One grievance above all is fuelling the rise of Hanson

June 6, 2026 — 5:00am

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No need to listen to the experts and commentators theorising about the reasons for One Nation’s recent surge. David Farley is qualified to tell us authoritatively. He is the personification of the party’s advance from the fringe to the centre of Australian politics.

He nominates three changes accounting for the party’s success but one imperative – desperation.

“People are operating out of desperation,” he tells me. That’s a strong word. It means despair leading to risk-taking. In this case, despair at the cost of living, leading to risky political choices. It is, he says, for many voters, a struggle for “survival”, another strong word.

Farley was sworn into federal parliament this week, formally occupying a seat held by the Coalition without interruption since 1949.

The three changes, he says, are generational, media and economic, “and then I think the most important thing that’s happening is we’ve actually got change in the economics of just basic living”.

The younger generation is struggling to afford a home, but even home-owning families are in a weekly scramble.

“Here’s a classic,” he volunteers. He has three daughters, all now established, as he puts it, and one of them rang him recently: “‘Dad, this is a first – filled up the Toyota Prado, the fuel bill was bigger than the weekly grocery shop’, and I asked her what she’s going to do about it. She said, ‘I’ll make sure I shop before I fill up the car’. It’s defining their lifestyle, and it’s defining the opportunities that they can give their children.”

Wages, he says, are relatively stable but costs are accelerating. This is inflation, an underestimated political phenomenon. It was identified by historian David Hackett Fischer as the convulsive force that drives human history.

It not only corrodes living standards and kills governments, it leads to revolutions, he explained in his brilliant 800-year history of inflation, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, published in 1996.

When Fischer wrote the book, inflation in the developed world was quiescent but he cautioned that “a major war in the Middle East or Eastern Europe or elsewhere could reignite inflation”.

He’s vindicated. Now we have Donald Trump’s Middle East war and Vladimir Putin’s Eastern Europe war and inflation is, once more, on........

© Brisbane Times