Something has changed in Australian politics, and we should stop pretending otherwise.
One Nation's result in South Australia was not a quirky state result, not a temporary protest flutter, and not something that can be safely dismissed because our electoral system softened the final seat outcome. A line has been crossed. A right-populist force has surged out of the fringe and into mass electoral relevance. Once that happens, the old assumptions no longer hold.
This was predictable.
It was predictable because falling living standards, rising insecurity, public anger, and institutional frustration do not simply sit there. They are converted into political momentum by whoever is prepared to speak to them most sharply. If our side does not offer a forceful answer to a system that is plainly failing too many people, then that anger will keep flowing elsewhere. Not because the populists are right, but because they sound like they are willing to break something.
That is the danger now.
The danger is not only that authoritarian populists are growing. It is that our side of politics remains too scattered, too thinly organised, and too willing to confuse isolated presence with real capacity. I use ‘progressive’ for ‘our side’ here in the broad sense: people committed to reform, pluralism, democracy, and a fairer society, whether they think of themselves as progressives, social democrats, or small-l liberals. We have independents, fragments, local efforts, suppressed currents inside larger organisations, and many good people working hard in good faith. But a loose collection of worthwhile people is not the same thing as a force equal to the moment.
History is not especially kind to fragmented progressive & pluralist politics when this kind of pressure builds. Sometimes those forces are wiped out outright. Sometimes they survive only in diminished or marginal form. Sometimes they stagger on by dissolving into broader blocs and losing the distinctiveness that made them useful in the first place. The pattern is clear enough: if you do not build something durable before the terrain hardens further, the choices available later are usually worse.
That is why this moment matters.
We are not watching an interesting development from the sidelines. We are living through the opening phase of a political realignment. South Australia should be understood as a warning, not an exception, and it should not reassure us if other states produce less dramatic results in the short term. Victoria may underrepresent the surge because it is less favourable terrain for One Nation, and that could encourage exactly the wrong lesson: that South Australia was an outlier rather than a warning. New South Wales may prove a truer reflection of what is coming, but by then it may be just five months from the federal election. If it takes until then for people to recognise and act on what has already become undeniable, there will be too little time left to build the united response this moment requires.
But there is still time to act.
If this moment is to be met properly, it will not be enough to simply denounce the populists and hope for the best. What is needed is a more serious answer: a united progressive force that is willing to reform a failing system, speak plainly about who it is failing and why, and do so in language strong enough to cut through public anger without surrendering to the cruelty and nihilism of the populist right.
So this is the moment to step up.
This is the moment to stop treating unity as an optional future discussion.
This is the moment to stop treating fragmentation as politically neutral.
This is the moment to stop assuming that one more independent, one more local effort, or one more isolated campaign will somehow add up on its own to a force capable of meeting what is coming.
If you are a member, now is the time to act like it matters.
Talk to your friends.
Meet with people locally.
Engage with local groups.
Reach out to the thoughtful people around you who know the current arrangement is not enough.
Make the case for unity.
Petition the MPs and public figures in this space who still have choices left to make.
Press the argument, respectfully but firmly, that the progressive movement cannot afford to remain divided and vulnerable.
This does not mean chasing the populists into their own destructive territory. It means doing something harder and more serious: building a united force of progressives, social democrats, and small-l liberals that is willing to shake up a failing system without surrendering to cruelty, scapegoating, or nihilism. It means speaking plainly about power, failure, reform, and material conditions. It means being equal to people’s anger without becoming captive to its worst impulses.
There is still time to build that kind of force.
But not unlimited time, and not time to waste.
The old comfort — that things will muddle through, that good people will naturally find one another, that the centre will somehow hold by inertia, that the existing fragments will somehow add up to something durable — is running out. If this political space is going to meet the years ahead with any seriousness, it will need more than isolated virtue. It will need organisation. It will need courage. It will need a shared reform agenda. And it will need people willing to recognise that the time for half-measures has passed.
The populist surge is here. The risk is real. The response must begin now.