Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party is enjoying unprecedented popularity in the polls. What does the party's rise mean for social cohesion?
Dr Jordan McSwiney is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy at the University of Canberra.
He told SBS Examines the current political conditions — including cost of living pressures, international crises, a terror attack on our shores, and dysfunction among the Liberal-National Coalition — are ripe for One Nation to perform well.
"Did I ever anticipate the polling spike would be so big and so quick? No, not really. I don’t think anyone really did," he said.
A recent Newspoll found One Nation now has the highest primary vote in Queensland, at 30 per cent – above Labor with 27 per cent, and the Coalition at 23 per cent.
In early February, a national Newspoll published by The Australian reported the party had a 27 per cent primary vote – behind Labor with 33 per cent, but much higher than the Coalition’s 18 per cent.
One Nation’s Western Australia leader Rod Caddies told SBS Examines the party's recent success is the result of a "perfect storm".
A familiar story
A similar turn of events happened back in 2016, when Pauline Hanson was voted back into Parliament after 18 years following the Lindt Cafe siege terror attack.
McSwiney said Hanson was "effective at inserting herself into that narrative ... so again here, [she is] leveraging the Bondi discourse to talk about things like national security and immigration, which are obviously key issues that One Nation has quite a lot of issue ownership over."
In this episode of SBS Examines, we ask: why is support for One Nation rising so rapidly?
