One Nation’s super-for-housing plan offers immediate relief, but risks repeating a message its new midlife voters know well: solve the problem with your own money.

At the weekend One Nation released its answer to housing stress. It is a superannuation policy.

The mechanics are these. Any Australian paying rent or a mortgage would be able to opt in. Their employer would keep paying the full 12 per cent superannuation guarantee. But the super fund, rather than banking the lot, would pay 3 per cent of it straight back to the worker as cash. A quarter of every contribution, redirected to the pay packet, for up to three years. The money would be taxed at the concessional super rate of 15 per cent rather than the worker’s marginal rate. Existing balances would not be touched.

One Nation’s own numbers: a full-time worker on about $90,500 would see roughly $2,300 a year, or $44 a week. A couple on a combined $168,000 would see about $4,300 a year after tax, or $82 a week. A full-time worker on the minimum wage, about $26 a week. Barnaby Joyce puts the eligible pool at around seven million people and argues only those in real strain will take it up. Asked whether the party should tell people what it does to their retirement balance, he said people are competent enough to work that out for themselves.

Labor called it a raid. The Super Members Council modelled a 30-year-old who takes the full three years and found them about $25,000 worse off at retirement. Jane Hume called it a headline.

All of which is the debate the political class wants to have. Is super sacrosanct or is it your money. Should it stay locked up or be released. That debate has been running for a fortnight now, since Andrew Bragg called compulsory super an illiberal experiment, Pauline Hanson called the system broken, and Jim Chalmers declared the next election a referendum on the whole thing.

I want to suggest the debate is not the point. The point is how this policy will be read by the people One Nation has spent the last year recruiting, courting and ‘renting’. There is a decent chance it reads to them as something very familiar.

The voters who moved to One Nation over the last 12 months are not the party’s founding base. That base, the roughly 6 per cent that stayed through everything, is older, and long detached from the major parties. The new cohort is different. In our polling they cluster hard in a single life stage: late 40s to early 60s. Gen X, with a slice of the youngest boomers. They live in the outer suburban mortgage belt and in the regions. They work, have kids at home, or kids who have only recently left, or kids who have come back. They carry a mortgage they took out in the 2000s or early 2010s, and most of them no longer expect to pay it off before they stop working.

They are the reason One Nation sits where it does. In May our RedBridge/Accent Research MRP had the party on track for 53 seats and the role of official opposition. Strip this cohort out and One Nation is back on the margins.

What unites them is not ideology but a running tally. A........

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