Pauline Conversions? Australian Politics after Farrer

Sooner or later, progressives will have to stop treating One Nation as symptom and assess them as a cause that’s here to stay

Until March this year, there was, in many quarters, a not-so-secret hope that One Nation’s polling numbers would prove illusory. The flaming orange liveried outfit was steadily polling at 25 per cent in every state and every region, with little variation between Queensland and liberal-minded Victoria. Surely this was just a fancy, a protest, an expression of frustration, a frolic in the years before an election came round again?

It was not, as Australia rapidly found out. The riverine agricultural seat of Farrer fell to the party with a massive 40 per cent primary vote. This was eye-catching, even though there are very specific reasons for deep dissatisfaction in a seat that has suffered from (necessary) water buy-backs, designed to stop the Murray-Darling system collapsing. Of equal or greater significance was its 24 per cent in Nepean on the Mornington Peninsula, effectively an exurban seat of Melbourne. And kicking it all off had been South Australia, the most liberal of liberal states, which went for Pauline’s party by 22 per cent. There was no gap between the polls and the polling booth. One Nation was here.

They were here for one overwhelming reason. In October 2025, six months after the election in which a confused and contradictory campaign by Peter Dutton was hugely defeated, the Coalition had failed to commit to any substantial reduction in inward immigration. They had dumped net zero, they were growling at renewables, but they had not committed to pulling arrivals down from the 300,000 or so annual intake.

The Coalition could not, of course. They knew that high immigration was crucial to labour market discipline and to expanding consumer demand, and was demanded by business groups. Dutton had ummed and ahhed and made noises. A section of Coalition voters had waited to hear a change of policy, and when it conspicuously didn’t appear, they moved, propelling One Nation first to 15 and then to 25 per cent in the polls. There they have stayed.

This huge polling success has been accompanied by a wave of affiliations, with new branches springing up everywhere. It had nearly overwhelmed the party’s small apparatus before funds from Gina Rinehart allowed it to expand and improve the quantity and quality of its staffing. Its imagery is now slick, and its organisation less chaotic. Following the boost in its support from Coalition voters, it clearly gained a tranche of Labor voters. In Farrer, with no Labor candidate, that was significant. Country independent Michelle Milthorpe only gained about 5 per cent of Labor’s 2025 15 per cent vote.

The shift to One Nation is a genuine political earthquake. Nothing like this has happened since the non-Labor party Fusion in 1909 sealed a decisive class-based Left–Right split in Australian politics, when the Protectionists abandoned their alliance with Labor in the wake of the Harvester judgement. Since the 1960s, there have been various attempts to realign politics from the progressive side, with a ‘values’-based politics floating free of social class. The hope has always been that once a nucleus was established in the lower house, the party’s fortunes would expand by the sheer rationality of their program—a left-centrist, solutions-guided politics. The Australia Party, the Australian Democrats and the Greens have all failed in this regard.

One Nation is now set to take this course from the other side, its support spread across traditional socio-economic class groupings. This looks like a culture or ideas movement, transcending social categories. It isn’t, but to understand why, a different form of social analysis is required, one that is beyond the mainstream media at this point.

That media’s response to One Nation, especially the progressive media’s, has been even more inadequate than usual. The spectacle of One Nation’s sudden success seems to have stunned many into an almost ritualistic recitative of cod-sociological explanations for right-wing movements. In a politics that remains dominated by economics and (background) class reasoning, that explanation is always displaced. One Nation and its supporters want reduced immigration because of the cost of living, the housing supply, the pressure on services, etc., etc. It’s not really about immigration and its wider effects and implications.

In taking it up this way, progressives select one period of Australian history to work from—the modernisation era, from 1948 into the 2000s, when first severe labour shortages and then steady resource-based growth licensed steady, multiethnic net inward immigration. Government cultural technologies, first policies of assimilation and then multiculturalism, turned various levels of consent into a new Australian identity, one built on top of familial notions of Australian community, once expressed in racial terms through the White Australia Policy.

This spirit of generalised nation-familialism—that a high-bordered non-cosmopolitan community represents what it is to be Australian—has never gone away. It has never fully yielded to the implicit citizenship-affiliation nationalism of recent periods. As we have noted in these pages before, the former is a form of abstract community, but it is something more than a mere superstructural or ideological binding. The nation is not a family or a face-to-face community, but it is real, and successive parties of both sides of politics have drawn upon the community model.

One Nation now has that franchise. It is not a skin-nativist movement, though it is substantially Anglo-Celtic, seeing continuity with a history of development and community-building that honours the achievements of past generations. It is unquestionably a social/racial chauvinist party: Hanson’s early claim that she would not represent Aboriginal people has now been transferred to the notion of Muslim-Australians. Hanson’s stunt in wearing a burqa into the Senate (twice) is the continuation of an old Australian xenophobia straight out of the Picture Post. Candidates, both noxious and oddball in their fascist or Nazi sympathies, have repeatedly appeared, and the degree to which very hard-right groups have formed networks within the now expanded party is unknown.

One Nation’s actual policies, as it transfers from fringe to major party, are, in class Left–Right terms, a mess. For decades, it has been, economically, a classic petit-bourgeois party: opposed to government spending, high taxes, benefit payments and also, less vocally, to favours given to big business and cartels. Its rapid spread has seen it adopt left-wing populist ideas, such as the compulsory acquisition of equity stakes and board seats in gas-exporting companies, and the repurposing of their products for Australian use, while retaining a core right-wing economic approach. It is a measure of the party’s success, in a mode other than class belonging, that this seems not to have curtailed its support.

This is a striking feature of One Nation that few have noticed. Across the world, right-wing parties have succeeded in building support over the past twenty years by dropping their twinning of nativist nationalism and right-wing propertarian policies, dropping the latter and replacing it with the wider notion of national community. The Danish People’s Party was the first to do this, adopting solidly social democratic policies. France’s National Front/National Rally followed, as did others. In much of Europe, this was, in a sense, a coming home. North European social democracy had always been grounded in notions of nations being family, whose mutual support systems drew on an analogy with the affective form of intra-familial mutual obligation. This was not an abstract form of obligation—one of rights—but rather one tied to an understanding of the person as being a member of that family prior to being an individual. Social democracy lost support to the Right when it began to substitute a rights-based citizenship approach for that, and collapsed through the floor when it signed up to the Maastricht Treaty, which turned immigration away from being a gift of the community to a stranger to being a right of the stranger to cross the border.

That One Nation has attracted support without having to reconstitute its economic policies suggests that right-wing populism is not foundering, but rather may be flourishing as other parties and movements fail to respond to the demands of its supporters.

One Nation’s surge has come at the same time as many progressives, especially those of ‘Generation X’ and many millennials, have begun to withdraw from a sense of engagement with Australia, which they once thought could be reconstructed as a progressivist domain. The ascendency of Kevin Rudd, and his relatively bold, if chaotically managed program, was accompanied by a simultaneous revisioning of the country as defined by its supposed 97 per cent migrant status. Much of this came from non-Anglo commentators such as George Megalogenis and Tim Soutphommasane. In more recent years, it has co-existed uneasily with an emphasis on First Peoples, dispossession and Australia’s foundation in genocide.

With the Coalition holding power for a decade, the hope for ‘Australia’s chance’, as Megalogenis put it, curdled. Many progressives came to see Australia as irredeemable, not a project that could be morally invested in. With increasing flows of globalisation offering borderless streams of culture, working from home, working in digital professions, apartment living and the like, the notion of the country as a bounded place we are all part of began to fall away. European-Australian non-Anglo public commentators were succeeded by global South figures from the Middle East and East Asia, who could assail the country as simply a node in the global expression of imperial white supremacy.

Recently, the old European-Australian progressivism has taken on a mournful quality, as in former Guardian journalist Amy Remeikis’s book Where It All Went Wrong—The Case Against John Howard. Here, a Keatingesque trajectory of a ‘maturing’, cosmopolitanising country is held to have been sabotaged by a specific regime, John Howard’s. This style of thinking—fall and conspiracy—it should be noted, is usually characteristic of the less educated right-wing base. Its appearance here is an expression of and a salve to a progressive, multicultural elite who feel deprived of the historical dominance they were promised.

Thus, the reaction to One Nation’s success by this group has been an expression of ideology at its most distorted. Karen Middleton’s essay in the most recent issue of The Monthly is a case in point. No One Nation supporters are interviewed. Middleton never attends a One Nation meeting, an election forum or the like. There’s a long historical recap of One Nation’s rise, and commentary and interpretation from progressive go-tos: Redbridge pollster Kos Samaras and social researcher Rebecca Huntley. In several thousand words, Middleton suggests that the reason for One Nation’s rise has been the cost of living, the loss of civility from Covid, the failure of the government to extend ‘social license’, the Liberal Party’s 2025 loss, global insecurity and defence, lack of trust in institutions, loss of trust due to ’90s spiv capitalism, revelations of institutional child sexual abuse, the ‘Fox[news]ification’ of the media, generic lack of faith in a future, social decline as measured by the decline in regular mail deliveries, the attraction of five different demographic ‘tribes’ to populist ideas, and Covid (again).

Everything suggests that One Nation has no first-order content: it is all reaction-formation. Not only are high levels of net immigration not discussed in Middleton’s article, but the word ‘immigration’ does not appear in the article.

This is, in part, pushing the older European-Australian progressivist agenda, of which The Monthly and Schwartz Media are a major force. But it is absurdly poor coverage, directed at one thing only: reassuring progressive readers that support for One Nation is no real movement of significant social groups, and thus does not challenge their faith in the endless march of progress.

As regular readers know, Arena does not believe that ‘progressives’ are a self-selecting group of people, drawn from all walks of life, united only by a common set of ideas. By and large, they are drawn from the social group known as the ‘intellectually trained’: educated and formed in abstracting, reflexive, inquiring intellectual work practices, which form their collective and individual subjectivity. This process of formation predisposes most of this grouping to see universalism, multi-dimensional equality and challenging inherited tradition and parochialism as absolute values, not simply the ‘general-but-particular’ values of the intellectually trained. They form the social base of the Greens, and the Greens express not merely the content of their values but the form of thought that progressives believe to be the only rational way of thinking: abstracting to smart ‘solutions’ to social problems.

The emergence of the Greens as a stable ‘major-minor’ party was a political expression of the great social shift that had occurred under class politics. Knowledge, both technoscientific and cultural, began to replace a world founded on routinised labour, which was expressed by the great division of (economic) class. This change occurred in the major parties too, as both came to be led by highly educated elites formed in the abstracting professions, of Left or Right—social policy for Labor, finance for the Liberal Party. These groups are increasingly separated from their shrinking rank-and-file memberships and the everyday values of much of their wider social base.

Labor has managed this shift much better than the Coalition, using its position at the juncture of labour and capital to present itself as the natural party of management of a complex, integrated contemporary society. It is a party now based within capital, but offers Rawlsian programs of relative improvement to the working classes and benefits-dependent. The shift has thrown the prior integrative party—a Liberal Party leading with capitalist economic management, and a degree of statist national development, with social conservatism as a secondary claim—into contradiction. As knowledge has replaced capital as the prime social contradiction, cultural questions have come to the fore. These include economic questions expressed culturally, such as renewables vs fossil fuels, thus forcing the party into leading with issues it was always split on, but which mattered less given the unity once provided by class politics. One Nation has succeeded hugely as that cultural division has roared to the centre of national life.

Because this political contradiction is expressive of a deeper socio-historical cultural contradiction arising from the undermining of settled and ‘parochial’ life by globalisation and the new forms of media and interchange it depends upon, One Nation will not proceed much further before it runs into those contradictions itself. The new member for Farrer, David Farley, is a member of a sixth-generation Riverina family. He’s also mostly been an agribusiness finance and management type, the intellectually trained coming to the top even here. Farley got into trouble during the Farrer campaign because he didn’t come out full-bore against high immigration, knowing well that ageing rural Australia, and the general economy, in its current orientation, need migrant labour.

That puts him into conflict with Hanson and her leadership, who genuinely believe that the demand for very low immigration is doable. They express the core politics of One Nation’s overwhelmingly Anglo base. This is not because immigration is putting strains on the economy, housing and services, but rather because it is changing the everyday character of the country and the content of its way of life. This, together with a hatred of the political elite, is what One Nation supporters express over and over again when one speaks to them. It is fuelled in part by changes in the immigration system, lasting for a decade or so, which require migrants to live in regional areas to convert from temporary to permanent visas. Some people like it, some don’t mind it, and a section of people mind it very much indeed. In many rural areas, the arrival of younger non-Anglo migrants, often starting businesses, may give towns a boost. But they also suggest to some that a whole way of life is being replaced. To many, this feels like death, and high votes for One Nation are a form of basic protest and resistance to this. It’s a measure of Australia’s relative liberalism, as compared to the United States, that the more conspiratorial notions of a ‘great replacement’ do not have huge public purchase here.

Yet the obvious truth about immigration is something that no one on the Right wants to say. If we were to strictly limit immigration numbers for a number of years, and then only resume at permanently reduced intake levels, our whole way of life would have to be consciously changed, as the free-floating labour supply would not be available for the way we live now. But any such reckoning is a way off for One Nation. For the moment, it is the party of those who, as a social grouping, value borders, limits, the ‘parish’ rather than the cosmos, the traditional rather than the new and allegedly exciting. The more that Labor, progressives and the Left fail to recognise this demand—which, couched in universalist humanist terms, was once a demand of the New Left—the more One Nation will prosper, with the next stage a rolling into outer suburban Labor-held seats, and a further transformation of the way we live now.

About the author

Guy Rundle

Guy Rundle was founding co-editor of Arena Magazine(second series) and is now co-editor of Arena Quarterly (third series). He is a well-known essayist and the author of many books.

More articles by Guy Rundle