The bust-up in the Coalition over the hate speech laws—with the Liberals joining Labor to vote for the bill in the face of National Party opposition—and feverish talk of a leadership spill in the Liberal Party are just the latest indications of turmoil on the Australian right. The key beneficiary of this crisis, as well as an important catalyst for it, is Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Its ascension in polling to be on a par with the Liberals in primary votes is a watershed moment in Australian politics, and one that the left needs to understand in order to build successful opposition in response.
The right inside and outside the Liberal Party currently have the wind in their sails. Inside the party, the right is on the offensive, and now dominates the parliamentary caucus. In the likely event current leader Sussan Ley is replaced, it will most likely be by someone from the far-right faction, possibly Angus Taylor or Andrew Hastie. The membership of the party too is dominated by the hard right whose ideas are shaped by Sky after Dark, the Murdoch media and a cabal of far-right lobby groups.
One Nation’s surge in recent months, and the threat it now poses to the Liberals in regional and rural areas, is a further factor pushing the party to the right. This is doubly so for the National Party, which is threatened with a wipe-out if One Nation polling translates into votes in coming state and federal elections. It’s unlikely Barnaby Joyce will be the last of their defections. In order to staunch the flow of support, the Nationals are shifting right.
This was evident late last year when the Liberals dumped their net zero carbon emissions target under pressure from the Nationals. Although the Coalition arrangement has broken down for now, this chain reaction of radicalisation, from One Nation to the Nationals to the Liberals, is likely to continue. It’s currently evident in the Nationals demand that the Liberals dump Ley in favour of an even more right-wing leader as the price for any discussions for reunification.
The crisis in the Liberal party, although pushed to front page news by the surge in support for One Nation and the end of the Coalition, predates both of these. Its roots lie in John Howard’s 2007 defeat.
Howard, prime minister from 1996 to 2007 and the party’s second longest-serving leader, created a right-wing Liberal Party, driving out many of the party’s so-called “moderates”. He brought together a right-wing electoral constituency that allowed him to win four straight elections thanks in part to rising living standards underpinned by the mining boom.
Howard was able to use his authority to discipline the party and hold One Nation at bay. Following the 1998 breakthrough by One Nation in Queensland, when the party scored 23 percent of the vote and won 11 seats, threatening the Nationals in their heartlands, Howard convinced the Liberals and Nationals to put One Nation last on their how-to-vote cards. This, along with One Nation’s internal shambles, sent it into reverse for several years. The Liberals and Nationals were able to re-cohere their right-wing base in the rural and regional areas.
The Howard government was eventually destroyed by overreach, as it attacked working-class living standards through its 2005 WorkChoices industrial laws. The resulting backlash cost the prime minister not just government but his own seat at the 2007 election.
Since 2007, the Liberals have been thrashing around, trying to recreate their glory days. The Coalition was returned to office in 2013 and the conservatives won the following two elections. But the Liberals’ internal leadership churn—Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull again, followed by Scott Morrison all taking the helm—told the real story. Whether “moderate” or hard right, they can’t find a leader with mass appeal, something only reinforced by then opposition leader Peter Dutton’s spectacular failure at the 2025 federal election.
The failure of party leaders to command authority has made it harder for the party to hold together its electoral base. In addition to the Liberals bleeding support in the cities, fragmentation on the right is rife. This is evident in the splintering of the right-wing vote in regional and rural areas in recent years, with right-wing micro-parties, some little more than vanity projects, taking advantage of disillusion with the mainstream parties and notching up quite substantial votes at the mainstream conservatives’ expense. In Launceston, Devonport, Goulburn, Dubbo, Broken Hill, Whyalla and Alice Springs, the Liberals suffered big swings against them in the last federal election, and in Ley’s own electorate of Farrar in western NSW, there was a savage swing against her in the city of Albury, where she failed to win a single booth.
This is significant, given the Liberals are now, with a few exceptions, restricted to seats in regional and rural areas. They cannot win a federal election by relying solely on these seats, given two-thirds of electorates are in the cities. In many cases, rural and regional electorates are losing population, and thus seats, as regular seat redistribution occurs.
One Nation, as the standard bearer of the hard right with the biggest brand recognition, has now seized the moment to make hay from this chaos. Unlike the Liberals and Nationals, One Nation has not held office and therefore disappointed their supporters, and since they have not been the main opposition party have not been under pressure to respond to every policy debate that might potentially alienate sections of their base. Because One Nation can pick and choose where they engage, they are united in their ideological message: anti-immigration, anti-“woke”, anti-socialist and anti-welfare (except for small business, farmers and mining companies).
Given the character of the right-wing radicalisation outside the big cities, which is whipped up by right-wing social media companies directing a curated diet of right-wing conspiracy theories into the feeds of so many, the old loyalties to the establishment right-wing parties, usually led by ruling-class politicians, have weakened substantially. This has opened the door for supposedly “anti-system” right-wing parties. They feed on the anxieties and hatreds caused by a sense of abandonment, the closure of regional facilities as populations shrink, an increasingly multicultural immigration intake shaking their conception of what it means to be Australian, challenges to gender and family roles, the covid pandemic and associated emergency measures to deal with the virus and, for some in the outer suburbs in particular, economic insecurity associated with a cost of living crisis and housing unaffordability. The Liberals, Nationals and One Nation are all fishing in this pool of voters and One Nation is for now landing the biggest catch.
It is not just on the right that the Liberals are losing their base. The most devastating blow to the party has been the loss of virtually every blue-ribbon wealthy seat in the inner suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne to the teals. These are not just any old seats. For many years Liberal branches in these electorates provided the party with their leaders, their front bench, their up-and-comers, their funding and their access to business executives and other channels of influence. These were the branches that mattered. Almost all of them were lost in the 2022 election, and the follow-up defeat last year suggests that these seats aren’t coming back any time soon. For now, at least, the socially liberal, economically neoliberal teals have stolen this element of the Liberal base.
Combined losses in the cities to the teals and Labor mean that the Liberals now hold just 34 seats out of 151 in the lower house, half the number they had before the 2022 election. The party is left with no seats in Tasmania after last year’s election. None in ACT. None in NT. In NSW they lost four seats, in Queensland, five and two in Tasmania. Millions spent by Advance to promote the Liberals’ cause did nothing to help them. In the Senate, the Liberals (including the LNP in Queensland) hold 25 spots and the Nationals another two out of 75, as against 39 for Labor and the Greens, the biggest deficit faced by the mainstream conservatives since the 1940s.
The Liberal Party is faring no better in state government, holding only Queensland and Tasmania. The result—leadership instability—is the same there: eight leadership changes at state or territory level since August 2024.
The Liberals are losing ground across important demographics. They have little support among young people. But nor are they winning among millennials, those in their 30s and early 40s who might once have transitioned from Labor to the Coalition as they aged. The housing affordability crisis is giving them no reason to identify with the party advocating multibillion dollar tax breaks for property investors. Last year, the conservative parties won only two seats where more than one-third of the electorate are renters. The Coalition is becoming increasingly dependent on older voters, born during the postwar boom decades but who are now literally dying out.
Nor is the Coalition advancing in seats with migrant groups the Liberals hope to win sympathy with. In a range of seats, the Liberals have selected non-Anglo migrant candidates and assiduously worked their respective business associations, but this has not translated into votes. Indeed, at the 2025 election, the Liberals went sharply backwards in electorates with significant Chinese populations, as well as those with large Muslim and Arab populations.
Dutton concluded from the No victory in the 2023 Indigenous Voice referendum that No-voting outer suburban seats traditionally held by Labor were ripe for the picking on the basis of an anti-woke, economically aspirational platform. The hope was that gains here might offset the loss of the party’s traditional inner-city base. Dutton failed; the Liberals won none of these seats at last year’s election.
Then there is the Liberals’ “women problem”, a euphemism for the party’s sexism, which consistently repels female voters. This, combined with the fact Labor has made women a significant focus and women are on average more progressive than men, means the Liberals are starting from behind with nothing to offer half the electorate.
The mainstream conservatives are in crisis, then, because they are losing two key constituencies, in the cities and in regional and rural areas. The more the Liberals swing further to the right in an attempt to hold on to the latter, the more they are likely to alienate the former. But judging from the experience of the Turnbull leadership, and, today, Ley, positioning as “moderates” won’t win the teal supporters back either.
One Nation may not be able to sustain its current surge. It lacks the organisational structures of its major rivals and has repeatedly blown up in the past. It has not, so far, received much in corporate backing outside open ideologues like Gina Rinehart. It appeals primarily to older people living in regional and rural areas who are insufficiently numerous or socially or economically powerful to sustain a party that can win and hold government. It is identified almost exclusively with Hanson herself, who at some stage will retire or die. It lacks a traditional hard right or fascist base such as exists in France or Italy or which has propelled right-wing US Republicans since the days of Barry Goldwater in the 1960s.
Nonetheless, even if One Nation does fail, this does not spell an end to the radicalisation of the right. It is here to stay. Whatever happens to One Nation, the Liberals and Nationals are unlikely to shift back to the centre again, a space now firmly occupied by the ALP. Right-wing strategists only need to look at Europe, the US, India and Latin America to see that the far right is on the march and that liberal centrism has had its day. Even without winning power, the right can still advance by hardening a critical mass of the population for the conflicts that are to come, whether wars, economic crises or climate disasters. These are the circumstances the hard right can break through using poisonous “divide and rule” rhetoric to destroy social solidarity and pave the way for a nastier and more vicious right to grab power.
Labor and the Greens will be no bastion against this.
Whether in opposition or in office, Labor pursues an uninspiring program that is incapable of responding to the widespread cost-of-living crisis. Its nationalism, its racist immigration policies, its anti-protest laws and its military expansionism and slavish loyalty to the US only reinforce and legitimise right-wing positions.
The Greens have been more forthright in fighting the right. But their middle-class liberalism means they cannot meet the need for a working-class opposition to the right, one which points not to parliamentary negotiations over the wording of clauses but collective mobilisation by workers—strikes, demonstrations, picket lines—that give courage to our side and demoralise the right.
The bifurcation in the Greens voting base, in some ways similar to that plaguing the Liberals, between young white-collar workers being squeezed by rising rents who might once have voted Labor, and middle-aged home-owning professionals with whom the Greens compete with the teals for votes, also limits the Greens’ ability to give a clear lead.
To push back the right, we need to fight them, not appease them or apologise for their supporters, and this fight needs to have at its centre working-class politics and action. The current trade union leaders, loyal as they are to the Labor Party, will likewise not lead this fight. They have quashed strikes and collective struggle for years, and refuse to oppose seriously Labor policy, even when it means remaining silent about a genocide. They have sat on their hands as the cost-of-living crisis rolls on into its fifth year, and their refusal to organise strikes has allowed the bosses to get away with murder.
This leaves the considerable number of people who want higher wages and are willing to do something to get them, who are disgusted by genocide backed by Western powers, and who want to see money going to health and education rather than nuclear submarines, without any mainstream leadership. This is the constituency the Socialist Party is attempting to connect with and give hope to. It is both a strength and a weakness that this left pole is currently largely unorganised and without credible leadership: it is less influenced by the apologists for the system that dominate official politics, but also it is a huge endeavour to begin to organise this layer into a political force that can make an impact on the political landscape. This is why involving more people in socialist organising is such an urgent priority: we need an anti-capitalist force that argues for working-class unity against racism, for improving living standards through unity in action against the bosses and their servants in Canberra, and that shows the real power workers have, which means we do not have to rely on political “leaders” in parliament or the unions to change things for us—we have that power ourselves.
This, then, tells us the priorities for our side. There is no point bemoaning the failure of the centre to hold back the far right. The sustained anti-war movement that has mobilised on our streets for well over two years and the widespread disgust at the Albanese government rolling out the welcome mat to Israeli President Isaac Herzog tell us that millions are pissed off with what’s currently on offer. The continued turn-up at Invasion Day rallies despite the loss of the Albanese government’s insipid Voice to Parliament referendum shows that people will resist racism even if the government won’t. Across the country, the Socialist Party is preparing to mobilise for local, state and federal elections in the coming years to put up a real challenge to the ALP and Greens. If you want to be part of resisting the rise of the right and fighting for a working-class alternative, there has never been a better time to get involved.
