‘The white males no longer rule’: Australia’s changed, and not in a way that helps One Nation

George Megalogenis is one of Australia’s most respected political journalists and commentators. His latest book, Three Shocks, maintains that Australia has undergone seismic changes in recent years which are only just being recognised.

Fitz: George, congratulations on the book. I can’t say that I’ve read it cover-to-cover, but in the words of Gough Whitlam when I once asked him had he read John Edwards’ book on Paul Keating, “Comrade, I have glanced at it extensively”. And I’ve read extracts and got the guts of it. Can we go through what the three shocks are for Australia, in the title?

GM: [Laughing at Whitlam line.] Yeah, No.1 shock is Australia has become a majority migrant nation again – a majority of people who are either a migrant themselves or are the children of migrants, like myself. That line was crossed around 2018.

Fitz: No.2 shock?

GM: The largest group of workers by occupation are professional females, tertiary-educated women. Their numbers have now surpassed those of blue-collar workers, the revered figure so vaunted, politicians John Howard referred to as “a battler”. Then he was an “aspirational voter”. Tony Abbott had him as “a tradie”. Scott Morrison subsequently had him as “the quiet Australian”. I wouldn’t say his time is ever up, but he is now substantially outnumbered by women working in professions. And that line was crossed in 2015, just as Tony Abbott was about to lose his job. Also, women working as carers now outnumber male labourers. So these first two were identity shocks for us. The story we have been telling ourselves since European settlement, that we are a white nation centred on the labour of men working with their hands, no longer adds up. That’s just not who we are today. The white males no longer rule.

Fitz: Well, allow me to say, on the behalf of my fellow stale, pale, males, I resemble that remark! But that had political ramifications …

GM: [Laughing lightly.] There are obviously political implications, which manifests itself in quite a dramatic way in the 2022 election, and again in the 2025 election. Obviously, the teal vote in ’22, but also the eviction of the Liberals from the capital cities is essentially a story of these two identity shocks coming to pass. And despite my Greek heritage, I identify, I might say, as one of the white males. On stage with Magda Szubanski at the Byron Writers Festival, I noted Greeks obviously weren’t considered white Australians growing up. She said I was a white Australian. I said, “When do you think I became white, Magda?” And she said, “Well, that’s easy George. When the Vietnamese came.” Imagine 500 people in the auditorium at Byron Bay. I’ve never heard an identity joke land better than Magda’s.

Fitz: Love it! But this was a phenomenal historical and political change?

GM: Absolutely. Our second prime minister, Alfred Deakin, once penned an infamous anonymous article for the British audience after the passage of the White Australia policy, where he noted that when it came to immigrants, Australians would have no traffic with the “unclean thing”. If your skin was tainted by any degree – yellow, copper, brown – Australia would have nothing to do with that that type of migrant. Politics was predicated on it and male dominance. And now here we are – in those last elections, politics caught up with reality. The politics of the white male was being surpassed. We were still contesting elections on the assumption that blue-collar males decide who we are and who should run this place, when the electorate itself pulled rank and said they don’t run this place, we do.

Fitz: So while the Libs were “standing by our tradies”, the famous teal from the electorate of Wentworth, the well-educated Allegra Spender – daughter of a famous migrant in Carla Zampatti – whizzed by in an EV and drove all the way to her new parliamentary seat in Canberra?

GM: Exactly.

Fitz: And the third shock, which Australia didn’t see coming?

GM: Australia finding itself in an unstable world where its two most important external relationships – with China and the US – were no longer reliable. Just as Malcolm Turnbull was finishing as prime minister, China was moving into the “wolf warrior” phase of diplomacy. Emblematic of this was when one of the Chinese ambassadors was being interviewed in Sweden and memorably said, “we treat our friends with fine wine but for our enemies, we’ve got shotguns”. And by the time Scott Morrison’s become prime minister and questioned the origins of COVID – suggesting arms inspectors be sent into China to get to the bottom of it, and he was out on his own – the Chinese government retaliated with $20 billion worth of sanctions on Australia, which damaged him politically!

Fitz: Whoa, Nelly! And hold the phone. Suddenly, China was throwing its weight around, all at a time when we could no longer rely on the good ol’ USA if things turned nasty.

GM: Exactly. By this time Donald Trump was in power, and we’ve all seen Trump since, trashing treaties, tearing up norms and imposing tariffs. Shocking. For Australia, think about it. I know you’ve done a lot of work in this area. Think about the sort of blessed “son of empire” we’ve been as a settler nation for the previous 220-odd years. First the British, and then the United States had our back, and we had stable and very wealthy trading partners.

Fitz: And suddenly we’re all alone in the South Pacific beneath the Southern Cross, and the serious moonlight, the serious moonlight.

GM: Exactly. We always sort of styled ourselves an independent nation, filled with robust people. We slashed tall poppies, we were very egalitarian and the world’s most welcoming people. But behind all that, somebody else was looking after us, and no one would pick on us because we had a really, really big mate. First the British Empire, and then the United States from WWII. But we had this other capacity as well, which certainly in the post-war era manifests itself in the trading relationship with Japan, and then subsequently with China. We had the best of both worlds for a long run.

Fitz: Until the empire struck back, and politics caught up?

GM: Yes. Firstly in the 2022 election, but especially the 2025 elections, the third shock starts to play into our domestic politics. In 2022, on the COVID story Morrison was badly damaged. And the members of the Chinese-Australian diaspora, who were very solid Liberal voters to that point, changed camps and a number of seats that had been Liberal marched across to the Labor Party and will probably never come back. And that was consolidated in the 2025 election, in no small part because of the allegation by the Liberal Senator Jane Hume, that “Chinese spies” were at play as election volunteers.

Fitz: These were seismic shifts, of whole electorates suddenly moving, because of pent-up forces being suddenly released?

GM: Indeed. 2022 was one of the craziest elections I’ve covered, Peter. The Labor Party squeaked in by a very narrow majority off a historically low primary vote. But suddenly that part of the parliament plus the teals looked more like the nation at large. And the Coalition, which had a bad election result in 2022, had a catastrophic result in 2025.

Fitz: Yep. So here’s my central question. I accept the three shocks that you have named. They’re not claims. They’re facts. But how does One Nation come into the frame, and rise, at exactly the same time these shocks play out? We’re a majority-migrant society – that should be inimical to the interest of One Nation, which demonises migrants. Professionally-educated women have replaced blue-collar men as the predominant group – and such women are generally against One Nation’s ill-educated schtick. And three, we’ve got the example of the insanity of Trump before us all, and yet a big chunk of the mob appears to want One Nation, which is Trump-lite! They’ve pretty much quadrupled their position in the polls in the last 18 months? How do you explain all that?

GM: It’s a very good question. Pauline Hanson’s vote is basically a two-to-one story. So every three votes that Hanson is picking up, she’s getting two from the Coalition and one from Labor, and those two votes from the Coalition are pretty much all from the regions. Some of it is in reaction to those three shocks, electors are not happy with the three shocks and wanting to go back to whiteness, to males, to a stable world. But after that last federal election, where cosmopolitan Australia delivered a landslide to the Albanese Labor government, aided by those three shocks, it saw the collapse of the Coalition. And that’s where Hanson began to rise. So a lot of people from the Coalition base, who were never going to vote Labor, moved across to One Nation. And when Labor had problems of its own, with inflation, a really tough budget with big decisions made on negative gearing and capital gains tax, it meant One Nation picked up some Labor votes, too.

Fitz: And yet, you talk in your book of the “Tendulkar Line” being a wall against the One Nation taking actual power? And this is your version of the famed “Barassi Line” which ran from Arnhem Land through Birdsville to Broken Hill, to Canberra. North of the line, they played league and union. South of the line they played Aussie Rules. I hesitate to say it, but when it comes to the Tendulkar Line … please explain?

GM: In Sydney, Melbourne and even in Perth – New Australia – the first and second generation migrant community is up to two-thirds of the population. And the “Tendulkar Line” – named for the famous Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar – runs through the outer suburbs of the major metropolises [and] is like a bulwark, a wall, against One Nation penetration. Parramatta is an example. The first and second generation migrant population is 90 per cent of the entire population. It’s the part of Sydney that looks most like Melbourne, where the largest overseas-born group is from India and the second largest is from China. That electoral map is quite a profound shift in the sort of political ecology of these places. And it will never vote for One Nation. So Hanson is no closer to capturing metropolitan Australia than the Liberal Party was in 2022 or 2025.

Fitz: Because even if they got through the Tendulkar Line, they then get to more migrants, more professional women, more cosmopolitan Australia, more people who look at Trump with horror?

GM: Yes. Labor’s vote in metropolitan Australia has actually been quite steady in the high 30s since 2010. It hasn’t been trending down. It’s the Liberal vote that collapsed in the cities. All while One Nation continues to eat up the regions.

Fitz: Do you see a decimation of the Nats to come in the next federal election?

GM: Look, a number of people on all sides of politics are making exactly this prediction that there won’t be a National Party MP standing after the next federal campaign.

Fitz: So, among all these different dynamics, what can the Coalition do to save itself between now and the next election?

GM: Well, weirdly, if the National Party could get Barnaby Joyce back, they’d be probably in a better position because that’d hurt One Nation. But I don’t think that’s going to happen because Barnaby’s still possibly hoping he will succeed Hanson as One Nation leader. But on the Liberal side, the leader they’ve got now, Angus Taylor, hasn’t learnt the lesson that when Hanson comes at you from the right, you have to go after her on your safe ground, which is economic management. He’s trying to out-Hanson Hanson on immigration, whilst at the same time trying to compete with Labor on tax policy. He needed to stay in that one lane, which is his budget reply speech, should have been about tax, not about immigration. And at the moment, he doesn’t look like a future prime minister to me.

Fitz: Is Andrew Hastie the answer?

GM: Well, Hastie may well be the option to save the furniture, and he’s already putting pressure on Hanson by coming at her from a patriotic right perspective, which makes it harder for her to just continue to be herself as a disrupter. And bear in mind, the other thing Hastie is doing is attacking her political vulnerability in supporting Trump. Hastie has this very interesting line which Peter Hartcher has written about that Hanson is “MAGA first and Australia second”. And that last election was the first time the bulk of Australians effectively wrote down on the ballot paper: “America sucks.” They repudiated Trump.

Fitz: And yet, I look back on early last year as the “good old days” of Trump, where he was only spraying around tariffs wildly and beating up [Ukrainian president Volodymyr] Zelensky in the Oval Office, not threatening Greenland, blowing boats out of the water in Venezuela, killing schoolgirls in Iran and blowing up the global economic system. Surely Senator Hanson must be more exposed now than ever to her association with Trumpian politics, which most Australians – if not all – reel in horror from?

GM: I think so, [which puts a ceiling on her votes]. I think the question that’s being posed in these opinion polls is, are you jacked up with a two-party system? Answer: Yes. Where are you going to go? One Nation. Yeah. OK. So that’s the protest element of it. But I don’t think that will translate to a solid vote. Just imagine a three-cornered leaders debate at the next election: say Albanese, Hastie and Hanson. Last time, Dutton was really damaged by his association with Trump, and I think that will apply again, but more so for Hanson. Hastie has been strong against Trump. When the rubber hits the road, I think the three shocks have moved Australia beyond being a country that One Nation can ever have sole power in.

Fitz: Thank you for your time.

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