Featured
4 Million People in 18 Months
What the Polls Say About the Rise of One Nation
On the 29th of August at 10:30pm, the ABC announced One Nation’s candidate, Luke Herdegen, as the projected winner of the Western Australian seat of Secret Harbour. It is an unprecedented upset; in 2021, Labor won the seat with 71% primary support, and within five years they saw a 47% swing against them. The seat was called officially on September 9th, the speaker of the house was informed of the result and Luke Herdegen, the first One Nation MP in the state’s history, was sworn into the State Parliament in what was once one of the safest ALP seats in the country.
The seat isn’t unusual. It’s an hour and a half drive from an urban centre where the national average is an hour, and houses are roughly 300k more affordable than in central Perth. Most in the area have a mortgage, people aged 39–54 are the main voting block, and half of the population claims English ancestry (against the national average of a third). It is a population older, whiter, and more rural than average, but it is by no means an abnormality. For the upcoming Victorian election, election analyst Kos Samaras lists over a dozen seats with the same make-up.
With State and Federal elections expected in imminent years, pollsters and politicians are currently fretting over the same question. What the hell is going on in the electorate?
The rise
Looking at national polling gives one explanation. In 2016, Pauline Hanson returned to lead the party and for the next nine years the party averaged between 4–6% of the national vote. In the May 2025 election they netted 6% of the vote, but by June 2026 national polls had the party overtaking Labor at 31%, quintupling in less than a year and a half. For an electorate of 18 million, that’s over 4 million people.
However, consider what happened in that time. Since the announcement of the 2025 election in March that year, two major events occurred — firstly, the Liberal Party lost, both decisively and suddenly. In February 2025, YouGov projected a clear coalition victory 73 seats to 66, and come May, they had lost 15 seats and the entire election, as shown in the polling below:
The Liberals’ own review implies a party seen as unserious, chaotic, and lacking policy depth. Metropolitan voters swung towards Labor or independents, and right wing voters saw a party no more incompetent or shambolic than the other right wing option, One Nation.
By November, off the back of infighting and splits with the Nationals, the Coalition primary vote fell seven points, picked up by One Nation, who reached 15%. Within just over half a year since the election, the party was polling on-par with the Greens. However, one month later, the Bondi shooting would occur.
On the 14th of December, two gunmen with ties to the Islamic State, a permanent resident and an Australian citizen, would open fire on a Hanukkah celebration taking place along Bondi Beach. The six-minute attack resulted in 16 people killed and 41 injured.
The perpetrator’s Islamic and immigrant backgrounds mean existing narratives of foreign migration and Islam as destabilising became less taboo, with the horrible event cited as evidence. One Nation, a party who for decades had never shied away from that taboo, rose another 15 points to 30%, tying with the ALP in June. Post-Bondi, their primary vote grew from roughly 1 percentage point per month to 1.6.
The taboos around policy discipline and anti-Islam, that had for years made the party toxic weakened, and combined with a bandwagon effect to legitimise the party in the eyes of the general public.
But the shooting and infighting as the main explanations for One Nation’s rise leaves two issues. Firstly, it leaves the mystery of who is voting for the party and why, and secondly, it gives no agency to the party itself; the presumption is that these events just happened, and numbers just moved. Examining demographic polling can give us more answers.
Who are they?
A June poll by Desmos AU found that the two defining characteristics of the One Nation cohort are that they are rural and 55 years of age or older. There is a slight overrepresentation of women, 32% against 29%, who on average only speak English and are more likely to own a mortgage then either rent or own their own home. They have most likely defected from the Liberal Party (“blue” One Nation voters), but increasingly there is a cohort of “red” voters who have left the Labor party as well. These demographics are in line with those of Secret Harbour.
Judging off of this data, the stereotypical voter is a 55 or older rural woman who does not own their own home and makes less than 45 thousand dollars a year — your average aged pensioner. The issues that push people to vote for One Nation are, safe to assume, ones that resonate with this cohort (55, non-home owners) and the broader electorate simultaneously. There is still diversity within One Nation voters, as outside of rural areas, no one indicator is above or below the national vote of 30% by more than a few points, hinting at the diversity of demands made on the party. George Megalogenis points out that an urban and rural divide comes with different attitudes as well as different living conditions. He’s not the first person to notice this, but he does make it relevant to Australia by pointing out it’s a generational divide. Over half of Australians are first or second generation migrants living in a capital city. They tend to see the country as a multicultural country. Rural populations are dominated by much older 3rd-6th generational migrants from Ireland, the UK, New Zealand, or Europe, and tend to see the country as a Commonwealth country. This is an important difference, with the over-representation of older rural voters hinting at a broader divide in attitudes.
This also explains not just the aggregate composition of the party, but also the likely location of seats they are looking to contest. Secret Harbour, Farrer, and the competitive Victorian seats that One Nation is looking to pick up in the upcoming state election are whiter and older than the national average, suggesting a demographic more sympathetic with parts of One Nation’s anti-immigration policies. It’s important to remember that although One Nation is not expected to pick up diverse inner city seats, they are expected to gain votes there; even if the base of the party caters most towards rural and suburban Australia, they clearly resonate across the country.
Get William Dwyer’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Megalogenis’ perspective clarifies the demands of voters but this alone is not enough. You can use demographics as a source of underlying attitudes, but eventually you will need to ask voters what their attitudes actually are, and give the party agency in the explanation of its own rise.
What do they want
The clearest head describing these issues is Tony Barry. He works for Redbridge Polling (the same company as Kos Samaras), and as a result can convey some of his otherwise paywalled findings to the public. His modelling suggests that the party’s vote is split roughly into thirds based on the topics of economy, immigration, and grievance.
The economic voters are the easiest to describe in data. Since 2022, the country has seen a real GDP per capita reduction, which in effect means Australians have gotten poorer owing to inflation, weak GDP growth, and interest rate hikes. People have noticed the unaffordability of day-to-day living, with consumer confidence low and falling. Also recalling that most One Nation voters do not own their own home, the price of mortgage repayments has also increased rapidly from 26% of income in 2022 to 48% in 2024, along with similar jumps in rental costs as rentals are often mortgaged investment properties. Against a backdrop of slowing growth, increasing housing costs is a massive pressure, especially for a cohort making less than 45k per year. Descriptions of the One Nation vote stemming mostly from desperation and cost of living pressures usually have this group in mind.
“There’s no good news for these major parties on the horizon. Interest rate rises, housing prices are going to increase, they haven’t got immigration under control. … people are looking to One Nation and going, “Help”, basically, “please someone do something.””
— Stuart Bonds, South Australian candidate for One Nation
The next group are migration voters, with migration polled to be the party’s strongest issue, polling above both the Coalition and Labor on the topic. In some respects, this is a mechanisation of economic grievances; in others, it is a unique issue. Australia saw a massive spike in net overseas migration post-COVID, reaching 555,800 by 2023, though falling to 300,000 in 2025. The dip from COVID means there are less overall migrants in the country, but more year-on-year arrivals (projected until 2026–7). It has been argued that this spike has overstretched domestic capacity, while others argue it is the result of demand for labour. Regardless, people blame the issues in part for the cost of living.
Migration is also dually perceived as economic and cultural. Within right-wing spaces, there are existing accusations that the U.K. is becoming a Muslim country, and racial suspicions of non-white people living within the E.U persist alongside accusations that the continent is under threat. It is these same suspicions that exist within Australia’s own domestic discussion around migration. The “March For Australia” rallies are an example of this, where January protesters held banners reading “where are all the houses” (economic) and “stop the white replacement” (a dog whistle). As News 24’s political editor Andrew Clennel put bluntly:
“…the dog whistle for them ultimately, which a lot of people want to hear, is less Muslim immigration… we [One Nation] won’t take them from certain countries, read: less Muslim immigration.”
Finally, grievance voters are a clear indication of the frustration Australians feel, directed at the current political and social institutions. Descriptions of the party as a ‘protest vote’ are usually talking about these voters. Perceptions of the major parties in modern Australia are incredibly low; they are seen to be managers, not reformers, aware of but silent on most issues, and most voters do not believe they stand for anything. Labor’s identity centres around being for the worker, probably explaining why it has not lost as much of its primary vote share as the Liberal Party, but the ALP is regardless seen as too timid.
What’s interesting about the Liberal Party is that its rightward shift likely hasn’t helped its perception among voters. The largest issues for voters are economic, but the Liberal Party has been moving right on cultural issues, and in effect not speaking to most voters’ concerns. For some voters COVID has also raised the bar for government action, and feel as if the parties are not cooperating as much as they did then.
As for why One Nation is the vehicle for this frustration, part of this is Hanson herself. Barry explains that she’s seen as an outsider, a wrecking ball, and someone who speaks her mind. When she says things that are too far outside a supporter’s beliefs, her unfiltered tendencies mean they are willing to say “I don’t hold that belief” and then vote for the party anyway. Another explanation is that after the Bondi terror attacks, more people are willing to see ideas they don’t believe in expressed through controversial statements as marks of honesty, not necessarily marks of genius.
Another factor is the views of the other parties. Historically, for example, economics has been the strong point of the Liberal Party, but voters are still unwilling to forgive the party for its performance in the Morrison years, and the opposition leaders since then have not presented a clear economic vision. Meanwhile, One Nation’s messaging on migration has cut through.
The party is also intentional about how it pushes and softens its message, and the ‘Please Explain’ cartoons are a good example of this. Their ‘Welcome to Australia’ episode from four months ago has roughly half a million views, and softens anti-immigration messaging through jokes. In the episode, characters jump from Iran to Australia and there is no difference, with mosques and Iranian architecture everywhere, referencing perceptions of Muslim immigration. Claims about how “numbers keep climbing” and “planes keep landing” are delivered in a musical number from Albanese about how unaffordable the country is, pinning economic and cultural change on migration. For a voter base that has, as implied by Megalogenis, a particular view of what the country should look like, this is a powerful, multi-pronged message that covers concerns on economic hardship and migration with the satire particularly acting as catharsis for grievances against the whole process.
Conclusions
This brings us to September 2026. Their vote has likely peaked, with their June polling matching the ALP at roughly 30%. Over the month of August and early September, Roy Morgan’s polls have them bouncing between 24% and 27%, and a polling aggregator put together by Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, echoes this shift. One Nation peaked in June, matching the ALP, but has been trending down ever since.
Individual polls may occasionally have them higher, but in the absence of another major event or breakthrough into metropolitan seats (which absolutely could happen), 24–27% primary support appears to be the new normal for the party. This is enough to do very well in upcoming elections, but their two party preferred vote, which models preference flows, is still well behind Labor’s, and Pauline Hanson won’t be prime minister without a coalition agreement.
One Nation has built a large, resilient but relatively concentrated coalition of voters. They are playing off of and benefiting from pre-existing frustrations and attitudes, and have netted about a quarter of the Australian vote, mainly in rural and suburban areas. The ‘three-part’ nature of their support means attacking the party’s credibility on one issue won’t inherently weaken it on the other two, especially considering the ability of One Nation to craft sophisticated messaging. Even in the face of controversy and scandal, their support is likely never fully going away.
This is Will’s second article for Statecraft, he is a third year Politics, Philosophy and Economics student. We can exclusively reveal that on the back of this excellent analysis Will has been formally offered the position of Statecraft Electoral Analyst. We are awaiting his response.
Thank you to Boudica Gotlucky and Toby Riches for editing this article.
