and it’s not as if PHON only racks their votes up in rural and regional australia. they clocked in at almost 7.5% primary vote in the lower house in penrith (which is a state seat) here at the 2019 election; one in every fifteen australians in a pretty built up and urban area, an area that’s totally rife with economic injustice, poverty, and flowing from those two (and not from the fact there are a lot of “methadone migrants who don’t speak english”), quite a lot of crime.
this is the exact area, one with a high crime rate, growing population of non white australians and widespread poverty, that policies and dog whistles of the far right marginalise, and yet the white population in these areas is turning out to vote for them still. penrith also has a professional middleclass, a lot of whom i know from experience are hard libs and don’t like the way the suburbs are growing in minority population. before i was at the firm i’m at, we won a case to green light a mosque in penrith and our team had to be escorted out of the court room by the cops because the local bikie brigade was ready to go at them outside, this is all anecdotal, sure, but it’s a bit naive to say that those views aren’t legitimised here