What happens to centre-right politics if One Nation continues to grow?

One Nation would be crazy to enter a formal preference deal, given its positioning against the 'uni-party'. Deals are not part of that story. The Liberals should probably avoid them too, despite advice from former Premier Jeff Kennett.

Preferences should be determined seat by seat, based on electoral arithmetic. It is also a distraction to concentrate on who the Liberals preference while Labor gets away with playing cosy with the socialists and what some allege is antisemitism in the Greens.

It may be that One Nation recedes again, as it has before, but this time feels different. We have not seen its vote this high in so many places, and it does appear to be attracting some capable candidates, such as David Farley in Farrer.

Much of the analysis of the One Nation vote has been economically reductionist. The Australian, for example, has plotted One Nation support against income, education, employment, and immigration status by seat.

From this they infer that One Nation voters are poorer, less educated, more likely to be unemployed, and more likely to have been born here. That is not what the data shows. It shows that One Nation does well in areas with higher proportions of voters with those characteristics.

Our polling suggests One Nation voters themselves are often better educated and higher earning than the average. There is no contradiction.

As an illustration, I grew up in a working-class suburb in Brisbane in one of the 30 per cent of households that voted Liberal. We weren't typical of the suburb, but we lived there because housing in the area was affordable when the move was originally made, and later because it was comfortable. Where you live, and who you mix with, shapes your view of the world.

I suspect it is people like our family who are now voting for One Nation in these areas, which suggests the party has access to a reasonable pool of good talent. The question is whether it can retain it.

One Nation is not, as far as I am aware, a properly democratic party. It is another example of the corporatisation of politics, where new parties are not mass movements but top-down, personality-driven brands.

Pauline Hanson, Clive Palmer, Jacqui Lambie, Derryn Hinch, and Nick Xenophon all built parties around themselves.

The Teals have a similar model, though structured as 'community independents' backed by Climate 200, effectively operating as a franchised network with individual upfront franchisees being the visible branding hiding the money politics behind it.

These models lack internal democracy. They operate on a take-it-or-leave-it basis: if you don't like the product, choose another vendor, but you are not invited into the kitchen to refine it.