Why Australians Are Voting One Nation And Why Nobody Wants To Say It Out Loud
Series note: Commentary on how decisions are made, who makes them, and what they actually produce.
By Aiden Garrison
Something deeper is happening in Australian politics than a temporary protest vote.
One Nation is pulling a significant and growing share of the Australian vote. The analysts are doing what analysts do — calling it a protest, a reaction, a symptom of anger.
What they’re not saying is the obvious thing.
People aren’t voting One Nation because they’ve become extreme. They’re voting One Nation because they look at the alternatives and see nobody who represents them. That’s a very different conversation.
Think about who’s running the country.
Modern political systems increasingly reward message discipline, factional loyalty, and career durability over real-world experience. The result is a political class that has spent its entire working life inside the system — union movement, staffer, candidate, minister — with little exposure to the decisions ordinary Australians face every week. There are isolated exceptions across both major parties, but they are increasingly rare.
Ordinary Australians feel that gap. They may not be able to articulate it in policy language. But they feel it every time a politician talks about cost of living pressures from a podium while collecting a salary that puts them in the top few percent of the country.
So what are they seeing?
Their living standards deteriorating. Quietly. Consistently. Year after year.
The median Australian dwelling now costs 8.2 times the average annual household income — up from 6.6 just five years ago. In Sydney that ratio has blown out to 10. Saving a 20% deposit now takes the average Australian household more than ten years. Rents rose 4.8% in 2024 alone.
Meanwhile, real wages are 4.8% lower than pre-pandemic levels, even as the OECD average has risen 1.5% over the same period. An economy cannot sustain rising living standards indefinitely without productivity growth — and Australia’s productivity performance has been deteriorating for years.
Their kids are coming home from university carrying debt and a growing sense of disconnect from the economic realities many Australians face. Their sense of where Australia was heading — what kind of country it was and what it stood for — feels increasingly distant from the decisions being made on their behalf.
One Nation speaks to that feeling directly. Not with solutions necessarily. But with acknowledgement.
When you feel invisible to the major parties, acknowledgement is worth something.
This is not a defence of One Nation’s policies. It is an observation about what happens when the political class stops reflecting the people it governs.
Right now I look at the three realistic options available to Australian voters and struggle to find a good one.
Labor understands the machinery of government but increasingly struggles to understand the people it governs.
The Coalition speaks the language of enterprise but often lacks the reform appetite required to reverse decline.
One Nation understands the frustration but not yet the complexity of governing a modern economy.
Three options. None of them good enough for what the country needs.
So what would a party that deserved that vote look like?
It would take living standards seriously. Not with targeted relief that disappears after the election cycle. Meaningful, structural policy that addresses why the average Australian feels like they’re going backwards. Housing supply that matches demand. Energy policy that reduces bills rather than just shifting emissions. Wages policy that tracks the real cost of living, not just the headline CPI. An economy that rewards building things — one that welcomes multinationals and entrepreneurship, because you can’t redistribute what you don’t create.
On immigration — the argument isn’t that immigration is the problem. It isn’t. The problem is that Australia has built an economy so dependent on importing labour that it stopped investing in its own people.
We need workers for healthcare, aged care, construction, infrastructure, and energy transition. Those shortages are real. Cutting immigration heavily and fast would damage essential services immediately. But the answer isn’t to keep importing indefinitely while ignoring the domestic workforce.
Australia currently spends roughly 0.2% of GDP on active labour market programs and retraining — well below the Nordic economies that spend between 1% and 2%. A party serious about this would invest meaningfully in retraining Australians into the occupations the country already admits it cannot fill. Do it properly and over time the structural dependence on imported labour reduces naturally. That’s not anti-immigration. That’s pro-Australian worker.
A party that made that argument clearly — we respect migration, we need it now, and we’re building the domestic workforce so we need less of it over time — would be saying something neither major party is prepared to say.
Then there’s the elderly.
Both major parties treat aged care as a budget problem. It isn’t. It’s a values problem. The countries that have handled it best understood that distinction early.
Singapore built its ageing strategy around housing decades ago — redesigning communities so elderly residents could age in place, close to family and services, with support built into the physical environment rather than bolted on afterwards.
The Netherlands moved away from institutional isolation toward community integration for dementia care — keeping people connected to the communities they came from rather than removing them when they became difficult to manage.
Hong Kong, operating in one of the most space-constrained urban environments on earth, developed supported living models that work within density — shared services, community-based care, solutions designed for small spaces.
Denmark invested heavily in home-based support — the premise being that keeping people independent in their own homes for as long as possible is both more humane and more economical than premature institutionalisation.
None of these countries solved the problem perfectly. But all of them asked a different question to the one Australia keeps asking.
Instead of how do we fund aged care, they asked how do we build a society that values its elderly.
A party that said — we are going to take the elderly seriously, not because they vote, but because they built this country — would be saying something most Australians haven’t heard from a mainstream politician in a very long time.
The One Nation vote isn’t the problem. It’s the signal.
The signal is that a significant number of Australians — the struggling middle class, the elderly, the worker who feels passed over, the young person who can’t see a future in the country their parents built — no longer feel represented by the people who are supposed to represent them.
A party that heard that signal and built real policy around it wouldn’t need to worry about One Nation.
Because the people currently voting One Nation are not looking for extremism.
They are looking for someone who sees them. Until a mainstream party is brave enough to be that — One Nation will keep growing.
