The Coalition faces not a messaging challenge but a structural impossibility. Voters abandoning them won’t be satisfied by marginally tougher rhetoric.

The 31 August anti-immigration rallies were never going to shift mainstream Australian opinion on housing affordability. They didn’t need to.

Understanding what happened requires examining the political psychology of cultural threat issues and how they operate as sorting mechanisms, rather than persuasion tools in contemporary democracies.

Political psychology research identifies distinct personality traits that predict heightened  responsiveness to immigration and  law-and-order issues. Individuals scoring high on measures of authoritarianism, characterised by conventionalism, submission to authority, and aggression toward perceived outsiders, demonstrate significantly stronger reactions to cultural threat narratives.

Similarly, those with elevated social dominance orientation, a preference for group-based hierarchies, show pronounced sensitivity to messages about demographic change and cultural preservation.

These psychological dispositions are not distributed randomly across the electorate. They cluster among specific demographic cohorts and, critically, they activate most intensely when individuals perceive their group status as threatened.

This explains why immigration becomes politically salient not when objective conditions change, but when political activists or parties successfully frame demographic shifts as existential challenges to in-group dominance.

Our data reveals this pattern with striking clarity. When asked to rank factors responsible for housing unaffordability, just 34% of Australians included immigration in their top three, equal with interest rates and well behind structural economic factors. Sixty-eight per cent identified housing prices themselves, 49% pointed to stagnant wages, and 42% cited rental costs while saving for deposits.

But among One Nation supporters, 72% ranked immigration in their top three factors, with 52% placing it first. This wasn’t the effect of persuasion as these voters already possessed the psychological predispositions that make cultural threat narratives real.

The demographic breakdown of  who has moved to One Nation since 31 August illuminates the sociological dynamics at play. One Nation’s doubled support drew almost entirely from Gen X and younger Baby Boomers without university degrees in periurban, regional and rural areas, precisely the Australians least affected by urban housing markets and least likely to live alongside recent migrants.

Geography and where you live matters enormously. Political scientists have long documented that abstract threats resonate more powerfully than direct, first-hand experience.

The renters competing for properties in diverse inner suburbs understand housing scarcity as a product of investment structures and supply constraints. Those in regional centres, removed from both more acute urban housing pressure and multicultural daily life, prove more receptive to  simplified causal narratives linking immigration to unaffordability.

The generational patterns underscore this sorting effect. Baby Boomers were three times more likely than Gen Z to rank immigration as the primary housing factor (24% versus 9%). Home owners outright were more than twice as likely as renters to blame migration (24% versus 11%). Those without Year 12 education were twice as likely as university graduates (25% versus 12%) and all of these trends are more profound the further we move away from our large cities.

These aren’t random variations. They reflect the systematic relationship between social location, threat perception and political tribe formation. Those most insulated from housing unaffordability, and most removed from diverse communities, demonstrate the strongest attachment to immigration-focused explanations.

This creates a peculiar electoral dynamic. Cultural threat issues don’t build broad coalitions; they intensify commitment among those already predisposed while alienating others. For the Coalition, this presents a structural and existential dilemma.

When immigration becomes politically salient, voters with high authoritarianism and social dominance orientation demand increasingly hard line positions. These psychological traits predict not just initial attitudes, but escalating demands for conformity to in-group positions. Satisfying these voters requires ever-stronger signals of cultural conservatism, precisely the positions that alienate the urban, educated and economically liberal constituencies the Coalition needs for majority government.

Coalition voter data demonstrates this tension. While 46% included immigration in their top three housing factors, only 26% ranked it first. This suggests a Coalition electorate divided not just by opinion, but by fundamental psychological orientation.

The minority who prioritises immigration possess the trait profile that makes One Nation’s uncompromising positioning psychologically satisfying. The majority who focus on economic structures, planning systems and investment tax settings operate from different motivational foundations entirely, and more aligned with the views of the moderate wing of the Coalition.

This explains why One Nation’s support doubled by drawing from Coalition voters, rather than building across the political spectrum. Cultural threat messaging doesn’t persuade centrist or progressive voters, it sorts conservative-leaning voters by psychological profile. Those high in authoritarianism migrate toward parties offering clearer in-group, out-group distinctions. Those lower in these traits, even if centre-right on economics, find such positioning alienating.

In 2025, politics works like supporting a football team – you adopt your side’s whole playbook, not just pick and choose issues. Labor voters aren’t just unconvinced that immigration causes housing problems. They’re immune to the entire “cultural threat” argument. These messages don’t land because Labor voters see the world fundamentally differently.

Only 23% of Labor voters included immigration in their top three factors, with a mere 8% ranking it first. But here’s the crucial point: even those Labor voters who do worry about immigration aren’t switching their vote over it.

These voters possess psychological profiles characterised by lower authoritarianism, higher openness to experience and greater comfort with demographic change. They live disproportionately in diverse suburbs where daily experience contradicts abstract threat narratives. When immigration does concern them, it’s weighed against other priorities — healthcare, education, workplace rights — that keep them in Labor’s column. The issue simply doesn’t have the gravitational pull to overcome their broader political identity.

This tribal sorting transforms immigration from a competitive electoral issue into a right-wing realignment mechanism. Labor strategists understand that voters susceptible to immigration messaging are not plausible Labor supporters anyway.

When these issues dominate debate, the risk isn’t losing Labor-leaning voters, it’s watching the Coalition fracture between those demanding cultural purity and those prioritising economic management and urban electoral success.

The Coalition faces not a messaging challenge but a structural impossibility. Voters abandoning them for One Nation won’t be satisfied by marginally tougher rhetoric; their psychological profiles demand uncompromising positions that alienate the urban moderates required for government formation.

Meanwhile, Labor governs a coalition of voters whose personality traits, geographic location and daily experience make them fundamentally unreceptive to immigration-housing narratives.

The 31 August rallies clarified the centre-right’s impossible position: satisfy voters whose psychological traits demand uncompromising cultural conservatism, or retain urban moderates needed for government. There’s no messaging sweet spot because the divide isn’t about policy nuance, it’s about fundamentally different ways of seeing the world. One Nation’s growth is a symptom, not a solution.

Republished from Australian Financial Review, 26 October 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.