One Nation’s surge is easiest to read as anger. It is better read through a different lens – gathering the Australians who formed their sense of who they are in an offline world, where belonging was anchored where they grew up.

Kos Samaras

For the first time, a RedBridge and Accent Research poll for the Financial Review has One Nation leading the primary vote: 31 per cent to Labor’s 28, with the Coalition a distant third on 20. A year earlier the party polled 6.4 per cent at a federal election. The numbers are now familiar enough that the more useful question is no longer how big the surge is, but who is inside it, and why the door they walked through was already wide open.

The standard answer is cost of living and migration. Both are real. Neither explains the shape of the movement, because the people moving are not, for the most part, the people the grievance playbook entirely predicts.

And the answer matters, because the surge is not one movement but two, bolted together. There is an old cohort that came to Hanson on identity and a new one that came on grievance, and they do not want the same things. The seam between them, between the voters who are hers for a generation and the voters who are merely renting, is the whole story. It is what makes the surge look unstoppable today, and it is where the thing can be pulled apart tomorrow.

That is what this essay sets out to do. To split a bloc this size you first have to understand it: who the two cohorts are, what each one actually wants, and which of them is holding on by a thread rather than by conviction. So it works in that order. It diagnoses the old cohort and the new, shows why only one of them is truly Hanson’s, and then traces the seam between them to the point where the newest, softest layer of her vote can be prised away.

The voter surge began with

Start with the voter the surge began with, because the order has been misread. The founding One Nation voter of this cycle was not young and broke. He, and increasingly she, was older: a Baby Boomer or the senior edge of Gen X, Australian-born, who owned the home outright or was within sight of it. In the narrow, cash-flow sense this voter was not poor. The mortgage was gone. What had gone with it was a sense that the world they grew up in, and raised families in, had gone too: not replaced, but declined.

The paid-off home sits in a part of Australia that has been quietly stripped of institutions, industry and services. Since 2017 around 37 per cent of the country’s bank branches have closed, and in the space of three years more than 600 towns were left with no banking service at all. In the Riverina alone, 22 towns have lost their last bank, and Grenfell lost all four of the majors.

The hospital tells the same story. More than 130 rural birthing units have shut their doors, so an expectant mother now drives hours to deliver. There are about 437 full-time-equivalent doctors per 100,000 people in the big cities and roughly 264 in the very remote. Close to one in five remote Australians cannot see a local GP, around 60 per cent have no specialist within reach, and life expectancy runs up to seven years shorter than in the capitals.

And the people are leaving. The young go first, to the capitals for work and study, which has pushed the median age in the regions to 42 against 36 in the cities, with only about 30 per cent of residents outside the capitals now in the prime 20-to-44 band. Whole districts are contracting: wheatbelt towns like Northampton and Morawa shedding three and four per cent in a single year, the old mining centres of Broken Hill, Mount Isa and Port Augusta bleeding numbers, and in a growing list of places the deaths now outnumber the births.

This is the lived backdrop to the founding vote. The housing asset is real, but it is stranded in a town with no bank, no birthing suite, a temporary GP if one can be found, and a school enrolment list that reads like a mirror held up to a community losing its young. The grievance is not how much it costs to live in these towns. It is the sense that the country has been governed, for a long time, by politicians who only care about the big cities, whatever they claim otherwise. So it is no surprise that across the One Nation column the wrong-direction reading sits near 88 per cent, and about a third say, in effect, that they want the system pulled down and rebuilt. Some say, burn it all down.

After the initial surge came a younger cohort, and the most recent movement, especially after Bondi, was led by younger Gen X. These are not asset-secure retirees in a dying town. They are still paying the mortgage, still raising children, and over the past few years they have watched their disposable income fall. They are the sandwich generation, caught between dependent kids and ageing parents, and those parents are disproportionately poor, many of them wholly reliant on the pension. So the hollowing-out of services lands on this cohort from both sides at once. The GP with no appointments are a problem for such a family; the thinning of bulk-billing, aged care and specialist access is a problem for the parents they are trying to keep well. Picture a 49-year-old in an outer-suburban or regional seat: a decade still owing on the house, two teenagers at home, and an 80-year-old mother on the age pension in a town whose last bulk-billing GP retired and was never replaced. For this person, the cost-of-living squeeze and the care squeeze arrived at the same time. That is who moved late, and why.

The diagnosis: identity formed offline

One Nation appeals, in the main though not exclusively, to Australians who formed their identity in an offline world. People who came of age before the online network lived a life anchored in physical place. The reference group was the people within their street or court. Status was local. Information arrived through institutions that sat in the suburb or town, via the lounge room TV, the radio and a newspaper you could buy at the local Milk Bar. To speak to someone your own age on the other side of the world required a pen, paper, a stamp, and the patience to wait a fortnight for a reply. Distance was real, so place in part shaped identity more than today. You knew who you were partly by knowing where you were.

The cohort that came after did not build a self that way. The digital natives formed themselves in networked, portable space, where the reference group is global and chosen rather than local. Belonging travels with them. It is not soil-bound, so a politics that says defend our way of life, place, country, does not resonate as much. This is why One Nation skews older. But age is the proxy, not the mechanism. The real line runs along the boundary between an offline and an online childhood, and that boundary does not fall where you would expect.

That generational split is key, and it is the strongest evidence for the thesis. One Nation’s strongest generation is not the oldest. It is the last one to have had a childhood that was even partly offline. The oldest Millennials and Gen X remember landlines, street directories, and a sense of self, bound to a suburb. The youngest of Gen Z never knew it. The fault line between them is the fault line in the vote. It is also why I would resist collapsing this into a story about old people being angry.

Where they live

Geography follows the same logic, because a place-anchored identity is reinforced by staying in that place for a long time. The vote concentrates in outer metropolitan Australia, the peri-urban fringe, and the regions, among voters with long tenure and low mobility. Queensland is the deepest exposure, where the LNP’s collapse across the regions and outer Brisbane has left One Nation dominating in the polls, in places, as the de facto opposition: Logan, Ipswich, parts of Townsville and Mackay. Western Australia is the next front, through outer Perth and the Mandurah corridor. And the pattern shows up in microcosm wherever you zoom in. In the Nepean by-election the affluent coastal tip held firm for the Liberals, while the stressed bayside strip, Rosebud, Capel Sound, Tootgarook, Rye, recorded a heavy One Nation vote.

How the blocs moved and when

The surge was not one event. It was a sequence, and the order matters, because different voters left traditional politics for different reasons.

The climb began long before many even noticed. One Nation was already in double digits by the end of September 2025, the traditional base consolidating on cost of living and migration while the Coalition was obsessed about leadership challenges.

Hanson’s appearance at Mar-a-Lago for a CPAC address in early November sat on top of that climb rather than causing it. The honest reading is that it was a legitimacy event. It reframed a domestic protest vote as the local chapter of a global realignment and gave nativist conservatives a permission structure to move. It also carried a cost the polling hints at: in the more affluent, traditionally conservative pockets, the Trump association repels as much as it recruits. There is a Mar-a-Lago scent that puts a ceiling on the vote in precisely the professional-class areas the right needs to hold.

Figure 1 - One Nation primary vote, May 2025 to May 2026 A structural climb, ratified at Mar-a-Lago, then broken open after Bondi. The phase strip marks which bloc moved in each window.

SEE CHART]

The catalyst that turned a significant vote into a leading one came on 14 December, at Bondi. The terrorist attack on a Hanukkah gathering, and the official response that followed, did the work no campaign could. The government’s language was judged, well beyond the One Nation base, as failing to meet the moment. Then the Coalition came across as playing politics with the tragedy, and in doing so vacated the ground it had been holding. That is the moment the first large wave moved: conservative Coalition voters, the blue One Nation cohort, walking out of a Liberal Party they no longer recognised as theirs. Barnaby Joyce also joining One Nation on 8 December gave the defection a face.

The most recent and still limited phase is different again. Through 2026, the cost-of-living grind now seems like a long term trend, triggering some soft Labor voters in the regions to drift. This is the red One Nation cohort, working people whose grandparents would not have given the One Nation a hearing. The movement out of Labor is smaller than the movement out of the Coalition, and it is concentrated in regional seats rather than the cities.

What the diagnosis implies

If the vote is anchored in a place-formed identity rather than in the world the iPhone made, two things follow.

The first is that it will not be bought off. A budget measure can ease a mortgage. It cannot return a voter to a country that feels like the one they grew up in, because that country was partly a function of being younger in a smaller, more legible world. The grievance is real, but at root it is not fiscal, which is why fiscal answers keep sailing past it.

The second is that the ceiling is generational, and hence it is now rising a lot more slowly than it did in the initial growth period. One Nation owns the offline-formed cohorts and is weak among the digital natives now joining the roll. The party’s task is to hold the offline-formed cohorts it has gathered, the Boomers and Gen X above all. The majors face the harder job: to speak to a voter whose sense of loss is about belonging, in a language that does not sound like the official language that voter has already decided cannot be trusted.

For now the contest, on current numbers, runs between Labor and One Nation, and the Coalition watches from the stands. The voter who put it there is not the angry regional man of the caricature. She is more likely to be older, secure on paper, and grieving a place that emptied out around her.

Where the One Nation bloc could come apart

If the bond is identity rather than policy, that is also where One Nation is most exposed. Its vote is not held together by an agreed policy platform – far from it. It is held together by a feeling that Hanson is one of us, and the blocs beneath that support are diverse and do not actually agree with one another. The founding base is culturally conservative and nativist. The newest arrivals, the younger Gen X and the ex-Labor movers who turned a strong vote into a leading one, are something else again: economic populists. They want wages to rise, services restored, and the powerful made to pay, and on social questions they are far more moderate than the label suggests.

On our reading, more than half of this cohort support access to abortion. They did not come to Hanson for some social-conservative revolution. They came because she was the only figure who seemed to be standing up for them, or who simply offered to turn a system they loathe on its head.

You do not break a coalition like this by attacking it head-on. You break it by making its two halves see each other clearly, and by forcing the figure who holds them together to choose between them. Industrial relations is the lever, because it is the issue on which the old cohort and the new are furthest apart and on which Hanson is most exposed. One Nation has a long record of siding with employers and the big end of town, voting against the wage floors, the bargaining rights and the penalty-rate protections the new economic-populist bloc relies on. For the founding base this barely registers; their bond with Hanson was never about a payslip. For the late movers it is close to the whole point.

Put that record under a light, attach a number to it, the rise they did not get, the cut they did wear, and the two cohorts are suddenly looking at different parties wearing the same name. Hanson cannot satisfy both. Hold the base and the donor class and she confirms to the new bloc that she stands with the bosses; lunge left to keep the new bloc and she dissolves the anti-politician authenticity that holds the old one, and starts to look like exactly the thing they fled.

The same fault runs through the rest of her positioning. Her embrace of Trump, gold to the nativist core as a badge of belonging to a global movement, reads to the economic populist as proof she has joined the billionaire politics she claims to fight. On abortion and the wider social agenda she sits well to the right of a new cohort that is, on these questions, relaxed or actively liberal. Each is a point where the thing that thrills the old bloc quietly unsettles the new.

None of this moves the founding base. Identity that deep does not turn on a policy platform, and it should not be the target. But it does not have to be. Any attempt to pull apart One Nation has to lead with a focus on the newest and softest layer, the late movers who arrived on grievance, security and cost of living rather than on tribe. The campaign that beats One Nation will not argue with the grievance, which is real and which these voters have already had validated by the result. It will do something narrower: it will make Hanson legible as a politician with positions, and show that on the things this cohort actually cares about – their wages, their parents’ care, their own freedoms – she is not on their side.

The day she stops being one of us and becomes one of them, the grievance detaches from her, and these voters are available again, most obviously to whichever major party is willing to hold the economic-populist, pro-services, socially moderate ground she only appeared to occupy.

That is the fault line and true weakness in the surge.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/06/why-pauline-hansons-biggest-weakness-is-her-newest-voters/

PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….