One Nation Filling Liberal's Working-Class Void, Analyst Says

A Victorian by-election has thrown fresh light on a structural realignment reshaping Australian politics, with polling analyst Kos Samaras of RedBridge Group warning that One Nation is filling a working-class vacuum the Liberal Party has left behind.

The seat — a traditionally safe Liberal stronghold on the Mornington Peninsula, where three-quarters of residents live within two kilometres of the beach and property values run well into the millions — produced few surprises at the top level. But the numbers inside the electorate told a different story. In Rosebud, a more blue-collar suburb further from the coast, One Nation recorded a primary vote of around 40 per cent, a figure Samaras described as a clear signal of the party's growing grip on older, working-class Australians.

"The Liberal party did have a working class base," Samaras said in a conversation with businessman Mark Bouris. "It's basically lost all of it."

One Nation's support base, he said, skews toward Australians in their 40s, 50s and 60s — predominantly working class, predominantly from a prior Liberal voting background. Wealthier coastal communities within the same seat showed no appetite for Pauline Hanson's party. The shift is not coming from Labor heartlands or progressive suburbs; it is the blue-collar cohort that once underpinned Liberal majorities.

Samaras founded RedBridge in late 2019 after campaign work that included stints on the Labor side. He describes himself as someone who thrives in fragmented, unpredictable environments — stable political eras like the early Howard years hold little appeal for him. That comfort with chaos has become professionally useful: Australian politics has rarely been more volatile.

The old certainties of political campaigning have broken down. For decades, a party with enough budget could saturate free-to-air television, radio and print and expect the message to land. That model is finished. Free-to-air advertising has already shifted toward older viewers because younger Australians have largely abandoned it. Research cited by Samaras found that 72 per cent of Australians did not purchase any news product in the past year, leaving campaigns chasing an audience that is actively tuning politics out.

His early career experience illustrated the problem vividly. Walking into a campaign office on his first day, he found staff distributing a 1,500-word glossy newsletter for letterbox drops. "It doesn't survive the distance from the letterbox to the bin," he said. A background in illustration and advertising had taught him that a message has roughly 15 seconds to make an impression — an insight that sat uneasily with traditional campaigning methods.

The fragmented media environment has forced parties onto podcasts, social platforms and digital channels, reaching voters one fractured audience at a time. Reaching younger Australians — whose voting patterns and media habits diverge sharply from older generations — presents a particular challenge, one political parties are still working out how to meet.

Taken together, the trends Samaras outlined — One Nation absorbing Liberal defectors, Gen Z rewriting generational voting patterns, and the collapse of mass-media campaign reach — point to a political era where the playbooks developed over the past four decades offer diminishing guidance.