these One Nation voters are. Despite the party’s main rallying cry of cracking down on immigration, 28 per cent of their supporters are born overseas. While 31 per cent have an Anglo background, 24 per cent are non-Anglo.
The view that One Nation appeals only to rural male voters is now clearly wrong. This poll tells us it also appeals to immigrants and non-whites.
Both mainstream parties have urgent work to do to listen to the angry electorate, to formulate policies and platforms that address the source of their anger without caving into populism or relying on simplistic, unworkable solutions and to take seriously this group of voters who are obviously not feeling heard by either side of politics.
If they don’t, Hanson and her party will ride this wave of discontent all the way to the next election and the results for Australia would be disastrous.
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