An orange wave is breaking over Victoria. Can Labor hold back the populist tide?

The hard men and women of the union movement gathered at a conference centre on the edge of Melbourne didn’t entirely believe what they were being told.

Kos Samaras, a former Labor Party organiser turned pollster and political consultant, was on his feet, explaining how One Nation, a party which had never won a lower house seat in Victoria, was on track to snatch a dozen at the next state election. In some Labor-held electorates, Pauline Hanson’s lot was Hoovering up 30 per cent of the vote.

The room was not entirely convinced. Any union secretary worth their salt knows the mood on the factory floor, in the smoko room, around the teachers’ staff room. They weren’t picking up what Samaras was telling them.

As it turns out, they were right to be sceptical. Samaras didn’t know the half of it.

The setting was the annual strategic forum of Victorian Trades Hall Council, the state’s peak body for trade unions, at a venue in Chirnside Park. The date was March, after One Nation had flexed in South Australia, but before Hanson’s party reduced the Liberal and National parties to bit players in the Farrer byelection. What seemed an alarming prediction now appears a gross underestimation of where One Nation is heading.

“People thought that 12 seats was maybe a stretch,” Trades Hall secretary Luke Hilakari recalls of the forum. “Now I’m looking at numbers like it could be 30 seats.”

To put this into context, the Liberal and National parties currently hold 29 seats in Victoria’s Legislative Assembly (lower house). If the revised projections commissioned by Trades Hall are accurate, One Nation will in November become the second-largest party in parliament behind Labor, and the dominant coalition partner within any non-Labor government.

As dramatic as this outcome would be, it is only part of the seismic shift we are seeing in Victoria, one mirrored in Donald Trump’s America, in Nigel Farage’s UK and across Western Europe, where populist movements have either replaced or decimated traditional centre-right parties.

The Victorian election, the first since One Nation overtook both major parties in popularity, could also produce the next step in Australia’s political upheaval – the emergence of an anti-establishment force capable of taking ground from both the right and the left, and muscling its way onto the government benches.

Jim Reed, founder of the Resolve Political Monitor surveys published by The Age, says One Nation has morphed from a protest movement into an agent of change that voters from a broad range of demographics are approaching with positive intent.

“The polls are showing One Nation stealing votes from both major parties, not just the right,” he says. Reed’s next survey of Victorian voting intentions will be published on Monday.

Federal One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce declared to 3AW on Friday that his party was now a force that both sides of politics needed to reckon with.

“The movement’s on. It’s not an aberration,” he said.

When seen this way, the November 28 poll is less a contest between Labor and Liberal than an insider-outsider stoush in which Labor’s biggest fight is against One Nation, the Coalition’s greatest rival is One Nation, and the make-up of parliament will be decided by a kaleidoscope of contests – red versus blue versus orange, not to mention green and teal.

A Labor versus Liberal fight for a marginal, mortgage belt seat will seem almost quaint.

Back in March, the union leaders left Chirnside Park with another piece of work commissioned by Trades Hall: a 67-page thesis developed by a clever young researcher named Oscar Kaspi-Crutchett, about how the left should fight the far right. Simply titled Antidote, it presents the case that while right-wing populism often begins as a glitch in the centre-right matrix, its “path to power leads through the working class”.

This is where the broader labour movement, including the Victorian ALP and the Allan government, wants to take the fight ahead of the election. While the Spring Street echo chamber is preoccupied with speculation about a challenge to Jacinta Allan’s leadership, Hilakari knows Labor faces far bigger questions.

“This is the most progressive state in the nation,” he says. “If One Nation plants their flag here in Victoria, they’re every chance to sweep the nation. This is where the fight is. This is the battleground. If we can’t push them out of Victoria, what’s that going to be like for Queensland, NSW and then the federal election?

“We’re running against Pauline Hanson.”

Allan this week sought to reframe the contest and sharpen her party’s focus and response to One Nation’s electoral threat. On a crisp winter’s day, she found an hour to slip out of her Treasury Place office, walk with this masthead around Fitzroy Gardens, and share her thoughts about what we are seeing in national and Victorian politics.

“What we knew as the old rules of politics don’t exist,” Allan says. “What we are seeing here with the fracturing of mainstream political parties is happening in Victoria, around the country and other parts of the world.

“We are the next big election going around. South Australia was an indicator, and obviously in published polls at a national level and state level around the country, we are seeing the One Nation vote surge. I think One Nation are a risk to working people and families everywhere, and we are the next ones who will be going up against them. That is why you will see me talk a lot about job security, about supporting workers, about helping people.”

Allan has raised the spectre of a One Nation-Liberal government. Under this scenario, Hanson, a Queensland senator but with the ultimate authority within One Nation, would have a real and present influence over Victoria’s affairs. Invert the question of how Opposition Leader Jess Wilson would govern if she accepts One Nation as a junior Coalition partner. What would One Nation’s Victorian leader – a position yet to be filled– do as premier?

Either way, the election will break new ground. This is the first state or federal election since One Nation’s revival a decade ago where it is poised to win seats from Labor as well as the Coalition.

This didn’t happen in South Australia, where One Nation won four lower house seats off the Liberal Party. It didn’t happen in Farrer, where Labor didn’t contest, and One Nation won a federal seat held by the Coalition since its creation. To find the last time it did, you need to go back to 1998, when the first iteration of One Nation won six seats from Labor and five from the Nationals at the Queensland state election.

Hanson says her ultimate aim in Victoria is to remove a long-term Labor administration that has plunged the state into record debt, allowed criminals to infiltrate its Big Build program and overseen record levels of crime. She told a fundraiser event in Melbourne on Friday night she would be willing to partner the Coalition in government to achieve this goal. While opinion is split about whether this is a gift to the Liberal Party or a curse, Allan is clear on what the worst outcome would be: a One Nation-led government.

The Liberal Party will, meanwhile, keep pressing the case that if One Nation supporters really want to change the government, the best way is to vote for the Coalition.

To understand what the next parliament could look like, let’s return to the Redbridge seat-by-seat modelling Samaras presented to the Trades Hall Council in March, and has since updated.

It showed Labor’s seats most likely to be swamped by an orange wave are in outer suburban and semi-rural areas, like Melton and Sydenham in Melbourne’s west and Pakenham, Bass and Hastings in the south-east. These are areas on the front line of the population debate that Hanson has sought to exploit as she blames “mass immigration” for overburdened roads, trains, schools and hospitals.

They also have a higher proportion of people who are not university educated and who are either production workers, service workers or small business owners. Kaspi-Crutchett identifies these three groups as having changeable political allegiances. “These communities are more exposed to economic shocks and consequently exhibit outsized discontent with the status quo,” he says in Antidote.

Wherever the far-right has achieved critical mass, it has done so by winning over significant portions of these occupational groups, Kaspi-Crutchett says.

The urban fringe is also a dangerous place for the Liberal Party, with similar seats, such as Berwick (the electorate held by former leader Brad Battin), Croydon and Evelyn (which includes Chirnside Park) also in play.

The electoral map for the Nationals is even more bleak because One Nation was already resonating with some regional voters at the 2022 state election. Samaras’ research shows seats such as Murray Plains, Gippsland East, Shepparton and Euroa are at risk of turning orange.

Samaras, who declined to discuss his confidential modelling, says that on published polling results, the Nationals could lose all their seats. But he adds an important caveat: “If you were going to pick a group of National MPs who could defend their seats because of who they are, I would pick the Victorians.”

Nationals leader Danny O’Brien says that at the last election, voters elected four new National MPs, including two who replaced independents. “Our great party has been written off many times in our 110-year history, but we have always prevailed because country people want a party that looks out for them and fights for their fair share,” he says.

The nuclear scenario, one canvassed by a Labor source, is that One Nation could wipe all established parties off Victoria’s regional and rural map. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the source said the outlook for Labor had deteriorated from bad to catastrophic.

If this situation is realised, then Allan’s seat of Bendigo East is squarely in the One Nation firing line. This comes on top of a well-planned Nationals challenge by Andrew Lethlean, a publican who took Labor’s overlapping federal seat of Bendigo to the brink of defeat in last year’s federal election.

On the desk of his Trades Hall office, Hilakari has an electoral map which, with each new input of data, he colours with shades of orange, blue, red and green. The state of Victoria already resembles a tequila sunset, with One Nation’s putative seats stretching from the edge of Melbourne to the NSW border.

There was a view among Labor, one expressed not long ago, that One Nation and the Liberals would devour one another, leaving the ALP as the only party capable of forming government. This has now been replaced by a growing sense of despair about what to do with a problem like Pauline.

A frustrated party official says: “We have a woman who is backed by billionaires, who does not vote for increases in the minimum wage or the pension, who says that people are lazy and don’t want to work, and somehow she is the champion of the working class.” How Victoria – where Labor has governed for all but four years this century – arrived at this place is also a live debate.

Kaspi-Crutchett traces the economic and social forces that tilled the soil for Hanson, such as the declining share of the economy paid to workers, growing disparities in the distribution of wealth, and the bleak outlook confronting younger Australians witnessing the disappearance of entry-level jobs and prohibitive house prices.

An Essential poll published in the lead-up to the 2025 federal election suggests that even though Labor voters backed in the Albanese government, they weren’t in a good place. According to the survey, only 16 per cent of Labor voters believed the political system was working well, and most felt Australia was on the wrong track. Not many of them will put much weight on this story – only 11 per cent trusted the mainstream media to report accurately.

Kaspi-Crutchett also presents some uniquely Victorian factors which help explain One Nation’s sudden appeal, noting the COVID-19 experience and particularly the 262 days Melbourne spent in lockdown “turbocharged both the scale and intensity of far-right political activity in the state”.

Lydia Khalil and Joshua Roose, experts on extremism, described the anti-lockdown movement in a 2023 paper as “a wide array of actors, including anti-vaxxers, religious communities, wellness influencers, QAnon and other conspiracists, sovereign citizens, and known Australian far-right actors and influencers” who converged alongside ordinary citizens to protest against vaccine mandates and social restrictions. From this unlikely cluster of bedfellows, a cohesive movement formed.

Labor knows it is both inaccurate and counterproductive to dismiss One Nation supporters as racist or conspiratorial cranks. Instead, the party’s state and federal headquarters are directing its MPs, including Allan, to shift the argument to what a Labor government can do for working people and what One Nation won’t.

That shift has begun, but the hour is late. In a little over five months, Victorians go to the polls for one of the most consequential elections in the state’s history. At least Labor now knows who it is fighting.

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