Surface detail

Another way to look at the South Australian election result

Most Culture cities, where they existed at all, resembled giant snowflakes, with greenery – or at least countryside, in whatever colour or form – penetrating almost to the heart of the conurbation. —Ian M. Banks

And so it begins. The One Nation surge foretold in polls since late 2025 has moved from speculation to reality in South Australia—and there’s little reason to think it will stop there. The same forces look set to reshape results in other states and even at the federal level, bringing to a head shifts that have been building for years.

A small body-colour drawing by an unknown artist of the interior of a London coffeehouse, ca. 1705. Everything about this oozes warmth and welcome from the bubbling coffee cauldron right down to the flickering candles and kind eyes of the coffee drinkers — Source.

The right‑wing conservatism and grievance politics that the Liberal–National Coalition managed to hold together from the Second World War—most recently under John Howard—is now coming apart. Numerically, this is Liberal Party fragmentation, as John Quiggin notes. Politically, it marks the Liberals’ loss of their long‑standing role as the right’s major disciplining force: the end of the “broad church”.

Beneath all that, a deeper malaise runs through the two‑party system itself. The preferences may have fallen Labor’s way on Saturday, but they would be foolish to take much comfort from it, as Antony Green notes.¹²³

---

When you look at those who Alex Fein described the other day as “One Nation- curious” they essentially converge on a fairly consistent profile: older, non‑university, regional or outer‑suburban voters who feel culturally and economically marginalised, distrust major parties, and are motivated by anti‑immigration and anti‑elite rhetoric.⁴

Fein sees this at least partly in aesthetic terms, and I think that is a really useful way to get our head around what is happening.

Aesthetics in this sense means the way power is made to look and feel—the styles, symbols, images, performances and atmospheres through which leaders, movements and institutions present themselves and try to shape people’s emotions and perceptions, from campaign logos and photo ops to rallies, memorials and media choreography, to personal style.⁵

Aesthetics analysis doesn’t replace material analysis. It’s the level where big changes in work, wealth and power first show up—as shifts in mood, image and atmosphere—and where they start to become politically usable.

To put it slightly differently, one of the most significant shifts in politics over the last forty years has been the emergence of culture—broadly understood—as a central driver of political behaviour. The oft-heard and anguished belch from liberal/progressive commentators in the United States, particularly from the 1990s, that people are “voting against their own economic interests” was the last cry of those whose understanding of politics—largely formed on the left and in a particular interpretation of Marxism—was being swamped by the sort of cultural transformation that would ultimately consolidate under Donald Trump and, in Australia, John Howard and Pauline Hanson.

That this shift coincided with the rise of neoliberalism—a system that sought to define people almost entirely as economic beings—is no coincidence, and as Alex White argues, a lot of what is happening at the moment is a reaction against that neoliberal turn.

But I don’t think it is enough to see all this as merely a reaction to changes in the people’s material circumstances. It certainly is that, as White makes clear, but neoliberalism is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is an economic one and part of the reason for its stickiness is that it has been underpinned by a new understanding of how people see themselves, not just their material circumstances.

Neoliberalism doesn’t just impose a set of market-based policies. It encourages people to think of themselves not as citizens bound together by a common purpose, but as entrepreneurs of the self—individual “operatives” competing in every sphere of life: individual influencers competing on various digital platforms for, yes, material success, but also for the cultural rewards of attention. By extension, success and failure have come to be understood as personal achievements or shortcomings rather than as a collective outcome shaped by social structures.

This cultural turn normalised competition, privatised risk, and made solidarity appear inefficient or even naïve.⁶ The market was no longer just a mechanism for organising the economy—it became the organising metaphor for social life. So when we talk about reactions against neoliberalism today, we’re not only seeing resistance to economic inequality, but also to that deeper cultural shift that redefined what it means to be human within a political community.

The backlash against such a transformation is complex, and it does not align with the material categories that held together the major parties, which is why the aesthetics framework can be useful: it picks up shifts in mood, image and affect before they stabilise as party systems. In fact, it indicates that the party form itself may no longer be a useful way of organising political action.

John Howard and the aesthetics of reassurance

John Howard presented as modest, suburban, almost stubbornly unglamorous, a kind of human valium for an anxious electorate. This wasn’t incidental to his politics; it was the image he cultivated to allow his radical economic and social restructuring to proceed.

In speech after speech Howard drew on a repertoire of “middle Australia” symbols—mateship, the fair go, the suburban home, the RSL and the cricket pitch—to wrap a hard neoliberal program in a onesie of comfort and continuity. His promise that Australians would be “comfortable and relaxed” about the direction of the country captured this perfectly. The message was: the world may be changing, but you don’t have to.

In aesthetic terms, Howard made himself custodian of a familiar national mythology. He stood at the centre of a stage populated by the imagined white, middle‑class, hard‑working Australian family. In that setting, market reforms and social conservatism didn’t appear disruptive, they appeared as common sense. His aesthetics stabilised his ideology and made a contested program feel natural.

But this aesthetic of reassurance had limits. It depended on a relatively coherent image of “mainstream Australia”, and his image of that was always narrower than the country itself. As society diversified and precarity deepened, a growing number of people looked at the stage Howard built and could not see themselves on it. What had once felt comforting began to feel exclusionary and threatening.

Howard himself revealed the lie he had been peddling. WorkChoices was the eyes-wide-open moment for the country, where the contradictions between the harsh reality of the economic program could no longer be magicked away by the aesthetic of reassurance. And in other ways, the mask had already been ripped off. His carefully coded white nationalism was decoded by a very different sort of player, the so-called “anti-politician”, Pauline Hanson.

Hanson’s jagged little pill

If Howard’s aesthetic smoothed and reassured, Hanson’s has always been spiky and disruptive. From her first appearance in the 1990s she has embodied an awkward, unvarnished style that signals refusal rather than reassurance: bright outfits, blunt language, the sense of someone stumbling onto the set of official politics from another world.

Hanson’s enduring appeal lies in the way she performs being out of place. She makes not fitting in a badge of authenticity. For voters who feel sneered at or ignored by “Canberra” or “the elites”, her clumsiness and abrasiveness read as proof that she is one of them. Her promise is not competence but recognition: I see your anger, I share your marginality, they laugh at me too.

One Nation’s voters aren’t looking for policy coherence, any more than Trump’s are: they require a deeper validation. The party’s imagery, social media output and media appearances form a consistent mood‑board of grievance, nostalgia and defiance. When Hanson attacks immigration, multiculturalism or “woke” institutions, she is not arguing about policy settings; she is punching holes in an aesthetic order in which she and her supporters feel slighted.

In that sense, Hanson doesn’t break with the neoliberal cultural script so much as twist it. She accepts the premise that everyone is an isolated, self‑interested unit, but insists that those units—“ordinary Australians”—have been disrespected and displaced. The entrepreneur of the self becomes the victim of woke and foreign. The result is an aesthetic of rupture that in a world of careful, technocratic political management can feel like honesty.

Albanese and the aesthetics of incrementalism

Anthony Albanese’s contribution to all this is an aesthetics of incrementalism, a practice of governance in which small, negotiable steps, low emotional temperature and institutional continuity are staged as the only reasonable way to govern a fragmented polity. He seeks to make “big” or contentious projects appear risky or unrealistic—naive—while presenting gradual, technocratic adjustment as mature, normal and in the national interest.

By making technocratic tinkering the dominant governing form, his incrementalist aesthetic makes structural conflict—class, race, climate justice, Palestine—appear either impolite, “divisive” or outside responsible politics. His capture by Zionist pressure groups is indicative, part of a broader strategy in which concern about antisemitism, “community safety” and national unity are mobilised to delegitimise anti‑colonial and pro‑Palestinian organising, while preserving Labor’s thin, managerial labourism as the only legitimate option.

Incrementalism presents as calm in tone, slow in tempo and procedural in focus to stabilise an order in which market logics and security commitments (AUKUS, alliance politics, corporate influence) are presupposed, while politics is confined to negotiating marginal improvements within those parameters. This is not the same as the “calm, moderate” type of governance Fein says people are longing for. An incrementalism detached from genuine material change is inadequate. As she says, people want “a government that governs: that legislates and regulates in the public interest and stops letting only the powerful dictate terms.” And that is not what Labor is providing.

Incrementalism creates a structured absence—a drained, tepid public sphere in which passion, vision and collective aspiration are systematically aestheticised out, leaving a vacuum right-wing and far-right movements are happy to fill.

The prime minister’s warning in the wake of the South Australian election result that we “need to be vigilant” is almost a perfect example of the aesthetic I am describing. After one-and-a-half terms of government in which he has singularly failed to articulate and defend an alternative idea of the nation against a rising rightwing tide, he finally acknowledges the gap he has created is being filled with something more extreme—as many of us have been warning—and the best response he can come up with is to counsel vigilance.

This is the aesthetics of incrementalism falling flat on its face.

“Siri. Draw me a picture of a politician closing a gate after the horse has bolted.”

The aesthetics of community

One Nation’s rise is a signal that the old emotional repertoire of Australian politics has broken down. It is part of a change that indicates the Liberal Party in particular, as any sort of unifying force, is unsalvageable. There are too many contradictions in rebuilding the small‑c coalition they once represented. You cannot, for instance, square the circle of community independents with the anti‑environmental and patriarchal politics of other constituencies. The voters who walked away in the “teal wave”—and stayed away—did so because climate denial, blokey culture‑war signalling and contempt for integrity norms had made the party’s brand toxic in those affluent, socially liberal electorates that once formed its core.

Likewise, you cannot reconcile a base that wants to walk away from net zero altogether with younger, metropolitan voters for whom climate action and pluralism are now baseline expectations rather than optional extras. You cannot, in short, rebuild the “broad church” while its former congregants inhabit incompatible moral and aesthetic universes: one tuned to nostalgia, fossil fuels and hierarchy, the other to renewables, gender equality and diverse liberalism.

The rise of community independents exemplifies this.

Their campaigns built a different aesthetic of representation—community halls, kitchen‑table conversations, thousands of local volunteers in bright T‑shirts—against the macho, donor‑driven, Sky‑after‑dark version of Liberalism that had taken hold in Canberra. In visual terms alone, the contrast was stark: a politics of listening and neighbourliness—and almost exclusively led by women—versus a politics of masculine, culture‑war theatre in which Scott Morrison thought it somehow impressive we don’t shoot women protesting outside Parliament House.

Fragmentation as aesthetic disintegration

Alex Fein’s piece, based on focus groups with people from across the political spectrum, suggests a way forward.

She argues we are not, as a nation, polarised in the way commentators often suggest. Voters are actually looking for a politics of inclusion and basic decency, and when you sit with them—as she does—in focus groups across class, region and culture, what emerges is a strikingly consistent desire for security, fairness and mutual care.

Seen through this lens, the collapse of the two-party system is not just about party labels or preference flows; it is about the disintegration of a shared aesthetic order. The postwar two‑party system depended on a broadly common idea of what Australia looked and felt like, even when parties disagreed sharply about policy. That common sensibility—white, suburban, secure, forward‑looking—lost credibility and a material basis a long time ago, at least Albanese is right about that.

The nation’s irreducible diversity and the national aesthetic that flows from that has more support that the culture warriors who dominate public discourse can ever allow, but we will need much more than “vigilance” to activate it into a meaningful form of governance.

---

Highlighting this aesthetic framing is not to trivialise politics as surface. It is to recognise that surface has become one of the main sites where power is organised. Who gets seen, how they sound, what spaces they occupy, which images circulate and which are mocked—these things increasingly decide who is authorised to speak for “the people”.

If there is a way out, it will not come from retreating into technocracy (Labor) or from trying to out‑grievance the grievance merchants (LNP). It will require inventing new political aesthetics in the way Fein suggests, underpinned by genuine material change: ways of making solidarity look and feel attractive rather than naïve; ways of staging democratic disagreement that are passionate without being zero-sum; ways of representing complexity that don’t immediately read as condescension or activism.

If the major parties continue to treat the shifts that are happening as a polling problem rather than an aesthetic one, they will keep misreading the moment—and the unity that Fein suggests already exists will find no way to express itself.

---

1. I’m reminded of the old joke that goes, “What do you call the person who finishes last in their class in medical school?” “Doctor.”

2. William Bowe has some thoughts on this too.

3. I grant that it can seem ridiculous to say this. In South Australia and even at the 2025 federal election, Labor won huge seats majorities, and many supporters scoff at the idea that somehow the result is bad for Labor. There is a lot to unpack in all this, but the way I would put it for now is that a system in which the winning party governs on a primary vote of around 35% (and Labor’s primary vote actually fell in SA last Saturday), in which a far-right party with no coherent programme is now the second-largest party in a state election, and in which more than a third of voters are refusing to give their first preference to either major party, is a system undergoing deep structural transformation that we can’t ignore. Labor's win is real, and sure, supporters can crow about it. But the malaise producing this transformation is also real. The two facts—the huge Labor wins and the underlying malaise—are not in contradiction; they are the same story told from different angles.

4. On economic marginalisation, it is worth noting Quiggin’s point: “Most of these identity voters have not been ‘left behind’ in an economic sense. On the contrary, One Nation gets its strongest support (above 30 per cent) from voters over 65, who are largely insulated from the economic shocks that affect those in insecure employment. Age pensions are indexed to the higher of CPI and wages, and are much more generous than unemployment benefits. Those with superannuation benefit from strong returns to capital. The only group of old people with significant exposure to economic shocks are the minority who don’t own their own home, and have no income besides the pension.”

5. The Wikipedia entry on political aesthetics is pretty good, actually.

6. One of the key areas where “naivety” is deployed as weapon is by political operatives, now steeped in the technocratic management of neoliberal governance, who accuse activists and others of being naive to for trying to engage in transformative left-wing and/or progressive politics.