Has the March of the Left Sparked an Australian Conservative Backlash?

What is driving Australia’s dramatic shift towards the conservative-leaning One Nation?Author Kevin Donnelly believes decades of cultural change have left many Australians feeling disconnected from traditional values, creating a “groundswell of anxiety” that is now being reflected at the ballot box.At the 2025 federal election, One Nation drew just 6.4 percent of the vote.The most recent Roy Morgan poll show 24 percent of respondents now intend to vote for One Nation, higher than the centre-right Coalition (23.5 percent) and 3.5 percentage points shy of the Labor Party’s 27.5 percent.Donnelly, the author of “Wake Up To Woke: Why Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party Is So Popular,” points to a global shift that has largely occurred in the United States and Europe, until now.The title of Kevin Donnelly’s latest book, Wake Up To Woke: Why Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party Is So Popular. Screenshot“People are fed up with all this politically correct woke ideology, whether it’s gender fluidity, whether it’s climate alarmism, whether it’s having three flags instead of one, whether it’s undermining Western culture,” he told The Epoch Times.Donnelly characterised the progressive influence as “cultural Marxism,” a phenomenon that has been occurring over the past 40 to 50 years.He says that after the communist revolution failed to gain support in prosperous Western democracies, Marxist thinkers shifted their attention from economic revolution to cultural change.