Opinion
One Nation can win the next federal election. Whether that comes to pass depends on a galaxy of factors whose orbits we can only guess. But now, for the first time, it’s possible to see how those orbits could deliver Pauline Hanson to the Lodge, even if it’s not the likeliest outcome.
Yes, this is about polling. But it’s about more than that. It’s about the forces beneath the numbers which are all heading in one direction. The only question is if and when those forces halt, and how far One Nation has gotten in the meantime.
Multiple polls have One Nation in first place on primary votes, ahead of Labor. That is obviously a sensational development, but actually the most seismic poll still had Labor in front, published late last week in this masthead. That’s because it showed the One Nation vote breaching what had previously been the great wall of Australian politics defined by two major characteristics: geography and formal education.
Simply, Labor dominated the cities and the tertiary educated. The Coalition and One Nation were left to fight over the rural vote, which can never be enough to deliver government. As long as this arrangement remained intact, One Nation could surge as much as it liked and not pose a serious threat. At most, it could replace the Coalition as a regionally based opposition party.
Now we learn One Nation has become more popular with women than with men. It is picking up younger, tertiary educated, high-income city voters. It has commenced its urban raid, crossing the containment lines that exclude it from government. People keen to write off One Nation as the party of angry, old, white men are now demonstrably wrong in exactly the way Democrats were wrong about Donald Trump in 2024.
In the latter case, Trump’s coalition turned out to be multiracial and intergenerational. He did well with women voters, even against a female candidate running hard on the issue of abortion. Now One Nation is showing signs of similar breadth. If a poll soon emerges showing it has growing support among migrant communities, there will be no reason for surprise.
We will spend enormous energy debating what the major parties’ response to this should be. We’ll examine the Albanese government’s every move to see if it can provide solutions to the electorate’s grievances and arrest the slide. If it cannot, we’ll deem it a failure of understanding, imagination or political competence. This overlooks the fact we’re seeing this pattern repeated in the US and the UK, to say nothing of France, Germany, Italy or Austria. And nowhere comparable in the world have establishment parties found a way to resist this movement once it gathered momentum.
In the US, it swallowed the Republicans. In the UK, Nigel Farage’s Reform party has crushed the Tories and is now crushing Labour. In France, the traditional major parties were swept away almost entirely, and Macron’s new centrist block only barely survives because parties conspire to keep the far-right out of power. Why should we assume Australia is an exception to this, that there’s some uniquely Australian rabbit to be pulled out of some hat?
These are deep, tectonic forces. We’re watching a broad, thoroughgoing rejection of the decades-long political consensus in Western politics. It’s not hard to point to the landmarks along this road of discontent – terrorism, the global financial crisis, Brexit, COVID, multiple rounds of inflation, AI’s onward march – but it’s the cumulative effect that matters: a near-constant sense of crisis, spanning the economic, social and political. The resulting sense is that the system itself is broken.
The problem for major parties is that whatever they now say, they symbolise that system. The benefit for insurgents is that whatever they say, they symbolise upending it. In that environment, it hardly matters what the establishment offers. The more deeply you’ve given up on the system, the less you’re even listening to the establishment any more. And the less critically you’ll examine the insurgency.
This is a politics of deep dissent. It is not unified by a shared worldview. Winding back immigration and climate policy are common touchstones, but little besides. The more we see One Nation members elected to parliaments, the more variety we see in what they actually believe. Most recently we have David Farley, freshly elected in Farrer, who values the contribution of migrants and thinks Muslims by and large respect and integrate into Australian culture. He’s happy to stand in front of the Aboriginal flag. What the movement agrees on most is the need to break the two-party system.
It works because there are no natural majorities any more. Instead, we have only majorities of dissent, cobbled together more around rejection than affirmation. That means the electorate constantly sends two consecutive messages: “We want change!” – then immediately, “Not that change!” Witness, for example, the response to Labor’s budget. Or, for that matter, any serious structural reform this century that asks someone to sacrifice something.
Conventional political wisdom suspects One Nation will falter upon facing the same policy scrutiny as major parties, beginning in earnest next week when Hanson addresses the National Press Club. But this makes two fragile assumptions: first, that One Nation’s roughness isn’t already priced in to its support; and second, that people will ultimately assess One Nation on the same terms they assess the major parties. That’s unlikely to be true for as long as One Nation remains an insurgent, building a coalition of dissent.
Perhaps that’s a week, a year, or the other side of the next election. No one knows, and everything depends on it. Perhaps the more used to One Nation we get, the less insurgent it will seem. In the UK, Reform is now being threatened by an even more hardline outfit, Restore Britain. Perhaps that could happen here. Meanwhile, we’re on the cusp of a serious, Iran-induced economic crisis. Will voters blame Trump for that and associate One Nation with him, or rage at the Albanese government and put One Nation over the top?
As I say, a galaxy of factors. But this is not a surge that can be managed away. One Nation is playing a different political game by a completely different set of rules, much as Trump did. The major parties cannot will those rules to change. Only time or a major disruption can do that. And only then will the surge abate.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.
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Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.