Beware the right-wing race to the MAGA bottom

Australia’s conservative parties are sliding into a Trump-style contest to see who can harness division, fear and anti-immigration politics most effectively, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

AFTER LABOR convincingly won the 2025 Federal Election, it would have been nice to believe that toxic, hateful, divisive and anti-democratic MAGAism was vanquished in Australia.

Yet, sadly, less than a year later, right-wing parties One Nation, the National Party and the Liberal Party are in a three-way battle to out-MAGA each other, using the same racist and bigoted anti-immigration and anti-minority strategies as U.S. President Trump.

One Nation has been on the racist fringes of Australian politics for three decades. However, never have One Nation’s polls been ahead of the Liberals like they are now. Seeing how well hate sells and seeking to repeat the successes of their toxic “No” campaign against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the Liberal Party has decided that if you can’t beat One Nation, you must join it.

This is why the Liberals rolled former leader Sussan Ley, deciding she wasn’t One Nation enough, and new leader Angus Taylor immediately began demonising immigrants. The Nationals have followed suit, appointing their own One Nation-esque leader in Matt Canavan, who is echoing White supremacist “Great Replacement Theory” extremism in calling for more Australian babies.

Angus Taylor’s One Nationfication of the Liberal Party is Australia’s MAGA moment

Friday 13 February is a fitting date for Angus Taylor to roll Sussan Ley as Liberal Party leader because Taylor represents a Trumpist MAGA horror show result for Australia’s social cohesion and democratic health.

The political strategy behind this three-pronged anti-minority push has been laid out quite clearly by Liberal-aligned billionaire-funded “Advance Australia”. When The Saturday Paper’s Conal Feehely went undercover to the Advance conference, he saw more than just extremism. He saw a well-funded and strategically developed war plan aiming to embed, normalise and spread right-wing extremism in Australia. This included linking ‘cost-of-living anxiety to immigration’.

Many commentators view the three-way race between Australia’s right-wing parties as a fracturing of the right and, ultimately, electorally positive for the Left. The orthodoxy goes that while right-wing parties are fighting amongst themselves to try to grab hard-right grievance votes, which are mostly found in the regions, they’re taking their eye off the inner-city seats where elections are won or lost.

This is exactly the electoral maths that Australia’s foremost psephologist Antony Green has predicted for this week’s South Australian Election, where One Nation is running in every seat. Facing popular Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas and with three leaders in four years, including one with a drug conviction, the Liberal Party is facing the prospect of being wiped off the political map, including losing its few remaining metropolitan seats.

There are no Nationals in South Australia, so in the regions, the Liberals are fighting off Independents and One Nation candidates.

Where once upon a time I would have been overjoyed at the prospect of the South Australian Liberal Party’s electoral extinction, this is certainly a case of being careful what you wish for. Because, no matter what happens on Saturday, when One Nation, The Nationals, the Liberal Party and its campaign arm Advance are putting all their political energy into whipping up division, hatred, racism and resentment, our community is being harmed.

When the Right is promoting simplistic narratives which falsely blame every structural problem – housing affordability, cost of living, healthcare – on minorities, Australia is at risk of the same polarising, fractured, broken society as America is experiencing under Trump.

We need to be honest about what is going on in right-wing politics and we must call it out for what it is. The three right-wing parties are battling over who will lead the MAGA movement in Australia. In the same way as the Republican Party embraced MAGAism, moderate right-wing politicians have disappeared from the political landscape. Unless you count the Teal Independents as centre-right because they are socially progressive and economically conservative, this means we do not have a centre-right wing party in Australia anymore.

What we have instead is a billionaire-funded, extremist group of MAGA personalities. They might look like they’re fighting amongst themselves, but in actual fact, they are collaborating in building an extremist movement of hate. The scary part is that they know exactly how to turn this movement into a viable electoral coalition because they are using the Trump playbook. Look how well it worked for Trump.

This is why, as a South Australian and an Australian, I feel nervous about this weekend’s election. Sure, Labor will win comfortably. But I don’t think annihilation of the Liberal Party is ultimately good for the country when it is driven by rising support for One Nation, and while the Liberals and Nationals chase One Nation using the same extremist tactics.

Even if this movement never wins an election, the damage it does to Australia in the meantime should not be ignored. It is not okay for minorities to constantly be attacked, made to feel unwelcome and unsafe, and to experience discrimination and racism.

Anti-immigration political strategies should not be normalised as a legitimate form of political discourse. Every Australian who wants this country to be inclusive, safe, tolerant and cohesive should be fighting Australia’s right-wing MAGAification. They seek to divide and conquer. If we do nothing, they will ultimately win.