A long-time anti-immigration agitator in Australian politics, Pauline Hanson’s political party, which adheres to a right-wing populist platform, has risen to unprecedented heights, rising above the Coalition, a first in modern Australian political history.

The latest Newspoll, conducted between the 23^th and 26^th of February found the Coalition parties at their lowest ever level of support, at just 20 per cent, with One Nation at 27 per cent, a historic high for a third party. Labor’s primary vote remained relatively stable at 32 per cent.

In a historic moment in polling history, Newspoll has chosen to discontinue its calculation of two-party preferred (TPP) results, traditionally used to evaluate the popular vote, indicative of a rapid collapse of Australia’s two-party system.

A TPP estimate by elections analyst Kevin Bonham puts Labor decisively ahead of the Coalition 54 per cent to 46 per cent, while One Nation would marginally outpace the Coalition, trailing Labor 47 per cent to 53 per cent.

If replicated at a federal election, this would yield the worst ever election result for the Coalition on primary votes, and likely seat counts, second only to the 2025 federal election.

The Coalition’s primary vote would fall by 12 percent, while One Nation’s primary vote would surge by 11 per cent. Labor would see a small swing of three per cent against it, but would retain a decisive lead against the Coalition and One Nation in head-to-head matchups, as suggested by TPP estimates.

The latest Newspoll follows a bombshell January Newspoll which sent shockwaves through the Australian political scene, showing the first ever polling result with One Nation ahead of the Coalition.

Since the poll, One Nation has taken a decisive lead in the polls, overtaking the collapsing Coalition in most opinion surveys.

One Nation on the Rise

In the 2025 federal election, amidst collapsing support for the Coalition, One Nation doubled its representation in the Senate from two seats to four, picking up one in New South Wales and Western Australia.

In a tide of anti-immigration sentiment in Australia, frustration over the cost of living, and infighting within the Coalition, voters have flocked to One Nation, with the party’s membership numbers more than doubling since the May election.

The party has also received a range of high-profile defections from the Coalition, including Cori Bernardi, a former president of the South Australian Liberal Party, who now serves as the leader of One Nation in South Australia, and Barnaby Joyce, former leader of the National Party, who served as deputy prime minister under Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull.

Joyce has been touted as a future successor to the ageing Pauline Hanson, who is currently 71, while Bernandi will lead One Nation to the upcoming state election in South Australia, to be held on 21 March, where the state Liberal Party is facing electoral decimation to the Labor government, amid a range of high-profile scandals and extinction-level polling results.

One Nation has also announced its intention to run more than a hundred candidates in the Victorian state election in November, along with all 88 seats in the lower house.

With One Nation’s entry into the race, polling for the Victorian state election has seen the Coalition’s dominant primary vote lead over Labor upended, with One Nation cannibalising the Coalition’s primary vote, placing substantial pressure on Victorian Liberal leader Jess Wilson, who has opted not to make a preference deal with One Nation.

A Roy Morgan poll in February showed One Nation with a shock primary vote lead over both Labor and the Coalition, with One Nation at 26.5 per cent, Labor at 25.5, and the Coalition at 21.5 per cent. In TPP and a hypothetical three-party preferred metric, Labor was found to have a comfortable lead over both One Nation and the Coalition.

Policy Platform

One Nation’s platform includes policies like slashing the federal budget by $90 billion per year, scrapping net zero, increasing natural gas production, rolling back abortion laws, and introducing joint tax statements for couples with at least one dependent child.

However, its primary focus is on immigration, which serves as its foundational policy issue. The party has proposed capping visas at 130,000 per year, deporting 75,000 immigrants living illegally in Australia, introducing an eight-year waiting period for citizenship applications, and rejecting migrants from countries with ‘anti-Australian values.’

Amidst the housing crisis, One Nation’s housing policy has been closely intertwined with its immigration stance, with Pauline Hanson believing housing affordability to be shaped by immigration policy.

A Redbridge poll published in November last year found that housing affordability and immigration were the second and fourth most important policy issues among voters respectively.

27 per cent of respondents allocated One Nation as the best party to handle immigration, followed by 20 per cent for Labor, and 19 per cent for the Coalition.

A YouGov poll published in January found that 64 per cent (+56) of people supported cutting immigration numbers, 28 per cent supported keeping immigration at about the same level, and only 8 per cent supported increasing immigration.

Among those who supported cutting immigration were 51 per cent (+41) of Labor voters, 43 per cent (+28) of Greens voters, and 51 per cent (+36) of people from non-English speaking households.

Who is Pauline Hanson?

A long-time agitator in Australian politics, leader Pauline Hanson emerged in the late 1990s as a firebrand anti-immigration advocate. Kicked out of the Liberal Party for derogatory comments made towards Indigenous Australians, Hanson has earned stardom among conservatives for her defiance against ‘political correctness’ in Australia.

Hanson held the federal Queensland seat of Oxley from 1996 to 1998, forming the One Nation party in 1997, which saw unprecedented momentum towards it.

In the 1998 Queensland state election, One Nation garnered 23 per cent of the primary vote, splitting the conservative vote share, and ushering in Labor for its first of five continuous election victories in the state.

In the 1998 federal election later that year, Labor and the Coalition opted to direct vote preferences against One Nation, resulting in a stunted result for the party, and Hanson’s defeat to the Liberals in the seat of Blair, due to preference flows from Labor voters.

However, Hanson returned to parliament in 2016, being elected to the Senate, and has since received renewed media attention for her controversial statements and stunts, which Hanson has become widely known for.

In her first speech to parliament in 1996, Hanson claimed that Australia was being “swamped by Asians,” and criticised cultural enclaves in the country. With the rapid growth of Australia’s Asian population, which has grown to a dominant 17 per cent, as of 2021, Hanson has since turned her attention to Muslim Australians, warning of the dangers of ‘sharia law.’

In one stunt in 2017, she wore a burqa in a session of the Senate to promote her attempts to ban full-face coverings, earning her mass condemnation from a wide array of public figures. Hanson repeated the stunt in November 2025, receiving a similar reaction.

In February, Hanson once again received mass condemnation after claiming in an interview that there were “no good Muslims.” Hanson issued a partial apology, but doubled down on her views.