The Coalition is losing its base, and One Nation is the beneficiary

The latest polling out of Queensland should alarm the Coalition, but not for the reason many will assume.

Across the final Newspolls of the year, One Nation’s primary vote in Queensland surged into the high teens, while Labor consolidated its lead. Over the same period, the Coalition’s primary vote fell sharply, with most of that lost support flowing directly to One Nation. This was not a marginal shift. It was a decisive shift in voter support away from the Coalition and toward a party once considered peripheral.

Yes, Labor remains ahead. Yes, the numbers are ugly. But the real story in this data is not Labor’s strength. It is the scale of the Coalition’s collapse among voters who once formed its backbone, and the vacuum that collapse has created.

That vacuum is being filled by One Nation.

In Queensland, the Coalition’s primary vote has fallen sharply while One Nation’s has surged into the high teens. This polling boost is not a protest wobble or a temporary mood. It is a structural shift, and it reflects a deeper problem that won’t be fixed with better slogans or sharper attack lines.

Conservative parties do not lose voters because they are too principled. They lose voters when they stop standing for anything recognisably different.

The uncomfortable truth for the Liberals is this: you cannot win elections by being “Labor-lite”. When voters conclude that the Liberal Party has become cautious, managerial, and unwilling to draw clear lines — offering a slower, softer version of Labor rather than an alternative to it — they do not wait patiently for renewal. They leave.

And when they leave, they do not drift gently. They choose clarity over comfort.

I saw this firsthand during the 08 March 2025 WA state election as the Nationals WA candidate for Darling Range. One Nation had a phenomenal turnout, earning third spot with 8.1% of the primary vote, up a remarkable +6.0% from the 2021 election. This is not a marginal increase, and it's certainly not a statistical aberration. This was a significant, motivated turnout from politically engaged voters who were deeply disillusioned with the state of the traditional centre-right.

Being on the ground, working the booths and knocking on doors, centre-right voters followed a clear pattern, doing one of two things. If they were still comfortable with the Liberal brand, they voted Liberal. Simple. However, if they had decided the Liberals no longer represented a meaningful alternative to Labor, they did not move sideways to the Nationals WA. They bypassed us entirely.

The reason was blunt and practical. In the minds of many voters, the Nationals WA and the Liberals have become too closely associated to be seen as distinct choices. Policy overlap, historical brand association, and shared messaging over many years have collapsed the difference. Some may be able to discern the difference between the state-based “Opposition Alliance” and the federal Coalition arrangement, but many don’t.

For voters actively rejecting the Liberals, voting for the Nationals did not feel like a break. It felt like more of the same, just with a country flavour. One Nation exploited that gap with ruthless simplicity.

In Darling Range, the One Nation campaign effectively co-opted Nationals WA policy positions on cost-of-living pressures, local planning issues, and firearms control, and added a single, decisive qualifier: unlike the Nationals, we are not associated with the Liberal Party. For a large cohort of disgruntled centre-right voters, that distinction alone was enough.

The challenge now is: how will the traditional centre-right parties respond?

When conservative parties blur into one another, the most ideologically explicit option wins the vote by default. Voters who feel ignored do not reward nuance or equivocation. They reward clarity, even if it is imperfect.

The polling shows this pattern repeating nationally. Older Australians and voters without university degrees, groups once central to the Coalition, are peeling away. Younger voters remain largely unreachable and notoriously resistant to traditional political messaging. Across demographics, dissatisfaction is not translating into renewed support for the Coalition. It is flowing elsewhere. And that elsewhere is increasingly becoming One Nation.

Leadership challenges compound the problem. In the federal arena, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley continues to struggle to connect, even as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese posts weak numbers in key states like Queensland. That should have created an opening. Instead, it has reinforced the impression of a Coalition unsure of what it stands for beyond opposition for its own sake.

Meanwhile, Pauline Hanson has built a movement that, whatever one thinks of it, understands something the Coalition appears to have forgotten: voters want to be spoken to plainly, without embarrassment or apology.

The lesson from Queensland - and, indeed, from Darling Range - is not that One Nation is inevitable. It is that neglecting your base has a deep cost.

For the Liberals, drifting toward the centre in the hope of neutralising Labor has not broadened their appeal. It has hollowed it out. For the Nationals WA, the risk remains existential. Either the party defines itself clearly, publicly, and unapologetically as something more than a regional adjunct to the Liberals, or it will continue to lose voters actively searching for a genuine alternative and unable to see one.

Coalitions may govern together. Brands, however, compete separately.

Right now, too many voters cannot tell the difference, and One Nation is winning simply because it offers something rare in modern politics: clear differentiation.