LATIKA M BOURKE: One Nation’s Newspoll surge showcases tough new political reality for Anthony Albanese

The surge of One Nation is no surprise after the Bondi terror attack, but it represents new frontlines that have opened up in Australian politics that will test Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in new ways.

Newspoll, published by Newscorp showed One Nation outpolling the Coalition for the first time in Australian political history with a primary of 22 per cent compared to 21 per cent. One Nation is just ten points short of Labor’s sagging primary of 32 per cent.

Resolve showed Labor’s primary even lower, at 30 per cent but One Nation at 18 per cent.

Both surveys recorded the Prime Minister’s personal approval ratings taking a solid belting.

They confirm what was obvious to so many, except seemingly the Prime Minister, his closest advisors, Cabinet and the Labor caucus — that the Government badly mishandled the country’s worst terror attack.

The country was watching and they were dismayed by what they saw.

Mr Albanese belatedly caught up, calling a Royal Commission and telling the House on Monday that “responsibility starts with me,” when it comes to transforming the anger into meaningful action.

It was a welcome and rare admission from the Prime Minister, but it underlined that when it comes to Bondi, he will forever be playing catch-up, having been marked down by voters for his very public failure.

But beyond the immediate response, the terror attack is set to define the terms of what is likely to be the Prime Minister’s toughest year in office.

Because it exposed several structural weaknesses around the Prime Minister that the hollowed-out nature of the Coalition up til now concealed.

The first major problem is the Prime Minister’s own judgment. Why it was not obvious to him that it was the right thing to do to call a Royal Commission, or at the very least anticipate that one would be demanded, is something he and his advisors should be asking themselves.

One answer may be that the Prime Minister is great at political management, control, party machinery and sorting numbers. Until now these skills have been attributes in several of his endeavours, such as helping him command a Cabinet dominated by his loyalists, Penny Wong, Katy Gallagher, Tony Burke and Mark Butler and a caucus that is almost wholly supplicant.

But Bondi was never about politics. The public expected politicians to put their tribalism aside when terror arrived at the iconic beach, but the Prime Minister responded as a Labor politician by initially refusing to call a Royal Commission into anti-Semitism. It exposed him to charges that he was more interested in protecting the left than searching for truth.

A second weakness exposed is the Prime Minister’s own feedback loop. It took far too long for good advice to make it through to him. If he was overly dependent on the advice of Mr Burke and Senator Wong, this should give him reason to seek some other opinions next time.

He does not need to look far. He could embolden Cabinet Ministers who are not normally encouraged to offer their advice out of their lanes to speak up.

Then there is the caucus. As MPs meet each other after their summer breaks, they will no doubt be swapping notes about what was said over Christmas lunch about the state of the government and the man who leads it.

But they should be wondering how it came to be that they are elected to represent their communities, but it was left to business leaders, sporting champions, bureaucrats and lawyers to use their voices to achieve a political outcome.

Backbenchers complain about the Prime Minister not listening to them, of the Prime Minister’s office barely communicating, and that they have no input into key Government decisions. But they would have been a vital antidote for the PM, who was strongly advised by his Chief of Staff Tim Gartrell, not to call a Royal Commission.

So what does all this have to do with the rise of One Nation?

Across Europe and most visibly in the United States, populists are coming of age, and Australia looks set to catch the bug too.

For mainstream Liberals and the Labor Party, Monday’s polls should shock them to the core. One Nation is on the way to being normalised.

This is a mirror of the scene playing out in the UK, where Nigel Farage’s Reform party was once fringe, then outpolled the Tories and has been dominating the polling for almost a year.

Pauline Hanson, leader of One Nation, has a political stamina akin to that of Mr Farage, who became active in politics in the nineties, and only broke into the House of Commons in 2024 after seven prior unsuccessful attempts.

If an election were held tomorrow in Britain, he could very well be Prime Minister.

Australia’s electoral system is very different to Britain’s voluntary and first-past-the-post voting method.

This is why, on paper, both Newspoll and Resolve still have the Labor Party in comfortable winning positions, 55-45 and 52-48, respectively, on a two-party preferred basis.

In a dream scenario for Labor, One Nation continues to cannibalise the Coalition’s primary vote and delivers Labor several more terms.

This might explain why Mr Albanese was quick to dismiss the threat they might pose.

“One Nation will never put forward real solutions,” he told the ABC on Monday morning.

“They appeal to grievance, and they appeal to division. They’re a divisive force. They have been for a long period of time.

“And what has tended to happen with One Nation as well, of course, as we have seen, is they get this bump, and then people leave them.”

When Mr Albanese visited London last year to speak with fellow centre-left leaders on how to avoid populism, he had plenty of advice for UK counterpart Keir Starmer and others.

“I don’t want to see the rise of populist organisations, such as that (Reform UK),” Mr Albanese said last year.

“I’ve met with the mainstream opposition party here, and I’m involved in parties of governance. (They) have to come up with solutions, not seek to divide people.”

Whether One Nation’s vote is a demonstration of protest from disaffected voters or a serious intent to move power towards them is a question that will only be answered at the next election.

But Albanese is hardly immune from deploying divide-and-conquer tactics.

His attempt to rush complex hate laws through the Parliament by attaching them to separate legislation to tighten gun laws was a political and parliamentary tactic. It was the act of a wounded political animal lashing out for some retribution.

But he quickly ditched the strategy and will pursue gun law reform separately as he tries to gather support for the hate speech laws, complaining that the Opposition was obsessed with “opposing things”, including themselves.

Mr Albanese has already annihilated the Coalition. If there is another great truth that the last month exposed, it is that the Opposition is rudderless.

The beast that led the successful attack on Mr Albanese, at his weakest moment, was not the Opposition Leader Sussan Ley, or the leadership wannabes Angus Taylor or Andrew Hastie, it was Josh Frydenberg.

Granted, he had a unique position as a prominent member of Australia’s Jewish community that Ms Ley did not. But it was not just his “Jewishness” that made him such a weapon. He whipped huge cross-sections of society to sign open letters and join his campaign for a Royal Commission and revived the media operation he used to run as Treasurer to dominate the cycle for weeks, leaving the Prime Minister completely flat-footed.

Mr Albanese prides himself on being able to talk to every end of town and cultivate an enormous network across Australia’s sporting, cultural and business elite. But with the Royal Commission campaign, Mr Frydenberg out-Albo’ed the PM.

The last figure to operate a one-man machine like this was Kevin Rudd when he was shadow foreign minister and then opposition leader in the lead-up to his 2007 election victory.

It is inescapable that if Ms Ley was ever going to make a mark and be seen as the alternative prime minister, it was after December 14. But she barely made a mark on her own approval ratings, which was up by two points in Newspoll and down one point in Resolve.

What all this points to is a different environment in 2026. The political attacks are unlikely to come from the limping Liberal party but from outside, in the corners of the internet and where Hanson dwells and flourishes.

This is different terrain for the Prime Minister and he may find his usual methods of control will fail him as they did after Bondi.

Either way, he may want to brush up on his own advice to global progressives last year, about how to avoid the perils of populism at home.