Kos Samaras is a political pollster who tells us every month that the Liberals are up a bit, Labor’s down a bit and One Nation continues to be strong. But now he’s dug a lot deeper and found a very different story to tell.
Samaras works on the RedBridge/Accent polling in The Australian Financial Review. But he adds a powerful statistical technique called multi-level regression with stratification to estimate the traits of voters in specific subgroups.
This shows not how people have changed their vote in response to some development but how they are using the three main parties to sort themselves into three different groups.
So forget left versus right or workers versus bosses. What’s happening, Samaras says, is voters are aligning themselves with the bloc that reflects their economic experience. “These three blocs are now sharper, more separated and more demographically distinct than at any point since the 1940s.”
The Labor bloc, he finds, is now overwhelmingly an inner- and middle-ring metropolitan formation. It is university-educated and it rents or has recently bought a home.
It’s overwhelmingly under the age of 45. It’s heavily first- and second-generation migrant. It is anchored in the public sector and the care economy. It is dominant among Gen Z and Millennial voters. And it skews female by a clear margin.
These are not the voters of the Whitlam-era Labor Party nor the Hawke-Keating party. They are something new, Samaras says. The educated diaspora of a de-industrialised economy; concentrated in the parts of the city where service-sector jobs cluster, anchored in cultural institutions rather than in workplace-based identity.
Two-party-preferred support for Labor among Gen Z now sits at about 70 per cent. This is not a polling fluctuation but a generational realignment. The Labor Party has, for the first time in history, become the natural home of educated youth, and it has done so while losing its grip on the outer-suburban and regional working-class workers who built it.
This is the trade Labor made, he says. It’s not yet clear whether the trade can hold. The bloc is large but it’s geographically concentrated and demographically narrow, which is Labor’s political vulnerability: a Labor Party that cannot deliver housing to its base will eventually lose it. The budget in May showed Labor trying to deliver for first home buyers without concern for people investing in further houses. They don’t fit in Labor’s bloc.
Next, the One Nation bloc. One Nation has reorganised Australian politics over the past three years, which neither of the other two parties has come to terms with.
Its voters are not the protest voters it had in the late 1990s, so not Pauline Hanson’s original constituency. They are mortgaged, asset-stretched, outer-suburban working class of western Sydney and Melbourne’s outer north and west.
These voters work in trades, transport, freight and what’s left of manufacturing. They are mortgage-stressed Gen X and Boomers, households that bought into the dream of asset-based prosperity and are now servicing the debt without the wage growth that was supposed to come with it.
Many are of Anglo/Celtic descent but with a rapidly rising second-generation migrant component, particularly children of the postwar migration wave, in western Sydney and outer Melbourne, who have completed the migrant aspiration stage and found, at the end of it, the same wage and housing pressures as their Anglo/Celtic neighbours. Their cultural register is anti-elite, not pure ideology. They don’t buy into a coherent program and reject the language and assumptions of the educated professional class.
The men in this bloc – and they are predominantly men – now give One Nation a primary vote of 45 per cent in the Gen X age group.
This is the structural failure of the Coalition, Samaras says. The Liberals were, in John Howard’s day, the party of the outer-suburban aspiration class. Howard understood it, talked to it and held it. The post-Howard Coalition has lost that language entirely. It now speaks to the asset-rich and assumes the aspiration class will follow on cultural grounds alone.
It won’t. One Nation has stepped into the space, and the longer the Coalition treats this as a temporary protest the more permanent the realignment becomes.
The third bloc – the one that fits me best (sort of) – is the Coalition bloc, which is in decline. Its remaining voters are concentrated in high socioeconomic stature suburbs, such as Sydney’s north shore and Melbourne’s east and bayside.
They are university-educated professionals in finance, law and corporate management. They own their homes outright and are self-funded retirees. They are the investment class. They are Anglo-Celtic and they’re predominantly over 55.
The Coalition has lost the asset-poor without holding the asset-rich. Its remaining voters aren’t a coalition, they’re a residue. They are the voters who have not yet been displaced by the great sorting exercise and they are the smallest of the three blocs.
The RedBridge/Accent poll now projects that, at the 2028 election, the Coalition will win no seats in Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia nor Tasmania. Yes, none.
“This is the structural collapse of a coalition that took 60 years to assemble and three years to dismantle. The teal independents took the asset-rich, socially progressive end of the bloc, while One Nation took the asset-poor, culturally conservative end,” Samaras says.
The Coalition’s path back doesn’t run through tax cuts for the asset-rich but through the outer-suburban belt, which now belongs to One Nation.
Labor’s path forward doesn’t run through repeating the cultural language of its inner-metropolitan base but through delivering on housing and wages for voters who, at present, remain loyal.
And the One Nation bloc is not going away. Why not? Because the economic conditions that produced it – for some, the cost-of-living crisis, the mortgage stress, the wage stagnation and the slow disappearance of working-class prosperity – are structural, not temporary.
Ross Gittins is economics editor.
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