Amid the chaos, broken trust and desperate lack of leadership, voters are abandoning the major parties in droves. Is a citizens’ assembly the only way to fix this mess now?
By Dennis Shanahan in The Australian
7th February, 2026
In the two months since the Bondi Beach massacre on December 14, and in the weeks since the special sitting of parliament last month and the implosion of the Coalition parties, public support for Labor, the Liberals and the Nationals has plummeted.
The latest Newspoll survey shows the depth of this withdrawal from mainstream politics, with the combined primary vote for the major parties at just 53 per cent – the lowest level in Newspoll history – and 47 per cent supporting One Nation, the Greens and other independents and minor parties.
For the first time, in protest against the major parties, primary support for One Nation now just outranks the Coalition – 22 per cent to 21 per cent.
There is a core of disdain for weak leadership in these numbers, and Hanson benefits from the perception of being a strong leader with a clear, consistent message – essentially about immigration – that answers anxiety voters feel without having to actually do anything about it.
Albanese’s massive election victory in 2025 exposed the pitiful support for the Coalition but the parliamentary result, built on preferential voting, masked Labor’s own poor primary vote as support for the major parties continues to decline.
More importantly for Australian voters and the established political parties, the 2025 election confirmed longer-term trends of growing dissatisfaction with the electoral process, increasing cynicism towards politicians, rising disengagement with voting, and declining trust in government – with only one in three believing governments will do the right thing.
Victorian Liberal MP for Goldstein Tim Wilson, the only Liberal at the 2025 election to win back a seat from the Climate 200 teal independents, believes the current climate requires a new “approach” to politics and leadership.
In an address to the Young Liberal Convention in Melbourne, Wilson said: “Families are anxious that their household budgets will be eaten by inflation and interest rates. And the next generation do not believe the Australian promise will deliver for them.”
Then he warned that: “When a system doesn’t work for people, their logical solution is to change the system. And when they don’t trust the institutions to do so, they’ll change those in the institutions to do it for them.
“We see this most glaringly in the United States and the United Kingdom, but we are not immune.
“There is only one way through this moment: leadership.
“Leadership is not occupying a chair, or (being) telegenic for election posters. Leadership is uniting people around vision. We are failing Australia and Australians, and they will have every right to judge us harshly. They already have,” he said.
The disillusion with party politics is building disengagement and an even more concerning erosion of faith in democratic institutions.
The respected and comprehensive ANU Australian Electoral Study conducted after the May 2025 election found that during the 2010s there were steep declines across a range of indicators capturing voter attitudes towards democracy in Australia, including political trust and satisfaction with democracy – although the 2025 results show that levels of trust have improved from the record low observed in 2019. Despite modest improvements, it is still only one in three Australians who believe people in government can be trusted to do the right thing.
The 2025 Australian Election Study incorporated a range of questions to explore citizen attitudes towards proposals to reform Australia’s democracy, including four-year parliamentary terms, restrictions on MPs’ service, and the use of citizen assemblies.
The responses suggested Australians have a degree of cynicism about Australian politicians, with Millennials the least trusting of government, while the Baby Boomer generation has higher levels of overall trust.
For the first time, the ANU study asked about attitudes towards Australia becoming a republic, lowering the voting age, and four-year parliaments, more or fewer referendums, and a citizens’ assembly.
Surprisingly, the proposal that attracted the greatest support, at 48 per cent, was to have a citizens’ assembly, described to respondents as “a body made up of randomly selected citizens who consider important policy issues and advise the government”.
It is surprising because there has been so little experience of citizens’ assemblies in Australia.
Even the advocacy group for such gatherings, NewDemocracy, was surprised, with executive director Iain Walker declaring it was a shock given the more “understandable” and well-known alternatives that were proposed.
“Surprisingly, even to us – given they were also presented with more immediately understandable reform options – it turned out that trying a citizens’ assembly was the most favoured option (most supported with 48 per cent and least opposed with 20 per cent),” he told Inquirer.
“In the context of people wondering how democracy ever gets better, this could be a pointer to where our parliaments should be looking. There’s a mechanism for earning support, and those who have been custodians of electoral processes can see how the two are complementary,” he said.
NewDemocracy wants to test the proposal and has challenged MPs to try it out.
“The only tests of any democracy innovation are whether it earns public trust and whether parliamentarians find it useful in taking long-term decisions. A large public trial will let us answer both those questions – especially if it’s a challenging topic.
“If we fail, then the cost is small. But if it works – and Australian politics finds a way to address hard trade-offs and take decisions normally endlessly avoided – then the benefit to the country is immense,” he said.
As part of the 2010 election campaign, Julia Gillard proposed a citizens’ assembly to consider the issue of climate change but in a febrile election atmosphere this was actually seen as a lack of leadership.
The current atmosphere and collapse of institutional support and party-political support may provide an opportunity for the untried idea.
