In two polls taken in the second half of August, One Nation stood five or six points ahead of the Coalition. In a third, it trailed by one. On these numbers the three parties sit within a few points of each other: Labor 26 to 29 percent, the Coalition 21 to 25 and One Nation 24 to 27.
Of course, none of this means Pauline Hanson will be prime minister after the 2028 election. One and a half years is an eternity in politics, polls are snapshots, and preferential voting could lead to very different parliamentary majorities.
But it is revealing that Labor and the Coalition currently attract only around half the popular vote between them. For a bit of perspective, their combined share was 66 percent at the 2025 election and almost 88 percent in 1977.
Across the Tasman, the picture is similar. Recent polls put National and Labour together on around 60 percent ahead of the 7 November election. They won 65 percent in 2023, just over 80 in 1978 and still topped 80 in 2005 and 2017, long after proportional representation arrived.
There are some obvious explanations for the public’s ongoing estrangement from the formerly dominant parties: frustration with the cost of living, concerns over immigration and a general distrust of government. In Australia, One Nation has become the voice of this discontent. In New Zealand, this role falls to several smaller parties ion both the left and the right.
But as we move into a much more fragmented political world, in which the traditional broad-church parties of the centre-left and the centre-right become smaller, it is worth reflecting. It is not just the political party scene that is changing but entire societies and their structures. This phenomenon is happening across very different countries, regardless of their electoral systems and their individual histories.
As someone who grew up in one country (Germany) and has lived in three others (Britain, Australia and New Zealand), I have witnessed these changes in all four. The parallels between them are remarkable.
You may have never heard of Gelsenkirchen, a city in the middle of Germany’s Ruhr Area. It is where my mother’s family is from, where my paternal grandfather ran a pub, where both my parents worked and where I was born. If you are a football fan, you may have heard of FC Schalke 04, which is the pride of the city (sometimes). I spent a semester break from my economics studies as an intern at the club. In administration, of course, because I am a lousy footballer.
By the time I was born, in 1975, the whole Ruhr region could look back on a century of industrial rise and the onset of decline. Socialists, Communists and Social Democrats had shaped it, as had Catholic workers and their associations. The pits and steelworks provided jobs, and around the jobs grew communities, identities and whole political worlds.
If you look at old electoral maps, these worlds had colours. Some districts were red, meaning Social Democratic. Others were black, the traditional colour of the conservative Christian Democrats. Religion, occupation, family and suburb could tell you a great deal about how someone would vote. And for a vast majority in the Ruhr, that was for the left.
Not all of Germany was like that, of course. If you went to Bavaria, you would have found similarly settled social structures, but in reverse. There, the centre-right Christian Social Union (CSU) did the integrating work of the Ruhr’s Social Democrats, the SPD.
There is a sociological term for such political worlds: milieu. It means more than a group of people with similar opinions. A milieu describes the complete network around a person’s life: church or union, newspaper, youth group, sports club, welfare society, workplace, pub and, yes, political party affiliations and sympathies.
You could belong to such a milieu without being a member of a party, let alone attending party rallies. But you still knew who ‘your people’ were and you were one of them.
The parties grew out of these worlds as much as they shaped them. To mention just one example, in another Ruhr city, Dortmund, a Catholic machine fitter named Johannes Gronowski helped establish a Volksbüro, a people’s office, in 1895. It advised workers on insurance, employment, schools, taxes and military service. Around such practical help formed the Catholic associations that sustained the Zentrumspartei (Centre Party), one of the roots of the postwar CDU.
The socialist side had its own network. Unions, elected workplace councils, party branches, city government and workers’ leisure clubs all overlapped. It meant that people were part of networks at the pit, in the trade union, in local politics and at the football club. The result was a system with a lot of informal information-sharing and decision-making.
A particularly good example of how this worked in practice, is the case of Gerhard Rehberg, a Gelsenkirchen celebrity. Rehberg arrived in the Ruhr at sixteen and trained and worked as a miner until 1992. Of course, he joined the miners’ union, became a youth representative, chaired his local SPD branch, sat on Gelsenkirchen council and served twenty-five years as one of the city’s honorary mayors. From 1994 to 2007, he was also chairman of FC Schalke 04.
The remarkable thing about Rehberg’s career was not that he held all these different offices over his career but that there was no sharp border between them. Schalke’s own club history openly records how Rehberg’s political connections helped secure a North Rhine-Westphalian guarantee when they wanted to build a new stadium.
From the outside, especially from the vantage point of today’s more fractured society, all this informal closeness may look suspicious. And sometimes, it clearly was. The world of the old Rehbergs was cosy, closed and occasionally self-serving. But that was the corollary of a world in which the same people lived across multiple institutions within the same milieu.
When I think back to my youth, it was a settled and stable political world. The SPD governed my state of North Rhine-Westphalia, often with absolute majorities, and dominated the cities of the Ruhr. It did not need spelling out that anyone seeking a career in the city would find a party card useful. And to guess the next mayor, you did not need to look at the opposition. You just watched who was rising inside the SPD. Yes, it was a democracy, but a democracy with few surprises. Or at least not in its elections.
The SPD was not just a political party offering voters some policy packages every four years. No, for many people it was some kind of secular spiritual force. It had more to do with family history, class and (sub-)regional identity. The Christian Democrats performed much the same function in the Catholic world.
This old world has changed beyond recognition. At Gelsenkirchen’s 2025 council election, the SPD received 30.36 percent and the Alternative for Germany, the AfD, 29.92. The party that once ran the city finished just about 400 votes ahead of a protest party founded as recently as 2013.
The Ruhr story is unusually vivid, but it is not unique. Look at Britain, and you will find much the same. The Labour Party also grew from unions, co-operatives and local branches like the SPD. The Conservatives had their associations, clubs and youth wings, just like the CDU.
Australia’s story is tied to that British history, with Labor’s branch and union networks, the Liberals’ associations and the Country Party’s rural roots. The Coalition itself is a durable reconciliation of city business and the farm.
The only thing that is quite different about Australia, which keeps amusing me as a German, is the Catholic connection. Whereas in Germany, Catholicism is traditionally tied to the right of politics, in Australia it more often ran towards Labor. That has much to do with Irish migrants rebelling against a Protestant establishment, leading them towards the left of politics.
In all these countries, there were certainly some real divisions between left and right: on property rights, wages and labour-market regulation and the overall reach of the state. Yet, rival parties on both the left and the right performed the same social task. They integrated people into large coalitions and, in doing so, taught them to live with people they did not entirely agree with.
But over time, these large-tent coalitions crumbled. There were many reasons for that, including the closure of previously important, employment-providing industries such as mining and manufacturing. The decline of organised religion contributed as well.
If you are a liberal, you may welcome this as a strengthening of individualism and personal autonomy. People should not inherit their politics with their baptism, postcode or father’s job. Still, the old loyalties had created social stability, which did not get replenished as they disappeared.
However, it was not just that social milieus changed. The political parties themselves underwent a transformation, too.
As the parties’ old social structures crumbled around them, their leaders needed to adapt. With fewer members and volunteers available, the parties became more streamlined organisations. That meant professional staff, polling and often more central control where once upon a time local branches had played a greater role. Sure, this would have turned the parties into better campaign machines, but as social institutions they were thinner than before.
The parties of yesteryear asked their members to spend time together at branch meetings, on committees and out knocking on doors. They also expected loyalty even when leaders or policies were uninspiring. In return, they offered something deeply emotional: a sense of belonging, almost like a secular church.
The new parties are different. They often more closely resemble service providers than social tribes. They study what their customers (i.e. voters) want, then adjust their products and compete for them in elections.
Of course, the parties of the past provided some services, too. But when they did so, these services came bundled with a longer-lasting sense of belonging which today’s more transactional parties rarely offer.
But it was not just that these old sentiments vanished with these changes. Alongside them, an entire information system disappeared as well.
As an economist, I appreciate Friedrich Hayek’s insight that knowledge is usually dispersed and cannot be centralised. We usually think of this phenomenon in the context of markets and how they coordinate consumers, producers and scarcities. As Hayek argued, prices perform the role of conveying complex, distributed information.
In a way, the old mass party was the nearest thing politics has had to such an information-gathering mechanism. It was not as elegant as the market with its price signal, but an information system nonetheless that allowed dispersed information to be brought together.
This political information mechanism worked through people like Rehberg, from the coalface (in his case quite literally) to the cabinet table. When there were problems at work, there would be a union official who knew about them. When a family ran into problems with the council, they probably knew someone at the local party branch. And all these instances would be channelled through people like Rehberg.
There was a degree of informality about the system. It did not require anyone to make submissions to a parliament or a minister. But the information reached them nonetheless – often in the form of an early warning system to sort out issues before they caused greater trouble.
Perhaps that was one of the best features of the traditional milieu-based political system. It ensured that before anything even reached cabinet, it had usually survived arguments inside a union, a church organisation, a local branch and a party conference. A broad party had to square factory workers with consumers, farmers with exporters, churchgoers with those who cared only about wages. The bargains achieved could be clumsy. But such grounding of political decision-making created lasting settlements.
Compare this old world to how politics happens nowadays. In the absence of deep social networks, parties are resorting to focus groups and intensive polling. And sure, this way you can find out if a majority of voters like a new policy. But such measuring cannot tell you how this will play out in individual communities, how to bring sceptics along or how to give it broader appeal.
As parties became more professional and more like service providers, politicians also changed. Today’s MPs often have a more formal education than their predecessors. They are also more polished when it comes to engagement with the media. Indeed, many of them would have spent their entire lives inside education and politics. But the trade-off is fewer deep reaches into communities and associations that previous generations of politicians had.
We can see these developments in the composition of parliaments in Western democracies. For example, among British MPs, manual backgrounds fell from almost 16 percent in 1979 to 3 percent in 2015, while the proportion of professional politicians and organisers rose from 3 to 17 percent. In New Zealand between 1996 and 2020, lawyers rose from 8 to 19 percent of MPs, while farmers fell from 13 to 3 and teachers from 17 to 8 percent.
All these changes have consequences for practical policy-making. A party deeply rooted in social and regional structures will make different choices than a party that has replaced them with opinion polling or, worse, pure ideology.
To see how this can play out in practice, consider the case of New Zealand’s ban on new offshore oil and gas exploration permits. It was a policy introduced under Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in April 2018, when she had been in office for half a year.
Ardern wanted to send a signal to the country and the world that her Government was serious about tackling climate change. At the same time, she might have thought that it was a rather symbolic announcement. After all, this was about future permits, not about the existing oil and gas fields. In short, Ardern could expect an immediate political reward for her announcement, and the consequences would take years to materialise.
As it turned out, there was no preparation done for this policy decision. The regulatory impact assessment, which is meant to test the policy’s costs and alternatives, followed nearly four months later. When it finally arrived, it considered no alternatives. And why would it? After all, the decision had already been made, and of course neither the public nor the industry was consulted.
The longer-term consequences of this policy were severe. When Ardern made the announcement, New Zealand’s fields were already ageing and offshore exploration had slowed. The formal stop then made the problem harder to solve. Even though Parliament repealed the ban in 2025, the industry has taken a massive hit from Ardern’s decision. Any potential investor will now think twice about engaging in exploration since there is always a chance a future government might switch off the industry once again.
Would a more traditional Labour party have made a similar decision to Ardern’s? To ask the question almost means to answer it.
Practically all of New Zealand’s oil and gas comes out of Taranaki, and the province’s towns live off it. A Labour party still rooted in those workplaces, in local government, in environmental groups and in the industry itself would have informed the thinking in Labour’s headquarters. It would have almost certainly provided a reality check on the Prime Minister’s wish to send a virtue signal out to the world. Instead, New Zealand got a political decision, most likely because it polled well enough.
I do not want to romanticise the old party-political order. But it is worth saying that, in today’s politics, nothing has completely taken the place vacated by the old broad-church parties. Yes, we now have multiple campaign groups, online communities, independent candidates and new parties. And many of them do one or two things well.
But most of the newcomers perform only part of the old party’s work because they are specialised. An environmental group does not need to reconcile cutting emissions with keeping the lights on. An online community can dissolve when attention moves elsewhere. And populist parties can afford to focus on a few hot-button issues without developing a complete political platform.
That is what happens when politics splinters into niche service providers.
I remain torn about the old order because I am a liberal individualist. I value the freedom to assemble my own identity rather than receive one fully formed. I do not want to live in a Gelsenkirchen of my youth where one party runs city hall, the workplace and the football club. And I do not think anybody’s politics should simply follow from their regional, religious or social background.
At the same time, I feel it is only fair to appreciate what the old milieu provided: not just a fuzzy sense of belonging, but a more stable form of government, ways of gathering dispersed political information and perhaps also longer-lasting political settlements.
Beyond that, it is worth understanding that, as things stand, there is no single institution on the horizon which would in any form replace the social functions of the old milieus. They are obviously not coming back, but nothing else will perform their roles.
Yet, I wonder whether, even in today’s fragmented, atomised and increasingly online version of society, there could be ways in which at least some of the old functions of political milieus could still be performed: not least the ability to understand other perspectives, respect different opinions and find compromise. A free society needs all of these, especially since it cannot prescribe them.
The era of the big, broad-church and identity-defining parties is over. As for myself, at least my adherence to FC Schalke 04 remains, despite everything. Unlike former party loyalists, Schalke supporters do not shop around for another club after a bad season, which is just as well in our case. Parties cannot demand that sort of faith.
To read the article on the Quadrant website, click here.