The One Nation reality check is coming soon
One Nation’s surge says less about Pauline Hanson and more about a political system losing the trust of voters who no longer believe change is coming.
Recent polling showing strong support for One Nation continues to generate fear on the left and excitement on the right across Australia’s political class. These numbers won’t hold up until the 2028 election – still two years away – but that’s almost beside the point. The real story is a political system that appears to be incapable of responding to the concerns of the electorate, even when they’ve been given so many chances to do this.
It’s easy to try and explain One Nation’s rise through the issues that they keep pushing – with great support from the mainstream media and assorted right-wing hangers on – housing, blaming migrants, cost-of-living pressures, distrust of institutions and growing disillusionment with the major parties – but this is more about the exhaustion of the current political system and its inability to adapt itself to the needs of the modern-day world.
The Liberal Party is still a shell of its former self – in terms of seats held and in the opinion polls – and is struggling to articulate a purpose beyond toxic politics and opposition for opposition’s sake – and it’s obvious that One Nation has moved into that space, positioning itself as the vessel for protest and grievance, a space which the Liberal Party is also trying to occupy, albeit unsuccessfully.
The Albanese government also bears responsibility for the rise in One Nation. Having achieved a massive victory in 2025 – one of the biggest ever in federal history – the Prime Minister appears to have convinced himself that his trademark caution and severe incrementalism is not just an electoral strategy worth pursuing further, but has become his entire philosophy of governing.
Reform has been slow and fragmented, and usually abandoned at the first sign of resistance. The lesson Albanese drew from that election victory – an incorrect lesson – was not that voters wanted change, but that voters wanted snail-pace stability and a level of conservatism that would make John Howard proud. But as governments often discover – and usually far too late – standing still in politics is just another way of moving backwards.
There’s a lot of comparisons going on at the moment with the Coalition after its surprise 2019 victory. Scott Morrison interpreted that election victory as a public endorsement of the status quo – and of him personally, only to discover that political sentiment rapidly deteriorates when governments mistake short-term approval for a long-lasting enthusiasm. An ill-timed and surreptitious trip to Hawaii wouldn’t have helped either. And a quick read of Machiavelli’s The Prince would have been far more valuable to Morrison than penning the words of Plans For Your Good, his post-prime ministerial book that gave an insight into his bizarre leadership.
Albanese risks falling into the same trap that most prime ministers fall into, probably now keeping a tally of when he’ll overtake Bob Hawke’s record of 3203 days in office (by the way, he’s up to 1484 days, so still a long way to go). While prime ministers might congratulate themselves on managing the headlines and achieving great results from their focus group testing, voters are looking around and wondering why so little seems to be changing.
That helps explain the extraordinary result of this week’s Resolve poll showing Pauline Hanson leading Anthony Albanese as preferred prime minister, with a figure of 33 per cent to 29. We can argue the point that the figures are ultimately meaningless so far out from an election – and that the figure is pretty much a vanity number – but it’s astonishing that a prime minister with every institutional advantage at his disposal has found himself trailing to a politician who is a racist, who has obvious limitations, whose appeal is built almost entirely around complaint, resentment and perpetual opposition to everything. That’s 33 per cent of people – every third person that you walk by – when given an option, will say they would prefer Hanson to lead the country.
Yet One Nation’s own contradictions deserve far more scrutiny than they usually receive from the mainstream media. Hanson presents herself as a champion of ordinary Australians standing against powerful elites, but kicks down on the ordinary people who don’t fit into her narrow world view. At the same time, she takes policy advice from Gina Rinehart, Australia’s wealthiest person, while maintaining a close relationship with well-heeled donors (usually racist as well), endorsements and access to private resources. For a movement that picks up a lot of support through its anti-establishment rhetoric, it’s a contradiction that never gets the serious attention.
And One Nation’s broader agenda is rarely subjected to the level of examination routinely applied to other political movements, mainly because it’s an agenda that fits into that of the establishment media: climate denialism, hostility to women’s reproductive rights, culture-war campaigns against trans people, vulnerable communities, minorities. When challenged on the details, Hanson always veers back to outrage and grievance, which is then lapped up again by the media. It’s a success that relies less on solutions, and more on identifying the targets that can be weaponised for political advantage.
That’s why Hanson’s appearance at the National Press Club this week matters. Despite our reservations about the support the club receives from the same donor pool as One Nation, this type of forum at least provides a level of scrutiny that Hanson has evaded for far too long. If Hanson believes that she’s “ready to be prime minister”, let’s put her up on that pedestal and see how far she gets with her racist squawking on the stage. She won’t be able to ban journalists from the ABC or from SBS from the club, as she has with other One Nation events, so let’s see how she fares once the full blowtorch is applied.
For decades, Hanson has benefited from a media environment that often treats her as a political curiosity rather than a public figure whose dubious claims, alliances and contradictions deserve intense forensic examination. The real question is whether Australia’s political journalists are finally prepared to subject one of the country’s most influential protest politicians to the same level of scrutiny routinely directed at everyone else.
The electorate just doesn’t care anymore
It’s the story that now sits under almost every political issue in Australia. The rise of One Nation; the collapse of trust in institutions; hostility towards immigrants, anger over housing and a cynicism towards government are all a part of the deeper breakdown between voters and the political establishment.
For decades, politics operated on a social pact. Governments couldn’t solve every problem in the world, but they needed to convince people that the system was broadly working in their interests. It’s obvious that the Australian electorate no longer believes this to be the case: stagnate wages, unaffordable housing – whether it’s housing purchases or rent – public services deteriorating and governments consumed by the management of headlines rather than dealing with the difficult problems. And voters are arriving as a simple conclusion: political leaders either cannot fix things or don’t want to.
Australia is beginning to resemble the same traits that have been visible for some time in the United States, Britain, Canada and parts of Europe, where it seems that the traditional contest between “left” and “right” is being replaced by a struggle between establishment and anti-establishment politics. For sure, that left/right divide has been waning for some time, and replaced with multiple divides – market–state; individualism–communitarianism; global–national; social progressiveness–conservativism – but this appears to be a new divide that the political system has yet to work out a way of dealing with.
Perhaps the clearest evidence of this shift is that even major international crises appear to have no influence in building confidence in political leaders. Traditionally, periods of uncertainty give rise to the “rally ’round the flag” effect, where voters gravitate towards governments for stability and reassurance: it’s certainly what occurred during the onset of COVID, where many incumbent governments received a boost in their political support and went on to achieve re-election (not the Morrison government, however).
Yet as conflict and instability escalate in the West Asia/Middle East region, and global economic uncertainty continues to grow, many voters appear to be unconvinced. They are just so alienated from the political class that competence, experience in office and even basic credibility don’t seem to matter that much anymore.
And that’s the danger for Australia’s political establishment. When voters lose faith in institutions, they don’t necessarily become more ideological or more informed, they just appear to not give a shit anymore, and are willing to take risks.
In this kind of environment, political outsiders, protest parties and professional peddlers of grievance politics don’t need to offer any convincing answers. And whether they are capable of governing has become almost irrelevant. The greatest threat to Australia’s politics is not that voters have found a better alternative in One Nation – they haven’t – it’s the increasing numbers who have decided that they no longer care.
In my view all the major parties in Liberal Democracies have been captured by donors and lobbyists and government for the 1%, even the supposedly Left of centre parties such as Labor.