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Notes -
Yes, I'd agree with this. There is definitely a strain of Australian populism, especially combined with resentment of the Canberra bubble. Palmer is, I would say, pretty incompetent, but Katter and Lambie have made very good runs at it and carved out niches for themselves. To an extent some of the other rising independents of the last decade or so also show the possibilities of political entrepreneurship - Nick Xenophon, more recently the Teals, and so on.
The wider context for all of this, which I imagine would be familiar to anyone in the US or UK, is the continuing decline of the major parties. It's been a relatively smooth decline without major shocks (there was no Australian Trump or Australian Brexit; the closest equivalent is the failure of the Voice, but even that was just preventing something, not actually changing the established order), and preferential voting has maintained the appearance of business as usual, but you can definitely see the yearning for something other than the current two-party system. Both Labor and Coalition primary votes have been steadily declining.
Unfortunately no minor parties seem to have really picked up the slack. The Greens have periodically had ambitions of eclipsing or even outright replacing Labor, but they seem to have hit a ceiling. There just aren't that many yuppies and they struggle to grow past that. One Nation is ramshackle and tends to shoot itself in the foot. We haven't seen any unified alternatives to the major parties. Instead it's just been more and more fragmentation, to independents and to doomed micro-parties like Trumpet of Patriots or Australia's Voice, while the major parties keep winning on preferences.
That can't last forever. Eventually either the major parties pivot towards what the electorate actually wants - Dutton's experiments with populism seem like an attempt to try this - or eventually someone gets their act together enough to overcome one of them. I think, barring some massive exchange in external circumstances that shifts the landscape, the former is more likely than the latter, but we'll see.
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