Introduction by Croakey: Understanding trends and changes in Australian demographics provides key insights into the forces contributing to the defeat of the Voice referendum and for future such campaigns to advance the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, according to journalist and author George Megalogenis.
Megalogenis was a keynote speaker at the recent National Allyship Summit; Marie McInerney reports on some of his key points below, which also have wider relevance for the development of health initiatives and health-related communications.
Marie McInerney writes:
In his new book, Three Shocks: Who We Are Becoming in the 21st Century, George Megalogenis describes how Australia has moved, again, to being a majority migrant nation — where most people are either a migrant themselves or are the children of migrants.
Another key development is that tertiary-educated women professionals now outnumber blue-collar workers. The average Australian is ”a woman aged 38 who is either born overseas or has at least one migrant parent” who likely lives in Melbourne or Sydney.
This might stop One Nation from making great inroads in Australia’s biggest cities, but growing ‘tribalisation’ in politics makes Australia prime for interference from bad faith online actors looking to exploit these divisions, as happened with the 2023 Voice referendum, Megalogenis told the recent National Allyship Summit.
While Megalogenis said he’s always optimistic that Australia’s “instinct for cohesion will probably save us in the long run”, he added that this is not something that can be done on auto-pilot.
He urged the summit, which is looking to progress Voice, Treaty and Truth, to return to old-fashioned doorknocking and community organising.
Below are some key takeaways from his address to the summit, convened by Allies for Uluru on Bidjigal/Bedegal Country at UNSW’s Kensington Campus, in partnership with the Uluru Dialogue.
Australia’s family tree
Megalogenis uses the concept of a ‘family tree’ to describe Australia. It has First Nations roots. Its trunk represents Old Australians (people whose parents were both born in Australia and go back at least three generations) and its branches and leaves are what he calls New Australians (first and second generation migrants).
Australia became a majority migrant nation (again) around 2018.
As the second chart shows, the first generation of New Australians are responsible for just over half of population growth, and their children for another quarter of population growth — making for close to 80 percent of Australia’s population growth over the decade.
That, he said, has had a “profound impact” on the ground because most migrants live in Melbourne or Sydney.
The trend has an “equal but opposite impact” in the regions where the population grows a lot slower, and where the majority of the ‘trunk’ (Old Australians) reside, creating a “separation between city and country at a rate that we haven’t experienced before in our 200-year settler history”.
He notes too (as did this week’s Intergenerational Report) that the ‘roots’ of the family tree, First Nations peoples, are the fastest growing part of the family tree.
Sydney and Melbourne
Naarm/Melbourne and Sydney are now home to two-thirds of all migrants from India, three-quarters of all migrants from China and Vietnam, and most migrants from places like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
That makes for “very diverse cities” and “regions becoming a lot whiter relative to the nation at large, and certainly whiter than the capital cities”, he said.
Sydney and Melbourne “don’t look like the rest of Australia,” including even to people living in NSW and Victoria outside the capitalcities. s
The change in this story through this decade has had “profound implications for our politics” and was “hiding in plain sight” when Australia went to the Voice referendum in 2023, Megalogenis said.
That created “enormous opportunity for bad faith actors to run very, very aggressive identity-based, race-based campaigns for the Voice and of course they were doing it below the line”, he said.
Location matters
Up until the turn of the 21st century, the largest overseas-born community, whether it was in a big cities like Melbourne or Sydney or regional towns, was from England.
Now Sydney’s largest overseas-born group is from China, and Melbourne’s from India.
Megalogenis has some related theories, which he admits might be “more anecdotal than scientific”. He says the Chinese community is more drawn to Sydney because it’s the financial and globally recognised centre of Australia,and also as a legacy from Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s decision in the late 1980s to let Chinese students stay after the Tiananmen Square massacre.
For the Indians in Melbourne, he theorises, with a bit of help from the Indian embassy, that it’s the MCG — “cricket essentially”.
By contrast, other cities and centres across the country are “over-represented” for Commonwealth migrants, including Perth and Adelaide (where the English remain the main migrant group) and Brisbane and the Gold Coast, where people from Aotearoa/New Zealand are the main migrant group.
Megalogenis says more than 60 percent of all Australians live in Melbourne, Sydney, the Gold Coast and Perth — “one is Eurasian with a Chinese top, another is Eurasian with an Indian top, and the other two look … more like Australia in the 20th century than the 21st century”.
The diversity divide
Megalogenis is concerned that Labor’s concentration in the capital cities, and the concentration of One Nation and “what remains of the Liberal National Party” in the regions, are creating a ‘separation by tribes’ in terms of white vs non-white, Old Australia vs New Australia.
“To my mind, this is possibly the worst thing you could do in terms of your governance and in terms of your politic,” he said.
Megalogenis asks what a migration debate would look like “that operates at the same level of toxicity that the Voice referendum operated in”.
“What happens to the very diverse electorates in Sydney’s west and in Melbourne’s west and northwest? Do they think ‘we’ll just weigh the immigration policies of the two major parties? Will we think about One Nation? — probably not, because she doesn’t like us. Why don’t we go independent as well?”
Such a Parliament, whilst it might be more locally representative, would be very difficult to manage. Australia would be a very difficult country to run “if everyone polarises by identity and by place”, he said.
Megalogenis is concerned also about the ‘trunk’ of the family tree, Old Australia, “becoming so alienated from the rest of the country that they operate as a force for negation”, as the Voice referendum saw.
The inner cities have seen a reversal demographically from his days of growing up in Melbourne, when they were working class suburbs that would receive migrants, while the middle class, Old Australians, headed for the middle and outer ring suburbs.
That’s been “literally inverted” now, with the gentrification of the inner cities of Melbourne and Sydney making them “whiter today, relative to the middle and outer ring suburbs, and whiter relative to their own selves about 20 or 30 years ago”.
While inner city residents increasingly count among the Old Australian ‘trunk’, they were the voters most likely to support the Voice in 2023, compared to regional Australia, where support for the Voice was lower than for marriage equality in 2017 and the Republic referendum in 1999.
Meanwhile, the middle ring suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney are becoming more diverse. Some are 90 percent first and second generation migrant.
Megalogenis pointed out that it wasn’t only the Teals who got the Liberal Party evicted from the capital cities in both the 2022 and 2025 elections. There were other factors: for example, seats like Bennelong, which has a strong Chinese community, moved from safe Liberal to safe Labor, because Prime Ministers Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton “leant too hard into the anti-COVID story with Beijing and couldn’t separate the Chinese Australian community from that discussion”.
As a result, the Chinese community, which had voted for the Liberal Party for a decade, is socially conservative, holds small business and family values, “flipped from Liberal to Labor”.
Liberal Party problems
Around the same time that Australia became majority migrant again, professional women outnumbered the blue collar trade — for the first time in history. Women working in the care economy (aged care, child care etc) also overtook male labourers.
From an economist’s perspective, the workers who are driving the economy are “either women working with their brains or women working with their hands”, Megalogenis said, adding the average Australian is “a woman aged 38 who is either born overseas or has at least one migrant parent”.
The Liberal Party’s crashing primary vote is, he said, “a function of both those stories interacting, denying the reality of New Australia in the cities, but especially denying the reality of a female-centred economy”.
Megalogenis said the Liberal Party’s postmortems of both the 2022 and 2025 elections acknowledged they had been “annoying female voters” since the early part of the Howard Government. They experienced swings against them in the last two elections “across the female population…regardless of age or education…which tells you something about how far off the pace they middle Australia were where is.”
The Liberal Party now recognises that multicultural communities are now a bigger problem for them than women, “which is saying something”, he said.
In the 2019 election, Labor won more seats in the capital cities than the Liberal National parties combined, but it didn’t gain government because the Liberal National parties had a landslide in the regions. Megalogenis recalls former PM Scott Morrison saying: ‘How good is Queensland?’
“That was the last election…where the frontier states decided who ran this country. The combination of Queensland and Western Australia gave the coalition enough seats to, in a sense, to insure them against Labor sneaking into power on the back of Melbourne and Sydney.”
By contrast, the 2022 and 2025 elections were “pretty much decided” by Melbourne and Sydney.
Death of the two party system
Megalogenis said Australia’s two-party system “officially died in 2022”, when the Coalition Government was turfed out in a landslide defeat, but the Labor Government came to power with a historically low primary vote, below 33 percent, and squeaked in with a majority of two.
The Liberal Party lost almost as many seats to the crossbench as they did to Labor, and Labor also lost to the crossbench: to the Greens in Brisbane and to independent Dai Le, the first Vietnamese refugee to be elected to Parliament, in western Sydney.
The two party system broke earlier in the regions, he said, with third parties exceeding both the Labor and Coalition vote at the last election, amid a sense that “the country is no longer listening to them”.
So the next question, he said, is what happens to the Labor vote in the cities?
“Does One Nation get into the migrant electorates? Unlikely. Does One Nation get into the inner city? Impossible. And in fact, One Nation is setting itself up against the inner city.”
Megalogenis believes there are lessons for the Liberal Party in how John Howard finally worked out how to manage Pauline Hanson’s growing popularity, when One Nation won 11 seats in the Queensland Parliament in 1998 but Labor also took seats from the Liberals.
Howard realised he couldn’t hold power if he sacrificed the capital cities so he opted to avoid a race-based election. Instead of fighting hard on a rollback of native title, he focused on a policy to introduce the goods and services tax (GST), which “re-polarised the electorate into a left versus right contest on the economy”, he said.
The Liberals under Angus Taylor haven’t heeded this lesson. Instead of ignoring One Nation, he decided “to hedge his bets” and dive into the migration debate. As a result, Megalogenis said, they’re polling third nationally.
Megalogenis highlighted two recent elections, including the by-election in Farrer, long-held 70-30 by the Nationals and the Liberals, which was won by One Nation’s David Foley, who was a really good local candidate, “out of the box” for One Nation.
The booth-by-booth story across the electorate shows a landslide for One Nation “pretty much everywhere”, except for the regional city of Albury where the Teal candidate won — if not by much.
Meanwhile, the South Australian state election was won by Labor’s “unashamed cosmopolitan pro-multicultural Australia” Premier Peter Malinauskas, who got a second term landslide, and won 32 out of 33 seats in Adelaide. The Liberals’ one city seat was all that kept them ahead of One Nation to be the state opposition.
Megalogenis said many political polarisations were played out in that election: city versus country, New Australia vs Old Australia, female professional versus male tradie, “and you had a landslide to Labor in the capital city which offsets their weakness in the regions”.
But the upcoming Victorian election on 28 November is a different scenario: Australia’s first genuine three-party contest is being fought by a Labor Government that has “lost confidence” in itself and facing defeat,
Confidence in world leaders
Megalogenis highlighted a Lowy Institute poll, taken as the Iran war began, that asked Australians to rate their level of confidence in various world leaders to do the right thing regarding world affairs.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rated the highest, while US President Donald Trump was down with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
None of this was surprising, and there was an “undeniable” anti-Trump factor at the last federal election, Megalogenis said.
That contrasts dramatically with how One Nation voters view the global stage: for them Albanese is “down in the basement”, alongside China President Xi Jinping, Putin, and Kim Jong Un, while Trump has overall approval.
On that metric alone, he said, One Nation voters are “clearly not representative of the mainstream Australian voter” and not informed by what appears in the mainstream media.
It’s also likely that the 70 percent of the Australian population “is not interested in a political movement that thinks Donald Trump is a rational actor on the global stage”, he added.
Takeaways
Megalogenis said the rise of the far right seems more acute in the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom than Australia, where he believes “our instinct for cohesion will probably save us in the long run”.
However, he said the poll findings, and a polarised media and social media environment that does not promote shared Australian identities and doesn’t even have an agreed set of facts to debate, may not only risk growing support for One Nation on the right. He asked: what if it starts to affect multicultural communities – for example, if Chinese Australians turn from both Labor and the Liberals over their immigration policy?
“It wouldn’t take much for a foreign government to decide that the Australian electorate is so fragmented now that [it] could start feeding into it,” he said. That doesn’t necessarily mean winning seats or influencing the balance of power, but risks further “tribalising” people’s views.
Megalogenis agrees he is looking at a “slightly pessimistic short-term scenario” but he sees upside in the challenge and opportunity to “teach people to build bridges again”.
Bridge-building will need to be “completely different” in these times of more “fragmented, scattered, polarised, localised” politics steeped in identity than it was in the 20th century, when the two parties held at least 80 percent of the primary vote between them and were usually led by “grown-ups”.
”The job of pulling Australia together is a much more active one, and I think it’s not something you can do on autopilot. It’s not something you can rely on the Australian population to just pull off because it’s always done it in the past,” he said.
While he’s pessimistic in the short-term, managing to “pull these Australias back together again with a unifying story would be the most terrific thing you could do in the 21st century”.
His advice to allies at the summit: “When you go back into the field, think about how you talk to Old and New Australia. Think about how you talk to city and country.”
The job of “bringing Australia back together again” is work out how to break the echo chambers we now live in, and this “can really only happen with face-to-face conversation”.
Echoing some of the advice from Croakey’s recent webinar on combating far right populism, he acknowledged that means much more concerted and longer engagement than is now done.
“But bear in mind this is what we used to do in the past. Politics used to knock on doors. Community organisations used to build membership bases, and they used to campaign, and their campaigns…. would be grassroots campaigns, and then the information would be fed up to politics, and then politics would have the confidence to do something because they knew that the argument had already won on the ground.”
That was his self-described long-term optimistic takeout message, but Megalogenis acknowledged that Australia is now “a country that is a lot harder to see, because tribal information, place-based tensions, are isolating us from one another potentially”.
“It’s everyone’s job to try and break that, to stop it to stop it reaching its sort of illogical conclusion, which is a nation totally polarised.”
With that, he said, Old and New Australia could learn from First Nations people who, before colonisation, lived among more than 500 nations that worked well together.
Observations and insights
His view on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese: Compared to Mark Carney, who saved the Canadian Government from an election drubbing by standing up to the US, Albanese did it in a more subtle way at the last election “because he was talking about not importing ideas, and he kept holding the Medicare card up”.
The Prime Minister’s understanding of the electorate in regards to the Voice was “off from day one”, which meant he wasn’t able to make one of two choices: essentially put his career on the line to make it happen, or pause it and blame Dutton, “which would have been a magnificent bait and switch”.
Albanese clearly isn’t a visionary leader, but “strategically, he’s still probably the sharpest mind federally on the Labor side”. He’s not socially conservative, “but politically, he’s much more wary of the electorate than a Hawke or Keating, so I don’t see him suddenly having a mid-career epiphany and then going for, for want of a better term, moral leadership”.
When a pollster told then Prime Minister Bob Hawke that the electorate was probably listening to Howard on the issue of migration, Hawke reportedly said, “I’m not interested in the polls. I want you to help me win this argument”.
Megalogenis said the electorate, even though it might disagree with a leader on some issues, “still intuitively rewards a leader who stands up for principle”. The counterfactual was evident when Labor walked away in 2009-10 from “the great moral challenge of climate change”. The absence of belief or principles, he said, “will always kill a politician”.
On the Murdoch media: Megalogenis, who worked for decades at The Australian, said the Murdoch media “do seem a bit confused by what they’ve unleashed with One Nation, and are now trying to wind it back”. The Australian has, he said, broken a number of the sorts of stories you’d expect to see the ABC and the Guardian about One Nation candidates. “I suspect they regret where they’ve ended up.”
On a Murdoch (Sky) dominated regional news landscape: Megalogenis believes something “more fundamental” is happening in regional Australia “than just the Sky effect”, but he believes Sky being the dominant media voice “had a big impact on the No vote in regional Australia in 2023”.
See Croakey’s archive of articles on the political determinants of health
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