A recent analysis by the AFR framed One Nation’s rise primarily as a triumph of modern campaigning – a victory in the ‘story wars’, powered by grievance, digital sophistication and relentless content. There is no doubt that Hanson has professionalised her operations, or that One Nation understands how modern political attention is captured and held. On that front, they have leapfrogged the so-called main parties. However to reduce a possible deeper political realignment to mere storytelling or grievance is a huge mistake. Campaign technique matters, but it does not generate political energy in a vacuum. Political messages succeed only when they resonate with reality on the ground. Grievance does not arise because it is cleverly articulated; it is articulated because it taps into reality.

The Bondi massacre – and the preparedness of the public to generally accept that the blame lay with Islamic fundamentalism – has turbocharged Hanson’s consistent long-term narrative to huge political advantage, but much, much more is going on. For several decades, liberal democracies – particularly those operating under Westminster traditions – have been drifting towards technocratic governance in which policy is increasingly devised by an expert class at a distance from the communities most affected by it. Decisions with profound local consequences are  justified not as matters of democratic choice, but as expert necessity: economics-driven, ‘science’-led, model-validated.

Elections still occur, but the range of outcomes that materially alter people’s lives has narrowed. Policy is presented as inevitable, not contestable. Don’t take it from me; political scientists around the world of all hues have been observing this for some time.

This hollowing-out of democracy has consequences. Policy is increasingly made by unelected bureaucrats, far from consequence. Land-use decisions, environmental regulation, and energy infrastructure planning are shaped by the invisible lap-top classes who have no political authority or accountability. The same governing style now impacts urban life, from immigration settings, to education and transport and planning,  to law and order and policing – where decisions are made by bureaucrats at a distance from the communities that live with the consequences and who do not see their values reflected in the policies.

None of this is new. Friedrich Hayek warned that central planners fail not because they are ill-intentioned, but because they are epistemically constrained. Knowledge, he argued, is local and dispersed – embedded in particular places, practices and forms of experience – and cannot be fully captured by models or experts operating at a distance. When policy is devised without input of that knowledge, mistakes become systemic. Yet the administrative state now justifies policy by ‘targets’, ‘compliance’ regimes and international commitments, while local input is either discounted or not sought at all. Resistance by locals is dismissed as ignorance rather than treated as genuine information about unintended consequences. The result is bad, unworkable policy and increasing alienation.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that politicians willing to articulate anger rather than simply manage anger are now getting traction. Labelling this phenomenon ‘grievance politics’ is wrong, and makes it worse. The structural imbalance was diagnosed a decade ago by David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere, in which he identified a widening divide between the Anywheres – globally mobile, credentialed, comfortable with endless abstraction – and the Somewheres, whose lives are more rooted in place, heritage, continuity and reality. Goodhart rejected the idea that emerging political resistance could be written off as nostalgia or cultural insecurity. Instead, he described it as rational and democratically necessary. From the bush, examples are not hard to find. Barnaby Joyce, long pilloried and ridiculed by the Anywheres, warned for years about these dynamics before his defection. His complaints were not abstract or ideological; they were fair and true.

Barnaby and I share some grievances. Let’s take native vegetation regulation. Originally designed in the mid-1990s with genuine environmental objectives, its implementation across large parts of rural Australia has been inflexible, ideological, and as the years have passed – in many places – ecologically disastrous. Yes, it is that bad. Vast swathes of northern and central-western New South Wales and the Monaro are now overrun by invasive species, a direct result of laws that require farmers to manage private land as if they were park rangers, without the resources or incentives to do so. Bureaucracies refuse to yield because their performance is measured not against outcomes on the ground, but against compliance with abstract biodiversity or emissions targets. Sensible, proven, decades-long land-management practices are criminalised. Even clearing fence lines or fire trails can attract criminal charges. When capable, environmentally minded farmers who have been custodians for generations are treated as offenders, grievance is not manufactured. The anger against the parties unable to deal with this is now palpable. Seats will flip unless things change radically.

The renewables rollout is worse. Vast areas of regional Australia will be transformed by solar and wind developments under frameworks that prioritise speed, capital certainty and national targets, while treating local impact as a mild inconvenience. There remains no credible mechanism to ensure future remediation of land and zero transparency about the scale of taxpayer support flowing through schemes such as the Capacity Investment Scheme – while governments still insist that renewables are cheaper. Rural people are smart, and understand hypocrisy and asymmetry: disruption, land devaluation, loss of amenity and long-term environmental risk are localised while the benefits accrue elsewhere. When objections are dismissed as Nimbyism or misinformation, resentment deepens. They do not see a green transition; they see a chaotic, costly and liability-free, environment-destroying  boondoggle for investment bankers, billionaires and foreign companies.

This is not confined to the bush. The Somewheres dominate the outer suburbs as well. Families compete with new immigrants for hospital places, basic services and school opportunities, while international students are prioritised for scarce places at Group of Eight universities ahead of their children, who will never afford a home. These pressures are experienced as evidence that decision-making has drifted away from expectations of fairness and reciprocity.

Those who say this is a temporary protest moment – a mood that will pass once the Coalition finds its feet – should think again. Australia has already had its early warning. Tony Abbott’s decision to stop the boats was interpreted by some as an aberration. But it was something else entirely: a clear sign that Australia was not immune from the same structural forces that would later drive Brexit, Trump’s first presidency, and now Trump’s return. It showed that when voters are offered clarity, conviction and moral confidence, they respond, especially when the issues really matter to them.

Goodhart’s warning was not that grievance was the problem. It was elite complacency: the assumption that openness, mobility, and globally minded expert-led governance were neutral goods rather than value-laden choices. Read in this light, the AFR’s misunderstanding of One Nation’s rise confirms Goodhart’s thesis. If the Anywheres continue to misdiagnose the concerns of the Somewheres as irrational grievance, democracy will do what it was designed to do. It will correct the misdiagnosis at the ballot box. It’s that simple really.