Kos Samaras

Housing costs, falling living standards and distrust of politicians are driving deep frustration among voters. Yet immigration dominates the national debate, obscuring the economic pressures behind the drift away from the major parties.

Before the marches, immigration was not a topic in our focus groups. After them, it still isn’t. The people keeping it on the front page are not those struggling.

For most of last year, RedBridge conducted over 400 focus groups that included voters in outer suburbs and regional towns across the country. We listened to them describe what was going wrong. They talked about the mortgage that seems not to get any smaller by the year, the rent that eats into 50-plus per cent of their weekly wage, the cost of food, the rising power bill, the wait to see a doctor, and the strong sense that nobody in charge wants to listen. They talked about their kids not being able to leave home.

Immigration did not come up. Not as a grievance, not as an aside, not at all. If you had judged the national mood by what people volunteered, you would have concluded the issue did not exist.

Then came 31 August 2025. The March for Australia rallies put tens of thousands of people on the streets of the capital cities, some of them organised by people who should never be near a microphone, and within a week immigration was the national story. It has stayed the national story through the October rallies, the Australia Day rallies and the anniversary rallies three weeks ago; even as the crowds thinned after that first Sunday, the coverage did not.

In the focus groups we have run since, immigration still does not come up. Prompt it and people will offer a view, usually a measured one about numbers and housing, and then they go straight back to what is actually happening to them. No one is ever going to tell a researcher that they are happy about population growth, even during better economic times.

So what can we learn from the quantitative data? One Nation is polling around 30 per cent. Sixty-two per cent of One Nation voters put immigration in their top three issues, against 31 per cent of voters overall and 17 per cent of Gen Z. So, the reasoning goes, immigration built One Nation. That is not what the number says.

Salience measures what a group talks about once it exists. It does not tell you what created the group. For that you have to look at everything else One Nation voters tell us, and it all points one way. Eighty-five per cent say the country is heading in the wrong direction. Net trust in politicians to do the right thing sits at minus 90. Seventy per cent say their vote is a tactic to make the major parties listen. Asked who they blame for rising prices and interest rates, 59 per cent name politicians and 14 per cent name immigrants.

The cohort supposedly consumed by immigration blames the political class for its circumstances by four to one over the people it is told to blame.

Then look at who they are. The initial One Nation surge after August last year came almost entirely off the Coalition: Gen X and younger baby boomers without a degree, living in the outer suburbs, the peri-urban fringe and the regions. Our Three Australias analysis tracks real incomes since 2015. Inner metropolitan Australia is up six points. The outer suburbs are down eight. Regional Australia is down 11. That is where the One Nation vote lives. These are people who went backwards for a decade under governments of both colours and then found a party willing to say the system had failed them – or, to be blunt, offer them a neat weapon to punish the establishment for ignoring them.

It’s not an ideological shift because of the influx of outsiders, it is revenge.

You can also see this in the softness of the vote. A vote built on immigration would be hard, rusted on, driven by deep tribalism. This one is rented. In Victoria, our polling for the Financial Review in August had One Nation down five points. In September, it was still down from its June high, most of it flowing back to the Coalition the moment the Coalition looked like the real agent of change. A vote about migration does not evaporate because the Coalition had a good fortnight. A vote about frustration does, one that was not formed because of immigration.

You can see it in housing too. Asked what is causing the housing crisis, 72 per cent of One Nation voters name migration. The renters of Parramatta and Dandenong, who live closest to the intake and pay the most for it, do not. Among Labor voters the figure is 23 per cent, among Greens voters 10. The blame sorts by tribe, not by rent. It is a badge people wear because of who they already are, not a diagnosis they reached from their own circumstances.

Last week the ABC put migration on the national stage. David Speers hosted; Anne Aly, Andrew Hastie and Barnaby Joyce took questions, and the framing was set before anyone spoke. Is our migration system still working? What is our national identity? What kind of country do we want to be? These were put to the audience as open questions, as if the country that exists today is not real.

The face of this country has already changed. Australia is home to 27.6 million people. Of those, 18.8 million were born here and 8.8 million were born somewhere else. That is 32 per cent, within touching distance of the record set in 1891. For the first time on record the largest overseas-born group is not English but Indian, at 971,000 people, up 522,000 in a decade. China is at 732,000, New Zealand at 638,000, the Philippines at 413,000, Vietnam at 327,000, and Nepal has quadrupled to 214,000. The groups that are shrinking are the Italians, the English, the Greeks and the Germans, all with a median age over 60; the post-war wave is now passing into history.

Roughly half the country was either born overseas or has a parent who was. Some in the political world, who are debating what the face of the nation should be, best peek out the window.

Furthermore, the electorate this produces does not facilitate a replay of the greatest hits from the 2001 federal election. When we test Labor’s two-party vote against the Coalition and then against One Nation, Australian-born voters who speak only English at home do not move: 52 per cent against both. Voters who speak another language at home go from 59 against the Coalition to 70 against One Nation. Overseas-born voters go from 55 to 61. Gen Z from 68 to 73. That is not a preference but a rejection of this debate, by a large enough group of voters to determine at least half the parliament and growing. By the close of this decade, there will be approximately 5.2 million Australians who belong to the Gen Z generation. Good luck to any conservative trying to spark up a debate that we should reduce the number of young people to fix this demographic (political) problem!

So why is this the national conversation? Two main reasons. Diverse Australians are presently supporting the parties of the Left and, critically, because it is the conversation the people who run this country can afford to have.

Consider what is not on the front page. Real household disposable income per person has fallen by more than eight per cent since mid-2022, possibly the sharpest fall in the developed world. Real wages sit around six per cent below where they were in 2020. Productivity has not grown in six years; output per hour worked is back where it was in 2018–19. Business investment collapsed during the pandemic and has only just crawled back to where it stood before it, and low investment is the common thread in every account of why productivity has stalled. In the June quarter, private investment contributed nothing to growth. In the March quarter, the growth we did get was data centres.

When was the last time a national broadcaster built a forum around the destruction of working people’s disposable incomes? When was the last week of front pages on wages that have gone nowhere for half a decade? When did a panel of politicians sit before a studio audience and take questions on why this country cannot attract enough investment to make its own workers more productive? These are the subjects that have moved a quarter of the electorate out of the major parties.

The reason is not hard to find. A serious conversation about incomes, wages and investment ends with those who have run this country for over 20 years admitting that they perhaps have not done a great job and, of course, realising that radical reforms are required, and that these come with significant political risk. A conversation about immigration is much easier: it ends with a number, and a number is something a minister can announce. It supplies a villain who cannot vote, and it puts a third of the country in the frame as the explanation for a decade that was done to everyone. A distraction from the real big issues facing the country.

Both major parties should read the room. The Coalition has already been locked out of the two cities where a third of the country lives. Our May 2026 MRP had it at 12 seats nationally, behind One Nation as the opposition, and there is no path back to government that does not run through Sydney and Melbourne, the two places where the overseas-born share is highest and the wall is most solid.

Every fortnight the Coalition spends auditioning for the One Nation vote in the regions is a fortnight in which a voter in Parramatta or Box Hill concludes the party is not for people like her, or him.

Labor’s position is worse, because it is more careless. The one cohort that stood between it and the Coalition’s fate in May 2025 and in our May 2026 MRP was the diverse electorate. That is the pillar holding the house up, and the party’s response to a debate about whether these people belong has been to join it, arguing over the setting of the dial while the families the dial describes look on, having not completed their migration journey. A journey that starts with one person and ends with a cluster of family members. Just like my parents’ generation, where the migration arc took well over 15 years, from the initial arrival at Port Melbourne to the siblings arriving years later.

A party that treats its own foundation as a problem to be managed should not be surprised when the foundation starts to crumble. The Coalition has already run the experiment on what happens when you lose these voters. Labor is running it a second time, even though the results of this experiment are published and peer reviewed.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/09/politicians-keep-talking-about-immigration-voters-keep-talking-about-their-bills/

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