The rise of far-right parties like One Nation in Australia is the direct result of decades of soaring inequality and neoliberal capitalism. Unfortunately, the way progressives typically respond has failed time and time again.
For decades, the working class and petit bourgeoise have been immiserated by neoliberal policies. Secure jobs have been replaced by precarious work, stagnant wages, and crushing debt. When actual social mobility and economic stability is materially restricted, this leads to a “tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability”.
Today, 44 percent of Australians feel they gained nothing from 26 years of continuous economic growth. This is hardly surprising when the wealth from that growth has been entirely captured by just 200 ultra-rich people.
Economic inequality has created deep mistrust and fragility in democratic institutions. Over 61 percent of Australians believe the government is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves. (They’re correct.)
Read more: Antidote: trade unionism as a vaccine against far-right politics
Most recently, in June 2026, polling shows that a significant majority of people think “the people who built this mess aren’t going to fix it”. Interestingly, university educated people are more likely to believe that “the system looks broken until you consider the alternative”, 36 percent compared to the 26 percent average, and this rises to 39 percent for people who own investment properties.
Let’s be completely clear. The massive increase in wealth inequality and wealth extraction from the immiserated majority to the billionaire-class is the primary driver of right-wing extremism and surge in support for far-right parties like One Nation.
A critical example is housing. There is a housing crisis across Australia and the world. The lack of affordable housing is a key structural driver of far-right radicalisation. Especially for young people who are locked out of the housing market, the housing crisis provokes widespread and deep economic pessimism. The beneficiaries of the housing crisis — people who own investment properties — are more likely to support the existing political and economic system.
The far-right exploits this real material deprivation by weaponising frustration, away from banks, developers and ultra-rich landlords, towards immigrants and refugees. For example, people experiencing homelessness often direct their anger at social housing policies that they perceive as prioritising newly arrived refugees over citizens. The far-right takes this and codes “citizen” as white and refugees/immigrants as non-white. Through blaming minorities for the lack of affordable homes, far-right movements successfully convert legitimate economic grievances (about neoliberalism creating artificial scarcity of housing to boost asset wealth of billionaires) into exclusionary racial resentment.
When the political establishment on the centre left and centre right fails to address real material decline and just offers more of the failed status quo, voters rationally look elsewhere for answers.
This is the vacuum that the far-right fills.
Parties like One Nation, MAGA, Reform in the UK and AfD in Germany acknowledge the reality of economic failure, but they present economic inequality as a cultural not economic problem. The far-right says the fundamental cause of economic misery is cultural elites, immigrants, welfare recipients and other marginalised groups, and construct an “in-group identity” centred on whiteness and maleness. They promise to restore pride, status, and dignity to the in-group voters who feel humiliated by the system and alienated by the rhetoric of progressive, inner-city elites.
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Unfortunately, misogyny acts as a critical uniting ideology and a gateway to broader far-right extremism. Especially through social media, far-right influencers and politicians use young men’s insecurities and feelings of marginalisation — caused by the economic exploitation of cpaitalism — by directing blame towards women and feminism. The manosphere is the gateway for a worldview that rests on the simultaneous desire to possess women and hating them. There is a complete overlap of misogyny and far-right violence.
Smug, middle-class lecturing from progressives has proven incapable of halting the rise of the far-right. When progressive liberals dismiss working-class economic anxieties as prejudice or lecture about intersectional disadvantage, the far-right uses this behaviour and language that to position liberal-centrists and progressives as part of the cultural elite who are causing the problems.
Since the Global Financial Crisis, centrist-liberal political and media elites have been entirely unable to explain the economic and social declines in Australia and the rest of the Global North. There has been an infantile retreat into binary thinking (e.g., the West versus Islam, free versus unfree, Abundance versus regulation). This exacerbates polarisation because everyday citizens, feeling unprotected by the state and ignored by the perceived cultural elites, are demobilised into “cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous brutality“.
The far-right has learned to used the tactics of identity politics. They encourage people to identify primarily by race, gender, or nationality — exclusionary categories. This is how far-right billionaires successfully secure millions of working-class votes.
Aggrieved entitlement and victimhood are integral to far-right identity politics. The rage experienced by people in the far-right political pipeline, particularly white men, who feel that the benefits they were promised by society have been unfairly snatched away, are rooted in material economic causes, not psychological conditions.
Instead of blaming systemic economic issues, individuals experiencing aggrieved entitlement direct their anger towards women, minorities, and progressive policies, believing these groups are advancing at their expense. This profound sense of having a rightful social status stolen fuels a desire to take back control, making it a powerful psychological driver for far-right mobilisation.
The abandonment of talking about class and class politics enabled this opening for the far-right. As mainstream centre-left parties capitulated to pro-market neoliberalism and gave up on redistributive economics, voters began to polarise over cultural identities rather than shared material interests.
In January this year (2026), I wrote “If the Federal Labor government continues to play by the rules of 1990s neoliberalism, refusing to tax the ultra-wealthy, break up monopolies, capture gas and mining super-profits, or touch the property market, they risk a similar fate to Starmer”.
This is exactly what is happening — One Nation is surging, like Nigel Farage’s Reform in the UK.
The best solution to this right-wing radicalisation is not more awareness campaigns or liberal scolding. As I wrote about seven years ago, the answer to tackling the far-right is bigger, stronger unions.
Unions are the institutions best capable of disrupting far-right rhetoric and polarisation. Union membership helps foster a more universal, unifying identity centred on real, shared material interests. Workers’ frustrations are directed at the actual sources of their economic precarity: the employers and the capitalist economic system. Immigrants, minorities, other marginalised groups are allies — fellow workers — in the struggle against this extractive economic system.
Unions also create many of the other inoculators against far-right polarisation: social inclusion, secure employment, greater economic equality, and a stronger and more active civil society.
Countering and ultimately defeating the far-right requires rebuilding the labour movement and winning real economic power for workers. We must not fall into the consensus trap, but instead replace centrist-liberal moralistic lecturing with genuine class solidarity.
Read more: Antidote: trade unionism as a vaccine against far-right politics