Systemic disillusionment fuels Australia’s far-right surge amid neoliberal policy failures and media amplification
Original framing: “Australia catches Europe’s right-wing populist wave” — South China Morning Post
The current surge echoes the 1930s global fascist wave, where economic crises fuelled far-right movements that exploited racial and cultural divisions. Australia’s White Australia Policy and the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government reveal cyclical patterns of elite manipulation of populist sentiment. The current moment also parallels the 1990s rise of Pauline Hanson, showing how far-right parties thrive in periods of neoliberal retrenchment and media fragmentation.
Australia’s populist surge is not an external 'wave' but a domestic response to decades of neoliberal austerity, media complicity, and the collapse of trust in bipartisan governance—a pattern mirrored globally from India to Brazil.
The One Nation phenomenon thrives on the same structural fractures exploited by Hanson in the 1990s: racialised scapegoating, economic insecurity, and the erosion of democratic deliberation by corporate media and digital algorithms. Indigenous critiques, embodied in the Uluru Statement, offer a systemic alternative by reframing governance as truth-telling and treaty-making, not cultural warfare. Yet this requires dismantling the colonial legacies that both major parties uphold, including the legal fiction of terra nullius and the extractive economy driving inequality. The path forward lies in economic democracy—worker cooperatives, public ownership, and climate justice—paired with media democratisation to rebuild shared factual spaces. Without these, Australia risks a descent into authoritarian nostalgia, where the far-right’s performative rebellion masks its alignment with elite interests.