One Nation hasn’t quintupled its vote over the past year by saying or doing anything new, it’s saying the same things it’s said for years, at least for the past decade since Pauline Hanson returned to parliament. For all its faults, it is consistent, and Pauline Hanson is the most consistent politician in Australia.
The player hasn’t changed, the game has.
The answer to why this is happening is, therefore, not to be found in the player, but in the game. The rise of One Nation is a symptom, not a cause.
The old game
“Conservatism” is essentially an electoral formula for compromise with the left that enables the business elites which fund it (and control the “right-wing” media) to negotiate the preservation of their economic power in exchange for complicity with the left’s social agenda.
“Conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit”, because conservatism was never about resisting the left’s social agenda, but about managing its implementation to ensure it minimally disrupts the power of big business.
The central thesis of political scientist Daniel Ziblatt’s Conservative Parties & The Birth of Democracy is basically that in order for democracies to remain “stable” and avoid polarising into a winner-takes-all power struggle between left and right, a strong conservative movement must leverage its financial backing from business elites to aggressively gatekeep out the so-called “radical” elements of the right, defined as “radical” precisely because they refuse complicity in this compromise.
The marketing strategy, which we all know and despise, to sell this compromise to right-wing voters was basically conjured up during the Cold War and is a fusion of praising the free market with Christian moral objections to abortion and gays. And for a time, it worked pretty well. In America with Reagan and the Bushes, and here under Howard.
Basically, it amounts to fighting the left on tax cuts (which always end up being more generous for big business than they ever are for you) and issues that have no political strategic value, like abortion and gay marriage. All this whilst offering the left total complicity to mass import a new voter base from the third world and institutionally privilege them to boot.
Thankfully, the marketing strategy underpinning this dead political formula has now irreversibly ruptured.
Christianity has declined into an ever-shrinking and increasingly irrelevant “moral minority”, spectacularly routed in all its moral crusades. Meanwhile an increasing proportion of those who identify with the “right-wing” of politics reject free market fetishism, as polling shows time and time again the bipartisan popularity of economic nationalist policies. What differentiates the left and right is increasingly social issues, not economic policy. And these social issues are cleavages around national identity and race, not Christian morality.
Considering all of this, we shouldn’t be surprised the Liberal Party is collapsing into minor party status, we should only be surprised it managed to stubbornly survive for as long as it did. Despite being forced to reluctantly concede on basically every Christian pet issue and reduce its sales pitch to the banality of its supposed “economic management credentials”, it managed to maintain a default image as “the better half” of the uniparty within the inertia of what everyone thought was a two-party system.
The new game
While Greens senators are weaving conspiracy theories about how the rise of One Nation is a consequence of some type of Big Tech/US Deep State foreign influence campaign, the reality is that One Nation’s brand of politics was being artificially suppressed by Big Tech until Musk and Zuckerberg reversed the post-2016 censorship agenda.
After Trump won the presidency and the Brexit vote up-ended British politics in social media fuelled populist revolts, the leftist establishment got together and concluded that they needed to stop people having the freedom to say things they didn’t like and talk themselves into voting against things they didn’t like, in order to save “democracy”. They concluded, correctly, that if people have the freedom to use social media to circumvent the mainstream press’s gatekeeping of political discourse, they might all talk themselves into patriotism and vote accordingly.
Less than three years on from Zuckerberg de-censoring Instagram and Facebook, and less than four after Musk de-censored X, “right-wing populist” parties have surged to lead the polls in Britain, France and Germany, and are now backed by a quarter of Europeans.
Australia is not special, we all use the same American social media sites used by our European cousins, we are subject to the same terms of service they are. The leftist establishment was literally screeching about how the restoration of free speech on social media would “threaten democracy” by enabling the populist right to win more votes, for the simple and obvious reason that in the absence of suppression it naturally gets more popular.
The voter base didn’t identify with what the Liberal Party was selling and then all of a sudden have a change of heart, they simply didn’t think there was a viable alternative to uniparty blue and uniparty red. They were demoralised and checked-out. This illusion of the two-party system was manufactured by mainstream media, an illusion which a couple of years of speaking freely on relatively uncensored social media shattered.
This was a somewhat inevitable process, because the actual policy preferences of right-leaning voters were radically out of sync with the manufactured “centre-right” consensus.
Studies show that whilst the left is an ideologically coherent group, where its voters and its leaders largely believe in the same things, the right has far more diversity of opinion within its ranks. Studies also show that its generally enough to be “right-wing” on only some issues to want to vote for the right. Whereas to vote for the left, one generally needs to agree with them on everything. And most crucially, it is people with mixed policy preferences who are most likely to vote for the so called “populist” or “radical” right.
Analysis after the 2016 election showed Trump voters were more or less evenly distributed between the categories of “economically right” and “economically left”, and his populist style enabled him to win over ex-Democrat voters in analogous ways to how the post-Brexit realignment in the UK drew working class voters across to the right.
This class-based re-alignment is occurring here as well in One Nation’s poll surge. Much has been made of the defection of Coalition voters, with a recent DemosAU poll showing the Coalition has lost 37% of its voters at the last election to One Nation. However, the same poll also showed Labor has lost 17% of its voters last election to One Nation.
Even more interestingly, the poll showed One Nation is pulling more votes than Labor from those who earn less than $45k/year. Labor, the traditional “party of the working class” is, however, 7% up on One Nation with voters earning more than $125k/year.
Objectively, One Nation is now the party of the White working class.
Meanwhile Labor has become the party of (non-White) immigrants, now winning only 23% of voters who speak no languages other than English in contrast to 39% of the vote from people who speak another language.
Studies have shown that in recent decades immigrants from non-Western countries have been about 20% more likely to vote Labor, whilst immigrants from Europe are more likely to support One Nation than the Australian-born. With the defectors from Labor to One Nation likely being disproportionately White, this historical trend is likely only now magnified.
Another dynamic we saw in the rise of Trump in 2016 was how secular right-wing voters carried him through the primaries against the preferred candidates of the religious right. Post-election studies showed that non-religious Trump voters were more concerned about immigration and more hostile towards non-White groups than his Christian voters were. As Christianity declines, people aren’t defecting from the right – they are simply identifying with it due to patriotism and race rather than religion and morality.
There are 10% more non-religious than Christian Reform UK voters, the inverse of the Tories, demonstrating a similar trend in Britain. And One Nation voters, whilst sharing Pauline Hanson’s proclivity to appeal to Australia’s “Christian” identity to justify their dislike of Muslims, are traditionally one of the least religious voting blocs in Australia, in contrast to the Coalition’s base.
The new right-wing base is increasingly secular and economic nationalist, and where they differ with the left is on immigration and race, not Jesus and tax policy. All they lacked was a way to form a critical mass around a political movement that actually represents them, so once Big Tech in America decided to turn off the woke censorship to get Trump re-elected, this vibeshift became inevitable.
One Nation’s policies remain far more popular than the party itself, the sky is the limit, and by sky I mean its own incompetence. It is a deeply unprofessional party, benefitting by default from a vibeshift it didn’t create.
But One Nation will remain the dominant electoral force on the Australian right for the foreseeable future unless another party comes along that can do One Nation’s brand of populism better than it can. Whether one can remains to be seen, but it won’t be the Liberal Party – no matter how hard they try we’ll never believe they’re sincere, nor should we.
As former PM Bob Hawke admitted after retiring from parliamentary politics in the early 1990s, there was “an implicit pact between the major parties to implement broad policies on immigration that they know are not generally endorsed by the electorate” and “they have done this by keeping the subject off the political agenda”.
Well, now it’s not just on the agenda, where you stand on it fundamentally defines what side of politics you’re on. The uniparty is over, the politics of identity has arrived.
Header image: A March for Australia rally in Sydney last year (Jesse J.S – X).
The post The vibeshift explained – uniparty politics is over first appeared on The Noticer.
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