Antony Green on the rise of One Nation

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Speaker 1 Support for One Nation has surged in recent polls, with the right-wing Populist Party doubling its primary vote since the election.

Speaker 1 Now, it comes as the Liberals' primary vote plummets to historic lows, and Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce eyes off a tilt to Pauline Hansen's party. He's still thinking about it.

Speaker 1 But it's not the first time the minor party has caused major headaches for the Liberals and the Nationals. But just how real is the latest threat? Is it getting more dangerous for the coalition?

Speaker 1 Today in a special episode of Politics Now, Anthony Green on the rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation and what history can teach us about the rising threat facing an embattled coalition.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Politics Now.

Speaker 1 Hi, I'm Patricia Carvallis and for a very special edition of Politics Now, I'm joined by ABC election icon Anthony Green.

Speaker 1 Anthony, I've missed you since the election. How are you?

Speaker 2 I'm pretty good. I'm not dead yet.
I'm sort of still involved and I keep being stopped and asked, have you retired? And I'm saying, not fully.

Speaker 1 I just love that you have declared, I'm not dead yet.

Speaker 1 You are very much not dead. You're alive and you've got so many insights.
I want to pull out all the facts out of your brain now.

Speaker 1 You emailed me about this topic because the political watcher that you are, you've observed some parallels between the current rise of One Nation, what happened in the late 90s.

Speaker 1 Just to remind people, at the moment, Barnaby Joyce is on a long tease, isn't he? With this kind of threat of potentially joining One Nation.

Speaker 1 He hasn't quite gone there yet, but it's set everyone insane in Parliament. But let's just talk about how this first emerged in the 90s.

Speaker 1 Like what is the what is the history here in terms of how One Nation became a thing?

Speaker 2 Well this all goes back to the 1996 federal election. Pauline Hanson, who ran a fish and chip shop in Ipswich, had been endorsed by the Liberal Party to be their candidate for Oxley.

Speaker 2 It was Labor's safest seat in Queensland. And in the 96 election, the Keating government was swept from office.
There was a massive swing.

Speaker 2 I remember on election night sitting with Maxine McHugh and everyone was just gobsmacked at this swing of about 19% that delivered Oxley to Pauline Hanson.

Speaker 2 She was disendors in the campaign for comments on Aboriginal welfare and Chinese migrants.

Speaker 2 But she still appeared on the ballot paper as a Liberal. And that big victory for her saw her elected as an independent and then she would go on to sort of set up a party.

Speaker 1 So that was quite seismic at the time. But the political reaction.
was really interesting too.

Speaker 1 Just looking at what happened at the time, there was some real pushback from the coalition, wasn't there, to try and manage that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and to some extent, when swing was so big, all the talk at the time was that Pauline Hansen is capturing some blue-collar base of Labor and that that can be delivered as preferences to the Liberal Party.

Speaker 2 She was taking people across the political divide as preferences. That's what the talk was for two years.

Speaker 2 But that assumed that if she set up a party, which she did, it would only get five, six percent of the vote. But actually, as we found out later, the party could poll much more strongly.

Speaker 2 And it wasn't just a matter of

Speaker 2 leaking preferences from Labor to the Liberal Party. There was a high likelihood that she was endangering the coalition as well.

Speaker 1 And that endangerment, like how did that track at the time? Was it just a high watermark for One Nation or

Speaker 1 have they been able to hold that?

Speaker 2 I mean, I mean One Nation's basically had two periods.

Speaker 2 It was that first explosion onto the political scene at the 1998 Queensland election, a new party getting over 20% of the vote, electing 11 members, the most extraordinary emergence of a new party in modern Australian political history.

Speaker 2 Now the party subsided after that, basically disappeared in the early 2000s when Pauline Hanson went off to do other things.

Speaker 2 She nearly got elected to the upper house in New South Wales, nearly got elected to the lower house in Queensland.

Speaker 2 But it wasn't until she returned to the party and it became Pauline Hanson's One Nation again from 2016 onwards that they re-entered the political fray.

Speaker 2 And I think you can say that the most recent election indicates they've probably become the fourth party of Australian politics.

Speaker 2 You've got Labor and the Coalition in the middle, the Greens to the left, and One Nation is now settled into the right.

Speaker 1 They've very much settled into the right. So, just going back to that time in the 90s, and you know, I was pretty young at the time.

Speaker 1 Pauline Hanson's emergence into politics, I think, was one of the like dead-set biggest stories of that era. It was so seismic.

Speaker 1 Just take us to that maiden speech and why, through the delivery of that speech, she changed politics.

Speaker 3 Mr Acting Speaker, in making my first speech in this place I congratulate you on your election and wish to say how proud I am to be here as the independent member for Oxley.

Speaker 3 I come here not as a polished politician but as a woman who has her fair share of life's knocks.

Speaker 2 She raised immigration, she talked about Australia's being overrun by Asians.

Speaker 3 I and most Australians want our immigration

Speaker 3 policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians.

Speaker 2 The issues critical of Aboriginal welfare in this. There was a running thing with Indigenous issues in the first term of the Howard government.

Speaker 2 The issue of saying sorry to Stolen Generation report on Howard refused to say sorry.

Speaker 2 There was the High Court's decision on the WIC bill, which meant that they had to amend the Native Title Act, and there's a lot of controversy around around that and those issues were running and the government and you also had the gun law reforms after the Port Arthur massacre in 96 and those issues tended to have a bit of a strong impact in the National Party's heartland but for solidarity reasons the National Party had sort of locked themselves in behind the Howard government the Joe for Canberra era of the decade before had been passed by and the Liberals and Nationals were doing everything they could to be seen as a united opposition having lost elections in the 80s because they didn't have a united opposition.

Speaker 1 United opposition sounds

Speaker 1 very unfamiliar with the current state of the opposition. So from the jump, One Nation is already a threat in many regional seats, right? John Howard is very wary of this.

Speaker 1 His antenna, and we know his political instincts were often quite good, was very high on this.

Speaker 1 Queenslanders are going to the polls. Let's look at the lead-up to all of this.
The Queensland Premier and Nationals leader, Rob Borbridge, was leading a coalition minority government.

Speaker 1 Just talk to me about this period of time.

Speaker 2 Well, it's unusual because they'd come to office mid-term. The Goss government lost office six months after the 95 election through a by-election.

Speaker 2 Borbidge took office as a minority government, a little bit unexpected. They had some problems with, lost a few ministers along the way.
But Borbidge was very loyal to Howard.

Speaker 2 He went along with the gun reform plans. He backed the WIC four-point plan.
He actually campaigned on it during the election campaign.

Speaker 2 And those things became a bit of a test at the Queensland election, amongst other things. What hadn't been expected was this surge in One Nation support in the run-up to that election.

Speaker 2 And the Nationals and the Liberals had,

Speaker 2 I mean, in the last week of the election campaign, Rob Borbich flew to Century Zinc Mine in the far northwest of the state to talk about how important the WIC plan was, the 10-point WIC plan was to security and mining.

Speaker 2 But on the same day, while he was flying backwards and forwards in this era when there wasn't a lot of mobile phones, Hansen just came out and said, we're going to abolish native title.

Speaker 2 And so what had been planned as this mechanism to highlight what needed to be done was trumped by Hansen coming out with a policy which was much more dogmatic

Speaker 2 and legalistically unrealistic.

Speaker 2 There was also the amazing thing in the last week of the campaign, the coalition suddenly realized what was, their vote was hemorrhaging in rural seats.

Speaker 2 John Howard spent over an hour hour on I think the Wednesday night on Talk Back Radio on 2 UE's Thanzamarnik's program, which was networked all across regional Queensland taking calls, trying to convince them about why they had to re-elect the Borbish government, why One Nation wasn't an alternative.

Speaker 2 It was an extraordinary performance to do that on an evening,

Speaker 2 even in that era when sort of, you know, it wasn't, not everything was done for television in those days, but that was still a pretty amazing occurrence.

Speaker 1 So the coalition, as you say, are hemorrhaging support across the state, and they're still worried about Labour forming a majority in Queensland. So they announced they'll preference One Nation.

Speaker 1 What were they thinking?

Speaker 2 Queensland has optional preferential voting. What they were trying to do was,

Speaker 2 there's lots of preference deals, talks about things like that.

Speaker 2 One of the main things parties do with saying what they're doing, their preferences, is sending a message to their supporters and the supporters of the other party.

Speaker 2 What the... coalition was trying to say to One Nation voters was, give us your preferences.
You don't want Labour. So give us your preferences.

Speaker 2 And that was the point of saying, we will give preferences to the coalition.

Speaker 2 Now, Bill Ochi famously said all this fuss about the preference deal was irrelevant because national and liberal preferences wouldn't be distributed.

Speaker 2 Well, that proved completely wrong because they were distributed. There were six seats which Labour lost because of national and liberal preferences.

Speaker 2 Of course, Bill Ochi lost his seat to One Nation at the next Senate election. So this rolled through to the election.
One Nation got... 22.7% of the vote, more than either the Liberals or Nationals.

Speaker 2 They won 11 seats. Now, all the preferences managed to stop Labour getting a majority but they made it absolutely impossible for the coalition to form government after the election.

Speaker 2 They would have had to bring One Nation into the tent to try and govern and two crossbench independents put Peter BD into power instead.

Speaker 2 And the coalition had to walk away and lick its wounds because there was no way it could form government.

Speaker 2 And just as well really, because all 11 One Nation members had left the party by the time the time of the next election.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because it was chaos, right? It was a very badly managed party.

Speaker 1 That has to be mentioned, too. I mean, Pauline Hanson started the party, but it was really, really filled with chaos, yes.

Speaker 2 And to this day, they lose, they've lost, over history, they've lost three-quarters of the members.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's three One Nation members, no independents in the New South Wales Upper House, with Mark Latham and his colleagues.

Speaker 2 One of them has left in the South Australian Upper House. It's still going on to this day,

Speaker 2 the difficulties of the party to keep its membership together in Parliament.

Speaker 1 And John Howard was watching this all unfold and Queensland being so key, of course, to the coalition's base and its victory. He was watching it incredibly closely.

Speaker 1 How did he pivot ahead of the federal election, which was just a few months later?

Speaker 2 Well, there's one very important thing, of course, is that Queensland is different from the rest of the country.

Speaker 2 The preference deal that might have worked in Queensland, which it didn't in this case, was highly likely to backfire in Sydney and Melbourne, the more multicultural seats, which they were concerned about.

Speaker 2 So what happened shortly after the Queensland election, the government abandoned the four points which were being held up on the WIC plan in the Senate and got it off the political agenda in about a week.

Speaker 2 So they just put the thing, put it through and accepted the Senate amendments.

Speaker 2 Andrew Robb, the National Director, came out and said that One Nation would be put last on how to vote cards, which Labor had already promised.

Speaker 2 And within two or three weeks, John Howard announced that there were going to be a major tax reform, GST, and the debate, which had sort of bogged down on a whole series of issues in Queensland was suddenly on tax and tax reform and Pauline Hanson floundered on that issue during the election campaign and

Speaker 2 the preference deals, the decisions put One Nation last blocked One Nation, Pauline Hanson from winning the seat she contested.

Speaker 2 It blocked One Nation from winning three or four Senate seats outside of Queensland.

Speaker 2 They did get one in Queensland with her with by reaching a quota and the government was re-elected and One Nation preferences sort of split relatively evenly as they did at the time.

Speaker 2 But because their vote had collapsed after the Queensland election, they were not as important.

Speaker 1 Not as important. So there's been, you know, periods in history where they've been less important than other times.

Speaker 1 And in fact, right now, which we're going to get to, I think they're quite important and very important to watch. But what I recall from those days also was kind of key figures in...

Speaker 1 the coalition. I'm thinking people, you know, someone who ended up being Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, campaigning really against One Nation, against Pauline Hanson.

Speaker 1 And in fact, One Nation was a toxic brand. Now, I recently put this to Tony Abbott, who's out, you know, selling his new book that he's written about Australian history.
And he framed it this way.

Speaker 1 I want to get your thoughts on this, Anthony. He said, that was a different One Nation.
Pauline Hansen has essentially changed. It's a different version now.

Speaker 1 And he really differentiates these two periods.

Speaker 1 Just take me, though, to that kind of, you know, there were people like the National Senator Ron Boswell who really campaigned against the politics of One Nation. It was a different era, right?

Speaker 2 Well, Ron Boswell had been involved in battles to keep the League of Rights out of the National Party in the 1970s and 1980s. So he was, you know,

Speaker 2 he believed that One Nation was a threat to the National Party. And he was proved quite right in that Queensland election.

Speaker 2 One Nation completely stuffed up his registration under the Queensland Electoral Act. They ended up in courts.
And you remember, Pauline Hanson ended up briefly in jail

Speaker 2 before the decision was overturned

Speaker 2 on appeal. But it was a chaotic party at the time.

Speaker 2 And because

Speaker 2 the coalition, because they wouldn't do a deal with it, wouldn't do a preference deal with it, they had to actively battle it. Now, it has changed, I suspect.

Speaker 2 I think Pauline Hansen is a little more experienced, but still, in the elections since, the party still hasn't been in that position where, you know, one of the problems the coalition has in preferences is that

Speaker 2 when they get back into power one day, they may find a block of One Nation supporters holding seats that were ones held by the coalition.

Speaker 2 John Howard regularly came within two or three seats of majority, and in fact did he get a majority in 2004.

Speaker 2 But the decline in both major parties' vote, which has seen the Labour Party now lose seats to the Greens in every state, the decline in coalition support is delivering seats to other right-wing parties.

Speaker 2 The other thing to say about One Nation, you have to accommodate with the changes to the Senate system that they had to have a chance of getting elected.

Speaker 2 One Nation used to be shut out in preference deals. There are no more preference deals.
Voters fill in the preferences.

Speaker 2 And what is significant, I think, at the last federal election is the coalition did, in all states, include One Nation in its preference sequences.

Speaker 1 Well, you've got exactly where I want to go. So, in 2025, this is really key and really, I think, was a huge, almost kind of watershed moment in terms of the shift here.

Speaker 1 The opposition broke with nearly 30 years of their approach and issued how-to-vote cards which controversially placed One Nation at what number two in many seats. That was huge wasn't it?

Speaker 1 That was a big departure.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was a big departure, but it probably also indicates the problem the coalition had that it needed preferences from One Nation. There was negotiation.
One Nation was going to originally put

Speaker 2 the coalition at three or four behind other right-wing parties, and in a number of seats they changed it to two.

Speaker 2 People don't necessarily follow how to vote cards, but the first, second preference can be important. It's also important for messaging.

Speaker 2 What's more interesting, and you can measure, because you can't, it's very difficult to measure because we don't see Liberal and National Party preferences distributed in the lower house.

Speaker 2 Cedar Hunter that was an 82% of National Party preferences flowed to one nation in that seat. There's not many seats where that happened.
But in the Senate,

Speaker 2 where previously they hadn't included one nation in every state, they did in 2025.

Speaker 2 And say in Victoria, the number of people, Liberal voters who included one nation in their preference sequence went from 21% in 2022 to 62%

Speaker 2 in 2025, a tripling. In South Australia, it went from 19% to 62%.

Speaker 2 One Nation preferences elected, the Liberal preferences elected one nation in both New South Wales and Western Australia.

Speaker 2 In both states, the first time one nation had won a seat at a half-senate Senate election outside of Queensland.

Speaker 2 And in New South Wales, in particular, it's possible that the change in how to vote card was responsible for that.

Speaker 2 It probably would have happened in Western Australia even without the preference recommendation. So

Speaker 2 that's now in play. I think One Nation has benefited in recent times from

Speaker 2 people wearing thin on the idea of Clive Palmer's various parties. And I think One Nation has established itself as the better known party on the right of politics.

Speaker 2 And I think many voters are coalition voters. I mean, we've got fewer parties on the Senate ballot paper and the new Senate system where voters determine preferences.

Speaker 2 I think that's all working to the benefit of One Nation. But if the coalition primary vote is

Speaker 2 low, that would deliver them one of the third seat that in the past might have been won by the coalition.

Speaker 1 That is so fascinating. So it brings us to where we're at.
Current polling, and I think big caveat on polling, you would agree. Look where we are in the election cycle.

Speaker 1 What people say to pollsters right now is not necessarily indicative of what we'll see at the next federal election.

Speaker 1 But the current polling is showing support for One Nation, has doubled since our federal election in May. We know that the coalition support is at a historic low.
There's a couple of reasons for that.

Speaker 1 I think they got smashed at the election. You see Susan Lee's leadership is under pressure.
The left and the right of the Liberal Party are eating each other, it seems to me.

Speaker 1 Defections, disagreements, people wanting to take different approaches, net zero, all of that, right?

Speaker 1 And so we have the the curious case now of Barnaby Joyce keeping the door open to a future pivot to One Nation.

Speaker 1 What do you make of that? Not like he'd been considering, I don't mean I'd love to hear your views, but like

Speaker 1 the power of that, like

Speaker 1 what that could lead to, whether this is a genuine thing that could be quite seismic for right-wing politics.

Speaker 2 For the coalition to get back into office,

Speaker 2 they have to win seats in metropolitan areas. The coalition, the Liberal Party was virtually wiped out in a number of Australian capital cities, reduced to a handful of seats in metropolitan areas.

Speaker 2 But the rise of One Nation, One Nation is always a threat to the National Party. One Nation polls twice, three times as much in rural areas as it does in the cities.

Speaker 2 When you look at their record from the past, One Nation, when it contests urban seats, might do well in some outer suburban Labor seats, but usually by pillaging the Liberal Party voting those sorts of seats.

Speaker 2 The seat of Hunter, which is the last of Labor's mining seats, is the only real seat where One Nation is a threat to Labour at this stage, unless One Nation can break into urban areas.

Speaker 2 And they haven't shown much evidence of that in the last 25 years, since the very early days, outside of Queensland in particular. So what does the National Party do?

Speaker 2 And it's got to try and protect yourself. But to get into power at the next election, they have to compromise the fact the Liberal Party need a more liberal agenda to actually win urban seats.

Speaker 2 And so you get issues like, you know, there's talk at the moment that there's some compromise agreement coming up about ameliorating what

Speaker 2 promising net zero by 2050 means. If they do that, will One Nation just say, well, we're going to do abolish net zero?

Speaker 2 So whatever they do in that area to try and accommodate the Liberals and winning the seats in the city, the National Party is going to find another party on its outside, which is prepared to be more extravagant.

Speaker 2 And the same could come up with trying to come up with a policy on immigration. Whatever the coalition settles on as a rational policy might be outbid from the outside by one nation.

Speaker 2 Now, whether one nation can have the sort of explosions it had in the 1990s, if one nation really is getting 10 or 12 percent

Speaker 2 across the country, you can probably bet that's probably twice that in some country seats. And if that's happening, that's a problem for the coalition.

Speaker 2 Now, they may be saved, as Labor constantly is in battles with the Greens by the other side of politics directing preferences to them.

Speaker 2 But even in 1998 and 2001, Labor Party preferences couldn't save a couple of National Party MPs.

Speaker 2 Very senior national ministers in 1998 were saved by Labor preferences because of the rise of One Nation. So

Speaker 2 that's a thing I'm sure the National Party is very concerned about.

Speaker 2 If the anger is out there and they don't deliver with answers to that anger, that's something that One Nation will pick off National Party supporters with.

Speaker 2 But if they move in that direction, where does that leave the Liberal Party in the city? I mean,

Speaker 1 it's so wicked, this problem, isn't it?

Speaker 2 You look at, let's just say, the Liberal Party, it's not been commented on, the Liberal Party in these seats where Teals is running is being crucified by strategic voting by Labor and Green voters.

Speaker 2 There are some of those Teal seats where Labor gets two to three times as many votes in the Senate as the House.

Speaker 2 So, you know, I think, you know, they're getting 25% in the Senate, but like 17, 18% of those in the House are voting for the Independents. And then Labor preferences from the rest go towards them.

Speaker 2 So the Liberal Party is being squeezed in the centre by those sorts of strategies in the city and the National Party is concerned about its right flank in the country.

Speaker 2 And so the Coalition is now trying to deal with this. And, you know, at some point, perhaps Labour will completely stuff up in government and that will solve the problem for the Coalition.

Speaker 2 But at the moment, with this dilemma, they've got a party to the right which is polling. There's a push to move to the right.

Speaker 2 But the government lost the last election with what happened in the centre in the cities. So if it wants to win the next election, it has to win city seats.
Do you move to the right to do that?

Speaker 2 History suggests not.

Speaker 1 No, history suggests not.

Speaker 1 In terms of the future of One Nation, I think the powerful point you made is they're really this embedded right-wing party now in Australia, right?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there's lots of reasons for that, but one of them definitely is the fact that they've been around so long, Anthony, like since the 90s. And

Speaker 1 there's a sort of consistency and brand knowledge about One Nation, and you see them on polling booths. They get people out, right?

Speaker 1 But if One Nation loses Pauline Hanson at some point, and she's getting older, you know,

Speaker 1 that's certainly possible and on the cards. Do they need a figure like Barnaby Joyce to continue to play that role of identification around certain issues?

Speaker 2 I'll make a comparison with the Australian Democrats. The Australian Democrats always did best when there was a clear leader that the public knew.
And that's always a problem for One Nation as well.

Speaker 2 If they don't know who the, you know, if Pauline Hanson moves on, who is the new leader that leads a party and gets public attention, that draws votes to the party?

Speaker 2 You know, the Greens do better when they have a high-profile leader who's well known. All these minor parties also rely on having a recognisable figure who speaks on their behalf.

Speaker 2 If Pauline Hanson moves on, as she did in the mid-2000s, the party sort of subsides. They've attempted to deal with that, say, New South Wales, they recruited Mark Latham.

Speaker 2 He became a prominent figure for the party, but now he's joined that great band who've left the party over the years.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, maybe Barnaby Joyce, if he chooses to go in that direction, could be that.

Speaker 2 But, I mean, there's a long history of people falling out with Pauline Hansen and the party organisers and it all ending in tears.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of comparisons to Nigel Farage's Reform Party in the UK, which is, you know, being seen as the real opposition to UK Labour, and the Tories are in all sorts of trouble in the UK, as we've seen.

Speaker 1 But because of preferential voting, it's unlikely One Nation could really become...

Speaker 1 you know, it's not quite the same, is it?

Speaker 2 I think the issue in this country is the two things. One is compulsory voting.
That's a big buttress behind the support for the established parties.

Speaker 2 Those Labor and Liberal votes will still turn out and vote.

Speaker 2 A second thing is preferential voting is that we're under First Past the Post in the United Kingdom, a right-wing party, you know, Liz Truss, the former Prime Minister, she lost her seat to Labor because reform votes split the Conservative vote.

Speaker 2 That wouldn't happen in the same way in this country. I do think there are differences in the issues, and this goes back to John Howard.

Speaker 2 We don't have asylum seekers arriving on boats, and that is just a toxic issue in Britain at the moment, and where those asylum seekers are being placed, and the numbers are huge compared to what we had.

Speaker 2 So that issue is not there. Britain has got all sorts of economic problems post-Brexit.
simply. They have a much older population, the difficulty trying to fund the national health, pensions.

Speaker 2 They they have all sorts of problems and there's just huge disgruntlement in the electorate.

Speaker 2 There are problems here, we have house prices, there are complaints about the level of immigration, that's slowly coming down, how much lower is it going to come?

Speaker 2 But the resentment is not as large as in Britain, would be my observation. And also, Australia is a much more urban country than many others we compare ourselves to.

Speaker 2 We live overwhelmingly within 50 kilometres of the coast, and much of the resentment on these sorts of issues is in more rural areas, but the numbers of people in live those areas is much smaller.

Speaker 2 We also have a much better performing economy. Maybe the crunch will hit one day when China finds somewhere else to buy iron ore for.

Speaker 2 But at the moment, in the short term, I don't see something like Farage's party

Speaker 2 being able to tap into resentments in a significant way to overturn elections in this country. But the existence of a party like that is a problem for the coalition going forward.

Speaker 1 And how do you see it to be, you know, looking at their trajectory,

Speaker 1 you say it's bad news if they move further to the right, but equally it's inevitable that people will continue to push for that when they see this high watermark for One Nation.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well,

Speaker 2 perhaps we've seen two wipeouts for the Liberal Party at state and federal elections in Western Australia.

Speaker 2 They were wiped out in South Australia at the federal election and could well be again at the state election next year.

Speaker 2 I think next Victorian election will be a good pointer to see whether a Liberal Party branch in trouble can recover and defeat Labor.

Speaker 2 And I think the next Victorian election will be a bit of a seismic test of politics in the next term of parliament. But

Speaker 2 in the end, the Liberal Party has its branch problems in some of these countries, in some states at the moment. The Nationals are being much more assertive on a number of issues.

Speaker 2 Look, it all may change over the next two years with the way the economy is running or something the government does, but there are times that this is a serious dilemma for the Liberal Party and where are they going to go do they follow the nationals or do they try and tack to the middle and if the coalition is going to continue what do they do about it what do they do about it well look as it stands I think that the the right is pushing pretty hard at the moment to sort of change the party itself.

Speaker 1 We've seen that for instance from Andrew Hastie, who is a conservative, leading conservative. He's trying to shift the direction as you you watch it.
And I know your lens is different to mine.

Speaker 1 I'm more daily, of course, but do you see that as all part of that play?

Speaker 2 They're trying to work out,

Speaker 2 is the

Speaker 2 liberal reforming position of the 80s and 90s liberalising the economy? There seems to be a shift back from that. Let's have more manufacturing here and the like.

Speaker 2 As a nation that relies very heavily on free trade, that's going to be a tough thing to do to bring back the sort of tariff supports that will do that.

Speaker 2 We don't have the problem that the British have at the moment, which is just a chronic problem. We don't have the sort of electorate and the low turnout of the United States, which affects politics.

Speaker 2 I think compulsory voting and preferential voting give it a very different framework in this country.

Speaker 1 Plus,

Speaker 2 populism just doesn't have a good name in this country.

Speaker 2 And I think populism in an electorate where you have compulsory voting is very difficult because if all you do is motivate people who in other countries,

Speaker 2 you've got to actually motivate people who aren't paying a lot of attention to policy sure I do think immigration I think housing I think housing is a chronic problem in this country I think it is in many Western countries and it's

Speaker 2 how do you split the Gordian knot of making housing more affordable for people without actually lowering the prices of housing for people who already own property I mean that's just you know a government any government that presides over falling house prices will lose the next election even if there are lots lots of people trying to actually get into the housing market.

Speaker 1 Isn't it? Yeah, that's it's again, it's my favourite word for this pod today. It's a wicked problem, the housing conundrum, right?

Speaker 1 Because, you know, you've got an electorate where there's a lot of people who own houses who don't want to see their values go down, but equally a housing crisis. So it's a huge one.

Speaker 1 As you've seen the sort of rise in these immigration demonstrations and, you know, sovereign citizens, all of this, do you think, you know, from your own observations and looking at sort of demographic shifts, that we're at a sort of at the highest watermark for anti-immigrant or right-wing populism now?

Speaker 1 Or do you think it could get more?

Speaker 2 I think it varies from state to state. I mean, there does seem to be a particular far-left, far-right battle going on on the edges of Melbourne politics.

Speaker 2 And I think that's much worse there than in other cities.

Speaker 2 I think that

Speaker 2 I think the issue is that coming out of COVID, we've launched a whole series of public distrusts of messages from government.

Speaker 2 I think there's a lot of people who really did badly in COVID. Their small businesses collapsed, and they are angry, and they're blaming government.
I think they're blaming immigrants.

Speaker 2 I think the fact that we do not have illegal migrants, it's illegal migrants that made the issue for Donald Trump in the United States.

Speaker 2 It's illegal migrants which is undermining support for the traditional parties in Britain. We haven't got illegal migrants because of the steps Howard took and then Labour backing those reforms

Speaker 2 in the decade later. As long as migration is under some form of control, I think it's hard to make it a dominant issue in the country.

Speaker 2 Plus, I mean, in the country, you're talking about single digits as the proportion of people who were born outside of Australia. In Sydney and Melbourne, you're talking about 30 to 40 percent.

Speaker 2 The numbers are massive in the cities. So an anti-immigrant,

Speaker 2 adopting an anti-immigrant platform might cause you major problems in the capital cities where there are large numbers of migrants and people from migrant backgrounds. So it's again,

Speaker 2 and it's also sowing social disharmony if you're not careful. You can try and have a rational debate.
about immigration numbers. The numbers should be 160,000 or 200,000.

Speaker 2 You can try and have a debate about that.

Speaker 1 But somebody will always come over the top and say as I've heard some right-wing MPs say in recent times we need a five-year pause in immigration that's a much more radical policy and would have a massive effect on the economy and on politics Anthony I have missed you so much I know our audience will be rapt to hear you too thank you for coming on and you know explaining what is complex really but you've made it easy to understand thank you thank you and that's politics now for today thanks for joining me don't forget to grab tickets to our Canberra live show if you haven't yet.

Speaker 1 Link is in the show notes. And tomorrow I'll be back with Mel Clark for the party room.
If you have a question for us, send it to the partyroom at abc.net.au.