For full disclosure, I should say that I am among those who doubt One Nation will be able to sustain its momentum. It is therefore possible I found what I was expecting or even hoping to find in her address. Still, it is striking that once she no longer had a script written by someone else in front of her — once question time began at the Press Club — her discipline slipped and we got to see the old One Nation, and the old Pauline Hanson. In substance she sounded much like the right-wing Liberal she was before she lost preselection in February 1996 — even while her message was delivered in the familiar populist style that, through word, tone, facial expression and body language, constantly announces Hanson has “had a gutful.”

In her seemingly interminable speech — at one stage, the chair Tom Connell asked her to begin winding up — she was making a pitch to keep a hold on that 30 per cent of voters who are already saying they will vote One Nation and to add perhaps 5 per cent more. After refusing to give a “divisive Welcome to Country” (she presumably meant “Acknowledgement,” but never mind), Hanson spent most of the next three-quarters of an hour continuing to tell us who and what she hates.

Hanson remains, in that sense, what she has always been: a bundle of resentments and a harvester of grievance. But her present efforts meet with the most favourable of seasons for such a politician and movement: an energy crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, a housing crisis, high immigration coming out of Covid, and the Bondi terrorist attack. On the political front, the Coalition is a mess, its leadership ineffectual. Labor stumbles on — paradoxically, given its enormous majority would normally be considered unassailable in a single election.

Predictably, Hanson treated immigration as the cause of the housing crisis. She then went on to link the problem to “the utterly flawed policy of multiculturalism.” Australia is “multiracial,” she said, but should be “monocultural.” Future Liberal leader Billy Snedden said much the same thing in 1969: “I am quite determined we should have a monoculture, with everyone living in the same way, understanding each other, and sharing the same aspirations. We don’t want pluralism.” But back then, to call for “monoculture” still meant something: Australia had barely passed out of the era of Britishness, and the White Australia Policy, while on the way out, was still in place. Even the politicians contributing to the dismantling of that old order still assumed the place would remain a white nation even when they politely refrained from saying so. But what could “monocultural” mean today, unless it is a nostalgic appeal to an Australia outside the living memory even of ageing Gen Xers like me?

As a populist, Hanson naturally claims the privilege of defining what that culture is: she represents real Australians, not the kinds of people who read Inside Story. More than half the population was either born overseas or had a parent born overseas: “Is that what Australia wants?,” she complains. It is a startling pitch, vaguely reminiscent of the old-time bragging that Australia was 98 per cent British and that it needed to stay that way notwithstanding the covetous Asian hordes to our north.

Populist politics is obsessed with drawing boundaries between those who truly belong and those who do not. But it is surely risky in an immigrant nation that has had an official policy of multiculturalism for about half a century to draw the line where she and her advisers seem to have decided to draw it. Who does Hanson think is living in all those suburbs she wants to win back from the Labor Party if not migrants and their children?

All the same, Hanson more or less held it together during her haltingly read text. Australia is “predominantly a Judeo-Christian society” and “Western civilisation and its values are under siege.” “Radical Islam” and the “transgender insurgency” menace the country. Net zero is a “hoax.” Anthony Albanese is a “liar.”

And a few specific policies. Nuclear energy for Australia. More control of artificial intelligence. Abolish SBS. Turn the ABC into a subscription service for city people. End government financial subsidies to renewable energy: after all, “the bloke in the corner store” doesn’t get this kind of help. (To which the obvious retort is that “the bloke in the corner store” no longer exists. There’s that nostalgia again.)

I don’t doubt the popular resonance of this kind of appeal in our present moment, even while I am sceptical whether most Australians support having broadcasts of the World Cup football taken from them because Hanson objects to the existence of a multicultural broadcaster. That said, it is in keeping with the basic joylessness of her politics. Hanson began her political career, in local government, with a campaign to prevent the building of a library in Ipswich because she thought it was a waste of ratepayers’ money. It is hard to discern much change in her outlook thirty years later. She is one of life’s straiteners.

Alongside her selective nostalgia, Hanson combines a vision of homeliness, an articulation of resentment, and a performance of authenticity, however contrived. Even while One Nation takes Rinehart’s money and Hanson drops in on Donald Trump at Florida’s Versailles, Mar-a-Lago, she continues to play the outsider challenging the political establishment, the real taking on the fake. All of this is well calculated to appeal to people who believe the world is hurtling outside their control, nothing is what it seems, and that politicians — insiders all — won’t listen to them.

And to be fair, it is hard to have much sympathy with the mainstream politicians who looked on complacently for decades while house prices went through the roof and now find themselves berated for it by a gifted, tested political opportunist. Hanson spent a lot of time in her address talking about poverty, hunger and homelessness, too — perhaps part of an effort to give her cause some moral ballast and confound the accusation she is the puppet of filthy rich “Mrs Rinehart,” as she likes to call Australia’s wealthiest woman and One Nation’s most generous financial sponsor. Still, Hanson had no policy to offer the poor and the battler apart from suggesting less government spending and more coal would reduce their cost of living.

In this connection, One Nation has a problem — and that materialised once the question and answer session started. It was then that we got our reminder that Hanson, for all her longevity, is not a particularly creative politician. Successful populisms elsewhere have mixed and matched, assembling bits and pieces from the left and right to create a broad constituency and thereby take the wind out of more centrist opponents’ sails.

If she were one of these types, Hanson would have said that she intends doubling the parental leave allowance and spending even more on childcare by taking funding away from Indigenous people or universities or the ABC — or from other of the many “rorts” she believes are being perpetrated under our collective noses. Instead, she said businesses should not be expected to pay women who were not at work and that government funding of childcare is “out of control” and requires “investigation.” Come election time, all of this is likely to go down in Australia’s suburbs about as well as Peter Dutton’s working from home policy.

In short, as she entered full, unscripted flight, all of the familiar instincts came into play. She sounded like a reactionary who, even now, could find a home on the right of the Liberal Party — the place where she began three decades ago. When asked by Mark Riley from Seven about her consistent parliamentary record of doing over workers, she sturdily defended business in its efforts to deal with lazy employees. They should be easier to sack. She complained about abortions. She harped on about government spending like a hardened 1980s economic rationalist. But some areas of expenditure were especially unwarranted: money would be taken out of Aboriginal affairs and placed in “consolidated revenue.”

On One Nation itself, she said some remarkable things that have barely featured in media coverage. She recounted how she had refrained from creating branches when One Nation Mark II emerged in 2015 because there were 350 the first time round and “I had nothing but trouble.” That’s a pretty remarkable confession even by the standards of Australia’s somewhat reduced political parties: the rank and file can’t be trusted, so let’s not have one. But One Nation does now have branches, although they seem to operate under bizarre controls and restrictions. Hanson’s support for constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech doesn’t apparent extend to them. Why? Because “I have to be in total control of it.”

There is also the not inconsiderable issue of how a party whose current lower-house presence amounts to two seats — one of them the result of Barnaby Joyce’s defection from the Nationals — will be translated into a credible competition for executive power. Interestingly, much of the media has been so entranced by Hanson’s verbal abuse of Sarah Martin that nobody picked up that while she was in full flight she indicated she intends to run for the Senate again.

No journalist asked the obvious question of whether she — or her new colleague Joyce, for that matter — would be standing for the House of Representatives now One Nation is supposedly vying for government. Indeed, there is a surprising indifference in the commentariat about this hardly trivial matter: it is as if it is imagined the sheer force of populist passion will sweep away all institutional barriers in the name of the people’s will. Those who recall the Joh for PM fiasco of 1987 will understand how magical that kind of thinking is in a parliamentary democracy.

It is often being said that One Nation is a more professional outfit than it used to be. Probably so. It certainly has plenty of money and is working social media with apparent success. Nonetheless, it is also still Hanson’s show. Her deepest instincts appear to remain those of an ageing minor-party leader more interested in saying what the 5 or 10 per cent of voters who form her traditional base still want to hear. The parallel with Peter Dutton’s retreat into culture wars and Sky appearances during the last election campaign is striking.

Coalition strategists seem no less sure about how to respond to the One Nation threat following Hanson’s Press Club address as they were before it. Labor strategists, on the other hand, have been given a generous allocation of material to work with. •

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So many big targets, so many uncosted “policies.” A lot of Hanson’s sentiments could appeal to many or most voters, but others, particularly when she was answering questions (workers are “lazy,” childcare workers don’t need qualifications, her slippery views about abortion), not so much. Left unmentioned were her strong anti-vaccination views, her adoration of Donald Trump, her fellow One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts’s conspiracy theories, her backing from posh squillionaire Gina Rinehart, her attitudes to guns.

She and her team would be happy with her performance: she was confident, strong, not for turning and avoided those tricky topics. The grievance theatre — everyone’s picking on her but she keeps soldiering on — was on full show.

Hanson is the leader of an insurgent party, so the rules that apply to the Libs and the Nats don’t apply to her. But this insurgent party is suddenly leading the pollsters’ primary vote figures in a three-way contest with Labor and the Coalition.

That doesn’t mean One Nation is “ahead in the polls” any more than when, in the old days, the Coalition led in primary votes but lagged after preferences. If recent survey results were replicated at the ballot box, Labor would likely have the most seats — maybe a majority — followed by One Nation, daylight, and then the Coalition.

If One Nation’s primary support gets into the high thirties, though, a majority of seats might (depending on other parties’ support) be on the cards. Somewhere between its current thirty-ish and that scenario, a One Nation–led alliance with the Coalition becomes likely.

Comparisons with Trump are limited: he took control of the major centre-right party, and hence its place in the country, its infrastructure, its finance and its rusted-on supporters. The United States has not seen the electoral splintering that’s happened in other advanced democracies (if America still sits in that category).

In Western Europe, where most countries use proportional representation to elect their lower houses, some far-right parties have topped the vote with very low numbers. Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy got 26 per cent in 2022, but along with her party’s junior centre-right partners won a majority of the Chamber of Deputies seats. (That’s the short version; the longer one includes first-past-the-post single-member districts, which members of her coalition divided between them so as not to split the vote — similar to Liberal frontbencher Tony Pasin’s recent thought bubble.)

At the other end of the range of outcomes, Austria’s Freedom Party won the most votes, 28.8 per cent, and the most seats in 2024 but remained totally out of government. In between, a few far-right parties won similarly modest vote pluralities and then entered government in some form, although not supplying the head of government.

France’s lower house’s electoral system is similar to ours: single-member districts, with its second round of voting rendering it all somewhat “preferential.” Two years ago, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally group topped the first round (like our primary vote) with 33 per cent, winning pluralities in a majority of districts. Other parties then selectively sat out the second round out to deny it victory.

In our compulsory preferential voting system, strategic non-contesting of seats (as advocated by Pasin) makes little sense, but recommending preferences to or away from other parties does. Labor always puts One Nation last on its how-to-vote cards, but at recent elections the Coalition has “preferenced” One Nation ahead of Labor everywhere, largely because most of the very conservative Liberal and Nationals memberships would strongly object, and possibly defect, if they preferenced Labor.

Hanson’s Wednesday speech devoted many words to lambasting Anthony “the Liar” Albanese and Jim Chalmers, but no Coalition members were mentioned. While One Nation casts itself as an alternative to the two-party seesaw, its strongest criticism is always directed at Labor (often with a swipe at the Greens). And yet it inflicts a lot more damage to the Coalition parties.

How much more damage?

There’s a question most pollsters ask without publishing the results. When a respondent says they’d put “1” next to a small party or an independent, the pollster asks which of the major parties they’d give their preference to on the ballot paper.

The question usually starts something like: “As you may know, you must rank either Labor ahead of the Coalition or the Coalition ahead of Labor on the ballot paper…” These words provide information people don’t get when voting, and this artificiality is one reason why these respondent-derived preferences don’t tend to stand up well against the eventual flows at elections.

But the question is brilliant for getting some idea of the (major) partisan leanings of these voters. One outfit that publishes these numbers is Redbridge/Accent, and in their last three (non-MRP) reports the results for One Nation voters averaged to 77 per cent for the Coalition and 23 for Labor. That’s a good proxy for the relative proportions the insurgent party takes from the majors.

Of course, the major parties began shedding primary votes years and decades before One Nation staged its recent revival; indeed, the revival itself is a symptom of the ongoing collapse of the two-party system. The support has to go somewhere, and at the moment it’s coalescing around this person.

As the election approaches, the prospect of a government comprising One Nation and the Coalition has the potential to push more voters, however reluctantly, to support Labor.

It’s barely a year since Peter Dutton led the Coalition to disaster, largely because he was seen as too Trumpy. But he was the epitome of sensible centrism compared with Hanson. That’s the big question about the 2028 election: will the old rules — that voters crave stability and reassurance and are risk averse — still apply? A lot will depend on how the economy is going, and whether the cost of living still feels alarming. People can take desperate measures in desperate times. •

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An exchange on Sky News last week summed up the mood, and the government’s response. Journalist Andrew Clennell asked Albanese whether Labor’s broken election promises on negative gearing and capital gains tax had contributed to One Nation’s rise. “There’s never been less trust in the major political parties,” said Clennell, “and One Nation support is rising. Is it really ideal to be breaking promises like this? Because that looks like something that could fuel the rise of —”

Albanese broke in. “I’ll tell you what’s not ideal,” he said. “It’s to see the rise of populism… [I]f people think the economy isn’t working for them and they’re working their guts out and they’re not getting opportunity, I tell you what, they will turn to more simplistic grievance-based politics. And that is the context in which my government is saying, ‘No, no, we’re going to deliver real change for the better. This is what we’re doing. This is why we’re doing it.’ Because it is real, the frustration that people have out there.”

The government argues its budget tax changes will  help young first-home buyers and stop the tax system from favouring those with investment income over those whose earnings come from wage labour. But that doesn’t answer the question of whether such measures will be effective in countering populism or whether a broken election promise has backfired at a time of rising distrust in government and the major parties. One Nation obviously thinks the latter, and has launched a major funding campaign using the slogan “Fire the Liar.”

It was not just One Nation’s rising poll numbers that should concern the federal government. Labor had a major wake-up call at the South Australian election back in March. As political scientist Luke Mansillo pointed out, SA Labor’s massive victory came with warning signs. He detected “enough places that Labor has suffered losses to One Nation for the federal government to worry about. Peter Dutton’s strategy of outer urban and regional seat targeting is coming off for One Nation, who can peel off voters the Liberal Party could not.”

Mansillo was referring to the Coalition’s populist strategy at the 2025 election, when Liberal leader Peter Dutton depicted himself as more in touch with ordinary working-class voters than Labor, which he accused of pandering to racial and ethnic minorities and woke elites.

Albanese depicted his government’s 2025 victory as a decisive vote against Dutton’s politics of division: as a vote for a socially inclusive national unity based on “fairness, aspiration and opportunity for all.” The implication was that right-wing populism doesn’t work in twenty-first century Australia.

But various commentators, including me, questioned Albanese’s analysis. He was telling part of the story, but many additional factors contributed to the Liberals’ massive election loss, from an unpopular leader to campaign own-goals and even the impact of Donald Trump.

Far from rejecting Dutton’s strategies, the Coalition is doubling down on issues like immigration, while leaving open the possibility of preference deals and a closer relationship with One Nation. It’s true that Angus Taylor has (for the moment at least) ruled out the suggestion of his “close confidant and numbers man,” South Australian MP Tony Pasin, that the Liberals should make a deal with One Nation to carve out the seats each party will contest so as not to compete with each other. Pauline Hanson has made clear One Nation will be targeting outer-suburban seats currently held by Labor.

Meanwhile, the more equal, diverse and socially inclusive society Albanese espouses can still be depicted as a woke-elite project by his opponents. It is an old Labor problem.

This is not the first time Albanese appears to have underestimated the influence and political effectiveness of right-wing populism. He also did so during the (failed) Voice referendum campaign in 2023.

Albanese’s attitude seems to go back to a view of Australian politics he held early in his term as prime minister. He apparently believed he would be managing a socially inclusive, idealistic, collaborative and progressive new politics that would favour Labor and groups such as the teal independents. He returned to that vision of Australian politics in his 2025 election victory speech.

One Nation’s rise since then should have made it clear that, while politics is changing and the old two-party system is under threat, the old politics of culture wars and right-wing populism is alive and well. Albanese is now more aware of the danger — how could he not be given recent opinion poll results? — but he seems to see the difference between his earlier depiction of the state of Australian politics and the unexpected rise of One Nation as primarily a reflection of changed economic circumstances.

In a time of global economic uncertainty with rising inflation, a major cost of living crisis and a housing crisis, a significant number of voters will feel disenchanted with traditional political parties and turn to populist alternatives. Many One Nation voters may also genuinely believe that reducing immigration numbers will help fix Australia’s housing and infrastructure crisis yet have no desire to see the reduction take racially or religiously discriminatory forms. The breadth of One Nation’s appeal is reflected by the newly elected South Australian MP who spoke lovingly of his Indonesian Muslim same-sex partner

But One Nation’s rhetoric can also appeal to those who do support discriminatory policies, to the “dark angels in our nation” famously referred to by former Labor leader Kim Beazley when he lost the 2001 “Tampa election” to John Howard. Right-wing populism can fuel the resentment of various social groups who feel their previous racial, religious, gender or sexuality privilege is under threat.

Some Labor figures emphasise the economic roots of discriminatory attitudes, and former treasurer and party president Wayne Swan has blamed rising economic inequality for the rise of populism internationally. But we should remember that Kim Beazley tried to counter Howard’s populist culture wars and mobilisation of national security issues  by focusing on the largely economic “kitchen table” concerns of ordinary Australians. Furthermore, the White Australia policy and blatant discrimination against Indigenous Australians flourished during the economically privileged postwar boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

Admittedly, Labor has had limited success in selling all it has done to tackle cost-of-living issues, including tax breaks, wage increases, increased government subsidies for healthcare and childcare. Although its efforts have also been undermined by rising inflation, fuel costs and a housing crisis, this failure doesn’t adequately explain Hanson’s resonance with substantial sections of the Australian population.

How else do we explain the electoral success of  a women who flies around the country in a plane given to her by Australia’s richest woman, Gina Rinehart, and who also accompanied Rinehart to party at Mar-A-Lago with the US president, whose war in the Middle East has contributed to Australians’ economic hardship?

Surely it is time for Albanese to reconsider his positive take on the new politics In Australia. We live in a time when the old politics of culture wars and division are very much still with us. As social democratic parties around the world have found, there are no easy ways of countering right-wing populism. But a first step is to correctly analyse populism’s nature and causes, and economic distress is only part of the explanation.

If it is to succeed in winning back mainstream voters, Labor also needs a better strategy for countering culture wars, including One Nation’s clever use of social media platforms. It also needs to be better at countering the populist framing of issues, and not just immigration. For example, it needs to make a stronger case that its broad equality agenda on issues from race to gender  is not “woke,” “elite” or anti-worker but actively supports disadvantaged sections of Australia’s  diverse working class. Above all, Labor needs to become better at anticipating the populist reaction to its actions and planning accordingly. •

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The bit about the budget is old news and entirely true. But it’s important to note that One Nation’s poll lead was in primary votes only, and we all know that’s not the full story under our electoral system. The concept of national two-party-preferred support might be outliving its usefulness, but that doesn’t mean primary votes now rule. Preferences are no less important than they ever were. And in fact the pollster, Redbridge/Accent, estimated Labor’s two-party-preferred support was 51 per cent regardless of whether its main opponent was One Nation or the Coalition.

The poll has 31 per cent for One Nation, 28 for Labor, 20 for the Coalition and the Greens on 12 (with 9 per cent for the rest). Since then another outfit, YouGov, has replicated the order if not the exact numbers, and Roy Morgan Research has Labor and One Nation tied. (An earlier Morgan poll put One Nation ahead, but as psephologist Kevin Bonham pointed out it was one of its less reliable SMS polls.)

How would these numbers, replicated at the ballot box, translate into House of Representatives seats? That’s awfully difficult to say, but it’s very likely no party would enjoy a majority. Labor would probably have a plurality (more than anyone else), with One Nation second and the Coalition third. Perhaps the ALP would retain government with support from the Greens and independents. Or One Nation plus the Coalition might be in a majority.

Could One Nation, during this parliamentary term, be in a polled position that translates into a likely majority all by itself? It’s possible; another five points at Labor’s expense, with all the others kept constant, would probably do it, assuming the Coalition continues to treat Pauline Hanson’s party favourably on their how-to-vote cards.

Late last century, prime minister John Howard was dragged kicking and screaming to “preferencing” Labor ahead of One Nation across the country, but that was a different time, a different electorate landscape — and a different Liberal Party. Preferencing Labor today would cause serious anger in the party membership and push more of them into the arms of the insurgent.

South Australia’s vote in March, the country’s first general election since the One Nation surge, showed us a few things. One was the durability of the party’s polled support all the way through to — and then on — election day. It happened in a particular context: a popular Labor premier and government widely viewed as certain to win (which it did very handsomely). This might have freed some people up to use their vote to send a message to the established parties, particularly the Liberals.

And it was a state — not federal — election, which probably means less at stake than a federal vote. Running a country is about the big items, particularly pulling and pushing those economic levers. Yes, many, perhaps most, people believe business as usual is no longer working, but when push comes to shove we know voters can be scared of changes that might affect their economic security. And Hanson has now discussed moving to the House of Representatives with a view to taking those levers. The other information South Australia provided was how seat-by-seat distributions of preferences play out with a large One Nation vote.

At the 2025 federal contest, when it received just 6.4 per cent nationally, One Nation picked up a quite strong flow of preferences from the Coalition. The Coalition dropped out of the three-candidate-preferred count against the ALP and One Nation in just one federal electorate, Hunter in New South Wales. When its primary vote (plus the preferences it had picked up from minor parties and independents) was distributed according to voters’ instructions between Labor and One Nation, it flowed a whoppingly one-sided 80.1 per cent to One Nation.

A year later in South Australia, the flows were noticeably weaker. Across the eleven electoral divisions in which the contest came down to Labor versus One Nation, the Coalition’s distributed preferences in the final round of counting favoured the latter by a much more modest 66.6 per cent.

More evidence came from electorates where Labor’s accumulated vote was distributed to the Coalition and One Nation. In the one 2025 federal where that happened, those votes went 58.9 per cent to the Coalition and 41.1 to One Nation. In South Australia in March, the percentages in the two such contests were favoured the Coalition much more, 71.5 to 21.5 per cent. This makes intuitive sense: if most “right-wing” supporters have shifted their first preference to One Nation, the rest will generally be relatively unenthused by the party.

These numbers matter when we’re trying to make sense of national polls — and even more so when we look at seat-by-seat ones such as Redbridge/Accent’s most recent MRP, a much larger, slightly earlier survey that still has Labor leading the primary vote. Pollsters and others must make assumptions when they simulate full seat-by-seat counts, eliminating parties one by one and distributing their preferences.

Redbridge/Accent’s estimates from that poll put Labor on 76, One Nation on 53 and the Coalition on 12. My estimates, mostly relying on South Australia’s flows, are quite different: 86, 43 and 12 seats respectively. For what they’re worth, that is. With lots of caveats. And with two years to go until the election. (Estimating preference flows to and from independents is the hardest part of the exercise.)

Victoria’s election in November will provide another big information dump, and will probably be more relevant to the federal sphere, given the absence of a popular Labor incumbent.

For the government in Canberra, two years is a long time, particularly from a budget as detested as this. The key date is 1 July 2027, when most changes come into operation and the fear of them starts to subside. But even before the budget, One Nation didn’t look like it was going away. •

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For this reason, candidates tend to matter more in by-elections, although in this case an objectively poor one romped home anyway. The party name, synonymous with its leader Pauline Hanson, was more than enough. David Farley’s roughly 39 per cent primary vote (on latest counting) doesn’t reflect much of anything outside Farrer in May 2026 — certainly not the party’s likely national support at the next election, or even “if an election were held today.” The national opinion polls, which have One Nation averaging around 25 per cent, are the tools for that. But a general election that saw One Nation get 25 per cent overall would certainly include electorates where the minor party received 39 per cent or more. And they’d mostly be rural, as Riverina is.

Labor didn’t contest Farrer. The big parties tend not to run these days in by-elections they have no chance of winning (although the Albanese government made an exception in Fadden in its first term). Would it have made a difference if they had? Actually, it might have. We’ll come back to that.

This will not be the first time One Nation has sat in the House of Reps. After winning the Queensland seat of Oxley as a Liberal in 1996 (despite having been deselected just weeks earlier), Pauline Hanson formed the first iteration of the far-right party in 1997–98 and unsuccessfully contested the 1998 federal election in Queensland’s Blair. Although she topped the primary vote with 36 per cent, she lost after buckets of preferences flowed to the Liberal candidate, thanks mainly to Labor how-to-vote cards.

In Farrer, a whole lot of preferences sat ready and willing ready to flow to the Liberal candidate Raissa Butkowski against Farley, but they didn’t matter because Butkowski didn’t get to the two-candidate-preferred count. Instead it was Farley who was deluged by preferences in the final count. His roughly eleven-point primary lead over independent Michelle Milthorpe increased after preferences to fourteen or fifteen points. That was the work of Liberal and National how-to-vote cards, which favoured One Nation over the independent, and of course the natural resistance of many Coalition supporters to any independent candidate with a highly publicised Climate 200 connection.

It’ll be several weeks before the Australian Electoral Commission publishes individual candidate’s preference flows, but the back of my napkin suggests that Liberal and Nationals voters’ preferences, combined, went very approximately 65 per cent to Farley and 35 to Milthorpe. Could the Coalition, via its how-to-vote cards, have delivered victory to Milthorpe? It’s unlikely. She would have needed to receive more than 70 per cent of total Liberal and Nationals flows (perhaps more than 75 per cent), and it stretches credulity to believe the two parties exercise such influence over their supporters.

Anyway, it’s now a given: the Coalition preferences One Nation over virtually everyone else — certainly Labor, the Greens, and Climate 300–funded independents — and that’s not going to change before the next federal election, if for no other reason than the Coalition parties’ memberships would go ballistic, sending even more of them to the far-right alternative. (On the other side, imagine the outrage from Labor’s true believers if the party preferenced the Coalition over the Greens.)

Given Saturday’s results, the only way Farley could have conceivably lost would have been if, like Hanson in 1998, he had faced-off with the Liberals’ Butkowski in the two-candidate-preferred count. The current tally of first-preference votes suggests the Liberal didn’t come close to reaching the top two. (The AEC had correctly picked the identity of the final two candidates who all other preferences needed to distributed to, and is currently concerning itself mostly with that count.)

But what if Labor had contested Farrer? It would have done embarrassingly poorly, struggling to hit double digits. But most of its votes would have come at Milthorpe’s expense, pulling her down closer to Butkowski. To meaningfully assist the Liberal (and admittedly the thought of party strategists doing this is a stretch) Labor could have preferenced her ahead of Milthorpe (while still putting One Nation last of course).

On the current counting, that probably still wouldn’t have been enough to elevate the Liberal to the final count. It’s not certain, though, and we’ll know more when final figures are available. But if Labor wants to minimise One Nation’s House of Representatives wins in 2028, this is the sort of preference action it would take, selectively, in seats where One Nation has a good chance. It might also mean installing the odd Coalition MP at the expense of a teal one, disadvantaging Labor in parliament. Look, they probably won’t do it. But they could.

In the meantime, the Liberals and Nationals can take some consolation from the fact that Farrer was unusual in having such a strong Climate 200–backed candidate, strong enough to have come second at last year’s general election. She came second this time too, which tolled the end for the Liberal candidate.

In a two-candidate-preferred count Butkowski would have easily defeated Milthorpe, while Butkowski versus Farley could’ve gone either way. But the Liberal and National parties’ combined primary support was just too low to reach that contest — thanks partly to Climate 200.•

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The Liberal Party’s problems are clear enough, and have registered in opinion polls over recent months. The Newspoll quarterly analysis for 12 January to 26 March has Coalition support at a fifth of the primary vote. In South Australian, the Liberals managed about 19 per cent to One Nation’s 23 per cent, with most of the Liberals’ lost vote going to One Nation.

But One Nation also picked up votes in Labor’s northern Adelaide heartland. In Elizabeth, an area that has experienced the full blast of economic disadvantage over decades, the swing on primaries against Labor was 15.7 percentage points and One Nation won a third of vote. In neighbouring Ramsay, centred on Salisbury, the Labor primary vote was down eleven points and One Nation polled 28 per cent. The seat of Light, which incorporates Gawler, also in the outer north, saw a swing of more than twenty points against Labor and a One Nation share of 34.5 per cent.

Labor retained these seats, but they are now marginal. In each case the two candidates left standing after preferences were Labor and One Nation rather than the traditional major-party standoff. Is this a vision of the Australian political future? Labor political strategists — especially in Victoria, with its unpopular Labor government and election later this year — will be looking nervously at these results. Liberals will be apprehending them in horror.

But both sides can perhaps take a little heart. The Liberals can tell themselves the National Party didn’t run in South Australia, which may well have sent the state’s more conservative voters One Nation’s way. The SA Liberal Party has also had a torrid time, with its frequent changes of leadership — indeed, a former leader, David Speirs, who stood as an independent, was convicted of supplying drugs. The notably popular Labor premier Peter Malinauskas is scooping up support that might otherwise, and elsewhere, go to the Coalition.

Labor, meanwhile, will take heart that its own vote is holding up pretty well in seats where its main competition is the Liberal Party. It is losing support to One Nation in some traditional heartlands, but not where middle-class voters are more prominent. The SA election confirmed Labor’s strength in metropolitan Australia — a feature of the 2022 and 2025 federal elections — while pointing to a vulnerability in the outer suburbs that the Liberals have so far been unable to exploit. And when pollsters calculate a two-party preferred vote for Labor and the Coalition, they are showing Labor well ahead — a recent Morgan poll reported Labor at 56 per cent to the Coalition’s 44 per cent.

The drivers of these patterns are well known. Cost-of-living pressures and housing shortages are undermining support for the major parties, which are each seen to share responsibility for them. As the Liberal Party’s review of the 2025 federal election pointed out, voters appear to have accepted the Albanese government’s case that “responsibility for the country’s economic travails were [sic] jointly shared with the former Coalition government.” After almost four years of Labor government, that attitude might be contributing to a conviction among disaffected voters that neither party has a solution to the nation’s economic woes — a conviction that could feed the idea, pushed in One Nation propaganda, of a Lib–Lab “uniparty.”

One Nation, which doesn’t yet run the risk of being in government and therefore needing a policy to deal with inflation or housing, can simply catch the wave of discontent. The Iran war’s effect in drastically increasing petrol and diesel prices is a further boon to a party strongest in the fuel-thirsty rural, regional and outer-suburban areas.

The growing salience of immigration as an issue has also greatly assisted Pauline Hanson and her candidates, who also ride on the back of anti-Islam sentiment without the kinds of hesitations, qualifications and even occasional pushback you get from your average Coalition politician. But above all, One Nation gathers the support of those who believe the system is not working for them: things used to be better than they are now. One Nation’s is a performative politics on behalf of those who, like Hanson herself, have had a “gutful” and resent that “they” have stolen from us… what? Perhaps it is a feeling of control over the conditions of their own lives, as Guy Rundle has argued.

Can One Nation’s momentum be sustained? Critics point to the party’s poor record of solidarity in the past, the dubious quality of many of its candidates, and its silence when asked about policy — failings that would normally devastate a party that aspires to a predominant role on the political right. One Nation might flame out as it did in the late 1990s after its stellar performance in the 1998 Queensland state election, with eleven seats and 23 per cent of the vote. As it gathers greater electoral support, the profile of its electoral support and the hopes of those voters are likely to diverge from what might be expected of a party gathering a mere 6.4 per cent of the vote — as it did at the 2025 federal election.

The party also remains Pauline’s baby: it is not entirely clear what it would look like without her. One Nation has a ripe history of bitter internal division and most of Hanson’s key political relationships end up foundering on one rock or another. It remains to be seen, for instance, whether cordial relations with Barnaby Joyce will last longer than they did with Mark Latham — to name two former leaders of mainstream parties who made the jump to One Nation. It is not a party that has managed to harbour more than one big personality at a time — and only one big personality, Hanson herself, can really claim the right to be considered a permanent fixture.

Much will also depend on the response of the parties of the right competing with One Nation for support. The Liberals have so far shown little capacity to rise to the moment. Their post-2025 federal election review, conducted by Pru Goward and Nick Minchin, judged that many Liberals smarting from their humiliation in May 2025 were rather better at recognising specks in the eyes of others than logs in their own, to borrow from Matthew’s Gospel. One of those logs is the collapse of Liberal support in metropolitan areas. Another is that it can muster majorities only among the over fifty-fives. It is being shunned by women — Crosby Textor’s estimate of the gender gap was 4.7 percentage points. It has deep problems in the migrant communities. (Strangely, Australians of Chinese heritage resent being smeared as spies during an election campaign — and probably at any time.)

The Liberal Party’s post-election response to these various ailments can be briefly summarised. First, it failed to release Goward and Minchin’s report. (Anthony Albanese eventually tabled a leaked copy in the House of Representatives.) It is ramping up a campaign to oppose changes to tax breaks for property investors despite investors’ advantages being a major grievance among younger voters trying to buy a home. It chose a woman, Sussan Ley, as party leader only for her colleagues to tear her down in the space of a few months. (Its National Party colleagues initially refused even to serve with her in a coalition and then broke with her a second time earlier this year.) It continues to oppose quotas for the selection of female candidates for winnable seats — a measure adopted by Labor more than thirty years ago.

On the multicultural front, meanwhile, the Liberals have adopted a hardline immigration policy that, in a nutshell, signals to migrants they are here under sufferance. Adopt Australian values or else: and we — the Liberal Party — get to say what those values are. Yet the very same migrants are a conspicuous presence in many of the outer suburbs the Liberals have been fantasising about claiming from Labor since Peter Dutton gave his first media conference as leader in May 2022.

Armchair criticism is easy: the Liberals’ dilemma is an admittedly difficult one. In the big cities, they are being squeezed on the left not only by their traditional rival, the Labor Party, but by teal independents and even the Greens. The Liberal election review makes clear there is more than one opinion in the party about how much of its energy needs to go into winning back teal seats and how much into dealing with Labor. That is already a bad place from which to start.

On the right, the Liberal Party competes with One Nation and, in some respects, with the Nationals as well; the Coalition partners are rivals, for instance, in the forthcoming Farrer by-election. Policy designed to win back younger, female and migrant voters in the metropolitan areas will push other voters to One Nation — not that the Coalition has actually done anything much to gain the support of the groups that have turned decisively against it. Meanwhile, policies designed to stem the flow of support to One Nation, like the recent one on immigration, might make the Coalition unelectable in the metropolitan seats that need to be reclaimed from Labor, independents and the remaining Green.

All the while, party members are typically old and conservative. There is a sense that the Liberals don’t like modern Australia much more than One Nation. As an unsuccessful metropolitan Liberal candidate at the last election told Goward and Minchin: “the Liberal Party needs to understand Australia as it is and not how we would like it to be.”

“Not how we would like it to be.” What do those few words mean? They surely imply that “we” — presumably, your average Liberal — instinctively dislikes what this country has become but out of a sense of pragmatism “we” need to get over it in the interests of winning an election some time. As well-meaning as the comment might be in trying to steer the party towards a more moderate and pragmatic course, it seems to me a bad place for a mainstream political party to try doing its business — really a recipe for another Abbott-like government, in the unlikely event that it yielded an election victory in the first place.

Meanwhile, One Nation is likely to be most competitive in rural and regional seats where it will encounter Nationals as well as Liberals. The Nationals have rather smugly treated the Liberals’ poor performance as if they had no share in it. This positioning was bogus from the start and does a party with a proud history of intelligent pragmatism no credit at all.

The Coalition’s loss of support among key demographics is hardly disconnected from those same voters’ grim view of the role of the Nationals in the Coalition, especially on matters such as climate change. At the time of the 2022 election, Barnaby Joyce, then Nationals leader, was about as popular among city voters as a bowl of lentils at the Guyra Lamb and Potato Festival.

Those days of smug aloofness are almost certainly over. It is not just that Nationals seats are in danger from One Nation. If, as the polls suggest, One Nation is getting 25 per cent per cent of the national vote and 30 per cent in Queensland (as reported by Newspoll), its share in some rural and regional seats — especially in its Queensland heartland — is probably north of 40 per cent. That is a big problem for the Liberal National Party in that state.

The Nationals are hardly in rude health. They have broken the Coalition twice since the last election. They recently changed leaders for the fifth time in a decade. They have endured three federal parliamentary defections since 2023, resulting in a loss of each of those seats to the party: Andrew Gee, who left over the party’s opposition to the Indigenous Voice and retained his seat of Calare as an independent at the 2025 election; Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who defected shortly after that election from the Nationals party room to the Liberals; and Barnaby Joyce, twice party leader, who has joined Hanson in One Nation. Speculation continues over other Nationals politicians making the jump, and some ordinary members have followed suit: as in Tamworth, the ABC reported, the National Party branch “moved en masse to One Nation” last October.

That’s the picture on the Liberal Party’s right. On its left (broadly defined), it has Labor and independents — and occasionally even the Greens — swallowing its metropolitan seats, and the occasional regional one. It is unlikely to be able to win an election again without reclaiming parts of its old heartland in the cities, since that is where most Australians live and vote. Yet to do so will lead only to further alienation among conservative voters, and accusations the party is “Labor-lite,” a charge foreshadowed by Malcolm Turnbull’s fate.

The closest historical parallel I can think of is Alfred Deakin’s Liberal Protectionists, which formed governments for much of the first decade of the Australian Commonwealth. But Deakin’s party was also squeezed between parties to its right and left at elections in 1903 and 1906. On the right it was George Reid’s Free Trade Party; on the left, it was Labor. Reid increasingly appealed to anti-socialist sentiment — indeed, his party was also known as the Anti-Socialists — and it grew in numbers. Labor was growing in numbers and confidence too, and its industrial wing in the unions was flexing its muscles as Australia emerged from depression and drought.

The result: Deakin chose to join with the Free Traders in 1909 to form a single Liberal Party, giving birth to the two-party system. But Reid’s forcing of the issue over the preceding years was probably the crucial factor. At the 1910 election a Liberal government faced a Labor opposition — and Labor won.

That was really the last great realignment in Australian politics, and we have been living in its shadow ever since. When a Country Party emerged nationally at the end of the first world war, it threatened to reinstate a three-party system (and briefly did so) but by early 1923 it had joined with the other major non-Labor party, by then called the Nationalists, in a coalition government. A two-party system, or at least a system in which two sides competed for government, had re-emerged. It endures still but seems more fragile now than at any time in the past century.

The Coalition parties might eventually have to confront Deakin’s dilemma, or something like the predicament faced by the Nationalists and the Country Party in the early 1920s. Should they join with One Nation, as a “fusion” (like in 1909) or a coalition (1923), to counter the electoral predominance of the Labor Party and the further rise of the independents and Greens?

We are not there yet, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get there. The most significant electoral effect of the current fragmentation on the right is to entrench Labor’s power federally and in a majority of states and territories. We can be certain federal Labor strategists are already eyeing off further seats they might win at a future federal election.

If Jacinta Allan’s Labor government should survive the next Victorian election, we will surely have arrived at the moment when it will be impossible for the Liberals to continue as before unless they are comfortable with permanent opposition or even minority party status. •

The post Stuck in the middle appeared first on Inside Story.

The Resolve poll reported a three-point drop in support for Labor since February. But it didn’t show that One Nation had benefited. The Greens were up by one, independents by one, One Nation by one, and the Coalition down by one. One Nation’s gain might just as well have been at the Coalition’s expense. (Tracking the change is difficult: the figures in this poll added to 100; those in February added to 101.)

Even if One Nation was “stealing” votes from Labor, that wasn’t news. True, there was no evidence of Labor losing support to One Nation back in September, when Resolve’s polling showed support for One Nation reaching “double figures for the first time,” as Massola wrote. Support for One Nation had risen by five percentage points since the May election but Labor’s share hadn’t moved. Nor was there any evidence of it in October, when support for One Nation was a little higher; or in November, when the party’s support had risen by more than ten points since May but support for Labor still hadn’t moved.

From mid-December, however, there is evidence of Labor voters shifting to One Nation. Perhaps not between Barnaby Joyce’s defection to One Nation (8 December) and the Bondi Beach massacre (14 December), when Morgan was the only poll to show a slide in Labor’s support. But after the massacre, when the nine polls conducted between 17 December and 21 January (before the Coalition fell apart) showed a three-point shift, on average, away from Labor and a three-point gain by One Nation.

Whether that shift among Labor voters reflected concerns about Labor’s security measures, or Labor’s response to the massacre, or broader sentiments about Muslims or immigration triggered by the massacre — or even a combination of factors, including the impact of Joyce — we cannot tell. But during those weeks support for the Coalition, the Greens, or those lumped together by the pollsters as “others” barely moved.

The shift of Labor voters to One Nation showed up not just in the polls overall; it also showed up in Resolve’s own polling, which reported support for Labor dropping from 35 per cent (2–7 December) to 32 per cent (17–20 December) and then 30 per cent (12–16 January). One Nation’s support rose from 14 to 18 per cent. Labor lost five points and the Greens one, with One Nation gaining four and the Coalition two. It was back then that One Nation started “stealing votes from Labor.”

This swing from left (Labor) to right (One Nation) was exceptional. For the most part, One Nation’s gains have come not from the left but from the right — the Coalition — and “others.” The shifts have been within the combined right plus “others” rather than from left to right.

Between the 2025 election and the end of February (the start of the war on Iran), polled support for One Nation increased by eighteen percentage points. Over the same period, support for the Coalition fell by 9.5, support for “others” fell by 4.3, and support for Labor fell by 3.8. Support for Labor and the Greens, combined, fell by four points.

If we assume support lost by the Coalition and “others” shifted to One Nation, this would account for about 80 per cent of One Nation’s gains; shifts from Labor would then account for the other 20 per cent. While the shifts are unlikely to have been as clearcut as this — some of the Coalition’s support would have shifted to Labor, no doubt, and some of Labor’s support to the Coalition — a four-to-one ratio of non-Labor to Labor voters moving to One Nation may not be far off the mark.

Since the election, support for Labor has moved down as well as up; likewise, for the Coalition. Compared to its performance in 2025, One Nation has benefited least from Labor when the Coalition’s vote has gone down and Labor’s vote has gone up: after the Coalition split, One Nation appeared to have gained six votes from non-Labor for every vote it had gained from Labor since the election. When Labor’s support has dropped, the ratio has narrowed: after the Bondi massacre, One Nation looked to have gained about two votes from the non-Labor side for every vote it had gained from Labor, and since the war on Iran the ratio has looked very similar.

While some of Labor’s first-preferences have shifted to One Nation, at no stage has this had more than a marginal effect on its share of the two-party-preferred. Given a choice between Labor and the Coalition, Labor has maintained a lead somewhere between 54–46 and 55–45, its winning margin in May. Labor voters who have shifted to One Nation appear not to have thrown in their lot with the opposition.

Whether we have witnessed anything quite like this before — certainly on this scale — is doubtful. After Labor’s split in the mid-1950s, the voters lost to the newly formed Democratic Labor Party mostly directed their preferences to the Coalition. This helped keep Labor out of power. The One Nation phenomenon looks quite different: Coalition voters who have shifted to One Nation prefer the Coalition to Labor; but voters who have shifted from Labor to One Nation continue to prefer Labor over the Coalition. If this remains the case, those preferences will help keep Labor in power.

By mid-March, the view that One Nation’s support was not “a blip” was widely accepted. That One Nation had been “stealing” Labor votes, not just those from the Coalition, was equally well established. Whether the rise was “real” was no longer a question of whether the rise in One Nation’s polled support was a flash in the pan — a consequence, some had thought privately, of the sort of sampling problems that might arise around Christmas and the New Year.

Rather, it was a question of whether One Nation would do as well as the polls suggested at the state election in South Australia, at the by-election in Farrer, at the state elections in Victoria and New South Wales, and ultimately at the next federal election — and of how its flow of preferences would affect the results. •

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But what pollsters have going for them should make them an object of envy to their counterparts elsewhere in the world. Among Australians eligible to vote, enrolments are rising: between 2013 and 2025, the figure rose from 92.4 to 98.2 per cent. Compulsory voting largely eliminates the need to work out which respondents are enrolled to vote and will turn out, and which aren’t enrolled or won’t vote. And while pollsters need to report first preferences for a relatively large list of entities — Labor, the Liberals and Nationals (preferably combined), the Greens, One Nation, and others — they are ultimately judged by their ability to estimate just one figure, the two-party-preferred vote, a figure that has proved easier to get right than the first preferences.

Now, some things are changing, and not in ways that make the pollsters’ work any easier. In 2025, turnout (90.7 per cent) was slightly lower than in 2010 (93.2 per cent); of those eligible to vote, less than 90 per cent did so. And 5.6 per cent of the votes cast were deemed informal (something few polls, if any, attempt to measure), slightly higher than in 2022. All up, a formal vote was cast by just 84.1 per cent of eligible adults. Without the Australian Electoral Commission’s efforts to boost enrolment, this figure might have dipped below 80 per cent.

Surveying the pieces or assuming nothing has changed?

Worse was the challenge posed by the Coalition’s disintegration — first, for eight days in May 2025 and then from 22 January to 8 February this year — before coming together again, however shakily initially and desperately now. Should pollsters have carried on estimating the vote for the Liberals, Nationals and the Queensland Liberal Nationals jointly — or should they have begun estimating support for the various members of the (former) Coalition separately?

Perhaps assuming the Coalition would sooner or later be back together — or perhaps because it was much easier — some pollsters continued to report the “Coalition” vote. (Almost no polling was done during the first split.) They either reported a single figure for the Coalition (Essential) or separate figures for the Liberals, the Nationals and the Queensland Liberal Nationals (RedBridge, YouGov).

Two pollsters did reject the business-as-usual model and reduced the Coalition to two parties, Liberal and National. One was Pyxis, which is responsible for Newspoll, the most watched of all the polls. Between 5–8 February it measured what it said was support for the Liberals and support for the Nationals and reported a historic low: just 18 per cent combined, down from 31.8 per cent at the 2025 election. The other was Morgan, which reported support for the Liberals plus support for the Nationals dropping first to 22.5 per cent (19–25 January), then to 20.5 per cent (26 January–1 February).

But measuring support for the parties that had made up the Coalition (even leaving aside the Northern Territory’s Country Liberal Party, or CLP) is less straightforward than this implies.

The biggest problem is that none of Queensland’s seats is contested by the Liberal Party or the National Party: they are contested by the Liberal National Party, a separate entity that styles itself as a “branch” of the Liberals and an “affiliate” of the Nationals. When the Coalition split, the LNP (Qld) stayed together. Of Queensland’s thirty seats, the LNP holds sixteen — ten occupied by MPs who sit in the Liberal party room, six by those who sit in the National party room. Were the LNP to win Kennedy, now held by Katter’s Australian Party but originally won by Bob Katter on behalf of the National Party, the new member would join the Nationals party room. Were the LNP to win any of the seats held by Labor (twelve) or the Greens (one), the new member(s) would join the Liberal party room.

Asking Queenslanders how they would vote, Newspoll divided seats into two categories. In the ten “Liberal” seats and all the other “non-National” electorates the party contested in 2025, respondents were given the option of the Liberal Party (alongside Labor, the Greens, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Other parties or independent candidate, and Don’t know); in seats the “Nationals” held and in Kennedy, it offered the option of the Nationals (plus Labor, the Greens, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Other parties or independent candidate, and Don’t know). Morgan did something similar, except it offered both alternatives — Liberal and National — in every Queensland seat.

What respondents made of being offered a Liberal and/or National option but not the LNP, the Queensland party that has contested every election since 2010, can only be wondered. Even in seats held by the LNP (Qld), how many voters would know that their member was “really” a Liberal or “really” a National?

Who’s most at risk from One Nation?

The Nationals are widely regarded as the party most likely to lose votes — and seats — to One Nation; and that means the level of support for the Nationals matters. At the 2025 election, contesting twenty seats outside Queensland, Nationals candidates won 3.8 per cent of the vote; contesting seven seats within Queensland, including the seat held by Katter, those who sat (or aspired to sit) in the Nationals party room won another 1.8 per cent. Adding these two figures, the Nationals might claim to have won 5.6 per cent of the 2025 vote.

To what extent has the rise of One Nation been at the Nationals’ expense? Between 22 January and 8 February, the polls estimated support for the Nationals (outside Queensland) to be just 1 per cent (YouGov) or no higher than 2 per cent (RedBridge). On these figures, support for the Nationals had (at best) almost halved since the election. If we include the Queensland figure for “the Nationals,” support rises to 2.5 per cent (Morgan) or 3 per cent (Newspoll). On these figures, too, support had (at best) almost halved.

How reliable are these figures? Traditionally, the National Party has been underreported by the polls. Not since 2019 have any polls reported a separate National Party figure in their final pre-election forecasts; and in 2019 they all underestimated how well the Nationals would do.

Analysing a post-1966 election survey, he had conducted in 1967, the political scientist Don Aitkin discovered that nearly half the respondents who had voted for a Country Party candidate claimed to have voted Liberal despite there being no Liberal candidate in their electorates. How much of the apparent change since 2025 reflects the same phenomenon — respondents saying they intend to vote Liberal when they will actually vote for a National (the Country Party’s successor) — and how much is due to One Nation eating the Nationals’ lunch, we cannot say.

The National Party might be the party most at risk of losing the greatest proportion of its seats to One Nation, but even if One Nation has already devoured half (or more) of the Nationals’ vote, this would still only account for a small part of One Nation’s support. If One Nation’s vote share has jumped from 6.4 per cent in 2025 to 26.5 per cent (the average of the most recent Morgan, Newspoll, RedBridge and YouGov polls, out of the field by 14 February) and the National’s vote has slumped from 5.6 per cent, for argument’s sake, to 2.5 per cent — a fall of about three points — its losses cannot account for more than about 15 per cent of One Nation’s twenty-point gain.

By far the largest slice of One Nation’s lunch is coming not from the Nationals but from the Liberals. Proportionally, the Liberal losses since the 2025 vote might not be as great as the Nationals’, but in terms of absolute numbers they have been much greater.

In 2025, the Liberal Party secured 20.7 per cent of the vote. During the most recent Coalition split, this dropped by about a third to 14 per cent (YouGov) or 13 per cent (RedBridge) — a fall of seven or eight points. If we add the “Liberal” vote in Queensland, the Liberals’ national vote appears to have dropped by at least a third, from 26.1 per cent in 2025 to 18 per cent (Morgan) or 15 per cent (Newspoll) — losses of between eight and eleven points. In other words, the Liberals alone have contributed 35 to 40 per cent (excluding Queensland) or 40 to 55 per cent (including Queensland) of One Nation’s rise.

Some of those voters who previously supported independents and a variety of very small parties are likely also to have switched to One Nation. In 2025, these voters accounted for 15.2 per cent of the vote. But now, in the most recent polls, independents and others account for no more than 10 to 11.5 per cent of the vote. Those who voted for independents and others in 2025 (though probably not the ones who voted for the teals) could account for 15 to 25 per cent of the rise in the One Nation vote.

Some on the political left have also swung to One Nation. Since we are dealing with net shifts — not the panel data required for us to see all the movement across the parties — the numbers that have shifted from left to right or from right to left can’t be calculated; to the extent that movements in opposite directions have been of equal size, they will have cancelled out. The Australian’s Simon Benson insists that after the Bondi massacre, Labor voters “disgusted” with Albanese or struggling with the cost of living jumped straight over to One Nation. But those losses, he says, were offset by moderate Liberals “appalled by the prospect of the Coalition chasing rabbits down the One Nation burrow.” This may be true, but he provides no evidence for it.

In net terms, the evidence is clear: the boost Labor voters have given One Nation has been relatively small. In 2025, Labor won 34.6 per cent of the vote; averaging the figures in the most recent polls by Morgan, Newspoll, RedBridge, Resolve and YouGov, Labor’s share stands at 32.2 per cent. That drop of just over two percentage points would have contributed about 12 per cent of the surge in One Nation’s support.

If any Greens have moved to One Nation, their numbers would have been much smaller. In 2025, the Greens won 12.2 per cent of the vote; in the latest polls, the Green’s average share (11.7 per cent) remains almost the same.

In short, the lion’s share — as much as 85 per cent— of One Nation’s support appears to have come from the Liberal, National, and Liberal National parties and from smaller parties and independents.

2PP or not 2PP?

More challenging for the pollsters than deciding whether Liberal and National support should be reported separately during the most recent split was deciding what to do with the two-party-preferred, or 2PP, the centrepiece of election reporting since all the polls adopted it in 1993.

To calculate the 2PP, pollsters take all the first preferences for Labor (or for the Coalition parties) and add all the other ballots that rank Labor ahead of the Coalition (or the Coalition ahead of Labor). Labor’s 2PP is then the percentage of all ballots where Labor is ranked ahead of the Coalition (and the Coalition’s 2PP is the percentage of the ballots where it is ranked ahead of Labor).

The concept of the 2PP dates from the early 1970s when: (a) Australia had a system of compulsory and exhaustive preferential voting (as it still does); (b) to win, candidates had to secure more than half the votes, either before or after the distribution of preferences (still the case); and (c) the winner in each seat, almost invariably, was either a Labor, Liberal or Country Party candidate. The third of these factors hasn’t held since around 2013: so much so that in 2025 no fewer than thirty-five seats (known as non-classic seats) out of 150 featured some other party or an independent in the final two-candidate count.

The significance of the 2PP, nationwide, is threefold. First, it shows whether Labor or the Coalition is the more likely to form government. Second, it suggests how many seats Labor would lose to the Coalition, or the Coalition to Labor, given a national 2PP swing of a given size — regardless of how many seats other parties and independents might win. Third, it propagates a new yardstick by which to judge which side deserves to form government — the side with more than half of the 2PP.

In each of these senses the 2PP has succeeded, largely. Its record of picking the winner, though not perfect, has been pretty good: two misses (1998, 2010) in the last 21 elections. Its anticipation of the net shift in seats between the two sides — despite the rise of the Greens and the teals — has been very good; even in 2022 and 2025 it was out by only two seats. Equally successful has been its elevation of the 2PP as the pre-eminent measure of electoral fairness in relation to the distribution of seats.

This last helps explain why calls for proportional representation to replace single-member electorates are largely a thing of a distant past. When Labor, with 54 per cent of the 2PP in 2025, won 63 per cent of the seats with less than 35 per cent of the first preferences, it provoked barely a whisper in favour of switching to PR. It helps, of course, that having succeeded in single-member electorates, the Greens and independents have no great interest in PR; their concerns about electoral reform are focused on electoral funding.

But what to do with the 2PP when the Coalition collapses? On this, pollsters were divided. For some, the collapse was either a temporary separation or, if a divorce, something to be recognised in polling methods sometime in the future. And even before the splits, not all pollsters had been calculating — or had ever calculated — the 2PP figures in the same way.

Morgan continued to provide two figures — a 2PP based on the actual distribution of preferences at the 2025 election, and a 2PP based on how respondents said they would allocate their preferences. (Come the election, this would allow Morgan to highlight whichever measure had come closest to anticipating the result — usually, the distribution at the last election, thanks to voters following their how-to-vote card).

During the parties’ separation, Morgan conducted three polls. Based on the 2025 vote, Labor’s 2PP started at 54.5 before falling to 53 per cent; based on respondent allocation, Labor’s 2PP started at 56.5 before falling to 53.5 per cent. Rather than showing the Coalition losing ground following the separation, as one might expect, these figures showed it gaining ground. A week after the Coalition had reformed, Morgan’s 2PP had it losing ground, with Labor’s 2PP jumping to 58.5 per cent (based on the 2025 allocation) or 55 per cent (respondent allocation) before falling back to 55 per cent (whether based on both the 2025 allocation and respondents allocation was not disclosed).

RedBridge, polling for the Australian Financial Review in association with Accent Research, also continued to calculate a 2PP while the parties were apart, in its case based on preference flows from the 2025 election. It warned, however, that with the new spread of primary votes, “the traditional two-party preferred measure” made the 2PP likely to be “less useful than it has been historically.” Its poll put Labor on a 2PP of 56 per cent. YouGov’s 2PP, also based on the 2025 distribution, was 55–45.

Resolve, polling for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, would report the same figures, 55–45, the week after the Coalition had got back together. Its 2PP was based on how respondents said they would allocate their preferences. But, as the mastheads’ chief political commentator James Massola was at pains to emphasise, Resolve held back from “highlighting” these figures: “those numbers are potentially inaccurate because in some seats where One Nation is polling well, a two-candidate preferred count that pitched Labor against One Nation, or the Coalition against One Nation, would be more accurate.”

In seats of that kind, this was no doubt true. But Massola appeared to misunderstand what a 2PP measures nationally, and Resolve’s pollster appeared to share a similar misunderstanding. A 2PP, Jim Reed was reported as saying, “only works at a national level when you have a binary contest.” At a national level, despite the large loss of Coalition and Labor votes in recent elections, the 2PP has continued to work well. How well it works with a resurgent One Nation remains to be seen, but no commentator expects Labor to lose the next election or for its 2PP lead (as the Resolve poll indicates), if it wins the election, to be anything other than substantial.

Newspoll, the poll most closely watched by politicians, had previously used “preference flows at previous elections”— not just the flow at the last federal election, apparently — to calculate a 2PP. After the Coalition’s separation, Pyxis thought a 2PP no longer applicable and didn’t calculate one. Regarding its absence as self-explanatory, the Australian offered no justification. Essential, whose polls are reported in the Guardian, also appears to have dropped the 2PP (which it usually bases on respondent allocation) — also, without saying why.

A new 2PP and a 3PP

As well as a standard 2PP, YouGov (in a relatively new partnership with Sky News) produced another quite different two-party vote — one that forced respondents to choose not between Labor and the Coalition but between Labor and One Nation. This had Labor ahead, 57–43. According to the announcement of the poll, the new two-party vote meant that One Nation would become the opposition party… if an election were held today.”

It meant no such thing. In a two-horse race, the horse that doesn’t finish first is indeed likely to finish second. But what YouGov missed is that a party needs to have the second-largest share of seats to form the official opposition, not the second-largest share of an arbitrary two-party vote. Even if One Nation outpolled the combined Liberal and National vote, it wouldn’t necessarily out-seat them.

For Benson, pollsters who had started polling a Labor versus One Nation two-party vote were “premature at best and simply whacky at worst.” Imagining that most seats would come down to this sort of contest would indeed be “whacky,” but wondering which way voters would jump given a choice like this was neither premature nor whacky.

The bigger story, entirely missed, was just how close the YouGov’s new two-party figure was to the traditional Labor–Coalition result — and what that said about how close nearly half the voters polled (especially Liberal and National voters) felt they were to One Nation. An analysis based on the 1998 Australian Election Study showed that what was distinctive about those who gave One Nation their first preference was their alienation from politics, their attitudes to Aborigines and their hostility to immigration. Yet large numbers of Coalition voters, if forced, said they would choose a party that  Benson described as  “extreme right-wing” over Labor, a party in the mainstream.

Newspoll also wondered about what voters would do if they had to choose between Labor and One Nation. But instead of posing a simple choice of second preference, Newspoll gave respondents three options: “Pauline Hanson’s One Nation,” “Labor,” and “Will just follow how to vote cards/don’t know.” Half (50 per cent) chose Labor, 29 per cent chose One Nation, and 21 per cent said they would either follow the how-to-vote card or didn’t know. For its headline (on the front page), the Australian chose “One Nation a No-Go on Preferences.” This was misleading. In addition to the 29 per cent who said they would preference One Nation, 21 per cent were open to the possibility of doing so — if instructed to do so by the how-to-vote card; that’s 50 per cent. Of the Nationals, 70 per cent said they would preference One Nation with another 24 per cent open to doing that if instructed to do so. Most Liberals, too, said they would either preference One Nation (43 per cent) or might if instructed to do so (24 per cent). Of those who intended to vote for “others”, half (53 per cent) said they would preference One Nation or were open to it. Only among the Greens was a One Nation preference off the table: 91 per cent said they would preference Labor.

Three weeks before the split, when support for One Nation had climbed into the low twenties, Fox & Hedgehog computed a 2PP “match-up” between Labor and One Nation and another between the Coalition and One Nation. Asked to choose between Labor and One Nation, 56 per cent chose Labor and 44 per cent One Nation — figures almost the same as YouGov’s. Fox & Hedgehog had the standard two-party vote at 55–45, identical to YouGov’s.

Freshwater, a few days before the split, produced a standard 2PP as well as a Labor versus One Nation two-party vote. These, too, were very similar: 57–43, Labor versus the Coalition; 53–47, Labor versus One Nation. Of those, in 2025, who had given Labor their first preference, 90 per cent preferred Labor to One Nation; so, did two-thirds of those who had given their first preference to the Greens. All the One Nation voters, three-quarters of LNP voters and most of the Others from 2025 preferred One Nation to Labor. These figures point to a clear left–right divide, voters preferring to switch between parties on the same side, where possible, rather than switch to parties on the other side.

Fox & Hedgehog also calculated a “three-party preferred” taking in Labor, the Coalition and One Nation. Its figures were intriguing: Labor, 46 per cent (building on a first preference of 29 per cent); the Coalition, 29 per cent (25 per cent); One Nation, 25 per cent (21 per cent). So, when asked to choose, most of the Greens (14 per cent of the sample) and Independent or other voters (11 per cent) chose Labor (up seventeen points) with the remainder dividing evenly between the Coalition (up four) and One Nation (up four).

When asked in the same poll to choose between the Coalition and One Nation, respondents chose the Coalition, 63–37. Here, switching between parties on the same side was possible for voters on the right — the two alternatives were drawn from the right — but not for voters on the left. Evidently, Labor voters overwhelmingly chose the Coalition.

How likely is it that Labor voters will be forced to choose between the Coalition and One Nation? Except for some seats in which Labor might come third, and the first and second places are filled by one of the Coalition parties and One Nation, it won’t happen.

If One Nation secured 25 per cent of the vote, it is conceivable that it would pick up something like a quarter of the seats, given that in many seats its vote would be much greater than this. A large One Nation vote that yielded only a small number of seats could well fuel a debate about the fairness of the electoral system — a debate that hitherto has been muted.

What is important about a Coalition–One Nation or a Labor–One Nation two-party vote is what it tell us about the attraction of One Nation to Coalition voters but not to Labor voters. While Coalition voters seem willing to preference One Nation over Labor (unless, perhaps, they are handed how-to-vote cards offering advice to the contrary), Labor voters (and Greens) overwhelmingly prefer the Coalition to One Nation; unless instructed otherwise, Labor voters might assist Coalition candidates threatened by One Nation to hold on.

None of the polls have tested a two-party vote between the Coalition and the Greens. Such a choice would test the willingness of voters, especially Labor voters, to choose the Greens over the Coalition. The result, very likely, would prove to be at least as one-sided as the equally unlikely match-up in the Fox & Hedgehog poll between the Coalition and One Nation.

The party spectrum and voter realignment

While the reuniting of the Liberal and National parties has solved, at least for the time being, some of the problems that have confronted pollsters recently, it hasn’t solved all of them; in particular, it has left them with a series of questions about how to treat the One Nation vote and whether the two-party preferred will continue to work in the way that it has worked for more than fifty years.

With the decline in support for the parties of government since 2019, Australian politics — until the rise of One Nation — had come to be discussed in terms of three more or less equal sized groups: Labor, the Coalition, and an inchoate melange of others. Descriptions of the electoral landscape of this kind have limited analytical value.

Commentators who thought the large group of “others” — those who didn’t intend to vote for either Labor or the Coalition — were just “protest” voters never explained why the same label couldn’t be applied, just as easily,  to some of those voting for the parties of government. After the 1993 election — an election in which Labor and the Coalition toegther secured over 89 per cent of the vote — when Newspoll asked respondents which was the “stronger influence” on the way they had voted — “your liking of the party you voted for” or “your disliking of the other parties” — the majority of those who had voted for Labor and the majority of those who had voted for the Coalition chose their “disliking of the other parties.” Known to political scientists as negative partisanship, it’s not something Newspoll has sought to document after recent elections.

Again, commentators who said those in the polls who intended to vote for “others” were simply “parking” their vote — a term Sol Lebovic, who used to run Newspoll, would use regularly — while making up their minds about which way to jump, never stopped to explain why some were “parking” their vote with the Greens while others were  “parking” their vote with One Nation. These choices are quite different and not random.

The rise of One Nation has made the idea of three groups of roughly equal size — Labor, the Coalition, and an undifferentiated group of others — even less tenable. The parties that are now attracting about 90 per cent of the vote are the Greens and Labor on the left, and the Coalition and One Nation on the right. The teals, often characterised as fitting somewhere in the middle — to the right of the Labor Party but to the left of the Coalition — hold a much greater proportion of the seats than they hold of the votes.

The surge in support for One Nation, whether temporary or not, and the willingness of Coalition voters to preference it over Labor, challenges what Benson sees as “the great equaliser” of the Australian electoral system — “compulsory preferential  voting.” Neither compulsory voting nor exhaustive preferential voting protects the duopoly (Labor and the Coalition) or guarantees that politics stays in the “middle.”

The movement of voters within blocs — left and right — rather than between blocs is not unique to Australia: recent research in Britain points to much the same thing. A world in which most of those who swung between elections moved from Labor to the Coalition or from the Coalition to Labor may have passed. A new world in which voters move between the Coalition and One Nation, or between Labor and the Greens, helps explain why the turmoil of the last few weeks — not least in the polls — has left the 2PP, with Labor well ahead, largely undisturbed. •

The post Polls and the remaking of the political right appeared first on Inside Story.

From just 6.4 per cent support at last year’s election, One Nation hit double digits in September and has since kept climbing. In December its measured primary vote was in the late teens, and so far in January it’s hovered around 20 per cent, with Newspoll even showing it, at 22, one point ahead of the Coalition. Liberal and National MPs would be all have been watching their slide and One Nation’s rise with horror, but Nationals in particular are most at threat.

And that’s just in the House of Representatives. Senate numbers would also suffer.

We don’t know when it will peak, but if the published data in any of January’s surveys were replicated at an election, One Nation would certainly take House seats. How many depends on which poll you use and what assumptions you make about seat-by-seat swings and preference flows.

Newspoll’s 22 per cent would appear as single digits for One Nation in some (urban) seats, but exceed 40 per cent in parts of the bush and particularly in Queensland. And the bigger the variance the better for the party’s chances.

Why? Labor always “preferences” the Coalition ahead of One Nation. Only a minority of voters follow these suggestions, but they can still make a difference. In David Littleproud’s Queensland electorate of Maranoa last year (the only head-to-head Coalition–One Nation count) it washed through to 59 per cent for him and 41 for One Nation.

The Coalition preferenced One Nation over Labor everywhere. In Hunter (NSW), the one electorate where we can observe the flows, One Nation received 83 per cent of the preferences of people who put a “1” next to the Nationals candidate, with just 17 per cent going to Labor’s Dan Repacholi.

But that’s not a representative sample, and the national numbers were probably around 72 to 28 per cent in One Nation’s favour.

Newspoll’s figures, with a big 55–45 two-party-preferred lead for the government, are the most dire for the opposition(s) vis-à-vis Labor, and also against One Nation. The twin contests are related: the higher Labor’s overall two-party-preferred vote the bigger One Nation’s likely seat haul. The reason is simple: One Nation would meet Labor (rather than the Coalition, if I can use that word) in a greater number of seats in the two-candidate-preferred count and benefit from Coalition preferences.

The Newspoll numbers would see One Nation’s seat haul in the twenties, at least. It would take some seats Labor would otherwise have won, but that damage would be nothing like what it would inflict on the Nationals and the odd Liberal.

In the Mother Country, a Labo(u)r government is also facing a grotesquely shrivelled centre-right opposition. Over there, One Nation’s counterpart, Reform, has been polling ahead of all other parties for quite a while, with most recent MRP polls projecting a parliamentary majority for the far-right party. Several Tory MPs have already defected. Give or take a Barnaby or two, we’re not at that stage yet in Australia, although late last year One Nation was hyping up dramatic announcements in the new year.

For a Nationals MP prioritising personal survival in the House in 2028, there’s a potential matter of timing. It makes sense to wait and see what future polls produce before jumping, but defectors will have to make the leap well before One Nation’s candidates are preselected. They’ve still got a year or so.

But help might be on the way from their erstwhile partner. Even before this week’s disintegration, Liberal leader Sussan Ley looked all but certain to be toppled in 2026. Of the two chief aspirants, Angus Taylor would promise a snoozefest punctuated by the odd bungle and Andrew Hastie is the red-pilled, high-octane-ideology option, promising a bit more excitement.

Despite being on the right of the party, Taylor would be the conventional choice; Hastie would be a throw of the dice. The raw materials he possesses — SAS backstory and visual attributes — as well as a likely big shift in rhetoric and policy, particularly on immigration, would be manna for the media and almost guarantee a honeymoon. He’s young, a breath of fresh air, he tells it like it is.

Then the contradictions would see it all unravel. Even more than Peter Dutton, Hastie is Trumpian, and Donald Trump scares the bejeezus out of most Australian voters. He’s likely to go on about God a lot, which Australians find a bit weird. And while high immigration has doubtless helped fuel the One Nation revival, none of it is as uncontrolled as in America and much of Europe.

Across the aisle, there used to be a pattern of mid-term Labor leadership changes (specifically in 2003, 2006 and 2010) producing an immediate rise in the party’s polled primary support mostly at the expense of the Greens. If Hastie became opposition leader then a big jump in Liberal and perhaps Nationals support would likely follow, with a corresponding drop for One Nation. In his early months at least, the opposition would probably also take votes from Labor.

The Nationals could return to the Coalition (freedom of speech disagreements, a symptom of the current opinion polls, would be forgotten) and the fall in One Nation support might even prove enduring. But the rightward shift would guarantee devastation for the Liberals in the capital cities.

As Liberal leader, Hastie can make the Coalition whole again. But if he takes it to the election, the cost would be a big loss. •

The post Labor’s splintering opponents appeared first on Inside Story.

From a disappointing election result of 6.4 per cent (disappointing thanks to the pollsters who routinely overstate the party’s numbers by a point or two in their final campaign polls) its support has more than doubled, and almost tripled.

The popular explanation is a perceived move to the left in the Liberal leadership — if not in actual policy, then in the presentation — since Sussan Ley took the charge. For one thing, she’s a woman, and in the past has taken some rather moderate policy positions. Instability sure doesn’t help, either, with Barnaby Joyce’s One Nation flirtation, finally consummated this week, surely beneficial for the minor party, in the short term at least.

The defection delivers leader Pauline Hanson a huge pay rise and perhaps more staff. It might even open a floodgate. (One Nation is spinning it that way, but we should believe that only when we see it.) Being rid of Barnaby will disappoint many Nationals supporters, but its impact at elite level is yet to play out. Most Liberal MPs, on the other hand, will be happy to see the back of him — particularly aspiring candidates in former blue-ribbon city electorates, where Joyce’s unpopularity peaks.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The track record of One Nation’s MPs is not one of picking and sticking. The supposed plan is for Barnaby to get elected to the Senate in 2028 and take over as leader, but that’s almost three years away. There’s plenty of time for a party implosion before then.

The decision to contest the Senate rather than New England presumably reflects an assessment of likelihoods. Voting evidence suggests Joyce is extremely popular in his electorate, and even if the odds of re-election under the One Nation banner in New England are better than even, the chances of succeeding in election to the Senate are even better — and might boost the vote to bring another senator with him.

Is Barnaby the articulate leader that can take the far-right party to the next level? There’s no doubting his communication skills, his word-picture creating, even if it’s getting a bit old and was never everyone’s cup of tea. His former Nationals colleague Bridget McKenzie said recently that “he’s not a racist,” and it’s true his repertoire over two decades in parliament hasn’t included “dog-whistling” of the kind favoured by John Howard in his time and enthusiastically embraced by Peter Dutton.

Watchers of an ABC 7.30 interview on Monday were treated to quite a lot of squirming and dissembling when Joyce was quizzed about some of Hanson’s utterances, including recent ones. He just couldn’t bring himself to agree with some of her nastier comments. Yet the leaders of successful far-right parties around the democratic world — the parties he claims are, like One Nation, the future of politics — aren’t so bashful. Immigrant bashing is a crucial part of the formula; it’s not enough simply to say immigration is too high. Will a hardening be forced on Barnaby’s rhetoric in the new year?

Australia also lacks the plentiful uncontrolled immigration that causes friction in the US and Europe. By comparison with other countries, though, we have long had a very high level of controlled immigration. And there’s also the abundant rorting of bridging visas.

Recent polls have the far-right party on between 14 and 18 per cent. Such support would see its numbers mushroom in the Senate, but what about the House, where government is formed? How would those figures translate into seats? That would depend on two factors.

Pollster Demos recently released a national voting intentions survey of a little under 7000 respondents. It used “multilevel regression with post stratification,” or MRP, which tightens the seat-by-seat margin of error. Demos’s national primary votes gave One Nation 17 per cent with Labor on 33, the Coalition on 24 and Greens 13. Its estimated national two-party-preferred vote is 56 for Labor and 44 for the Coalition. Seat by seat One Nation swings were somewhat proportional to 2025 support: the bigger the One Nation vote in May, the larger the swing its way in this poll.

That’s splendid for the minor party. And, as might be expected, most of the support is coming directly from the Coalition. Demos has the 18 per cent translating into twelve seats. That would make One Nation happy. But this is where the caveats come in.

Demos uses 2025 election preference flows to arrive at each electorate’s two-candidate-preferred results. That’s fine — so they should — but it assumes the Coalition’s how-to-vote cards will again recommend One Nation ahead of Labor everywhere. Is that a certainty in 2028? It seems likely, but it will largely depend on who the Liberal leader is, how much authority they enjoy and whatever in-vogue ideas decree to be the best way forward.

Under Dutton, the pro–One Nation preference strategy was justified by his prioritisation of the outer suburbs and regions. But a Liberal Party that wished to regain territory from the teals and protect itself from  further losses in the inner city might put as much distance as possible between itself and One Nation.

Andrew Hastie and very likely Angus Taylor would happily do deals with the minor party. But Sussan Ley or some other “moderate,” trying to reclaim capital city support, might not.

I’m not suggesting Ley will last until the next election — she won’t — but her right-wing replacement next year might not either; and if that person crashes it would likely be interpreted as showing the hard-right experiment was a dud. Then, in typical Liberal leadership fashion, the pendulum would swing back to a “moderate” or at least “compromise” individual. That could even be Ley.

The second condition for maximum One Nation seat success is not just a rock-bottom Coalition primary vote but also a reasonably healthy Labor one. Of Demos’s twelve projected One Nation wins, the strongest seven come from two-candidate-preferred counts against the ALP. This is where its best chances are, because Labor “preferences” the Coalition over One Nation everywhere, which makes the former difficult to beat in a final count.

If we hold Demos’s One Nation, Greens and “Others” primary votes constant and move three percentage points from Labor to the Coalition in all electorates, four or five seats shift from One Nation to the Coalition. Make it a six-point movement (which would mean a 50–50 national two-party-preferred result) and One Nation is left with just one electorate.

So Labor doing well is also good for One Nation. The 2028 election might see a repeat of 2025, but to assume it will is to succumb to the tyranny of the present. In fact, across federal election history, big wins are nearly always followed by notable corrections.

The other, most important variable, of course, is the One Nation vote itself. Who knows, this time next year it might even, à la Reform UK, be leading the pack with support of around 30 per cent.

There is no reason to believe One Nation’s surge has peaked. •

The post Exit, stage right appeared first on Inside Story.

This month’s numbers, averaging around 11 or 12 per cent, are also nothing like some far-right parties in Europe, the highest-profile from this distance being Reform in Britain and France’s National Rally bloc, both on around 30 per cent and comfortably in the lead, and Germany’s AfD, in the mid-to-high 20s, sometimes leading the pack, sometimes behind the governing CDU.

In Italy, meanwhile, the far-right Georgia Meloni is actually prime minister, and in other countries similar parties sit in governing coalitions.

One Nation is not remotely within distance of those parties. But a couple of recent polls have them slightly ahead of the Greens (Resolve has 12 per cent, Essential 13) and hence in third place. (Essential stubbornly persists with its slightly insane post-2019 policy of not publishing data net of undecideds; there’s a better than even chance that the 13 is really a 14.)

Pollsters are probably overstating the party’s support. When taking their mid-term voting-intention surveys they must decide whether to include a minor party in the same breath as the major ones, or leave it to a secondary list along with the ones you might not have heard of. The first strategy tends to overstate support for the small party, the second tends to understate it. These days the Greens and One Nation always feature in the first list, which is why both go on to underperform at the ballot box. (The Greens less in recent years.)

At this year’s federal election, for example, One Nation received 6.4 per cent in the lower house, a couple of points below what most of the final surveys had suggested.

One reason for the party’s apparent doubling in support since the election might be that the Liberal Party is now led by a “centrist,” even if she’s obliged not to behave like one. Perhaps Peter Dutton, with his regular forays into immigration, racially tinged rhetoric and fierce opposition to the Voice, kept a few potential Hansonites in his tent. Last month’s March for Australia might also have galvanised some people to prioritise immigration when participating in surveys.

But why hasn’t One Nation reached the heights of similar parties in Europe? And more generally, why doesn’t Australia exhibit similar levels of “populism” to Europe and America? Total support for far-right minor parties at this year’s election barely cracked 10 per cent.

I reckon uncontrolled immigration is a major factor in our outlier status: we have virtually zero. Even when “the boats” peaked under the Rudd and Gillard governments, the numbers as a proportion of our population were minuscule compared with what other advanced democracies experience today. In Europe and the United States the huge numbers of “illegals” can be evidenced in many camps, streets and, infamously, hotels, while over here they only appeared on television news.

Electoral systems are a factor, too. With some exceptions, chief among them France and Britain, European countries tend to elect their lower (or sole) chambers via a form of proportional representation. Under such a system down under, Hanson’s party would probably have got a foothold in the House of Representatives in both 1998 and 2016 — as they did in the PR-elected Senate at those elections — and might have played a role in deciding who formed government. From little things big things have been known to grow, although One Nation’s record of losing senators needs to be taken account of. On the other hand, both Britain’s Reform and France’s National Rally managed to overcome the single-member-district hurdle.

There’s the persona of Hanson herself. It’s very likely that in the late 1990s and early noughties her unpolished inarticulateness played a big role in her rise, contrasting with the slickness of those “elites” and the “establishment” who — in her supporters’ view — ridiculed and looked down on her, and hence on them. But perhaps that shtick can only get you so far.

The successful European far-right leaders, according to reports, tend to have the gift of the gab. (I’m monolingual so can only judge Farage, who certainly does.) Many have university degrees and some were born into privilege. In America of course, where the far right has hijacked the major centre-right party, Donald Trump’s undoubted communication skills and outsized personality have been key.

Also in the United States the highly decentralised, partisan-infused, ramshackle election apparatus provided fertile soil for Trump to succeed in persuading some people of his false claims about the 2020 election. In Europe, trust in elections seems to vary. Norway, where it seems to remain high (I couldn’t find any surveys) has nonetheless taken preemptive measures to increase transparency and guard against potential future disinformation campaigns. Australia should do the same.

Our Australian Electoral Commission and its state and territory counterparts deservedly enjoy wide support. Not only do they have legislated statutory independence, but the AEC is most unusual in conducting all aspects of elections. (In most countries, local government plays a major role.)

But our Achilles heel is our voting system, which is widely misunderstood. The intricacies of electing senators are unfathomable for nearly all Australians, though the identity of the government is not decided in that chamber, and the roughly proportional votes-to-seats results do make sense.

It’s the “alternative vote” in the lower house — the thing we call preferential voting — that provides scope for mischief now that major party support is so low. Most Australians probably don’t understand how it works. No data exists for this, but anecdotally many people believe parties “give” each other preferences (as actually was the case for the Senate from 1984 to 2014); journalists’ jargon, which often implies this, is largely to blame. Others assume a second preference has less value than a first, or don’t understand why it doesn’t. Many questioned how Labor could form government in 2022 despite easily losing the primary vote.

France actually has a very similar system to ours, but it’s conducted on two separate occasions. When, between the first and second rounds of last year’s legislative election, some parties made agreements to selectively withdraw from some electorates so as to not split the anti-National Rally vote — which meant that Le Pen’s party won just a quarter of seats despite topping the first-round vote — most French would have understood what had transpired, not least because they (or at least the two-thirds of registered voters) participated in that second round. Not so with preferential voting.

The fate of National Rally in 2024 is analogous to Hanson’s in the Queensland federal electorate of Blair in 1998. She topped the primary vote but failed to win because Labor voters overwhelming preferenced the Liberal candidate thanks to Labor’s how-to-vote cards and general advocacy. Not surprisingly, the result fuelled conspiracy theories among her supporters that can still be heard today; Hanson herself, in her 2016 comeback speech, falsely claimed that “the introduction of full preferential voting… cost me the seat.” Full preferential voting has been with us federally since 1918.

One day a wilier, more articulate far-right politician might emerge who is also a dab hand at spreading dangerous porkies. They might even, as in the United States, come through a major party; Dutton showed he was at least willing to try to spread untruths about electoral shenanigans during the Voice referendum campaign. Our much-misunderstood method of electing members to the House of Representatives (and its counterpart lower houses across the mainland) is a big juicy target.

Some will say the answer is education, but that’s been tried forever. Journalists can’t change their spots. The answer instead is to change the electoral system, preferably to proportional representation (for other reasons as well, and despite any uncomfortable European experiences) or, failing that, to an actual two-round vote.

We do not know what delights America and the rest of the world will throw at us in coming years. But like Norway’s, our legislators and electoral commissions should try to anticipate possible future enablers of widely believed disinformation about how MPs are elected, and build appropriate safeguards. •

The post One Nation’s warning appeared first on Inside Story.

Second time around, the nervous neophyte of 1996 was replaced by a more calculating politician, ladling out a still-potent brew of scares to her loyal, angry supporters. She railed against her “false” imprisonment, the “trumped-up charges” that had put her in “maximum security.” She blamed Australia’s “decline” on globalisation, bewailed the “destruction of our farming sector” and, most memorably, reworked her claim about Australia being swamped. Where it had been a flood of “Asians” in 1996, she substituted a contemporary target: “Now we are in danger of being swamped by Muslims, who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own.”

Wait a minute, says Hanson biographer Kerry-Anne Walsh. Let’s look at the facts. The charges against Hanson were not “trumped up.” Her conviction by a jury on charges of fraud (relating to the registration of her political party) and dishonestly obtaining cheques from the electoral commissioner of Queensland to the value of around $500,000 led to a sentence of three years’ jail. After eleven weeks this was overturned on appeal. Her assignment to the maximum-security wing at Brisbane Women’s Prison had been for her own protection, and besides, she herself admitted later that conditions inside were “pristine.” “There was air-conditioning, exercise bikes, a personal trainer…” she confided to shock jock Ray Hadley. “We had fantastic meals, our washing was done for us, we just had to keep our cells clean. There was a library, television in our cell, education facilities.”

Walsh dissects Hanson’s other claims in similar fashion. Using data from the OECD, the Department of Agriculture, the 2016 census and other authoritative sources, she demonstrates that the Australian economy has benefited from globalisation, that production in the farming sector is at record levels, and that Muslim adherents constitute just 2.6 per cent of the population.

Walsh’s conclusion: Hanson’s speech was “a fraudulent call to arms to the blinkered and ignorant, based on distortions. Hanson is the mistress of fake news and alternative facts.” Confronted by evidence that her claims are inaccurate, she digs in. “This is quintessential Hanson,” Walsh comments.

So, no, this is not the authorised biography.

Kerry-Anne Walsh is an experienced reporter who clocked up twenty-five years in the Canberra press gallery before setting up a communications consultancy. She doesn’t mind taking sides or dishing out criticism, having turned her guns on the media in her 2014 book The Stalking of Julia Gillard. She declares she did not set out to write an “on the one hand, on the other” treatise about Hanson, and she has delivered.

What she has done, and it is a service to us all, is to collate and document Hanson’s words and actions through a long political career.

Retrieved from Hansard, newspapers, TV transcripts and websites, here is the full archive of awfulness: Hanson’s words of self-pity and narcissism, of vilification and jaundice, of inconsistency, ignorance and incoherence. Here are the minders: John Pasquarelli, David Oldfield, David Ettridge and James Ashby — though it is never clear if she ran them or the other way around. Here are the cameos of colourful Queenslanders: Joh and Flo Bjelke-Petersen, Mal Brough, Peter Fisher and the very peculiar Malcolm Roberts, dual citizen and self-styled “living soul.” Here is the chronology of taxpayer-funded election payouts to Hanson’s various political entities, including as an independent candidate: an aggregate of more than $8 million over the twenty years up to 2016. Here is the evidence of how the One Nation movement was ruthlessly transformed into a personal autocracy, “a business disguised as a political party.”

It is a freewheeling narrative, delivered with a neat turn of phrase (“James Ashby is to controversy what cow dung is to blowflies: he attracts it in swarms”).

As Walsh draws out the patterns in Hanson’s career, its remorseless logicbecomes clear. Whether they be with husbands, donors, enthusiastic rank-and-file supporters, staffers, One Nation party officials, endorsed One Nation candidates, or even the aforementioned minders, so many of Pauline Hanson’s personal and political relationships have traced the same trajectory, from trust to bust. One feels sympathy for the loyalists — retirees, pensioners, small businesspeople — who put their faith in Hanson and devoted their time and efforts to her movement, only in many cases to be pitilessly thrown out of the organisation by a high-handed executive acting in Hanson’s name — and given an earful on the way out. Two individuals named affectionately by Hanson in the Senate maiden speech, a staffer and a party official, were disposed of shortly afterwards. The pattern recurs: “People were useful, up to the point when they weren’t; then they were adversaries, never to darken her sunshine again.”

With Mark Latham now officially on Hanson’s side, as the lead One Nation candidate for the NSW upper house, one can only believe that this relationship, too, is doomed for a messy end. (Reviewing Hoodwinked in the Australian Spectator, Latham dismissed it as a “book of insults” and — pot, kettle — criticised Walsh for not disclosing her “allegiances and bias.”)

And that’s Walsh’s conclusion. Hanson’s career has displayed “an unerring ability to hoodwink her apostles into believing she has nothing else on her mind but their welfare.” Her anger, however, has less to do with the plight of the average Australian and more to do with “personal revenge and misplaced victimhood.” She is not an anti-politician, but rather a politician like any other, with a brand to maintain:

She relies on… keeping alive the image that she’s a battler. Even though every shred of evidence points to the reality that she long ago ceased to be that person… She’s permanently fed up, sick and tired of mainstream politicians, always standing up for “the people.” But the reality of her parliamentary record shows she does deals with the government that end up screwing the battler; she negotiates cynical preference deals that defy her anti-politician persona; and she only stands up for “the people” when she is standing in front of them in campaign mode.

This book would have been doubly valuable with an index and proper citations. In the absence of these tools, the many references that Walsh has rescued from obscurity risk returning there, and much of the utility of her effort will be lost to those future researchers who wish to delve into this populist phase of Australian politics. Perhaps citations could be posted on the publisher’s website?

Why? Because there will be many in the future who will reflect on our contemporary dilemma of democratic politics. We know that our national campaign finance laws need urgent reform; they lag far behind those of our European peers and even many Australian states, in terms of integrity and transparency. Yet genuine reform efforts founder on partisan grounds.

The reform challenge is made more difficult by the rise, at a time of growing public disillusionment with the major parties, of micro-parties. Some of these may of course reinvigorate the language and practice of democracy; but there are others, built entirely around the image of a leader, that do not appear to care about their members, let alone the public interest. Impervious to mainstream critique (indeed, seemingly energised by it) and incapable of reasoned debate, they use fear and vilification to promote populist “us versus them” solutions, uncritically reported by a hamstrung media. And we reward them with a seat in parliament — not once, in this case, but twice. •

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But what has driven these voters to desert the Coalition (and, to a lesser extent, Labor)? Racism pure and simple, asserts David Marr in his recent Quarterly Essay, The White Queen: One Nation and the Politics of Race.

For that conclusion, he relies almost entirely on the latest Australian Election Study, the universities’ long-running post-election survey, directed by Ian McAllister of the Australian National University. Based on its findings, Marr insists that One Nation voters are not those doing it hard economically — “they are in work and middling prosperous.” Rather, what drives them to Pauline Hanson is their hostility to migrants. “One Nation is an anti-immigration party.”

To the extent that it relies on the Australian Election Study, David Marr’s analysis is invalid.

I have great respect for David Marr as a journalist, but statistical analysis is not his forte. If it were, he would not have put so much weight on a source once valuable, but now, regrettably, an eccentric, unreliable outlier in the surveysphere.

Last year’s AES survey was sent out to 12,497 people, by mail or email, of whom just 2818 replied: that’s a response rate of 22.5 per cent. Open up the survey, and you’ll see why. It has ninety-nine questions, many of them multiple, requiring up to 263 responses. It asks you how much confidence you have in fourteen separate institutions. It asks you if you think Malaysia is likely to invade Australia. It wants to know which political party your mother supported, whether any of your friends or neighbours lobbied you during the election, how you judge Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten on nine separate qualities, how you rate the parties on ten separate issues… and so on, interminably. It would take the average person several hours to complete the survey.

That’s why only 22.5 per cent of respondents replied in any form, and many questions got less than a 20 per cent response. Those who replied were disproportionately retired people who had been managers or self-employed, and who voted for the Coalition. (For the Senate, 46.1 per cent in this survey voted Coalition, compared with 35.2 per cent of the electorate.) By the end, most also regretted having wasted so much time on the survey, and only 46 per cent said they would be prepared to do it again next time.

Few One Nation voters filled out the long questionnaire. Just seventeen of the 2818 respondents described themselves as One Nation supporters. Just thirty-five said they voted One Nation for the lower house. Just seventy-two voted One Nation for the Senate. That is not a valid statistical base for making assertions about the 10 per cent of Australians who support One Nation.

Apart from their views, the most striking fact about these One Nation voters is that they were overwhelmingly Australian-born and working-class (far more so than Labor voters). Marr tells us they were “oddly gloomy about their (economic) prospects” but doesn’t ask whether that might be because their economic prospects were indeed gloomy. He does note that “focus groups say many One Nation voters are working part-time when they would like to be full-time” — but the AES survey doesn’t ask about underemployment, and some of its questions don’t distinguish between past and present employment.

The biggest problem, however, is that a sample of seventy-two people from a group disproportionately made up of older and better-off people can’t provide reliable information about One Nation’s supporters. To the extent that it relies on this survey, David Marr’s analysis is invalid.

The truth is that we don’t know how much Pauline Hanson’s support is driven by economic factors, and how much purely by racism. If her supporters are overwhelmingly working-class, and disproportionately underemployed, or unemployed, or struggling small-business owners, economic factors could well be playing a crucial role. •

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In some ways Australia was ahead of the curve. Pauline Hanson has been riding a wave of dissatisfaction for twenty years now, more than a lifetime in political terms, and the Howard-era culture wars were a transparent attempt to curry electoral favour by opposing the government to an imagined “elite” who could wear the blame for society’s ills. More recently, both Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott rode anti-politics into (and back out of) power, and we now enjoy a Senate populated by a colourful collection of minor parties, all claiming to represent the disenfranchised and dispossessed.

In this context, Bernardi’s split from the Liberals should have come as no great surprise. Emboldened by Trump’s successes – the standard-issue “Make Australia Great Again” caps are not exactly subtle – Bernardi is banking on his capacity to exploit a similar, as-yet-untapped electoral undercurrent. Or, in his own words, to “give hope to those who despair at the current state of Australian politics.”

Yet this bold step into the unknown is predicated on a critical miscalculation. The problem for Bernardi and his ilk – and he is certainly not alone, enjoying support both within his former party and from mining magnate Gina Rinehart – is that they fundamentally misunderstand Trump, Brexit and the broader political forces in play. These have very little to do with values and a whole lot to do with economics – and not the sort of economics likely to be promoted by a party bankrolled by a billionaire.

American voters primarily motivated by moral precepts – by opposition to abortion, Islam or socialised healthcare – had no shortage of highly qualified Republicans to choose from. Whatever one thinks of Trump, the likes of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio can hardly be construed as moderate, even in comparison. The fact that they were roundly rejected shows that the wheels have come off that particular bus. Working-class voters will no longer be distracted from their economic interests by talk of God and guns.

Brexit reinforces this reality, particularly in comparison with Trump. Where the Republican nominee campaigned on repealing Obamacare (and even then with the promise of replacing it with “something better”), those making the Brexit case explicitly (and, as it turns out, dishonestly) claimed that disengaging from the European Union would free up substantial funding for the National Health Service, among other popular social services.

Unfortunately for Bernardi, the public disenchantment he aspires to harness in Australia reflects unhappiness with much of what he stands for – neoliberal economics and insider politics. Despite the broad benefits conferred by global capitalism – and it’s easy to forget that the current generation enjoys opportunities their grandparents would not have dreamed of – it has not been universally beneficial. Broad swathes of society have been left behind by economic change, technological development and the offshoring of industry, and a new generation faces an increasingly uncertain employment market, out-of-reach housing and the progressive withdrawal of the education and healthcare benefits their parents (and political leaders) enjoyed. Worse still, they are blamed for the mess they’ve inherited.

Given the circumstances, an anti-establishment mood should be no surprise. But a party that subscribes just as strongly to the precepts that got us to where we are can’t plausibly argue that it’s different. The Abbott government stood for much of what Bernardi is selling, and was broadly and consistently on the nose.

Even if Bernardi were to fully embrace anti-establishment sentiments, Australia simply doesn’t have the broad left-behind demographic that exists in the north of England or the American midwest – at least, not yet. Trump and Brexit reflect the views of a substantial group of people who have lost all faith in the status quo, and if your income, employment prospects and life expectancy had been dropping for three decades, how could you not? This disaffected electorate is now willing to vote for anyone – literally anyone – who offers the chance of an alternative, no matter the practicality of a border wall or a trade war.

Australia, too, has lost much of its manufacturing capacity (the car industry being the most recent high-profile victim), but a mining boom and a property bubble have papered over the cracks for the moment. This is not to say the same sentiments do not exist, and the day may yet come, but for the moment there is nothing within the same order of magnitude. The politics of grievance and resentment are sufficient to elect a Hanson or Xenophon (or a Palmer or Katter – remember them?) and a few fellow travellers, but without further economic decline that is the ceiling. There simply isn’t sufficient unrest to propel a new party that aspires to meaningful involvement in national governance, and without further economic decline there is unlikely to be.

Nor do Australians have any real distaste for (let alone fear of) big government. The broadly peaceful relationship between government and citizen means we simply don’t have the accumulated antagonism that drives such a sentiment. We may well support a reduction in spending and taxation, but only up to the point that it affects our own access to services. This means that while there is ample support for cuts to the meagre percentage of the budget that funds unemployment benefits, there is very little backing for cuts to healthcare, education or the aged and disability pensions.

It is this broad-based public buy-in that has allowed the Australian Settlement to stand for a century in the face of evolving global economic conditions, and precluded any serious political attempts to alter it. This sentiment is so entrenched that the two longest-serving prime ministers in Australia’s history, both dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, embraced it without any particular qualms. In founding the Liberal Party, Robert Menzies advocated “a true revival of liberal thought which will work for social justice and security” and drove important expansions in healthcare and welfare policy. More recently John Howard, inspiration to the current generation of conservatives, presided over what was at the time the highest-taxing government in the country’s history.

This is not to say Bernardi shares no common ground with his fellow anti-establishmentarians. Like Farage and Johnson in Britain, and even Trump in an economic rather than political sense, he is the consummate insider, having reached his present station in life through connections rather than any particular talent. He was parachuted into a casual Senate vacancy in 2006 by the party machine, and from then on enjoyed the first or second position on the Liberals’ Senate ticket – a guarantee of election in all but extreme circumstances. That privilege was at odds with his value as a member of the party. Bernardi has no demonstrated campaigning or policy talent; his chief contribution to this government has been destabilisation, and before that he offered little more than confirmation of everything the public found distasteful in the Abbott ministry.

Still, in the short term it’s not a bad career move; better to be a big fish in a small pond than the inverse, and Rinehart has demonstrated a proclivity for throwing good money after bad in politics and media that she has prudently avoided in business. And he has timed his run as well as he might have, with a good five years in the Senate to build his movement and drum up sufficient support for re-election.

But, as Inside Story’s Peter Brent pointed out earlier in the week, Bernardi and his Conservatives aren’t guaranteed electoral traction. Free of the need to court direct public support, Bernardi has so far been insulated from the realities of electioneering, and may be in for a rude shock. He is now in direct competition not just with the Liberals, but also with a raft of similar parties, most of whom have a better handle (consciously or otherwise) on the electoral mood. Indeed, his gamble will be made that much harder by his particular electorate – Nick Xenophon has the anti-political angle and the cohort of disaffected major-party voters sewn up in South Australia. Yet even Xenophon’s prospects, like those of Hanson and One Nation in Queensland, face limits.

The real challenge for the likes of Hanson, Xenophon and Bernardi is to articulate public dissatisfaction into a sustainable vision for the future, not merely a distorted mirror of the past. It seems probable that Bernardi will be joined by others who share his feelings, within both the parliament and broader society, and in the short term there are no doubt votes to be milked in opposing marriage equality and denying anthropogenic climate change, much as there have been in harking for a return to a world that can never be restored. In time, though, and to his chagrin, Bernardi may well discover that raging against the dying of the light is not a platform for broad and sustained electoral success. •

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