One Nation’s rise is often treated as cultural anger. New data point to something more concrete: poor health, financial insecurity and communities left without the services that make life work.

For the past year, Australian politics has been having an argument about immigration. It has filled talkback, dominated social media and spilled onto the streets. The new Australian Resilience Index, released this week by Zurich with Mandala, RedBridge and Accent Research, suggests that argument has been aimed at the wrong target.

The index draws on two million data points to measure how well Australians can withstand and recover from a shock, across more than 2,000 local communities. It looks at health, finances, social connection and the physical environment people live in. The single strongest driver of overall resilience is financial wellbeing. Right behind it sits health. Whether you can absorb a rate rise, a lost shift or a diagnosis in the family matters more to how secure you are across all these key measurements.

More than one in five Australians now live in communities of significant vulnerability. These are households with no buffer. When something goes wrong, there is nothing between them and real hardship, and it should come as no surprise that where we find vulnerability, we find political volatility.

At RedBridge, we have matched the index against our May federal MRP, seat by seat across all 150 electorates. The result is one of the clearest relationships I have seen in this work. An electorate’s health resilience explains 63 per cent of the variation in the One Nation vote on its own. Fifty of the 53 seats One Nation is projected to win sit in the bottom three-fifths of the country on health. Not one sits in the top fifth. The average One Nation seat has five hospitals within 15 kilometres. The average Labor or Coalition seat has 38.

That is the national picture. But the real value of this data is what it shows at the level of individual communities, and what that tells political parties about the mistakes they keep making.

The pattern of the last 30 years is depressingly consistent. Policy is designed around averages, marginal seats, playing the game of elections. Communities are treated as blocs that will vote the way they always have and, when those communities finally turn, the parties that took them for granted read the anger as a cultural phenomenon rather than a material one. They blame the messenger, the social media algorithm or the populist of the moment, and miss what was happening on the ground for years beforehand.

I am going to focus on two places that detail all of this.

I grew up in Meadow Heights, in Melbourne’s north-west. It is a suburb built on the hopes of migrant families who arrived with very little and wanted a house, a job and a better life for their children. For a while, mainly during the 1980s and 1990s, it delivered.

Today it is the 22nd least resilient community in Australia out of more than 2,200. It sits in the bottom 1 per cent of the country for financial resilience. Twenty-eight per cent of residents have no........

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