Australia's Right in Crisis as One Nation Overtakes Liberals

Australian right-wing politics is fracturing along lines not seen in the postwar era, with One Nation polling above the Liberal Party for the first time in the nation's history and the coalition struggling to define what it stands for after a bruising federal election defeat.

The Liberal Party's internal contest to replace the departing leader ended with Angus Taylor defeating Susan Lee 34 votes to 17, but the result barely papered over the divisions beneath. Taylor himself acknowledged the scale of the challenge on day one. "If an election was held today, our party may not exist by the end of it," he said — a rare admission from a newly crowned leader that the crisis runs deeper than personnel.

At the heart of the conflict is a fundamental strategic question: should the Liberals and Nationals emulate the populist playbook of Donald Trump and Britain's Nigel Farage, or return to the economic-management tradition associated with John Howard and Peter Costello? Taylor's faction argues the party drifted from its core values and must reclaim them. A rival camp led by Andrew Hastie wants a harder turn on immigration and cultural issues, aided by lobby groups pushing for what one described as people "committed to the cause who will go all the way to the end."

The urgency is sharpened by One Nation's surge. Pollster Tony Barry, a former Liberal strategist, described the party's polling as "the most formidable they've been in their 30-year history." He attributed the rise to widespread economic insecurity generating grievance that One Nation is filling. The Liberal Party, he argued, had surrendered its economic narrative voluntarily at the last election and had not yet found a replacement identity.

The demographic mismatch is stark. The average Australian is a 37-year-old woman; the average Liberal Party member is a man in his seventies.

The drama was compounded by Barnaby Joyce's shock defection from the Nationals to One Nation, announced days before the Bondi terrorism attack. Joyce framed the attack in terms of multiculturalism and Australian values, declaring in Parliament that he did not believe in multiculturalism. His former Nationals colleague Senator Matt Canavan acknowledged the damage plainly: "He is a political rockstar. That is going to hurt us."

Joyce told Four Corners he felt a strong "philosophical alignment" with One Nation on most issues, though he drew distinctions on some policies — noting, for instance, that certain positions that resonate in Queensland do not translate to western Sydney, where he is contesting a Senate seat.

The hate speech bill introduced in the wake of the Bondi attack deepened the fractures further, prompting the Nationals to walk away from the coalition and making Susan Lee's already shaky leadership untenable ahead of the leadership ballot.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson was unapologetic about the party's momentum. "The people are on the move. The polling is correct. I see it. I've walked into hotels and people start clapping." Her party's ability to name grievances — even where critics say it falls short on solutions — has proven a powerful electoral asset.

Whether the Liberals can arrest the slide depends on resolving a contest between two visions that may prove irreconcilable: a return to economic orthodoxy, or a wholesale reinvention along populist lines. As one observer put it, change the party's entire direction and risk destroying it; don't change and risk watching it absorbed by the movement it once dismissed.