The kids are alright. But what about the millennials?

Will the 'smashed avocado generation' vote for One Nation out of spite at the next election?

On latest check, One Nation is polling near a quarter of the primary vote. Whether the surge survives a full blown election campaign is one question. Who is driving it, and why, is another.

Ten years ago, Australian millennials were told they could not afford homes because of smashed avocado. Today they are the strongest cohort behind One Nation. The avocado, it seems, is biting back.

The global story about populism, imported almost reflexively into Australian commentary, invokes teenagers on TikTok, Gen Z right wing activists, and the global phenomenon of young men drifting to the extremes. This is the narrative being peddled by some about One Nation’s poll surge.

It is a compelling story, but it happens to be wrong.

A RedBridge/Accent survey published earlier this month puts One Nation at 30 per cent among Australians aged 30 to 45, ahead of Labor at 28, ahead of the Greens at 18, ahead of the Coalition at 16. Among Gen Z voters, those aged 18 to 29, One Nation polls at 10. The cohort powering the most significant realignment in recent Australian polling history came of age under John Howard, graduated into the GFC, and has been renting ever since.

Millennials were not supposed to do this. The 2025 Australian Election Study, arguably one of the most rigorous barometers of shifting political currents in this country, noted something its authors called “portentous.” Unlike every previous generation, millennials were not drifting to the right as they aged. The pattern that had held for decades, where young voters lean left, then moderate, then track conservative as they accumulate property and wealth, appeared to be breaking.

Millennials, the study found, were bucking the trend. They were staying left. They were, if anything, moving further in that direction. An entire generation of strategic assumptions, on both sides of politics, had been built on the expectation that the drift would eventually resume. The election study suggested it would not.

That study was published in a seemingly different time.

One year on, the same generation that political experts were citing as evidence of a structural shift in Australian conservatism’s prospects is now One Nation’s strongest age cohort. The party that secured 6.4 per cent of the primary vote at the 2025 federal election is now their first preference. Millennials first met Pauline Hanson in childhood or adolescence, when both major parties framed her as the extreme position mainstream Australia had agreed to reject. The cohort whose political consciousness was formed in opposition to Hansonism is now its electoral spine.

The global commentary on youth and populism has largely been structured around gender. Young men going hard right, young women going hard left, the so-called gender-generation gap that has animated politics from South Korea to Germany to the United States. Australia has not followed. Multiple pollsters find the gender gap in One Nation support to be negligible. DemosAU has women at 24 per cent and men at 25. YouGov finds them equal at 25 each.

The age gap, however, is sharp, and it cuts in an unexpected direction. The usual assumption that youth radicalism drives populist surges does not hold here. One Nation’s weakness is among the youngest voters. Its strength is among those old enough to have watched a couple of decades of political promises about housing, cost of living, and economic security with no follow through.

Australian National University political scientist Ian McAllister has tracked what he describes as a trust collapse among millennials that correlates directly with the property market. “They’re not able to get into the housing market,” he said, “and that’s driving a lot of the distrust they have in the political process.” The 2025 study found that 74 per cent of One Nation voters believe politicians “usually look after themselves.” That is the figure of a generation that has decided politicians lie, and has resolved to say so with a ballot.

These voters did not move to One Nation through disengagement. Disengagement is the easy explanation. Exhaustion is the accurate one.

The orthodox response to One Nation’s surge has been to treat it as a policy problem, addressable through housing settings, migration calibration, or a sharper budget. RedBridge director Tony Barry observed that the 2026 budget appeared to have “turbocharged anti-establishment sentiment” rather than defused it. Barry’s reading points to something the policy framing keeps missing. Millennial trust has collapsed across a much wider institutional front than housing.

To understand the disillusionment, start with the notion that millennials have done everything right, but are failing anyway. They racked up HECS/HELP debt for the degree. They saved for the deposit that always became harder to reach. They worked hard for the promotion that delivered a real wage increase smaller than that year’s rent rise. They’ve seen the friend who bought in 2014 and is now a millionaire on paper. The colleague who inherited in 2018 and is now ahead by the price of a house. Those who waited it out are often still waiting.

For a decade and a half, this cohort was told the story would resolve. Prices would correct. Wages would catch up. The first home buyer scheme would work. The shared equity scheme would work. The budget reform, when it finally arrived, would work. Each promise came with Treasury modelling and a timeline that sat just outside the next life decision.

What does it do to a generation to be told, repeatedly, that the answer is coming, and then to watch the people making the promises retire into the wealth their own policies generated?

The disillusionment is multi-layered. It is the parents who talk about the renovation while the children think about the next rental inspection. It is the wedding speech that mentions the home, and the room that knows half the audience does not own one. It is the school open day missed because the work trip was booked to cover the childcare. It is the specific feeling of having done the work, and watching the institution that asked you to do it stop returning your call.

The smashed avocado was the cultural cover story for an institutional failure. The cover has now been blown.

In 1942, Menzies named them the forgotten people: salary earners, shopkeepers, the skilled and the saving, the Australian middle that worked and aspired but went unspoken-for in the politics of the day. The home, he said, was “the foundation of sanity and sobriety,” the “indispensable condition of continuity.” The bargain was that effort would meet outcome.

The party that named the forgotten people built its long electoral majority on the credibility of that bargain. Eighty-four years on, the cohort now voting One Nation in record numbers is the cohort for whom the bargain has broken audibly and at scale. They worked and aspired. The home did not arrive. The forgotten people of 2026 are 38 years old.

A generation in this condition cannot be recovered with a well-targeted media buy or a better budget speech. The trust that has been lost was drawn down steadily, over a decade and a half of compounding disappointment across every institution that had promised to deliver.

The political system produced these voters, and One Nation is merely receiving them. The uncomfortable question for every political strategist currently modelling One Nation’s demographic profile (and there are many) is whether the offer that was supposed to retain these voters was ever credible. How to win them back from Hanson is a question for a later disappointment.

The global story about young people and populism is one of radicalisation. The Australian story, at least the millennial chapter of it, is something much harder to fix.

It is disillusionment. And disillusionment, unlike anger, does not respond to volume.

Julianna Burgess is a former full-time political staffer and current full-time millennial.