By popular I mean they have the highest primary vote - I don’t believe that’s irrelevant
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I was responding to Tessa’s post - ha you seem very grumpy this morning @swoodley
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What is the current government and opposition getting so wrong that its driving people to ON?
I ask this alot and am normally met with the same old “EVERYONE IS RACIST” response.
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I would tell you…
But that’s exactly the response I’d get. Plus a ban.
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ON is gaining traction from voters from both major’s.
Its not a left and right thing when its drawing in voters from both sides.
Was talking to someone the other day who has been life long ALP voter and is now planning on voting ON.
From the Government’s perspective, one of their major issues is the lack of a sympathetic mainstream media outlet.
Murdoch’s press and electronic media outlets do not give balanced reporting on issues of the day and never miss the slightest opportunity to smear Labor and the Government in general.
They do say things that allow those potential ON followers to move across and feel good about themselves.
People like Peta Credlin also regularly attack the Liberals as not being Right enough and so some more people swing to ON.
Question for you @scotty21 and @Donslaught9 …do you think that MPs (of all persuasions) should attend a majority of parliamentary sessions so that they are up to date and able to vote on the various pieces of legislation put forward?
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Then you know why.
I mean, surely they told you why they’re making such a radical departure from their previous values?
Edit: Scotty…you regularly ask left-leaning posters to explain why people would vote for a party with a racist moron for a leader…as if the onus is on them to answer.
You never try to explain it yourself. It’s a very silly gotcha. It was silly then. It’s silly now.
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I’ve said this before but it bears repeating. I understand why someone would want to Not vote ALP or LNP.
That doesn’t come anywhere near explaining why a person would choose ON to switch to.
There are other options that are not racist, that are not incompetent, that don’t expose their idiocy to the nation every other day.
If the reason people switch to specifically One Nation is not that they’re both racist and stupid, then what is it?
The Liberal Party are just as forthright on immigration, are they not?
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Here is a view that’s might help explain the rise of ON. Might be right might be wrong. And no it’s not because 31% of Australians indicating they’d vote for ON are all racists
One Nation now speaks for a generation politics ignored
By Kos Samaras
There is a moment in the life of a democracy when anger stops being episodic and becomes structural. Australia reached that moment quietly, somewhere between the shutdown of the last car plant and a mortgage repayment that swallowed everything left after the groceries.
One Nation’s extraordinary rise, from fringe irritant to genuine political force reshaping state and federal contests, is not a story about Pauline Hanson. It is a story about what happens when a significant cohort of Australians spends nearly two decades watching its world dismantled, its concerns dismissed, and its votes treated as a problem to be managed rather than a signal to be heard.
To understand where we are, you have to start at the GFC.
The global financial crisis did not devastate Australia the way it savaged the United States or the United Kingdom. Our banks held. Our stimulus worked. We were told we had dodged a bullet. What we were not told was that the political class had drawn exactly the wrong lesson – that the system was fundamentally sound, that the recovery validated the existing order, and that the people most exposed to structural economic global change would simply adapt.
That global change arrived and the places where they lived paid the price for that flawed assumption for the next 15 years.
The factories went first. Ford closed its Australian manufacturing operations in 2016. Toyota followed. Holden, the car that was, in many ways, the symbolic marque of Australian working-class aspiration, ceased local production the same year. Thirty thousand direct jobs. Multiples of that in the supply chain. Gone, not in a crisis, but as a considered policy outcome.
These jobs did not exist in the inner suburbs or the postcodes that hosted ministerial fundraisers. The automotive supply chain ran through Geelong, through Adelaide’s northern corridor, through Elizabeth and Broadmeadows and regional Victorian towns where the assembly plant wasn’t just an employer, it was the economic spine of the community. When it went, so did the hardware stores, the mechanics, the futures.
Then the change came for regional industries. Timber communities across Tasmania, Victoria’s east, and Western Australia watched native forestry contracts expire, with transition packages that transitioned nobody to anything meaningful, a political conversation about their lives conducted entirely by people who had never set foot in their towns. The same pattern repeated across Queensland and regional New South Wales: rationalisation announced from a capital city, the impact absorbed by people with no seat at the table.
Steel. Textiles. Abattoirs. Canneries. What these industries shared was this: they employed people with TAFE qualifications, trade certificates, and decades of embodied knowledge that the market, suddenly, had no use for. And they were concentrated in places both major parties had quietly classified as safe.
The political abandonment
For decades, Labor held its outer suburban and regional heartland not because it was attentive to it, but because those voters had nowhere else to go. Seats across Melbourne’s north and west, across the Hunter and Illawarra, across regional Queensland, were banked. Resources flowed to marginals. The base was managed with the confidence of a party that believed its working-class voters were permanent.
The Liberals did the same in their own regional pockets, assuming conservative loyalty would endure regardless of what was actually delivered.
The consequence was political abandonment dressed up as electoral strategy. Infrastructure spending followed marginal seat maps. Outer Melbourne’s northern fringe – communities like Melton, Wyndham and Hume – expanded at enormous pace with minimal investment in the services that should have accompanied that growth. Regional cities were told their time was coming. It never did.
What grew in place of those industries was the gig economy, the ideological triumph of flexibility rebranded as freedom. Labour without conditions, without superannuation certainty, without sick leave, without any of the institutional architecture working Australians had spent a century building.
Middle-aged workers who had done everything right – the trade, the mortgage, the kids – found themselves competing for hours in a market that rewarded precarity and punished loyalty.
The crises that compounded
For 15 years, the housing market sent the same message: get in now, or get out forever. So they got in. They borrowed at the edge of what the bank would approve, bought further from the city than they wanted, commuted longer than was reasonable, and told themselves the sacrifice was temporary.
Low interest rates made the mathematics survivable. Then they didn’t. When the Reserve Bank began lifting rates in 2022, it didn’t just make new borrowing harder, it detonated debt that had been quietly accumulating for a decade in households with no margin left.
In outer suburban Melbourne, in regional Queensland, in the growth corridors of western Sydney, families who had done everything the system asked found their repayments consuming 40, 50, 60 cents of every dollar earned. The promise that had justified every sacrifice – that homeownership was the floor beneath Australian life – turned out to be a debt trap.
For those still renting in their 50s, it was worse. The same rate rises that punished mortgaged households pushed rents to levels that made saving a deposit a mathematical impossibility. The ladder hadn’t just gotten harder to climb. For many, it had been pulled up entirely.
Then came healthcare. In outer suburban and regional communities, bulk-billing has collapsed. GP waitlists stretch for weeks. The chronic disease burden in these areas is measurably higher, type 2 diabetes prevalence runs significantly above the national average in lower-socioeconomic and regional postcodes, a direct consequence of food access, physical stress, and inadequate preventive care.
Then came inflation. Then an energy crisis and a cost-of-living squeeze that consumed what little remained.
The verdict
This is the constituency One Nation is capturing. Not because its policies are coherent or its prescriptions adequate, they are neither. But because Pauline Hanson and her candidates offer something the major parties stopped offering a long time ago: the acknowledgement that something has gone badly wrong, and that somebody is responsible for it.
These voters are not confused. They are not susceptible to simple manipulation. They have lived, for nearly two decades, through the managed decline of the world they were promised, and they have watched the institutions charged with their welfare either accelerate that decline or look away. Their verdict, delivered through the ballot box in growing numbers, is not a protest. It is revenge.
The question for Australian politics is not how to manage One Nation’s rise. It is whether either major party is still capable of understanding what produced it.
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In a nutshell.
Moronic own the libs by making things worse for everybody.
I doubt, but Kos says she will lose her seat so anything could happen.
I actually don’t care, we all deserve to have Pauline run the place.
It’s certainly not an informed protest, given how anti-worker (especially at lower income levels) Hanson has long been.
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About time the keys to Australia were handed over to the Chinese who could productively run this country.
I think older white Australia very racist . gotta remember we had a white Australia policy for 50 years or more ..so older anglo Irish / English type australia has some deeply ingrained racist attitudes . if not outright racist it’s a feeling that foreigners are taking what they are entitled to .I think younger Australia is much better , I guess because a large number today are have family links other countries or are directly from immigrants
hanson says outright racist things so it you support her you have to wear that label too. it’s like saying adolf hitlet wasn’t a bad bloke aside from the holocaust stuff
But you’ve also had responses (admittedly fewer, because it sticks in the craw for most) that if people are so worried about housing affordability, energy costs, cost of living, workers rights, and yes, even sustainable migration, then the Greens have better policies than ON in every one of these areas. Costed and published policies.
So, given that there is a better alternative answer to each of the concerns that are “more than just racism”, why would anyone move to ON and not the Greens?
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Oh, and just another reminder that two days ago Pauline and her lot votes against an increase to the minimum wage.
They voted against an increase to the minimum wage.
Who would like to explain that to me?
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and don’t forget about her policy of forcing all non citizens to hand back their houses even permanent residents . they are looking to.pick a fight on abortion , they will implode , it’s only a matter.of when not if.
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Yep. That’s bigger than it has so far been acknowledged.
These people are utter ■■■■■ looking to import another country’s dysfunctional and corrupt society and culture wars.
A vote for One Nation is now also a vote for oppressing women.
The list of things that voting for this party “is not just because of” was already indefensible, but it’s only getting worse.
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I can’t wait to see who they roll out for shadow cabinet if they do make opposition status . I just cannot see them getting even close to that . they just won’t win enough inside the capitals . I don’t know what the demographic is that are being polled but I simply don’t believe them