The recent South Australian election has caused a political earthquake, but it is vital that we do not misread the shockwaves. The One Nation surge is not due to a sudden shift in cultural values or deep support for right-wing politics. Their 20 percent vote is because the material basis of our society are cracking under the economic strain of the failing status quo.

On 21 March, the South Australian election saw One Nation rocket to around 20 percent of the primary vote, beating the Liberal Party into second place. Although One Nation’s vote did not result in a large number of seats in SA’s parliament, it would be a mistake to dismiss this ongoing realignment in Australian politics.

To understand exactly why voters are abandoning the traditional centre-right, you must examine the material basis for why so many people are angry.

It is easy to look at One Nation’s rallies and see only grievance, stigmatisation, and resentment. The demonisation directed at immigrants and welfare recipients is worsened and reinforced by venal reporting in much of the mainstream, billionaire-owned media. This reactionary anger is a symptom of a much deeper structural problem.

The real drivers of One Nation’s surge are fundamentally material.

In Australia, the top 20 percent of households now own 92 times as much wealth as the bottom 20 percent. We live in a system designed to enrich a wealthy minority while leaving everyone else to fight over the scraps.

When generations of workers watch their security evaporate while the political establishment presides over the greatest upward wealth transfer in history, casting a vote for a far-right party like One Nation is not ideological conversion but is a rational response to profound political despair.

Australians are experiencing a severe cost-of-living and housing crisis. Basic survival for millions of people is a daily struggle of soaring rents, inflation, and crushing mortgage repayments. Political volatility and despair is the inevitable result.

The common denominators behind the strong vote for One Nation include financial stress relating to employment, income, home ownership, and especially household debt.

Housing stress, mortgage stress and rental stress are a significant drivers for support for One Nation. Voters are angry because they played by the rules and are still struggling. Society promised a “good life”. The promise has been broken for many, many people, driving the strong the resentment with our economic and political system.

We must look at extreme wealth inequality to make sense of this political rage. One Nation voters are using their vote to reject a system that has abjectly and materially failed, and reject a political party that smugly dismissed their anxieties while engineering the systematic evisceration of their living standards.

Above all the other material drivers, the massive increase in wealth inequality and wealth extraction from the immiserated majority to the billionaire-class is the primary driver for people voting for One Nation.

The central economic driver of inequality is the “wealth pump“. This is an economic system where asset prices increase, wages stagnate and wealth is extracted upward from workers and the increasingly precarious middle classes to the ultra-rich elites.

Predatory, extractive, monopolistic rentiers corporations define the Australian economy. The banks, mining and oil companies, property speculators and developers, the major supermarket chains, airlines, the pharmacies, the insurance companies, the media, even online job-searching.

A “rentier” is a company or person that makes money by owning things people need (like land, housing or a utility company) rather than by making things.

These rentiers prioritise short-term profits over long-term investment, so they increase costs and cut quality. This worsens the quality of life for everyday people.

This severe inequality has created a demobilised class society. Everyday working people are exhausted by the daily grind of surviving while collective political institutions needed to fight back against the elites, especially unions, have been systematically degraded and attacked. The long-term decline of union density in South Australia, caused in large part by the deliberate destruction of Adelaide’s car manufacturing sector, is an example of how society is deliberately demobilised and collective agency is undermined by the corporate elites.

In a demobilised society, people lack collective agency. Their anger is redirected downwards.

Instead of targeting distant CEOs, big banks, or commercial landlords, frustrated voters project their rage onto vulnerable scapegoats like immigrants or the unemployed. The legitimate economic rage has been weaponised by right-wing media, billionaires and politicians into xenophobia, which provides the perfect smokescreen for the ultra-rich

This is worsened by precarious asset anxiety. Decades of neoliberalism linked our prosperity to housing price rises rather than stable wage increases.

For example, Gen X holds the most wealth in property, making them highly leveraged and terrified that falling behind on mortgage payments is a social and economic death sentence. 97 percent of mortgage loans in Australia are variable interest rate loans meaning every economic shock is directly felt by millions of precarious, financially anxious people. This variable rate system is designed to extract maximum wealth from the working class

When the implicit social contract of working hard to be safe is broken by inflation and housing costs, voters look for an alternative to the status quo.

One Nation exploits this exact fear by offering a nostalgic, authoritarian promise to restore an idealised past of economic security and order, while blaming immigrants, Muslims and First Nations people for Australia’s problems. This manufactured culture war ensures the working class and petit bourgeoisie fights amongst itself and each other.

The Liberal Party and National Party are collapsing because they cannot offer solutions to an economic crisis they created through their ideological allegiance to neoliberalism, big business and ultra-rich elites.

The surge of older, financially stressed voters toward One Nation proves that traditional conservative and centrist appeals are failing to address intense material anxiety. Whether this realignment proves permanent remains to be seen.

The Liberals and Nationals are trying hard to shift their rhetoric to the far-right to appeal to One Nation voters without understanding that it is not right-wing political attitudes, ideology or social identity behind the surge, but rather, is a (potentially temporary) anti-incumbent reaction sparked by inflation and financial stress.

The anger of the working and middle classes is justified (our economic system really is a disaster!), but their target is wrong. To defeat reactionary politics, we must redirect this anger and moral disapproval upward toward the oligarchs and multinational corporations who are actually hoarding the wealth.

The misdirected fury strengthens inequality, and empowers dangerous, reactionary forces on the far-right, while enabling the corporations to further repress and weaken the unions that remain the only viable mechanism for workers and everyday people to fight back.

There is a real risk that Labor responds to the One Nation surge by also deciding to move to the right. This also would be a disaster — as we have seen in the UK and Starmer, where his various appeals to the right, like the Island of Strangers speech and attacks on immigrants have failed to address the real, material needs of Britons.

We can defeat the far-right by rebuilding collective power with stronger unions, so we can demand universal public goods, like housing and healthcare, that eliminate scarcity and diminish resentment. We must have a wealth tax, so the exorbitant power of the ultra-rich is broken. We must break up the monopolies that give corporations extreme power and extract wealth from everyday people. And we must decommodify housing and utilities, so that the basis for life is not subject to the whims of financial markets.