I have a confession to make about One Nation

June 28, 2026 — 3:00am

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I was wrong about One Nation. The party waited 30 years for Australia to come to it; I thought that meant it would persist unchanged. Instead, since leader Pauline Hanson appeared at the National Press Club, the party has transformed at lightning speed.

I didn’t think that was possible, or likely. In February, when One Nation was hovering around 23 per cent according to the Resolve poll for this masthead, I wrote that the party would hit its limits as the nation turned its mind to fixing a foundering economy. That has turned out to be wrong.

I’m not the only one to have been mistaken. There is a lot of history currently being rewritten by sages conveniently forgetting their sermons. The internet remembers what they predicted better than they seem to remember themselves. But unrectified errors are a sludge that gums up the entire predictive engine. Wrong just gets wronger. Reflecting and refining is something analysts shouldn’t be afraid to do. As a new political dynamic takes hold of the country, it’s crucial we try to accurately understand what’s going on.

Evidently, I overestimated the ability of the demoralised Coalition to capitalise on the obvious economic opportunity to make a comeback. The government has sustained more damage from its own improvised exploding economic devices than the Coalition has been able to inflict on it. It took independent senator David Pocock to force a backdown on the “widow tax” that would have ended grandfathering on existing investment arrangements in the event of divorce or........

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