Australia's One Nation Party Is Surging in Polls — Here's What That Means

Australia's political system is seeing a shift. A Capital Brief/DemosAU poll from February 2025 found that One Nation had 28% of voter support in primary voting — nearly tied with the Labor party at 29%. A few months later, a Newspoll in May showed Labor at 31% and One Nation at 27%, up three points. The Coalition fell to 20%, the Greens to 12%, and others at 10%.

This pattern shows the same thing across different polls: Pauline Hanson's One Nation party has moved from being seen as a protest vote into the space where major Australian parties usually sit.

How Australian Voting Actually Works

This matters, but not in the way the numbers might first suggest.

Australia doesn't elect its parliament the way some countries do. Instead of just counting votes, it uses a preference system. Voters rank candidates by preference. This means a party polling at 27–28% nationally doesn't automatically win as many seats as that number sounds like. One Nation's votes are spread across the country but not concentrated in specific areas where they'd be strongest. Think of it like having supporters scattered everywhere rather than clustered in neighborhoods where you could win decisively.

But this caveat doesn't make the polls unimportant. Primary vote — the percentage saying they support a party first — is the clearest sign of what voters actually think. When a party holds double-digit support over multiple polls by different polling organizations, it signals a real shift in politics, not just a temporary spike. The fact that both the February poll and the May poll by different companies both found One Nation in the high-20s suggests something lasting is happening.

The Budget Made Things Shift

The timing is the clearest clue to why One Nation's support grew.

Three reliable polls taken after Australia's 2025 budget all showed One Nation gaining ground. At the same time, the Coalition and Greens each lost a point. It looks like the budget pushed unhappy voters toward One Nation rather than toward other parties that disagree with Labor.

A budget is basically a report card on what a government thinks matters — how it handles living costs, how much it spends, who it helps and who it doesn't. When voters dislike a budget, their unhappiness doesn't flow in one direction. People who feel squeezed financially or left out by mainstream politics have increasingly turned to parties outside the two major ones. One Nation has historically been the party that catches these voters.

But One Nation isn't just benefiting from Labor's problems. The Coalition also losing support at the same time suggests something broader is happening. Conservative voters who used to vote Coalition are splitting in different directions — some toward One Nation, some toward independent candidates. One Nation is gaining from multiple sources, not just pulling Labor voters to the right.

What People Say They Want vs. Who They'd Vote For

Here's where things get complicated.

The Capital Brief/DemosAU poll asked who Australians would prefer as Prime Minister. Anthony Albanese (the current Prime Minister from Labor) scored 37%. Pauline Hanson came in at 25%. Angus Taylor (the Coalition leader) scored 19%.

It's interesting that Hanson outscores Taylor on this measure, even though the Coalition has more primary vote support than One Nation. This reveals how Australians think about voting. They can separate "which party speaks for me right now" from "who would I want running the country." Hanson's score is high enough to show she's a real political force, but not high enough to suggest voters think One Nation is ready to govern.

Albanese's 37% gives Labor a cushion. When an incumbent Prime Minister has this much lead on who people prefer, they keep control of the political conversation, even when their raw vote numbers are tight.

This Has Happened Before in Australian Politics

Australia has seen something similar to this before.

In the late 1990s, One Nation's first wave polled around 9% in the 1998 election — very high for the time, but nowhere near today's numbers. The preferential system compressed that into a few Senate seats and almost no House seats. The mechanics of how voting works haven't changed. What has changed is the scale.

A party polling at 27–28% gets taken seriously by politicians and media in ways a 9% party doesn't. Other democracies have seen this pattern too. The UK Independence Party surged in polls before Brexit, and Canadian votes have fragmented in ways that scrambled expectations about seat counts. In each case, the headlines overstated how many actual seats minor parties would win, but the underlying voter shift was real and forced major parties to respond to new policies or concerns.

The question Australian politicians are asking now is straightforward: Is One Nation's current support a ceiling, or a floor? Will it drop, or keep growing?

The Coalition's Problem

This is genuinely difficult for the Coalition mathematically.

At 20% support, the Coalition is polling below the level where it can comfortably operate. Its candidate networks, campaign machinery, and the way preference votes flow are all built for a party polling higher. One Nation at 27–28% is now above the Coalition for the first time in the party's federal history.

What happens next depends on where One Nation voters' second preferences go. If One Nation supporters prefer the Coalition, many of those votes end up with Coalition candidates in close races. But if a chunk of them prefer Labor instead — which has happened before — that hurts the Coalition in regional areas and outer suburbs where races are tight.

The Senate and What's Ahead

The Senate might be One Nation's real opportunity.

The Senate uses a different voting system that's kinder to parties whose votes are spread out. High-20s primary support could mean multiple One Nation senators from each state — enough to become a powerful group negotiating with whoever forms government.

For Labor, the immediate challenge is preventing One Nation from pulling more working-class and regional voters away. For the Coalition, the challenge is larger: how to recover ground from a party that now sits alongside them as a major force on the political right.

The consistency of these polling numbers across multiple organizations and over several months suggests this is not noise or a blip. Whether this shift lasts beyond the next election will be the real test.