Nominal realities bedevil politics. They usually find form in polling statistics, airings in the land of pundits and those self-appointed wise people who think they have a measure of the electorate and its various wishes. Folly often follows, garlanded with errors of judgment and failed predictions: Brexit and Donald Trump’s election in 2016; Trump’s re-election in 2024. The list is wearisomely long, the electorate often inscrutable. Yet the pollsters always live another day, at large and unpunished.
In Australia, the cathedral of commentators and psephologists is expressing interest in the emergence of a new horse from the political stable. Not a thoroughbred, mind you. More of a nag, a persistent presence that took form when Pauline Hanson gave her unsteady if clear maiden speech in the House of Representatives on September 10, 1996.
The theme then, as now, was being alarmist with appeal, a ragbag of heartfelt concerns largely regarding immigration, the dangers of multiculturalism, the loss of local industries to foreign ownership, the gravy train of international organisations, and the supposed privileging of the Indigenous population. “Present governments are encouraging separatism in Australia by providing opportunities, land, moneys and facilities available to Aboriginals.” For the freshly elected Member for Oxley, a disadvantaged Aboriginal was a museum piece, an intrusive relic. As for immigrants, she felt no problem echoing the views of former Labor leader Arthur Calwell about keeping the swarthy and yellow races out. Multiculturalism as a policy needed to be abolished. “I believe,” she said with shrill conviction, “we are in danger of being swamped by Asians.”
Many of the views of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation were slyly and ruthlessly incorporated by the conservative government of John Howard. In the 1980s, he had himself played the anti-multicultural, anti-Asian immigration card as a failed opposition leader. His avenging successes from 1996 to 2006 turned Australia into a Hansonian simulacrum of suspicion and envy, softening her rough messages by adding sparkle to the prejudice. It was never the authentic Hanson, but it became appropriate, sensible, and necessary – at least for his political survival and belief in Comfortable Australia – to demonise undocumented boat arrivals, refugees, and asylum seekers, imprisoning them in mind-withering dungeons in the Pacific paid for by the Australian Treasury at enormous cost.
Despite this purloining of its sentiments (Hanson has views and little by way of programs), One Nation survived, a place to park votes of simmering grievance, and a forum for those who simply wanted to give Hanson what Australians call a “fair go”. It also survived despite many of its elected representatives at both the state and federal levels failing to serve their full term without defecting to other parties or becoming rogue independents. Hanson is notoriously incapable of keeping the family together.
In 2026, survival is now becoming a burgeoning promise. The pollsters think they are on to something. A national Newspoll covering February 5-8, sampling 1,234, placed Labor at 33% of the primary vote, One Nation at 27%, the Coalition at 18%, the Greens at 12%, and other parties at 10%. For the Coalition, which previously held government from 2013 to 2022, this was particularly galling.
A poll by the Redbridge Group had similar results: One Nation at 26% and the Coalition at 19%. Among the “Gen X” cohort (46-61 year olds), One Nation was viewed “very favourably” or “most favourably” by 48%, while 30% of millennials (30-45 year olds) expressed the same view. In the week of January 26 – February 1, 2026, the Roy Morgan Poll, covering 1,401 electors, showed One Nation polling at 25%, with support for the Liberals dropping to 18% and the Nationals steady at 2.5% (a Coalition total of 20.5%).
While all the polls show that Albanese’s Labor government would be returned comfortably were an election to be held now, that very finding has been eclipsed by the excitable commentary on Hanson and her party. One could almost be forgiven for thinking a coup was in the works, heavily gestating. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, wrote veteran columnist Phillip Coorey for The Australian Financial Review, “has taken a sharp hit in his personal ratings, while Hanson is now the most popular political leader in Australia.” Redbridge poll director Tony Barry added that the Liberal and National parties could see their vote share plummet further, admitting that he could not be sure “how much One Nation’s vote is protest or power. But if the Liberal and National parties keep accumulating scar tissue and don’t change the story arc, it might be unsalvageable.”
There is hardly any surprise that a right-wing political force flavoured by the mantra of common sense, earthy feeling, and resentment should be doing better when the centre-right Coalition is nowhere to be seen. Acrimony is the unwanted offspring of a failing relationship, and the Liberals and Nationals have struggled to maintain their union since their calamitous defeat in May 2025. Two brief periods of acrimonious separation have followed, marked by testy disagreement over legislation on gun control and free speech. As they bicker, surveyed electors are unimpressed and bored.
Polls, with their unpardonably vague formulations of “most” or “very” favourable intention towards a party, are largely worthless as a measure of electoral grunt. It’s a cliché to point out that the only poll that matters is the one that involves ballots at the ballot box. Short of that, everything else is a drain of unnecessary oxygen. But fanning One Nation’s rise and assuming an oracular position on its prospects shows the dangers posed by the polling industry, itself never an entirely neutral force.
An argument can even be made that such an industry is itself a force for electoral interference, a meddling distortion that reduces the complexity of an electorate to a curating measure warped and framed by the questions asked. The late Christopher Hitchens, writing in Harper’s Magazine (April 1992), was firm on this point, taking issue with questions that put “a firm, no-exceptions, yes-or-no proposition to the interviewee.” Polling was a vehicle for pursuing a consensus to be exploited by the professional political class. “In alliance with the new breed of handlers, fundraisers, spin-specialists, and courtier journalists, it has become both a dangerous tranquiliser and artificial stimulant.”
Be wary, the lesson goes, of what that legendary huckster of polling, George Gallup, called the “sampling referendum”, a means of testing the electoral temperature and mood in a great room falsely resembling a town meeting.
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