March for Australia rallies, at which neo-Nazis have been a visible presence. The heightened prominence of the sovereign citizen movement. Vigils in state capitals for the assassinated MAGA provocateur Charlie Kirk. A surge in the polls for One Nation. The intrigue surrounding the ambitions of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Barnaby Joyce, both figures with journalistic entertainment value, a prerequisite for successful political disruptors. US- and European-style populism appears to be taking deeper root on Australian soil.

Australia’s resisting the global populist tide. But now’s no time for smugness

Ever since returning from the United States four years ago – and waking up in a quarantine hotel on our first Saturday morning back to the muffled roar of an anti-lockdown protest down below – I have been sounding the alarm about the Americanisation of Australian public life. In recent months, however, I have not shared the fatalistic sense that Australia will inexorably travel the same path as the US, Britain, France and Germany. Populism with an Aussie twang is not somehow preordained.

True, Sussan Ley’s moderate conservatism looks like a frail finger in the dyke. Already, her leadership is under pressure from the right. Why, Andrew Hastierecently test drove the slogan “Australians First”, standing alongside a vintage Ford Falcon – a social media post laced with nostalgic nationalism and machismo.

Still, wasn’t the main lesson from the 2025 federal election that the electorate preferred to retain the services of an emphatically Australian prime minister rather than a hard-right opposition leader mocked as “Temu Trump”. In this polity, the theatrics of Trumpism, not to mention its testosterone, do not appear to have election-winning appeal, especially among women.

Aside from the shellacking Peter Dutton’s Liberals received in May, there are other reasons to think Australia won’t automatically lurch to the right. First, and most obviously, compulsory and preferential voting push electoral politics towards the centre rather than the fringes – safety valves that are winning newfound public approbation. This year’s first ABC Boyer lecture, delivered by US-based Australian academic Justin Wolfers, became a love letter to the democracy sausage. Australia’s democratic institutions, he declared, were “freaking amazing”. (He had wanted to use another f-word.)

Later this month, also on the ABC, Annabel Crabb launches a new series exploring the historical roots of Australia’s democratic robustness. She has published a children’s book, There’s a Prawn in Parliament House: The Kids’ Guide to Australia’s Amazing Democracy, providing timely lessons in civics. “How an ancient land became a great democracy,” is the subtitle of Tony Abbott’s new history of Australia. In this teachable moment, there is growing awareness that Australia’s electoral system, if not its politics, is something of a national treasure.

Numerous national character traits also erect useful guard rails. The piss-taking streak has a puncturing effect on puffed-up political posers. Finely tuned bullshit detectors spot phoniness and pastiche. Voters are not only willing to countenance prime ministers who lack charisma and main-character energy, but seemingly prefer that personality type. Clive James once joked about the “rumour that the young John Howard looked like Ben Affleck, but the Liberal Party’s cosmetic surgeons went to work on him to make him more electable”.

It helps, too, that Australia experienced a populist mini-quake 30 years ago, with the emergence in the 1990s of Pauline Hanson. In her incendiary maiden speech to parliament, she not only warned of the country being “swamped by Asians” but she demanded the Howard government stop “kowtowing to financial markets, international organisations, world bankers, investment companies and big business people”. In blending anxiety about immigration and globalisation, she foreshadowed the anti-establishment grievance politics that later fuelled Brexit and Trumpism.

Crucially, the response back then to the rise of Hansonism helped protect Australia from a resurgence of Hansonism. At the Tampa election, both parties adopted a hardline bipartisanship towards unauthorised immigration, neutralising to a large extent an issue that Donald Trump and Europe’s far and hard right have exploited to the full. Though the morality of holding asylum seekers in legal limbo at offshore detention centres is highly questionable, stopping the boats has acted as a check on the rise of blatantly xenophobic politics.

Hansonism was also self-sabotaged by Pauline Hanson, starting when she asked 60 Minutes correspondent Tracey Curro to “please explain” what was meant by “xenophobic”. Homegrown populists, such as Hanson and the billionaire Clive Palmer, have not been widely seen as plausible prime ministers. One Nation peaked at the 1998 federal election with an 8.43 per cent primary vote share – though its 6.4 per cent share in 2025 was its best performance since. As for its recent polling surge, its 12 per cent to13 per cent share pales in comparison with the 30 per cent figures for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which is leading Labour and the Conservatives, or the 34 per cent for National Rally, now France’s most popular party.

In countering the politics of rage, Australia benefits from the passiveness of its electoral politics, and the fact that public passions are rarely aroused. Even during World War II, John Curtin spoke of the “somewhat lackadaisical Australian mind”. The coming 50th anniversary of the Dismissal reminds us that not even a constitutionally sanctioned de facto coup executed by governor-general Sir John Kerr could inflame the electorate. In the federal election held the following month, pitting Malcolm Fraser against the deposed Gough Whitlam, the Coalition won in a landslide.

The country’s political geography makes it harder for populists to flourish. This is one of the world’s most urbanised countries, with 85 per cent of the population living in the cities. In the US, MAGA is most virulent outside of urban centres.

Then there is the political topography of Sydney Harbour. It is hard to see a right-wing politician reaching The Lodge without winning a seat with a view of that beautiful expanse of water, but these are now parliamentary divisions that favour moderation. The success of the teal independents goes to show that the most effective disruptors in Australian politics have been communitarian centrists, such as Allegra Spender and Zali Steggall, rather than nationalistic populists like Palmer and Hanson.

Nostalgic nationalism works differently here, too. Trump and Farage benefit from wistful narratives of lost American and British greatness. Here, sepia-tinted pining about how “things aren’t like they used to be” are effective, but not as potent. Were a homegrown populist to chant “Make Australia Great Again”, when, precisely, would that be located? This is a great country, for sure. But it does not go in for the triumphalism of bygone national greatness.

Australia is comparatively prosperous. Life here is the envy of most rich nations. State governments generally deliver good governance. Sports and social clubs proliferate, forging communal ties. The fact that 87 per cent of the population lives within 50 kilometres of the coast contributes to a sense of national wellbeing. Sky After Dark is but a fruitfly compared with the 800-pound gorilla of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. The list goes on.

All this is not an argument for smugness or “she’ll-be-rightism”. Though the democratic model is robust, the economic model created during the reform era of the late 20th century needs urgent renovation. Economic inequality, according to the most recent Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, is at a 20-year high. Income polarisation begets political polarisation. COVID, the Voice referendum and the Gaza war have frayed the social fabric.

The housing crisis is ripe for populist exploitation. A 2024 survey of 18- to 24-year-olds conducted by Monash University suggested 62 per cent thought they would be worse off than their parents. An Aussie populist could declare the Australian Dream dead, in much the same way Trump sounded the death knell of the American Dream when mounting his insurgent presidential campaign. But again, the politics of generational inequity are not clear-cut. Over the course of this century, as the housing crisis has worsened, younger Australian voters, male and female, have become more progressive.

Recently, I read an article from The New York Times that further buoyed my spirits. “Could Australia’s luck have run out?” asked Roger Cohen, one of its shrewdest foreign affairs analysts. “Is it ripe for the politics of anger?” Australia, he added, “watches the American and European political dramas from afar. But it is not immune to the new anger.” Why does Cohen’s pessimism make me optimistic? For the simple reason that he essayed those words in 2016.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC correspondent, is author of The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a Great Nation Lost Its Way.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/australia-s-resisting-the-global-populist-tide-but-now-s-no-time-for-smugness-20251030-p5n6nw.html

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