By Dean Kalymniou
The renewed prominence of One Nation within Australian political life has generated the predictable cycle of commentary that accompanies every electoral disruption. Analysts search for demographic explanations, journalists interview voters in marginal electorates and political opponents attempt to determine whether the phenomenon represents a temporary protest or a more enduring realignment.
Beneath these discussions lies a deeper question that extends beyond the fortunes of any particular political party. Every society periodically reaches moments when significant numbers of its citizens conclude that established institutions are no longer listening to them. Whether those perceptions are justified, exaggerated or entirely mistaken is often less important than the fact that they are sincerely held.
Once large groups of people become convinced that their concerns are either misunderstood or dismissed, political landscapes begin to shift in ways that frequently surprise those who had previously regarded the existing order as stable.
Greek Australians should recognise this process immediately, not so much because there is anything uniquely Greek about engaging with One Nation, but rather because the history of our own community is in many respects a history of competing grievances, rival loyalties and contested visions of legitimacy.
From the earliest decades of organised communal life in Australia, disputes concerning ecclesiastical authority, political developments in Greece, questions of identity, the governance of institutions and the distribution of influence have repeatedly divided us into opposing and often aggressively antagonistic camps.
Few Greek Australians can claim unfamiliarity with the phenomenon of members being excluded from organisations, frozen out of communal activities, subjected to whispering campaigns, gaslighted into silence, ignored by former allies or drawn into expensive litigation over matters that often appear incomprehensible to outsiders.
Long before contemporary commentators began speaking of affective polarisation and democratic erosion, many within our community had already experienced their practical manifestations through contested elections, factional struggles, institutional gatekeeping, strategic silence and the transformation of disagreement into personal enmity. Entire organisations have at times become identified with particular factions, while criticism has occasionally been interpreted as disloyalty and dissent as a form of betrayal.
Such divisions are hardly unique to migrant communities. Historians increasingly describe them through the language of grievance politics, a term employed to explain how perceived injustices are transformed into collective political action. Although the terminology is modern, the phenomenon itself is ancient.
During the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century, the Byzantine Empire experienced a catastrophe that killed vast numbers of its inhabitants and disrupted every aspect of economic life. Its consequences were not confined to merely a public health crisis but instead, created a crisis of legitimacy. Peasants whose livelihoods had collapsed watched tax collectors continue their work with undiminished zeal, labourers facing acute shortages saw imperial authorities attempt to restrict wage growth and religious factions interpreted the plague as divine punishment inflicted upon their theological opponents. Existing resentments acquired new force owing to the extraordinary circumstances that amplified grievances long present beneath the surface. In this way, the plague itself did not create those grievances. It exposed them, organised them and gave them a language through which they could be expressed, a decade after the violent suppression of the Nika Riots.
Periods of rapid social, economic and cultural transformation have historically generated fertile conditions for the emergence of political movements capable of converting diffuse anxieties into coherent programmes of action, particularly where substantial sections of the population come to perceive that established institutions have either lost the capacity or the willingness to articulate their concerns. Under such circumstances, grievances that might otherwise have remained isolated within particular communities acquire broader significance, drawing together individuals whose experiences may differ considerably but who nevertheless share a conviction that prevailing political arrangements no longer reflect their understanding of social reality.
The ideological character of the movements that emerge from such conditions has varied enormously across time and place, encompassing nationalist revivals, socialist insurgencies, religious reformations, populist revolts and democratic renewal movements alike, yet beneath these differences lies a recurring dynamic whereby political entrepreneurs succeed in persuading supporters that concerns regarded elsewhere as marginal, unfashionable or illegitimate deserve recognition within the public sphere and, more importantly, that existing centres of authority have failed in their responsibility to provide it.
The experience of the Weimar Republic illustrates the dangers that emerge when political disagreement evolves into mutual incomprehension. Contemporary scholarship increasingly emphasises that the collapse of German democracy cannot be understood solely through economics or constitutional weakness. Equally significant was the progressive transformation of political opponents into existential enemies. Democratic politics requires citizens to accept that those with whom they disagree nevertheless possess a legitimate place within the political community. Once that assumption disappears, compromise begins to resemble capitulation and disagreement becomes evidence of moral deficiency. The tragedy of Weimar lay in the progressive collapse of the assumption that political opponents nevertheless belonged to the same civic community, a development that transformed ordinary political disagreement into a struggle between rival groups increasingly convinced that the continued success of the other represented an existential threat.
No serious observer would suggest that contemporary Australia bears meaningful comparison to Weimar Germany, nor would it be intellectually honest to draw direct parallels between modern Australian political parties and the movements that ultimately destroyed German democracy. The value of such historical examples lies in their capacity to illuminate recurring human tendencies rather than provide simplistic templates for contemporary events, for democratic institutions ultimately depend upon habits of listening, restraint and mutual recognition that cannot be sustained by constitutional arrangements alone.
Greek Australians have witnessed comparable dynamics within their own communal life. The years of the Greek financial crisis generated some of the most intense political divisions the diaspora had experienced since the ideological conflicts that followed the Civil War, with arguments over responsibility for Greece’s collapse frequently evolving into broader disputes concerning legitimacy, representation and betrayal. Across the community and increasingly on social media, discussions that began with austerity measures, bailout agreements and public debt often expanded into searching questions about the competence of political leadership, the integrity of institutions and the future direction of the Greek nation itself. The dramatic implosion of the political order that had dominated Greece since the restoration of democracy in 1974, symbolised by the collapse of PASOK and the weakening of New Democracy, was experienced by many as the exhaustion of an entire political settlement that appeared incapable of protecting national prosperity, social cohesion or public confidence.
Within this atmosphere, political movements occupying radically different positions on the ideological spectrum nevertheless drew support from remarkably similar reservoirs of frustration. Golden Dawn attracted followers among some sections of the diaspora through its uncompromising rejection of a political establishment widely blamed for corruption, economic mismanagement, unemployment and national humiliation, while Syriza channelled an equally powerful desire for rupture among voters seeking a fundamentally different political future.
The social backgrounds, economic circumstances and ideological commitments of these supporters often differed considerably, yet they were united by a growing conviction that the traditional custodians of political power no longer possessed either the competence or the legitimacy required to address the crisis confronting the country. One movement promised national regeneration through the language of exclusionary nationalism, the other through radical democratic and economic transformation, yet both benefited from a profound collapse of confidence in established authority.
Citizens who agreed on very little else nevertheless converged around a shared belief that existing elites had failed them, producing an electoral landscape in which long standing loyalties dissolved with surprising speed and political actors previously confined to the margins suddenly occupied the centre of public debate. For many supporters, both in Greece and within the diaspora, the attraction lay in the possibility of disruption itself, in the hope that a political order widely regarded as exhausted might finally be compelled to listen.
Viewed through this lens, the rise of One Nation reveals less about any single political party than about broader currents within Australian society, particularly the perception among many citizens that established institutions, political actors and cultural gatekeepers have become increasingly distant from their concerns. Whether one agrees with these concerns is ultimately secondary to the recognition that they exist. Democratic societies rarely benefit when grievances are ignored. Equally, they rarely prosper when grievances become the sole basis of political identity.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of contemporary debates surrounding One Nation is the manner in which they expose the diversity that has always existed within the Greek Australian community itself. For decades outsiders often imagined migrant communities as politically uniform blocs defined primarily by ethnicity. Reality has always been more complicated. Greek Australians have come from different regions, social classes, educational backgrounds and political traditions. Our historical memories, experiences and political loyalties have always been diverse. The arguments taking place within our community today therefore signify not a departure from our past or a social aberration, but a continuation of it.
Ultimately, the debates surrounding One Nation reveal something less about One Nation than about ourselves. We participate in the same anxieties, confront the same uncertainties and bring to public life the same mixture of convictions, experiences and prejudices as the rest of our fellow citizens. Our political views may be shaped by family histories, migration experiences and inherited memories, yet they have never been uniform. They have always been contingent upon place, circumstance and time.
The more important question is not whether disagreement exists. Instead, it is whether we retain the capacity to conduct disagreement respectfully, whether we continue to regard political opponents as worthy of being heard and whether we preserve the habits of discussion upon which democratic life depends. If those habits disappear, the system that emerged from our ancestral homeland, one in which debate was regarded as a civic virtue rather than a threat, risks becoming another inheritance that we celebrate rhetorically while allowing it to collapse in practice.
