For about a century and a half, parties have been integral to Australian democracy. When citizens voted at elections, they usually did so through the lens of party. When politicians have acted in parliament or government, they have usually done so as members of a party. Political parties mediate the relationship between citizens and the legislative and executive branches of government. And because governments appoint judges, they also, in practice, mediate relations between citizens and the judiciary, although in a less obviously partisan manner than in the United States.
All of this occurs with barely a whisper of a mention of parties in the federal constitution. They were entirely absent from the original document in 1901, making their first (and so far only) appearance via a referendum in 1977 governing the replacement of casual Senate vacancies. All along, though, federal elections have been a contest between parties for executive power; not a pure two-party system because of the prevalence of coalitions on the political right, but a two-side system, as I prefer to call it.
We may now be witnessing a revolution in Australian politics, however: the passing of this system. What are its manifestations?
First, there is the weakening hold of the parties on voters. The Australian Election Study has pointed to the declining number of survey respondents who report sticking to the same party across their voting lives. In 1967, 36 per cent of Coalition voters and 32 per cent of Labor voters said they were stable supporters of their side. In 2025 the respective figures were 13 and 11 per cent.
The growing habit of electing independent and minor party candidates is another manifestation of this weakening hold. The only independent elected to the federal House of Representatives between 1951 and 1990 was Sam Benson, originally a Labor by-election winner in the seat of Batman in Melbourne before his expulsion in 1966 over defence policy. Since 1990, with the election of Ted Mack to North Sydney, independents have become more of a feature of electoral politics.
Much has been made of the successes of the community independents, or teals, in 2022 in metropolitan electorates, all previously Liberal heartland; but earlier successes, from Peter Andren’s in Calare in 1996 to Cathy McGowan’s in Indi in 2013, had often been in regional seats. After the brief appearance of the Greens Michael Organ early this century after a by-election, since 2010 at least one Green has sat in the House of Representatives, and for one term, 2022–25, there were four. This presence contrasts with the failure of the Democratic Labor Party, the Australia Party or the Australian Democrats — earlier significant minor parties — to win a federal lower-house seat.
As a result, a combination of independent and minor-party members of the House made up a crossbench of sixteen following the 2022 election (which, with defectors from the Liberals and Nationals, had grown to nineteen by the time of the 2025 election).
A third, obviously related way of witnessing the major parties’ weakening hold is to observe their declining primary vote share. When Labor won office from opposition in 1972 and 1983, its primary vote was, respectively, 49.6 per cent and 49.4 per cent. In 2007 it was 43.4 per cent and in 2022, just 32.6 per cent. Its landslide of 2025, yielding ninety-four seats, came off a primary vote of less than 35 per cent.
The story is similar on the Coalition side. Its primary vote share in its initial election victories was over 50 per cent in 1949, about 53 per cent in 1975 but only a little over 47 per cent in 1996 and about 43 per cent in 2013. An electorate that was once mainly divided along partisan Labor–Coalition lines was split in 2022 and 2025 into three parts of roughly similar size: Labor, Coalition, and minor parties and independents.
Polling since the 2025 election suggests a downward trajectory in the Labor primary vote, especially since the Bondi terrorist attack, but the most spectacular developments have been on the political right. Some polls have One Nation attracting the support of about three in ten voters. Even seasoned commentators seem a little stunned by the suddenness of this apparent recalibration.
When the University of Canberra’s vice-chancellor Bill Shorten entered the federal House of Representatives in 2007, just two independents, Bob Katter and Tony Windsor, were among his peers. Pauline Hanson’s political career seemed to be behind her. Labor, led by Kevin Rudd, had won a formidably large victory in 2007, recalling Hawke’s in 1983. The system had worked, with a simple change of one major party to another, one slightly dorky-looking man in glasses giving way to another.
It had seemed less so in the mid-1970s, when one of those men, John Howard, first entered parliament and the other, Kevin Rudd, was beginning his studies at the Australian National University. The dismissal of the Whitlam government shook the faith of many Australians in their democracy. Gough Whitlam said parliamentary democracy as at stake. That voters had returned Malcolm Fraser’s caretaker government in a landslide at the December 1975 election and then given the coalition government a ringing endorsement at another election two years later, left bitterness and despair among progressive voters.
Donald Horne, later a chancellor of the University of Canberra, was among the dismayed. Horne is best known as the author of the 1964 bestseller The Lucky Country, where in a much-quoted passage, he called Australia “a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.” In a less-quoted passage, he found in both major political parties “an archaic flavour in political affairs… even for Australia the deadness has been remarkable.” Neither party had “a contemporary sense of identity,” which explained “why a whole younger generation of Australians of the kind who normally might now be revitalising political life are more likely to despise the whole set-up.”
It is sobering to read this kind of analysis, so close to much that we hear from the commentariat today. Horne was so incensed by Whitlam’s dismissal that he dashed out Death of the Lucky Country and reactivated Citizens for Democracy. He believed that the Whitlam government’s fate was a turning point; that the campaign to destroy it had gone “on for so long, involved so many powerful institutions, and had such an infamous victory that many people who believed in reform believed it possible that their time would not come again. There was too much power on the other side. They could never win.”
The return of Labor to government occurred more quickly than Horne, and most other observers, could envisage. Neville Wran’s narrow victory in New South Wales in 1976 set the ball rolling, but genuine party competition was in play in national politics from 1978, with Bill Hayden leading a successful process of party reform and policy development. The election of the Hawke Labor government in 1983 produced a sense of excitement and helped relegitimise the system for many otherwise disillusioned people.
In 1982, political scientist Don, a future vice-chancellor of the University of Canberra, provided a snapshot of the political order at that time: “the shape of Australian politics has been largely unchanged since 1910, and… the causes of this stability are to be found in the adoption, by millions of Australians then and since, of relatively unchanging feelings of loyalty to one or other of the Australian parties.”
One can see why Aitkin thought so. The most recent election, in 1980, had seen the Coalition returned to office — its third election victory under Fraser — although with a reduced majority. More than nine in ten voted for the traditional parties of government and opposition, as they had since the second world war. For all the turbulence of social and political life in the later 1960s and 1970s, the basic shape and structure of the party system seemed essentially unaltered.
The 1983 election reinforced that impression: Labor’s vote share was now 49.5 per cent, the Coalition’s 43.6. The major parties plus the Nationals took all House seats, and the Australian Democrats consolidated their balance of power in the Senate. The party system had been sufficiently robust to absorb the era’s wider political and social turbulence, including the emergence of minor parties seeking to draw disillusioned Liberal and Labor voters into their ranks. A modified form of mass politics, now dominated by catch-all parties incorporating a variety of voters and groups, reigned supreme.
The major parties themselves were also shifting, not always comfortably, to accommodate the changed environment produced by the arrival of movements for the rights of women, gays and lesbians, Indigenous people and migrants, and campaigns for consumer rights, the arts, environmental and heritage protection, and against uranium mining and nuclear weapons.
In the Liberal Party, the new progressivism was most obvious in Victoria, in the shift from Henry Bolte to Dick Hamer. In Queensland, there were confrontations between middle-class reformers and the Labor Party old guard at Breakfast Creek, culminating in federal intervention in 1981, as well as a bust-up of the National–Liberal Coalition government in 1983. The discarded Liberal Leader, Terry White, went off to make a fortune with his pharmacies while Joh Bjelke-Petersen made a crazed bid to grab the prime ministership.
NSW Labor, meanwhile, was dogged by bitter, occasionally violent struggles for control of inner-city branches between stalwarts of the old right-wing machine and middle-class professionals and social movement activists aligned with the left. In Tasmania, the old developmentalism of the Hydro-Electric Commission — a kind of state-within-a-state — came under challenge in struggles over the damming of Lake Pedder and later, the Franklin River. Yet, the party system survived these challenges intact, being sufficiently adaptable to open up to new ideas and issues, and to previously marginalised or excluded groups, such as women and migrants.
The disintegration of a longstanding national consensus about the central mission of the Australian polity in the Hawke era was critical in the process of “unmaking.” As political scientist Ian Marsh wrote in 1995, “the two-party regime was based on considerable common ground between the parties about the purposes of government.” That broke down following the dismantling in the 1980s of the policy regime Paul Kelly called “the Australian Settlement,” with its strong emphasis on the role of the state in shaping market outcomes. Now, as Marsh puts it, “political relations” gave way to “market relations.”
The Hawke government received its first electoral shock at the early election of December 1984, with its majority reduced from twenty-five seats to sixteen in a House that had been enlarged from 125 to 148. Labor’s post-election analysis pointed to a marked fall in its support among younger voters. The Nuclear Disarmament Party was active in this election; Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett almost won a NSW Senate seat and one of the party’s other candidates, Jo Vallentine, was elected a senator for Western Australia. We can see in this a dry run for the Greens’ later challenges to Labor.
Labor’s post-election review commented on the disarmament issue’s “obvious implications for the youth vote and the need to sell the government’s actions in the disarmament area”:
The party having never been committed to unilateral disarmament or neutralism must assess how it wishes to compete with those parties who will never have the responsibility of government and therefore do not have to cope with the restraints of reality in the evolution of their policies.
It is a criticism that uncannily anticipates later attitudes of Labor leaders to the Greens. Labor won another election in 1987 with a successful marginal-seat strategy, but was losing support in its heartland. The 1990 election was the one that foretold the future: Labor won a majority with less than 40 per cent of the primary vote using a preference strategy designed to appeal to the environmentally concerned.
As the economy went bad, the neoliberal orientation of government policy was no political asset; tariff cuts and privatisation never gained popular support. Nor were large groups of workers demanding to be released from the shackles of the industrial arbitration system. Meanwhile, the government’s desperate use of interest rates as a primary instrument of economic management was harmful both to Labor’s standing and, more importantly, to the lives of ordinary Australians.
So far, I have stepped back to a time within the living memory of many of us. Now, I want to go back further.
In the Australian colonies of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, manhood suffrage preceded the arrival of political parties, in some cases by several decades. Victoria arguably had the first of the mass political parties, the National Reform and Protection League, also known as the Liberal Party, from 1877. Parties are usually acknowledged as having arrived in New South Wales a decade later, at the 1887 election, when rival Protectionists and Free Traders emerged to replace an older, more informal and more fluid faction system. South Australia did not have a party system until the 1890s, while in Queensland, manhood suffrage in 1872 was followed by the emergence of parties lining up behind the political giants of the day, Samuel Griffith and Thomas McIlwraith.
In each case, what contemporaries understood as democracy came first, political parties later. It seems to me that if we are to go far in explaining the “unmaking” of the party system, in the first place we need to establish how it was made. We might expect the erosion of the conditions that initially produced the system to have played a role in its decline.
The Australian colonies had electoral systems that encouraged the political mobilisation needed to create mass political parties. There was manhood suffrage using a secret ballot and official, printed ballot papers. Having abolished property qualifications for the lower houses for most men in Australia by 1872, it was easy for men to get on the electoral roll and to remain there. A similar simplicity was in evidence when women received the franchise in the Commonwealth and states between 1894 and 1909; while some women, such as Vida Goldstein, at first ran as non-party candidates, votes for women did not upturn the emerging party order. On the contrary, organisations such as the highly successful Australian Women’s National League, on the anti-labour side, and the various women’s organising committees of the Labor Party, helped to build the system. Payment of members of parliament began in Victoria in 1870 and extended to the other colonies during the 1880s and 1890s. It was almost certainly a precondition for the formation of labour parties, which began to appear from 1891.
When the Commonwealth parliament first sat in Melbourne in 1901, there were three parties: Liberal Protectionist, Free Trade and Labor. That arrangement mirrored the situation in New South Wales, where three such parties had emerged in 1891. In the early Commonwealth, between 1901 and 1909, no party was able to govern in its own right: each needed to rely on the support of one of the other parties, or at least a part thereof.
The most common pattern in that first decade was for a Liberal Protectionist government, supported by the votes of the Labor Party. Deakin complained in a celebrated speech in 1904 that a three-party system could not work: it was like having three cricket teams out on a field. Yet, with Labor’s support, he created much of the policy regime that would be dismantled in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1905 George Reid, the Free Trade leader from Sydney, tried to force the issue by launching a campaign against Labor, and his party would now often operate under the title “Anti-Socialist.”
But there would be no combination against Labor — not yet. That would have to wait until 1909. By then, parliament had settled on a protectionist tariff, so a contentious point between the two “Liberal” parties was removed. The White Australia policy, industrial arbitration, old age pensions and an Australian navy were all in place. Rising union militancy also encouraged a defensive posture on the part of those parties. And finally, Reid’s retirement removed an obstacle, since Alfred Deakin, the Liberal Protectionist leader, couldn’t stand him.
So, in 1909, the two non-Labor parties combined in a fusion and turned out of office a minority Labor government. When two parties, Labor and Liberal, confronted one another at the following year’s election Labor gained a majority in both houses, the first such party in the world to win a national election.
Political scientists have produced a large body of literature showing how electoral systems shape party systems. Single-member constituencies using first-past-the-post voting, as Australia did in 1910, tend to produce two-party competition. Australia’s use of preferential voting for the House of Representatives since 1918 has had a similar effect; it was introduced in large part to ensure that the Nationalists and the Country Party would not split the non-Labor vote and allow a Labor candidate to gain election.
But what were the societal, cultural and ideological characteristics that underpinned the two-party system? Let me suggest four, while I also explore how three of them have been eroded, possibly strengthening the influence of the fourth.
First, the party system has often been presented as class based. Many people understood society as divided into a working class and a middle class, although other terms were also used. In the Australian self-image (if not in reality) there was no upper class. Once a two-party system emerged, it was accompanied by the assumption that the two parties represented these two classes. Labor was the workers’ and unionists’ party. Liberals were the party of the middle class and employers.
Although commentators noticed that other social groups attached themselves to the major parties, the essence of each party was assumed to be its links to its core of supporters — what might now be called, in American terms, “the base.” My point is not to suggest that the two parties actually represented classes in this way. I am rather making claim about how the party system was imagined, how it could be seen as the “natural” outgrowth of modern industrial society.
A new complexity appeared from the time of the first world war, when a Country Party emerged to represent the interests of those on the land while also claiming to advance “countrymindedness” more generally. This development might have undone the two-party system. But in the federal sphere, after the 1922 election, the Country Party entered into a coalition agreement with the larger non-Labor party, which was at this time called the Nationalists. That meant a return to a modified “two-party” system. It might be tentatively suggested that as it became harder to imagine Australian society as divided into two classes — as it did with the expansion of white-collar work, of women’s employment, and of the professions — it also became harder to imagine a “two-side” system as the expression of the underlying social structure.
Second, there is the role of religion. Judith Brett has argued persuasively that the strength of Protestant-based ideas about the individual conscience within Liberal politics fuelled hostility to Labor’s “machine politics” and its demand that parliamentarians sink their individual judgement for the sake of party unity. Labor’s collectivism sat more comfortably with the Catholic Church’s expectation of adherence to religious doctrine and loyalty to the church.
Brett was staking a claim for the role of denominational difference in moulding the party system, in contrast with the more conventional emphasis on class. Certainly, Catholics gravitated to Labor, Protestants to the Liberals. To take just one example, historian Jeff Kildea tells us that Catholics “were more than half of the Labor caucus and… almost 60 per cent of the cabinet” in federal parliament between 1946 and 1949. They were less a quarter of the population.
The attachment of people to political parties imitated, shadowed and extended their attachment to their religious denomination. That became a major problem for the Labor Party in the 1940s and 1950s, as Catholic parishes became organising hubs for efforts to rid the unions of communist influence and increase the influence of Catholic social doctrine in the Labor Party. It helped cause the split in 1955.
But quite apart from these fireworks, Australia’s reputedly secular brand of politics had an underlying, underestimated spiritual content. For the most important politician of the early Commonwealth, Alfred Deakin, spiritual life gave and inner meaning to everyday politics, his quest for a “Christlike citizenship.” As a young man, he had published a book called A New Pilgrim’s Progress which he believed to have been dictated to him by the spirit of John Bunyan, author of the original in 1678. During difficult periods, he sometimes consulted the spirits of long deceased politicians.
Also notably, if less spookily, the two most famous statements from and about the major parties each appeal to a spiritual ideal. In “The Forgotten People,” his famous 1942 radio broadcast, Robert Menzies appealed to “homes material, homes human, homes spiritual,” while Ben Chifley later evoked Labor’s vision as “The Light on the Hill,” presumably derived from the Matthew, 5:14: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.”
This kind of allusion made sense in an overwhelmingly Christian society; they could be decoded by Protestant and Catholic alike. But what happens when people stop believing? At the 2021 census, Christianity was still the largest religious category, at 43.9 per cent, but those professing no religion came in at 38.9 per cent. Given the significance of religion in shaping Australia’s party system in its formative period, it is surprising how little attention the political implications of these vast changes receive.
Many Australians, if they have any interest in it at all, see religion as something to be chosen from a variety of offerings, as in a marketplace. That looks to me rather like how those same people, especially younger ones, also now choose who they will vote for at elections. They are not inheriting their political allegiances from their parents or even their social milieu any more than they are inheriting, as part of their being, their religious belief and the community life that came with it.
Third, there is race. The politicians who made the early party system all believed in a White Australia. Almost as soon as they had settled into their seats in Parliament House in Spring Street, Melbourne, they were legislating to exclude Asians, to exclude and deport South Sea Islanders and to take votes from Aboriginal people. That is all well enough known; what is less often recognised is that the appeal to whiteness was part of the effort to mobilise support for Australia’s nascent mass political parties.
I have researched one telling example of how this could work: the story of John Quick. A Bendigo lawyer, Quick is sometimes recalled for his role in designing the democratic process by which Australia was federated. What is almost never recalled is that Quick entered Victorian politics in 1880 on a platform of disenfranchising Chinese voters. While he failed, his bill gained the support of the great Liberal leader of the era, Graham Berry, who saw the anti-Chinese issue as a means of rallying mass support when his party fell on hard times.
Racial exclusion was not just one policy among many grafted on to the party system as it developed. It was there in the party system’s DNA. It is at least plausible that the more recent widening cultural and ethnic diversity of Australian society is one of the pressures pulling apart the old two-side system. Clearly, dissatisfaction with immigration policy, invariably linked to concerns over the cost of living and housing, has now emerged as a force recasting the politics of the right as well as a chipping away at Labor’s base.
That brings us to One Nation and what I will treat as the fourth of the underpinning features of the old party system: “antipolitical” political thought. The term “populism” is sometimes used for what I have in mind here. Again, let me take us back to the formative period of the Australian party system.
Pauline Hanson did not invent right-wing populism. The first great conservative populist revolt in Australian history occurred a few months after federation in 1901. Australia was in the grip of the Federation drought, and the economy looked like it was returning to depression. The recent opening of federal parliament made it easy for some to argue Australia was over-governed.
The Kyabram movement emerged from a public meeting in the Victorian town of that name. Commercial and financial interests in Melbourne soon joined with the rural activists in forming the National Citizens’ Reform League. It wanted drastic reductions in the numbers of ministers and parliamentarians at the state level, as well as big public service cuts. And it proved an irresistible force, sweeping into power in Victoria under the leadership of W.H. “Iceberg” Irvine, and then attacking the Victorian railway unions in a bitter and long-remembered strike. This new phase of party organisation, echoed elsewhere in Australia, fed into George Reid’s anti-socialist agitation and helped form a base, as well as an organisational structure, for a new, conservative party nationally.
There would be later such revolts, invariably against Labor governments: against unorthodox financial policy in the Depression of the 1930s; against bank nationalisation in the 1940s; and against social democracy in 1974–75. In each instance, the two-side system quickly absorbed the activities of citizens’ organisations, new staters, Western Australian secessionists, fringe parties, and secret paramilitaries. Mainstream parties on the right gained strength and purpose from these mobilisations.
The Depression saw the Nationalists re-emerge as the United Australia Party, or UAP, and win elections across the nation in the 1930s. World War Two saw the UAP become Menzies’s spectacularly successful Liberal Party. But in each case, the two-side system was resilient. The pattern recurred with One Nation’s first challenge, which the Coalition eventually absorbed after 1998. The question today is whether the system still has the resilience to absorb the latest One Nation shock.
A new book by Oxford academic Anton Jäger might be able to help us here. Jäger argues that we are currently living through the age of “hyperpolitics.” It follows twentieth-century “mass politics,” the “postpolitics” of the 1990s following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the “antipolitics” that came with the global financial crisis of 2008.
The “mass politics” of the twentieth century involved mobilisation and institutionalisation, such as party formation and union organisation. The “postpolitics” of the 1990s was depoliticisation, deinstitutionalisation and a retreat into the private realm. Political parties now shifted to the “electoral professional” model, in which it is politicians, officials and staffers who dominate the show. “Antipolitics,” often called populism, was the revolt of the 2010s, emanating from both left and right, against the alternation in power of mainstream party elites, each seen to be committed to a failed neoliberal order but, above all else, both wedded to enjoying the spoils of office.
“Hyperpolitics” — our present condition, says Jäger — continues this repoliticisation but with even lower levels of institutionalisation than antipolitics. Large numbers of people are emotionally invested in politics but mainly shun the collective voluntary organisation of the older mass politics. Hyperpolitics, in Jäger’s words, is “dynamic, intense, and polarising, yet also ideologically diffuse, visibly modelled on the fluidity of the online world.” The mood “is one of incessant yet uncoordinated excitation. Emotionally, it is related to the crisis of attention characteristic of the age of the smartphone.”
These categories and the chronology underlying them might help us understand One Nation in its latest iteration. It has been nourished by a global “antipolitics” of the populist and demagogic right, epitomised by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and by Fox News and the even more extreme media outlets that appeared in its wake. It finds local expression in organisations such as Advance and events such as CPAC Australia.
Even with its daggy, nostalgic leadership redolent of the heyday of the late Boomers and early Gen Xers, One Nation is parasitic of the online outrage industry, to which it contributes with its own increasingly professionalised social media. In that sense, it is new and modern — part of a global ecosystem, and a style of post-GFC populist, digital politics that Jäger argued “split politics from policy.” It is low on institutionalisation, at least as traditionally understood in the era of mass politics, preferring to mobilise supporters individually in the digital realm and through transgressive political rhetoric and gimmickry.
Consider Hanson’s attitude to party organisation, as revealed in the Q&A of the recent National Press Club lecture. In an ideal world, she implied, One Nation would have no branches because they have only ever caused her trouble. But if she must have them, they needed to be kept firmly under her control. This is not a mass political party of the old kind. Its affiliation with the ephemerality of hyperpolitics, which aligns it with the angry and emotional temper of our politics and is its greatest asset, could also prove its undoing given the ambition to succeed in parliamentary politics. Understood in a longer timeframe, One Nation might be seen as an adapted version of an older tradition of “antipolitical” political mobilisation that has periodically disrupted but failed to displace two-sided competition for government. And perhaps that failure will occur again.
Or perhaps it won’t. It is possible the outcome of the One Nation insurgency will somewhat resemble the Kyabram movement, which transformed wider party configurations in the Federation era. If so, that is obviously bad news for the Coalition parties. There is a parallel here with Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin’s Liberal Protectionists. They were usually in government but were also squeezed at elections in 1903 and 1906 on both right and left. Today’s Coalition is experiencing a similar fate — with Labor, the Greens and the Teals to its left, and One Nation to its right. If it jumps one way to win back disaffected metropolitan voters who have departed for Labor and the Teals, it alienates regional and suburban voters attracted to One Nation. If it moves closer to One Nation in word or deed, it loses support on the other side.
The Coalition’s problem may have no resolution. If that’s the case, we might be seeing the most consequential change in our politics since 1909. One possible result is an extended period of Labor government at the federal level. That would be an unusual development in federal politics, where Labor has governed for about a third of the time since 1909, and its opponents for two-thirds.
Whatever happens electorally, these issues are not just curiosities. They matter for leadership — including who will represent this country’s identity and interests in the wider the world — as well as for every aspect of policy, domestic and foreign. The fate of Australia’s party system has the potential to affect almost every aspect of our shared future. •
