One Nation’s performance at last month’s South Australian election confirmed two trends that have been clear for some months. One Nation is challenging the Liberal Party as the dominant force on the right of Australian politics. And Labor, while benefiting from fragmentation among its opponents, it is also losing support to One Nation among voters in traditionally safe seats.
The Liberal Party’s problems are clear enough, and have registered in opinion polls over recent months. The Newspoll quarterly analysis for 12 January to 26 March has Coalition support at a fifth of the primary vote. In South Australian, the Liberals managed about 19 per cent to One Nation’s 23 per cent, with most of the Liberals’ lost vote going to One Nation.
But One Nation also picked up votes in Labor’s northern Adelaide heartland. In Elizabeth, an area that has experienced the full blast of economic disadvantage over decades, the swing on primaries against Labor was 15.7 percentage points and One Nation won a third of vote. In neighbouring Ramsay, centred on Salisbury, the Labor primary vote was down eleven points and One Nation polled 28 per cent. The seat of Light, which incorporates Gawler, also in the outer north, saw a swing of more than twenty points against Labor and a One Nation share of 34.5 per cent.
Labor retained these seats, but they are now marginal. In each case the two candidates left standing after preferences were Labor and One Nation rather than the traditional major-party standoff. Is this a vision of the Australian political future? Labor political strategists — especially in Victoria, with its unpopular Labor government and election later this year — will be looking nervously at these results. Liberals will be apprehending them in horror.
But both sides can perhaps take a little heart. The Liberals can tell themselves the National Party didn’t run in South Australia, which may well have sent the state’s more conservative voters One Nation’s way. The SA Liberal Party has also had a torrid time, with its frequent changes of leadership — indeed, a former leader, David Speirs, who stood as an independent, was convicted of supplying drugs. The notably popular Labor premier Peter Malinauskas is scooping up support that might otherwise, and elsewhere, go to the Coalition.
Labor, meanwhile, will take heart that its own vote is holding up pretty well in seats where its main competition is the Liberal Party. It is losing support to One Nation in some traditional heartlands, but not where middle-class voters are more prominent. The SA election confirmed Labor’s strength in metropolitan Australia — a feature of the 2022 and 2025 federal elections — while pointing to a vulnerability in the outer suburbs that the Liberals have so far been unable to exploit. And when pollsters calculate a two-party preferred vote for Labor and the Coalition, they are showing Labor well ahead — a recent Morgan poll reported Labor at 56 per cent to the Coalition’s 44 per cent.
The drivers of these patterns are well known. Cost-of-living pressures and housing shortages are undermining support for the major parties, which are each seen to share responsibility for them. As the Liberal Party’s review of the 2025 federal election pointed out, voters appear to have accepted the Albanese government’s case that “responsibility for the country’s economic travails were [sic] jointly shared with the former Coalition government.” After almost four years of Labor government, that attitude might be contributing to a conviction among disaffected voters that neither party has a solution to the nation’s economic woes — a conviction that could feed the idea, pushed in One Nation propaganda, of a Lib–Lab “uniparty.”
One Nation, which doesn’t yet run the risk of being in government and therefore needing a policy to deal with inflation or housing, can simply catch the wave of discontent. The Iran war’s effect in drastically increasing petrol and diesel prices is a further boon to a party strongest in the fuel-thirsty rural, regional and outer-suburban areas.
The growing salience of immigration as an issue has also greatly assisted Pauline Hanson and her candidates, who also ride on the back of anti-Islam sentiment without the kinds of hesitations, qualifications and even occasional pushback you get from your average Coalition politician. But above all, One Nation gathers the support of those who believe the system is not working for them: things used to be better than they are now. One Nation’s is a performative politics on behalf of those who, like Hanson herself, have had a “gutful” and resent that “they” have stolen from us… what? Perhaps it is a feeling of control over the conditions of their own lives, as Guy Rundle has argued.
Can One Nation’s momentum be sustained? Critics point to the party’s poor record of solidarity in the past, the dubious quality of many of its candidates, and its silence when asked about policy — failings that would normally devastate a party that aspires to a predominant role on the political right. One Nation might flame out as it did in the late 1990s after its stellar performance in the 1998 Queensland state election, with eleven seats and 23 per cent of the vote. As it gathers greater electoral support, the profile of its electoral support and the hopes of those voters are likely to diverge from what might be expected of a party gathering a mere 6.4 per cent of the vote — as it did at the 2025 federal election.
The party also remains Pauline’s baby: it is not entirely clear what it would look like without her. One Nation has a ripe history of bitter internal division and most of Hanson’s key political relationships end up foundering on one rock or another. It remains to be seen, for instance, whether cordial relations with Barnaby Joyce will last longer than they did with Mark Latham — to name two former leaders of mainstream parties who made the jump to One Nation. It is not a party that has managed to harbour more than one big personality at a time — and only one big personality, Hanson herself, can really claim the right to be considered a permanent fixture.
Much will also depend on the response of the parties of the right competing with One Nation for support. The Liberals have so far shown little capacity to rise to the moment. Their post-2025 federal election review, conducted by Pru Goward and Nick Minchin, judged that many Liberals smarting from their humiliation in May 2025 were rather better at recognising specks in the eyes of others than logs in their own, to borrow from Matthew’s Gospel. One of those logs is the collapse of Liberal support in metropolitan areas. Another is that it can muster majorities only among the over fifty-fives. It is being shunned by women — Crosby Textor’s estimate of the gender gap was 4.7 percentage points. It has deep problems in the migrant communities. (Strangely, Australians of Chinese heritage resent being smeared as spies during an election campaign — and probably at any time.)
The Liberal Party’s post-election response to these various ailments can be briefly summarised. First, it failed to release Goward and Minchin’s report. (Anthony Albanese eventually tabled a leaked copy in the House of Representatives.) It is ramping up a campaign to oppose tax breaks for property investors despite investors’ advantages being a major grievance among younger voters trying to buy a home. It chose a woman, Sussan Ley, as party leader only for her colleagues to tear her down in the space of a few months. (Its National Party colleagues initially refused even to serve with her in a coalition and then broke with her a second time earlier this year.) It continues to oppose quotas for the selection of female candidates for winnable seats — a measure adopted by Labor more than thirty years ago.
On the multicultural front, meanwhile, the Liberals have adopted a hardline immigration policy that, in a nutshell, signals to migrants they are here under sufferance. Adopt Australian values or else: and we — the Liberal Party — get to say what those values are. Yet the very same migrants are a conspicuous presence in many of the outer suburbs the Liberals have been fantasising about claiming from Labor since Peter Dutton gave his first media conference as leader in May 2022.
Armchair criticism is easy: the Liberals’ dilemma is an admittedly difficult one. In the big cities, they are being squeezed on the left not only by their traditional rival, the Labor Party, but by teal independents and even the Greens. The Liberal election review makes clear there is more than one opinion in the party about how much of its energy needs to go into winning back teal seats and how much into dealing with Labor. That is already a bad place from which to start.
On the right, the Liberal Party competes with One Nation and, in some respects, with the Nationals as well; the Coalition partners are rivals, for instance, in the forthcoming Farrer by-election. Policy designed to win back younger, female and migrant voters in the metropolitan areas will push other voters to One Nation — not that the Coalition has actually done anything much to gain the support of the groups that have turned decisively against it. Meanwhile, policies designed to stem the flow of support to One Nation, like the recent one on immigration, might make the Coalition unelectable in the metropolitan seats that need to be reclaimed from Labor, independents and the remaining Green.
All the while, party members are typically old and conservative. There is a sense that the Liberals don’t like modern Australia much more than One Nation. As an unsuccessful metropolitan Liberal candidate at the last election told Goward and Minchin: “the Liberal Party needs to understand Australia as it is and not how we would like it to be.”
“Not how we would like it to be.” What do those few words mean? They surely imply that “we” — presumably, your average Liberal — instinctively dislikes what this country has become but out of a sense of pragmatism “we” need to get over it in the interests of winning an election some time. As well-meaning as the comment might be in trying to steer the party towards a more moderate and pragmatic course, it seems to me a bad place for a mainstream political party to try doing its business — really a recipe for another Abbott-like government, in the unlikely event that it yielded an election victory in the first place.
Meanwhile, One Nation is likely to be most competitive in rural and regional seats where it will encounter Nationals as well as Liberals. The Nationals have rather smugly treated the Liberals’ poor performance as if it had no share in it. This positioning was bogus from the start and does a party with a proud history of intelligent pragmatism no credit at all.
The Coalition’s loss of support among key demographics is hardly disconnected from those same voters’ grim view of the role of the Nationals in the Coalition, especially on matters such as climate change. At the time of the 2022 election, Barnaby Joyce, then Nationals leader, was about as popular among city voters as a bowl of lentils at the Guyra Lamb and Potato Festival.
Those days of smug aloofness are almost certainly over. It is not just that Nationals seats are in danger from One Nation. If, as the polls suggest, One Nation is getting 25 per cent per cent of the national vote and 30 per cent in Queensland (as reported by Newspoll), its share in some rural and regional seats — especially in its Queensland heartland — is probably north of 40 per cent. That is a big problem for the Liberal National Party in that state.
The Nationals are hardly in rude health. They have broken the Coalition twice since the last election. They recently changed leaders for the fifth time in a decade. They have endured three federal parliamentary defections since 2023, resulting in a loss of each of those seats to the party: Andrew Gee, who left over the party’s opposition to the Indigenous Voice and retained his seat of Calare as an independent at the 2025 election; Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who defected shortly after that election from the Nationals party room to the Liberals; and Barnaby Joyce, twice party leader, who has joined Hanson in One Nation. Speculation continues over other Nationals politicians making the jump, and some ordinary members have followed suit: as in Tamworth, the ABC reported, the National Party branch “moved en masse to One Nation” last October.
That’s the picture on the Liberal Party’s right. On its left (broadly defined), it has Labor and independents — and occasionally even the Greens — swallowing its metropolitan seats, and the occasional regional one. It is unlikely to be able to win an election again without reclaiming parts of its old heartland in the cities, since that is where most Australians live and vote. Yet to do so will lead only to further alienation among conservative voters, and accusations the party is “Labor-lite,” a charge foreshadowed by Malcolm Turnbull’s fate.
The closest historical parallel I can think of is Alfred Deakin’s Liberal Protectionists, which formed governments for much of the first decade of the Australian Commonwealth. But Deakin’s party was also squeezed between parties to its right and left at elections in 1903 and 1906. On the right it was George Reid’s Free Trade Party; on the left, it was Labor. Reid increasingly appealed to anti-socialist sentiment — indeed, his party was also known as the Anti-Socialists — and it grew in numbers. Labor was growing in numbers and confidence too, and its industrial wing in the unions was flexing its muscles as Australia emerged from depression and drought.
The result: Deakin chose to join with the Free Traders in 1909 to form a single Liberal Party, giving birth to the two-party system. But Reid’s forcing of the issue over the preceding years was probably the crucial factor. At the 1910 election a Liberal government faced a Labor opposition — and Labor won.
That was really the last great realignment in Australian politics, and we have been living in its shadow ever since. When a Country Party emerged nationally at the end of the first world war, it threatened to reinstate a three-party system (and briefly did so) but by early 1923 it had joined with the other major non-Labor party, by then called the Nationalists, in a coalition government. A two-party system, or at least a system in which two sides competed for government, had re-emerged. It endures still but seems more fragile now than at any time in the past century.
The Coalition parties might eventually have to confront Deakin’s dilemma, or something like the predicament faced by the Nationalists and the Country Party in the early 1920s. Should they join with One Nation, as a “fusion” (like in 1909) or a coalition (1923), to counter the electoral predominance of the Labor Party and the further rise of the independents and Greens?
We are not there yet, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get there. The most significant electoral effect of the current fragmentation on the right is to entrench Labor’s power federally and in a majority of states and territories. We can be certain federal Labor strategists are already eyeing off further seats they might win at a future federal election.
If Jacinta Allan’s Labor government should survive the next Victorian election, we will surely have arrived at the moment when it will be impossible for the Liberals to continue as before unless they are comfortable with permanent opposition or even minority party status. •
