One Nation's rise is not an isolated protest vote: it is a warning about the direction of Australian democracy.

The politics of permanent grievance

The victory of Pauline Hanson's One Nation in the Division of Farrer should concern every Australian who still believes democracy is more than grievance dressed up as patriotism.

Two years before the next federal election is a decade in Australian politics. Political fortunes rise and collapse with astonishing speed. By the next campaign, the global movement orbiting Donald Trump may already be entering its twilight.

Trump himself will eventually disappear from political life; the movement he unleashed will not. The danger is not one man, but the normalisation of a style of politics built upon permanent anger, cultural resentment, conspiratorial thinking, and the corrosion of trust in democratic institutions.

Australia has never been immune from these forces. We flatter ourselves when we pretend otherwise.

First Nations peoples in the crosshairs

For First Nations peoples, this development carries particular danger. Across the world, far-right populism always seeks an enemy to define itself against. Sometimes that enemy is migrants. Sometimes academics. Sometimes journalists.

But First Nations peoples are especially vulnerable because our very existence challenges the mythologies upon which nationalist movements often depend. The expression of culture becomes 'division'. Historical fact becomes 'unfair guilt'. Calls for justice are reframed as 'special treatment'.

The rise of One Nation in regional Australia, or elsewhere, is not simply a protest vote about cost-of-living pressures or dissatisfaction with the major parties, though those realities are undeniably part of the story. It also reflects a deeper cultural anxiety being deliberately cultivated by political actors who profit from fear.

Australia's true enemies tell Australians that they are losing their country, while offering no meaningful economic or social program capable of restoring dignity to communities doing it tough. If they ever took government, they would drive this nation into a recession from which we may never recover.

The great deception of modern populism

This is the great deception of modern populism: it speaks the language of ordinary people while protecting the very systems that make ordinary life harder.

For First Nations Australians, the implications are profound. Hard-won progress toward power-sharing, treaty discussions—and truth and justice—can easily be frozen or reversed in a political climate increasingly hostile to nuance and historical honesty.

Indigenous communities already facing entrenched inequality may once again become rhetorical punching bags in a culture war imported from overseas.

And yet this moment is not hopeless.

Australians are not Americans. Our democratic traditions, voting system, and political culture remain fundamentally different. Most Australians still possess a quiet decency that rejects extremism when it eventually reveals its true face.

We saw glimpses of that spirit when overt displays of neo-Nazi ideology were met with widespread public disgust. We saw it when communities rallied against hatred rather than surrendering to it.

Decency without vigilance is not enough

But decency without vigilance is not enough. The lesson of history is that democratic societies rarely collapse all at once. They erode gradually through cynicism, exhaustion, and the normalisation of conduct once considered unacceptable.

The language becomes harsher. Institutions become weaker. Public trust dissolves. Eventually, people stop believing anything can improve, and begin embracing those who promise strength through division.

That is why the result in Farrer matters beyond one electorate. It is not merely about one seat in Parliament. It is a warning light on the dashboard of Australian democracy.

For First Nations peoples, the stakes are even higher. When nationalism hardens into resentment politics, Indigenous peoples are often among the first to feel its effects. Not because we threaten Australia, but because acknowledging our history requires moral courage from the nation itself.

A country worth defending

The future of Australia will not be secured by those who endlessly mine grievance, nor by imported slogans from foreign culture wars. It will be secured by Australians willing to defend democratic institutions, historical truth, social cohesion, and the principle that dignity belongs to all people equally.

This is a worrying time for anyone who still values peace, prosperity, and freedom.

But it is also a time that demands courage.

Jesse J. Fleay is a Boorloo-born Noongar writer and academic living in Naarm. He lectures in Politics and International Relations at Monash University. Views are his own.