The wave of right-wing populism sweeping Western democracies in recent years appears to be hitting a ceiling. This ceiling is not the relative popularity of immigration restriction – it is the relative unpopularity of “right-wing populism”.
The problem with right-wing populism, is that very few things about it are actually popular other than immigration restriction.
Trump stormed back into the White House promising to end wars, prosecute corruption and reduce inflation – three also actually popular things in addition to restricting immigration. Getting in power and doing the opposite just turned the country against him, even though he did implement greater immigration restrictions than any US president in living memory.
Whilst the average reader of The Noticer may see immigration as the most important issue, most voters don’t, even if most voters support restrictive immigration policies. Achieving immigration restriction in Western democracies, therefore, requires combining immigration restriction with other policies voters want, and avoiding combination with policies voters don’t want.
This insight may seem obvious, but to many commentators it isn’t.
Left-wing election victories don’t prove immigration restriction isn’t electorally viable. We must remember Albanese only became prime minister after promising to restrict immigration more than the Coalition.
After this promise was spectacularly broken and the Coalition failed to win back power in 2025, many commentators claimed this proved that the right needed to abandon opposition to “diversity” and multiculturalism because the electorate was now too brown to vote against it. This take aged like milk, with One Nation now leading the polls – and for every two voters they’ve taken from the Coalition, they’ve taken one from Labor.
(It’s important to remember that about a third of the non-Whites permanently living in Australia aren’t citizens and can’t vote, so the eligible voters in this country remain about 80% White.)
The Coalition lost in 2025 precisely because it didn’t run on immigration restriction and opposition to multiculturalism, which is the only thing that makes the right-wing attractive to vote for anymore if you aren’t a boomer. Without that, all they had to run on was the economy, a domain where “right-wing”-coded policies are only diminishing in popularity year-on-year.
One of the main reasons for this is the hyper-financialised Australian housing market, where the median house price in a capital city is now over 10 times the median yearly income, more than double what it was in the 1990s.
Traditionally, as left-leaning young people become homeowners and start families a significant portion of them turn conservative. Yet young Australians are struggling to buy into the inflated housing market and are delaying family formation at least partially as a result. Millennials and now Gen Z, therefore, are not becoming middle class liberal voters at the rate Gen X and Baby Boomers were when they entered their 30s and 40s, largely because they’re disgruntled renters.
Yes, immigration obviously does drive up housing demand and therefore prices. This is probably a big reason why One Nation is more popular with renters than the Coalition.
But the inflated housing market isn’t only driven by immigration, it’s also driven by investor demand. The Greens are so popular with young voters, who are disproportionately renters, because they champion policies like abolishing negative gearing and capital gains tax discounts that benefit investors and therefore drive demand.
In the last election Greens voters were the most concerned voters about housing, Coalition voters the least. This maps onto younger voters being way more concerned about housing than older voters, because they didn’t get to buy their first house last century when they were actually affordable.
The idea that young people are so disproportionately voting for the left, especially the Greens, simply because they’re all “woke”, runs into serious problems when you realise that they’re voting in their economic self-interest. This is to a very significant degree the result of a tax system that reinforces inflated property prices to the benefit of older property investors at the expense of younger renters and aspiring first-home buyers.
It is profoundly exploitative of young Australians that the inflated property market-driven equity in the mostly paid-off homes Gen X bought last century enable them to take out second mortgages to buy investment properties, which they then pay off by renting them to zoomer serfs who can’t afford to buy a house precisely because this type of financialised investment inflates the property market. And the fact that property investors are incentivised to service mortgages on investment properties in this manner because of generous tax breaks on the practice is straight up evil, and only further inflates the property market.
No wonder the only party that has policies to stop this – the Greens – has such a large zoomer voter base.
The IPA’s March polling on immigration, however, showed that 67% of Greens voters want net migration capped at 100,000 or less (a number lower than what One Nation is now targeting), and 26% of them support either a net-negative or net-zero migration intake. The poll also found 37% of Greens voters agree, and only 38% disagree, that there’s too many migrants in Australia. And perhaps most surprisingly, it found 40% of Greens voters agree that Australia should prioritise migrants from countries that share our values, such as Britain, Canada and New Zealand, with only 34% of Greens voters disagreeing.
A substantial portion of Greens voters, therefore, appear to have more radical preferences on immigration policy than One Nation!
The right is not losing to the left on immigration; it’s losing on basically everything else.
Banning abortion is not popular. Supporting Israel is not popular. Being corrupt is not popular. Appearing to have been bought off by wealthy donors is not popular. And economic policies which reinforce boomer wealth-hoarding appear to be losing popularity as the boomers die off.
This is what explains the ceiling Trump and Farage have hit this year, and that Hanson is likely about to hit herself if she hasn’t already. It is not the ceiling of anti-immigration politics; it is the ceiling of all the other “right-wing populist” bullshit that is ironically not popular nor all that populist, being that it largely serves bourgeois interests at the expense of the everyman. It is the ceiling of all the electoral baggage being carried by anti-immigration sentiment.
Ultimately then, as the right-wing populist formula alone fails to tap into the full potential of the anti-immigration vote, and particularly struggles with younger voters, we will need to develop a new type of anti-immigration politics.
If only one faction of the electoral spectrum takes the immigration issue seriously, the fate of the White race within democratic systems remains far too precarious. Especially if it’s bound up with the baggage of outdated religious moralising, the business interests of billionaire donors, and anti-youth, anti-science, anti-working class, pro-Israel slop. The objective should be to get as much of the electoral spectrum to adopt immigration restrictionism as possible, which should be possible in principle considering how broadly popular immigration restrictionism in fact is with voters.
The only true victory over White replacement would be a democratic process where once mass immigration from the third world is halted, it becomes electoral suicide to propose unhalting it. Where we win the debate on immigration, and then the debate is settled for a generation, and political discourse moves on to other issues. Where not only parties that appeal to conservatives, but also parties that appeal to progressives, commit to immigration restriction – that is the victory condition.
Maybe instead of trying to get One Nation to be less retarded and corrupt, which is a fool’s errand, maybe we should try building that instead. If only the Greens still had the same immigration policy they had in the mid-90s, then I’d vote for them.
Header image:
