Left and Right Populism. It has arrived in Australia
Australia Has Two Populist Movements. We’re Only Talking About One.
The conversation about political disruption in Australia keeps returning to One Nation. The fear, sometimes bordering on obsession, is that Australia is following the same path as the United States or Hungary: a hard-right populist movement swallowing the conservative mainstream whole. And there is something to that story.
But it’s only half the picture.
For months, our existing published RedBridge and Accent Research data has revealed that Australia is not experiencing a single populist insurgency. It is experiencing two, simultaneously, driven by entirely different generations, and shaped by the same underlying force: financial stress.
Look at the numbers. Among Gen X Australians reporting a great deal of financial stress, One Nation is polling over 40 per cent on first preference. Among Gen Z Australians reporting the same level of stress, the Greens are polling at 40 per cent. The same number. The same emotional fuel. Two completely different political destinations. Right across the country, irrespective of suburb or town.
This is the modern structural political feature of where Australia finds itself in 2026. And to understand it properly, you need to put a face to it.
She is twenty-two. She lives in Melton, or Werribee, or Cranbourne, or Campbelltown, or Logan, or Caboolture. The suburb has a different name depending on the state, but the geometry is the same: a long way from the city, a long way from opportunity, and getting further from both with every year that passes without serious investment from any level of government.
Her parents are Gen X. Her father works in construction or warehousing or the uber economy. Her mother works in aged care or retail or the uber economy, maybe part-time, maybe casual. Neither of them owns a home outright, they’re carrying a mortgage that got refinanced during COVID and has not gotten easier since. They are not poor by any official measure, but they are not comfortable either. They have nothing left at the end of the month. They have nothing to give her.
Her grandparents are on the pension. There is no family trust. There is no investment property. There is no inheritance coming that will change the trajectory of her life. The intergenerational wealth transfer that economists talk about, the great Boomer bequest that is supposedly reshaping housing markets and consumption patterns, is not coming to her family. That story belongs to a different Australia: the one in the inner suburbs and the leafy middle ring, where the house that was bought for $80,000 in 1987 is now worth $1.8 million and the kids will eventually get their share of it. Her family’s house, if they have one, was bought much later, further out, and is worth a fraction of that.
She did not go to university, or she tried and found it unworkable. If she enrolled in a degree in the city, the commute from where she lives runs to two hours each way on a good day, a train that runs infrequently, a bus connection that doesn’t come, a car she can’t always afford to run. Four hours of her day gone before she’s sat in a lecture theatre. The university assumed she could afford to live near campus, or that she had a car and a parking permit and a petrol budget. She had none of those things. The flexible online option was theoretically available but required the kind of reliable internet and quiet domestic space that outer-suburban renters and crowded family homes don’t always provide. She is not less capable than the student who grew up in Hawthorn or Mosman. She is less resourced, and the system was not designed with her in mind.
She is working. More than likely in retail, hospitality, logistics, or care. The wage is low. The hours are variable. There is no clear path upward that doesn’t require either further credentials she can’t easily access or a move to an inner-city job market that would eat half her take-home pay in rent. She is probably also supporting her family in some informal way, contributing to the household, picking up her younger siblings, covering a bill here and there when things get tight.
And she is, in Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane, quite likely not Anglo. The outer suburbs of Australia’s major cities have become the settlement geography for migrant and refugee communities, the places where families landed when they could afford nothing closer, and where subsequent generations have stayed because the social networks are there even if the services aren’t. She might be of South Sudanese or Pacific Islander or Indian or Filipino or Afghan background or even the third generation of Europeans who arrived in Australia over 60 years ago. Her parents or grandparents came to Australia with the expectation that if they worked hard, their children would be better off.
This is the part that the underclass conversation in Australia struggles to name clearly, because the concept sits uncomfortably with Australian egalitarian self-mythology. But in Melbourne’s outer west and outer south-east, and in the equivalent corridors of every major Australian city, there are now communities that have been structurally left behind across multiple dimensions simultaneously, transport, health, education, employment access, open space, hospital capacity, mental health services and have been left behind not by accident but by decades of deliberate underinvestment. The population growth came. The infrastructure did not follow. In Victoria specifically, the outer suburban growth corridors absorbed hundreds of thousands of new residents through the 2000s and 2010s with infrastructure funding that lagged years, sometimes a decade, behind need and in Melbourne, until recently, this was part of a deliberate policy. Schools were temporary demountables that became permanent. Train lines didn’t extend. GP clinics didn’t open. The people who live in these places know, viscerally, that the city and the government that runs it does not think about them very much.
What has accumulated, across a generation of this, is not just disadvantage in the technical sense. It is a lived experience of being peripheral, of being the people the system works around rather than for. The outer suburb is where you end up when you can’t afford to be anywhere else, and once you’re there, the cost of getting out, financially, logistically, socially, is higher than most people can pay.
Her parents felt this. They voted informally for years, or they voted Labor out of habit, or they drifted to Palmer and then to One Nation when something finally spoke to the shape of their frustration. Gen X came of age during deindustrialisation, the slow erosion of the kind of secure, working-class employment that once anchored outer-suburban and regional communities. They watched factories close, penalty rates get cut, and house prices rise beyond the reach of their kids. Their politics have calcified around a sense of betrayal, not just by Liberal or Labor, but by the entire established order. One Nation has become the vessel for that grievance. Among Gen X men, it is now polling in the mid 30s. Among Gen X women, just over 30 percent. If both are experiencing financial stress, those numbers climb jump well into the 40s for One Nation. I have written extensively about this in the Australian Financial Review.
She has watched her parents. She understands what that frustration feels like because she is living her own version of it. But she is twenty-two, not fift-five. She did not grow up with the same cultural reference points, the same attachment to the institutions her parents once trusted and then felt betrayed by. She has grown up in an era of complete institutional distrust, of media, of major parties, of corporate Australia, of the financial system. Her political formation is happening in real time, and it is not happening anywhere near the major parties.
Gen Z came of age during something different but equally corrosive: a housing market that locked them out before they even started, a cost-of-living crisis that hit them hardest, and a climate trajectory that felt like inherited catastrophe. The Greens have become their vessel, although the Greens party seems to not actively be reaching out, unaware of the Left wing tsunami that will sweep through the electoral roll. But as I have stated, it’s not about the environment. It’s on housing, on economic fairness, on a politics that actually acknowledges their reality. Among Gen Z women, the Greens are already polling over 40 per cent. Among Gen Z Australians reporting extreme financial stress, they hit over 40 per cent.
Here is where it gets important for anyone trying to read the next decade of Australian politics.
One Nation’s growth has a ceiling. Gen X is a demographically locked cohort. They are not getting younger. Their numbers in the electorate, as a share, will only shrink. One Nation can consolidate them and it largely has, but it cannot grow beyond them without reaching a generation that has no particular attachment to its politics.
Gen Z does not have a ceiling. It has a runway train. Within five years, there will be more than five million Gen Z Australians enrolled to vote.
What does that mean in practice? It means the Coalition faces annihilation from two directions at once. One Nation will continue to cannibalise its right flank in the regions and outer suburbs, especially amongst Gen X and Baby Boomers. Whilst the Greens and Labor
will continue to eat into its moderate inner-city and younger voter base. There is no obvious path back, yet.
It also means Labor will face its own reckoning. The Greens’ Gen Z growth will be geographically concentrated, in inner-city and inner-suburban seats, in the university precincts, in the dense housing corridors where young Australians have been pushed as they’ve been priced out of ownership. Labor will lose seats to the Greens in these places. Not all at once. But steadily.
In the outer suburbs the impact will be different. The Greens she is moving toward are not the Greens of 2010, the inner-city, university-educated, environmentalist party that her parents’ generation sometimes dismissed as a luxury for people who didn’t have real problems. The Greens she is choosing, purely out of frustration, has not entirely pitched to her anxieties or hopes. It is a party that has yet made cost of living and housing its central pitch, that has yet positioned itself explicitly as the party of people locked out of the economic mainstream. But it’s her vehicle and in the outer suburbs, people like her will act as a significant counter force to One Nation and over a longer period, actually place a Labor Greens preference coalition in a strategic advantage.
Manwhile, the political class, by and large, has not caught up to this. The assumption remains that the outer suburbs are Labor-or-One-Nation territory, that the Greens are a phenomenon of the inner city, that young people in the growth corridors are either politically dormant or being absorbed into the same populist right current as their parents. The data suggests otherwise.
The deeper story is this: the two-party system as Australians have known it is not just under pressure at the margins. It is being hollowed out from two different directions by two different generations carrying two different kinds of economic pain, bound together by geography, by financial stress, and by a shared sense that the system was not built for them and has no serious intention of being rebuilt.
The commentary has spent months talking about One Nation. That focus is not misplaced. But it is incomplete.
The more consequential disruption may not come from the right at all. It is already here, already voting, and it is twenty-two years old and it’s coming from the Left.