Editorial: Australia catches up - Understanding One Nation's far right surge

We are now at a watershed in Australian politics, the most dramatic developments for decades. The entire political order that has governed Australia for more than a century – the alternation in government of Labor and Liberal-National parties (and their predecessors) – is crumbling. While important developments are under way on the left of politics, with the ALP’s primary vote sinking steadily, the most dramatic change has been a radicalisation of the right. Support for the Liberal Party, the preferred party of the capitalist class, has been dropping for two decades but is now collapsing.

A catalyst for this latest turn and its chief beneficiary has been One Nation, now overtaking the Coalition in the polls. With the far right pushing ahead of the established centre-right parties, Australia is now catching up with much of Europe, where centrist parties have been hammered by the far right since the 1990s. The speed at which Australia is doing so is astonishing, suggesting that processes in this direction have been under way for years but awaiting an outlet around which far-right sentiments could coalesce. One Nation has now become that outlet. Any number of developments may follow; the very future of the Liberal Party is in question.

The Bondi massacre in December was an accelerant to trends already under way: the hardening of the right and increased state repression of civil liberties.

The situation demands resistance on every front which puts a premium on building a much bigger socialist left. “Business as usual” is not an option. If the right is radicalising, we need a radicalisation on the left. Labor’s sinking primary vote and paralysis in the Greens opens the space for socialists to grow, but we can only do so if we seize the opportunity.

How did we get to this moment?

The Liberals may have seen their support collapse in a few short months, but the roots of the crisis lie in the defeat of the Howard government in 2007.

John Howard, prime minister from 1996 to 2007 and the party’s second longest-serving leader, created a right-wing Liberal Party, driving out many of the party’s so-called “moderates”. He brought together a right-wing electoral constituency that allowed him to win four straight elections, thanks in part to rising living standards underpinned by the mining boom.

Howard was able to use his authority to discipline the party and hold One Nation at bay. Following the 1998 breakthrough by One Nation in Queensland, when the party scored 23 percent of the vote and won 11 seats, threatening the Nationals in their heartlands, Howard convinced the Liberals and Nationals to put One Nation last on their how-to-vote cards. This, along with Howard’s adoption of many of Hanson’s policies, determined left-wing protests to prevent One Nation making inroads into Victoria, and One Nation’s internal shambles, sent the party into reverse for several years. The Liberals and Nationals were able to re-cohere their right-wing base in the regional and rural areas while Howard’s tax cuts kept the party’s affluent metropolitan base happy.

The Howard government was eventually destroyed by overreach, as it attacked working-class living standards through its 2005 WorkChoices industrial laws. The resulting backlash cost the prime minister not just government but his own seat at the 2007 election.

Since 2007, the Liberals have been thrashing around, trying to recreate their glory days. The Coalition was returned to office in 2013 and the conservatives won the following two elections. But the Liberals’ internal leadership churn – Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull again, followed by Scott Morrison – told the real story. Whether “moderate” or hard right, they have failed to find a leader with mass appeal, something only reinforced by then opposition leader Peter Dutton’s spectacular failure at the 2025 federal election.

The failure of party leaders to command authority has made it harder for the party to hold together its electoral base. There has always been significant support for the hard right in regional and rural areas which have been the basis of support for a string of right-wing extremist organisations going back more than a century. The most important elements of this strand of Australian politics have been antisemitism, anti-socialism, anti-trade unionism, white supremacy and support for crown and empire. For many decades the Liberal and National parties were able to hegemonise this layer. Gradually, however, they lost their grip on these people to right-wing micro-parties, some little more than vanity projects, who took advantage of disillusionment with the mainstream parties and notched up quite substantial votes at the conservatives’ expense.

On top of the traditional anxieties and hatreds widespread among these regional and rural voters, the far right today feeds on their sense of abandonment, the closure of regional facilities as populations shrink, an increasingly multicultural immigration intake shaking their conception of what it means to be Australian, challenges to gender and family roles, the covid pandemic and associated emergency measures to deal with the virus. Trump’s presidential victories in the US have confirmed in the minds of the far right that their cause is just and right, reinforced by right-wing, US-owned social media companies and Murdoch’s Sky after Dark, which direct a curated diet of right-wing conspiracy theories into their newsfeeds.

The far right has also made inroads in the outer suburbs of the major cities in recent years. Here, it is likely that economic insecurity associated with a cost-of-living crisis and housing unaffordability has been a factor undermining support for both the major parties. While many of this layer might once have voted Labor, the party’s enthusiastic embrace of neoliberalism in the 1980s and the failure of the unions to fight for working-class interests has seen them defect to the right. Labor’s demonisation of refugees and its targeting of immigrants as pushing up house prices created an environment in which open racism has become normalised.

The Liberal Party has shifted steadily to the right to try to capture these voters. In doing so they are following a path trodden by many of their formerly centre-right partners overseas. In a world increasingly characterised by chaos, militarism, irrationalism and growing disenchantment with the record of centre-right governments in office, the far right have promoted themselves as an alternative by popularising authoritarian, blood and soil politics, targeting immigrants, socialists and, in today’s parlance, woke policies for weakening the nation.

The centre-right parties have prepared the way for the far right with their own anti-immigration policies which, far from providing a buffer against the far right, only legitimise them. And while the centre-right parties may initially refuse to form coalitions or election pacts with the far right, little by little, the barriers to partnership have been dismantled. In the case of the United States, this process has taken place within the Republican Party but in Europe and Latin America, the process more commonly involves the rise to power of new right-wing parties.

This process of right-wing radicalisation may have been slowed in Australia to some degree by a lesser degree of social polarisation associated with four decades of unbroken economic growth. However, pressures in this direction have been building up over that time, evident in the votes garnered by far-right parties at successive federal elections.

The Liberal Party membership has also been drifting rightwards as it shrinks and ages. The party itself has shrunk dramatically over many decades and membership now stands at around 25,000, one sixth of the figure in the mid-1970s when the overall population was half the size. Failing to recruit new members, the party is rapidly ageing, with average age of members now standing at 70, nearly twice as old as the median. This shrinking, ageing membership is a support base for the hard right within the party, as is evident from members’ enthusiasm for John Howard, Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton and, today, Andrew Hastie and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.

One Nation, with the biggest brand recognition on the far right, has now seized the moment. The party is potentially on the threshold of displacing the Liberals and Nationals as the main conservative force in Australian politics. Unlike the mainstream conservatives, One Nation has not held office and therefore disappointed its supporters, and since they have not been the main opposition party, have not been under pressure to respond to every policy debate that might potentially alienate sections of its base. They are filling the space of an increasingly discredited centre-right Liberal Party which in shifting right itself has only legitimised and normalised One Nation. Pauline Hanson’s party can both pose as a mouthpiece of the hard right and rail against what it calls the failed duopoly of Labor and the Liberals.

Because One Nation can pick and choose where they engage, they are united in their ideological message: anti-immigration, anti-“woke”, anti-socialist and anti-welfare (except for small business, farmers and mining companies). Dutton believed the Liberals could use the 2023 Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum to whip up racism and win votes on that basis. The main beneficiary however was the far right, which seized on the campaign to radicalise its supporters and won over Liberal voters at the 2025 federal election.

It is not just on the right that the Liberals are losing their base. At the 2013 election, the Liberals won 44 metropolitan seats; they now hold just nine. Labor has picked up the majority of the party’s urban seats – 28 – most in the middle and outer suburbs. But the most devastating blow to the party has been the loss of five wealthy, blue-ribbon Liberal seats in Sydney and one each in Melbourne and Perth: Wentworth, Mackellar, Warringah, Bradfield, North Sydney, Kooyong and Curtin. These are not just any seats. For many years Liberal branches in these electorates provided the party with their leaders, their front bench, their up-and-comers, their funding and their access to business executives and other channels of influence. These were the branches that mattered. Almost all of them were lost in the 2022 election, and the follow-up defeat last May– with Tim Wilson the only Liberal to grab a seat back off the teals – suggests that these seats aren’t coming back to the Liberal Party any time soon. For now, at least, the socially liberal, economically neoliberal teals have stolen this element of the Liberal base, while Labor has grabbed two dozen seats in the middle and outer rings.

The problem for the Liberals is that they are now, with a few exceptions, restricted to seats in regional and rural areas but cannot win a federal election by relying solely on these seats, given two-thirds of electorates are in the cities. Combined losses in the cities to the teals and Labor mean that the Liberals now hold just 34 seats out of 150 in the lower house, half the number they had before the 2022 election. The party is left with no seats in Tasmania after last year’s election. None in the ACT. None in the NT. In NSW they lost four seats, in Queensland, five and two in Tasmania. Millions spent by the Gina Rinehart-funded propaganda vehicle Advance to promote the Liberals’ cause at the 2025 election did nothing to help them.

In the Senate, the Liberals (including the LNP in Queensland) hold 25 spots and the Nationals another two out of 75, as against 39 for Labor and the Greens, the biggest deficit faced by the mainstream conservatives since the 1940s.

The situation is only getting worse as depopulation of the bush sees the Liberal and National’s natural constituencies lose numbers on the floor of parliament.

The Liberal Party is faring no better in state government, holding only Queensland and Tasmania. The result – leadership instability – is the same there: eight leadership changes at state or territory level since August 2024.

The Liberals are losing ground across important demographics. They have little support among young people. But nor are they winning among millennials, those in their 30s and early 40s who might once have transitioned from Labor to the Coalition as they aged. At the 2025 election, just one in five millennials voted for the Coalition. The Menzies-era Liberal Party put great store in home ownership steering voters towards the Liberal Party. That has now gone into reverse as younger voters see no reason to identify with the party advocating multibillion dollar tax breaks for property investors. Last year, the conservative parties won only two seats where more than one-third of the electorate are renters. The Coalition is becoming increasingly dependent on older voters, born during the postwar boom decades but who are now literally dying out.

Nor is the Coalition advancing in seats with migrant groups the Liberals hope to win sympathy with. In a range of seats, the Liberals have selected non-Anglo migrant candidates and assiduously worked their respective business associations, but this has not translated into votes. Of the 50 electorates with the highest migrant populations, the Liberals hold just two. Dutton’s strategy of targeting No-voting outer suburban seats traditionally held by Labor on the basis of an anti-woke, economically aspirational platform came to nothing. Indeed, the Liberals went backwards in these areas.

Then there is the Liberals’ “women problem”, a euphemism for the party’s sexism. Sussan Ley’s dumping as leader after just nine months, leaving only five women in the party room, will only have reinforced this in the minds of potential Liberal voters. This, combined with the fact Labor has made women a significant focus, means the Liberals are starting from behind, with nothing to offer half the electorate. Liberal support among university-educated women in white-collar jobs, an increasingly important element of the workforce, is minimal – of the top 20 electorates by percentage of professional women, the Liberals hold just one.

The mainstream conservatives are in crisis, then, because they are losing two key constituencies, in the cities and in regional and rural areas. The more the Liberals swing further to the right in an attempt to hold on to the latter, the more they are likely to alienate the former. But judging from the experience of the Turnbull leadership, and, today, Ley, positioning as “moderates” won’t win the teal supporters back either. And, when push comes to shove, the “moderates” capitulate to the hard right of the party every time. It was the moderate Turnbull who as prime minister not only carried out traditional pro-capitalist policies like cutting corporate tax, removing restrictions on concentration of media ownership and reintroducing the anti-union Australian Building and Construction Commission but who also blocked the introduction of marriage equality for two years. It was Ley who in her last weeks in office went full Trump, drawing up an immigration program barring citizens from countries supposedly hosting Islamist terrorist groups.

The Bondi massacre and its aftermath

Support for the Liberals has been weakening for years. One Nation has been steadily climbing in the polls for more than a year. Government repression of protest movements, in particular the climate movement but more recently Palestine demonstrations, has been increasing. But the Bondi massacre and the ruling-class offensive against the Palestine movement that followed have brought things to a boil.

Ever since the first demonstrations were called in solidarity with Palestine on 9 October 2023, the ruling class has been attacking the movement for supposedly making Jews feel “unsafe”. The media have uncritically regurgitated every story of supposed antisemitic attack and sheeted home blame for them to the weekly Palestine solidarity demonstrations in Sydney and Melbourne. They have slandered the movement as “extremist” and invoked “social cohesion” to try to silence protests.

The Bondi Beach massacre gave the ruling class an opportunity to ratchet up pressure on the movement. While the offensive was initiated by the Coalition parties, One Nation, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Zionist Federation and the Murdoch press, it was quickly taken up by a broad spectrum of ruling-class bodies, including big business lobby groups, former heads of security agencies and armed forces, judges and barristers, the editors of the ABC and Nine newspapers and university vice-chancellors.

The right-wing offensive cohered on a series of demands: full implementation of the Segal Report recommendations, a set of McCarthyite measures aimed in particular at the universities and ABC, a royal commission into antisemitism and legislation to criminalise so-called “hate speech” and “hate groups”, by which they meant the Palestine solidarity campaign.

The ruling class has made some important gains out of its despicable weaponisation of the Bondi massacre. Having initially opposed a royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion, the Albanese government agreed to it, with hearings already under way. The right will now use the royal commission hearings to demand a crackdown on the Palestine movement and attack immigrants. The widening of powers of the security agencies that will undoubtedly result from the royal commission will allow the police and security forces greater leeway to attack the freedoms of the Palestine campaign to organise.

The Albanese government has agreed to implement all the recommendations of the Segal report, to accept the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and to pass hate speech laws. It invited the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog to visit Australia to reinforce good relations with the apartheid state. The Minns government banned street demonstrations in Sydney and orchestrated a savage attack by 3,500 riot police against a demonstration called by the Palestine Action Group (PAG) to protest Herzog’s visit.

State Labor governments in Victoria and WA are moving ahead with laws to give the police greater powers to restrict demonstrations. The Crisafulli LNP government in Queensland has introduced legislation to prohibit even the expression of pro-Palestine slogans.

It is unclear exactly how things will pan out in coming months, but the frenzied media campaign against PAG and, specifically, organiser Josh Lees, suggests that the Palestine movement will be squarely in the sights of state and federal governments. How much the university vice-chancellors will prosecute Palestine activism on campus, a particular animus of the right-wing campaign, will be clearer in coming months. We don’t know how much the NSW Police and Minns government will regard the police riot in Sydney as a model for future responses; for now, the restrictions on Palestine demonstrations have been lifted. Regardless of short-term considerations, it is easy to foresee how this machinery of repression will be rolled out against any movement in future challenging Australia’s involvement in a US war in Asia or against striking trade unionists.

The ruling class has not had it all its own way since the Bondi massacre. The Palestine movement refuses to be cowed by the ruling-class offensive. Few were prepared to sign on to a campaign supposedly to combat racism that featured figures like John Howard, Pauline Hanson and Tony Abbott. So, when the board of the South Australian Writers Festival, on the orders of premier Peter Malinauskas, cancelled Randa Abdel-Fattah’s appearance at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival in January, it was heartening but no surprise to see the majority of other invited speakers pull out, wrecking the festival.

The ruling class believed they could use Herzog’s visit to rebuild Israel’s image in public opinion and to marginalise the Palestine movement. But it wasn’t difficult to see the cynicism involved in a tour by a man who had signed IDF missiles and declared the entire population of Gaza military targets. The Palestine movement struck back, organising rallies in 26 towns and cities to protest the visit. Tens of thousands came out on demonstrations across the country. The Minns government’s violent attack on the Sydney demonstration meant that the media story of the week was not happy photo ops of Herzog meeting school children and gladhanding politicians but mass opposition on the streets to the Israeli president.

The resilience and defiance of the Palestine movement should not, however, make us overlook the dominant feature of the political landscape: the radicalisation of the right.

While Ley may have made the running in the early days after the Bondi massacre, her demand for hate speech legislation backfired on the Coalition. The Liberals, under pressure from the ruling class and Israel’s supporters to pass the Albanese government’s bill, supported it after doing their best to ensure it could not be used to target racists. The Nationals, keen to keep the faith with unapologetic racists and to prevent a further drift of support to One Nation, opposed it. The Coalition split for a second time and then again reunited but on an even more right-wing basis. Disastrous polling for the Liberals in the face of One Nation’s rise was the catalyst for a leadership spill, resulting in Ley’s replacement by the hard right’s Angus Taylor, who immediately raised anti-immigration and Muslim-bashing rhetoric and appointed right-wing warriors Hastie and Price to his shadow Cabinet. Should Taylor fail to lift polling for the Liberals he in turn will be replaced by Hastie or a similar figure from the party’s far right, confirming an almost complete ideological convergence with One Nation.

The Liberals’ recent internal disarray and continued drift to the right is in large part a function of One Nation’s success. Hanson’s party now regularly runs second in polling, drawing support primarily from the mainstream right parties. If One Nation can turn polling support into votes, it could become the second largest party in federal and many state parliaments. That would be the most dramatic shift in Australian politics since the formation of the ALP in the 1890s.

Far from moderating its political stance as their support has soared, One Nation has become even more extreme, dispensing with the niceties of the soft racist distinction between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims” to denounce the entire religion and its practitioners. Every other right-wing cause – reducing immigration, especially from Muslim and other “brown” nations, the flag, the national anthem, the armed forces, Australia Day, men’s rights, anti-vaccination – is now being deployed by One Nation as it seeks to consolidate its new position as a catch-all party of the entire far right in Australia.

The Liberals and Nationals are now at risk of being wiped out by One Nation. That is the imminent threat and one the Liberals are countering by pushing further to the right to try to win back defectors to One Nation. At the forthcoming Farrer by-election, all three parties will be fielding candidates. In that sense the traditional conservative parties are in a fight for their lives. But whoever wins, the rightward shift in Australian politics will continue. More unites them than divides them: all three are racist, nationalist, militarist, anti-welfare, pro-Trump, anti-union and anti-socialist. That Barnaby Joyce, once deputy prime minister and leader of the National Party, could decamp to One Nation without any obvious change of political line demonstrates that all three parties are cut from the same cloth. More defections are likely, as we are witnessing senior Tories jumping over to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. A realignment of the right-wing parties, the better to take the fight to the Albanese government, is by no means ruled out.

How can we fight the right?

Over the course of One Nation’s life, the dominant liberal response has been to denounce Hanson as a simple-minded bigot and to argue against any mobilisations against her on the basis that they would just “draw attention to her” or “give her oxygen”. Others comforted themselves, with somewhat more justification, that she should just be ignored because her movement would collapse, as it has done several times since its formation in 1997.

These arguments were an excuse for passivity. There was no basis to suggest that by not protesting she would be denied publicity; the entire spectrum of media gave her intensive coverage in the late 1990s, transforming her from a minor independent on the floor of parliament to a national figure. Several factors were responsible, but it cannot be denied that big protests outside planned Hanson public meetings in Victoria played a role in cruelling her attempt to break through in that state in the late 1990s.

Today, the argument to “just ignore” One Nation is more dangerous. One Nation is no longer a noisy but minor force in national politics. It is pulling support in the mid-20s across the country. The party is attracting funding from the country’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, and a growing cohort of other capitalists. With its reach and funding, One Nation is in a better position to set up stable structures with competent organisers. This is not to say it will sustain its current level of support; it could stabilise or fall back. But even if One Nation did collapse, that would not be the end of the far right. The Liberals and Nationals are both going in that direction anyway, in line with their peers across the world.

Any idea we can look to the Liberals and Nationals as a bulwark against One Nation is evidently a dead end and should not need saying. But unfortunately, it does. Some figures in and around the ALP have argued recently that progressives must “throw our votes behind the Liberal”, as former NSW premier Bob Carr put it in relation to the Farrer by-election where Labor has no chance of winning. This will supposedly send a message to migrants and international observers that “race prejudice” is unwelcome in Australia. But this approach is a dead end. How does voting for a Liberal candidate anywhere help beat back racism when the entire party is chock full of racists and elected representatives are bound by the party caucus to vote for the racist bill of fare that now forms the Liberal program? While socialists advocate putting One Nation last, this in no sense involves relying on the Liberals or Nationals to fight Hanson & Co. We need to fight all the parties of the right. And that means building a bigger left alternative.

Nor can Labor be a defence against the rise of the far right. Support for Labor has held up in the polls since the last election but this is not out of any love for the party or its leaders, it is rather a function of widespread antipathy towards the opposition. Despite its electoral dominance the ALP is possibly the weakest it has ever been, undermined by its much-diminished membership and a decrepit union movement that seems incapable of doing anything other than posting on social media, all made worse by its decades of right-wing policies. This has resulted in extremely low party loyalty, as seen in its historically low primary vote.

Whether in opposition or in office, Labor pursues an uninspiring program that is incapable of responding to the widespread disgust towards the status quo. Labor’s nationalism, its racist immigration policies and Islamophobia, its anti-protest laws and its military expansionism and slavish loyalty to the US only reinforce and legitimise right-wing positions. The Albanese government’s callous response to the plight of the so-called “ISIS brides” and their children, stuck in horrific conditions in Syrian camps, demonstrates that Labor’s reaction to the rise of One Nation is to ape them, not fight them.

Nor do the Greens offer any real solution to the rise of Hanson and the right. For the past two or three years, their modus operandi has been to do deals with Labor and to promote themselves as a party of progressive liberalism, part of respectable society. This tendency only accelerated after Adam Bandt and Queensland MHR Max Chandler-Mather lost their seats at last year’s election, leaving in charge Larissa Waters, the epitome of milquetoast liberalism. The Greens’ desire not to rock the boat was demonstrated by their decision to back the antisemitism royal commission.

Chandler-Mather and close ally Jonathan Sriranganathan have both criticised the Greens’ recent trajectory and argued for a more fighting stance. But while this might appeal to young white-collar workers being squeezed by rising rents who might once have voted Labor, it runs up against the interests of a significant element of the party’s constituency of middle-aged home-owning professionals with whom the Greens compete for votes with the teals. Trying to straddle these two constituencies prevents the Greens from giving a clear anti-capitalist lead, one that might involve strikes and picket lines that would give courage to our side and demoralise the right. The Greens have simply failed to capitalise on the political turmoil of the past 12 months, their polling remaining static. The contrast with the Greens in the UK, who have built out of disillusionment with the Starmer Labour government, is obvious.

To push back the right, we need to fight them, and this fight needs to have at its centre working-class politics and action. The current trade union leaders, loyal as they are to the Labor Party, will not lead this fight. They refuse to mobilise against One Nation, excusing themselves with the argument that many of their members support the party and will quit the union if it attacks them. Better stick to the bread-and-butter demands for higher wages and better conditions that all workers can support, they argue. But union leaders are not even doing that. They are failing on both fronts. They have quashed strikes and collective struggle for years, and refuse to oppose seriously Labor policy, even when it means remaining silent about a genocide. They have sat on their hands as the cost-of-living crisis rolls on into its fifth year, and their refusal to organise strikes has allowed the bosses to get away with murder.

This leaves the considerable number of people who want higher wages and are willing to do something to get them, who are disgusted by genocide backed by Western powers, and who want to see money going to health and education rather than nuclear submarines, without any mainstream leadership. This is the constituency the Socialist Party is attempting to connect with and give hope to. It is both a strength and a weakness that this left pole is currently largely unorganised and without credible leadership: it is less influenced by the apologists for the system that dominate official politics, but also it is a huge endeavour to begin to organise this layer into a political force that can make an impact on the political landscape. This is why involving more people in socialist organising is such an urgent priority: we need an anti-capitalist force that argues for working-class unity against racism, for improving living standards through unity in action against the bosses and their servants in Canberra, and that shows the real power workers have, which means we do not have to rely on political “leaders” in parliament or the unions to change things for us—we have that power ourselves.

This, then, tells us the priorities for our side. There is no point bemoaning the failure of the centre to hold back the far right. The sustained anti-war movement that has mobilised on our streets for well over two years and the widespread disgust at the Albanese government rolling out the welcome mat to Herzog tell us that millions are pissed off with what’s currently on offer. The continued turn-up at Invasion Day rallies despite the loss of the Albanese government’s insipid Voice to Parliament referendum shows that people will resist racism even if the government won’t. Across the country, the Socialist Party is preparing to mobilise for local, state and federal elections in the coming years to put up a real challenge to the ALP and Greens. If you want to be part of resisting the rise of the right and fighting for a working-class alternative, there has never been a better time to get involved.

Tom Bramble has published widely on political economy and the labour movement and is a regular contributor to Marxist Left Review. His recent books include Introducing Marxism: A Theory of Social Change and The Fight for Workers’ Power: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in the 20th Century (with Mick Armstrong).