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With One Nation’s meteoric rise in the polls seeing them pass the once-dominant Liberals for the first time, the big question is: is the surge sustainable?
The media-political establishment are desperate to convince themselves it’s so. Some are comparing it to the late-’80s flash in the pan of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s mooted run for the Lodge. But, for all the media panic, the “Joh for PM” campaign never seriously polled and didn’t even last to election time.
By contrast, One Nation’s rise has all the sense of a long-time-coming seismic shift. One Nation’s numbers have built steadily over years, particularly under the guidance of senior advisor James Ashby. The Please Explain satirical YouTube cartoons – with a movie-length version hitting cinemas this weekend, an unprecedented move in Australian politics – have been a sustained boost to One Nation’s already-cemented presence in the public mind.
More importantly, the Overton Window has been shattered. People are no longer ashamed to admit their intention to vote One Nation.
Just because more people now tell pollsters they would vote for One Nation over the coalition does not mean a seismic realignment is about to shake Australian politics.
But it’s the growing anger, reaching white-hot levels, over years of record-high mass immigration that has really sent One Nation into the forefront of the political race.
So, the decisive shift hasn’t happened quite yet. But the coming months will see it either cement or crumble. At the moment, the former seems most likely.
It does mean, though, that such a realignment will happen unless the coalition – which, as of writing, appears set to split for a second time under Sussan Ley’s leadership – can address the concerns driving One Nation’s support: financial insecurity, disrespect for national symbols and fears that mass migration is rapidly changing Australia for the worse.
All of these should have made the Albanese government an easy target at the last election.
At last year’s election, the coalition did enough to acknowledge voters’ concerns were real, but not enough to persuade voters that the Liberal-Nationals were serious in dealing with them. For instance, Peter Dutton’s team proposed the introduction of nuclear power to tackle the astronomical costs of an electricity supply but then refused to argue for its own policy in the face of a Labor scare campaign.
The coalition said it would cut the permanent migration intake by 45,000 but proposed no mechanism to restrain the mass influx of overseas students that has driven the nearly 1.5 million boost to net overseas migration over the life of the Albanese government.
Couple that with what was the most woeful election campaign in living memory, and it’s no surprise the coalition crashed and burned. The campaign wasn’t just mind-bogglingly bad, but none of the coalition’s policies gave off any real sense of providing a decisive alternative to the left. To voters long despairing of the “Laboral” duopoly, there didn’t seem any point in voting for the same-but-a-bit-less coalition. The centre-right vote fractured among a welter of minor parties.
Like Reform in Britain, post the election One Nation has emerged as a clear and credible alternative, genuine centre-right party.
One Nation’s vote has surged from six per cent at last year’s election to 15 per cent in last November’s Newspoll and 22 per cent now. This means, for the first time in the 40-year history of Newspoll, One Nation has the greatest share of centre-right primary vote.
Voters sense that One Nation, at least, actually believe in what they say.
Unlike the coalition, which convulsed itself in an internal argument over whether to keep a commitment to net-zero emissions and had two of its most talented frontbenchers resign over the direction of an immigration policy, One Nation has consistently opposed net zero, supported coal-fired electricity generation, opposed mass migration and wrapped itself wholeheartedly in the flag. There has been the high-profile defection to the insurgent party of charismatic former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, with two more Nationals MPs reportedly thinking of following him.
The Bondi massacre shocked the nation to the core. Australians have grown increasingly impatient with a war on the other side of the world dominating Australian politics, as well as emboldening an increasingly radical left into more and more overt anti-Semitic violence. The worst Islamic terror attack in our history made it clear that the past two years of two-party politics has failed appallingly.
To the extent that it wasn’t obvious before, the Bondi massacre has reinforced the need for a new approach to immigration and multiculturalism. We simply can’t keep importing hatreds from overseas. And popular attitudes here are hardly less ripe for a political upheaval over immigration, given its impact on wages, housing affordability and the sense that Australians are at risk of becoming strangers in their own country.
The ‘sudden’ rise of One Nation is, in fact, not that sudden at all. Rather, it’s the outcome of years of bubbling discontent fuelled by mass immigration.
In an important paper released last November, The Australian Population Research Institute, led by former Monash University academic Bob Birrell, asked: “Is Australia ready for a political realignment?” It concludes that “the huge influx of temporary entry visa holders under Labor’s watch has produced an underclass nearly two million strong. This underclass is a major contributor to Australia’s housing and urban crises as well as being a ferocious competitor for entry-level jobs. These outcomes have increased voters’ sense of insecurity, thus laying the groundwork for a populist challenge.”
Particularly fuelling voter anger is the obvious fact that millions of foreigners are gaming the immigration system to mooch off a country they openly hate. Nearly 10 per cent of Australia’s population is now here on temporary visas – mostly ‘student’ visas.
Yet it won’t entirely have escaped people’s attention that one of the alleged Bondi shooters had been here since 1998, first on a student visa and subsequently, it seems, on a spousal visa, without ever becoming a permanent resident or citizen.
The more the elite class parrot their ‘diversity is our strength’ bullshit, the angrier with the two-party establishment voters get. Polls show 80 per cent support for cutting migration. Two-thirds of voters want it cut drastically.
Only one party is consistently and meaningfully addressing these concerns. No wonder they’re skyrocketing in the polls.
