Celina outlines the conditions that allow populist movements to displace traditional centre-right parties as Australia’s One Nation under Pauline Hanson is in the process of displacing the Liberals:
Everyone has an opinion about why One Nation is surging. Most people argue it’s immigration. Others say it’s the cost of living, housing, or just a general distrust of politicians. And obviously all of those things are factors.
But of course, all of those explanations are just opinions, and more importantly, they don’t really explain why this is happening now.
One Nation isn’t the first party of its type to emerge, in fact, Australia is actually pretty late to this trend. We’ve already watched similar parties rise in Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and across much of Western Europe.
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So if immigration alone explains One Nation’s rise, why didn’t One Nation explode ten years ago?
The answer, according to a growing body of political science, isn’t simply that voters changed. It’s that the centre-right stopped functioning the way it used to. For decades, parties like the Liberal Party acted as gatekeepers. They bundled together free-market economics, cultural conservatism and a vague patriotism into one broad electoral coalition. But the Liberal Party has fractured rapidly and everything has changed.
This is exactly what happened with Trump and the Republican Party, with Brexit and then Reform UK in Britain, and with similar populist parties across Europe. The rise of the populist right isn’t just about people becoming more conservative, it’s about the collapse of the old centre-right policy formula. Australia is now going through exactly the same process.
As a comparison, Reform UK established itself as the dominant force on the British right rivaling the Tories whilst they were already crumbling, which allowed those voters to become apart of Reforms broader support base. Analyses of the 2024 election in the UK found that around 80% of Reform voters had voted Conservative in 2019. The same thing now seems to be happening with One Nation. Some of that growth comes from former Liberal voters. Some comes from people who previously supported smaller right-wing parties and have now consolidated behind One Nation because they think it’s the only party capable of replacing the Liberals. Some comes from Labor. But overwhelmingly, this is a story about the collapse of the centre-right rather than some sudden ideological revolution among Australians.
So yes, immigration matters. Cost of living matters. Housing matters. But those things explain why voters became dissatisfied. They don’t explain why millions of those voters suddenly stopped expressing that dissatisfaction through the Liberal Party and started expressing it through One Nation instead. To answer that question, you need political science and when you look at the research, the rise of One Nation starts looking like Australia’s version of a much bigger political realignment that’s already transformed much of the Western world.
So, populist insurgencies are underway in Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands … so why not in Canada, where all of the conditions are at least as pro-populism as any of the others? My answer is propaganda. Most Canadians still get their daily news and opinions from traditional sources — almost all of whom are now directly on the government’s payroll. Most Canadians are as insulated from dissident voices as Germans were in the 1930s … and Canadians still trust their government more than most other westerners.
I remember when One Nation started in the mid 90’s. The feral election in 1996. I had moved house and made sure to register for the vote. Registration confirmation in hand, I reported to the polling place on election day, was checked off on the roll, voted for ON. Three weeks later I received by mail a letter stating that as I was not registered to vote my vote was not counted. I remember holding the conflicting documents, one in each hand, and realising something was terribly wrong.
Three weeks after that, a lone borderline cretin allegedly shot up the Port Arthur penal colony monument with a kill ratio better than the highest trained direct action specialists from any military. His weapons were burned in a fire but miracled back into pristine condition for the press conferences. Flakjacket Johnny Howard rammed in disarmament, the whore media reported many hundred thousand strong protests as mere ten thousand ones, and twenty five years later the goobermint threw covid notavax refusers in concentration camps, and billed them for the pleasure. Oh, and imported millions of replacement morons and savages.
I doubt voating harderer for ON, or AfD, or any so-called “party”, will accomplish anything worthwhile. Participation implies consent to the farce. If any uncompromised person ever gets into a position of influence, they will be distracted, turned, or eliminated. Consider Harold Holt, for whom they named memorial swimming pools as an insult, and whose successor went “all the way with LBJ”. It aint fair dinkum, mate, an hasn’t bin fer some time. Watch yerselves…
Comment by Stefan v. — July 19, 2026 @ 11:59