This article was first published in the Australian Financial Review, 17 May, 2026, by Alex McDermott

The coming period may prove more volatile than anything the founders of the Commonwealth confronted when Deakin’s “three elevens” took the field.

“Three elevens” in the field, and the umpire has lost control of the match. That was how Alfred Deakin described the disintegration of Australia’s two-party system in 1904. A century later, his observation feels unexpectedly contemporary. The structural realignment of Australian politics is no longer a looming vulnerability for the major parties but a dangerous reality.

Post-budget polling suggests neither major party can take its electoral base for granted. What once appeared solely a teal threat to the Coalition is now eroding Labor’s support as well. Australian politics is returning to the fluidity and fragmentation that characterised the early years of Federation – and may yet become more fractured still.

To understand what comes next, look back to the upheavals of the 1890s. The sudden eruption of the Labor Party in the 1891 New South Wales colonial election offers the closest parallel. It emerged directly from an explosion of class conflict, mass strikes and economic catastrophe that destroyed the seemingly endless prosperity of the colonial “workingman’s paradise”.

The collapse of the early 1890s shattered that dream. From the wreckage and its savage disenchantment emerged a radical outsider force: the Labor Party. To the political establishment, its members were unwashed, uncouth and unfit for national office. Sound familiar? Even Labor’s accession to government in 1904 did little to soften that contempt.

But what ultimately broke the resistance Labor faced was its ability to transcend its origins as a sectional movement. By presenting itself not as the party of labour but as the party of Australia, it escaped the confines of class politics and secured a permanent place in the nation’s political settlement. The unruly interloper rapidly became part of the basic furniture of Australian political life.

For opponents, the response was institutional as well as political. Non-Labor forces turned to preferential and compulsory voting to manage divisions within their own ranks and prevent conservative liberal votes from being fatally dispersed.

Those arrangements once again serve as an essential dam wall against new popular forces. Yet whilst such institutions can manage fragmentation, they cannot eliminate its causes. By cushioning the major parties from the full consequences of declining support, Australia’s electoral arrangements delayed realignments, but the fix is not permanent.

As in the 1890s, the forces that have brought us to this point today spring from a basic disconnect between the nation at large and the nation in parliament. The ongoing political car-crash of the current crisis is a profound expression of the long-term structural decay of democratic legitimacy. The economic boom of recent decades was built upon the 1980s and 1990s uni-party consensus, which dismantled the old Australian settlement of tariffs, centralised industrial arbitration and restrictive migration. This transformed Australia for the better, enabling a long boom, which rivalled that of the 19th century. But the project was executed by internal party vanguards on both Labor and Liberal sides who largely overrode the preferences of their traditional bases.

Pauline Hanson was the first major figure to give voice to democratic discontent. Her emergence in the mid-1990s was dismissed as a temporary reaction against a settled reform consensus. Yet here she is still, three decades later. Many of the protests she voiced, derided as marginal, have moved steadily towards the centre of public debate. In an age of carefully managed political communication, Hanson has built formidable brand power: an authenticity that voters don’t see in the increasingly professionalised major parties.

There is, however, a striking contrast with early Labor. Labor’s rise was driven by hope: the promise of a better social order and a more prosperous future. Contemporary populism’s animating force is far darker – the belief that the political class has actively undermined the basic Australian promise that the next generation will inherit greater prosperity and opportunity, and the feeling that the country is moving in the wrong direction.

Those sentiments can no longer be dismissed as a passing protest. As support broadens across demographic groups that were thought resistant to populist appeals, barriers that appeared permanent begin to dissolve. The lesson of Australian political history is that once those thresholds are crossed, realignments proceed regardless of the obstacles incumbents throw into their path.

There is one further contrast with the upheavals of the early 20th century. We are not entering a period of orderly realignment. Unlike the early Labor Party, contemporary outsider politics is deeply fragmented. It lacks the organisational discipline, institutional coherence and militant solidarity that enabled Labor to transform itself from a protest movement into a governing party. If the conditions of the present resemble those that produced Labor’s rise, the vehicles carrying today’s discontent are far more fissile and unstable.

Yet the frustration generated by shrinking opportunities and diminished expectations is proving every bit as politically consequential as the grievances that animated the upheavals of the 1890s. The arrangements that stabilised Australian politics for much of the past century are increasingly strained by an electorate that no longer sees its hopes and fears reflected in either major party.

The coming period may therefore prove more volatile than anything the founders of the Commonwealth confronted when Deakin’s “three elevens” took the field. The most likely outcome is not the rise of a single disciplined insurgency but a prolonged period of fragmentation and political experimentation.

What that will produce is unclear. What is clear is that some rough beast is slouching towards Canberra. Is its arrival a renewal or a reckoning? The answer will follow soon enough.