There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
Hamlet, Act five, Scene two
We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror.
Measure for Measure, Act two, Scene one.
In a recent
article published in Pearls and Irritations (link
here), political strategist and pollster Kos Samaras provides an insightful
analysis of the reasons behind the rise of One Nation, and the structural
bifurcation embedded within its base. As he says
There
is an old cohort that came to Hanson on identity and a new one that came on
grievance, and they do not want the same things.
I found his
argument to be persuasive, but my aim here is to repurpose his analysis to
explore one element of an issue that I have previously articulated in a number
of contexts (link
here and link
here), namely the importance of leveraging and reforming mainstream policy frameworks
in seeking to address Indigenous disadvantage. More pointedly, I emphasise the
risks of not engaging with mainstream policy and relying solely on the fiction
that the solutions to Indigenous disadvantage can be found in greater
utilisation of Indigenous specific policy approaches and/or are solely the
domain of Indigenous interests.
The element of
this mainstream/Indigenous specific tension that I focus on here is the related
but conceptually distinct divide between remote Australia (and its remote
communities) and urban and regional Australia.
In his article
on One Nation, Samaras has this to say about the origins of the cohort of
voters that are focussed on identity. They were people who while they owned
their homes in the towns that range right across Australia’s hinterlands:
In
the narrow, cash-flow sense this voter was not poor. The mortgage was gone.
What had gone with it was a sense that the world they grew up in, and
raised families in, had gone too: not replaced, but declined.
The
paid-off home sits in a part of Australia that has been quietly stripped of
institutions, industry and services. Since 2017 around 37 per cent of the
country’s bank branches have closed, and in the space of three years more than
600 towns were left with no banking service at all. In the Riverina alone, 22
towns have lost their last bank, and Grenfell lost all four of the majors.
The
hospital tells the same story. More than 130 rural birthing units have shut
their doors, so an expectant mother now drives hours to deliver. There are
about 437 full-time-equivalent doctors per 100,000 people in the big cities and
roughly 264 in the very remote. Close to one in five remote Australians cannot
see a local GP, around 60 per cent have no specialist within reach, and life
expectancy runs up to seven years shorter than in the capitals.
And
the people are leaving. The young go first, to the capitals for work and study,
which has pushed the median age in the regions to 42 against 36 in the cities,
with only about 30 per cent of residents outside the capitals now in the prime
20-to-44 band. Whole districts are contracting: wheatbelt towns like
Northampton and Morawa shedding three and four per cent in a single year, the
old mining centres of Broken Hill, Mount Isa and Port Augusta bleeding numbers,
and in a growing list of places the deaths now outnumber the births.
Samaras
documents, in a highly revealing graph showing the level of voter support for
One Nation, that in September 2025, that support was just above 10% nationally
(essentially the Party’s original identity based cohort) and grew over the
succeeding four months to over 25% and in the subsequent four months to the
present rate of 31% support nationally. This later growth is due to the second
of Samaras cohorts, younger voters with cost-of-living grievances.
In analysing
the implications of his analysis, Samaras explains why One Nation's place based
cohort support base is so resilient:
If
the vote is anchored in a place-formed identity rather than in the world the
iPhone made, two things follow.
The
first is that it will not be bought off. A budget measure can ease a mortgage.
It cannot return a voter to a country that feels like the one they grew up in,
because that country was partly a function of being younger in a smaller, more
legible world. The grievance is real, but at root it is not fiscal, which is
why fiscal answers keep sailing past it. [I don’t explore the second factor here].
I’ve quoted the
Samaras analysis here, because it resonates strongly with and even parallels my
own analysis of the reasons Indigenous residents of remote Australia over the
past five decades have had their world upended.
If the decline
of a pre-existing institutional footprint of government and the economic
impacts of modern capitalism (or neoliberalism) is such that small towns become
economically and socially unviable, and this in turn leads to the political
earthquake of national significance we are seeing today with the rise of One
Nation, is it surprising then that the failure of successive governments to
invest in and establish these institutions in remote Indigenous communities for
the past half century would also have major, extensive and cumulative impacts
on the social and economic viability of remote communities? And is it also
surprising that the subsequent demographic shifts, which have seen an
increasing exodus from communities and influx into regional centres like
Kununurra, Halls Creek, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs, would also bring with
them the mayhem and despair of their prior world turned upside down? My point
is not that the processes of remote community displacement and the hollowing of
the local economies of regional Australia are equivalent, but rather to point
to the fact that the loss of institutional frameworks by citizens structurally
included within the Australian political settlement while earthshattering, is
nevertheless overshadowed by the ongoing impact on citizens excluded from the
Australian political settlement because they have never had access to the
benefits of the institutional frameworks most Australians take for granted.
While
colonisation and the expansion of settlement across the nation was violent, and
extremely traumatic for Indigenous societies, with the establishment of the
pastoral industry across the northern savannahs, missions in the most
geographically remote areas, and various Aboriginal reserves in desert and
other non-pastoral areas, a social and economic equilibrium was established
that created widespread stability within remote communities. It was an
equilibrium built on access to rations, seasonal employment on pastoral
stations for both men and women, and in many respects was an accommodation
which averted the ongoing violence and economic cost for both sides of
continuing frontier violence, but also had embedded within it mutual
misunderstanding of what the accommodation involved and where it might lead in
the future. See my brief discussion of Tim Rowse’s insightful book White
Flour, White Power in this earlier post (link
here). Historian Shannyn Palmer has also written persuasively on the reasons for
the demographic shift from the deserts to remote communities in central Australia
prior to World War Two, emphasising the role of Indigenous agency in the
choices Aboriginal people made.
In my
assessment, the equilibrium established was neither just nor institutionally
inclusive. This led in turn to a decades long project by progressive
Australians and increasingly Aboriginal advocates for civil rights, human
rights and land rights. On one metric, the extent of legally acknowledged
Aboriginal land ownership, that struggle has been extraordinarily successful.
The land rights movement has seen the establishment of a complex array of
institutional reforms leading to acknowledged Aboriginal land ownership of one
form or another rising from effectively zero to some 58% of the Australian land
mass being either owned, managed or subject to special rights (link
here) in 2024.
Yet despite
those successes, and the associated policy shifts away from assimilation, and
towards self-management, and later self-determination, the social and economic
equilibrium in place across remote Australia in the 1970s has seriously
fractured. Perhaps the most significant shift was the well-intentioned decision
in 1967 to force the pastoral industry to pay Aboriginal workers equal wages.
It led to an immediate and significant loss of Aboriginal pastoral employment,
which in turn led in many cases to the eviction of Aboriginal people from
access to their country. Simultaneously, Government ration stations were
closed, mission funding began to dry up and most closed or took a back seat as
the Commonwealth stepped in to fund self-managing communities. These
settlements were in locations where state government and local government
services were not provided since they were structured around servicing
ratepayers (who often were paying only nominal fees). Over subsequent decades, the
Commonwealth (through DAA first, and later ATSIC) put significant pressure on
states and territories to lift their game and support Indigenous citizens. In
recent years, the Commonwealth has pre-emptively pulled away from the provision
of comprehensive support to remote communities even in circumstances where the
states and territories were not locked into the provision of sustained funding
arrangements.
The situation of
First Nations citizens in urban and regional Australia is also fraught but has
different manifestations and thus requires different policy approaches (in my
view). I do not address those issues here.
The drivers of
the political shifts that underlie the accelerating loss of political and
social equilibrium across remote Australia are not well understood. My own
diagnosis is that the dominant coalition of the most influential economic and
social interests in Australian society is itself in a perpetual process of internal
bargaining and ongoing pressure on governments over the institutional
frameworks which comprise the national political settlement, and that these
interest-focussed processes structurally ignore, and where feasible exclude, weaker
interests, including remote Indigenous interests. For a detailed discussion,
see the Policy Insights Paper titled Overcoming Indigenous Exclusion
which I co-authored with Neil Westbury in 2019 (link
here).
Whatever the
reasons, the reality of the breakdown of the social equilibrium that was
established in the 1970s across remote Indigenous communities is beyond
question. I have written extensively about social and economic dysfunction in
remote communities in this blog. For example, I list 16 former posts in this
omnibus post from August 2025 (link
here). This is why the Samaras analysis of the disenchantment of mainstream
voters across regional towns struck a chord with me, and why his account of the economic and
social decline due to the withdrawal of private and public sector services reminded
me of the argument I made (with Neil Westbury) in our 2007 book Beyond
Humbug (link
here).
We argued not
that key institutions had been present and were now being withdrawn across
remote communities, but rather that governments had failed to pursue policies
that ensured that the institutional footprint of government was ever established
in those communities. That missing institutional footprint includes not just
economic frameworks that encourage and incentivize commercial activity (e.g.
banks, surveyed residential land titles, and the like) but the public sector
footprint that ensures there are effective properly funded and staffed schools,
access to specialist health care such as dentists and optometrists, aged
persons care, disability services aligned with the service delivery models
being pursued at state and federal levels, properly regulated social housing
systems, and so on.
From time to
time, it is argued that geographic remoteness goes hand in glove with the
absence of economic viability, and that this undercuts the rationale for any
support for remote communities. Indeed, a decade of so ago, the West Australian
Government openly canvassed options for closing some or all remote communities.
Ultimately, they backed down in the face of sustained outrage and opposition from
Indigenous land councils and wider interests and the Commonwealth.
My own view is
that framing policy reform opportunities in terms of remoteness/viability
issues quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Long term under-investment
erodes the institutional viability of communities, and the residents ultimately
vote with their feet (albeit in directions that governments do not anticipate).
Yet, for example, governments do not decide where to locate military
infrastructure across the north based on an assessment of the economic
viability of the locations under consideration. They determine that the defence
of the nation is in the national interest and then invest accordingly. While an
under-appreciated proposition, I take the view that keeping people on country
across the north is a key component of the national interest, is also in the
public interest, as well as being something that the Aboriginal people of the
north see as important. With land ownership goes responsibilities for land
management. Without land and coastal management, important biosecurity issues
will be ignored and will create risks for the nation that extend beyond the
lands in question. There are strategic benefits in ensuring the north remains
populated not just along the coast, but inland.
If I am correct, then policies that incentivise residents of remote
communities to leave their communities and move to regional urban centres are ultimately
counterproductive to advancing that national interest.
It is
incontrovertible that there are economic costs to the budget of building social
and economic footprint of government in remote and northern Australia. Similarly,
there are costs to building infrastructure designed to contribute to the defence
of the nation. While governments do have fiscal constraints, if something is in
the national interest, it deserves to be funded at some level over a sustained
period.
Moreover, there
are strong arguments in support of strengthening the institutional footprint in
remote Australia, ranging from normative/ethical ones to more practical arguments
based on the benefits of not creating a permanent class of citizens that are
structurally excluded from the benefits (and responsibilities) of effective
citizenship. The economic and social costs of the current levels of community dysfunction
across remote Australia are not listed in the annual budget papers, but they
are substantial and growing. More importantly, the opportunity costs of that
ongoing dysfunction on communities and families, but also on the nation are
considerable.
A key
implication of this analysis is that it is for governments to expand the
footprint of mainstream institutional frameworks to remote regions and
communities. That is not to say that the mode of implementation ought not to
take into account local and cultural concerns and aspirations, but fundamentally
it is not an Indigenous specific responsibility, but a task that falls to mainstream
government. Moreover, it is both
intellectually (and politically) lazy and fundamentally incorrect to ‘blame the
victim’ for persistent social dysfunction. Just as the planning and
construction of roads and highways is governed by generalised algorithms and
policy approaches, other institutional frameworks should also be provided nationally
and not be artificially constrained in their application by structural and
systemic biases that are built upon the structural exclusion of Indigenous
interests. The risk of seeing the challenges of remote Indigenous communities
solely through the lens of Indigenous specific policy frameworks is that it can
contribute to leaving longstanding and enduring structural exclusion in place
and ultimately may lead to the premature or unnecessary depopulation of those
communities, and the concomitant influx of remote migrants into regional towns.
The bigger risk
is that by not investing in the institutional frameworks necessary to include
remote populations within the mainstream institutional architecture of the
nation, thus ensuring that these places and populations are governed as part of
the nation, we are creating the conditions where systemic exclusion
metastasises beyond remote communities and ultimately in ways that both rebound
on Indigenous people and corrupt the wider body politic.
The bottom line
is that remote disadvantage is primarily a function of systemic exclusion, and
as Kos Samaras points out (in the context of analysing the grievances
underpinning the rise of One Nation) the solution is not merely one of
allocating more funding (however necessary that might be) but expanding the
governance and institutional footprint (both public and private) of the
nation’s governance to the whole expanse of the nation.
15 June 2026
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