For the first time in Australian political history, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party is polling higher than the Liberal–National Coalition.
Let that sink in.
A party that thrives on fear, resentment, and division – a party built on racism, dog-whistling, and grievance politics – is now outperforming the mainstream conservative alternative. This is not a curiosity. It is a warning.
And it forces a confronting question: how did Australia get here?
The uncomfortable answer is that this moment has been years in the making.
One Nation’s rise is not primarily a story about Pauline Hanson. It is a story about political failure – particularly the failure of the major parties to speak honestly to Australians about economic insecurity, social change, and the forces reshaping their lives.
When people feel unheard, they don’t always become thoughtful. Often, they become angry.
The LNP Opposition has offered little more than cultural skirmishes and imported American talking points. Instead of articulating a serious, coherent alternative vision for the country, it has drifted between silence and performative outrage. Leadership has been replaced by mimicry. Policy has been replaced by posture.
Into that vacuum steps One Nation – loud, simple, and shameless.
The party offers certainty in an uncertain world. It points fingers. It names enemies. It promises easy answers to complex problems. And for some voters, that is enough.
Australia has also absorbed something corrosive in recent years: the tone and tactics of Trump-style politics, without the institutional guardrails or civic culture to blunt their impact. Conspiracy thinking, contempt for expertise, hostility to minorities, and the fetishisation of “strength” over decency have all found a home here.
One Nation didn’t invent this climate – it exploits it.
Media ecosystems that reward outrage over accuracy have played their part. When anger is monetised, when fear drives clicks, and when minorities are framed as threats rather than neighbours, extremist parties don’t need to persuade – they simply wait.
What makes this moment especially troubling is that One Nation is not shy about what it stands for. Its history of racist rhetoric, its hostility to First Nations Australians, its flirtation with authoritarian leaders, and its open admiration for Donald Trump are not hidden. They are features, not bugs.
That a growing number of Australians are willing to look past – or even embrace – those traits should alarm anyone who cares about social cohesion.
This does not mean Australia has suddenly become a hateful country. But it does suggest that we have become more tolerant of cruelty, more cynical about politics, and more willing to excuse prejudice when it is wrapped in the language of “common sense” or “telling it like it is.”
The greatest danger is not that One Nation will ever form government. It won’t.
The danger is that its ideas seep into the mainstream – softened, laundered, and normalised by larger parties chasing votes instead of values. History shows that democracies don’t fail overnight. They erode gradually, as the unacceptable becomes familiar and the outrageous becomes routine.
If a party built on division can now outpoll a major party, then the real question is no longer about Pauline Hanson.
It’s about us.
What kind of country do we want to be – and what are we prepared to tolerate in the meantime?
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Just let people absorb what is happening in the US and think about what that kind of hate would do to them, here in Australia. Border Force on the streets in masks checking IDs on anyone who isn’t white? Straight out of Poorlene’s playbook. Pandering to the lowest common denominator of thugs who follow her nasty shade of nationalism. Good it’s happening now, long way out to an election so people can REALLY see what’s at stake.
Dear Michael, you’ve nailed it. Again.
Politically Pauline hasn’t changed, in fact she might have even softened a little?
What we are watching, is the decay of the Liberal Party and sadly they are dragging the Nationals down with them.
One Nation is a therapy group for a collection of misfits who could not find a home in the main parties.
It will implode when the going gets tough.
How did we get here Michael?Years of gutless politicians who value their own arses more than the public good, the creeping control of vested interests, and a poisonous media led by the New York nearly corpse.Not to mention a public who are largely disinterested in politics, except when led by that same media when an election rolls around.I also clearly recall when Laura Tingle was pilloried for describing us as racists…she was right then, and is still right.
I realise that the current government have inherited possibly the most difficult time in many a long day, but so far have flubbed it.
Albo and co need to to lift their game, hitch up their trousers, and start LEADING.
Perhaps this will spur the Liberals to do something about their public image and the corrosive negativity that people like Susssan come out with.
I think you will see the Nationals demand a change in Liberal leadership or the coalition will come undone.
So it’s likely that Hastie will make a move soon which could be a good thing when you look at the alternatives which seem to be Ted O’Brien, Angus Taylor and Michaelia Cash and just for a laugh, Dan Tehan.
It’s not looking good is it?
Well said, Keitha. It’s clear that we, as Australians, can never take the high road over Americans (as we often think!) As a nation of voters, we’re very similar. Have people even thought about what it would be like with Pauline Hanson as Prime Minister?
It seems our experience of Trump has taught Australians nothing about red necks.
The scuttlebutt has it that Pawleen’s running a secret agenda to install Her Royal Fatness, Queen of the Iron Oxides, as the next head of Australia, with the ever-loyal Barnaby of the Beetrooters as Her Fatness’s man-in-waiting, ready to serve in whatever context. The mind boggles!
Having replaced the Jabiru J230 for free travel in Her Fatness’s Gulfstream G700, debts are accruing, and will need repaying in due course.
All agree that the Rust Rock Queen will serve
herselfAustralians diligently once she ascends to the throne.“A party that thrives on fear, resentment, and division – a party built on racism, dog-whistling, and grievance politics…”
You left out rorting the public funded pig trough for every cent that Hanson and her odious homunculus offsider can get their greedy mitts on. Her politics is revolting, but it’s ultimately more about raking in cash than anything else.
Jen,
Hanson does come from the Texas of Australia.
Newspoll is only one of several polls over the past couple of weeks. Resolve Strategic: One Nation 18%, Coalition 28%. Morgan: One Nation 15%, Coalition 30.5%. New poll firm Fox & Hedghog: One Nation 21%, Coalition 25%. DemosAU: One Nation and the Coalition each on 23%.
William Bowe’s Pollbludger’s poll aggregate is the most reliable guide and it shows One Nation on 19% and the Coalition on 26%. But great article though.
So where is the Albo mob sitting? Or does it matter?
You have to get the sense right.
Once again,a little ring and a lightbulb. And the answer came.
Australia was towed here by several over size Greenlandian Tugs, so the Australians would not feel the cold anymore.
I would be more interested in One Nation polling if they held any seats in the lower house.
How does this translate to electorates? Further, like Brexit a civil war amongst the right or conservatives, but everyone paid for it with US & Russian influence….in related Oz scheme of things, desperate for a similar Brexit uprising of pensioner populism & middle age radicalisation…..Voice was No campaign was a start, but think blow back after Bondi noise…..
“A party that thrives on fear, resentment, and division – a party built on racism, dog-whistling, and grievance politics – is now outperforming the mainstream conservative alternative. This is not a curiosity. It is a warning.”
Exactly, especially for those who lack basic thinking skills, have paid no attention to politics let alone policy except for WITFM and unfortunately that’s quite a lot.
The old proverb ‘be careful what you wish for’ is upon us and it’s being led by another bitter woman for god’s sake.
Crikey, you must hear her preening from miles away right now.
The LNP Opposition has offered little more than cultural skirmishes and imported American talking points. Instead of articulating a serious, coherent alternative vision for the country, it has drifted between silence and performative outrage. Leadership has been replaced by mimicry. Policy has been replaced by posture.
And yet, that’s all that OneNotion is. They’re just louder and nastier about it.
Harry, the English language needs to be able to say, in one word, “setting aside one’s personal interests to act in the interests of the common good”. That word is “disinterested”. Go ahead – call me a pedant.
How did we get here? Scratch an Australian and you get a racist and a sexist.
ps
Good one, Lyndal, the poll squirt is barnaby dragging lnp twits. Surely, Labor will preference lnp before on so no lower house seats?
Lyndal,
As I understand it, by recruiting Barnaby, One Nation acquired their sole Lower House seat but it must irk serious voters in New England that, having voted for a National Party representative last May, they now have a One Nation muppet who has said clearly that he will not stand again in New England [because he wouldn’t get elected].
Surely Barnaby should be told by the Nationals and the NE Electors, to resign his seat right now and if he does subsequently nominate for the Senate which appears to be his strategy this then becomes a separate and distinct issue. In the meantime a bi-election in New England is essential to return the decision making to the electorate.
What do you think ?
B Joyce should resign, disappear, evaporate, for our hygeine and health. A serial shagger and manifest bladderbrain should shove off, relieve us all, release that electorate from poxery, misery, deviousness, stupidity and all evils. But the turd DESERVES the red topped broom jockey, yes. And Jen, B. Joyce has a red neck, just below the overoscillated glans penis. True.
We got here because we have a Uni-Party parliament that colludes to maintain control to their own advantage rather than address and act on existential social issues that are preventing our younger generations from achieving their aspirations for normal, healthy, and prosperous living. There is no effective opposition so therefore irrational opportunists gain a megaphone voice that does not reflect the sentiments of the majority of Australians.
I suggest that without the murderous Murdochracy social issues would be vastly different.
I remember when I lived in the inner west, many years ago. Painted on the wall of Harold Park Paceway. Australians are bloody minded sheep. This was just after Malcolm Fraser was elected. I dont think this has changed too much.
Mediocrates, you said it all!
One question, will she and her horrible nazi party survive the new hate laws?
Oz original occupants were extremely well organized, with brilliant cooperative legal and trading systems, and sustenance based upon the provisions of the natural environment modified but not to the depletion of plants or other animal species, and not with the mindset of human superiority, but acquired wisdom.
Then came the colonists of the ‘West’. Their systems, intolerant, brutal, punitive, militant, murderous, racist, extractive, polluting, usurious and destructive based upon a mindset of hereditary rights and supremacy over all things.
These systems of the ‘West’ were embedded in their legal system and laws, and as such ensured a manifestation of criminality and corruption.
The ‘West’ through its expansion, wherever it ventured has saturated the populous with its model of existence leaving a sordid trail of haves and have-nots upon which it relies – privilege or poverty and prisons.
And today this model of existence is imposed by blackmail and lethal force.
Oz, of course has likewise become saturated. And although the system is obviously collapsing in on itself, old Constitutions, despots and sophisticated obdurate career politicians along with the general populous are afraid to speak out and change. And for that matter do not know how and what to change to.
Those under the model of the ‘West’ have become inured to it and its illogic and cruelty.
That’s how Oz got here.
Opposition leader Sussan Ley and the LNP are gonners. Last night (21Jan2026) all National Party MPs removed themselves from the LNP, and today Littleproud confirmed the coalition was (again) no more.
Pawleen and the Beetrooter will be drooling.
Could be just attention-seeking/diversioning Clakka.