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A decade after Brexit and Donald Trump’s first election victory, Australia is having its own populist moment. While the economy overall has largely sailed unscathed through a turbulent 21st century, compounding crises have left a deep scar on a growing number of households.

And instead of being powered by disgruntled younger folk thirsty for change, the driving force has been a generation that has mostly sailed quietly through the recent decades of compounding crises.

Stereotypically disengaged from politics and reluctant to make a scene, generation X are now mostly in their 50s and are finally making themselves heard.

And they are not happy.

One Nation’s ascent over the past year is nothing short of extraordinary. The party scored 6.4% of the primary vote at the May 2025 election. By October the party’s primary vote had notionally doubled to 13%, according to the Essential poll.

One Nation’s popularity has since doubled again to now sit at 28% – only one point behind Labor.

The grievances that have driven voters towards One Nation have coalesced among people in their 50s, where support peaks at 43% among Gen Xers, according to polling by Redbridge.

Experts refer to Gen X as the sandwich generation, having to provide for older parents and younger children. They face a swathe of economic challenges including far lower home ownership, watching the rich get richer as they struggle with low wages growth that has many feeling left behind.

It’s this environment, the unique issues stretching people in their 40s and 50s, which experts say could be driving Gen Xers towards what once were the fringes of politics.

‘It’s 100% the economy’

Wesley Jasper doesn’t need to think about it. Ask him why he intends to vote for One Nation, he says “the economy”.

“100% the economy,” he says. “Where does my money go in taxes, and how does that benefit me?

“And living standards. What can we do for people like me who’ve worked hard my whole life? Let’s raise the living standards a bit, shall we, or let’s improve standards for people who choose to go out and do the right thing.”

Jasper had a long career in the military and now works for a government organisation. He and his partner wanted to bring their kids up in Canberra; they “love everything about it” but have just moved back to Ballarat because it’s more affordable.

“The wife and I, [in the] last 10, 15 years or so, we both came out of previous relationships,” he says. “We were living and working in Canberra, so we were trying to pay high rent and that sort of stuff. We both kind of lost everything.

“So we scraped, and we saved, and we came back to Ballarat because financially it made sense, so we are new mortgage holders.”

Jasper describes himself as “longtime listener, first-time caller” to One Nation. He had always been a swinging voter – but this year, he signed up to be a member of the party.

“At the end of the day, I’ve worked for 35 years, and I’m kind of feeling like I’m not getting value for money out of what I’ve done,” he says.

“I’ve really got not much to show. And that hurts because I know there are people who have been able to retire. And I’m still probably 10 or 15 years away.”

The orange tsunami

Academic studies have found a powerful causal link between growing economic pessimism and Australia’s extraordinary shift away from major parties and towards independent – and now populist – alternatives.

Kos Samaras, Redbridge’s director of strategy and analytics, said before the latest surge in support, the typical One Nation voter was in the 50s and 60s, living in a home they were close to paying off. They were worried about deteriorating services and a community in decline.

“Lots of status anxiety, but financially not doing too bad,” Samaras says.

The Redbridge polling suggests One Nation’s overall primary vote is now at 31%, against Labor’s 28%.

The new supporters swelling One Nation’s base are a much broader constituency, he says. This group are younger, in their 40s and 50s, and are renting in the outer suburbs or in the regions.

Not owning a home in your 50s is a source of deep despondency, Samaras says. “Or if they have a mortgage, they have borrowed at the edge of their capacities when rates were low.”

Analysis of ABS data shows a major rise in renting among those aged between their mid-40s and mid-50s: from 12% to 21% over the nearly three decades.

The meat in the sandwich

Terry Rawnsley, an urban economist at KPMG, says Gen X are the classic “sandwich generation”, squeezed between older boomer parents in their 70s and 80s and kids who are still at home and facing their own generational challenges.

But Rawnsley says today’s crop of Australians aged between their late 40s and early 60s are contending with a set of economic challenges that are particular to them.

He also points to the fact that home ownership rates among Gen X are much lower than their parents at this age, while “the lucky ones who do own their own home have much bigger debt than their parents would have had, and are operating in a more uncertain economic environment”.

The ABS data confirms that the share of people aged 45-54 years who own their home outright has dropped dramatically since the late 1990s.

In 1998, more than 40% of Australians aged 45-54 owned their own home outright. By 2020, only 15% lived in a home they owned mortgage-free.

Ali Carter, 49, and her partner live in Echuca. She’s studying social work and is on the disability support pension; he works as a gardener and factory worker.

“The bank owns the house,” she says. “It’s not too bad, compared to a lot of people.”

The price of petrol has gone up, their weekly shop has more than doubled, and Carter says, even if her husband works overtime, they might only get an extra $50 a week.

“You’re not going to get ahead, which is ridiculous,” she says.

Carter says she never really understood or cared about politics – she wouldn’t think about her vote that much.

But during Covid she started listening to alternative voices outside mainstream media, and in the past 12 months her interest in politics has grown.

Carter says she supports One Nation because she wants to see Australia “go back to what it was”, where more products were made here and there was less foreign ownership.

She worries about the lack of jobs in regional areas, the cost of living and public transport – Echuca is not as connected to Melbourne as other regional cities.

“I can relate to One Nation,” she says.

“Pauline will go out into the community and talk to them. She doesn’t talk down to you. She remembers she used to own a fish and chip shop – she doesn’t forget her roots.”

Rich get richer

Beth Webster, an economics professor at the University of Melbourne, says economic disaffection is rooted in soaring cost of living.

Rising interest rates, the US-Iran war on Iran and the associated fuel shock and now talk of falling house prices in the wake of the budget’s tax changes have helped push consumer confidence to around its lowest on record.

“It is certainly the case that sections of society are hurting and have been for a while,” Webster says. “And obviously the rise in the price of oil that has really brought it out.”

This sense of grievance is further fuelled by a growing divide between the rich and poor.

Webster’s analysis of ABS data shows that wages for the highest paid workers are growing at more than twice the pace of those earning the least.

After adjusting for inflation, median hourly wages for the top 10% of employees by income climbed by 25% between 2014 and 2025, or about 2% a year.

At the other end of the distribution, median hourly wages for workers in the bottom 10% have lifted by just 10% over the same timeframe – about 0.8% a year.

Brent Larkham was a bit of a “lefty” when he was younger, he says. Born in 1970 and growing up in the 80s, he was concerned about nuclear energy and weapons; he even sometimes played at environmental benefits, raising money to close the hole in the ozone layer.

“When I was a kid, I wanted to save the planet and save the whales and save everything,” he said.

Then he went through a period of apathy. A decade ago politics “was something done by other people. You didn’t concern yourself too much with it”.

But like a lot of gen x - born between 1965 and 1980 – he’s since changed his mind. These days the Tamworth small business owner and country musician wants a different kind of change.

About four years ago he started thinking about One Nation. At the last election he stood for the electorate of New England, against the former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce – now a member of One Nation himself, but at that time a long-term National MP.

“We still had some sort of belief in in the system. It was a time when the party would make their promises to get in, and they were held accountable to those promises, and if they didn’t fulfill their promises, they would promptly moved out. I think the difference between that and now is that people kind of expect them just to lie,” Larkham said.

“[One party says] ‘I’ll give you 20 bucks’ and the other party will say ‘I’ll give you 30’, and people are going, ‘Oh, I’ll take the 30’.

“Integrity is lost.”

He said many in his generation had seen politics switch between the two parties of government without any change. “I think people are going, well, they’re just passing the ball between each other, and meanwhile, you go to the petrol pump, or you go to the supermarket, and things are getting tough. And if you own a small business, well, look out, it’s getting really tough,” he said.

“It just doesn’t seem to make sense”.

He’s even now a proponent of nuclear power, opposing the massive planned build out of renewables generation in the New England area.

If his younger self could see him now “I’d probably say, ‘what would you know, you old bastard?’ You just want to blow us all up, you know,” he said.

Now, he says, he’s older and wiser.

Identifying solutions

Were a vote to be held tomorrow, the polls suggest the Liberals and National parties would suffer a catastrophic collapse.

But Anthony Albanese is aware that One Nation is also beginning to peel voters off Labor as part of the drift away from major parties.

“Quite clearly right around the world there’s some frustration with the system and whether the system is working for people and that’s something that we’re very conscious of,” the prime minister told journalists this week.

But hitting back at Pauline Hanson, Albanese said it’s “not enough to identify an issue”.

“What you’ve got to do is identify a solution. And when people make their assessment of voting … they’ll determine it based upon who is in a position to actually provide solutions.”

Solutions for what ails the disaffected Australians of generation X, however, remain in vanishingly short supply.

Additional reporting by Andrew Messenger