Has One Nation won the 'family feud' of Australian conservatives?

analysis As Liberals and Nationals jump ship, has One Nation won the 'family feud' of Australian conservatives? Wed 24 Jun 2026 at 4:52pm Did neoliberals create the conditions for right-wing populist parties to thrive in recent years? That's an argument we're hearing from some analysts, such as Allan Patience, an honorary fellow at the University of Melbourne in the School of Social and Political Sciences, and a graduate of Monash University and the London School of Economics. "Over the past four decades, the Australian economy has been systematically hollowed out," he recently wrote in an analysis arguing that rising inequality and economic insecurity had led directly to the rise of the populist right. "In what's left of the Liberal and National parties in the parliament, an entrenched commitment to neoliberalism remains intact, even though they are the very parties most responsible for inflicting so much of neoliberalism's damage on the Australian economy. (A notable exception in their ranks might be Andrew Hastie). "With their heads buried in the ideological sand, they studiously ignore the fact that surging inequality is a potent factor inciting voters to abandon them in droves," he argued. "No wonder One Nation seems more attractive than the Liberals and Nationals." Patience didn't spare the current Labor government either, which has also lost voters to independents and The Greens, as well as some to One Nation. "Some in the Albanese government remain in thrall to neoliberalism even as it has proven to be disastrous for middle- and working-class people across the country," he argued. But as One Nation surges in the polls, and as senior Liberals and Nationals jump ship to the party, we're also seeing free market think tanks joining the bandwagon. And it begs the question: Will One Nation supporters welcome the extra "help" from the same think tanks that pushed the neoliberal policies they're now apparently so angry about? Or will all be forgiven in a squabble amongst friends? The biggest promoters of 'mass immigration' are now abandoning ship For example, if you're a One Nation supporter and you hate "inner-city elites" who support "mass migration", guess what? Some of the organisations that are keen to ride the coat tails of One Nation's growing political support have been among the loudest supporters of high immigration for decades. And they used to attack people who questioned it. When Labor prime minister Julia Gillard and Liberal opposition leader Tony Abbott both raised concerns about high rates of immigration in the early 2010s, The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), a neoliberal think-tank based in inner-city Melbourne, criticised them for it. In 2012, a leading IPA analyst warned that "Liberals' legacy of mass migration is at stake", with the same analyst arguing again in 2015 that, "You can't blame foreigners for high house prices." But the IPA has done a loud 180 on the topic more recently. In the last couple of years, it has reinvented itself as a vociferous critic of high immigration, and it's blaming inner-city elites for having forced high immigration on Australians for decades. Which is unintentionally true, since IPA staff are quintessential inner-city elites. The Australian Financial Review (AFR) has also noticeably changed its tune. In the early 2010s, when Gillard and Abbott were raising concerns about high immigration and long-term population growth targets, both noted that many voters were feeling uncomfortable about the rapid pace of Australia's population growth and its ability to build the necessary infrastructure and housing. The AFR said it was "disgraceful fearmongering". See this AFR editorial from 2010: But 16 years, and two Trump election victories later, the AFR's editorial writers are now criticising the current Labor government for apparently ignoring people's concerns about high immigration. See this editorial from February this year: Fascinating, hey? The AFR is the paper of business and finance. Big business generally likes high rates of immigration because it means more people, and that means higher economic growth and more customers. Plenty of farmers like it too, because it gives them access to cheaper imported labour. So the recent shift in Australia's political winds must be blowing pretty strongly through the AFR's Sydney office. "The disconnect between elites and ordinary people on migration has been one of the primary sources of disruption of the political establishments in Western democracies on both sides of the Atlantic," the AFR intoned in February. "The left cannot put their heads in the sand and ignore how uncontrolled mass migration has led to the rise of anti-migration Reform Party in Britain and revived the far-right in Germany," it said. If the implication is that the "left" is primarily to blame for uncontrolled mass migration, that's not what the evidence reveals. Let's be friends The Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) is another organisation worth watching when it comes to ideological re-positioning in 2026. Last week, the CIS's chief executive, Michael Stutchbury (a former editor of the AFR), sent a newsletter to CIS members boasting about how many of One Nation's policy ideas now align with the CIS. As the headline of his newsletter read: "Pauline Hanson falls in line with CIS policies!" He noted that Hanson has complained about the budget cost of childcare being out of control and she has questioned why a university degree is required to look after children. "As in line with CIS policy for many years, she suggested that government childcare spending should go to struggling parents instead of subsidising childcare centres," he wrote. For those interested, you can trace the lineage of that particular policy idea to Milton Friedman. Stutchbury said Hanson didn't think Labor's tax changes to capital gains were "reform", and the CIS agreed. He said Hanson thinks Australia is a high tax country, not a low tax country ("as the CIS has also argued"). He said Hanson has complained that Labor's net zero policies have failed to deliver Labor's promised $275 cut to power bills, even amid the unquantified amount of subsidy to renewable energy ("Again, CIS has pointed this out"). And Stutchbury said Hanson has called for a complete overhaul of Australia's "obsolete industrial relations system" because it's not working ("as I argued the other day"). It's worth thinking about. The CIS was the first neoliberal think-tank to be established in Australia (in 1976). If it's making an effort to draw peoples' attention to the similarities between CIS and One Nation policy ideas today, how "neoliberal" is One Nation? A family feud That may sound like a weird question, but it's genuine. In the book Hayek's Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right (2025), the historian Quinn Slobodian traced major strains of thought that have emerged from the neoliberal movement in recent decades, and it's relevant to what we're seeing today. "Since the political surprises of the Brexit vote and Trump's victory in 2016, there has been a stubborn story that explains so-called right-wing populism as a grassroots rejection of neoliberalism," he wrote. "As mainstream parties lose support, the elites who promoted neoliberalism out of self-interest seem to be reaping the fruits of inequality and democratic disempowerment they sowed. "[But] this story does not capture the whole truth," he added. According to Slobodian, nobody should expect important factions of the populist New Right to start rolling back key neoliberal doctrines. "The parties dubbed as right-wing populist, from the United States to Britain and Austria, have rarely been avenging angels sent to smite economic globalisation," he noted. "They offer few plans to rein in finance, restore a Golden Age of job security, or end world trade. By and large, the so-called populists' calls to privatise, deregulate, and slash taxes come straight from the playbook shared by the world's leaders for the past thirty years." In fact, he wrote, when we see neoliberalism as a project of retooling the state to save capitalism, then its supposed opposition to the populism of the Right begins to dissolve. "The arrival of more than one million refugees to Europe in the course of 2015 created the opportunity for a new winning political hybrid that combined xenophobia with free-market values," he argued. "Many contemporary iterations of the Far Right emerged within neoliberalism, not in opposition to it. "They did not propose the wholesale rejection of globalism but a variety of it, one that accepts an international division of labour with robust cross-border flows of goods and even multilateral trade agreements while tightening controls on certain kinds of migration. "The reported clash of opposites is a family feud," he concluded. The shift is well underway That's an important insight. In February this year, the right-wing lobby group Advance held a two-day conference in Sydney. It was a significant event for Australia's conservative and centre-right voters, and what occurred there was more than symbolic. One of the international speakers at the event, Benjamin Harnwell, told the audience that Germany's former chancellor Angela Merkel had badly mishandled Europe's refugee crisis in 2015, along with other centre-right European leaders. In fact, he said Merkel had done more damage to Germany's social fabric than Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. "The immigration, the invasion in continental Europe, hasn't primarily taken place under the left. It's primarily taken place under the centre-right," he complained. He said the centre-right political establishment had been "betraying" its supporters in the West for decades, with its support for "mass immigration", and he encouraged the audience to start voting for populist right-wing parties. And to help them make a clean break emotionally, he said right-wing populist movements such as Nigel Farage's Reform UK in England were the true inheritors of Thatcherism. So yes, it's a family feud. Some major populists are claiming a direct political lineage from Margaret Thatcher, one of neoliberalism's major figures, while condemning mainstream centre-right political parties. And on a panel immediately afterwards, the IPA's Daniel Wild told the audience that the Liberal Party no longer had a monopoly on debate on the centre-right in Australia. It was not an offhand comment. Since then, the IPA, which was founded in 1943 by Melbourne's inner-city business elite and which helped to found the Liberal Party in 1944, has been boosting One Nation. As the IPA's Cian Hussey argued recently, One Nation is now the only mainstream political party in Australia. The next federal election is two years away. Will the family feud be settled by then?