Australia’s far-right party leads in national poll for first time
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Since its 1997 launch, One Nation, led by Pauline Hanson, has had only a peripheral presence in Australia’s Parliament.
PHOTO: REUTERS
SYDNEY – Australia’s far-right populist party One Nation overtook the ruling Labor Party in a national opinion poll for the first time, buoyed by voter discontent over the centre-left government’s recent budget measures.
Primary support for One Nation rose 4 percentage points to 31 per cent from a month earlier, according to a closely watched poll by Redbridge Group and Accent Research.
The ruling centre-left Labor Party polled at 28 per cent, down three points.
Support for the conservative coalition opposition fell two points to 20 per cent.
The polling comes after the government’s May 12 budget introduced the biggest changes to property taxes in decades to tackle intergenerational inequity.
The results suggest the proposed measures failed to win over voters and were especially unpopular with the Gen X and Baby Boomers.
But it also appeared unpopular among the younger Australians it aims to benefit. Just 26 per cent of millennials and 13 per cent of Gen Z voters believed the budget would be good for them, the results showed.
Labor was still ahead of One Nation, by 51 per cent to 49 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis, when respondents distributed preferences under Australia’s ranked-choice voting system.
The poll of 1,005 voters, with a 3.4 per cent margin of error, was held between May 25 and 28.
Since its 1997 launch, One Nation, led by Pauline Hanson, has had only a peripheral presence in Australia’s Parliament.
But its recent resurgence came after it tapped voter anxieties over high living costs, economic uncertainty and anti-immigration sentiment. REUTERS
