A week or so out from last year’s federal election, a narrative emerged offering a glimmer of hope for the Coalition’s flailing campaign.
With the popularity of One Nation rising, preferences flowing from Pauline Hanson’s supporters could help the Liberals topple Labor in working-class seats in the outer suburbs and regions.
“Aunty Pauline is now acceptable,” a Liberal insider was quoted as saying in the Australian Financial Review, implying Hanson had become palatable to more voters and her right-wing party an electoral weapon for the Coalition.
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The narrative never materialised as the opposition leader Peter Dutton’s suburban strategy spectacularly tanked on polling day.
Nine months on, a One Nation narrative still surrounds the Coalition.
But now it tells of a genuine electoral opponent.
After years on the extreme fringes of Australian politics, pollsters and political insiders say financial stress and disillusionment with the major parties – particularly the Coalition – is pushing Hanson’s hardline brand of rightwing populism into the mainstream.
But how far can One Nation go in reshaping the political landscape?
An expression of dissatisfaction
The latest Guardian Essential poll put One Nation’s primary vote at 22%, triple what it achieved at the 2025 election and just three points below the Coalition.
Peter Lewis, a director of Essential Media, said One Nation’s support should be viewed as an expression of dissatisfaction with the major parties – particularly the Liberals and Nationals – rather than a genuine voting intention, given the next federal election isn’t due until 2028.
But he said it cannot be dismissed.
“The rise in support for One Nation is not trivial,” Lewis said.
“It reflects shifts occurring elsewhere in the UK , Europe and of course in the US where populist movements are repudiating the mainstream parties’ failures to harness global capitalism.”
Kos Samaras, a former Labor strategist-turned-pollster with Redbridge Group, said One Nation was becoming a political destination for people voting on cultural issues.
Pauline Hanson at the March for Australia rally in Brisbane. Photograph: Darren England/AAP
“Over time, particularly over the last decade, they have started to experience financial stress and a decline of living standards. They have now given up on the Coalition, which was the party they used to support because they thought they managed the economy better for them,” Samaras said.
“They are now just voting on cultural grievances and One Nation is absolutely the vehicle for that.”
A breakdown of the Essential numbers confirms One Nation’s rise is largely, though not entirely, due to Coalition voters shifting further to the political right.
The poll found 23% of respondents who voted for the Coalition in 2025 now intend to support One Nation.
In contrast, 8% of one-time Labor voters have switched to Hanson – a smaller, but not insignificant shift.
John Roskam, a former executive director of rightwing thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs, said the Liberal party had for too long been unconcerned about the risk of losing votes to its right flank.
“The Liberal party has been pretty complacent about those challenges because they’ve convinced themselves that Liberal voters couldn’t bear to vote for One Nation,” Roskam, a long-time Liberal party member who remains close to state and federal MPs, said.
“It’s now pretty clear they can.”
One Nation is ‘more binary’
One Nation’s base is still concentrated outside the capital cities and among non-university educated people on middle-to-low incomes.
But other findings challenge the stereotypes of One Nation as a political brand for older men.
For example, One Nation is polling higher than the Coalition with female voters (23% to 21%) and considerably better among 35-54 year-olds (26% to 19%).
The polling surge has not coincided with new policies or a toning down of Hanson’s stances, as evidenced by her burqa stunt in the Senate in November.
Outrage at Australian senator Pauline Hanson wearing burqa to parliament – video
One Nation’s grievance politics remains centred almost entirely on two blunt positions: ending what it claims is “mass migration”, and abandoning net zero and the Paris climate agreement.
The Coalition last year moved on both of those issues, junking its Scott Morrison-era net zero target and discussing plans to slash immigration levels. But it still failed to arrest the slide.
Barnaby Joyce, the former Nationals leader who defected to One Nation in December, claimed it was the “clarity” of One Nation’s positions that was so appealing to disenfranchised voters.
One Nation, for example, wants to completely abandon the Paris accord while the Liberals and Nationals remain committed to it, at least rhetorically.
Pauline Hanson and Barney Joyce at the memorial to the victims of the Bondi terrorist attack. Photograph: Mark Baker/AP
“We’re very much more succinct, deliberate and on some issues more binary, which some people don’t agree with,” Joyce said.
“After [the] Bondi [massacre] people have said: ‘that’s it, we’ve had it’. We don’t want you to try and make everyone feel happy. We want you to fix the problem.”
In an email to supporters this week, One Nation boasted that membership had exploded almost 600% since the election – although it refuses to provide actual numbers – and the party now has branches in all 150 federal electorates.
“The speed at which Australians are turning away from the major parties has been extraordinary,” the email said.
Lower house seats in play
After a 19 January Newspoll showed One Nation ahead of the Coalition on primary votes for the first time ever, Hanson declared her ambition to turn the party into a viable alternative government.
One Nation holds a single seat in the chamber where government is formed (Joyce’s regional New South Wales seat of New England), meaning such a goal is ambitious in the extreme.
Kevin Bonham, a psephologist said reports suggesting One Nation could win more than 30 seats on their current numbers were “not realistic” given the party historically struggled on preferences.
But Bonham agreed with fellow election analyst Antony Green’s assessment that if One Nation was polling above 20% nationally then its support would be above 35% in certain rural and regional areas, enough to put Hanson’s candidates in serious contention.
The LNP-held seats in Queensland of Wright, Flynn, Capricornia, Hinkler, Wide Bay and Dawson would all be in play, Bonham said, as well as Labor-held Blair outside of Brisbane.
The Labor seats of Hunter – where One Nation finished second in 2025 – and Paterson in New South Wales coal country would also be targets for Hanson, he said.
Winning all of Flynn, Capricornia, Hinkler, Wide Bay and Dawson would wipe out more than a third of the Nationals’ lower house seats, highlighting the threat One Nation poses to the country party and helping to explain its hardening right-wing positions, including on climate.
The spectre of One Nation was considered a decisive factor in the Nationals’ opposition to Labor’s hate speech laws, which triggered the political crisis that ended the Coalition.
The Flynn MP, Colin Boyce – who will challenge David Littleproud for the Nationals leadership on Monday – last week warned that splitting from the Liberals would leave the party exposed to a “right-flank onslaught” from One Nation.
Pauline Hanson has been a federal Queensland senator since 2016. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian
Boyce doused speculation he would defect to One Nation despite a “surge” in his central Queensland seat, but hinted others might soon jump ship to join Hanson and Joyce.
Hanson’s chief-of-staff, James Ashby, confirmed One Nation had been on a recruitment drive and was planning a “significant announcement” ahead of parliament’s return on Tuesday.
“It will shock people just how significant announcement this will be,” Ashby told Sky News on Thursday.
Hanson’s office would not divulge any details about the announcement when contacted by Guardian Australia on Friday.
One Nation has long been wracked by disunity and disorganisation in Canberra, hampering its ability to consolidate support outside the far-right fringes.
The latest surge could end in similar chaos, or it could reshape the political landscape.