In May 2025, the Albanese Labor government’s decisive victory suggested that the tides of populism which had inundated Europe and the United States would not reach Australia’s shores. Eighteen months later, with One Nation regularly polling first or second federally and a state level, it’s clear that the same divisions leading to a rejection of mainstream politics in other countries are also present in Australia.
What causes these divisions? Some commentators have pointed to economic inequality. “Australia, like much of the West, is at an inflection point, largely thanks to 30 years of market-led policies that have failed all but the very rich” wrote Amy Remikis in The New Daily in January.
There is definitely an economic element to the dissatisfaction behind the rise of One Nation. But it is only part of the deep and growing divide between society’s ‘insiders’, who are generally tertiary-educated, urban, generally financially-secure, savvy in the arcane rules of modern society, and adaptable to change, and ‘outsiders’, who live outside cities, have had generally negative experiences with social and economic change, and who feel they have nothing in common with the urban university-educated professionals who seem to run the society they live in.
Like a one-way mirror, the divide is far more apparent from one side than the other.
The divide has always existed. It was apparent in One Nation’s original rise over 1997 and 1998, and in the 1999 Republic referendum, with wealthier and more educated urban areas voting ‘yes’ and poorer rural areas with fewer university graduates voting ‘no’.
But, over the last decade and a half, it has deepened in Australia and in other western countries. There are several reasons for this.
We can start with economics. Outsourcing, automation and economic concentration have seen wealth flow to knowledge industries at the expense of workers in traditional industries, often outside the inner cities.
The labour share of income in Australia – that is, the percentage of GDP that goes to workers’ wages rather than shareholders’ dividends has fallen from over 60 per cent in 1980 to below 55 per cent by 2018. Based on Commonwealth Government estimates, from 2015-16 to 2021-22, the economy of greater Melbourne grew by an average of 2 per cent per year while the economy of the rest of Victoria grew by 1.4 per cent.
But it is a mistake to view One Nation’s support solely as misdirected economic anger. An ABC analysis of One Nation’s support based on February 2026 polling data suggested it was fairly consistent across income groups, while it varied hugely by age, geography and education level.
One Nation voters themselves raise economic concerns in interviews, but also speak to a much wider range of frustrations, from free speech and gun rights to the decline of rural towns.
A consistent theme is frustration with the political class in Sydney, Melbourne, and above all, Canberra.
“Sure, you need the smart blokes up the front to say the big words, but you need those blokes that sat at the back of the class that just had bloody common sense” a publican in Hay told the ABC during the Farrer by-election campaign. “Maybe they’re not as dumb as people thought they were”.
The geographic divide is massive. As Gabrielle Chan wrote in her 2018 book, Rusted Off: Why Country Australia is Fed Up:
Across the divide, there is a group of people who are not so cushioned from economic shocks; are often not university educated; have seen the world change and their towns decline and their opinions downgraded. They don’t see much diversity apart from economic diversity – with them near the bottom and all these unrecognisable people at the top. In an era of connectivity, they feel disconnected and neglected.
According to the ABC data cited earlier, immigration is a top three issue for more than half of prospective One Nation voters, and the top issue for nearly a quarter. This does not mean, though, that these voters share the same concerns and same goals.
Some of them are simply racist. Others follow a media diet which, even if it does not actually contain misinformation, centres narratives of immigrant crime and misconduct. But, for others, high levels of immigration have meant pressure on housing and infrastructure, particularly in the outer growth suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney, while the economic benefits of the immigrant workers have often ended up going to someone else.
For others, it has meant further social fracturing and greater disconnection. Immigration represents a bundle of economic, social and cultural concerns, some more real than others.
This is true of many of the issues sending voters to populist candidates.
Social and cultural divides
There is a strong social and cultural element to the divide between the insiders and outsiders.
In the past, voluntary associations such as trade unions, clubs and civic societies promoted connection within communities and between members of communities and their elected representatives. As more of our entertainment and social life has moved online, these organisations have all shrunk.
The number of Australians who are members of a civic or political group, such as a political party, dropped from 18.6 per cent in 2006 to 7.4 per cent in 2020. Religious societies, professional associations, have seen a similar decline.
Similarly, our sources of news and information have moved online, allowing people – insiders and outsiders alike – to limit their exposure to media to a handful of online sources confirming their worldview.
At the same time that social media has grown, a cultural divide has opened up. The mid-2010s saw a rapid growth in interest in and concern about systemic inequalities in society. The use of the terms ‘racism’ and ‘racist’ rose quickly on Twitter to peak in 2019, and there were similar peaks around the same time for terms related to misogyny and homophobia.
Within academia, the public sector, corporate HR departments, and the media, there was a new focus on inclusivity, including in the use of language. As a society, we became aware of things we had long overlooked. For example, the ongoing impacts of colonisation on Indigenous Australians.
But to many people on the outside, including many immigrants, this was an elite project, led by those who were financially secure and enjoyed influence and power, and hyper-focused on race, gender and sexuality while uninterested in social class. At worst, it seemed like a cynical exercise, a mere padding of the diversity chapters of corporate and government annual reports.
Across the divide were communities which felt themselves to be under attack. The insiders, who seemed too acutely-aware of the importance of celebrating the cultures of Indigenous Australians and multicultural communities, seemed to overlook that they, too, had their own traditions.
For various reasons, there has been something of a pushback against the politics of social justice. To give a neat illustration, a Resolve Political Monitor Poll has found a steady decline in the number of respondents who support changing the date of Australia Day, from 39 per cent in 2023 to 24 per cent in 2025. Other opinion polls have shown similar results. This pushback is directly related to the rise of parties like One Nation.
Educated urban voters tend to have a cosmopolitan outlook. To them, these overt displays of patriotism can be a bit cringy. But to people for whom social and economic change has often been negative, traditions and symbols are important. Anzac Day, Australia Day, the flag, and other symbols of nationhood can mean connection in an increasingly disconnected world.
Distrust and misinformation
Online disinformation has certainly been a factor in the success of populist parties, whose voters increasingly distrust official and mainstream sources of information and look for alternatives on the internet.
The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by a similar pandemic of online distortions, half-truths, and outright fabrications. This is challenging, but, in a sense, not surprising. People tend not to trust those who appear to have very different values and priorities to themselves.
Take the example of youth crime, an issue which One Nation is campaigning heavily on in Victoria, and which was a central issue in the 2024 Queensland state election. Rates of youth crime in Queensland actually fell from over 3,500 offenders per 100,000 people in 2010 to under 2,000 per 100,000 in 2023. Yet, the Courier Mail ran stories in 2023 claiming offending was out of control. For example, in the course of a single week in early 2023, it ran articles entitled: ‘Dear Premier, enough is enough on youth crime crisis’ (21 February); ‘Two years of fear: The victims of Queensland’s youth crime crisis’ (21 February); and ‘Wakeup call as youth crime grips entire state’ (25 February).
Outlets like the ABC and The Conversation regularly run articles challenging both the idea that there is a youth crime crisis or, if there was, that the policies proposed by the populists are likely to solve it. But these articles tend to be written by journalists and academics living in relatively safe neighbourhoods who don’t share the actual lived experience of those who live in the suburbs – often low-income outer suburban areas like Melton in Victoria, where youth violent crime is a real and pressing issue.
Coming to grips with populists
A necessary pre-condition to being able to defeat parties like One Nation is understanding where their supporters are coming from. This can be a real challenge for university-educated progressives who struggle to comprehend people who seem to casually accept online misinformation on topics such as climate change and COVID-19, brush aside overt racism, and vote against their economic self-interest.
But we have seen that populists can be beaten. We saw that earlier this year in South Australia, where Labor easily fended off a strong One Nation challenge. Overseas, we have seen it in Canada, and more recently, in the United Kingdom, where Labour’s Andy Burnham handily beat Reform in Makerfield, a constituency in a part of greater Manchester where the populist anti-immigration party had come first in local council elections in May.
Burnham’s campaign was focused on local bread-and-butter issues, like public transport. It is too early to tell if his approach will work in a general election. But his message of acknowledging the concerns of Reform voters, including the “unfairness of the immigration system”, while also painting a positive picture of empowered working-class communities receiving decent government services and sharing in national prosperity, has clearly cut through with some of the voters Labour needs to hold onto, or win back.
Ultimately, if the major parties want to win back One Nation voters, they will need to accept that they have legitimate grievances, and that these grievances are both economic and non-economic. “They’re not unintelligent”, said a former Labor strategist about One Nation voters. “They are of the view that the political system no longer serves them”.
Attempting to beat populists on culture war issues tends to be a losing game, but presenting their voters with a positive program can work. Above all, the insiders need to acknowledge that the disconnect is there before they are able to bridge it.
Published 17 October 2026.
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Image: US Embassy Australia (Flickr, CC); Australian Electoral Commission.
