Reflections on the Rise of One Nation

The essays in this cluster have developed a theoretical account of the structural enemies of happiness in contemporary democratic societies: the cognitive burden of complexity, the damage of the attention economy, the unaddressed longing for identity and belonging, the mismatch between post-material aspirations and governance systems still oriented around material outcomes. This essay does something different. It takes a single, live political phenomenon — the rise of the One Nation political party in my home country of Australia — and reads it through the analytical framework the project has developed. The purpose is not current affairs commentary. It is to test whether the framework illuminates what is happening, and to ask whether what is happening in Australia has anything to say back to the framework.

The Climate: Australia in 2026

Over the course of around six months, One Nation’s support as measured across all the major political polls, increased from around 10%, to around 30%, overtaking the mainstream parties of both the right and the left. Any attempt to understand this surge requires first understanding the public mood in which it is occurring. The 2026 Lowy Institute Poll, conducted in March with a nationally representative sample of 2,013 Australian adults, provides an unusually detailed snapshot of that mood — and it is bleak.

For the first time in the history of Lowy Institute polling, a majority of Australians — 53% — say they feel unsafe or very unsafe in the world. In 2010, the equivalent figure was just 8%, making 2026’s reading a 45-point deterioration over a decade and a half. The previous nadir for feelings of safety was reached in 2020, at the onset of the COVID pandemic, when 50% reported feeling unsafe or very unsafe. The 2026 result is three points worse.

Economic confidence tells a parallel story. Six in ten Australians (59%) describe themselves as pessimistic about Australia’s economic performance over the next five years — a figure the Lowy Institute describes as the highest recorded result in the history of the Poll, 11 points above the pandemic low of 2020 and 46 points above the level recorded after the Global Financial Crisis in 2009. The backdrop is not difficult to identify: persistent inflation running above the Reserve Bank’s target band, near-zero labour productivity growth, the shock of Trump administration tariffs on global supply chains, the disruption to energy markets caused by US-Israeli military strikes on Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the growing employment anxiety generated by the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence — 64% of Australians say AI’s risks outweigh its benefits, a 12-point increase since 2024.

The most arresting single data point in the Poll, however, concerns cultural diversity. In 2024, nine in ten Australians (90%) described Australia’s culturally diverse population as mostly or entirely positive. In 2026, that figure has fallen to 73% — a 17-point drop in two years. The proportion describing cultural diversity as mostly or entirely negative has increased from 10% to 26%, a change that the Lowy Institute describes as “the largest movement on any societal question in the history of Lowy Institute polling.” This shift in sentiment on cultural diversity roughly corresponds in magnitude to the rise in One Nation’s polling support over the same period. The proportion saying immigration levels are too high has reached 55%, a record high for the Poll. And when Australians were asked directly about threats to Australia’s vital interests, 52% listed “a breakdown in social cohesion” as a critical threat.

What the data collectively show is a public experiencing genuine and compound anxiety — about physical safety, economic security, cultural coherence, and the reliability of the institutions and alliances that have underpinned Australian life since the Second World War. This is the poly-crisis described in the cluster essay, no longer abstract: it is manifesting in public sentiment data with unusual clarity.

The Trigger: Bondi, November 2025

Against this background of accumulated anxiety, the Bondi shooting of November 2025 operated as something considerably more than a single criminal event. Two men loosely associated with Islamist radicalism killed fifteen Jewish Australians at a Hanukkah festival at Bondi Beach. The attack appears to have been conceived by its perpetrators as a retaliation for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza — a Middle Eastern geopolitical conflict, physically transplanted to an Australian beach.

The political psychology literature provides a clear framework for understanding what such an event activates. Terror management theory, which traces its intellectual origins to Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, documents that mortality salience — vivid reminders of death and physical vulnerability — reliably increases attachment to in-group cultural identity and sharpens hostility toward out-groups perceived as threatening. A mass killing of civilians at a religious celebration, carried out in the name of a foreign conflict, is close to an ideal activation event for these dynamics: mortality salience, out-group threat, and a vivid challenge to social cohesion operating simultaneously. Karen Stenner’s work on authoritarian latency adds a further dimension: authoritarian responses are not simply a function of stable personality traits, but of what she calls “normative threat” — threats to the oneness and sameness of the group. A significant proportion of the population that is not dispositionally authoritarian will become behaviourally authoritarian under the right threat conditions. The Bondi shooting was precisely the right threat conditions.

The polling surge that followed was rapid and, by Australian political standards, extraordinary — One Nation reaching approximately 30% support within six months of the event. What is equally notable is the demographic profile of that surge. One Nation’s traditional constituency — older, white, rural and outer-suburban, socially conservative males — has been supplemented in 2026 by significant increases in support among women, young voters and migrant communities. This matters for how the phenomenon should be read. The expansion to demographics with quite different social profiles suggests something broader than the usual cultural-backlash explanation: a more generalised anxiety about social cohesion that is finding political expression in One Nation’s offer.

What One Nation is Offering — and Why it is Working

Jonathan Haidt’s framework of moral foundations provides the most useful analytical lens here. The six foundations — care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty — are not equally activated across the political spectrum. Progressive and mainstream liberal politics primarily engage the care and fairness foundations. Nationalist movements like One Nation engage all six, and particularly loyalty, authority, and sanctity — the foundations most directly concerned with group membership, cultural integrity, and the felt security of a community under pressure. A party whose entire political offer is organised around evidence-based economic management and social fairness is speaking to two moral channels. A movement organised around belonging, tradition, and the defence of a community felt to be under threat is speaking to six. The asymmetry is not incidental, and no amount of better messaging or policy tinkering can bridge it while the underlying channels remain unaddressed.

The Maslow framing developed in this cluster offers a complementary and equally sharp diagnostic. One Nation’s voters are, in significant measure, people experiencing a deficit not primarily at the base of the hierarchy — they are not, in most cases, impoverished — but at Level Three: belonging, community membership, the felt coherence of a shared social world. The communities from which One Nation draws disproportionate support were already experiencing the erosion of traditional social structures before the Bondi shooting: stable industrial employment declining, religiously cohesive neighbourhoods dispersed, culturally homogeneous localities transformed. The people most affected are those for whom the post-material self-actualisation project that preoccupies the professional metropolitan class is not yet a live option, because the belonging layer beneath it has not been stably established. The mainstream political class, predominantly operating at the self-actualisation level, is offering policy arguments about economic competence and social fairness to people who are asking a more fundamental question: do I still belong here, and does my way of life have a future? The question is being asked in the emotional register. One Nation is answering it in the same register — regardless of the policy incoherence of everything that follows.

It is worth noting that One Nation shares its essential political DNA with movements that have surged across the wealthy world over the past decade: Reform in the United Kingdom, the AfD in Germany, the National Rally in France, the MAGA movement in the United States. What each of these movements offers is not primarily a policy programme — their economic prescriptions are typically confused and internally incoherent — but an emotional validation of the experience of cultural displacement and an affirmation of identity. The political science literature on fascism has long documented that this kind of movement tends to generate emotional relief that substitutes for, rather than produces, durable wellbeing. The energy of the rally and the solidarity of the crowd provide genuine psychological satisfaction of the belonging need. They do not, however, address its structural causes, and when the movement reaches power and fails to deliver the promised cultural restoration, the gap between what was felt and what was delivered historically tends to be filled with escalating enemies, internal scapegoats, and institutional aggression. One Nation is not a fascist movement. But it shares the defining structural feature that makes fascism instructive as an extreme instance: politics organised around emotional identification rather than substantive programme.

The Vocabulary Problem

Pauline Hanson’s address to the National Press Club in 2026, in which she argued that Australia should be multi-racial but mono-cultural, is revealing precisely because it is so difficult to evaluate rigorously. The formulation discloses, first, a significant shift in the register of right-wing nationalist politics: the move away from biological racism, which is intellectually indefensible and legally hazardous, toward cultural essentialism, which is considerably harder to rebut and resonates with a much wider audience — including, importantly, some immigrant communities who are themselves culturally conservative. The argument is no longer “we don’t want people who look different” but “we want people who share our values and way of life.” This is actually closer to the French republican tradition of laïcité than to classical racism, and part of why it commands more serious attention than its predecessors.

But the formulation immediately exposes a deeper problem: the absence of adequate vocabulary for the conversation Hanson is attempting to have. This project has adopted a concept of culture as the dominant shared values and beliefs of a society — a layered, contested phenomenon in which societies exhibit considerable internal variation around a statistical centre of gravity. Within that understanding, Hanson’s “mono-culture” would point toward tightening the boundaries around acceptable deviation from core values — a lower tolerance for difference and diversity. In the framework of this project, that is a prescription for reduced tolerance, and for leaning toward collectivism and away from individualism, which elsewhere I have argued is precisely the opposite of what the evidence on flourishing suggests societies should be doing.

The other candidate interpretation is more generous and more interesting. One Nation’s surge began immediately after an event that signalled a fracturing of social cohesion — the importation of violent conflict, rooted in a foreign geopolitical dispute, into an Australian public space. What Hanson’s “mono-culture” may be reaching for, however inadequately, is a concern about social cohesion rather than about racial or ethnic uniformity. Her invocation of Japan as a model is telling: Japan is a society characterised by very high levels of social trust, low crime, and strong communal norms. The observation that cultural coherence can support these outcomes is not inherently racist. The question is whether the prescription — increase cultural uniformity — is available to a society that is already demographically diverse, and whether it addresses the actual problem even if it were available.

This is precisely where the vocabulary problem becomes consequential. Without adequate conceptual tools, the public debate tends to resolve into unproductive binary positions: cultural diversity is entirely positive and any concern about it is racist, or cultural diversity has been net negative and Australia needs to reclaim cultural cohesion. Neither framing captures what is actually at stake. The former fails to take seriously the legitimate social cohesion question that the Bondi shooting made vivid. The latter lacks any workable prescription and tends, in the absence of precision, to slide toward targeting communities rather than ideologies.

The Legitimate Concern and its Inadequate Expression

Hanson’s specific focus on radical Islam deserves neither reflexive dismissal nor uncritical endorsement. There is a legitimate concern embedded in her rhetoric that her lack of analytical precision fails to articulate with the rigour it requires.

Elsewhere I have written about Popper’s paradox — the obligation of a tolerant society to be intolerant of intolerance. This is the appropriate framework for thinking about ideologies that seek to use the freedoms of an open society to destroy the conditions of openness. Radical Islamist ideology — as distinct from Islam as a religion and from the diversity of Muslim communities in Australia — is a genuine instance of the kind of intolerance Popper identifies. It rejects the liberal framework of individual rights and freedoms, insists on the subordination of civil law to religious law, and in its most extreme expressions denies the fundamental freedom of individuals to exit the faith. Classical Sunni jurisprudence traditionally prescribed death for apostasy, and while this position is rejected by many contemporary Muslim scholars and is not enforced in most Muslim-majority countries, it remains active in radical Islamist contexts and retains majority support in some Muslim-majority societies. The distinction matters: the concern is not with Islam as a religious tradition, which is as internally diverse as any other major world religion, but with radical Islamist ideology as a specific political programme that is structurally incompatible with an open society. That is precisely the threat that Popper calls out — a form of intolerance that cannot be accommodated within the liberal framework without undermining the liberal framework itself.

Hanson’s rhetoric, however, does not make this distinction. It tends to conflate the radical ideological fringe with the much larger and more diverse Muslim community in Australia, the great majority of whom are law-abiding, integrated members of Australian society with no sympathy for the ideology that motivated the Bondi attack. The conflation is both factually wrong and politically counterproductive. It alienates exactly the moderate Muslim voices whose participation in the social cohesion project is most valuable, and it grants the radical fringe an unearned representativeness that substantially overstates their actual influence.

This project’s framework provides more rigorous tools for this conversation than Hanson deploys. The relevant question is not “what is the cultural character of Muslim communities” but a narrower and more tractable one: does any community’s internal organisation require the systematic denial of rights to its members, including the right to leave? Where the answer is yes — in the case of communities that enforce religious prohibitions through social or physical coercion — the liberal framework’s response is clear: this cannot be accommodated within Kymlicka’s external protections framework, because it involves internal restrictions that violate the foundational rights that a constitutional order based around liberal democracy is required to protect. The appropriate target of intolerance is the ideology that denies exit, not the community defined by its ethnic or religious identity.

The Mainstream’s Structural Failure

The mainstream political response to the One Nation surge has, predictably, been conducted almost entirely in the rationalist register: better policy arguments, more persuasive evidence, condemnation of racism and intolerance, appeals to Australia’s multicultural success story. This is, as the preceding essays have established, the rider trying harder while the elephant goes where it has already decided to go.

The failure is structural rather than tactical. What One Nation’s voters are seeking is not a slightly better interest rate or a more rigorously administered immigration programme. They are seeking something that modern democracies have, largely, moved beyond being institutionally capable of addressing: the acknowledgment that their sense of who they are and what they belong to is under genuine pressure, and that this pressure deserves a serious political response rather than dismissal or lecture. The 52% of Australians who identified social cohesion as a critical threat in the Lowy Poll are not asking for a policy paper. They are asking whether the political class can hear them.

This is not a new observation. The Inglehart-Norris cultural backlash thesis, developed in their 2019 work Cultural Backlash, documents that the post-war rise of post-materialist values left behind a substantial cohort whose values had not shifted at the same pace and who found themselves culturally marginalised by the very progress the liberal mainstream was celebrating. But the 2026 Lowy data suggests something is changing: the 17-point drop in positive sentiment toward cultural diversity, and the broadening of One Nation’s support base to include women, younger voters, and immigrants themselves, is consistent with anxiety spreading beyond the traditional cultural-backlash demographic. A majority of Australians — not a fringe — now report feeling unsafe in the world. This is not, any longer, a peripheral phenomenon to be managed. It is a mainstream one.

The mainstream’s deepest failure may not be in its policy prescriptions but in its failure to think in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy: that people have needs that go beyond security and wealth. These higher order needs are not being adequately addressed. The belonging layer remains. And a political programme that offers economic management without identity, policy competence without purpose, and governance without community, will continue to generate the gap that movements like One Nation instinctively try to fill.

What a Politics of Happiness Would Say

One Nation will not be adequately addressed by a smarter communication strategy. It will not be diminished by more forceful condemnation of racism. It will only begin to be addressed when mainstream democratic governance develops structural responses to the belonging deficit it has consistently failed to acknowledge — and when the conversation about social cohesion is conducted with the analytical precision that the question requires and that the current political vocabulary is falling short on.

The framework this project has been developing points toward several such responses. The Tribunate process for establishing constitutional values provides a mechanism for the social cohesion conversation to happen in a register that is neither partisan nor dismissive: a genuine, citizen-constituted deliberation about what a society stands for, conducted across the full demographic and cultural spectrum, with the democratic authority that no parliamentary debate and no political party’s platform can match. The recognition of collectivist communities within a framework that protects the right of exit — following Kymlicka — provides a principled way to respond to communities that value cultural distinctiveness without endorsing the suppression of individual freedom within those communities. And the Sovereignate framework provides a mechanism to increase the defence of the country from external threats, both military and economic, by the targeted formal use of collective power pooled with like-minded countries.

None of this is a complete answer. The Popper paradox does not resolve itself, and the tension between tolerance and the intolerable requires ongoing democratic management rather than a once-and-for-all institutional fix. The belonging need, as this project has argued throughout, is real and structural and will not be satisfied by better policy communication. What this case study illustrates with unusual clarity is that the conceptual tools available for a conversation shape its quality and its outcomes. One Nation is filling a conceptual vacuum. The vacuum is partly informational, partly emotional, and partly institutional. This project’s contribution is an attempt to provide better tools for the conversation that Australian democracy — and its counterparts across the wealthy world — urgently needs to have.