Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party is gearing up to feed on disaffection with the Nationals in upcoming Western Australia and Queensland elections. They expect to win upper house seats in the West, but, in the Sunshine State, they even dare to think they could be in coalition government. They will seek political party registration in NSW early next year.

Longtime One Nation member Graham Burston (Hunter Valley resident and twin brother of one of the organising principals behind the party's renaissance, NSW One Nation senator Brian Burston), predicts Hanson's party is on course to win up to 11 Queensland seats.

"We anticipate there will be an election in Queensland before the end of next year and on current polling, neither of the major parties will get enough seats to form government," Burston says. "Whoever wants to form government will need our support."

The rout of the Nationals in Orange came out of the blue in much the same way that Jeff Kennett's rampaging premiership came to a juddering halt in the 1999 Victorian state election partly due to his neglect of National Party regional seats.

Talkback radio mavens Alan Jones and Ray Hadley had pulled into Orange in the dying days of the campaign, exhorting voters to do a Trump and send a grey-haired message to the political elite that they were not going to take it any more. But the rot set in long before the radio ranters arrived.

The campaign turned on local issues – council amalgamation and the NSW Premier Mike Baird's quixotic quest to destroy the greyhound industry – but, in reality, it was fought on age-old Australian fault lines: town versus the bush, only for once the Nationals were on the city side of the divide on pivotal issues.

Pundits with long memories regard the 17 per cent swing against Labor in Tasmania's 1975 Bass byelection as a harbinger touchstone but it pales against Donato's achievement for the fledgling Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party.

On November 12, the National vote in Orange plummeted 34 per cent.

In Molong, a small village outside Orange where Baird wants to ram boutique Cabonne Council into department store-sized Orange Council, the amalgamation proposal highly affronted locals: 60 per cent went for Donato.

"These were lifelong National supporters. It was a hard thing for them to do. Their hands were shaking as they signed the ballot," says Paul Mullins, proprietor of What the Dickens bookshop and the local newspaper The Molong Express. "It will take a lot to bring them back."

Donato, a popular Orange police prosecutor, beat the Nationals candidate Scott Barrett 18,593 votes to 18,543 on preferences.

"The 50 votes that handed Phil victory came from right here in Molong," says Marj Bollinger, who owns a cattle and sheep property at Gumble about 20 kilometres outside town. "Mr Baird and the Nationals should think about that." She has been leading the charge to save Cabonne. She knows the power of vested interests, that Barnaby Joyce personally intervened to save his family's local Walcha Council in New England from amalgamation and has not lifted a finger to stop Baird's hard charge. Since May last year, she has issued 46 media releases opposing amalgamation and each sought a meeting with Baird.

"Every request was ignored," she says. "It's not only rude but arrogant. In country NSW, councils are the life and soul of a community. They provide jobs, keep young people in small communities, give locals access to people in authority.

"In the city, councils are for developers who want to take something from their community. In the country, councils give something to their communities. Mr Baird does not understand that. The Nationals are paying the cost of his failure. And unless they do something quick across NSW, Barnaby Joyce will also pay."

At Spring Hill, about 20 kilometres south of Orange, Greg Board houses 170 greyhounds. A bull rider in younger days, the 65-year-old runs a concrete business with his sons but regards his dogs "as my superannuation".

"Baird with the support of the Nationals listens to what the ABC says [about the alleged cruelty within the greyhound industry] and plays to city voters. Thanks to them, I don't know what lies ahead. If a bunch of blokes are drinking in a pub and one of them drives off and is done for drunk-driving, you don't come back to the pub and charge the other blokes," Board says. "But that's what Baird did with the greyhound industry.

"Everyone knows somebody with a dog here. There are old blokes with a couple of animals and they're the only reason they get out of bed of a morning. Baird doesn't understand that. He's a fool, wrote the National Party's suicide note in Orange."

Barnaby Joyce was upbeat when he claimed victory in his seat of New England on a chilly federal election night at West Tamworth League Club. Unlike the Liberals, it was clear the Nationals had held their own.

Joyce told his rowdy supporters it was "brilliant victory" for the party. He saw off Tony Windsor and the Nationals picked up the Victorian electorate of Murray from the Liberals, giving the party an expanded role in the Turnbull government ministry.

But just four months later, Orange voters rebelled. There were inevitable comparisons with the shock result in America's presidential election held a few days earlier. Was there a "Trump" or "Brexit" effect at work here too?

Ariadne Vromen, Professor of Political Sociology at Sydney University, cautions against reading too much into the result of a single byelection. "You see unexpected results happen in byelections all the time," she said.

Even so, the Orange byelection exposed seething voter discontent.

While the Nationals were able to defend their seats in the federal election in July there were clear signs of dissatisfaction. One Nation picked up a Senate seat in NSW and polled strongly in some National Party electorates. One in every 10 Senate votes cast in the vast far-western NSW seat of Parkes went to Hanson's resurgent political movement. In the federal electorate of Calare – which takes in the state electorate of Orange – and Joyce's seat of New England, One Nation snared more than 7 per cent of the Senate vote. Just to the north of Joyce's seat, in the Queensland electorate of Wright, the One Nation candidate for the lower house, Rod Smith, won 21 per cent of first preferences.

A striking backdrop to these electoral trends is the growing economic and demographic differences between Sydney and other parts of NSW. Analysis by Terry Rawnsley, an expert in regional economics, showed growth in Sydney was motoring along at 3 per cent in 2014-15 compared with just 0.6 per cent for the rest of NSW.

A "hunk" of regional areas were actually going backwards.

The divergent economic performance of city and country has now shown up in Rawnsley's figures for about five years.

"It's hard find somewhere outside of Sydney that is doing well," he says. "It is pretty grim for a range of reasons and people are really starting to notice."

Analysis of regional unemployment data published by CommSec on Thursday showed the average jobless rate in New England and north-western NSW in the year to October was 8 per cent, the highest in the state. That compared with just 2.9 per cent in Sydney's eastern suburbs and 3 per cent on the Northern beaches.

Rawnsley points out that manufacturing was once a significant employer in parts of regional NSW and Victoria. But over the past two decades much of it has disappeared "with little to replace it".

Manufacturing has also shrunk in Sydney and Melbourne but a swag of alternative jobs have been created to compensate, especially in knowledge-based services.

"In [the Orange byelection] things like greyhounds and council amalgamations had a role to play but people were probably also sending a message that they are doing it tough," says Rawnsley. "They can't put together the narrative from prime ministers and premiers with their everyday experience and that's why they are turning to the Donald Trumps and One Nations of this world."

For many regional voters there's a disconnection between the national political narrative – which suggests the economy is performing fairly well – and the local reality.

"People can't quite put together the 'jobs and growth mantra' that they hear from politicians with what's happening locally," says Rawnsley. "There's been a loss of faith in the elites."

While economic conditions help explain the disaffection with major parties in parts of regional NSW, cultural and demographic differences are also at play.

The strength of Sydney's economy isn't the only thing that sets it apart. The city's population profile is also conspicuously different to most other parts of the state.

Ben Phillips, from the Australian National University's Centre for Research and Methods, compared demographic data for the state electorate of Orange to both Greater Sydney and the inner-city electorate of Sydney.

"Sydney and particularly inner-Sydney is younger, better educated, better paid, less likely to be born in Australia and more likely to be in a professional occupation when compared to Orange," he said.

Dr Phillips' analysis showed Orange's median age, of 38, was six years higher than inner Sydney's and its proportion of over 65s almost double (15.8 per cent compared to 8.3 per cent). Educational attainment is another striking country-city divide. Nearly 40 per cent of those in inner-Sydney have a university degree compared with 9.7 per cent in Orange (in Greater Sydney the share was 19.5 per cent). The residents of Orange are much more likely to be born in Australia - 86.4 per cent compared to 59.9 per cent in Greater Sydney and just 31.9 per cent in inner-Sydney.

In recent weeks the media and Parliament have had great sport observing One Nation's erstwhile new WA senator Rod Culleton play the fool. Culleton might be reminiscent of Hanson's collection of 11 Brown's cows MPs in the Queensland Parliament of the late 1990s who petulantly imploded in a mess of internecine brawls, bruised egos and resignations. But whatever mainstream media and politics think of the Culleton imbroglio, behind the scenes the party has moved quickly to capitalise on their leader's surprise renaissance.

Liberal senator George Brandis' observation that his Liberal National Party colleagues in Queensland are "very, very mediocre" has exposed the panic that One Nation is starting to cause in the Coalition. The Nationals have closed ranks.

On November 17, with the outcome in Orange unclear, Ron Boswell, the leader of the National Party in the Senate in the late 1990s, told Fairfax Media that Hansonism had changed: "This time, she's far more formidable. Her MPs back then were amateur, ill-disciplined, a rabble."

The architect of a hard-headed campaign conducted with Tony Abbott that, together with an electoral redistribution, banished Hanson to 18 years of political oblivion, Boswell had been confident the Nationals would retain Orange on absentee votes but by Thursday he had gone to ground and would say nothing on the record.

Sitting in the patio of his home in the old Hunter Valley coal mining village of Heddon Greta, Graham Burston smiled when Boswell's name was mentioned.

"They should be worried. We've got 60 candidates, quality candidates this time, lined up to contest Queensland seats," Burston says. "We'll take support from Labor but it will be the Nationals who will pay the greatest price. This is what happens when you lose touch and stop representing and reflecting the desires of the people who elected you."

The Burston brothers stayed loyal to Hanson throughout her years in the wilderness. Senator Burston was responsible for her decision to reattach her name to One Nation and is a valued counsellor seen steadfastly in the background on most of her television news clips.

Graham Burston stood for One Nation in the federal seat of Paterson last July. He attracted 13 per cent of the total vote but polled 25 per cent in some booths around Salt Ash, where ongoing fears about contamination from the nearby RAAF base continue to be fobbed off.

"People like to think One Nation support is strongest among older Australians but I failed to get strong vote around Port Stephens [where Pauline Hanson has been living on and off in recent years]. Here in the Hunter, the miners are worried about the future with more projects under jeopardy from proponents of climate change, and they know the major parties are prepared to ignore their fears to protect votes in the cities," he says.