The 2025 Federal Election exposed Australia’s structural political fractures and the fragility of the outcome was its defining feature.

Subsequent polling suggests a dramatic fragmentation of the Australian electorate across generational, gender and asset ownership that has a profound impact for right-wing politics.

The recent Australian Election Study (AES) tracked the enduring trend of younger generations shifting to Labor and the Greens. Polling from multiple sources conducted in the months after the election show an alarming rise in support for One Nation at the expense of the Coalition.

We are witnessing a significant but fragile realignment of Australian politics towards a volatile new political environment defined by educational status, concentrated asset ownership, and profound alienation, anger and loneliness.

The traditional “workers versus capital” divide is being supercharged by inequalities of education and wealth. And to spoil my conclusion, the most impactful way to respond to this realignment is to build stronger, more powerful unions.

The AES study and basically every poll since the 2025 election (and since around 2022 to be honest) confirmed that economic anxieties dominate Australian life, with the cost of living being the top concern across all major voter groups. For renters, housing affordability was the second most important election issue.

The AES data absolutely confirms that Labor’s voting base is no longer the “industrial worker” stereotype of the 1960s, and is now the party of the tertiary educated and credentialed, administrators and managers, and urban progressives — what Piketty called in 2018 the “Brahmin Left”.

Conversely, the Coalition’s voter base is now diminishing to affluent asset owners, business owners and, increasingly, the non-university-educated working class who feel alienated by cultural progressivism — what Piketty termed the “Merchant Right”.

However, after the 2025 election, a significant portion of the Coalition’s voters are now parking their support with One Nation — a phenomenon that has also happened in the UK, with the Conservative Party (and Labour) experiencing a collapse, and the anti-immigration party Reform UK on the rise.

So, is the One Nation surge real? The polling data suggests, for now, that it is real, reflecting a shift in voter intentions following the election. Whether it is sustained remains to be seen.

One Nation secured 6.4% of the Lower House primary vote in 2025, but now the November 2025 DemosAU MRP model estimates their support has nearly tripled to 17%.

This dramatic increase threatens the Coalition’s remaining electoral base, projecting that One Nation could win 12 seats and surpass the Nationals as the third largest political force. This volatility indicates the Coalition political support is facing a structural decline, largely due to 1 in 5 former Coalition voters now intending to switch their support to One Nation.

Older voters, specifically Generation X (born 1965-1980) and Boomers (1946-1964) are the key demographics that are driving the increase in support for One Nation.

Financial pressure is a significant factor driving the political choices of Gen X, with 26% of male members of Gen X supporting One Nation. Within Gen X, the common denominators behind the strong vote for One Nation include financial stress relating to employment, income, and home ownership — especially household debt.

The Gen X anger isn’t just economic anxiety; it is mortgage distress and rental stress — Gen X may own a house but the bank owns them. They are angry because they played by the rules and are still struggling. The higher the societal promise of a “good life”, the stronger the resentment when it isn’t delivered.

This specific betrayal is what One Nation exploits, pointing the finger at immigrants.

Immigration increased in saliency as a top concern in the 2025 election, driven by bad-faith reporting about housing and infrastructure pressures, providing a perfect external target for this displaced rage.

For Gen X voters, immigration has become a defining factor in voting attitudes. For the 2022 federal election, Gen X voters that felt immigration levels were “much too high” was only 11%. In the 2025 election however, there was a sharp increase in concern in immigration for Gen X where it jumped to 33%. Boomers also think immigration is too high, at 37%. For One Nation voters, concern at immigration is at 97%, vs 49% for Liberal Party voters, 44% for Nationals, 17% for Labor voters and 6% for Greens voters.

Educational attainment plays a significant role in shaping voting behaviour across the major and minor parties. Tertiary education is strongly linked to voting for Labor and the Greens, compared to the reverse for voting for the Coalition and One Nation.

Support for One Nation is highest among voters with lower levels of educational attainment, especially non-university degree holders. The highest proportion of One Nation voters were those who didn’t finish Grade 12 (24%), with support dropping off as education attainment increases (e.g. TAFE qualification 19%, undergrad degree 10% and postgrad 9%).

The geographic areas where One Nation is seeing its strongest performance are rural/regional and outer metropolitan areas. These electorates also have lower shares of tertiary degree holders.

For the Coalition, educational attainment and voter support is relatively stable, around 22% (non-school finishers) to 27% (undergrad). However, the Coalition is deeply affected by the loss of less-educated voters to One Nation, and like the Conservatives in the UK devastated by the rise of Reform, the Coalition faces electoral oblivion.

Again, this absolutely confirms the long-term historic trends of class cleavages noted by Piketty.

To understand this political rupture, we must examine the underlying crisis of class and capital, and the “demobilised” society that has formed in Australia and other Anglophone countries.

The contemporary political crisis is inseparable from soaring wealth inequality. Australia’s top 20% of households own 92 times the wealth of the bottom 20%. This is the essence of a plutonomy — an economic system that operates in the interests of the absolute wealthiest.

Neoliberalism, as a political project, successfully convinced ordinary people they are alone, responsible for their own survival, and that mutual aid is obsolete. This erosion of social bonds creates what German sociologists call a “demobilised class society“.

In this environment, working people and the petit bourgeoisie (tradespeople, small shopkeepers) are too exhausted by the struggle for basic dignity (paying the rent, managing cost of living) to band together and fight the elites.

This exhaustion leads to a profound sense of powerlessness, loneliness and anger. The traditional working class and the petit bourgeoisie live in fear that falling into the underclass is a death sentence, given the deliberate dismantling of the social safety net. Their deeply felt, reactive sense of injustice is rooted in a broken implicit social contract: “if I work hard, I should be safe and secure”.

This injustice is what One Nation (and Reform UK, and MAGA-Trump in the US) have tapped into, and then weaponised against immigrants.

One Nation voters (like other voter groups) are acutely susceptible to this material stress, reporting feeling high financial stress related to employment, income, and home ownership.

In rural areas for example, the twin cruelties of climate change and neoliberal de-industrialisation mean that communities and livelihoods have been wrecked and the remaining assets (farms, waterways) are losing value and becoming uninsurable. This is destroying the wealth of the farmers and workers in those areas. Their turn to One Nation is a frantic denial of this reality; voting for a party that says “climate change is fake” is a psychological defence mechanism against the devaluation of their property and the destruction of their old job security..

Furthermore, loneliness and social isolation play a crucial, yet often neglected, role. Right-wing populism thrives in atomised societies. Studies show that One Nation supporters are far more likely to report feeling lonely “always” (9%) compared to supporters of other parties (around 2%).

Right-wing parties and organisations “solve” the loneliness problem of their supporters by providing a fictional bond. By hating the same “enemy” (immigrants), isolated individuals feel a phantom connection to a non-existent “silent majority”.

This damaging rise of loneliness is hardly surprising.

Neoliberal policies over the past 30 to 40 years have purposely destroyed civil society structures like unions, local communities, churches, clubs, and social organisations that once provided solidarity, stability, and a sense of belonging.

When these institutions decay, people are left unattached, vulnerable to political ideologies that offer new, metaphorical “quasi-communities” based on ethnic nationalism and tribalism to reduce feelings of detachment and insecurity.

Digital tools and forums like 4chan, Reddit, Telegram groups and the like have supercharged the virality of these “quasi-communities”. And extreme right-wing groups and neo-Nazi organisations have also crept into some of the key remaining in-person communities that remain, such as boxing gyms in Australia and MMA and Brazilian Jui-jitsu gyms in the US.

To understand this shift, we need to recognise that this cohort comprises the “old petit bourgeoisie” and the traditional working class. For a generation raised on the myth of “meritocracy,” seeing an immigrant “succeed” or receive support feels like a theft of their own “hard work.”

Their “moral disapproval,” as analysed by sociologists like Klaus Dörre, targets those perceived to be breaking the implicit social contract, like “queue jumping immigrants” or “dole bludgers”, rather than the distant billionaires and CEOs extracting wealth.

However, as noted earlier in my post, the One Nation surge is not universal; it is sharply divided along lines of class, gender, education, and age.

Crucially, Millennials (1981-1996) and Gen Z (1997-2012), who are also politically cynical and angry, are channelling their anger and disillusionment overwhelmingly to the “left”, specifically Labor and also the Greens and “other/independent” parties and candidates. Their support for the Coalition has fallen steadily, dropping from 38% in 2016 to just 21% in 2025.

Gen Z swung massively to Labor (67-33 two-party preferred) in 2025, while Millennials delivered 64% TPP to Labor, and Labor gets 41% of the primary vote for Gen Z, with the Greens receiving 27% primary. The proportion of young voters shifting to One Nation is notably smaller than for older cohorts, even in rural areas.

Cost of living and affordability was the major issue among all age groups, with housing affordability especially important for people aged under 30, who are more likely to rent. In inner cities, under 30s also highlighted climate change as a major issue, along with political integrity. Gen Z voters have the lowest concern about immigration at 16% with Millennials at 23%.

However, Gen Z voters are as sceptical about the political process and parties as people who don’t vote at all, showing no significant differences in agreeing with statements like “parties do not care about people like me” or “parties are all the same”.

Ideology doesn’t drive voting behaviour changes; assets do. The old political wisdom of the “conservative drift” as people age requires capital accumulation (housing). Without it, Millennials and Gen Z remain in a state of proletarian precarity and downward mobility.

Housing is a top-tier issue for renters but statistically irrelevant to homeowners. This is the definition of a plutonomy. The comfort of the asset-owning class is structurally dependent on the exploitation (high rents/prices) of the non-owning class.

The support for Labor and the Greens among Millennials and Gen Z may appear hopeful, but really it is evidence that younger voters are trapped by the brutality of the asset economy. Locked out of the possibility of buying a home, they are voting for protection and redistribution — they’re hostages to the rental market.

This distinction maps onto Piketty’s “Brahmin Left-Merchant Right” framework. Highly educated, culturally rich but precarious and downwardly socially mobile young professionals, often living in inner cities, use their cultural capital to articulate and mobilise around “post-material” concerns like climate change and social issues.

Meanwhile, the non-university educated, older regional cohort, feeling betrayed by stagnant wages and economic insecurity, leans toward the jingoistic appeals of the “Merchant Right” — captured by the anti-immigration rhetoric of One Nation.

Tertiary education like vocational education and TAFE can inoculate against the worsening swing to right-wing political ideologies. As noted earlier, the data shows that holding a TAFE degree or higher significantly decreases support for One Nation.

However, the solution, lies not just in formal qualifications but in dismantling the deep-seated political alienation that drives support for extreme right-wing parties.

The far-right exploits this manufactured powerlessness by encouraging men to project their agency onto a “strong leader” and redirect their rage toward the weak, rather than the true beneficiaries of the broken system.

Liberal democracy relies on affluence to “numb” the population and suppress radical critique. Australian households have suffered the worst decline in disposable income in the OECD since 2022. The anaesthetic is wearing off.

The path forward requires we reject the consensus trap and accept that politics is conflict.

Firstly, and most importantly, building collective power through unions is one of the best way for workers and the tradies and shopkeepers to regain agency and inoculate themselves against the false promise of far-right extremism. For electoral politics, union membership is causal in shifting votes to Labor and the Greens.

In fact, the most effective, impactful thing that we can do to address the root causes of worsening right-wing radicalisation (wealth and income inequality) is to support unions and increase their membership, power and influence, through increased bargaining power and removing restrictions on strikes.

It can’t be overstated how central stronger unions are to tackling the rise of right-wing political ideology and parties

Beyond that, we must channel the real anger and “moral disapproval” felt by the demobilised classes not against immigrants or welfare recipients, but directly toward the plutocracy: the big banks, multinational gas companies, and commercial landlords.

To counter the fragmentation across workers and petit bourgeoisie, progressive organisations must ground their politics in clear material needs (as Mamdani did recently in the New York mayoral race). Ignoring the grievances of the “Merchant Right” leaves a vacuum for extreme right-wing parties to exploit.

We must pivot from “managing the economy” to transforming it. Focusing on “competence” and economic management is a trap. If Labor manages a recession well, workers and everyday people still suffer.

The “housing supply” approach is also a dead end. More housing creates more assets for rentiers and property speculators to buy. Instead, housing must be de-commodified and become a universal right, not an asset class. This approach would bridge the gap between the educated renter and the working-class “struggler”.

For decades, but especially during the Pandemic, the right has monopolised the idea of “freedom”. As Grace Blakeley correctly argued, the Left must reclaim it.

We need to attack “corporate power” not just as unfair, but as authoritarian, This means real economic democracy: co-operatives and public ownership.

Labor’s huge victory masks a fragility caused by worsening material living conditions for the vast majority of people. These material interests are stubborn and Australia is ploughing headlong into a US and UK nightmare of creating a permanent underclass where the new factory floor is the rental inspection and the new overseer is the property manager.

This is not a stable realignment. It is a waiting room for the next crisis.