One Nation has political momentum right now like we’ve perhaps never seen in recent Australian political history. For the past year there’s been a trend where every time there’s a new poll, its numbers go up.
There was, however, a blip – One Nation’s polling surge stagnated in response to the US attack on Iran. The surge only resumed once the first ceasefire was declared, petrol prices stabilised, and the war stopped dominating the headlines. Polling showed one of the only things less popular with Australians than the Iran War was the state of Israel itself.
Pauline Hanson was the only mainstream politician who called for Australia to join Trump and Israel’s war on Iran, a show of loyalty that the Americans no doubt appreciated, but which cost her politically. She’s very lucky to have been bailed out by the supreme law of nothing ever happens, and so the issue lost salience for voters and the poll surge resumed.
Nevertheless, it showed that One Nation’s momentum is not impervious to derailment. The electorate does not like mass immigration, but unfortunately mass immigration isn’t as important to the average voter as it is to chuds on X. They are not single-issue voters. And for most voters mass immigration is not the most salient issue, even if most of them don’t like it.
One Nation’s popular opposition to mass immigration will, therefore, not enable it to get away with brutally unpopular policies in other areas.
The electorate will tolerate a vague pro-Israel stance, they will even support a strong pro-America stance if its articulated in terms of checking China rather than publicly volunteering Australia for another blatant war for Israel in the Middle East. But having your top donor Gina Rinehart out there floating giving the Israelis free land to build military tech? Read the room.
Even Donald Trump himself is trying to distance himself from Israel now to salvage his dismal polling numbers before the midterms later this year. Shut the hell up about Israel – in 2026 its electoral cancer.
Unfortunately for One Nation though, the Israel issue isn’t its only area of weakness.
Christian lobbyists are now trying to push One Nation into taking a hard stance on abortion, despite restricting abortion almost being as unpopular in Australia as the state of Israel. This is a strategic nightmare, especially considering the fact that recent polling is showing One Nation’s support base is majority female.
Patriot influencer Hugo Lennon recently put out a well argued video on this and copped some flack for it from Christians, but his argument is fundamentally sound. The reality is that if you want to win elections, particularly as “populists” who market yourself as the voice of the “silent majority” against the establishment, you need to actually be popular. Christian moralism is not popular. It’s a form of moralism somehow even less popular than the woke moralism people are voting for One Nation to rebuke.
Resurrecting this dead issue to activate women against the right at this existential moment in the immigration fight needs to be shut down.
Recent polling has One Nation around 31% of the primary vote with immigration being the single biggest reason voters are backing them.… pic.twitter.com/nx5C2uQrUs
— auspill (@aus_pill) June 23, 2026
Thankfully no one actually watched Pauline Hanson’s recent press club all the way through, and so it is collectively remembered as a speech primarily about abolishing multiculturalism, as that was what grabbed the headlines. This is obviously good, even though One Nation is still struggling to articulate what they mean in concrete policy terms by abolishing multiculturalism. If One Nation can identify this with defunding and jettisoning minority ethnic and religious lobbying from the political process, rather than getting bogged down in debates over cultural freedom, this policy will have mass appeal. For more on this check out my previous op-ed.
However, in this speech Hanson also made remarks that sounded like floating cuts on paid parental leave. Thankfully she has now clarified that she doesn’t want to change the parental leave system as it currently exists in Australia – but this is another example of not reading the room.
In a democracy, you win by buying votes. “Socialism” they call it. This is why all the most intelligent free market libertarians became Hoppean monarchists. If the common man or (perhaps even more importantly for One Nation) common woman perceives that you will make them poorer, they won’t vote for you, even if they agree with you on slashing immigration and that “the wokes have gone too far”. Cutting taxes and regulations on small business sounds great to most voters and will be good for the economy, unless it entails cutting benefits to the working class voters you’re trying to win over from Labor.
Populism works because it’s popular. Because it’s challenging an establishment policy agenda driven by ideology, not popular will and majority interest. Once you start indulging in too much ideology yourself, but simply the conservative variants of Zionism, Christian moralism and free market fetishism, you stop being populists fighting out-of-touch elites, and just become conservatives fighting progressives over ideology again. And that is a fighting a fight that conservatives have already lost, rather than fighting the fight that populists will win – if they can have the self-consciousness to stay actually populist, and therefore popular.
Populism “unbundles” the conservative political formula, this how it re-aligns the electorate. One Nation can win precisely because it’s not the Liberal Party, if it becomes simply the conservative wing of Liberal Party re-packaged with a new orange label, it will lose.
Header image: Pauline Hanson with a female supporter (One Nation).
