Why Pauline Hanson's biggest weakness is her newest voters |
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.
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........