The real force reshaping Australian politics

The Coalition increasingly believes its future lies further to the right. Labor, buoyed by a commanding parliamentary majority, appears confident that its current agenda offers a compelling alternative.

Yet a simple question posed recently by Karl Stefanovic cuts through much of the commentary surrounding Australian politics: “Do you miss the old Australia?”

The question resonates because it touches something deeper than nostalgia. It speaks to a growing sense that the institutions that once gave shape to Australian life are no longer fit for purpose, leaving voters feeling isolated and insecure.

For much of our history, churches, trade unions, political parties, sporting clubs, and community organisations did more than perform civic functions. They connected individuals to a wider story. They gave people a place to belong and people with whom to share community. Today, many of those institutions are in decline. Religious affiliation has fallen sharply, union membership has contracted dramatically, and political parties increasingly rely on professional campaign structures rather than mass civic participation.

This matters because institutional decline is never merely organisational. It is social, psychological, and spiritual.

Émile Durkheim, the French sociologist, described anomie as the condition that emerges when shared norms weaken and people lose the social frameworks that once helped them make sense of their lives. His insight remains strikingly relevant. When institutions no longer provide stability, people do not simply become more individualistic. They often become more anxious.

Rapid social and cultural change can produce a reaction among those who feel that the values, symbols, and identities that once anchored them have been displaced. This is not just warm nostalgia. It is the disorientation of people who feel that the country they understood has moved faster than they can process. Then it is fear, followed by grief.

Michael Hogg’s uncertainty-identity theory sharpens the political point. The British social psychologist posited that when people become uncertain about who they are, where they belong, or whether they matter, they are drawn to groups that offer clear identity, strong boundaries, and moral certainty. In unsettled times, ambiguity becomes exhausting. Certainty becomes attractive.

That is the context in which Australia’s politics is now playing out.

Economic pressure, housing insecurity, technological disruption, cultural change, and declining institutional trust are not separate phenomena. They compound one another. They create a public mood in which many Australians feel not only dissatisfied, but frightened, anxious, and unstable.

This emotional milieu matters politically.

People rarely respond to prolonged uncertainty by seeking more complexity. They look for clarity. They look for someone who can name their anxiety and give it shape. They look for a community that says, “You are not imagining this. You are not alone.“

This helps explain the rise of One Nation.

Its support should not be understood simply as a rightward shift in Australian politics, nor dismissed as mere protest. One Nation’s appeal lies partly in its capacity to offer certainty in a time of disorder. It gives anxious voters a story with a clear victim, villain and hero: what has gone wrong, who is responsible, and what must be restored.

Whether one accepts that story is not the point. The point is that the story meets a real emotional and social need. And it resonates now with even more weight than it did in the 1990s, because of the void left by diminished institutions that were once able to act as a check against fragmentation. They no longer possess that ability, and hence One Nation 2.0 is not a passing fad.

As traditional institutions lose their power to provide belonging, movements that offer identity become more compelling. As civic trust weakens, parties that speak in sharp moral binaries gain strength. As people feel less secure, they become more responsive to politics that promises control.

This is why the response from Australia’s major parties matters so much.

If Labor and the Coalition interpret the rise of One Nation only through left and right, they will misread the moment. The deeper challenge is not only ideological or social; it is psychological.

I know something of the grief involved in this transition. The Church has had to reckon with its declining authority and its own failures. Political parties have had to confront the loss of mass membership and, with it, the decline in influence. Both institutions can be tempted to respond defensively, imagining that the answer is simply to recover what has been lost.

But the task is not restoration for its own sake. It is renewal.

A healthy democracy requires institutions that help people belong before they are asked to believe. It needs places where trust can be built, disagreement can be held, and citizens can be formed for something larger than themselves.

The question posed by Stefanovic therefore deserves to be taken seriously, though not simplistically. The answer is not to return to an imagined past, to reach backward for an old anchor like a childhood teddy. It is to ask why so many Australians feel unmoored in the present.

Our political future will not be shaped only by policy platforms, campaign tactics, or ideology. It will be shaped by whether Australians still feel connected to a common civic project.

That is the real force reshaping Australian politics. The common human need to belong.