LATIKA M BOURKE: Pauline Hanson vote is no protest as Australia catches up with Trump and Brexit era politics

The South Australian election result shows that a decade after Trump 1.0 and Brexit, Australia is finally catching up with the anti-globalisation and anti-establishment sentiment that has been sweeping Western politics.

It is easy to forget now, in the throes of Trump 2.0 and two major wars raging, but those results were shocking and cataclysmic at the time.

Since then, populism, mostly on the right, in France, Germany, the UK, and central Europe, has taken hold. More recently, as the election of Zohran Mamdani to New York mayor and the surge of the Greens in the UK also show, it is also happening on the far left.

In Australia, Pauline Hanson’s endurance has been her secret strength, as it has caused many, including the Prime Minister, to dismiss the credible threat she poses.

The familiarity, being part of the scene for so long, combined with reality television stints, is something Donald Trump, Pauline Hanson and Nigel Farage have in common: their endurance and dalliances with reality television.

Straight-talking to the point of being crude, politically incorrect to the point of being offensive, the populists, after a long start, are finally on the march and taking Australia in their stride.

Those with memories long enough to remember Pauline Hanson’s fear of being “swamped with Asians” and seeing her ask a television journalist to “please explain”, felt their mockery was vindicated.

But just as Nigel Farage was written off after seven failed runs for the House of Commons before finally winning not just his own seat but four others, Pauline Hanson has barnstormed her way to second place in the South Australian election. One Nation outpolled the Liberals with 22 per cent of the vote compared to the Liberals’ 19 per cent.

Few thought Donald Trump would take his reality show to the Oval Office, but he did.

Ms Hanson’s surge is still no victory. That belongs to Peter Malinauskus, the charismatic State Premier who won his second term with the biggest election victory in South Australian history.

Labor suffered a 2 per cent swing but won 32 seats. The Liberals won four. But One Nation broke through with one, and could claim more, with nine seats still in doubt. Former Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, who failed to launch his own conservative movement with any success, now represents the party in the State’s Upper House. He called One Nation’s surge an “earthquake”.

Mr Malinauskus was wise to note One Nation’s surge as he called for progressive, inclusive patriotism.

“If we focus on what unites us — a shared love of living in a peaceful, prosperous place, a state full of hard-working people that value care and compassion — then we can harness this moment with our newfound confidence,” he said.

It was, dare we say it, a prime ministerial display.

But he did not try to deny the obvious. One Nation is an opposition force.

This is no protest. This is a structural fault line that has opened in Australian politics and already exists in the US and UK.

In the US and UK, both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage have scooped up votes from traditional working-class voters, beginning with Mr Trump’s shock win in 2016 and Brexit in 2016.

The UK campaign group Hope Not Hate found Reform voters constituted five main types, including the “Working Right”.

Labor in Australia has pretended this can’t happen to them.

Last month, Cabinet Minister Pat Conroy told The Nightly that One Nation’s surge was not about Labor but about the Liberals.

And Cabinet Minister Don Farrell remained confident Ms Hanson’s track record of losing candidates once they win, would repeat this time around.

“Politics is always about the centre,” he said.

But should Labor be more nervous?

Earlier this year, RedBridge research showed that for the first time in two years, the number of Australians who think the country is headed in the wrong direction surged into the majority at 55 per cent compared to 43 per cent in June 2025.

The number of people who said the system needed “major changes” was 44 per cent, while a further 15 per cent wanted it “burned down so we can start over”.

This burn the house down mentality could become radioactive given the inflation shock Donald Trump’s war in Iran is about to impose on voters, coming after the war in Ukraine, the pandemic and the financial crisis.

In 1997, William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote their theory, based on 500-years of history, that history moves in four distinct turnings.

Those turnings start with the high, move to the awakening, which then unravels before turning into a crisis. The authors argued that the crisis or the Fourth Turning would be precipitated by a great shock and identifiable by intense political polarisation, financial instability, geopolitical conflict and institutional decay.

The global financial crisis was arguably the great shock that these prophets predicted that would start the cycle of change, leading to the conditions so fertile for populists.

The global shocks have hurt the right rather than the most, because they exposed the failure of two supposed centre-right fundamentals — the markets and liberties.

Given that Australia, thanks to its strong economic fundamentals, mining economy and Labor’s quick stimulus, got through the financial crisis relatively stronger than Europe and the United States, it is no surprise that the populist reaction has been latent.

But the next global shock, the pandemic, delivered the Liberals their reckoning.

The Liberals have never accounted for the damage they did to their own business model by signing up to support the world’s harshest lockdowns, subsidised by the state.

Since the pandemic, the Liberals have only been returned in Queensland and two of the country’s smaller jurisdictions, Tasmania and the NT.

Liberal MP Andrew Hastie recently singled out the response to the pandemic as another example of the system being rigged against the everyday person.

Noting that those in the Zoom economy were largely determining rules with the greatest effect on the blue-collar or “Bunnings economy”, he told CPAC: “The decisions taken during the pandemic damaged the covenant between our governments and the Australian people they serve.”

“They’re now in the position where they see government handouts as the way home,” the right-wing Liberal Senator Alex Antic complained of former Liberal voters.

But it is little wonder that, having been told that welfare is now okay, some voters would take a new look at Labor while those who were aghast at the two-party system becoming a single-party one have since looked elsewhere.

This is why the tired debate about whether the Liberals should “lurch” more to the right or to the left misses the point.

Voters looking at One Nation are not on this spectrum of minor shift. They exist in an entirely different conversation about how to upend the system.

“People just feel ignored, the issues that they are struggling with — they’re heard, but they’re not actually acted on,” Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young told 7News’ election broadcast.

She rightly identified housing as the issue that would kill the major parties if they did not fix it.

Liberals are asking themselves if they face political death. They should have no doubt that One Nation could consume them. It is no longer a question of existential crisis but of extinction.

They need to find a break glass in case of emergency response, and fast.