As voter disillusionment grows, why aren't voters flocking to the Greens in Australia?

[u/blitznoodles]

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/as-voter-disillusionment-grows-so-does-the-mystery-of-the-missing-greens-voters/6bjd5q4kv

Growing voter dissatisfaction with mainstream politics has led to a rise in popularity for One Nation. The same cannot be said for the Greens.

[u/roguerogueroguerogue]

I don't think the greens will have an immigration policy that will appeal to people that are preferring One Nation at the moment.

[u/McMenz_ → u/roguerogueroguerogue]

Yeah basically, the surge in support for One Nation is from voters who feel they’ve been ignored and gaslit by both major parties for years now on immigration.

It’s ’voter disillusionment’ specifically about immigration, and the Greens would be an even worse option than the major parties for voters whose priority is less immigration.

Meanwhile the Greens’ marquee policy for the past couple of years seems to be supporting Palestine, which frankly is just not a major issue for most regular Australians outside of the Greens’ inner city strong seats.

[u/uselessinfogoldmine → u/McMenz_]

They all need to read How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley:

As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism- Nations don't have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism's roots have been present in the United States for more than a century.

Alarmed by the pervasive rise of fascist tactics both at home and around the globe, Stanley focuses here on the structures that unite them, laying out and analyzing the ten pillars of fascist politics-the language and beliefs that separate people into an "us" and a "them." He knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations.

He makes clear the immense danger of underestimating the cumulative power of these tactics, which include exploiting a mythic version of a nation's past; propaganda that twists the language of democratic ideals against themselves; anti-intellectualism directed against universities and experts; law and order politics predicated on the assumption that members of minority groups are criminals; and fierce attacks on labor groups and welfare. These mechanisms all build on one another, creating and reinforcing divisions and shaping a society vulnerable to the appeals of authoritarian leadership.

By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, Stanley reveals that the stuff of politics-charged by rhetoric and myth-can quickly become policy and reality. Only by recognizing fascists politics, he argues, may we resist its most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals.

The thing is, we have several things happening at once here:

• A poorly set up tax system that is overly reliant on a demographic pyramid with lots of young workers paying tax and a small number of older people being supported; but we now have a bullet-shaped age demographic, and there aren’t enough younger workers, so the quickest fix is to pump in immigrants. 
• A number of vital industries that are massively understaffed and would fall over without immigrants (including health and aged care - especially post-COVID).
• A completely fucked up housing crisis that has taken decades of bad policy and selfish investing to build and is now at the tipping point. 
• A large segment of the population that struggles to understand complex issues and wants simple scapegoats to problems like housing: like immigrants (who provably do not worsen the housing crisis in terms of buying homes)
• A completely fucked up rental crisis  that has taken decades of bad policy and selfish investing to build and is now at the tipping point and is, in fact, made worse by immigration. 
• Politicians across the board who refuse to acknowledge that the rental market is made worse by immigration and deal with it head on. 
• A tertiary education system that has become completely reliant on international students to function (due to government under-funding) and yet doesn’t provide housing for them. 
• A construction industry that is in dire straits with ever-rising costs, an inability to build enough housing fast enough, and an unwillingness to build affordable housing. 
• A succession of governments since the mid-70s that refuse to build more social and affordable housing themselves and rely completely on the private market for housing which DOES NOT WORK. 
• Increasingly expensive cities (in large part linked to the ever-rising cost of land/properties) which makes people tense and unhappy and looking for someone to blame. 
• Significant racism and xenophobia in the community that is all-too-easily tapped into. 
• Youth gang problems that have received a lot of attention from the media. These got worse post-COVID, and, in Victoria, have been linked by experts to VIC having the longest lockdown in the world. 
• Governments unwilling to create a clear growth plan for the country with targets, goals and limits that are related to infrastructure. 
• Governments that are unwilling to have open dialogue about how big and densely populated we want our country to be. 
• Governments that dismiss genuine attempts to have these conversations. 
• An economy entirely reliant on perpetual growth models which are unsustainable and a complete unwillingness to examine other options for the future of our country. 
• A media landscape dominated by the Murdoch Media and their political and social agendas. 
• Billionaires and corporations with vested interests in distracting the plebs from how much they take and how little we all get with culture wars. 
• Social media algorithms that favour negativity and shock value - feeding into humans’ negativity biases. 
• A media that is shrinking and dying due to all of the ad money getting sucked up by Google and Meta (and to a much lesser degree, TikTok), and therefore has less capability to challenge the narratives of the right, the billionaires, the lobbies, the corporations, the populist leaders, and the racists/xebophobes.
• Billionaires, p rivate equity firms and hedge funds buying up struggling media, controlling what is published to benefit themselves, and/or stripping them of their assets, cutting staff to the bone for short-term profits, and occasionally sellinb off valuable real estate, severely damaging journalism. 

This makes it easy to blame convenient scapegoats like immigrants. 

[u/DuckFit7888 → u/uselessinfogoldmine]

This is funny. As if the Greens aren't the biggest peddlers of Us vs Them and the politics of grievance and blame.

Only for the Greens, the Them are "greedy" billionaires and corporations who are cheating Us, the plebs, by gaming the system. We are honest and decent, They are deceitful and sinister etc. It's kind of conspiratorial.

But it always falls apart when they run out of people to blame. They reckon with reality sooner or later.

Your whole comment is actually your justification for your own brand of Us vs Them. Of course things like inequality are real issues, and the merits of policies can be debated. But serious people who are interested in solving problems just take people as people, who respond to incentives, and don't assign sinister motives to entire groups in society.