She leads when she leaves. Women have been leaving the major parties and now, according to Resolve polling conducted for this masthead, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has more women supporters than men. The myth that women are more left-leaning than men has been exploded.
In a polling sense, it’s a very small earthquake. One Nation’s vote has been on the rise for the better part of a year. Believe it or not, men and women have been pretty much in lockstep the entire time, separated by a couple of percentage points at most. At the end of last year, women preferred One Nation slightly more than men – 14 to 12 per cent– but back then the rise of the party was less a surge and more a novelty.
Now it’s inexorable. After men drew level with women at 22 per cent support for One Nation at the start of this year, the latest release puts women another two points ahead.
There are different ways this story can be told. One story might be that women are drawn to a political party led by a woman. In that telling, this is a version of the year that professional women went teal. There is some evidence for the gender affinity story. Julia Gillard as prime minister had more support from women; some analyses suggest that the gender gap in her support derived from her lower popularity among men. That’s often attributed to sexism. But Pauline Hanson is also a woman. Her support has been low, if stable, for years. Men haven’t been put off by her gender, nor women more inclined to support her because of it.
Another story could be that women tend to be more radical than men. A survey of populist parties in other parts of the world notes that there are numerous “men’s parties” – the ones men are much more likely to vote for – which are led by women, such as Marine Le Pen in France, Georgia Meloni in Italy, and Alice Weidel in Germany. It’s true that women do appear in more extreme roles at both ends of the political spectrum. The left had Ulrike Meinhof, a prominent leader of the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist terrorist Red Army Faction. The cultish climate movement Extinction Rebellion is about 60 per cent female.
But the very small difference between male and female support for Australia’s One Nation suggests that this is not a story of female radicalisation.
It could also be a story about the way many women leave relationships – gradually, but then with a terrifying finality when all her attempts at repairing the situation have been ignored or rebuffed. This is how female voters left the Liberal Party. Now it is how they are leaving Labor. In the middle of last year, 35 per cent of female voters preferred Labor. That’s now down to 29 per cent. Their votes are distributing across many minors, with some going to One Nation.
I favour this story, as women’s vote for “other” parties and independents is consistently a bit higher than men’s. The main parties have lost their trust; voters have stopped believing that politicians serve the electorate rather than themselves. If this story is true, the Labor Party should be very afraid. She’s leaving and she won’t be back.
And that’s bad news, because she leads the way. Take it from the Coalition. It finally hit gender parity this week – men are now equally as unlikely to vote for it as women have been for a while. According to the Sky News Pulse poll conducted by YouGov, only one in five men and women would vote for the Coalition at an election tomorrow.
On one hand, it’s a simple numbers problem. Women are a majority of the population. On the other, it’s more than that. Women tend to be driven by the need to belong, and to signal their belonging, as Cat Bohannon argues in her book Eve.
One of the strongest drivers of action, in politics and beyond, is social proof – following what others do. It’s why repressive regimes find it necessary to prevent people from speaking openly to one another about what they think. Because people tend to assume that the majority must be right. As long as everyone is spouting the orthodoxy, it remains orthodoxy. But when it becomes visible that others dissent, dissent spreads.
Realising this, the prime minister has pivoted to describing his struggling budget as disruptive. The sales job which was, as Resolve pollster Jim Reed observes, first framed around intergenerational equity, then around housing, then tax reform, is now apparently about protecting democracy and social cohesion.
But Labor’s problem isn’t whether voters buy its economic agenda. The budget isn’t just suffering from a case of broken promises; it’s burdened with a loss of trust that has been accumulating for years.
Some women I’ve spoken to, who’ve shifted to One Nation, speak about the betrayal they feel that Julia Gillard changed sex discrimination law in a way that undermines biological women’s rights, as is now playing out in the Giggle v Tickle court case. Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s decision to take on the role of president of negotiations for the UN’s COP31 climate summit is regularly criticised on X by people who’d rather Australia focused on accessing our natural resources for economic growth. It’s not uncommon for people I’ve interviewed to say they resent the government focusing on Gaza rather than on them. And now they’re realising that others feel the same way too.
Many people who aren’t on the left feel that the left has dominated the public sphere for decades, determining what has been acceptable to say and represent. The rise of One Nation is a snowball effect as disgruntled voters realise the status quo is being swept away.
Before the budget, One Nation’s vote had briefly plateaued. The focus on trust that followed has just acted as a reminder of a thousand little betrayals. Both women and men are leaving their political relationships with the main parties. But women already had one foot out the door.
Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.
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Parnell Palme McGuinnessis an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies. She is also an advisory board member of Australians For Prosperity, which is part-funded by the coal industry.
