One Nation's Pauline Hanson (Image: Pauline Hanson's Please Explain/Facebook)

Support for Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party (UAP), Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and other far-right populist parties hit a ceiling during the 2022 election, despite fears they could capitalise on the pandemic to lift their vote.

With about three-quarters of votes counted, UAP, One Nation, Katter’s Australian Party, Liberal Democrats, and Shooters, Fishers and Farmers have picked up about 11% of first preference votes. This is a slight increase from 2019 where they gained about 8% — although part of this is explained by One Nation’s primary picking up by 2% because it ran three times the number of candidates. 

Dr Benjamin Moffitt is an Associate Professor at Australian Catholic University and author of The Global Rise of Populism. He says the right-wing populist parties stalled at about the same vote in the past three elections. He says there was reason to believe they might perform better before the election. 

Parties like UAP and One Nation had broadened their remit from being just anti-immigrant or anti-vaccine. Their policies ranged from the economic populism of Palmer’s promise to cap home loan interest at 3% to One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts courting sovereign citizens. 

The government’s responses to the pandemic inflamed a very vocal group of anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown campaigners that at times appeared to broaden these groups’ support beyond their previous ceiling. In October last year, pollster RedBridge found that UAP had a vote of 17% in the western Sydney seat of Lindsay, and Palmer boasted it was even higher elsewhere.

Plus there was evidence of better organised parties: One Nation ran candidates in 149 House of Representatives seats compared with 59 in 2019. 

Ultimately, Moffitt argues, the 2022 federal election result wasn’t defined by a rising populist wave. While the coming out of teal independents reflected a grassroots movement that was unhappy with the federal government, those candidates were often “elites” who represented their communities. There was no obvious protest vote against the parties whose state counterparts oversaw harsh COVID-19 restrictions — in fact Labor was seemingly rewarded in Western Australia and Victoria for its handling of the pandemic.

Other aspects of the political environment also neutered the salience of issues they’ve traditionally campaigned on. One Nation’s traditional message of anti-immigration was rendered redundant by the closure of Australia’s borders for much of the past few years and also undercut somewhat by historically low unemployment. Meanwhile, Palmer’s UAP poured millions of dollars into an assault on faith in vaccines — an issue that completely dropped out of its messaging as Australians overwhelmingly got vaccinated. 

Even an attempt by former prime minister Scott Morrison to bring the so-called freedom movement into the fold by promising no more lockdowns in the dying weeks of the campaign was unsuccessful. Moffitt says this failed because the movement tends to demand ideological purity and wouldn’t buy into a message from someone who had overseen a national vaccine rollout. 

“The state is popular at the moment,” he said. “We’ve done relatively well in Australia during COVID-19. This election became a referendum on the federal government and not ‘a pox on all the major parties’.”