Everyone has an explanation for the surge of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party: immigration, cost of living, housing shortages, distrust of politicians. All of those factors matter. But they don't fully explain why this is happening now, and why One Nation specifically is the vehicle capturing the discontent.
The deeper story is bigger than Australia. It is part of a Western-wide political realignment that has already transformed politics in Britain, America, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and beyond. The key insight from political scientists studying this phenomenon is simple but powerful: the rise of populist parties on the right is not primarily because voters suddenly became more radical. It is because the traditional centre-Right parties stopped performing their historic role, as Celina101 argued in her substack, linked below. Here is a condensed version:
For decades, parties like Australia's Liberal Party acted as effective gatekeepers. They bundled together several strands of Right-leaning sentiment into one broad, electorally successful coalition:
Free-market economics
Cultural conservatism and traditional values
A sense of national identity and patriotism
This "bundle" worked. A voter concerned about taxes, another worried about family and religion, and another who simply wanted strong borders and pride in Australia could all find a home in the same party. The centre-Right mediated social change, absorbed discontent, and prevented more radical alternatives from gaining ground.
That bundling function has broken down across the West.
The Liberal Party (like its counterparts overseas) increasingly prioritised globalist economics, elite consensus on immigration, and progressive cultural signalling over the concerns of its traditional base. As a result, large numbers of voters no longer saw the party as representing them.
Immigration anxiety did not suddenly appear in 2025. It was a major issue throughout the 2010s. But back then, the centre-Right still contained and managed that discontent. Once that containment failed, voters looked elsewhere.
This is exactly what happened with Trump and the Republicans, Brexit and Reform UK, the National Rally in France, and similar movements across Europe. The populists did not create the fracture: they moved into the space the collapsing centre-Right left open.
One Nation's growth comes from former Liberal voters, disaffected Labor voters, and people who previously supported smaller Right-wing parties. It is consolidation around the only vehicle that now appears willing to address the issues the establishment centre-Right abandoned: rapid demographic change, housing and cost-of-living pressures, and a defence of Australian identity.
This is not a sudden ideological revolution among ordinary Australians. It is a political realignment driven by the failure of the old centre-Right to hold its coalition together.
Political scientists increasingly describe modern politics as operating on two dimensions: the old economic Left-Right axis, and a newer cultural/identity axis (nationalism vs cosmopolitanism). When the centre-Right abandoned or downplayed the identity side, it created an opening that populist parties are now filling.
Australia is late to this trend, but it is not immune. The same forces that reshaped politics in Britain, America, and Europe are at work here.
The rise of One Nation is not mysterious. It is the logical consequence of a centre-Right that stopped conserving the nation its voters actually live in.
The establishment can continue to dismiss these voters as "deplorables," "racists," or "populists." Or it can recognise that when the traditional parties fail to represent legitimate concerns, the people will find new vehicles to express them.
One Nation is rising because the old centre-Right stopped listening. The solution is not to smear the voters. It is to address the underlying failures that created the opening in the first place. For more:
https://celina101.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-one-nation-explained