Poll agency Redbridge director Kos Samaras is right about one thing: Australian politics can no longer be read through a simple two-party lens. But his analysis still treats One Nation mainly as a Coalition problem, when the bigger shift may now be heading straight for Labor’s suburban heartland.
The first phase of One Nation’s rise was obvious. It took votes from the Liberals and Nationals in regional Australia, among older, conservative, financially stressed voters who no longer believed the Coalition spoke for them. That part of the story is well understood.
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But the second phase is more politically dangerous. One Nation is now positioned to eat into the vote of long-relied-upon Labor communities: trade-qualified workers, union households, outer-suburban mortgage belts and middle-class families who once saw Labor as the party of secure work, affordable living and practical government.
These voters are not at all racist. Many are not driven by the culture war. They are worried about the future. They are worried about rent, mortgages, power bills, hospital queues, crime, congestion, school pressure and whether their children will ever be able to buy a home.
And increasingly, they are starting to blame Labor.
That is the part missing from the neat demographic story. It is too easy to say Labor holds up in “younger, educated and multicultural” urban seats, while One Nation dominates “older, less diverse” regions. That framing ignores what is happening in the suburbs, where economic stress cuts across ethnicity, age and class.
A truck driver in Melton, a nurse in Cranbourne, a tradie in Ipswich, a factory worker in Werribee, a small business owner in Tarneit or a mortgage-stretched family in Camden may not have the same background. But they can share the same frustration: life is getting harder, services are not keeping up, and governments keep asking them to accept more pressure.
Migration is central to this debate, not because every voter concerned about migration is anti-migrant, but because people can see population growth running ahead of housing, roads, hospitals and schools. In outer suburbs, this is not an abstract national conversation. It is lived daily through traffic jams, rental queues, crowded classrooms, GP shortages and longer waits for basic services.
Labor’s danger is that it mistakes multicultural suburbs for automatic Labor suburbs.
Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Greek, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Nepalese and other migrant communities are not immune from cost-of-living anger. They are also homeowners, renters, workers, parents, small business operators and commuters. They also get frustrated when crime rises, when hospitals are overloaded, when roads are clogged and when government feels more interested in symbolism than service delivery.
For years, Labor could rely on a broad coalition of union workers, public sector workers, migrants, renters, young voters and progressive professionals. But those groups no longer always want the same thing.
The inner-city progressive voter may see the migration debate mainly through identity and inclusion. The outer-suburban worker may see it through housing supply, wage pressure, infrastructure failure and competition for services. That does not make them racist. It makes them economically anxious.
This is where One Nation sees an opening.
Its message does not need to win majority support across multicultural Australia. It only needs to peel away enough disillusioned Labor voters in the right suburban and regional seats to shatter Labor’s margins. In a multi-party system, small shifts matter. A few thousand voters moving from Labor to One Nation, or exhausting their preferences, can change the entire map.
The Coalition has a serious problem, but Labor’s problem is more subtle. The Liberal vote may be visibly bleeding. Labor’s vote may be quietly hollowing out.
The old union member who once voted Labor because Labor stood for wages, jobs and the working class is now asking why their bills keep rising. The suburban parent who voted Labor because it promised fairness is now asking why fairness does not seem to include their family budget. The migrant small business owner who once saw Labor as welcoming is now asking why government regulation, taxes and costs are making survival harder.
This is not just a right-wing revolt. It is a trust revolt.
Labor’s mistake would be to believe that as long as the Coalition alienates diverse communities, Labor will inherit them by default. That may have been true once. It is less true now. Diverse Australia is not one voting bloc, and working-class Australia is not permanently loyal to any party.
One Nation’s next growth area may not be the wealthy Liberal suburbs or the deepest rural heartland. It may be the suburbs where Labor assumed economic hardship would keep people loyal, even as those same voters feel ignored.
The real warning for Labor is simple: when people feel poorer, less safe and less heard, they do not always move neatly from Labor to Liberal. In 2026, they may move to One Nation, independents, minor parties or no one at all.
That is why reading this purely as a Coalition crisis misses the point. One Nation may have started by raiding the Liberal base. But its next target is Labor’s working-class and outer-suburban base.
And if Labor keeps treating those concerns as prejudice rather than pressure, it may only accelerate the shift.
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