Hanson Has Outflanked Murdoch on His Own Terrain
With the rise of Hanson, Murdoch has been outflanked on his own terrain and the Liberal Party is paying the price.
Sky News and The Australian spent years normalising a suite of talking points: climate denial, anti-immigration sentiment, and culture war politics. The implicit bargain was that this radicalised audience would deliver its votes to the Liberal Party. That bargain has broken down. One Nation has moved in and captured the voter base that Murdoch media cultivated a base the Liberal Party can court but never fully own.
The Liberals are now stuck in a doom loop of their own establishment’s making. An entire generation has grown up with nothing to conserve: locked out of housing, with no property accumulating and no stake in the asset-based order that traditional conservative politics was built to protect. At the same time, the fallout from the Iran conflict has driven energy costs high enough that renewables are no longer ideology they are essential household infrastructure. The culture war framing that turned climate policy into a loyalty test runs headlong into the lived reality of a generation for whom solar panels are a budget decision, not a political statement.
One Nation, free from the burden of governing, can always outbid the Liberals on the terms Sky News itself established. The Murdoch-Liberal establishment built its politics for a voter who owned something. That voter is ageing out and the machine has no answer for what comes next.
