One Nation’s rise is being driven by economically stranded Gen X voters in outer suburbs and regions, not the racial and culture-war constituency Pauline Hanson keeps trying to address.

Last weekend Pauline Hanson delivered a speech to CPAC London titled The Australian Fight Back. Around 120 people turned up. Fewer than a quarter of the seats were filled. She used the platform to defend her remarks blaming the end of the White Australia policy for the country’s migration problems, and to attack the concept of white privilege.

That half empty hall is the perfect image for the moment we are in. Hanson was speaking to an audience that largely does not exist. The ideological faithful she imagines behind her party’s surge, the room full of true believers in a racial and cultural project, did not show up. Because they were never the story. The voters who have propelled One Nation to the position of Official Opposition are not in London ballrooms nor are they the Australians that have supported her for the last 20 years. Her new supporters come from Cranbourne, Ipswich, Elizabeth, the Latrobe Valley and the Hunter. And they are not voting for the things Hanson talked about on that stage.

To understand who they are, we have to look deeper. And that means looking at a generation Australian politics has ignored for 30 years.

The stable generation that stopped being stable

For most of their voting lives, Generation X were the ballast of Australian politics. Polling barely bothered to distinguish them. They split their votes between the major parties in roughly the proportions their parents did, swung modestly with the national mood and attracted none of the attention lavished on Boomers, who decided elections, or Millennials, who were supposed to decide the next ones.

That stability has now collapsed. Our recent polls published in AFR place One Nation around 30 per cent of the national first preference vote, neck and neck with Labor. Twelve months earlier that figure was in the teens. As recently as December it was 17. The surge that followed over summer, nine points in a single month, was not evenly distributed across the electorate. It was driven by one generation above all others.

Among Gen X voters, One Nation’s first preference vote now sits at 43 per cent. That is the highest of any generation, ahead of Baby Boomers on 35, older than the party’s stereotype and vastly ahead of Gen Z on just 10. The generation........

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