The reasons for the rise of far-right politics in Australia are often cited as financial stress, housing shortages, and frustration with the government. Yet this doesn’t explain why disillusioned voters are drifting toward the far right instead of the left. To understand this, we need to look at how far-right ideas actually connect to mainstream Australian values – not treat the far right as some separate, foreign, or imported movement.
The common assumption is that far-right politics is fundamentally opposed to democratic values, or is a kind of “sickness” in an otherwise healthy system. But Cas Mudde argued the opposite: “The radical right isn’t a rejection of mainstream values, it’s an extreme version of them.”
This means that the drift to the right has grown out of ideas already normal and accepted, just pushed further. To see this, it helps to look at the three core ingredients of far-right politics – nationalism, authoritarianism, and populism – and ask how much of each already exist in Australian life.
Nationalist language is nothing new in Australian politics. Phrases like the “national interest,” “Australian values,” and warnings about the “nation in danger” are everywhere, and people who disagree with those phrases are often branded “un-Australian.”
