Australians have been seeking better expression of their values and representation of their interests, neither of which they have gotten from the Labor or Liberal parties for more than a decade.
Members of the political and media classes like to characterise One Nation as a “fringe” political party, but they have this exactly the wrong way around. It is they who hold fringe opinions, while One Nation is the only mainstream political party in Australia.
According to the most recent The Australian Financial Review/Redbridge Group/Accent Research poll, One Nation is now the most popular political party with a primary vote of 31 per cent. Labor came in with 28 per cent, and the Coalition just 20 per cent.
For the first time in our post-Second World War history, Australians say that they prefer a minor party to either of the establishment major parties. If the party which is most popular in opinion polling is “fringe”, then what does that make the parties which trail behind it?
In recent polling commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs, 79 per cent of respondents said they wanted annual migration levels of 100,000 or below. So it is fair to say that supporting lower migration levels is a mainstream opinion. When you look at the migration policies of the political parties, only one comes remotely close to this level: One Nation.
Those who disregard One Nation’s popularity as a temporary blip are in denial. One Nation is not going anywhere.
There is mainstream support for a break from the “uniparty” and a reprioritisation of ordinary people and their interests in politics.
Detailed polling conducted in March for the Australian National University found that 41 per cent of Australians like One Nation, making it the best-liked political party. Almost 12 per cent gave One Nation the maximum ranking of 10/10, an extraordinary result. While a similar 39 per cent of Australians said that they like Labor, only 3.7 per cent ranked the party as 10/10.
What this means, contrary to what establishment politicians and commentators often argue, is that there is strong positive momentum behind One Nation. There is mainstream support for a break from the “uniparty” and a reprioritisation of ordinary people and their interests in politics.
In a recent paper reflecting on that detailed ANU polling, academics from the university concluded that “the rise in One Nation support is not best understood as a temporary protest driven by cost-of-living pressures, though financial stress is a significant predictor. It reflects instead a potentially more durable and structurally grounded configuration… [with] a distinctive and internally coherent support base.”
Those words do not describe a fringe movement. And what the South Australian election and the Farrer byelection demonstrated is that this support is not just frustrations vented at a pollster.
For years, both trust in and satisfaction with our political system and parties have been in a seemingly terminal decline. Australians have been seeking better expression of their values and representation of their interests, neither of which they have gotten from the Labor or Liberal parties for more than a decade.
The confluence of material and cultural decline experienced by mainstream Australians in recent years has made it clear that something different to the bipartisan consensus on mass migration, net zero, and cultural deregulation is required.
Some commentators criticise One Nation for being “light on policies”, but they miss the point that Australians like One Nation because it is heavy on values.
Besides, we have just seen the ease with which the Labor Party rips up its own policies on taxation and negative gearing after an election. And that was not an isolated incident. Before the 2022 election the Labor Party was light on industrial relations policy, and then fundamentally changed the industrial relations system. Before the 2019 election, the Liberal Party was light on net zero policy (that is, it was rejected outright), and then in 2021 signed Australia up anyway.
Australians have been shown time and time again that they cannot trust whichever policies the major parties claim to stand for. So they have made an assessment that it is better to back a party that is committed to the values that they hold.
The most remarkable thing about the rising popularity of One Nation over the past year is not that it happened, but that the major parties act as though it was not a predictable result of them becoming disconnected from the mainstream.
