Before the marches, immigration was not a topic in our focus groups. After them, it still isn’t. The people keeping it on the front page are not those struggling.

For most of last year, RedBridge conducted over 400 focus groups that included voters in outer suburbs and regional towns across the country. We listened to them describe what was going wrong. They talked about the mortgage that seems not to get any smaller by the year, the rent that eats into 50-plus per cent of their weekly wage, the cost of food, the rising power bill, the wait to see a doctor, and the strong sense that nobody in charge wants to listen. They talked about their kids not being able to leave home.

Immigration did not come up. Not as a grievance, not as an aside, not at all. If you had judged the national mood by what people volunteered, you would have concluded the issue did not exist.

Then came 31 August 2025. The March for Australia rallies put tens of thousands of people on the streets of the capital cities, some of them organised by people who should never be near a microphone, and within a week immigration was the national story. It has stayed the national story through the October rallies, the Australia Day rallies and the anniversary rallies three weeks ago; even as the crowds thinned after that first Sunday, the coverage did not.

In the focus groups we have run since, immigration still does not come up. Prompt it and people will offer a view, usually a measured one about numbers and housing, and then they go straight back to what is actually happening to them. No one is ever going to tell a researcher that they are happy about population growth, even during better economic times.