One Nation's Surge: Why Australia's Populist Right Is Rising

The 2025 federal election was supposed to cement Anthony Albanese's authority. Labor defied a significant polling deficit to secure a second term — an impressive result by any measure. Yet just weeks later, the government finds itself slipping, with the Liberal-National Coalition closing to within a couple of points. More striking still is the steady rise of One Nation, Australia's anti-immigration populist party, which is drawing fresh attention and fresh votes.

To understand One Nation's current momentum, you have to go back almost three decades, to a Queensland fish and chip shop owner named Pauline Hanson.

In 1996, Hanson sought preselection for the Liberal Party in the federal seat of Oxley in south-east Queensland. She won that preselection, but during the campaign she publicly argued that Aboriginal Australians received excessive government assistance — comments that led the Liberals to disendorse her. The disendorsement came too late to remove her name from the ballot, however, and aided by a collapse in Labor's Queensland vote, Hanson won the seat outright.

Taking her place in the House of Representatives as an independent, Hanson delivered one of the most polarising maiden speeches in Australian parliamentary history. She argued that a "reverse racism" was being applied to mainstream Australians and declared the nation was "in danger of being swamped by Asians", citing immigration figures from the preceding decade. The speech split the country sharply — for some, she was a voice for ordinary Australians; for others, she was giving prejudice a parliamentary platform.

Within months, Hanson capitalised on that wave of attention by founding Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party. The debut at the 1998 Queensland state election was dramatic — eleven seats — but the momentum stalled quickly at the federal level. Through the 2004, 2007 and 2013 elections, One Nation failed to return a single representative to either chamber of parliament.

Then came the revival. In 2014 Hanson reassumed the party's leadership. By 2016, with a new focus on Islam and Muslim immigration, she and three colleagues won Senate seats. In her second maiden speech, she declared Australia was now "in danger of being swamped by Muslims" and argued that multiculturalism had caused crime to rise and social cohesion to erode. A string of calculated controversies followed: she entered Senate question time in 2017 wearing a full burqa before calling for it to be banned; in 2018 she moved a motion declaring "it's okay to be white"; and in 2019 she claimed domestic violence victims routinely lied to the family court.

Hanson's political profile has frequently drawn comparisons to Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen — populist figures who have either won power or come close in their own countries. The parallel is more than stylistic. Across the developed world, mainstream parties are losing ground to voices promising simple answers to complex pressures: immigration, cost of living, and a sense that established institutions no longer represent ordinary people.

Australia has not been immune to that shift. With Labor's polling softening and a global mood favouring anti-establishment candidates, One Nation is well-positioned to capture voters who feel overlooked by the major parties. Whether that translates into seats at the next election remains to be seen — but the trend is unmistakable.