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Brace yourselves for a fresh avalanche of legacy media hatchet-jobs on One Nation. The worst possible news for the uniparty establishment and its legacy media bootlickers has just landed: One Nation is officially the most popular political party in the nation. The upstart party is now almost at the level of primary vote that won Anthony Albanese a landslide majority last year.
Anthony Albanese’s Labor government is now as hated as Julia Gillard’s was, before it was wiped out in a landslide. At the same time, the PM himself is scraping the depths of the most-hated PM in poll history.
And the coalition? Fast being relegated to the same minor party status as the Greens.
Core support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has surged ahead of Labor for the first time in Newspoll history, as Anthony Albanese’s popularity hit record lows and an overwhelming majority of voters declare Australian politics is overdue for a big shake-up.
In a watershed moment for Australian politics, support for the major parties has plummeted below less than half of the share of the primary vote as core support for One Nation soared to 31 per cent, ahead of 30 per cent for Labor and 18 per cent for the coalition, which slumped to its February nadir that ended Sussan Ley’s leadership.
Albanese’s net approval has cratered to minus 24. Sixty per cent of voters are dissatisfied with his performance. The last time a prime minister polled that badly was Tony Abbott in 2015.
Labor’s primary vote has sunk to levels last seen under Gillard in 2011–13. The coalition has lost ground even since its February leadership bloodbath. Combined, the old uniparty now commands just 48 per cent of the primary vote: a record low.
These are the numbers the uniparty has been dreading. First they tried dismissing One Nation’s rise as a ‘blip’. As the months dragged on and One Nation’s polls kept rising, and worse they started winning elections, that one wore increasingly thin. Then they turned to, ‘a vote for One Nation is a vote for [insert enemy party as needed]’. Nobody cared.
Now, they’re trying the ‘One Nation are not fit for government’ gambit, which will blow up in their faces, too. Unfit, by comparison to whom? The uniparty clownshow who’ve brought us to the social and economic nadir we’re now at? By comparison, that makes One Nation look pretty good.
Since Jim Chalmers handed down the Albanese government’s fifth budget on May 12, One Nation’s primary vote has jumped from 24 per cent to 31 per cent.
And Bob Hawke’s apocryphal jibe at Albanese – ‘Unfortunately, he’s not very bright’ – is ringing truer than ever. Check this clanger out:
Anthony Albanese when quizzed on the drivers behind One Nation’s meteoric rise in popularity says: “it’s the economy, stupid” […]
“Many people feel that the system isn’t working for them; that they’re working for the economy, not the economy working for them.
And whose running the economy, stupid?
Albanese, in his usual tone-deaf fashion, is writing One Nation’s next campaign script for them. This is the economy Albanese and Jim Chalmers have run for the past four years and Labor has helped mismanage for roughly half of the last half-century. The man who broke his core promise on negative gearing and capital gains tax, after breaking his first-term promises such as lowering power bills, now lectures the public about feeling the system is rigged against them. The cheek is almost impressive.
Then comes the self-righteous coda, delivered with more front than Myers:
“I want an Australia that is united, one that has social cohesion at our core, one that respects people for who they are, but is patriotic about all of us being Australians,” he said.
Is he kidding? Is he fucking kidding? The hypocrisy is staggering. On Albanese’s watch social cohesion has been systematically shredded. The horror at Bondi was not an aberration: it was the predictable culmination of years of elite denial, open borders and refusal to confront imported hatreds. The same government that lectures about unity spent months gaslighting the public over rising antisemitism before the inevitable atrocity arrived. The same prat who blatherskites about patriotism regularly relegates the Australian flag to second and third place behind the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags.
Labor and coalition strategists are already spinning the obvious: voters are furious about the cost-of-living crisis, housing unaffordability and immigration. These are the very issues both parties have controlled since World War II. They are the issues on which both sides have repeatedly ignored the clear wishes of the Australian people – immigration most brazenly of all. Of course voters blame them. They own the results.
Into this mess wanders Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie, the second-greatest disappointment of the coalition base.
Liberal Andrew Hastie has labelled Pauline Hanson “MAGA first” after the One Nation leader said US President Donald Trump’s war in the Middle East could still be a success, in one of the most direct critiques of Hanson from an opposition MP as the coalition scrambles to fend off the populist party.
As my father used to say, “Fools and little boys criticise unfinished work”. The war is just 100 days old. The Iranian leadership has been decapitated, while in turn it has barely inflicted any great strategic damage on the US. More importantly, Hastie’s critique ignores the rather salient fact that Iran is a direct enemy of Australia through its sponsorship of local terror networks and ideological fellow-travellers. When the regime that chants ‘Death to Australia’ and arms groups that have already murdered Australians is the subject of discussion, loyalty to the national interest is not ‘MAGA’ posturing. It is basic realism.
And they wonder why One Nation is winning.
One Nation has extended its lead over the coalition since Labor’s budget was handed down last month, despite the opposition raising hopes that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s broken promises on tax would lead voters back to the opposition […]
But on the whole, the opposition has struggled to run a sustained argument against Hanson.
Worse, for both sides of the uniparty, the more they attack the One Nation tarbaby, the deeper they find themselves in the briar patch.
The broader message from the poll is unmistakable. Almost 70 per cent of voters, across nearly every demographic, except rusted-on Labor loyalists and the deep Greens, agree that the people who built this mess aren’t going to fix it and that Australian politics is overdue for a big shake-up.
One Nation’s surge is not mysterious. It is the direct consequence of two major parties that have treated the Australian people as an afterthought for decades on the issues that actually matter: housing, energy costs, border security and cultural cohesion.
The uniparty can keep sending its media attack dogs. The voters are making their judgement.
