Liberal, National and One Nation – Friends, Enemies or Frenemies?

Current opinion polling may have One Nation leading the (former) Coalition parties on primary votes, but a strong non-Labor vote may not deliver victory if split across three parties. Achieving victory also requires voters for the three parties to be disciplined and deliver a tight exchange of preferences.

Polls indicate One Nation has attracted some Labor voters, but the party’s surge is largely at the expense of the Liberal and National Parties. One Nation’s rise is a re-arrangement of support amongst parties of the right, not necessarily a shift in the centre ground of Australian politics.

Last week I explained that if One Nation is polling 22% nationwide, its vote will be above 35% in some rural and provincial seats. With such high polling, One Nation is well placed to win some seats, and based on past results, mostly at the expense of the National Party.

But for One Nation to win seats, it will require good flows of preferences in seats where the party outpolls Liberal and National candidates. And equally, Liberal and National candidates will need good flows of One Nation preferences to defeat Labor in other seats. And in many rural seats, it will be Labor preferences that decide whether Liberal, National and One Nation candidates are elected.

After One Nation’s dramatic entry to politics at the 1998 Queensland election, the Liberal and National parties joined Labor in building a cordon sanitaire around One Nation ahead of the 1998 Federal election. The three parties put One Nation last on how-to-votes, limiting the new party to a single Senate seat and preventing Pauline Hanson winning Blair, the seat she contested at the 1998 Federal election.

Labor and the Coalition continued to recommend preferences for each other ahead of One Nation until the arrangement broke down for the 2017 WA and Queensland state elections. Some preference recommendation ‘deals’ began to appear at the 2022 Federal election. They became more common in 2025 as the Coalition needed and negotiated with One Nation over how-to-vote preference recommendations. It didn’t prevent the Coalition’s disastrous defeat.

Now with One Nation polling strongly, it would be politically brave for the Liberal and National parties to refuse a preference arrangement with One Nation. Three state elections in SA, Victoria and NSW over the next year may be testing grounds for the next Federal election.

But preference negotiations are only about arranging what is printed on how-to-vote material. As I have demonstrated numerous times on this blog, voters do not simply copy how-to-vote recommendations. How-to-votes have an influence, but all evidence points to voters making up their own minds. Especially minor party and independent voters.

I believe the Liberal and National Parties will return to Coalition before the next election. But the bitterness of the last few weeks may mean it is some time before the reformation, and probably won’t happen until both parties have changed leader.

After that the Coalition and One Nation will have to navigate the minefield of treating each other as political enemies, not worthy of a first preference vote, but friendly enough to deserve preferences ahead of Labor.

Not friends, not enemies, but frenemies. Politically acceptable as a preferences destination despite dislike and rivalry.

What the Coalition and One Nation parties need is a relationship like that between Labor and the Greens. The two left of centre parties engage in bitter local contests, but deliver strong preference flows despite their campaigns.

As I outlined in a previous post, Greens preferences to Labor have risen election after election and passed 88% in 2025. We have fewer examples of Labor preferences being distributed, but in six contests since 2016, 82.2% of Labor preferences have flowed to the Greens. (The seats were Higgins 2016, Kooyong 2019, Brisbane, Griffith and Ryan 2022, and Ryan 2025.)

In Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s seat of Grayndler at the 2025 election, an almost unheard of 96.0% of Greens preferences flowed to Labor. In Melbourne where Labor defeated Greens Leader Adam Bandt, 95.3% of Greens preferences flowed to Labor. In Griffith where Labor defeated Max Chandler-Mather, 92.8% of Greens preferences flowed to Labor.

These are astonishing flows between competing parties and stronger than the Liberals and Nationals can deliver to each other in three-cornered contests after a century of being in Coalition.

In an era when combined support for Labor and the Coalition has plunged to record lows, it is increasingly preferences that tip the balance on who wins.

While elections are determined by results in individual seats rather than the national vote, the chart below of 2025 two-party preferred vote by source shows how the Coalition lagged not only on first preference votes in 2025, but also lost badly on prefererence flows.

The chart shows how strong flows of preferences between Labor and the Greens coalesced the two party’s vote into an even stronger lead over the Coalition.

Labor received 88% of the preference from the Greens 12.2% vote, and 65% from the 9.9% with Independents and other minor parties. From a pool of 11.6% for One Nation and other small right-wing parties, the Coalition received 71% of preferences, lower than Labor received from the Greens.

With One Nation eating away at primary vote for the Liberal and National parties, all hopes for victory by the right of politics at the next election demand stronger preferences flows. And it will also require strong flows of Coalition preferences to One Nation in seats where the party has the highest vote.

At the 2025 election, preference flows from One Nation to the Coalition rose to 74.5%, the highest yet recorded. That matches the 74.3% flow from One Nation to the LNP at the November 2024 Queensland election.

Evidence on how Coalition preferences might flow to One Nation is thinner on the ground. Examining the entrails of preference counts at the 2017 and 2020 Queensland state elections indicate that around 75% of LNP preferences flow to One Nation.

But rather than clog up this post with endless preference statistics, I’ll publish a dissection of preference flows in a separate post.