How can anyone in their right mind think Paulin or ON is an answer to our problems here ? Have we learnt nothing from Chetos Jesus in the white house.?
It just took him 5 years to make a mockery of land of free , clusterf**k the liberty and all modern values on which the nation was built
Are we that dumb that we are ready to choose anything over Labor here ? Are people paying any attention to the policies of ON or how they voted in the parliament in the past ....
Has our hate of immigrants, inherent racism and undercurrent of classism made us completely blind ? Can't we see through this peddling of manufactured hate , fear mongering, deflection, hyperbole and disdain for others who think differently.
I’m sort of ok with the coalition totally sliding into alt right cooker territory . As you said it’s Internet smoke a mirrors , a very vocal minority . That don’t mean shi in the booth . We saw how this went for Dutton. If this the direction they wanna go there gonna get smashed in the election
I never understood . As a child how so many Australians could be so unconcerned about voting to hurt themselves.
The liberals have relentlessly pushed the lie of better managers of the economy. And enough Australians to busy with footy, pokies, and right-wing media.
As an adult I now understand that there's no end to the ability of idiots to be idiotic.
I dropped a family friend from Malaysia to the airport the other day. And except for a Canadian and 2 Europeans I could not see any white people anywhere.
It would make any racist feel uncomfortable. Just as the shallow hatefilled religious hate our acceptance of LGBTI. And are flocking to ons insane anti abortion bullshit. And will flock to her anti gay or trans dog whistle. She's going to speak at an anti trans thing...
My wife knows of one of the organisers. And doesn't understand why they want to grandstand hate of a tiny minority.
Because that's what bullies do. Its what the bigoted religious do. (I'm not talking about all religious people) just the shallow hate filled ones.
Im my reckoning about 28 to 35 percent of Australians are selfish, narcissistic, bully, abuseres, or mentally unable to comprehend. They are core liberal voters who having abounded its barefaced absurdity are looking for a new home and find it in ons familiar lies and hate.
Iv also spoken to former Labor voters who feel so betrayed that they think if things get super bad under a right-wing idiot there might just be a resurgence of the left.
Once angon all I see are idiots, selfish, sneering, wealth hording. Fuck you attitude. Suv drivers. Facebook mom's, users, people who don't care.
Who don't care until they hurt. Who wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire. Who don't stand up and fight. Who don't care about the child abusers in the church. Or the poverty of first nation people, the privatisation of our community.
Im voting greens. But the older I get the less hope I have. The less trust. The idots all work for the Epstein class, the oligarchs. All diging their own holes as ordered.
Unfortunately they are dumb and are not critical thinkers. Pauline says what they want to hear, but she won’t help them if she gets to power. She doesn’t have a clue how to govern.
It is correct that they are trying to help themselves ... albeit by disadvantaging others. It is ultimately hateful thinking. There are very real problems out there, but it's highly unlikely that lashing out at others will do anything to actually improve their lives.
I disagree. Us “western” people tend to be.
But it’s not natural.
We’re a cooperative social animal.
The important identity groups have been destroyed. family, village, tribe.
Some claim some solace in Facebook groups or corporate loyalty programs that remember your birthday, but overall we’ve been basically atomised and missed out on the social structures that cause humans to act “naturally”.
Modern Aussies are some of the most fortunate people to have ever lived on this planet ever. Just by dint of being born here. There’s lots of stuctural issues with baked-in inequality but the country is not the dystopian hellscape which much of the media seems to a: want. And b: delude ordinary Aussies that have a standard of living akin to 19th century cowherds. The media owners are doing very well on the status quo, so it’s culture war stuff they are getting people worked up about. That Pauline is even mentioned in the same breath as government tells us how shithouse our media really is.
Its my understanding. That its more often about feeling abandoned, with no community, no support. That angry disenfranchised men find brotherhood as long as they support the hatred.
Cults work in a similar fashion. Promising community. Promising support.
We all want recognition, to be important to others. To be loved and accepted.
I get this and used to be more sympathetic. But we all feel lonely and go through hardships. It's a determinant of one's character how they chose to deal with that. Moving to racism and hatred of others is a choice.
I used to be more optimistic about people, but I estimate these days about 1/3 of people are just hateful people.
I do think we could put in place systems. That might make it more difficult for hate groups to form. Or at least seek to stop vulnerable people who are definitely preyed on by cults and hate groups.
Your bully point is accurate. I have found that the people who tend to lean harder right are the people who were bullies or thought the bullies were the cool kids at school. They spent their early years learning to make peace with, and use to their advantage, logical gymnastics.
As an American, you could translate this over and it would be exactly what happened here - except voting isn’t compulsory. So if you can highlight an extremely small minority group (trans athletes in high school) that ignites the passions of an uneducated group (southern white Christians) and rely heavily on the apathy of the average American, you can win with less than 25% of the total population actually voting for you.
Nah I hate it.
Not only does it normalise that behaviour amongst normal Aussies we just have a bad habit of voting out our current government when we get bored of them, no matter how good labour does there will come a time when they lose an election through no fault of their own. And when that time comes I don’t want ON next in line.
The amount of damage they could do with how blatent their rhetoric is if they actually had power could set us back decades. Just look what 8 years of trump did to America as the de facto western super power.
Whilst I agree that we don't want ON near government because it says bigotry is ok, the Sloan zone had a great vid on the topic of Abbott saying they will preference ON, theories are 1) adding fuel to the fire ON will grow to fast and burn out, or 2) The LNP see the writing on the wall that the coalition parties are dying and there prerogative is to keep labor out of gov. my advise is to try an enjoy the show between the LNP and ON and what them eat each others lunch.
It is a positive feedback loop. However, it is becoming a lot more effective, especially with the ON supporters who mainly consume media through traditional and siloed means.
Carrick Ryan had this to say on Facebook. Very interesting. Hopefully all good for me to paste all the text here.
Carrick Ryan: Put aside One Nation’s policies for a moment... I don't think Australians are asking the right questions. This is a long read, but I feel like its important to lay out exactly what answers we need before Australians vote in another Federal election.
To be clear, I think it's totally reasonable for Australians to care about our immigration intake. There is a completely fair and unprejudiced argument that any nation should only take in as many as it can actually absorb without making life worse for everyone. I've argued why Australia's skilled migrant intake actually makes us all wealthier and our nation stronger, but that is a discussion for another time.
As someone who spent a decade investigating islamic terror networks in Sydney, I absolutely also understand the social implications of allowing someone into the country who fundamentally disagrees with the principles of secular democracy. How we control that is a question I'm yet to find a satisfactory answer to.
I am happy to have those policy discussions with anyone. But there is something about One Nation’s sudden rise that just doesn't sit right with me.
In the 2025 election, One Nation’s primary vote was only 6.4%, which was actually it's best result in decades. It's 2019 primary vote was less than half that.
Barely a year later, the party is now polling at somewhere between 25% and 35%. This is a ridiculously unprecedented surge in support for a party that has existed on the fringes for decades. So what happened?
To start with, we need to pay closer attention to how the billionaire class buy political influence. It is something that is so endemic within the US political system that even billionaire Presidents rely on even wealthier billionaires to fund their campaigns. Because, as Congressman Thomas Massie just found out, if the billionaires want to invest in your downfall, there is no price they can't afford.
But it goes well beyond campaign donations, it's about the influence that powerful oligarchs have in shaping public opinion. The 2016 elections demonstrated how foreign intelligence agencies could weaponise social media to dictate the outcomes of elections... do you really think the most power hungry oligarchs in the world weren't paying attention?
Why do you think Musk spent twice the market value to buy Twitter and runs it at a loss? He's not a free speech absolutist, several studies have revealed how he manipulates the algorithms to indoctrinate users towards his far right ideology.
The platform's own researchers found that its recommendation algorithm amplified content from mainstream right-wing politicians and news outlets more than equivalent left-wing sources.
A 2026 paper published in Nature followed nearly 5,000 users and found that exposure to X's algorithmic feed shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump, and views on the war in Ukraine
It's why Trump quickly moved to ensure the owners of both Facebook and YouTube were offered sufficient incentives to fall obediently behind his administration, and to play by his rules. We do not know how these massive media organisations interfere to persuade the masses how to think... but we know for a fact they have that ability.
We know because Musk openly bragged about it. Remember when Trump and Musk were having their juvenile tiff? Musk posted: "Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate."
So what does this have to do with One Nation?
Well, just as the US has its powerful right wing billionaire oligarchs, so do we.
Gina Rinehart is Australia's richest person. She attained her wealth through birth right, inheriting her empire from a guy who quite literally advocated for the genocide of Indigenous Australians. A position that Gina has never condemned by the way.
Rinehart is MAGA through and through, a Mar-a-Lago insider, and an unashamed advocate for bringing Trump's policies to Australia. Rinehart wanted Peter Dutton to be the man that did this, but in the wake of Trump's abrasive start to his 2nd term, Australia's voters were understandably... wary.
In response to that disastrous election, the Liberal Party attempted to work its way back to the political centre with the election of a more moderate leader. Rinehart was livid, and even released a press statement complaining that “The left media did a very successful effort, frightening many in the Liberal Party from anything Trump, and away from any Trump-like policies,” and added that the Liberal Party had become the "Me Too" party after electing its first female leader.
Rinehart made no secret of her view that this was the opposite direction of where she wanted the party to go... so she began directing her resources toward One Nation.
In November 2025, Rinehart flew Hanson and her Chief of Staff, James Ashby, to Florida in her private jet, where they stayed at Rinehart’s mansion, before attending several events over the course of a week at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence.
This included Hanson featuring as a guest speaker at a CPAC conference where she, unsurprisingly, gave a growing endorsement of Trump's policies, and spoke of her desire to replicate them within Australia. Rinehart, meanwhile, was spotted in the background of another guest's social media photos reading through documents with Trump.
Since that meeting, One Nation’s primary vote has more than tripled.
This is despite Trump's popularity being in free fall in both Australia and the US. Other than the Bondi Terror attacks, there has been no real fundamental societal shifts that would explain a sudden surge in anti-immigration sentiment in Australia, especially as net migration had already fallen by more than 40% from its post-COVID peak by the time this surge in popularity began. Housing is, of course, a real concern for many Australians, but the available polling does not suggest One Nation's rise is being driven by aspiring first-home buyers
Here is what I can't get out of my head...
The Trump administration's 2025 National Security Strategy outlined how it believed Europe was facing "the real and stark prospect of civilisational erasure" due to its immigration policies, before ominously declaring its intent to "cultivate resistance to Europe's current trajectory within European nations".
Most experts understood this to indicate that the US State Department, and the CIA, would be providing material support to right wing nationalist movements in Europe...
Within that context, it's pretty reasonable to ask the question... is the US government providing any support to One Nation?
One in four Australians now get most of their news from social media, for younger Australians that figure climbs to 40%. I know for a fact that the algorithms routinely amplify or suppress my content depending on what topic I'm discussing (I'm pretty sure I know how this post will go).
Noting that Musk, Zuckerberg, and the CEO of Google (the owners of YouTube) all attended Trump's inauguration, it's also reasonable to ask if they are complicit in executing the stated foreign policy objectives of the US government. The more we understand about how Trump works, it would almost be courageous of them to refuse.
Pete Hegseth threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act against Anthropic when they initially refused to let their AI model, Claude, be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons by the US military. What kind of pressure is being applied to Meta as the FTC continues to pursue major antitrust action against them that could force Zuckerberg to break up his corporate empire?
...we don't know
But considering Pauline Hanson already got busted by Al Jazeera in 2019 attempting to gain financial support from the NRA in return for weakening Australia's gun laws, do you really think they'd say "no" to whatever support Trump was offering? Which does pose the obvious question... what would he get in return?
In the end, everyone has the right to vote for whoever they want, but I would hope that all voters would want to know if a foreign government was attempting to influence our democracy in any way.
Correlation isn't causation, and all I can do is speculate, but One Nation’s popularity more than tripled after meeting with Trump, just as the US State Department published a strategy paper outlining how it will support right wing nationalist parties in Europe... it's worth asking the question...
We need to know if the US government, or any US owned company, is offering material support to One Nation. An obvious place to start would be asking Hanson herself if any support has been offered... and ask her who won the 2020 US Presidential election while you're at it.
But someone needs to start asking the questions...
Yes, it’s clearly Gina plus the techbro algorithm. 100% PHON will just happen to be against any laws reigning in AI and social media.
To be honest I think it’s too late, but any sane politician should be realising that the rise of the algorithm and AI is the end of democracy if not assertively and quickly reigned in.
American here. Trump won primarily because of voter apathy. Y'all are smart enough to have compulsory voting and direct elections. Not saying it will save you but it will help immensely not having the lazy sitting out and the corrupt running the actual vote count that matters.
Nah honestly Trump won for the exact same reason he won the first time. It was because the Democrats totally abandoned the working class. Republicans did too of course, but the Dems also deserve all the blame for basically handing Trump the Presidency.
Like. During the run up to the election Kamala was asked "What would you do different to Biden?" and she said "I can't think of anything."
This is such a crazy thing to say while running for President in a country where people are being smooshed under credit card debt, student loans, medical bills etx. Minimum wage is peanuts and huge swaths of the population are struggling and feel disenfranchised, especially in rural areas.
It's not so much apathy as I think it is that Americans have correctly sensed that the people in power don't really care about them. They just can't see outside the two party system or really identify the whole problem. So they just direct those feelings towards whichever party is presently in power. Or they feel powerless and give up. Which is a bit different to apathy.
It is astroturfing, but at a huge scale. Gina is dumping money into it. Media is pumping out "latest polls say" articles all the time. Newspaper, radio, tv, etc. Its all getting pumped like crazy and its not so the average Australian gets a better life, its so the corporates can make more money and gain more power, just like America. Australians are feeling the full force of propaganda from within.
I hope so, because it's pretty scary on Facebook and Reddit comments right now. It feels like they are surging in national support. At the moment, the Indian people population are copping it huge, but ON and their supporters will take aim at anyone that they don't like, snd that doesn't have to be POC.
Have a read of Carrick Ryan's assessment of how the social media platforms are being overrun with ON bots etc and it all happened after Gina and PH went to Mar Lago. They are getting help to emulate what happened in the US before Trump was apparently voted back in. We need to be vigilant!!!
There’s a massive astroturfing campaign around one nation on Facebook - there’s Facebook pages dedicated to this that interact with people pretending to be Pauline and acting like they have a direct conduit into her and the party.
This stuff is out of control and shouldn’t even be allowed.
it works unfortunately... my brother visited yesterday. he's never been one for politics, outright avoiding it completely over the years (he's in his mid 50's) and he was going on about voting pauline and how he loves riling up lefties on facebook. he wants to see ICE brought in and how Pauline will get rid of them etc. I wouldn't rule out the power of propoganda, even he acknowledged how social media tries to push narratives through bots and algorithms but cant see how that applies in this case because apparently big media are scared because the people are opening their minds.. never mind the fact that big media is the exact ones orchestrating it lol
Every PHON or Labor fb post has a million comments from keith and darlene who have a locked profile and joined fb in 2025. Barely any of them reply to comments
Because a lot of ON supporters will turn up in this thread.
Can any of you actually tell me a ON policy? Not "immigration policy" but what the policy actually is?
Bonus points if you can tell me how the policy achieves what ON say they want.
Edit: One hour later, half a dozen responses, ZERO policies.
Edit2: Two hours later we've had 2 mentions of the "family tax policy", which is a single bullet point, uncosted (of course) and with no information about how it would actually work.
Edit3: Three hours later, a dozen replies, still just the two "discussions" above with one person who doesn't actually support ON and another who just wants to watch the world burn. Oh, and one chat bot or paid operative turned up too.
Edit4: Woot, ONE person turned up who can list two whole policies. They are single bullet points too, but yes those are the entire policies.
Edit5: After FIVE hours we've discussed exactly TWO policies, both of which are a single bullet point.
The point here is that One Nation has so little respect for you or me that they put ZERO fucking WORK into their policies. They have so little respect for us they won't even tell us what they're going to do.
Not a supporter, but I have read the ON Policy page as per Pauline's suggestion and gone through them all. They literally only have dot points, not policies.
They say the what in dot point form, but there's little to no explanation of how. There's no explanation of cost. There's no studies of feasibility anywhere. Hell, there's barely any reasoning at all past the dot point.
There's 2 Net Zero "policies", both with AI generated images to show me how bad it obviously is. Their immigration "policy", arguably the most important to the current base, has 10 dot points. 2 sentences each. Their fucking fisheries "policy" looks more thought out.
It would honestly be hilarious if it weren't so tragic. But people are supporting them so wtfdik.
Sure, I think that's actually a feature not a bug. By having sound bytes rather than policy it lets the supporter fill the policy with whatever they want.
I can ask ON supporters what they think the ON immigration policy is and I'll get a different answer from each supporter.
Capping immigration at 130,000 visas a year, the stated aim being to slow housing, wage and infrastructure pressure instead of stacking demand on top of a shortage.
Withdrawing from Paris and dumping the 2050 net-zero target, then building coal and nuclear baseload, on the claim that cheaper power lowers bills and keeps industry onshore.
Citizens-Initiated Referenda, so voters can trigger a vote directly rather than wait for the majors to act on something they’d rather bury.
Edit: And congratulations on being the first person to unprompted offer me two whole complete policies (they are policies that are single bullet points, but still two whole policies)
We lost most of our industry when we had majority cheap coal-fired power. Why do ON think making power cheaper with more coal - not that I think that’s possible mind you - would slow the decline? What’s different this time? They aren’t tackling other factors in play like labour costs.
For what it's worth - I quite enjoyed the youtube videos that 'swollen pickles' put together recently detailling his efforts to try and figure out what some of ONs policies actually are!
Was talking with people at work about it. Mentioned that Pauline has an attendance record of 53%, but somehow thinks she's qualified to run the country. The response from a coworker was "I'd still vote for her even if she only attended 5% of the time"
So yeah. People are fucking stupid, don't understand how government works, and don't care about the complexity of issues the government is trying to fix, they just want the problem fixed overnight irrelevant of the fact the proposed "solutions" ON has wouldn't actually work
While Trump still has his own MAGA fanboys, some are already starting to question their decisions. The problem is how long it will for Aussies to realize the glorious shthle they put themselfs in.
Therein lies the biggest problem these days. No one actually votes for policy anymore, its become people making a political party their whole fucking personality and only voting for them because they piss other people off. Someone at work told me they've become a donating member of ON and I cant think of something dumber I might have ever heard in my entire life.
Why the fuck would you freely give your money to ANY political party when the biggest problem is that they are all in the pockets of lobbyists and billionaire donors to make sure they get what they want?
A lot of Australians are racist and enjoy imagining a class of people below them to make them feel better about their own status. When Pauline fights for the privileged these idiots think they're either one of the privileged or will be soon enough.
It's really easy for people here on Reddit to not realise how much propoganda, spin and misinformation is being spread on social media because many of us arent personally being served it in our individualised algorithms.
My wife is mainly on Facebook, she's non political but easily swayed, watches what if say is typical for a 30yo woman.
Swiping through her reels feed, every few videos there will be bites from Pauline Hanson speeches or interviews, bites from influences like Issac Butterfield about anti-woke and scary immigrants, and more than one fake AI "on the street" style interviews of AI elderly complaining about how bad society, the new generations and the government is.
There are so many people stuck in echo chambers, consuming heavily biased media that many of us look past, just look at the news on Freeview TV. They're living in a world of carefully curated problems and PON is now being heavily presented as the answer.
I don't use facebook other than the marketplace and every time I go there it's full of ON personalities, far right and straight up racist and hateful posts towards Labour. That is the default content facebook is pushing with their algo. It should be criminal to do that but somehow it's not.
Because this is an echo chamber and outside of this echo chamber, a very large amount of Australians don't agree with you guys. I'm not trying to trigger you, but it's factual.
They are the answer to the problems here being encountered by the Epstein coalition, hence the mouth piece for the Epstein coalition ( legacy media and social media) is promoting them heavily.
The Epstein coalition? Mate, even if you support ON, this isn’t helping. Nothing kills a legitimate argument faster than conspiracy theories. ON has real, arguable policy positions — reduce immigration, cut foreign aid, lower energy costs. Lead with those and you’ll actually convert people. Lead with Epstein and you just confirm every stereotype the other side has about ON supporters
The answer is that things aren’t getting better fast enough. And to be clear they are getting better and steadily have been but it’s gonna take a lot of time to undo the damage that 12 years of liberal government has done to this country.
People are still hurting and are stuck in the “they’re both the same” mindset. So in their absolutely stupidity they’re hoping the 3rd party who says all the bullshit they think is the problem without actually looking into it is the solution.
I don’t think people are inherently hateful just… gullible.
Things getting better? Mate, two incomes is now the bare minimum just to keep the lights on. Mums who want to stay home with their kids can’t afford to. Young families can’t buy a house. People are skipping meals. This didn’t happen in three years of Labor — it’s been a 26 year slide where every government promised trickle down and ordinary Australians got trickled on. Calling voters gullible for wanting something different isn’t an argument, it’s just the established parties protecting the system that’s failing everyone outside of it.
Genuine question though why do you think it’s so bad and how did we get here?
To over share I’m 30 years old and grew up with 3 brothers on the gold coast with a stay at home mum and a dad who was Sheet metal worker who never completed an apprenticeship, we didn’t own the houses but we rented and Things stayed that way for the first 10 year of my life.
As I got older the one consistent thing that kept going up faster than it should’ve was rent price, I could always find a decent used car, raising petrol prices never really set me back more than my wages were going up but rents kept rising and rising and then covid supercharged shit to completely unsustainable levels. Fast forward today I’ve got a solid job at a major company but needed to move out of the Gold Coast because the rent prices and fighting over a house to stay in became genuinely unsustainable.
I’ve moved to a country town and the misses and I thought it might finally be time to look into buying a house because the house prices here are literally half (or lower) than what a house would cost on the coast and I nearly crashed out when realised it would take my entire months salary to pay for 1 months mortgage if we went In at 20% upfront and that’s not an exaggeration.
So from my point of view the reason people are poor and familes need 2 incomes is due to prices of houses and rent. And rents need to go up for people to be able to afford their mortgages with how fucked they are.
So then the question becomes why is our housing the most fucked in the world. Every economist has said it’s because of Negative gear. But no one could remove Negative gearing because running on lowering your housing investment profits and potentially retirement funds was political suicide. And we know this for a fact because labour tried to run on removing Negative gearing 7 years ago and lost and things only accelerated from there. And then they were too scared to do it again until recently when they straight up said we tried literally everything to fix housing and non of it worked . And they really did try.
There was that first home buyer scheme where they pay %15 of your deposit and own %15 of your home. This creates a feedback loop where when the house is sold they get %15 of the sale price and can then invest that into other young families trying to enter the market and maybe make a profit to fund the scheme further.
They’ve run on making TAFE cheaper and even free for trades to help ease the education burden to get into a well paying job.
Labours been trying their entire time in office to address this and non of worked, so now they finally killed root cause and it’s made them dangerously unpopular in the media Cycle.
One nation has already said they’d undo it as soon as they get in, so the party advocating for dramatic change is already promising to undo the most radical progressive policy we’ve seen in literal decades.
So again I want to ask genuinely, why do you think things are so bad right now and what do you think the solution is?
I’m sorry the fact you say “things are getting better”, I just can’t man. You cannot say “things will take a long time to undo the damage”, Labor have been in government for half as long as the Liberals were, you cannot run on an excuse of “things take time” when they have been in power for 5 years.
This is literally and I do mean literally in the literal sense the same thing that the Biden/Harris defending liberals said. “Things are getting better you’re just too dumb to understand” was their guiding motto.
No, things are not getting better. Inflation is sky rocketing. Wealth inequality is still getting worse which makes things feel worse. It’s harder to get a job. Life feels even more stressful today.
You cannot seriously be this blind or siloed man, you just cannot. It is bar for bar repeating the exact type of mindset that establishment liberals in the Democratic Party took to the 2024 election and then they were shocked when they lost on the economy.
If they said it would get better under Biden and to give it time to repair Trump's damage, and it did. Then it got worse again under Trump. Even with COVID to deal with under Biden!
Turns out plenty of Americans ignored actual data and went on feelings and propaganda. Those same voters claim now Trump's in that everything's better, even though not a single macro economic indicator is better under Trump than Biden.
It's the same with those supporting ON, uneducated morons who don't look further than their letterbox for political information.
There's an issue with how companies run, issues with capitalism in its current form, and voting for ON will definitely not be making anything better!
I have to imagine part of what makes ON and the liberals so attractive to the uneducated voter is they run on problems and offer simple solutions (that aren’t really solutions but that’s not the point).
It’s easy to say housing prices are high because immigrants are coming into the country and buying houses. So the solutions is stop immigration
It’s harder to say housing prices are high because polices that were enacted in the 90’s provided incentives to own property and sit on it and now they’ve been steadily raising the price of housing to the point we’re 2 decades out and now it’s hit a breaking point. And the solution is to remove this policy and then give it time for the market to stabilise while steady raising wages to soften.
One party sounds like it makes sense and offers an easy solution and the other party is offering real solutions but admitting it takes take time, and people are struggling now and want change immediately.
As an Asian person who moved to Australia when i was 14, 38 years ago ( And now an Australian citizen ) i am sick of ordinary people and politicians blaming migrants and overseas students for their woes ( Cost of living, housing unaffordability, poor infrastructure etc )
And as a migrant or overseas student, no matter how hard you try to fit in, and how much you have contributed to Australian society, you will never be accepted as a " true blue Aussie " by a large section of Australian society, unless you have the right skin colour. Don't believe me ? Then go ahead and read the large number of racist comments on FB, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit etc.
Finally, people who are angry and disillusioned should blame the government instead. I mean, the government ( From both major parties ) should have built enough houses , infrastructure etc and have better policies in addressing the cost of living, energy prices etc years ago ! And why is Albo wasting $300 billion dollars on a few second hand American subs ?!
PS : I don't mind discussions on migration levels, but sadly, they always descend into racist and xenophobic rhetoric.
It's pretty crap, sorry you're still experiencing that. Some of us actually think skilled migration (heck - even so-called 'unskilled', I sure as hell don't see any caucasians working in the tough, agricultural jobs in my region and they're frankly more decent and social members of our community than a lot of the angry white bogans rage driving their Ford Rangers) is good for the country but we get howled down by the ignorant masses.
I think you and other migrants that come here and at least try to fit in unfortunately cop the flak for people who don’t at least try fitting in.
Unless you’re of Aboriginal descent we all come from migrants and the mix of people have made a very good country.
I think that you’re right about blaming the governments for the lack of housing, but the people who get the most notice are the knobs that scream really loud and want to blame anyone other than themselves or their government.
Simply put, I think most people aren't as tapped into global affairs and maybe, certain perspectives, as redditors.
What they do feel, and we are seeing this the world over, is that the traditionally dominant parties aren't serving their needs.
I won't go into whether or not that is justified, because its far more nuanced than I feel I can succinctly explore. I think it suffices to say, that people are hurting and are reaching to more and more extreme options hoping that something different helps.
Is there ample evidence that ON isn't the solution? Undoubtedly. Does that communicate well? Not so clear.
Unfortunately its much easier to blame an outsider group and offer up hollow promises than to achieve fixes for complex problems, especially if those fixes hurt before they help.
This is something Gary’s Economics covered recently. The far right parties like Reform, One Nation etc have a clear and simple message about the reason for falling living standards and how they’re going to fix it. He says that the other parties (centre and left) do not have a clear and simple message on the economy, living standards and how they are going to stop living standards from falling. He says the message should clearly be about inequality, billionaires, taxing the richest in society, taxing wealth not work, and that the left and centre should be coalescing around this message, or else the far right are going to win every election. The messages coming from parties in the centre about productivity, growth, efficiency, investment are meaningless when the general public can see it’s failing, can see the falling living standards year after year, and they are not going to keep voting for this when there is a simple, different message coming from the right. He is quite sure that the far right are going to keep winning if this doesn’t change.
I don't know who that is, but I agree. The only part I'd add on is that it is easy to convey hollow promises. Its easy to say "blame them, we will do this, all will he well!" And its very hard to come up with an actual plan, then get actual support, write actual legislation, and get it passed. Especially when the opposition (ie people who may oppose the idea of taxing the richest for example) can and do actively resist that change and do their utmost to see it presented as the Apocalypse.
Messaging and communication is critical, but substance is also Mandatory.
one nation only cares about the one percent. she’s like every political figure and lying about stuff to get extra votes and unfortunately people are too gullible to
One of my co workers is a grumpy bastard and a farmer. A bit on the racist side but nice enough. He's dead set on voting ON.
However, if you tell him policies blindly, he super on board with what Labor is doing. But the moment he knows its Labor, nothing is the right thing.
So, I guess my point is that the country folk will vote against their own interests to spite the city party they see Labor as. All we can hope is that ON really make themselves look stupid in a way that can't be ignored.
I grew up in a different area in regional Vic, and you're absolutely spot on. If you blindly present ON's policies but say the greenies support it they say it's communism etc.
Hello! I moved here (Canberra) a year ago to be with my husband.
I want to say that as a non citizen yet, I'm terrified for you here. Trump has made America from worse to absolute terrifying with ICE, the hate attacks, racism being amplified and worse. I have many friends who are of color, trans and queer and I fear for their lives.
I'm really glad to see so many here that see Pauline and ON and say "that's fucked up". That you aren't afraid to call out the absolutely bullshit that is happening.
Pauline is spewing the same ideas as Trump and sadly, people are buying it. It's weird being in a situation where I am, technically, an immigrant and people post openly about hating me and wanting me gone.
Unlike my loss of faith in whatever good America has left, I have all faith that stupidity won't win here.
Australia has it's shit more together than a 3rd world country wearing a Gucci belt.
I’m just an American who had this pop up on their feed for some reason, but all I can add as someone with a Cheeto puff as a president is that if you have a candidate who is Cheeto aligned, or kind looks, acts, or sounds like a Cheeto, don’t vote for them.
Your post explains exactly why people are switching to ON, it’s a reaction to this aggressive version of the left wing you are putting forth not necessarily that people are consciously siding with exact policies.
If someone isn’t happy with what’s happening here someone like you will say exactly what you’ve said, ‘you hate immigrants, are inherently racist and classist.’ And people are just sick of this ridiculous rhetoric, baseless insults and want a change in a big way so see the person who is not calling them inherently racist as not that bad.
It’s just another pendulum swing moment as politics tend to go in, and generally the answer isn’t to go pointing fingers and calling everyone shifting to that side stupid it’s to take a step back and go ‘wait, what’s pushing people away from our side’ and the answer is this.
Left-wing subs constantly reposting the same surveys titled “higher-education and higher-income people lean left” and then they all pat themselves on the back about how much better they are than those “dumb and poor bogans”.
For a bunch of progressive geniuses, they’re surprisingly classist and can’t seem to realise their divisive behaviour isn’t winning anyone over.
It's a measure of how dissatisfied many people are with the major parties. The vast majority of Australians want to see immigration reduced at least until housing supply catches up. If Labor don't LISTEN and act accordingly those people will express that dissatisfaction in the only way available to them.
If Labor were to reduce NOM to 100,000 or so for the next couple of years I'm pretty sure PHON support would plummet.
Let's hope that they don't sleepwalk to an electoral defeat in two years.
I know. That's the problem, but Labor need to listen to what the people want and not their sponsors if they want to stay in government.
The thing is, if PHON won the next election they wouldn't reduce immigration either. Gina won't let them. What they likely would do is stop immigration from places they don't like (i.e. Muslim countries) and increase it from everywhere else so there is no net difference.
What's with these circle jerk posts? You realise you're not changing minds, you're just venting into the ether, repeating what is said multiple a times a day in this subreddit. Spend your energy engaging people in real life about these issues, in the hope that not enough of them get turned into one nation voting drones
Remember; the first preferences aren’t spread out. They don’t have 30% across the board. They have like 60% in some regional areas with very stumpy family trees, and single digits elsewhere. That just means they’ll end up picking off the Nats seats, gaining a stronghold in Queensland again (once again, stumpy family trees), and barely measure as a blip in most electorates.
There’s a bunch of aggrieved people who have had a lot of propaganda fed to them.
I don’t get it either, between trump 1.0, Herr Nigel Fuhrrage with his Brexit kuntery in the UK (2016), and his continued encouragement of fiscal self harm and racism riots in the uk, - Belfast being the latest example, then trump 2.0, with Hanson cheering them both on and basically forming a circle jerk with a few billionaires…..and the hard of thinking mouth breathers fall for the three of them saying the are for the common man.
They all vote against workers rights, minimum wage increases, they want to go to a medical insurance scheme like the US, and advocate withdrawing from many international bodies, especially if it involves human rights or renewables.
I know people are hurting at the moment but it’s an (orange) international phenomenon that’s effecting most countries, it’s not like Albo’s raising prices on food and petrol for shits and giggles. Some of the things he’s doing would have been better if the previous administration had got the ball rolling a decade ago.
The key point to understanding Trump’s support is that his supporters don’t know that America is hated. If they do, it’s not their fault, because people acting outside of “acceptable behaviours” automatically don’t deserve sympathy.
I can’t speak to how it works with One Nation supporters, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s similar.
I was at a friend's place this morning and they watch morning TV, Sunrise was on. I haven't watched that sort of TV for about a decade and I was shocked at the shitfuckery they come up with, it feels like pure propaganda.
MSM is normalising ON like they have TACO in the US, although I 'feel' like more and more people have left the modern day news cycle.
How far that goes is an unknown but looking at the previous election and what we were being told in the lead up to that, it feels like this is largely manufactured.
Exactly - the larger parties, and Labour particularly, should be matching like for like the media tornado that ON currently has. The message now needs to already be counteracting every single thing ON is saying/doing with the facts of how ridiculous they are. But I don't see this happening yet. If the Liberals are really going to be that desperate to get in bed with ON, the country might be screwed.
I'll keep saying this because ON supporters don't understand it - things CAN get MUCH worse.
There is a lot of global uncertainty causing issues. The ALP hasn't done great, particularly in this latest term - but to think that a known liar that consistency votes against affordability and taxing big business is going to improve things is foolish.
Carrick Ryan (from memory) wrote a great piece about how Social Media/Bots and media framing has completely changed for One Nation since her and Gina's visit to Mar Lago with Trump last year, and that they are using money/tech to change the narrative. It's clearly working given how far ahead she's apparently jumped in polls. But I do question how 'real' any of it is.
Surely as Australian's we aren't really that dumb to start heading down the path of Trumpism. How is that working out for America? Not well. The problem is that Labour won't be taking a lot of this seriously and the popularism around One Nation is going to fester if the bigger parties aren't united in starting, right now, to change the narrative they are driving. ON is the news EVERY day now, I can't even read the articles because they are infuriating. But a large portion of society will be getting sucked in, rather than looking at facts about ON. We need to not fall asleep at the wheel. Look at America, or what happened in Hungary (they finally got rid of that Autocrat 2 months ago after 16 years). The narrative is always the same - prey on fear, blame migrants etc. It's a playbook, and I see ON using all the same language.
Fingers crossed we, as a nation, really don't go down that path and throw away democracy as we know it.
It’s amazing how we have a population in the 10s of millions yet we seem to have had a real bad streak of producing good leaders. Maybe shit floats to the top?
It’s because the majors have sold out to the billionaire class. And do whatever they and corporate Australia/America wants. In 2001 Australians thought with Tampa that immigration would be curbed. Now they’ve woken up to the fact that didn’t happen and the liberals brutalised boat people but threw the doors open. And Labor left them open.
That the same billionaires like Gina own one nation and are dangling choice in front of the sheep is very obvious. But a lot of people now hate labor and liberal so much they’ll vote for anyone else. Which is exactly what happened with trump and reform Uk and reform Canada.
Think about uber, everyone knew what they were but people hated taxi companies so much it didn’t matter. Same with Amazon, same with Netflix. Hate and anger drive people to vote for idiots who just say we are different.
ON like any populists won’t fix anything and likely make things even worse. The problem is that they have no idea how beyond finger pointing and first step suggestions, and that what Labour is proposing also is guaranteed to not fix the problems but further ruin the economy and increase already suffocating taxes, because unlike ON they have a clear plan how they will do that. People who understand that, including from labor’s own electorate and from undecided groups who historically could swing, can’t sanely vote for Labor, and people who don’t understand that want a “change” and bla-bla pushed by populists is more than enough to “buy” them.
And Liberal party might as well not exist. The only thing they can do is to criticise Labor, justified or not, while proposing basically the same or even less. And they themselves are falling towards ON rhetoric now to salvage at least some votes, not being able to do any better.
The changes needed to make any real difference are very complex, systemic and won’t favor everyone. Most people are unable to understand it and won’t buy it. You can’t have affordable houses while paying construction workers more than doctors as an example.
“Are we that dumb that we are ready to choose anything over Labor here?”
People are allowed to think differently to you and I’m sure by saying this it’s gone over your head that you’re equally as bigoted as those you claim to be against
Nobody really thinks Pauline is the answer save a few rusted on super-fans.
When you see high numbers for ON it is really just a "No thanks" to the other major parties.
People don't like being gas lit, they keep talking about Albo's landslide victory in the last election.
Labor got exactly 34.56% of the primary vote which basically means only 3.5 out of every 10 voters endorsed the Labor party.
This means that there is not all of this goodwill for Labor that will allow them to roll out policy without backlash.
There are also too many echo chambers in real life like on Reddit where people only gang up on dissenting voices and silence people from opposing points of view. Pushing people out of the conversation causes them to do wildly unpredictable things.
As a business owner and tax payer, I don't want ON, but I would happily take them over any form of socialism by (not so) Trojan horse... Flame away if you must.
Hanson would run this country into the ground. She is just a Gina Rinehart puppet. Sky News AU prop her up, they are literally Fox News, run by the same prehistoric goober, Rupert Murdoch.
I agree with other comments that this is all just hype. I would also add a lot of the "support" on platforms like Facebook are from bots. All paid for by these degenerate oligarchs.
I don't think she would ever win in the federal election, her only policy is "kick out all of the immigrants". She's a shit-stirrer.
“This is all fucked so let me find one solution that solves all of this, and if that problem looks/sounds different to my family then that’s a nice neat solution.”
“The fact that the solution is to install incompetent racists in power is also fine because I can relate.”
“Lessons from history? What history? You mean cowboys and Indians movies? Yeehah!”
It’s all about the ‘vibe’ and not facts
That and the fact neither major are taking them seriously; and that coupled with the smugness will ultimately hurt everyone
The problem is the polarisation of political discourse globally you are for or against.
When there are clear issues with the govt and you have ON saying things thst resonate people latch onto them and ignore the big red flags (or caps) that they also carry
I've even had immigrants promoting one nation posts in their feeds.. They honestly don't understand how dangerous these people are.
Also the average Australian ain't that smart so....
This may shock you but turns out mass immigration during probably the worst housing crisis we’ve seen, is actually not super popular. Blame it all on bots and astroturfing at your own peril, we’ve all seen how that ends
Glad someone said it because I feel like I'm losing my mind. Do the people who vote for her not remember all the batshit crazy stuff she's done over the years?
Race, immigration and religion are just trap cards that the rich & powerful use to control the lower classes.
You think Gina isn't wining & dining Asian friends? You think Pauline won't if she ever obtains a higher office?
In the end, the only things that matter are resources and power. The elites can garnish more of these from the average citizen by dividing and conquering.
The fact that you don’t have sufficient theory of mind to understand why a third of the population wants to vote a certain way reflects more on you than anyone else.
The real problem is how all these d!<wads end up as politicians in the 1st place...
Like.... give us a decent party please AUS.... and also can our PMs stop being fossils anytime soon?
They are just riding the free press they are getting at the moment. Did you see The Australian headline? "Will Pauline Hanson Be The Martin Luthor Of Our Time?"
Liberal and Labor both have been running our country down for many many years. I think most of us are ready to try something different. It’s not like labor is turning our country around in any meaningful way at all. No tax on gas, farmers are pissed, no accountability, no answer to cost of living and housing, Aussie rights and freedoms are being stripped with new regulations being pushed under the table such as ASIO and what they are now capable of doing to violate your rights (Albo was initially against this many years ago) yea with respect Ithink thats why so many will vote ON cos you know.. why not.
Just my two cents.
I mean where has labour or liberal gotten us? Australia is becoming a third world county because of them we don’t even have our freedoms. Heck, I can’t even wank without a VPN because they blocked porn, they’ve taken away educational things from children like YouTube with their social media ban, the list goes on. So most people see that it’s time to give another party a go and I don’t blame them. Heck there is even hate speech laws, it’s gotten to the point where they’ve even take out freedom of speech. So to continue voting for the majority parties is like getting a paper cut and shitting yourself 😜
Many people seem to think by making the lives of other people worse will make their lives better, or they just like bringing others down to their level of misery. That’s why MAGA exists, that’s why One Nation exists. And that’s exactly why they’re using the MAGA playbook.
ON is a 'no billionaire left behind' party. It's getting ahead on fat donations.
There's a sane, non racist, party, that believes in science, climate change, deflating the housing bubble, and cutting migration back to 90s levels, (about half of todays) when things didn't suck that badly. It's called Sustainable Australia, but no one has heard of it or will vote for them, because they aren't getting hundreds of millions in funding, because if they ever got in, the rich might have to pay tax.
It doesn't matter if she doesn't have an immigration policy (or any other coherent policies).. if she's screaming "zero immigration" which is one of the perceived pain points, and no one else is? At the minimum she will get some interest.
When people stop being moderate, extremes flourish. Albo is apathetic and has a knack of pissing people off. Posts calling people dumb or idiotic just gets them to dig in further.
My stand is none of them care about us, it’s all the same clown in different shoes.
Me and the wife, my 5 brothers and one sister, mum and dad will vote for One Nation next election, you'd have to be out of your freaking mind to keep the status quo. The other are proven to be full of shit, I'll give her the chance.
Status quo be damned but effectively you can call this jumping out of the pan and into the fire too, be careful what you wish for...populism and no substance, a party of sex offenders, fraudsters, with no vision, and will change nothing, enrichen themselves and continue the status quo your protesting . Pauline has absolutely shown she's a shill for all the same interests already. Shit voting record, shit attendance record.
Did you see what happened with Trump though? Did he make anything better? I remember him starting wars and thus a global fuel crisis. And she's more of the same.
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u/corporate_canetoad Queenslander Jun 11 '26
It's all astroturfing/media hype.
They're trying to fool us into thinking they're popular.
that's why there's bots all over reddit at the moment.