The Newspoll released last week by the Australian shows a continuation of a trend, visible since January this year, which has seen One Nation equal to or higher than Labor or the Coalition in voter sentiment. The poll has Labor’s primary vote at 30 per cent, which is equal to One Nation at 30 per cent and ahead of the Coalition (at 19 per cent).

In light of these numbers, the question that is being asked is, why don’t One Nation and the Coalition form some sort of alliance to defeat Labor? After all, Labor has been banding together with the Greens to fight the Coalition since the 1990 federal election (thanks to the late Graham Richardson).

We have seen in the UK a political realignment on the right with the rise of Reform. A Reform-Conservative coalition or deal is widely seen by political commentators as an eventual necessity if the right wants to form a majority government in future elections in the UK.

A similar realignment seems to be occurring here in Australia. The numbers, as the saying goes, don’t lie. Obviously, we are probably two years out from a federal election. Moreover, the LNP is in government in Queensland and the Northern Territory, and ahead in the polls in Victoria. However, as former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett pointed out, to ensure the defeat of the Jacinta Allan Labor government, the Coalition there must form an alliance with One Nation.

The simple fact of the matter is that – as it stands now – whether they like it or not, One Nation and the Coalition really have no choice but to work together.

It won’t be the first time a realignment has occurred on the right of politics in this country.

History shows us that the dissolution of centre-right parties in Australia has occurred several times since Federation.

The first ‘Liberal party’ in this country was formed in 1909 and led by Alfred Deakin in an event known as the ‘Fusion’ between Deakin’s Protectionist party and the Anti-Socialist party led by Joseph Cook (which was once the Free Trade party). As you can imagine, the only thing really bringing these opposites together was the fact they were anti-Labor and had joined forces to counter the ALP’s growing popularity, thus it couldn’t last.

After an election win in 1913, the party was soon out of office and ended up merging with Billy Hughes’ National Labor party to form the Nationalist party in 1917, which itself ended up being subsumed by other defectors from the ALP, led by Joseph Lyons, to form the United Australia party (UAP) in 1931.

The UAP was also reasonably successful initially, governing in coalition with the Country party (these days called the Nationals) until 1939 when Robert Menzies became leader. Although the coalition was re-formed, after the 1940 election, Menzies governed in minority until the following year when he resigned in favour of Arthur Fadden, who himself lasted only 40 days before Labor formed a government under John Curtin.

At the 1943 election, the UAP was soundly defeated and Menzies realised that a new political party had to be formed on the centre right that did not have being anti-ALP as its sole unifying factor.

At the Albury Conference in December 1944, Menzies outlined the aim in drawing together the 18 non-Labor forces at the time by declaring: ‘I want to make it clear that political unity among the non-socialist forces is … not a mere matter of political convenience or opportunity.’

‘It represents our great chance to give a means of expression to the deepest feelings to hundreds of thousands of Australians who are frustrated by the present and who are seriously alarmed about the future.’

It was for this reason that Menzies founded his party to be the party of the ‘forgotten people’, the middle class, who he called ‘the backbone of the nation’.

It is these people who now are forgotten once more, and not just by the ALP, but by the very party that was formed to stand up for them.

Soberingly, a recently published report by the Curtin Bankwest Economics Centre showed that Australians in their forties and fifties were experiencing the heaviest load across nearly every domain of life, leading to a generation marked by burnout and stress thanks to the costs of mortgages and school fees, to name but two. Consequently, suicide rates peak between the ages of 45 and 54.

And where do the vast majority of these people live? Not on Sydney’s North Shore or in Perth’s western suburbs, but in outer metropolitan and regional areas.

It was the Irish statesman Edmund Burke, upon whose thought the foundation of the Liberal party rests, who declared that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Liberal leader Angus Taylor leads a party that has forgotten how to fight, since it hasn’t picked one in years. Hence, the voters have abandoned it. It is therefore no surprise that polls show voting preferences shifting to One Nation.

As Margaret Thatcher once put it, ‘Once you start to compromise with the left, first you compromise with the near left. Then they’re fanatical, and you compromise with the middle left. Then you find yourselves compromising with the far left.’

The Liberals have been compromising with the left for far too long, and voters have lost trust with them. Once that trust is lost, it is extremely difficult to win back. Angus Taylor so far has made some mea culpas, along with important statements surrounding taxation policy and immigration, but more needs to be said and especially done, in particular on fundamental principles such as free speech, government overreach (there is still much anger at the Liberals for their failures during the Covid years) and, of course, climate ideology.

The Australia – and its values – that we know and love, is slipping away. OECD figures show that the Albanese government has presided over the worst fall in real living standards anywhere in the developed world.

The only way to arrest that – and for the right to regain power, as things stand now – is possibly a repeat of 1943 in some form. Not necessarily a dissolution, but rather a realignment on the right.

To do that, the Coalition and One Nation have to put personalities aside and put Australia first, in order to, as Menzies said ‘give a means of expression to the deepest feelings to hundreds of thousands of Australians who are frustrated by the present and who are seriously alarmed about the future’.