One Nation leads Australian poll as populist right surges past Labor and Coalition

Pauline Hanson's One Nation party has surged to 31 per cent in a nationwide primary vote poll, leapfrogging both the governing Labor party and the traditional centre-right Liberal-National Coalition for the first time. The Redbridge Group and Accent Research survey, published in the Australian Financial Review, puts Labor on 28 per cent and the Coalition on 20 per cent. The fieldwork ran from 25 to 28 May, two weeks after Treasurer Jim Chalmers delivered a budget that broke election promises on property tax concessions and coincided with the Reserve Bank's latest rate increase.

One Nation breaks through in national polling

The four-point jump for One Nation and three-point drop for Labor since the pre-budget poll represent a significant shift in a short window. The Coalition's two-point decline is arguably more revealing: a major opposition party typically expects to harvest government dissatisfaction. Instead, voters angry at Labor have migrated further right. The sample of 1,005 voters carries a 3.4 percentage point margin of error, meaning One Nation's lead over Labor is within statistical noise, but the direction of travel is unambiguous. Hanson's party has never led a national primary vote poll before.

Budget fallout fails to lift traditional opposition

The May 12 budget abandoned a pledge to leave negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts untouched, a move that angered property investors and aspirational homeowners alike. The Reserve Bank followed with a 25 basis point cash rate increase on 20 May, the thirteenth since May 2022. Together they handed the Coalition a textbook opposition opportunity. Yet the Liberal-National primary vote slipped from 22 to 20 per cent. Tony Barry, director of Redbridge Group, described the dynamic bluntly: "The downstream effects of the budget and another interest rate rise is Labor have lost more vote share, but the Coalition aren't the beneficiaries on a primary vote basis." The words capture a structural problem facing centre-right parties across the democratic world.

The European pattern repeats in Australia

The Australian shift echoes what happened in the June 2024 European Parliament elections, where populist right parties made historic gains at the expense of mainstream conservatives. In Germany the Alternative für Deutschland secured 15.9 per cent, becoming the second-largest delegation despite the CDU/CSU winning the popular vote. In France Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National took 31.4 per cent, more than double the combined centre-right vote. The Netherlands saw Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom win 17 per cent and become the largest single party in the Dutch parliament months later. Italy's Lega and Brothers of Italy, Spain's Vox, and Belgium's Vlaams Belang all followed similar trajectories. The common thread: voters punishing incumbents for inflation, migration and cultural alienation bypass the traditional alternative and back parties that reject the consensus entirely.

Australia's compulsory voting and preferential system distort direct comparison, but the underlying voter logic is recognisable. One Nation's 31 per cent primary vote would, under a European proportional system, translate into a parliamentary weight comparable to the Rassemblement National or the AfD. The Coalition's 20 per cent mirrors the collapse of Les Républicains in France or the CDU's erosion in eastern Germany. The difference is that Australia's single-member districts and full preferential voting still allow the Coalition to win seats through Labor and Green preferences, a mechanical advantage European counterparts lack.

Immigration and economic nationalism drive the shift

One Nation's pitch centres on two pillars: a hard line on immigration and economic nationalism that rejects free-trade orthodoxy. Net overseas migration to Australia hit 518,000 in the year to March 2024, the highest on record, fuelling rental crises in Sydney and Melbourne. The party demands a moratorium on net migration until housing supply catches up. On trade, Hanson has long opposed agreements she argues undermine Australian manufacturing and agriculture. The message resonates in regions that have lost processing plants and seen farm incomes squeezed by supermarket duopolies. In Europe, the same combination powered the AfD's breakthrough in former industrial heartlands and the Rassemblement National's dominance in deindustrialised northern France. Eurostat data shows asylum applications across the EU reached 1.14 million in 2023, the highest since 2016, keeping migration at the top of voter concerns from Stockholm to Rome.

The economic nationalist strand also finds European parallels. The OECD's latest Economic Outlook notes rising trade restrictiveness across advanced economies, with subsidy races in green technology and strategic materials replacing the liberalisation agenda of the 1990s. One Nation's call for "Australia first" procurement and scepticism toward critical minerals deals with Washington and Beijing sits comfortably within this trend. The difference is that European populist parties now sit in or prop up governments in Italy, the Netherlands and Finland, giving them direct influence over EU trade policy. One Nation holds only two Senate seats and no lower house representation, but a primary vote above 30 per cent would force the major parties to negotiate preference deals that could hand Hanson significant Senate leverage.

Outer suburbs become new battleground

Historically, One Nation's strength lay in rural and regional Queensland, the NSW north coast and Western Australia's mining towns. The latest poll suggests the party is making inroads in the outer mortgage belts of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, seats Labor has held for decades. These electorates combine high household debt, long commutes, and demographic diversity that makes immigration a salient issue. The Coalition once dominated them; now they are a three-way contest. If the trend holds, Labor's path to a majority becomes narrower, and the Coalition faces the prospect of being squeezed out in its former heartland. The dynamic resembles the "blue wall" seats in southern England where Reform UK threatens Conservative majorities, or the Parisian suburbs where the Rassemblement National has eaten into traditional right-wing strongholds.

What the numbers mean for the next election

The next federal election is due by May 2027. A uniform swing of this magnitude would deliver One Nation a handful of lower house seats, most likely in Queensland, and potentially the balance of power in the Senate. More importantly, it would force the Coalition into a strategic dilemma: compete for the same voters by adopting One Nation's rhetoric, risking its urban professional base, or hold the centre and accept permanent minority status. European centre-right parties have tried both approaches. The CDU's refusal to cooperate with the AfD has contained the latter but left the former unable to form governments in Thuringia and Saxony. The Dutch VVD's attempt to govern with Wilders' support has produced policy concessions on migration that alienated its own voters. Australia's preferential system adds a third option: the Coalition could direct preferences to One Nation in key seats to keep Labor out, a tactic the Nationals have used before but the Liberals have resisted.

A global realignment of the centre-right

The Australian data point fits a broader realignment. In Britain, Reform UK now polls consistently above the Conservatives in some surveys, a position unthinkable two years ago. In Canada, the Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre has adopted populist language on housing and carbon pricing to fend off the People's Party. In the United States, the Republican Party has been remade around Trump's economic nationalism. The common catalyst is a loss of trust in the post-1990s consensus on migration, trade and institutional authority. Voters who once saw the centre-right as the natural alternative to social democracy now view it as complicit in the policies they oppose. The budget betrayal on property tax in Australia is a microcosm: a Labor government broke a promise, but the Coalition's silence during the campaign on the same issue left voters feeling unrepresented by either major party.