With its vote surging, One Nation is throwing down the gauntlet to the entire Australian political system, not just to the Coalition but to super-progressives as well.

For those who have missed it (and to be fair, if you are reading this you are not the intended audience), “super-progressives” are the target of One Nation’s feature-length cartoon movie entitled A Super Progressive Movie – launched to boycotts and derision over summer – in which honest Aussies do battle with the “Naarm bubble” and its aristocracy of special interests united under “the victimhood”.

As the latest Guardian Essential report starkly illustrates, the party that for decades has been a political punchline with a vaudeville villain is now seen as a viable alternative for more than half of the voting public – including 45% of Labor voters and a third of all Greens.

Note, these results were gathered even as Pauline Hanson amped up her crude attacks on Muslims, a move that was a bridge too far even for conservatives within the fragile Coalition. Not so much the broader public.

It’s nearly 30 years since Pauline Hanson made her maiden speech in parliament, with its attack on Asians “swamping” Australia. This was after John Howard expelled her as a Liberal candidate after her comments about Indigenous Australians.

The consistent approach from the political establishment since then has been to dismiss Hanson and her views; the politics of putting One Nation last became a proxy for whether the conservative parties would countenance her racism.

Now, with populists gaining traction around the globe, we need to understand what is driving her surging popularity.

First, the breakdown of the political monoculture into self-reinforcing bubbles fuelled by division has provided a perfect vehicle for angry outsiders to build momentum. If Hanson did not exist, the algorithm would invent someone like her.

Second, One Nation is building its case with a crass humour that has all the hallmarks of South Park for the right. A Super Progressive Movie might be offensive and heavy handed but it is also quite funny if you can get past the triggers.

Third, the number of PHON-curious voters is significant among younger Australians, for whom cost of living, particularly housing affordability, is the most pressing issue. While a phalanx of academics and development lobbyists try to write the perfect housing policy, One Nation’s policy of simply cutting immigration links the cultural with the material. This is the holy grail of populism.

Clearly, the rise of One Nation is an existential threat for the Nationals and the Liberals. There is nowhere Hanson will not take Fortress Australia, and the further the Coalition follows her, the harder it will be to win back the higher socioeconomic voters in the metropolitan seats lost to independents over the past two federal elections.

But these numbers also suggest twin challenges for Labor: to confine the drain of its own voters to One Nation, while being in a position to win any future contests for power should One Nation assume the status of opposition.

The good news is that Labor has ready-made templates of what not to do.

The US Democrats assumed that Trump would be deemed unfit for office, first by dint of his crudity and then his alleged criminality. In defending against his outrages, progressives became the custodians of a system that had stopped delivering for working people.

The embattled British prime minister, Keir Starmer, offers a different but equally flawed approach in chasing Reform – which has displaced the Conservatives as his likely election challenger – to the right with his own limp set of anti-immigration interventions.

The alternative is to recognise that One Nation is not simply a rightwing political challenge but rather an expression of frustration of the outsiders against the dominant elites. The exemplar of this approach is Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign for New York mayor, which was bolstered by respectful and curious street interviews with Trump voters.

A couple of tables separating out the One Nation supporters illustrates the potential in this approach. The first pertains to culture:

While progressives bemoan the loss of social cohesion and present One Nation as Exhibit A, it is One Nation voters who are much more likely to say they feel the nation is becoming more divided.

This is where One Nation’s Super Progressive Movie is revealing. In their mind’s eye, the woke elites have cynically unified the minorities, the gender-diverse, the neurodiverse and the racially diverse into an alliance that lords over “normal” Australians.

The cartoon’s thesis, if that is not too fine a word, is that people are people and if we only got on Australia would be the best nation on Earth. I’m not arguing the merits here but this sentiment resonates with voters.

Breaking people into identity groups and having them fight each other has always played into the hands of the powerful because it undermines the more material bonds of class that unite us. When trade unions were stronger, they could provide a counterpoint by driving solidarity across race and gender from the shop floor up, championing material benefits such as equal pay, universal healthcare and super. As those networks have weakened, so has that consensus.

It’s also interesting to see the policy issues where One Nation voters stand outside the broader national mean. The gap is widest on climate change and renewables, an emerging talisman for One Nation.

But it’s also instructive to see where issues align – protecting local industries has strong support across the board, as does the regulation of big tech and AI. Indeed, in the US there is an emerging unity ticket on both issues between the likes of Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon in regulating the broligarchy.

Finally, Hanson’s self-image as the ultimate outsider totally collapses under the weight of her party’s record, characterised by long-term opposition to many measures that are pro-worker and her patronage from nepo baby and regular Mar-a-Lago visitor Gina Rinehart.

For all its momentum, Hanson’s populism offers a vehicle for the powerful to harness rational disdain for the status quo by doing the opposite of what her supporters want: winding back government, cutting taxes for the wealthy and wages for workers.

The gap between what Hanson says and what she actually does is the real joke. Defending that is a much harder sell than poking fun at welcomes to country and pronouns.

© The Guardian