Sixty percent of Australians think immigration is too high, and yet for a massive chunk of One Nation voters, immigration isn't even the point. Let that sit with you for a second. According to a sweeping new essay by Waleed Aly in The Guardian, the fury driving people toward the political fringes isn't ideological. It isn't even really about policy. It's something older and uglier, and it's been building for twenty years.
The Conveyor Belt of Catastrophe
Aly's essay reads like a trauma inventory for the modern world, and the list is exhausting in the best possible way. September 11. The London bombings. Iraq and the WMDs that weren't there. The global financial crisis wiping out homes and life savings. ISIS. Brexit. Trump the First. Covid. Lockdowns. Masks. Inflation. October 7. Gaza. Trump the Second and his tariff circus. Bondi. And threading through all of it, artificial intelligence accelerating faster than any democratic institution can process.
That's not a rough patch. That's a civilizational stress test with no breaks. As The Guardian piece notes, Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers put it plainly when he said 'all of these rolling shocks for 20 years have been cumulative. And every time it feels like ordinary people are going to get off the mat, something else arrives.' Chalmers meant it as a diagnosis. Aly takes it further and makes it a verdict.
The compounding is the point. Each individual crisis might have been manageable. But stack them on top of each other across two decades, let them bleed into each other across social media, watch them all arrive faster than governments can respond, and what you get isn't policy failure. What you get is the collapse of the basic premise that things can get better. That someone's in charge. That the system works.
When the Voters Stop Believing in the Promise
Here is where Aly's essay lands its sharpest punch. The conventional read on the global rise of populist rage is that people are mad about specific things: immigration numbers, house prices, interest rates, wokeness in schools. Fix the specific things, the logic goes, and the anger dissipates. The Guardian essay argues this is wrong. Dangerously, humiliatingly wrong.
Polling analyst Simon Welsh from Redbridge is quoted on One Nation voters directly: 'It's not ideological, it's not about moving right, it's not even necessarily about policy. They're coming across because it is the vehicle for this fury that is directed towards the major parties because of this very long sense of neglect and social economic disempowerment that has become so profound.' That's not a swing voter with concerns about net migration figures. That's someone who has written off the entire system and is now looking for something to throw at it.
This is the distinction that mainstream political parties keep fumbling. They hear 'immigration is too high' and announce a cap. They hear 'cost of living is killing us' and announce a rebate. They are tuning a guitar while the house burns down. The voters who are truly gone aren't waiting for better policy. They've stopped believing that policy, as a concept, can deliver anything worth having.
Monsters Everywhere, Depending on Where You Stand
What makes Aly's framing genuinely useful is that he refuses to assign the monsters to one side. His opening paragraph is a masterpiece of deliberate provocation, listing the enemies of every tribe simultaneously: tech billionaires, AI, legacy media, the manosphere, gender ideology in schools, machete-wielding migrants, anti-immigrant mobs, Hamas, Israel, Russia, far-right rallies. Something in that list, he notes, probably outraged you. Which means you're already seeing monsters in whoever sees different monsters from you.
This isn't both-sidesism. It's a structural observation about what happens when the shared premise of a society collapses. When people stop believing in progress, stop trusting institutions, stop thinking the system can deliver, they don't arrive at calm skepticism. They arrive at paranoia. And paranoia needs a monster. The monster you choose tells you which tribe you're in. But the choosing itself, the need for one, is universal right now.
The essay lands in a place that's more unsettling than partisan. It's not that the right has gone crazy or the left has lost the plot, though there's evidence for both. It's that the whole operating system of liberal democratic progress, the idea that things generally get better if we muddle through together, has lost its credibility. And once that's gone, the question of which monster to blame becomes almost secondary.
Australia Is Not a Special Case. It's a Case Study.
It's tempting to read this as a specifically Australian story, framed around One Nation and Bondi and Pauline Hanson. It isn't. Aly's essay in The Guardian uses Australia as the ground-level view of something happening across every liberal democracy simultaneously. Zohran Mamdani's stunning Democratic Socialists win in New York gets a mention in the same breath as Trump's re-election and Brexit. The common thread is rejection of the conventional order, from every possible direction.
What makes Australia slightly different, and slightly useful as a case study, is that it's a country that largely avoided the worst of the 2008 financial crisis, maintained relatively robust institutions, and still watched this same political fragmentation take hold. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. The story isn't 'look at what economic devastation does to people.' The story is 'look at what twenty years of cumulative crisis does to people's faith in the project itself, regardless of how well they were insulated from any single shock.'
That's the harder lesson. And it's the one most comfortable centrist political figures in every country are still refusing to absorb.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that the answer to populist rage is better messaging. Cleaner policy. A leader who 'connects' better. This is what the professional class of political consultants has been selling for a decade, and it is wrong in a way that keeps being demonstrated and keeps being ignored. What Waleed Aly is describing in The Guardian is not a communications problem. It is a legitimacy problem. People have not merely lost faith in specific governments. They have lost faith in the premise that government, as a mechanism, can produce a life worth living. You cannot A/B test your way out of that.
The real horror in Aly's essay isn't the list of catastrophes. It's the observation that the catastrophes weren't even the cause so much as the proof. They proved what a lot of people already suspected: that the institutions were fragile, that the experts were guessing, that the promise of liberal progress was, at minimum, conditional on a run of luck that has now demonstrably run out. When One Nation voters tell pollsters that immigration isn't really their main issue, they are telling you something important. They are telling you they don't have a grievance that can be addressed. They have a verdict that has been rendered.
None of this means the far right is right. The monsters they've chosen are largely confected, and the 'solutions' on offer range from useless to genuinely dangerous. But you do not beat a movement built on the wreckage of broken faith by proving your policy platform is technically superior. Someone should tell the major parties. They don't seem to have gotten the memo yet.
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