One Nation is on the rise — but do we know what it means?

ABC. This podcast contains audio advertising. To hear it without ads, head to the ABC Listen app now. ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music, and more. I'm David Mar. Host of Late Night Live on Radio National. Very slob, herodite, kind of guy. We're here to surprise, delight, and maybe enrage you from time to time. We go without curiosity leads. Let's talk crazy. Let's act crazy. Let's be crazy because then the enemy doesn't know what you're thinking. Late Night Live, four new shows week on ABC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Mind Field at a time that feels like, well, the miniest of fields. I suppose. Things had to change dramatically in the last couple of weeks on the political front. And today we will delve into it and hope that we don't get burnt or some other kind of melody. Well, Italy is my name. Scott Stevens is my co-host. As we try to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar Scott, and I don't know that there's any time that that has been more apt. How are you? I'm fine, except if we are sticking with the Mind Field metaphor, then surely we're talking about the risk of losing some kind of limb or otherwise. Yeah, I did occur to me as I was departing from the metaphor, and I just didn't want to say anything quite so graphic. And here we are trying to figure out which disaster we would prefer. I don't actually know that that's the best way into this. Well, I'll let you frame the topic because that is your traditional role on the show. But we are talking about a kind of what feels like an upheaval in Australian politics that mirrors politics we've seen in like societies around the world, if I can put it that way. That seems now to have arrived in Australia and burst the banks that I think conventionalism had assumed would contain it in this country. That's how I'm going to frame it in a sort of vague preliminary way. But I'll let you do the heavy lifting now. What we're talking about really is surrounded on all sides by questions. We are seeing phenomena. We don't necessarily know what that phenomena means, whether we are talking about sort of seismic permanent changes to the political order, whether this is the end result of a long, steady erosion of popular support for the two-party system, whether the analogies, the echoes that we're seeing between Australian and other countries, whether these are durable, whether there is something peculiarly Australian about what's going on here. I mean, really what we're talking about is the surge over the last 12 months. Not even. Not even. I mean, we're really talking about the last six months. But there have been two phenomena that have been notable within the Australian political landscape over the last six months. Sorry, we should name this surge. The surge in the One Nation Prime Revote. That has been expressed in real votes in South Australia and again in Farrah, although it's bi-elections, slightly different. And which now in multiple polls and it seems now to be a public consensus has resulted in One Nation being the most popular party in the country. Narely, but nonetheless, it's remarkable. I mean, what we're really looking at is a growth in something like say six to seven percent around this time last year, to something much closer to 29 to 32. That is remarkable. Initially, the thing that has the phenomenon that's been paired with that is the precipitous decline in the vote for the Liberal Party. And it would be easy enough to say that what's going on is simply kind of bleeding of one voter base into another. But there does seem to be a whole lot of things about what's happened over the last 12 months that would render that simple narrative relatively inane. And one of the other things, of course, that we're seeing is that there has been not as sizeable decline, but some decline in the primary vote of the Labour Party. At this stage of a government cycle in between elections, especially after a budget that has been met with mixed reviews or in many quarters, it's been regarded rather negatively, there does also seem to be a certain bleeding of votes from Labour to one nation. But you see, here's where I've got to confess, I've got all sorts of questions. For instance, are we looking here at something like an affirmation of what one nation is, what it stands for, in other words, some kind of policy base, some coherent articulation of a platform? Are we looking here at a form of political affirmation? Yes, this is what we want. We are after more of the same. Or is one nation here prospering from what we've referred to on other occasions as a kind of aggregation of discontent? In other words, is the support in one nation less to do with one nation and more to do with a collapse in confidence in the two-party system and the major political parties themselves? I guess the other question that I would raise at this stage is I'm really keen to see where you want to take the conversation. You know, we have seen in other analogous nations, in other words, nations with relatively high rates of immigration, nations that have been struggling in one form or another, with what they want their multicultural policy to be, nations that have been struggling with inflation, with relatively high levels of unemployment, nations that have been suffering from various forms and various degrees of cost of living pressures, housing shortages, and so on. We have seen in other analogous nations, in here I'm thinking of something like, say, Canada, Germany, the UK, France, we could even throw a poll in an Austria in the mix if we wanted to, we have seen in-between elections, we've seen certain spikes in support for far-right and populist parties that are being tipped, that are being favored, that are achieving a certain degree of political approbation, but crucially, in-between elections themselves. In other words, many people using the available political mechanisms that they have at their disposal. This might be polling, this might be by-elections, this might be European parliamentary elections, in order to register a certain form of dissent from or discontent with the prevailing political parties, and to signal a certain approbation of a desire that the political parties perhaps would accommodate, something like the policies of or maybe a certain style of democratic political dealing that tends to be exemplified by parties like, for instance, Rassemblem on that in France, or alternative for Deutschland in Germany. But then when the moment of decision comes, when something like political responsibility is called for, it's not so much that the support simply evaporates, but rather there does seem to be either through a blocking off available pathways from the major parties, or a kind of, you know, we actually want people who are competent, who have experience in office to run the levers of government. So I've got all sorts of questions about what this particular surge in one nation's primary vote, what it's communicating to the major parties, and whether this, whether or not this could, in fact, translate into something more durable that would lead to either an unseating of the coalition, or the Liberal Party, as the presumptive opposition for the next couple terms, or in fact whether one nation could, in fact, achieve government in its own right. Well, I think one nation can win the election, the next federal election, and if not, I think they can win the one after that. I don't think it's likely. I'm going to put a figure on it, just straight from the gut. This is based on anything more than that, but just fairly straightly purposes. I would, as we sit here right now, say the chances of that are maybe 15%. Two three weeks ago, I would have said that was 0%. The reason for that change, so that's a very significant change. I know this is just my estimation, which is not significant, but I just mean there was a big difference between 0 and 15 is my point. And the reason I say that is not about a polling surge, and it's not about one nation becoming the most popular party in the country now, and repeated polls by different companies, and so on. It's about the spread of its demographic support. So the most significant poll to my mind was actually a poll that didn't have one nation in front, although that poll has since put them in front, and that's the resolve poll that is published in the Sydney Morning Herald and the age. And that poll was interesting because it showed that support for one nation was now starting to break through the rural wall. It was starting to turn up in the inner city. It was starting to turn up among younger people, millennial voters, Gen Z voters, sorry, Gen X voters. It was starting to turn up amongst tertiary educated voters, higher income voters, and that the majority of its support was now coming from women. So the traditional theory that I think suggested one nation could never be a party of government was that it was ultimately a party for older, older, older, re-rural white men, and it's now challenging every one of those containment lines. Now I don't know how far it will go in breaching those lines, but the fact that it has started shows that it's now serious proposition and it's potentially a governing coalition, and I have to confess, every response I've seen particularly from progressives, but actually probably from establishment figures that wants to dismiss this, seems to be making exactly the same mistakes that were made in the United States on the onset of Trumpism. That is, it'll flame out. This isn't actually serious. It can't carry more than the white vote, which is never enough to end the election. It's just a media creation. It's all hype. It's not real. All these sorts of things. You maybe could have maintained that when Trump won in 2016, because he really did win by maxing out the white vote and a trick of the Electoral College's light, which put him in the White House, even though he had a minority, the vote, and so on. You could maintain that. I don't think it was Y's too, but you could. Not in 2024. In 2024, he builds a multiracial, intergenerational coalition, and he does better with women than he has any entitlement to expect. Better than women than he did in the past. This was against a female candidate running hard on abortion. If there was a hard gender split that he couldn't get over, these were the perfect conditions for that split to assert itself, and yet it didn't. I think it's real. I don't think there's any doubt about that. The question really becomes how durable. On what terms and for what reason are people voting? You are really talking in aggregate terms, and that's very hard to do just by having a chat to people. But I can take my lead from the people who are in the focus groups who are doing the polling, who are getting the stated reasons for people's support for one nation. And what seems very clear from them, and they keep saying this, is that the number one reason is that they've had it with the major parties, that outstrips any other reason to do with policy. There was one really interesting mood of the nation's survey from, I think, February, that found that the proportion of one nation's supporters who nominated even immigration, something as foundational, you would think, as their reason for voting one nation, or being interested in one nation, the proportion was 17%. So really not that much. Now that's not to say that people who nominated other things don't care about immigration or don't agree with one nation's immigration policies, but it's not the motivator. And indeed, it doesn't seem to be any particular policy motivator. It's very much a mood. And it's for this reason that I think we see something really interesting, and that is that when the establishment parties start picking up the themes and then gesturing towards them, you know, I think of Angus Taylor's budget in reply speech, where he promises a historic reduction. I think the greatest reduction in immigration, in Australia, some, something like that. Not only do the polls not move, they continue sliding. And then a poll comes out showing that those particular policies that he announced in the budget reply speech are very popular. Sorry. The policy, actually, the major parties can align with some of the policy prescriptions that same popular and that one nation is profiting from, but it doesn't shift it, because that's not ultimately what it's about. It has something to do with the messenger. I think it has something to do with the mood. So yes, to do the messenger, yes. And Pauline Hansen is the perfect messenger for that moment, because she's been there so long, so she represents. I do want to come back to that. Trump was the perfect messenger in some ways as well, because he was the insider turned outsider. But in either case, what we're sorry, in both cases, I should say, what we're seeing is a form of insurgent politics. That's the way I think of it. And the thing about insurgent politics is, it can't be dismantled by conventional methods, by conventional rules. So we saw this week, for example, Pauline Hansen stand up at the National Prosec love. This was meant to be the beginning of a process that has actually already been a little bit underway of one nation now facing scrutiny in the way that major parties do that. The conventional wisdom says, "We'll cause it to be dismantled," because people will start to realise that they're not very serious. Their policy is not thought through, etc., etc., etc. Leave aside the policy debate. I just think it's a misdiagnosis. It's not built in the same way that major party support is built. It's not built on the basis of affirmation, on the basis of accent, on the basis of coalitions that have been developed organically through society. It's built far more in the image of dissent. And rejectionism. And when that's the case, pointing out policy holes or factual errors or whatever it might be, isn't likely to move things. The only thing that will move it, it seems to me at this point, is a change in the atmospherics that surround a party like one nation, or indeed reform in the UK or whatever you like. And that is that they cease to become the insurgent and they start to become interpreted as part of the furniture, part of the establishment. Then the government come assessed on conventional terms and then perhaps they fall apart. We've seen that with Trumpism, haven't we? That works brilliantly as an insurgency. And then when it's in power, it's support falls. To some extent, the 2024 election was a contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris to claim the title of opposition. Each wanted to be the change candidate. It was just a tricky one for Kamala Harris to pull off because she was literally the vice president at the time. And in the end, Trump's framing won, as well as, you know, certain focus, the focus on certain issues, like immigration, economy, as opposed to democracy and abortion, for example. But the framing, it seemed to matter. The mood music is the thing that ultimately, it seems, defines this. So I'm not entirely sure that we can say that the natural thing to play out here is that once the possibility of government starts to become sort of, sort of, hove into view, that people will back off. Yeah, maybe, maybe, but not necessarily. We've seen that that plays out in the US. We've seen how that plays out in Italy. We've actually, frankly, seen how it plays out in France, where national rallies only kept out of power by the collusion of the other parties. Because they refuse to form a coalition with it. And coalition is necessary in that parliament and that European system. I think the fundamental thing to get your head around is this is not a conventional political movement, and I think it is a movement. It's not a conventional political movement governed by conventional political rules. Sure. Let me offer, I'm really keen to get to the guest. I'm really interested to hear what he has to say. I would like to offer two and a half brief responses, though, or qualifications to what you've said. I don't fundamentally disagree, except on one slide point. I will just say, even with the example of resemble Malnassianal, their vote does tend to drop off. Come, the election. I mean, there's still more than enough for them to be able to join, say, a coalition. But there is something that happens even in a place as fractured and divided as France, where there's a kind of sharpening of the intentions and awareness of the consequences of the act of voting for such a party. I think you're right about the mood. But I also really do think that the messenger in this particular instance does matter. And I think it matters in two fundamental ways. Firstly, there is something extremely deft about the way that Pauline Hansen in these circumstances, in this particular instance, has been able to capitalize on her fundamental and repeated message that the labor party is lying to you. Things are simpler than they say. They keep telling you that this is complex, that there's no other way apart from this particular way of pursuing renewables or these particular mechanisms for diversifying energy or these international agreements. Things are simpler than what they say. And the particular way, I think, that she has been able to capitalize on a general feeling that what was always going to be a relatively unpopular budget in between elections, that this is not just unpopular, but it's also disvanaging young Australians and it's fundamentally deceptive. So her ability to capitalize on, I've not changed in 30 years. I'm telling you the truth. The parties are coming. The countries caught up with me. The parties have caught up with me. It seems to me, though, she seems to be saying that the country has always been where I've been. It's now that the parties are having to accommodate themselves. So I think in this instance, the fact that she has been able to say whatever she's wanted to say, that there have been moments of scandal, but she's skated through it all with relative impunity. The fact that she has now reached the point of almost political unshockability. I think there's something, you remember, sort of John Howard saying, in 1986, the times will suit me. If you think about the way that the ecosystem works, if you think about the patterns and habits of hyperbolic, political, rhetoric, of kind of scandal-free public zones, the times really do suit her. Things that in the past might have been borderline disqualifying are now simply part of her stick. So I think including the loss of control of the public conversation from traditional media. Yes, exactly right. I get immensely frustrated with people talking about the media promoting and platforming, as though that were the prerequisite. And as though the media actually has that power in this increasingly fractured informational landscape. And particularly among one nation voters, and again, the pollsters are talking about this. That's not where they're getting their views. That's right. Yeah. Here's the main thing, though. This isn't going to come as a surprise to you, but I'm going to try to restate it in the light of Paul Inhanson's press club address. The messenger, in this particular instance, matters because it seems to me that Pauline Hansen epitomizes with remarkable efficiency and concision the central appeal of populist parties more generally. And that essential appeal is, again, I'm going to make reference to this French political theorist who has who has shaped the way that I sort of think about certain forms of post-democratic and democratic political life. Pierre Rosenvelleau says that what defines the populist appeal is a threefold simplification of the nature of political and public life. And if you just map these three points on to Pauline Hansen's fundamental sales pitch to the electorate, it's remarkable how they work. First of all, there is a simplification of the social bond. What should bind people together should be natural. It should be something as easy as a common language. It should be something as simple as a common culture. Pauline Hansen said during her press club address that Australia is a multiracial community, but a monocultural nation. It should not be difficult to relate to the people with whom you live. So simplification of the social bond you should feel at home where you live in terms of your country. The second thing that Rosenvelle identifies is the simplification of the political process. The solution is easy. Don't let anybody tell you that it's more complicated than it is. So for instance, how do you deal with cost of living pressures? You end Australia's response to climate change. You cut off funding to various forms of subsidies and investment into renewables. As she said at another point during her press club address, stop blaming the Middle East for cost of living pressures. This is because of rampant government spending. This is because of inflated government departments. This is because of out of control budgets, which lead to inflation, which lead to higher interest rates. So everything from that point of view, everything is relatively simple. If you want to address cost of living, which is the primary issue for so many Australian voters, this is the line item that you delete. But then the final thing in the populist appeal, the final moment of simplification, is the simplification of whom it is you should blame for the various things that have gone wrong. And again, well, it was kind of remarkable. It's nothing that we haven't heard before. But it was kind of remarkable hearing Pauline Hanson referred to to primary and she referred to them as as as insurgent or subversive forces within Australian political and social and cultural life. One being the threat, the menace of radical Islam and the other being what she referred to as militant transgender ideology. Again, it's quite remarkable. The number of times that she referred to, they're lying to you, I'm telling you the truth. They want to make it complex. Let me make it simple for you. The number of times that she referred, for instance, to electoral common sense. Anybody with a degree of common sense knows that immigration is responsible for this. We don't have enough housing because of this. So there is a kind of simplification of the problem and therefore a simplification of the solution that then leads to a simplification of the type of social bond that people want to have restored to their common life. She does that with an extraordinary degree, I think, of a decision if not quite sophistication. And there's something about that threefold simplification at a moment of dishearing complexity and geopolitical interconnectedness and seemingly irresolvability of intractable conflicts. There is something about that that is electrally potent. Yes, I mean populism at the right time with the right intersection of factors is definitely potent. But I'm just not sure the substantive content matters more than the posture. That's right, but I think you can have that simplification without it descending into clear policy prescription. Yes, you can. It doesn't need clear policy prescription. All I'm saying is, I think the policy prescription element of it is beside the point, at least for now. And even the sort of background attitude to these things, I mean, stop and consider for a moment, just the sheer range of one nation's own MPs. That's right. I mean, you have Malcolm Roberts who this week, it was, it was a report. It was a report. It was a report. It was a report. It was a United States, the greatest terrorist threat on the planet, I think, something like that. He's been talking about the bond I terrorist attack as a false flag operation back in 2016. He was talking about NASA based conspiracies to do with climate change and all these sorts of things. That's his world. Then you've got someone like Jason Virgo who's in the South Australian parliament who gives a maiden speech thanking his Muslim husband as the love of his life. And talking about how much he loves migrants, even though he thinks migration does need to be reduced and so on. It can be misused and so on. But that was his posture. And talking about how his friendship grew, mostly Chinese, Filipino migrants. I think there was one other nation you mentioned, but you get my point. The new member for Faro is quite happy to stand in front of an Aboriginal flag. Well, it hints and seriously has a claim to be presiding over the broadest church in the parliament. And that's because what's being presided over here is a posture. She's not calling any of those people into line. She has her positions, which are very clear and very, but the appeal is not confined to those things. So there's the simplicity element of it. There's the identification of elites, all of those sorts of things. All I'm saying is I think the guts of that appeal is more aesthetic than it is substantive. Yeah. Apart from one final point, which is, I mean, at the heart of her critique isn't just that the current government is lying to you. It's that the major parties court your vote or they ignore your vote because they think they can't get it. Either way, once you vote for them, they switch off, they don't listen. And it's not for nothing that Pierre Rosavallon has suggested that if there is any political virtue, if there is any democratic disposition that is essential for the answering, the addressing of and the the deeper concerns that are reflected in certain forms of populist insurgency, but also dismantling some of the more pre-nicious aspects. If there is any political virtue that is required for that, it is a heightened degree of democratic responsiveness, not just being responsive to the concerns of voters, but also weaving that responsiveness into an authentic and a compellingly, passionately communicated narrative that conveys the reinforces, that this is not something that we are simply doing for you, but rather that this is a shared, common project and we at this point are your representative servants, not so much pure critic overlords. As into the people, not the media, and I'm accountable to the people, not the media, as a destroyer, as a club. It's remarkable. All that sort of stuff. And that actually the way is different from the they who are all the same, hence the popularization or the use in certain one-nesian circles and popular circles of the term "uniparty" to describe the two major parties. Shall we get to it, I guess? Yes, please. All right, listening to the mind field on ABC Radio National, well, they'd all use my name. Scott Stevens is my co-host and Scott Winnett tells the name of the men who join us. Our guest is Paul Strangier. He's a meritous professor of politics at Monash University. He's the author most recently of the alchemy of leadership, seven Australian Prime Ministers, in a turbulent 21st century. Paul, thanks so much for joining us once again on the mind field. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Waleed. Are you taking notes? Do you want to launch? I'll take up straight away something you said, Waleed. You know, we shouldn't dismiss what's going on. And I take your point. We've got a wildfire, if you like, political wildfire, burning in Australia at the moment. So it's unquestionably a significant moment. But it does throw up a whole lot of paradoxes. We came out of the 2025 election with one side of politics, putting forward an aggressive xenophobic charge, popular style politics, because there's no doubt about there's been a strong strain of populism in the coalition's mix throughout this century. And a deliberately Trumpian posture. Yeah, you know, evoking a douche and all this sort of stuff. That's right. Up to a degree. And yet it was repudiated and it was repudiated soundly by younger Australians, by women, by migrant Australians in the out of suburbs. And here we are, not long later, with it's almost as this hydra beast has redeveloped. So that's a shock at one level. I would suggest they've been poorly enhanced and, you know, Ashby and others around are shocked by what's going on that is so unpredictable. To go to Trump, remember the last election. One of the turning points was there. It was clearly the Trump influence. We're Australians, took stock of what was going overseas with go test series of Trump's governance with his destabilising of effects and took a step back, especially Liberation Day. That was a really big turning point for them. And yet again, here we are, not that long afterwards, seemingly with the surge of support for someone who was the closest we have to a Trumpite or style candidate. So there's lots of paradoxes and I'm trying to wrestle with and understand what's going on. I do step back and I say, okay, I look at the polls and for example, well, I lead you referred to a resolved monitor poll. One came out a week ago and it struck me straight away that in the commentary on that poll it said, well, look, Labor's vote is down to the lowest level it was since February 2025. At that point, Labor was 25%. The coalition was surging to 39%. And yet less than three months later, the coalition went to a disastrous defeat and Labor was comfortably re-elected. So I really do wonder anymore what the polls are measuring. I don't think it's voting intention. It's something else. As you just showed that though. Up to a point, although I think we can say, we said, everyone knew that Malan Ascus was going to be re-elected. So voting for one nation was a comfortable, again, you could protest. Same with Farrah, it's interesting. Some of the focus group work indicates that even people are saying they're shifting their allegiance to one nation. They're doing so, but they're saying, we actually don't want Pauline Hanson to be prime minister of this country. And yes, again, it goes to the point they're kicking at the established system. But where that leads us in two years' time is quite another matter. I do think Victoria is coming up, is because of the very strange dynamics with the stark hostility to the Labor Government and yet the discomfort with the coalition. So I've compared that to a witch's broom. It's so hard to get your mind around what's going to happen there. But how this plays out over the next two years, I think at this stage, as Scott said, there are more questions than answers that are clear at the moment. The other point I'd make is what we know from Australian history and the patterns are very stark that Australians have always in the end walked away from extremism, demagoguery, moonshine politics. You know, that has been the historic pattern. It's in bed. And we do have the institutional stabilizers in the system. And they have- You're talking about compulsory legislation. Yeah. And so although there are some people that are saying, be careful what you're saying about compulsory voting, the orthodox argument is that that keeps politics in the centre. It has a moderating influence. So look, there's different views about. Well, whatever you think it normally does though, it can be nothing more than a buffer. And so there does come a point, at least theoretically, where the buffer is overcome, where you crack into the top two and the preference game is wild and unpredictable or you're less reliant on preferences than you perhaps people expected. That's what happened in Farrah. At which point, forget your buffering. The buffer has been broken. It's been- the surges sufficient overcome that buffering. That's right. And it would not have surprised me if that's what we're saying now. Now, I take your point about two years. Absolutely. There are so many things that could intervene here. And all I'm saying is, as long as it's cast out as an insurgent, it will prosper. And that could last a week. I mean, it could last years. It could last three months. I don't know. And frankly, I don't think anybody has any idea. And all sorts of things could intervene in the meantime. But I think the shape of this thing at the moment is actually relatively clear. There are lots of questions that surround it. But their questions about how those things ramify into the future. They're not questions about what it is we're looking at right now, are they? No. Well, one of the interesting things to come out of all this, again, go back in the wake of the last election. A lot of people stood back and marveled at Australia. And they were marveling at Australia internationally as well, saying, you know, if there's a future to liberal democracy, it's the Australian model. That's being tested again. Are we an exceptional society that always used to the centre and the politics? Well, you've just said we are. Well, no, historical evidence is clear. It is clear. That's being tested once again, just as it was before 225. And most people stood back after and said, isn't Australia a marvelous place? Part of it because of where we haven't experienced the same sort of economic dislocations that many of those comparative societies have had. We've had a cushioned experience of neoliberalism partly because of our strongly majority and political culture and so forth. We didn't really get the global financial crisis in so many ways. We were late to the popular party. We tried to get off largely. So at Australia had all these benefits, advantages and it meant that it stood out from the rock. But suddenly we seemed to be back there. In my book, in the last chapter, I did pose the question. It seemed to me that after 25 years of political instability of policy, stagnation, we were living on borrowed time. There was going to be a point, a breaking point. And suddenly, whoosh, maybe it has arrived. It was being postponed. And therefore, was the 225 election just a moment of postponement of again that style of politics? It was also a highly singular moment. There was something utterly remarkable about the timing of that election. As you yourself reference the coalition actually looked like the front runners, not very long before it. Trump gets sworn into office. Liberation Day happens. Everyone freaks out. Labor winds 94 seats, but they do it with a 35% primary vote. And the overall vote for the major parties is still in decline, even with a 94 seat, I'm hauled from Labour. So the way I've explained the 2025 election before is that we saw what was happening in America. We saw the tariffs being applied out all over the world. We were shocked by this. We didn't like it. We punished the coalition for aligning themselves aesthetically with Donald Trump. But our basic message was nobody moved. Everyone just stay exactly where you are. Government used to where you are. Opposition used to where you are. And it just happened to shake out that that transpired to 94 seats. But it wasn't a vote of affirmation for the Labour Party to the tune of 94 seats as we would understand it in any way from political history. But that didn't mean that the populist dynamics weren't there beneath the surface. Just that election fell at a moment where we felt like we wanted to take little risk. When inflation starts to climb again around October, that is about the time that the one nation served begins in the polls. I'm not saying it's all about economics either. I think it's about far more than that. That's about a poly-crushing. I think we're going to go. Yeah. But the point is that that doesn't happen because something fundamental changed between May and October. That happens because the fundamental preconditions that were suspended in May 2025 that led to a singular outcome that is bizarre. So your suggesting May 25 was a post-pone of something was going on? Catalyzed by a particular moment in time. Yeah. It would be interesting to have Anthony Elberto easy in here at this moment because he is someone who entered the parliament the same year as Hanson did. They're two great survivors now facing off against one another. What again, he would argue that he read the Australian people far better than anyone else. He had a far better intuition of how things would finally work themselves out. You might be right about that. I'm not quite as certain that there wasn't some degree of affirmation of the Labor government in May 2025 that had been an orderly government, a grown-up government. I agree with that. But that only mattered so much because of that. I don't disagree with you that the outcome was inflated and therefore lent itself to a hyperbolic interpretation. Try to think I'm an easy-hat. No, probably not. And maybe in my book, I have a hyperbolic interpretation that was a moment in which Australians finally did by twice in consecutive elections having a repudiated, that type of populist politics, the virus inside the Liberal Party's bloodstream. Maybe I was misinterpreting that. As I said, I'm not sure. I, six months out, I hope I always said that women and young voters would be the bridge too far for the coalition. I remain skeptical. I remain skeptical whether young people whose whole lived experience has been one of diversity and comfort with it will now be dragged across in any meaningful way to the one-nation project. Is that the same argument made against Trump? Yeah, on the second coming, I don't think we're the United States. That's where I think the analogy can fall over. Yeah, look, I'm with you there. And I think the other element that was in play certainly in 2024 in the US was, I mean, for one of a better term, the masculine affect of the Republican Party and the success that the Trump campaign had in characterizing the Democrats as being a more concerned about transgender migrant inmates than they were about, quote, unquote, everyday Americans and going back to one of the oldest Republican critiques of Democrat welfareism, which is that basically they are an a feat at an old party. In other words, even the men aren't really men. So there are those gender dynamics that were at play that Trump has been able to marshal and that gained a tremendous amount of male support across the board, across demographics, across age groups that was notable. And I just don't quite see that playing out in the same way here, certainly not in terms of political aesthetics. Can I just ask something of you both, though? I'm assuming that this last budget, as we've talked about before, will lead, that this last budget was a kind of each of vegetables budget. It was a kind of take your medicine budget. It was a budget where there were certain crucial things that needed to be done in order to rectify a longstanding imbalance within the system that was never going to be overly unpopular, but that wasn't going to be terribly popular either and it was going to be a budget without the sweeteners that you usually expect. They might be redistributive. They might be increases to payments, advocating wage raises or whatever. They might be some of the things you would expect to see when you're closer to an election. So this budget always struck me as one that wasn't going to gain large amounts of popular ascent. Where we have that additional element of popular descent is the, well, I mean, what is being described as the government not telling truth about their intentions when it comes to, particularly negative gearing in capital gains. Truth and politics is important to me. I do think that truth and frankness is a political virtue and I think it's one of the forms of democratic both responsibility and responsiveness. I think it was a terrible idea for the government to do what they did and to do it relatively cavalierly without much concern about the truth claims that they took to the previous election. That has to be affecting, if we are really talking about mood, that has to be affecting the popular mood. Well, let Paul go first. It's a very interesting paradox after being critiqued, high and low about being conformist and cremmentalist, Anthony Almanese has suddenly been conjoined and influenced to picking some higher reform fruit of the tree. Maybe deep down he's now wondering whether his instincts are being accortious and cremmentalist or rather long because I think they were. But Scott's point is more about how it was done. Yes, that's the thing. Yeah, how it was done. And I'll go to that if I talk about leadership repertoire is a lot. This is where Anthony Almanese has a major deficiency and that he's underwhelming communication skills because someone had to come along and offer a better explanation and a more compelling one and building one into a broader narrative of whether the government is taking the nation about why this moment it was necessary to move. Now I think they've done some of that but in no way in a sufficiently compelling way and of course they are operating in a an extraordinarily difficult media landscape and I think we can, while before you said this, none of this is a media confection and it's not. But nor can we have avert our eyes from I think the development of what I'd describe as far as now I hate media in Australia that is making governance so problematic and difficult. That's definitely true. Yeah. But I think the one nation rise has far more is far more boosted by the social media phenomenon than it is any mention. I think one other thing not to lose sight of is that in watching the rise of one nation that's not lose sight of all you are now witnessing the death of the Liberal Party. And this is a profound development. This is the most successful of the major governing parties since World War II, which is disintegrating before our eyes. Now my argument is this is a long-term thing and certainly the collapse of its primary vote has been evidence. It's at least 2016. It has itself become a victim of that populist virus that was let loose in that party. Early in the 21st century. So now it's not all lose sight of that. The other thing is with the moral panic if you like about one nation, where has the coalition lost seats thus far? You know, over the last 10 years. It's been in urban, blue, ribbon areas. And so we shouldn't, you know, avert our eyes from that and what's going to continue to happen in the metropolitan areas where the Liberal Party has, you know, eight out of or nine out of 88 urban seats, just metropolitan seats. There is a really interesting, though, democratic or electoral terrain where I think this moment and this particular encounter between labor and one nation could actually be conducive. You know, it was striking to me listening to Paulian Hansen during her press club address, talking the language, use the language of popular contempt. You know, I wanted a plebiscite a national plebiscite on immigration levels, but I was told by a liberal senator that it's too complex that people can never understand it. This idea that they are contemptuous of you. They are contemptuous of your intelligence, contemptuous of your views. She also, you know, refers to and uses quite assiduously language, not just of common sense, but also for one of a better term of decency. It is indecent for a wealthy nation like this to have these levels of homelessness, these levels of child hunger and impoverishment. Why are we sending foreign aid elsewhere when we should first be strengthening and repairing our own backyard? You know, for all of his political deficiencies, the language of decency and the language of empathy is something that someone like Albanese can speak with a degree of authenticity, of genius desire, even wonderful, whether his lack of eloquence even helps him on that front. Yeah, look, sometimes I've wondered whether, you know, at one level, I thought the voice was a moment where he went into a funk after the voice where he's in capacity as an advocate, was exposed better than another level, whether he's the sort of leader who accepts his limitations and maybe that speaks to the moment. I often noted too, and the lead up to 225 for people railing against him so much, when I looked around the globe that there was something reassuring about a Prime Minister spoke about kindness and compassion and used those words because it was so non-lust in a world of strong man-laders, but it's got to build into something more. And for example, the national identity space, he doesn't enter it. We don't. It's about progressive patriotism. What button, yeah, and show what? Did he build on that? Did he build on it? Or has it been a stillborn theme? But how do you frame it? This is a point, I mean, we've come up with this show before. How do you frame it in a way that's potent or at least matches the potency? Yeah. I kind of native us to the national. It's very hard to match that potency because it's concentrated. Yeah, there's nothing diluting it at all. No, and I entirely agree. It's a challenge, but the best of our Prime Ministers, and I take Howard as an example, they've been creative in that space. Now, I have a lot of issues about Howard's long-term legacy in Australia, but he was creative in that space and the best of our Prime Ministers have been. Elvenazy does struggle and this is a much moment, you have to grab hold of the conversation in some way. At the same time, I take your point, or lead that insurgency politics is so difficult to counter on that while fire. Once it's got momentum, can I make this one point about that? No where in the world in a society that is comparable to ours has this been resisted. We will sit here and have all sorts of conversations about what we should do. There's the college you should do that. They've got to pull this rein, they've got to meet this concern, they've got to find that solution. The track rule gets records are bismill. The idea that there is just some line through this, some magic leave at a pool, I am skeptical of. Far more likely it seems to me is that something internal to the insurgency itself, or in the atmospherics that surround it, that are not created by the major parties because they don't have that power, will cause it to decline. Like I've said before, the time horizon for that is anyone's guess. It seems to me these things are brought down by some force of external and internal logic, not by some maneuver that someone in the establishment has managed to pull. Part of what's going on in this insurgency politics is the writing off of the establishment. The establishment can't say, "Hey, we're going to fix it with this," to what people have already decided they are no longer interested in listening to anything they have to say. I don't know how many one nation voters that describes, but I suspect it's a sizeable proportion and growing. Which goes to the point, the very question though, how many one nation voters are there out there? The poll is telling us something like 30%. But is the polling, as I said, measuring something else? Is it a measure of discontent? Is it a measure of putting the government on the rack? I've had a sense now for a few decades that polling is serving some different service for voters other than indicating voting intent. That might be right. The Victorian election will be the limit test because that is one where the outcome is genuinely uncertain. Although as I said before, I think the ingredients there are so anomalous and so awful at one level. So now if it's going to tell us so much about that measure, let's imagine what nation does really well in that election. They've then turned polling in devices out there. They've then stormed to a victory that didn't require much in the way of preferences in Farrah. They've then won or done really well in an election in Australia's most urbanised progressive state at a time where the outcome was uncertain and a vote for one nation genuinely might have resulted in a one nation government. It seems to me at that point they've ticked just about any box you can. Now we don't know if they'll do that. But if they do, I mean, maybe we just need to do this show after the Victorian election. I think we should revisit. Well, ask yourself this scenario, will it? What happens if Victoria merges with a one nation premier? Highly unlikely what happens if that? And then we have 18 months of a one nation premier to play out on the second most popular state in Australia. How would that play out in terms of one nation? Totally for hold on the Australian public. And then we have an election in New South Wales not long after that. All right. Well, we don't know what the hell is going to happen. Paul's probably got a better idea than I do. Scott, I don't know if you've got any idea at all. I certainly don't. But there you go. I think we've sketched the range of possibilities. Thank you so much for dropping in Paul. Thank you. Thank you. Paul Strangio, Emeritus Professor of Politics at Monash University, all for most recently and perhaps relevantly of the alchemy of leadership, seven Australian Prime Ministers in a turbulent 21st century. I guess for this week's edition of The Mindfield, it's done. We'll be back next week and you can listen to us on the radio then or anytime you like on ABC. Listen. And if you want to hear more discussion about one nation's rise, the Religion and Ethics Report I should point out is going to look at a specific part of it and that is the extent to which the religious right is playing a role in that rise and exactly what that role may or may not be. So tune into that on ABC. We'll see you soon. You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.