His family had voted Labor for generations. Even the Split hadn’t moved them. Something in the last ten years finally did. As it turned out, my model had been defining this man for about a year before we shared a train carriage.

A few times each year I make the journey between Canberra and Melbourne. A lot of my family live in Victoria. My grandparents spent the better part of 20 years in Wangaratta. My aunts, uncles, and cousins have lived in Melbourne or towns such as Dandenong, Beechworth, Ballarat, and Castlemaine. The most wonderful woman – whom I took to the school formal, the Year 12 ball – lives in Geelong. Other close friends live around country towns such as Mansfield, Bairnsdale, and Hamilton.

When I do the trip, it is always on the V/Line link – either down the east coast via Traralgon, which takes at least 12 hours door-to-door, or through the centre and Albury-Wodonga, which is a few hours quicker.

Last week, I jumped on the train back through Victoria with my daughter, with the idea of breaking our journey in Albury. The free seats, yet again, for public transport meant the train was overflowing. As we struggled to find our carriage and some available spaces, we ended up next to the very same family we had encountered the previous time back in January. The son, an aspiring sound engineer, had diligently explained on that earlier journey some of the best places to eat and drink at key points along the train line.

This time I sat next to his father and we started talking – initially about the health benefits of olive oil and lemon juice and teas like chamomile or ginger. ‘Always chew properly when eating,’ he added. The guy was looking forward to some pumpkin soup when he got home – his son was recommending it with cinnamon. His wife wasn’t so much in favour.

The conversation soon turned to politics and religion. The discussion was so interesting I noted afterwards what he’d said, in his order. Here is my summary, near verbatim.

‘Things are not getting better. Need for security, for cohesion. MPs in it for themselves. Hanson’s policies sound really good. Commonsense. China is not our friend. Australia is not utilising its resources. Catholicism. Irish background. Meat worker. Lifetime Labor voter. Gough Whitlam. Charity. Compassion. False preachers. Golden calf. Interference in personal life. Inflation. The cost of Australian products at home and overseas.’

I took these rough notes after the trip at 2am in the morning, not a recording at the time, so what follows is my attempt to flesh out a shape of the man I met – not a transcript of his conversation or a biography of his life. He was so nice and his family were so friendly both this time and last. We ended up effusively shaking hands and wishing each other all the best.

One extended conversation over several hours proves nothing – which is exactly why I have spent a year or so building an engine that runs on census tables and election files instead of anecdotes. What unsettled me on that train was not that the man was unusual – if only the world had many more such big-hearted and sincere men.

What unsettled me was that he wasn’t surprising in a political sense. My model had been describing this voter, in factors and coefficients, with increasing precision since before I sat next to him in carriage E and shared a bag of liquorice.

Reading the paragraph

When I look at my paragraph of notes again, it resolves into four clusters, and the clusters together form a fascinating political life.

Let’s first start with who he is: ‘Irish background, Catholicism, meat worker, lifetime Labor, Whitlam, charity, compassion.’ That is not a list of attributes; it is a complete civilisation. It is the mid-century Labor-Catholic settlement in a single man – the world where your parish, your union, and your party were three interlocking institutions, where each section buttressed and informed the other, where the leaders knew not just each other but also you by name.

‘Charity’ and ‘compassion’ were not policy abstractions but things that happened in your street. Every element of that settlement was a membership – a membership that he still practised. He talked about walking down the street in Melbourne and giving someone on the pavement five dollars in a Styrofoam cup before another commuter, all dressed up, accidentally kicked it over, sending the coins and notes flying. He went back, picked up all the money, put it back into the cup, and added another five dollars.

It reminded me of collecting for charity in Norlane. The people with the least money were often the most generous, offering a real and substantial portion of their disposable income so that others might enjoy a better life. It mirrored a hard-won warning my grandmother, a nurse and later a priest’s wife, gave me growing up: that the self-righteous were some of the least helpful people she knew.

Today every one of my fellow passengers’ institutions – the parish, the union hall, the party machine – has become a legacy vehicle shedding members without a clear endpoint while its custodians describe the challenge as a communications problem.

The second cluster in my notes is what ails him: ‘Things are not getting better; inflation; the cost of Australian products at home and overseas; Australia not utilising its resources; MPs in it for themselves.’ This is the material economy’s indictment, and mostly you have heard it before – it is, almost line for line, the inventory a Queensland politician and Nationals leader recited to his party’s conference earlier this month while holding a packet of Tim Tams.

Like Matt Canavan, my fellow passenger observed what few speechwriters think to include – because they don’t actually inhabit the real world: the relative price of Australian products overseas. A meat worker stands inside the export chain. He handles product he cannot always afford at his own supermarket but watches it board ships for shelves where it sells for less. He did not raise it as a talking point; it was no more than an occupational fact – evidence.

The commentariat needed an OECD report this month to learn what he knew from the loading dock: this country has been running an experiment in how expensive one’s home can become even when it produces its own resources.

The third cluster of notes reflect where he’s going: ‘Hanson’s policies sound really good; commonsense; China is not our friend; security; cohesion.’ The first verb shows a man in motion rather than one who has arrived – ‘sound really good’ is a customer circling a choice, not a convert reciting a creed.

And finally, the cluster that unlocks the whole paragraph: ‘False preachers; golden calf.’

The excommunication

Those two phrases are doing the heaviest work a lapsed-parish vocabulary can do, and it matters where the golden calf sits in the story he’d have learned at school. The calf is not a generic idol. It is the idol built by the priesthood itself – by Aaron, keeper of the faith, while Moses was up the mountain – and worshipped by a people who had been led to expect better from their own clergy.

When this man says golden calf, he is not describing his enemies. He is describing Labor in government: the institution he tithed to for a lifetime, discovered worshipping something other than the god it was ordained to serve. And ‘false preachers’ names the succession – a new moral clerisy that inherited the pulpit and changed the sermon. The old church told him about sin and gave him charity.

The new one, as he experiences it, tells him about his dinner plate, his attitudes, and his love of old Datsun cars. He recalls the day he took his girlfriend, her mother, and their Alsatian across to Lakes Entrance in his secondhand Datsun Stanza. The new church orders him into compliance with the priesthood’s standards.

‘Interference in personal life’ is the phrase of a man who can remember when moral instruction came from institutions with which he had a symbiotic relationship, rather than from ones that have grown increasingly self-interested and demanding. Given his background I could have talked about the church in Rome before the counter-reformation.

My neighbour was not leaving the faith. His complaint was that the preachers had changed gods. He was essentially describing an excommunication, pronounced in the only liturgical register he knew – and it was he who was excommunicating them.

The men the Split couldn’t take

Here is where the paragraph stops being a portrait and becomes a measurement, because consider the profile: Victorian; Irish-Catholic; industrial worker; exercised about communist China, social cohesion, security; estranged from a Labor Party he considers captured by an alien creed. Australian history has seen this exact man before. He fits the 1955 profile – the Movement, the Split, the DLP – the Catholic industrial right that walked out of the Victorian branch and kept Labor from office for a generation.

Except for the detail that turns the resonance into a finding: my fellow passenger’s hero is Gough Whitlam. This man is not a DLP nostalgist; he is from the wing that stayed. The Split – the most violent tribal rupture in the party’s history, fought street by street through his own community, his own parish, quite possibly his own union – could not move his family. They held through the sectarian fury of the fifties, held through the DLP’s two decades of preference warfare, and were rewarded with a series of governments they’d waited a lifetime for. Whatever loyalty means, whatever strength it has in real life, his was of the toughest industrial grade.

And yet – the last decade has moved what 1955 could not. This is my finding the commentariat should sit with. Labor’s present bleed is routinely discussed as the loss of ‘soft’ voters at the margin. The man on the train with me was not soft. ‘I know kung-fu,’ he would say, repeatedly.

He was from the deepest stratum the Labor party had – and when this deepest stratum starts describing its own government in the vocabulary of Exodus, the rupture underway is not smaller than the Split. It is larger, more powerful, and potentially more serious. Like a rip off a beach, it is invisible from the sand – those who look out across the sea cannot see it – but enter the water and it carries away the unwary.

My model had met him already

A columnist with an anecdote, like mine on the regional train, is little better than an investment adviser whipping up FOMO about space flight. The reason this conversation unsettled me was that my engine had predicted this man – specifically him, not ‘disaffection’ in general.

Run the country’s own election-study data through one model, identically, for every election since 2010, and One Nation first becomes measurable in 2016 – and already in that first wave, alongside the expected education signal, sits union membership (+0.94, significant): the material worker leaking rightward out of Labor while the commentary was still talking about Brexit as just foreign news.

Run the 2025 wave and many of One Nation’s admirers resolve as older, lower-paid wage-earners – employees, not just tradies or small-business proprietors. And the values gate that supposedly prevents critical voters from pursuing such options turns out not to exist: religiosity (or more precisely, its opposite – secularism) fires only on the Greens side of the ledger. It is irrelevant for One Nation. My neighbour’s Catholicism is no obstacle whatever to where he’s heading.

Nothing about the man is anomalous. He is the collection of my regressions wearing a jacket – not asking for more but proudly telling me how easy it had been to lead a fulfilling life as an Australian.

And my model says another thing about him which the daily commentary has no easy category for: his new destination recruits from both old sides at once. The displaced – the voters whose position in the material economy has been disrupted and who have concluded the system did it – are roughly a quarter of the electorate on my seat-level maps, and they arrive at One Nation’s door in the same queue—from the Coalition in torrents, from Labor in a widening trickle which the engine expects to gain momentum.

The party the commentariat files under ‘far right’ is, structurally, a cross-flank vehicle: the man on the train, ex-Labor, will stand in that queue beside an ex-Liberal small businessman with whom he agrees about almost nothing except the one thing that now matters most – that the people running the system are in it for themselves.

The compass star is turning

Which returns us to one of the strangest statements in my paragraph of notes, the one I nearly rejected: ‘MPs in it for themselves’ – all of them, undifferentiated. A lifetime Labor man who no longer bothers to distinguish the parties. The journalist sees this as just cynicism. My engine suggests the future arriving. In the political landscape now taking shape, on the axis slowly taking form, the distinction he’s dropped is genuinely disappearing.

As the old left-right line dissolves, the natural sorting is no longer labour against capital but system against displaced – and on that axis Labor and Liberal drift toward the same pole. My engine carries this as a formal scenario, not a flourish: the defensive convergence of legacy parties, with the German grand coalitions as an obvious precedent among others.

And the ending is similar: each round of establishment huddling, each effort to lock out the unwanted insurgent, feeds the cross-flank opposition it targets. The man on the train is not confused about the difference between Australia’s major parties. Simply he has noticed, before these legacy parties have, that the difference between Labor and Liberal is ceasing to be the load-bearing one.

So, he is not moving from left to right. The compass rose (or star) itself is turning beneath him, while he is standing still – same values he learned in the parish, same suspicion of concentrated power he learned in the union, same test he has always applied: ‘Are things getting better for people like us?’ The parties have moved; his needle hasn’t.

Somewhere in the night, he and his family got off at the station. The old platform wasn’t long enough, and they had to be careful not to miss it stepping out in the dark. We all shook hands and waved. I watched them go: the man, his Asian wife – whom his best friend had introduced when he sang at his mate’s wedding – his daughter who’d finished university in Melbourne, his son – the sound engineer.

I had the peculiar feeling of having shaken hands with a data point. The national conversation has spent most of its time debating whether men like him are extremists. My neighbour spent our hours on the train quoting Exodus and Gough Whitlam in one extended argument. He talked of security, cohesion, compassion, charity, livelihood.

Generational supporters of Labor, he and his family would all vote One Nation in November’s Victoria state election. But there was something still more surprising to me than this turn. And it showed how off-track the major party campaign machines have become: to this man – kind, sincere, well-meaning – Pauline Hanson represented the new Gough Whitlam.