The populist vibe shift makes landfall in Australia

In typical style, we are late to the game but catching up quickly

I’ve just written for UnHerd about the wild rise of Australia’s Right-populist One Nation party. Largely a backlash against mass-migration, their support has gone into overdrive since the Bondi terrorist attack and grown still further in the wake of new hate speech laws passed in parliament last week.

I write:

If Australia found itself in a job interview, it might describe its cultural and political latency as both a strength and a weakness. The latest trends and ideas still seemingly come by tall ship, our distance serving as a kind of ballast that limits the wild political swings and upheavals felt elsewhere in the world. It’s the beach for us — until people start shooting us on it.

December’s Isis-inspired Bondi Beach terrorist attack has rapidly turned Australia into the global populist vibe shift. Until then, the country had been in a slow-motion version of the Western political realignment, its political duopoly bleeding support from a few scratches rather than an open vein. Now, however, the Right-populist One Nation party has climbed to 26% in some polls, up from just 6% support at last May’s election. The centre-right Liberal Party, which was last part of a government in 2022, has a vote share as low as 14% in some polls. In decades of polling, never has a member of the two-party duopoly polled third. What, then, is behind this realignment on the Australian Right?

If the country’s populist shift had previously been concealed, it was in part because of high living standards and a conservative coalition that took a robust approach to illegal immigration in the early 2000s. But the conservatives also catalysed mass legal immigration, a policy later enthusiastically embraced by their Labor counterparts. This reached a record high in the year ending September 2023, with more than 500,000 arrivals, in a country whose total population was around 26 million at the time.

In poll after poll, a strong majority of Australian voters express a desire for far less immigration. And despite the luxury of being able to observe the predictable impacts of mass migration in other Western countries, the Australian political class has dialled down the programme only slightly. Now, One Nation is reaping the benefits from this development, its rise turbocharged by the Bondi attack and then the Liberal Party’s backflip last week from opposing to supporting radical new hate speech laws.

You can read the full article here.