I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to seven AM. For the first time in history, almost one in five Australians support One Nation. Their surgeon popularity comes as the Liberal Party bleeds support from both ends of its base as it tears itself a part of a climate and immigration.
So is this just a protest or the start of a permanent shift on the right of Australian politics Today, Director of Strategy and Analytics at Redbridge cost samrus on why One Nation is soaring and what it means for the country.
It's Wednesday, November nineteen.
So, as Susan Lee likes to say, the Coalition didn't just lose the last election, they were quote smashed.
Totally smashed, as the Liberal Party presented to the Australian people was comprehensively rejected.
So tell me what that meant exactly what proportion of people actually voted for the coalition and who were they?
Okay, So the first thing we need to look at is the number of seats they won in our large capital cities. So it's about nine out of about ninety that are urban electorates in this country. Two of them are in Melbourne, three of them in Sydney and the rest are in Brisbane. They've been completely pushed out of Adelaide, Perth, They've never had a held a seat in Hobarts. That's really doesn't count in this conversation, but there is a life prospect that come next election they'll lose their footing
in both Melbourne and Sydney. And these are two cities which of course have got massive population growth occurring, massive enrollment occurring. So that's one level of smashing, so to speak. The next one is, of course, what happened to them amongst Generation Z, so that is Australians between the ages of eighteen and twenty eight. They received about fifteen to
twenty percent of the vote amongst this generation. If we remove regional and provincial Australia from that, amongst this generation it drops down to the low teens and right now as we speak, their polling numbers are at ten percent for generations. So it's a structural clubs. So whether it's diverse Australians, whether it's younger Australians, even millennials, the oldest
is forty four this year. Even they are bad for the Coalition, they're not becoming more conservative as the year's roll on every metric that we look at, except for baby boomers and those who own their homes outright, they are doing badly.
And their decision to scrap net zero.
How does that square with what your research shows about what the liberal base wants.
Yeah, well, the liberal base that they have still sitting in their column are probably okay with this narrative when that is they basically abandon that zero and basically don't pursue an aggressive posture when it comes to climate change. The problem is that that is almost your entry ticket to talk into younger Australians. When we speak to a lot of Australians. When we say okay, so do you think our transition to where your RGE is going to
result in cheaper energy prices? Most Australians will tell us no, I don't think so. I think right now my literricity bills are going up. And then we ask some of the next question, So does that mean that the country needs to slow down? No, I say. In other words, I the consumer understand there are problems with the transition. Governments have not moved fast enough and things are more expensive now, But that does not give you an excuse
to not take action on climate. And this is where I think the coalitions misreading the data, where they don't understand that most Australians actually are quite complex human beings. Right. They will have all sorts of contradictory views about policy areas, but in the end they still have a view that climate as a problem needs to be tackled.
And you mentioned the people who aren't voting for the coalition, so.
People in cities, young people.
But to take a broader view, just how bad is it for the Liberal.
Party right now? How low is their polling?
Yeah, we have them at about twenty percent if we take out the National Party. Most of that twenty percent is inflated by the Queensland and OLMP, So their numbers are in the teens in the southern states of New Soopwhales and Victoria and Adelaide and Perth. And we haven't seen the bottom yet. And they're losing their right flank to one Nation, and they're losing whatever is left of their moderate vote to the Labor Party or the till
Independence and they're getting smashed from both sides. They're a very very serious predicatment at the moment.
Cause you mentioned one Nation, their popularity is surging while the coalition goes down. So tell me, just yea, how popular is one nation at the moment?
Yeah, so one nation is growing at the expense of the coalition. So from the August of thirty first, when we had those anti immigration rallies take place, a lot of us who have started this space predicted that what will happen is that the right flank of the Coalition will splinter.
Shadow Home Affairs Minister Andrew Hasty has resigned from the Liberal frontbench, declaring he can no longer remain silent on the issue of immigration the movement.
When you elevate issues like this, if immigration is an issue of salience to a voter, that vote will vite for the genuine real deal before they vote for someone who's trying to balance the books to speak and not actually offend everyone. So the element of the coalition vote that is anti immigration has gone to one nation.
What have I been warning Australians about for nearly three decades, the high immigration coming to this country.
It has.
That's one side of the corn. The other side of the corn, of course, is the other growth it's occurring for one nation is again still coalition voters not animated by immigration, but by a sense that the major party they used to support is just not up to it. They've given up, so they're going they're just voting for One Nation now because basically they think the Liberal Party in particular is just not up to the job and
they've lost hope. And so we've seen this surge of one oation up to about eighteen percent nationally, and it's largely made up of Gen X and young baby boomers living in our regions and out of suburban areas.
And eighteen percent, that's a high figure for one Nation. Can you talk to me a bit about.
How that fits in with the party's popularity over time? What are the drivers of success for a party like One Nation.
We haven't seen these sort of numbers before. One Nation has done well historically in some electrical cycles, but what we've always seen is that number will dissipate as we are close to an election. What we've never seen before is a one nation vote this high paired up with an historically low coalition vote. This is the big difference. We are seeing similar pattern to what we are witnessing in the UK, where reform is gobbling up. Basically the
Conservative vote. So I wouldn't necessarily rule out that we are actually living for a transformative period where there is a possibility that the Little Party doesn't bounce back, That we are looking at a transition period where politics in this country is going to look very drastically different. In twenty twenty.
Eight, coming up, what happens when the fringe gobbles up the center. So you're describing what sounds like a bit of a death spiral for the Liberal Party at the moment. Do you foresee some sort of coalition with one nation in the future.
I could see that. Yes, Yes, I wouldn't rule that out, but that will be problematic because the coalition with one nation means you are not going to come across as appealing to urban Australians, urban diverse Australians, and that coalition will make it very hard for them to win enough seats in the big cities to actually get close to seventy five seats as a coalition.
Yeah, because Australian elections, they're sort of they're fought and won in the middle here. So if one nation is pulling the Liberal and National parties to the right, where do those kind of center rite voters up.
That's why we're there is probably now a live conversation around what do those two independents do? Do they form some sort of qui as a political movement? I mean, it already exists. Many of them were re elected, All but one were re elected. Whereas researchers are having a discussion as to whether we put senerta po cop in the list of leaders to rate popularity, which we probably will in the next next sample. So yeah, I probably
don't have the answer to what that looks like. But it's hard to see those urban professional classes in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and Perthin and Adelaide vote for a coalition that has one nation in it.
I wanted to ask what all of this means for labor, because on the one hand, a low polling for the coalition is obviously good for labor, But on the other do you think they are worried both about what this might mean for their primary vote in the future and also, you know, worried about a one nation resurgence.
They wouldn't necessarily be worried about the one nation resurgence because they're Metra collige now it is made up of diverse Australians in our large cities, young professionals in our lard cities they've called the market when it comes to provincial city electrics, which are also probably many versions of Sydney in Melbourne. So really they have to watch their
left flank, which is the Greens. Then where times do record very high numbers of Green support amongst Gen Z that supersede and overwhelm the Labor vote amongst that generation. Sometimes we don't, but sometimes we do. So that's a thing that I think Labor needs to be really careful with. Green's at the moment are struggling to get cut through
and so on. But it wouldn't rule out that younger Australians just you know, wake up one morning and go, you know what, this major party that we're voting for, we probably won't do that. There's a caveat to that that if one nation at that time comes across as a serious threat electoral threat, progressive voters will park their vote on the one party that think that can stop them. So there is that risticity that I'm talking about where you could see a situation where Labors vote just balloons
just so they can stop one nation. Because we saw a bit of that. There was a by election in Wales recently in the UK where former labor voters voted for the Welsh National Party, which is a social democratic party in that country, to stop reform.
And you mentioned reform in the UK earlier. To what extent do you think that this.
Kind of realignment of the right in Australia mirrors what happened there.
It's very similar trends. So the one thing, the one thing that we can say looks very similar is one nation cannibalizing the Conservative vote, and that's exactly what's happened in the UK with reform cannibalizing the Conservative vote. The undercurrents driving that are very similar, despondency when it comes to party establishment, frustration that the world is unraveling. The one thing we know about the types of voters that left the Liberal Party and now planning the vote one nation,
they're in their fifties and sixties. They've got massive mortgages and the occupations that generally they work with their hands or stand on their feet. So if you're sitting with a massive mortgage in you're fifty five, and you've got probably ten years of prime working age left in, you and you're on a massive mortgage, you're thinking to yourself,
I'm not going to retire sixty five. That obviously creates a lot of despondency and frustration and anger, and these former liberal voters are clearly now protesting.
And to what extent do you think that political parties I suppose here were talking specifically about the Liberals and the Nationals really have themselves to blame here for not offering people like that a better solution to the issues they face.
Absolutely. I mean they have been preoccupied with cultural wars now for a good decade. The last time the Liberal party actually took a package of economic reform to the public was on how It's gst well over two decades ago. It's been a long time since the liberal parties are actually spoken to their base about what their plan is to address their concerns about the economy and their concerns
that they're no longer as prosperous as their parents. You know, they've been talking about that zero Recently, they're going to talk about immigration, but the elephant in the room is the economy.
And labor faces the same challenge obviously.
Yeah, from the left side, right. So if they do not address housing, and they do not address intergenerational inequality, and they seem to be treading order. I will not rule out the Greens winning seats back off them in twenty twenty eight in significant number.
What Cause. Thank you for your time.
Thank you.
Also in the news, Jess Wilson is the new leader of the Victorian Liberal Party after Austin Brad Batton. Thatton was in the job for less than a year after replacing John Pisuto when he lost a defamation case against Moirademing. Since then, Baton has struggled to unify the fractured party. Jess Wilson is a former advisor to Federal Treasurer Josh Bridenberg, a first term MP, and now the first woman to lead the party in the state's history.
She says her priorities are.
Getting the budget back on track, ending the crime crisis, healthcare and housing, and an international stabilization force will provide security in Gaza after the UN Security Council approved a US plan. The plan also outlines a possible path to a Palestinian state. AMAS has rejected the resolution and Israel opposes the plan for independent statehood for Palestinians.
I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven AM. Thanks for listening.