Last weekend, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson delivered a speech to the right-wing 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 who have supported Hanson for the past 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.

Stable generation stops 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 the Australian Financial Review place One Nation at 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 per cent.

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 per cent, older than the party’s stereotype and vastly ahead of gen Z on just 10 per cent.

The generation supposedly defined by young male grievance is barely participating. The generation nobody was watching is driving the bulk of the realignment.

A generation that........

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