If the major parties want to win back One Nation voters, they’re going about it all wrong

March 29, 2026 — 5:00am

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The sincerity of the much-flaunted virtues in politics – empathy and kindness – don’t take much to expose. After the South Australian election, their chief advocates have fallen silent. They baulk at extending the tender caress of mutual humanity to a newly visible cohort of Australians: One Nation voters, who are no longer “shy” but happy to tell the world they voted for Pauline’s people.

The truth is, the major parties are in a rancid panic. More than one-fifth of voters around Australia are telling pollsters they plan to vote for One Nation. In South Australia, they actually did. Most voters there made a straight swap from the Liberal Party. But a few per cent of Labor voters also shifted to ON. As a result, neither of the venerable parties are feeling entirely secure.

In their fear, they are making a hat-trick of mistakes which only serve to illustrate to the voters leaving for One Nation that they were never really valued or understood in the first place. The first is trying to understand ON voters by talking among themselves. The second is patronising them. And the third is trying to fob them off with messaging rather than responding respectfully to their experiences.

The first is obvious and everywhere. Well-heeled or at least white-collar commentators and political types examine the concerns of One Nation voters with distaste. They suspect them of being bigots, troglodytes, or just downright stupid. Most have never lived in the areas where the One Nation vote is growing. If they have, they were in a........

© The Sydney Morning Herald