Let’s be honest. Australia’s young people have been marinated in Woke ideology from the cradle to the doctorate. From childcare centres, where toddlers learn about ‘gender fluidity’ before they can tie their shoelaces, through school curricula that treats Western Civilisation as an original sin, to university faculties that reward grievance studies over rigorous inquiry.
The left has had a captive audience for decades. They’ve been told that feelings trump facts, that capitalism is the root of all evil, and that the only moral posture worth striking is performative outrage. Impressionable? Absolutely. Stupid? Not even close.
The proof is in the polling.
Recent surveys show One Nation now leading the Liberal-National Coalition in every state except Victoria, with the party surging to second place nationally behind Labor. Most strikingly, support among 18 to 34-year-olds has more than doubled in recent months, overtaking the Coalition among younger voters.
And it’s not just the lads in hi-vis. Women are shifting too, with One Nation now the most popular party among Australian women in some polls. Reality, it seems, has a way of cutting through the rainbow haze.
Because while you can virtue-signal your way through a tutorial on decolonising the syllabus, you can’t virtue-signal your way out of an electricity bill that’s doubled, groceries that cost a week’s wages, or fuel prices that make filling the tank feel like a luxury tax.
The Albanese Labor government has presided over an economic demolition derby. They’ve smashed energy policy that’s left us hostage to the weather, migration settings that have strained housing and infrastructure to breaking point, and a cost-of-living crisis that has turned the basics of food, shelter, transport, energy, and security into daily negotiations.
These aren’t vibes. They’re bills. And no amount of pronoun seminars or Welcome to Country ceremonies will pay them.
It’s a textbook Maslow moment. When times are flush, virtue-signalling sits comfortably at the top of the hierarchy of needs. It’s like self-actualisation for the Instagram age. You can afford to agonise over micro-aggressions and systemic this-and-that when the fridge is full and the mortgage is manageable. But then the bottom rungs start to wobble. You’re choosing between rent and groceries, or wondering if the power will stay on through winter.
Suddenly, the immutable laws of economics reassert themselves with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. You can’t eat self-actualisation. You can’t heat your home with a land acknowledgement. And no amount of leftist minders in the education system can shield you from the cold, hard reality that incentives matter, trade-offs are real, and printing money doesn’t create wealth.
Our youth have spent years being hoodwinked by those minders. They’ve been fed a steady diet of anti-capitalist fairy tales and identity politics, often by people who’ve never met a payroll or balanced a household budget.
But economics has a nasty habit of punching people in the face, and the punches are landing. The global shift is unmistakable. It manifested in Trump’s resurgence in America, in Europe’s populist revolts, in voters rejecting the elite consensus on open borders. Voters are now hyper-aware of Net Zero zealotry, and that endless redistribution is not cost-free.
In Australia, that backlash is manifesting as a rush towards One Nation.
Pauline Hanson’s party has become the unlikely home for the forgotten people. These include the battlers, the tradies, and the young families staring down the barrel of intergenerational theft.
The Liberals, meanwhile, spent years abandoning them. Chasing inner-city moderates, fretting over focus-group-approved ‘compassion’, and failing to offer a coherent economic alternative, the party of Menzies left a vacuum.
The forgotten people noticed. And now it’s too late for a quick rebrand. When your primary vote craters to the low twenties while One Nation surges past you in state after state, the writing isn’t on the wall, it’s in the polling booth.
This isn’t some mindless lurch to the ‘far right’ as the commentariat will hysterically claim. It’s a rational response to lived experience. Young people aren’t suddenly discovering xenophobia, they’re discovering that housing affordability collapses when you import a city the size of Canberra from an incompatible culture every few years.
They’re not embracing ‘racism’, they’re rejecting the idea that their children should inherit a nation that can no longer guarantee reliable power, affordable energy, or secure borders. Women, often the ones juggling the family budget and worrying about safety, are noticing the same things. Reality bites, and it doesn’t care about your pronouns.
My only hope now is that we can root out the socialism that has infiltrated our national institutions. From the education bureaucracy that preaches equity over excellence, to the regulatory state that strangles enterprise, to the media and cultural elites who treat dissenting views as heresy. We need to restore Australia to, well, one nation. A place where opportunity is real, responsibility is expected, and the national interest comes before every fashionable global fad.
Our youth aren’t stupid. They’re waking up. As my military mentor once said to me, ‘The weather is always warm if you wait long enough’. But I’d really like to see this leftist rot gone before I am.
Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.
