One Nation: An Information Operation Pushing on an Open Door
One Nation's surge isn't a lurch to the far right. It's what happens when a sophisticated information operation meets an electorate the major parties stopped listening to.
Something has shifted, and too many of us are using the old heuristics to try to understand it.
One Nation has surged nationally in our latest MRP poll. They have exceeded expectations in South Australia and Farrer. The reflexive interpretation, that Australia is simply lurching to the far right, is wrong, and dangerously so - not only because it lets those in power off the hook for the conditions that made any of this possible.
For years now, at RedBridge, our focus groups have shown us an electorate seething with fury at collapsing living standards, deteriorating public services, and a political class that does not appear to know or care about either. Trust in institutions, in government, media, business, and the major parties, has collapsed.
In that environment, an open door has been left swinging.
Through it has stepped a highly sophisticated, transnationally networked information operation that has spent years patiently cementing Pauline Hanson’s image as authentic, courageous, and “one of us”. And the depth of the parasocial relationships that voters have now formed with her cannot be overstated.
This is an authoritarian-style influence apparatus of a kind we know well from overseas. ABC News Verify exposed one limb of it in March, identifying networks of AI-generated Facebook accounts targeting Australians with pro-Hanson content.
It is taking far too many of us far too long to cotton on to what is happening, and now there is a momentum that has our focus group participants telling us about chats at the pub, conversations with workmates, and family discussions, all of which discuss the talking points seeded by the information operation. The consistency of what participants tell us they like about Hanson, whom they simply refer to as ‘Pauline’, as though she were a friend, is itself a tell.
That’s why commentators who thought that Gina Rhinehart’s gift of a “sexy” plane might adversely affect Hanson’s populist appeal were dead wrong.
Quite the opposite, in fact. When we ask about it, participants are thrilled for Hanson, because it is as though a close, personal friend or family member has won the lottery. Finally, one of them has access to the baubles traditionally reserved for the ‘elites’.
It doesn’t actually matter that Hanson is most certainly an elite these days. Reality, for now, does not matter. That is, unless other political actors get smarter about how they do things.
What is driving the excitement around One Nation has little to do with their (meagre) policy offerings. Few participants across many projects around the country even raise immigration as the key reason they like Hanson so much.
Instead, it is the carefully curated impression of Hanson as someone who would make noise. She is a “ballsy” politician who is “one of us. She is saying what no one else will say.”
This is the emotional register that institutional or polite political choices simply cannot match.
Of course, there will always be those more susceptible to authoritarianism. The psychological literature (see Karen Stenner’s and Bob Altemeyer’s work) suggests that susceptibility to authoritarian politics is less a fixed ideology than a latent predisposition activated by perceived “normative threat”: the sense that shared values, social cohesion, or familiar ways of life are coming undone.
Voters with this predisposition tend to score lower on tolerance for ambiguity and openness to experience, and higher on need for cognitive closure and threat sensitivity. They are drawn to clear hierarchies, strong in-group loyalty, and decisive leaders who promise to restore order. Those more impervious to authoritarian appeals tend to display the opposite cluster: higher openness, comfort with complexity and diversity, lower threat reactivity, and a deeper commitment to democratic norms even when they personally lose.
However, what we are currently seeing cannot be explained by such traits alone - particularly because we see such clear demographic and geographic patterns of support. For many, the Hanson “vibe” that has been legitimised by friends and family is really all that many voters are engaging with.
All of the above comprises ‘the door’ that the information operation has pushed on.
Had the major parties met their constituents’ material needs, addressed the fury around price-gouging, fixed housing, and stopped legislating for sectional interests against the national interest, the door would have been closed.
Had their representatives spoken to people as adults, in their actual emotional register, no information operation would have had any real purchase.
But because this hasn’t been done, progressives and the established/centre right in politics and civil society) urgently need to understand how modern information ecosystems now work. They need to take stock of what needs to be fixed materially and begin building informational coalitions with each other around that as a matter of urgency. They must coordinate with each other instead of protecting their own turf or looking for evidence of betrayal.
No matter how well some may feel they’re doing right now, it’s not going to stay that way if they fail at this task.
Because right now, with every win, One Nation’s legitimacy compounds. Voters who would once have been embarrassed to admit a One Nation vote no longer are. And the vote itself has become the reward because it is a way to provide the “kick up the bum” that participants tell us they are desperate to deliver to those in power.
Alex Fein is RedBridge’s Research and Intelligence Principal