2 hours ago
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For those Australians thinking of voting One Nation, Pauline Hanson is their wrecking ball and truth teller.
One of the big conversation points among the political and media class is whether One Nation’s primary vote will run up against some form of a ceiling.
This week’s Redbridge Group/Accent Research poll published in the Australian Financial Review shows the ceiling keeps rising, with One Nation’s primary vote now punching through 30%. With Labor’s vote crashing three points to 28% and Coalition down another two points to 20%, One Nation now leads all parties on a primary vote basis, an unprecedented event in Australian politics. Another first in this poll is that a majority of Australians say they would not vote for Labor or the Coalition.
Assessments of the budget were broadly negative, with respondents believing it will be both bad for the country and for them personally.
But what will be concerning Labor strategists is that only around a quarter of the generation Z cohort – one of the claimed targets of their efforts to tackle intergenerational inequality – say the budget will be good for the country, while 36% say it will be bad or very bad. Similarly, only 28% of millennials say the budget will be very good or good for the country.
Gen X voters had the most negative evaluations, with just 6% saying the budget was good for them personally and 54% saying very bad or bad.
Among those renting – another key strategic demographic for the government – just 16% said the budget was good for them personally. Young renters were the very demographic Labor were appealing to with this budget but at the moment they aren’t persuaded; instead, Labor has antagonised its older constituencies.
It’s almost as though Labor deliberately designed a budget to turbocharge more anti-establishment sentiment and pump up One Nation’s tyres.
But while some of Labor’s lost vote share can be attributed to the downstream effects of the budget and another interest rate rise last month, what’s also underpinning this voter realignement has more to do with a pervasive national negative mood.
This sentiment holding up the One Nation vote is underpinned by frustration and despondency with the current political model and is fuelling more anti-establishment support and a view among a cohort of voters that the answer lies outside established norms and major parties.
We found that the typical One Nation voter is characterised by a loss of trust in institutions and a deep scepticism about the competence and motives of both government and large corporations.
In a test to assess the mood for change, we found just 25% of all respondents think Australia is heading in the right direction (for a comparison, the week after Peter Costello’s last budget in 2007, the national right direction was 65%). But among One Nation voters, 90% said the country was heading in the wrong direction and just 5% have the opposite view.
We also asked respondents who they think is most responsible for rising interest rates – politicians, corporate CEOs, immigrants, someone else or just a function of markets. Forty per cent thought politicians were mostly responsible and a further 20% blamed the CEOs of corporates. Just 6% think the rate of immigration is most responsible. But among the cohort who said they are voting One Nation, 59% think politicians are mostly responsible while 14% nominated the rate of immigration. Just 9% of One Nation voters believe it’s mostly because of big business.
What’s mostly fuelling and sustaining One Nation’s vote is a protracted pessimism about the future, especially for the next generation. In another AFR Redbridge Group/Accent Research survey, more than half of respondents believed the next generation will have a worse standard of living than their parents and just 20% believed it will be better. But those voting One Nation are even more downbeat, with 78% believing the next generation will have a worse standard of living than their parents and just 12% who think they’ll have a better one.
In previous decades we have seen that voters will put up with a lot from governments if they are optimistic about their future and that of their children and grandchildren. But now politics is operating in an environment where the electorate is losing hope, so governments no longer have that sort of social licence.
These sentiments provide the architecture for One Nation’s vote. With the insurgent party untainted by a record of perceived failure in government, it has the capacity to start eating more into Labor territory if the Albanese government is seen to lack a political mission. But with these low levels of institutional trust, the government also can’t make the mistake of thinking there is a licence to do whatever it wants. It’s an opportunity for meaningful reform to give voters some hope the future can be better.
Because if Labor can’t define that purpose, the risk is its base will start to look elsewhere to deliver that change or political disruption.
