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Why Populism is Rising in Australia: Immigration and One Nation Surge

Australia has long been considered politically stable compared with Europe and the United States. But according to political scientist Eric Kaufmann, that period of “Australian exceptionalism” may be coming to an end.

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Eric Kaufmann, Zoe Booth
· 11 min read
Pauline Hanson and Zoe Booth before Australian flag graphic under headline “Australia’s Populist Revolt”, one with short red hair, one with long dark hair.
Pauline Hanson's One Nation party is surging in popularity.

Based on an essay by Eric Kaufmann, presented by Zoe Booth.

Australia has long been regarded as one of the most politically stable democracies in the Western world. Compared with the turbulence seen across Europe and the United States, Australian politics appeared relatively insulated from the populist upheavals that have reshaped many advanced democracies in recent years. But according to political scientist Eric Kaufmann, this period of “Australian exceptionalism” may now be coming to an end.

This video essay examines the growing electoral support for populist politics in Australia, particularly the resurgence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Drawing on comparative political research, Kaufmann argues that the same forces driving populist movements across the West—rising immigration levels, cultural change, and increasing political polarisation—are now reshaping Australian electoral dynamics.

Across many Western democracies, immigration has become one of the most politically salient issues for voters. As public concern about cultural and demographic change has grown, populist parties have gained support by challenging mainstream political taboos around immigration and national identity.

Is Australia simply following a broader Western political trajectory, or are there uniquely Australian factors driving these changes?

Australia Joins the Populist Wave
The surge in support for Australia’s populist right-wing party One Nation suggests that immigration restrictionism has become increasingly popular with voters: a political trajectory that echoes that of many other Western nations.
QuilletteEric Kaufmann

Chapters

00:00 The End of Australian Exceptionalism
02:03 What Is Populism?
05:26 Immigration and the Rise of Populism
09:35 Political Taboos and Populist Opportunity
12:46 A New Political Divide

Transcript

View full transcript For decades, Australia liked to think of itself as different. Immune, somehow, to the populist contagion spreading across Europe and North America. The kind of place where Pauline Hanson was a punchline rather than a political force to be reckoned with. Where mainstream parties held the centre, immigration was broadly popular, and the notion of a hard-right insurgency felt — well — a little too foreign for the sunburned continent at the bottom of the world. Australia, the thinking went, was exceptional. That exceptionalism is now over. Recent polling — a poll of polls dated just days ago, in February 2026 — shows that approximately 25 percent of the Australian electorate is prepared to give its primary vote to One Nation, the populist right-wing party led by Pauline Hanson. Twenty-five percent. That is not a fringe number. That is not a protest vote by a disgruntled handful of people in rural Queensland. That is one in four Australian voters declaring, loudly and clearly, that the mainstream is no longer speaking for them. And when you place that figure alongside comparable numbers from across the Western world — the Sweden Democrats, the AfD in Germany, Reform in Britain, the Freedom Party in Austria, the RN in France, Vlaams Belang in Belgium — a very uncomfortable picture begins to emerge. Australia has not just caught up with the West. It has joined a movement that is fundamentally reshaping democratic politics across the entire Anglosphere and beyond. So how did this happen? And more importantly, why did it take so long — and why is it happening now? To answer those questions properly, it helps to take a step back and understand what populism actually is, because the word gets thrown around with alarming looseness. Populist parties, whether of the left or the right, define themselves against the elite and for "the people." They argue, in essence, that a corrupt or out-of-touch ruling class has betrayed ordinary citizens, and that only they — the populists — can restore what has been lost. Left-wing and right-wing variants differ somewhat on who they consider the elite and who counts as "the people," but the underlying structure is the same. And crucially, the rise of right-wing populism in particular is not, despite what many commentators insist, primarily an economic story. It is a cultural one. It is about values, identity, and the pace of social change — not wages, inequality, or being "left behind" by globalisation. This is a point worth dwelling on, because the "left behind" thesis has been enormously influential and enormously misleading. The idea is simple and intuitively appealing: deindustrialisation stripped away good jobs, entire communities were hollowed out, and the people who suffered economically turned in desperation to populist parties offering simple solutions. It is a tidy narrative. Unfortunately, the data does not support it particularly well. Research into right-wing voting behaviour across twelve Western European countries has demonstrated that immigration attitudes are the single most important predictor of populist right voting. Meanwhile, there is near-consensus in the academic literature that personal economic circumstances — being poor, being unemployed — do not explain immigration attitudes. Rurality, too, turns out to be a weak predictor once demographic factors are properly controlled for. The mythology of the dispossessed rural voter is just that — mythology. Studies of Brexit voters, for instance, found that middle-aged white Londoners without degrees were just as likely to have voted Leave as their counterparts in provincial or rural England. And Leave voters in 2016 were actually far less likely than Remain voters to name inequality as the most important issue facing Britain. The "left behind" thesis, it turns out, should itself be left behind. What actually drives the populist right is something more uncomfortable to discuss in polite society: the cultural and demographic consequences of mass immigration. The numbers from surveys are quite striking. Ninety-nine percent of Sweden Democrat voters canvassed said they wanted reduced immigration. One hundred percent — every single AfD voter surveyed in Bavaria — agreed with the statement that Germany is gradually losing its culture. And in Australia, 96 percent of One Nation voters said that immigration has "gone much too far." Compare that with 45 to 50 percent of Liberal-National voters, 17 percent of Labor voters, and just 6 percent of Greens voters who felt the same way, and one begins to understand quite clearly what One Nation's electoral coalition is built on. Now, here is where a distinction that often gets glossed over in media coverage becomes critically important. There is a difference between immigration attitudes — how someone feels about the general level of immigration — and immigration salience — how high a priority reducing immigration actually is for a given voter. Attitudes tend to be ideologically stable. Salience, however, is more dynamic. It rises and falls in response to actual immigration levels, particularly irregular or illegal inflows, which also drive media coverage and social media conversation. And when salience rises — when immigration stops being an abstract policy question and starts being something people see and feel in their daily lives — populist parties benefit enormously. Research by James Dennison and Andrew Geddes, covering twelve Western European countries across the period from 2005 to 2018, found that as immigration salience rose or fell among voters, populist parties' vote shares increased or decreased in lockstep. Furthermore, those who want less immigration tend, in general, to be more motivated by that issue than pro-immigration voters, making them more likely to switch their votes to a restrictionist party. The asymmetry matters enormously. Restrictionist voters will punish mainstream parties for failing them on immigration. Pro-immigration voters rarely prioritise the issue enough to do the same in reverse. Which brings us to Australia's recent history, and the specific chain of events that triggered the current populist surge. After the pandemic, Australia — like Britain, Canada, and Ireland — opened the immigration taps to unprecedented levels. Net long-term arrivals were approaching 500,000 in 2024. To appreciate what that means, consider that Australia's total population is roughly half that of Britain. Yet it was experiencing immigration surges of similar absolute scale. The foreign-born share of the Australian population had reached historic highs. And the political response, like a freight train that takes a long time to stop, was slow to materialise — but when it did, it came with force. One Nation began its ascent from around mid-2025, and by early 2026 it had reached the polling numbers that now have Australian political commentators scrambling for historical analogies. The timing fits a pattern that has been observed across the Western world. It can take as long as one to two years for voters to fully register what is happening to immigration levels. When they do, they tend to punish whoever is in power — or whoever promised to do something and failed. The history of the British Conservative Party over the past decade is instructive on this point. David Cameron famously promised to reduce net migration to the "tens of thousands." He did not. That failure gave oxygen to UKIP in 2015 and ultimately to Brexit in 2016. Boris Johnson then won a landslide in 2019 by promising to "get Brexit done," with many voters assuming this would include drastically lower immigration. Instead, under Johnson, net migration hurtled to over 700,000 per year. The Tory brand has since collapsed among Brexit voters, while Reform — the successor to the Brexit Party — sits at nearly thirty percent in the polls and is now in a plausible position to win a majority at the next election. The Australian Liberal-National coalition has followed a strikingly similar trajectory. Unlike the United States, where Donald Trump's restrictionist insurgency overthrew the pro-immigration Republican establishment from within in 2015, the Australian Liberals remained relatively liberal on immigration, promising only limited cuts — and modest ones at that, relative to OECD comparators. That restraint left a political vacuum. One Nation was ready to fill it. There is an illuminating way to think about this dynamic, offered in the original analysis underpinning this discussion. Politically correct taboos around discussing immigration — and they have been potent in Australia, as in Sweden before 2015, or in the pre-Trump Republican Party — function like a Soviet-era department store that sells only one colour of trousers. When the mainstream offers voters no legitimate outlet for their concerns, demand does not disappear. It finds another channel. Populists, in this framing, are political black marketeers, catering to forbidden demand. The moment mainstream parties decide to stock blue jeans, the black market shrinks. But the moment they promise blue jeans and then quietly restock the beige ones once in office, the black market comes roaring back, angrier than before. Now, one might reasonably ask: if this wave is so broad and so powerful, why hasn't it crested everywhere equally? Why is New Zealand First sitting at only around 10 percent of the vote? Why is Canada's People's Party — One Nation's closest cousin — stuck in the low single digits? And why has Ireland, which has seen significant anti-immigration sentiment and protest, not yet produced a coherent populist right party of any real size? These are fair questions, and the exceptions are genuinely informative. In Malta and Iceland, the populist right remains essentially nonexistent — and both countries happen to have had comparatively low levels of non-European immigration. The correlation is not coincidental. In Canada, Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives have adopted populist rhetoric on immigration to an extent that earlier Conservative governments never did, effectively siphoning off demand that might otherwise flow to the People's Party. Crucially, Poilievre's Conservatives have not yet had the opportunity to disappoint while in office — and if they were to be elected and preside over continued high immigration, the conditions for a PPC surge would become considerably more fertile. Ireland, meanwhile, has seen rising anti-immigration sentiment crystallise in protests and at the ballot box in fragmented ways, but no organised, charismatic populist figure has yet emerged to consolidate that vote into a durable force. One thing the analysis makes clear, however, is that betting on continued Irish or Canadian exceptionalism would be a fool's errand. Germany, Britain, Sweden, and Australia were all once described as exceptional — as places where this kind of politics simply would not take hold. All four countries are now firmly part of the populist surge. The pattern has proven itself remarkably consistent: high immigration, a mainstream that fails to respond, and eventually a political entrepreneur who is willing to say what the established parties will not. And underlying all of this is a deeper demographic and cultural transformation that is, in historical terms, quite extraordinary. Low birth rates across the Western world, combined with what might be described as an increasingly post-national sensibility among political and cultural elites, have together facilitated brisk immigration, record foreign-born population shares, and rapid ethnic change. The Anglo settler societies — Australia, Britain, Canada, the United States, New Zealand — are, on current trajectories, likely to see their white majorities shrink below fifty percent sometime after 2050. Western Europe will follow, probably a few decades later. Political psychologist Karen Stenner, based in Australia, has argued that this kind of rapid change particularly disorients a specific category of voters: those who experience change as loss and difference as disorder. For this group, immigration functions as a lightning rod — a highly visible, highly legible symbol of a world that is being transformed faster than they feel able to absorb. National populists have understood this intuitively and have capitalised on it accordingly. The political consequence is a tectonic shift in the very structure of electoral competition in Western democracies. The old left-right divide — the cleavage between labour and capital, between social democracy and conservatism, between the working class and the middle class that structured politics for most of the twentieth century — is being displaced. In its place, a new and rather more turbulent divide is asserting itself: globalist versus nationalist, cosmopolitan versus communitarian, those who view rapid cultural and demographic change as progress versus those who view it as loss. Immigration sits at the heart of this new axis. And it is reshaping party systems, coalition possibilities, and the very meaning of left and right across the entire Western world. Australia spent a long time telling itself it was different. It turns out it was not. It was simply — to borrow a meteorological metaphor that feels apt for the sunburned continent — later to the storm. That storm has now arrived. And if the trajectory of every other Western nation that has passed through this same political moment is any guide, it is unlikely to pass quickly. This video was based on the essay ‘The End of Australian Exceptionalism’ by Eric Kaufmann, who is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and Director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science. It was published in Quillette on 26 February 2026.” It was read by Zoe Booth. And now, a question for viewers: Is the rise of national populism primarily a response to immigration levels themselves, or to the way political elites have handled the issue? Let us know in the comments section.

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