one nation

Preference Flows at the Secret Harbour By-Election

Update after full distribution of preferences published: The Liberal Party polled 4,777 votes. During the distribution of preferences, its tally rose to 6,018 votes. When excluded, 3,549 votes transferred to One Nation. That means it is mathematically impossible for Liberal preferences to flow to One Nation at a rate higher than 74.3%. (3549/4777).

My original estimate based on flow data counted out for the Early Voting Centre was that 70.2% of Liberal preferences flowed to One Nation. While I cannot update that number from the distribution of preferences, the lower Liberal vote on polling day suggests to me the % flow of Liberal preferences to One Nation is under 70%.

A quick break from my holiday to deal with some nonsense claims made about preference flows at the Secret Harbour by-election.

In this YouTube video, Topher Field uses some weird maths to come to the conclusion that the Secret Harbour by-election saw a record flow of Liberal and right-wing candidate preference flows to One Nation.

It is a bit hard to be clear what he is saying, but I think he comes to the conclusion that once you exclude left-wing parties from the calculations, 88% of preferences from right parties, including the Liberal Party, flowed to One Nation.

This claim is rubbish and preference flow data released by the WA Electoral Commission shows that claim to be wrong.
Read More »Preference Flows at the Secret Harbour By-Election

One Nation and its Elected MPs

Since One Nation’s breakthrough at the 1998 Queensland election, the party has had a mixed record of maintaining parliamentary beachheads.

By half way through its first term in the Queensland Parliament, the party had lost all its elected members. There were numerous disputes between Pauline Hanson, her close party confidants and the elected members. It was not helped the legal action that led to the parties de-registration.

In the party’s first decade, there were 20 elected or appointed One Nation members of parliament. Seventeen split from the party, one was defeated, one disqualified and only one re-elected.

After Hanson’s departure in the early 2000s, the party became largely irrelevant. That changed when Hanson returned to the fold in 2013. The party elected its first new members of parliament at the 2016 Senate election and has reached new levels of success over the last year.

Since 2016, One Nation has had 31 members. 16 are current members, the party boosted by four new Federal members and seven members elected at the March 2026 South Australian election.

But until the last year, the pattern of losing elected members continued. Two members were re-elected but subsequently left the party with Mark Latham still in Parliament. Another eight left the party before facing election of whom three in addition to Latham remain in parliament. Four One Nation members were defeated while still in the party. One Senator resigned due to ill-health.

The party’s record of hanging on to members remains patchy, though surging opinion polls and the recent success of the party have certainly provided an incentive for elected members to stay with the party.

I’ve been keeping track of elected One Nation since that first election in 1998. When the party returned to the Senate in 2016 and began losing members to disqualification and resignation, I published a list of elected One Nation members and their fate in 2018.

When Pauline Hanson sacked the NSW Executive of One Nation and dismissed Mark Latham as the party’s NSW leader, I published a blog post on the party’s record of losing its parliamentary members.

I’ve been asked numerous times over the last year if I could update the list. I’ve finally done it and you can find all the details on the party’s 51 elected or appointed members of state and federal parliaments here.

Trying to pick apart whether members were expelled from the party or resigned can be a little difficult. I tend to use a generic ‘departed’ as the description to get around the participants in the departure having different views on what happened.

Inside the post I’ll publish the overall summary of representation from that document, but you can check the full detail using the above link.

And let me know if you spot any errors.
Read More »One Nation and its Elected MPs

2026 Victorian Election Pendulum

(Update – Three days after this post was published, Jacinta Allan was replaced as Premier by Ben Carroll. The post has been left as originally published.)

Victoria’s state election on 28 November will see voters pass judgment on Premier Jacinta Allen’s unpopular government and 12 years of Labor rule.

Most recent Victorian opinion polls reveal a three-way split of support between Labor, the Coalition and One Nation. Several have reported One Nation with the highest primary vote.

These are extra-ordinary polls in a state where two-party politics has traditionally been strongest and One Nation’s electoral support weakest.

One Nation’s poll ratings are also remarkable given the party has no state leader, no announced state policies, one upper house member and just one lower house candidate.

Were it not for other results this year, I would dismiss One Nation’s ratings as unlikely to hold until November, especially if it doesn’t hurry up and announce a leader.

But polls proved right in predicting One Nation would outpoll the Liberal Party at the South Australian election. The party polled well at the Nepean state by-election in May, and a week later matched expectations by easily winning the Farrer federal by-election.

If current polls prove correct, the result in November will have greater consequences for the course of national politics than any state election in my lifetime.

Australia’s two-sided party system has been around for more than a century. The two major parties have always clustered left and right of the centre. Smaller parties have come and gone, the most significant until now being the Greens who have staked out a significant base to the left of Labor.

Other prominent minor parties, like the DLP and Australian Democrats, lasted two decades and never built a base that could transmit loyalties to another generation. In retrospect, both were parties of transition, pathways for voters to change major party loyalty.

Until now, no new political entrant has threatened the foundations on which Australia’s two-party system is built. But the surge in One Nation support suggests the Coalition is in danger of being supplanted as Labor’s major opponent.

Is the Coalition about to fade away and be replaced by One Nation? Or will the Coalition and One Nation grow closer together and a new type of coalition emerge on the right?

It may sound odd to predict problems for the federal Coalition when it is a deeply unpopular Labor state government facing defeat in Victoria.

But if the Liberal-National Coalition cannot capitalise on Labor’s woes by winning majority government in Victoria, if it is forced into some governing arrangement with One Nation in a state where the party has previously barely rated, then there are consequences across the country.

It raises serious question about the Coalition’s future in states where One Nation has a stronger base. First cab off the rank will be the NSW election next March where optional preferential voting will magnify splits between the Coalition and One Nation.

Under optional preferential voting, parties can’t rely on voters to complete preference sequences. Especially if NSW Labor fills the airwaves with “Just Vote 1” messages. Many Coalition and One Nation voters will exhaust preferences and help deliver a comfortable majority to the Minns Labor government.

One Nation capturing the balance of power in Victoria will force some form of governing arrangement on the Liberal Party and (whatever remains of) the National Party. For the first time One Nation would have a say on who governs a state and how.

To date One Nation has been a powerless crossbench upper house party that chucks metaphorical rocks at government. It will need to learn new ways to behave if the election result draws it closer to the levers of government. Chucking rocks becomes a dangerous pastime from inside the glasshouse of government.

Plus One Nation has a terrible record of keeping its elected members within the party. If instability were to strike while One Nation filled a starring or support role in Victorian government, every failing of the party would be highlighted across the nation by its political opponents.

I’ve seen the pressure of governing splinter third parties before. At the 1996 New Zealand election, a similar populist party to One Nation, Winston Peters’ New Zealand First, won the balance of power. After weeks of negotiation, the party joined with National to form government. Over the next three years New Zealand First splintered, popular slogans mugged by the reality of governing. Its more sensible members were lured away by its coalition partner, the less sensible ostracised.

If the polls prove right, converting a three-way split of primary votes into seats in parliament has a range of possible outcomes. Some could produce a majority Coalition government. If not a majority, the question will be how far short of majority the Coalition finishes and whether a government supported by One Nation is possible.Read More »2026 Victorian Election Pendulum

Farrer By-election post-mortem – Where to now for the Coalition?

There are lessons to be drawn for current politics from One Nation’s second Queensland election in 2001. A collapsing Labor government called a snap election and played the instability card. Labor’s campaign included a memorable ad (inside this post) comparing Pauline Hanson to a back seat driver interfering with a Coalition government. Labor was re-elected in a landslide, even sweeping Gold and Sunshine Coast seats for the first time.

Saturday’s Farrer by-election has revealed the scale of the threat One Nation poses to the electoral prospects of the Liberal and National Parties.

One Nation polled just short of 40% of the primary vote. At 12.4% the Liberal Party lost three-quarters of its vote from last year’s election. The Nationals polled only 9.7% of the primary vote and struggled to reach 15% at the western end of the electorate where it has traditionally dominated. All this in a seat that for eight decades has been one of the Coalition’s safest.

Labor chose not to contest the by-election which might have disappointed local party members and supporters. It was an easy decision to make given Labor hasn’t passed 20% in the seat for a decade, or reached 30% for three decades. Labor’s absence left the seat open for the slim chances of Independent Michelle Milthorpe.

But the main advantage for Labor is the by-election left no measure of One Nation’s impact on Labor’s vote. It is the Liberals and Nationals left picking through the wreckage of Saturday night’s result.

Farrer has given us a true measure of One Nation’s support. But it creates a series of new questions on how the Liberal Party, National Party and One Nation will engage with each other in the run-up to the next Federal election.

If repeated elsewhere, the Farrer result will come close to destroying the National Party and reduce its representation in the House of Representatives to a rump. The same existential threat applies to rural and regional Liberals.

We know that One Nation has always polled more strongly in rural and regional seats than in city seats. Last month’s South Australian election provided hints that One Nation could be a threat to Labor in some city seats.

But where One Nation is an electoral threat to Labor, it is an existential threat to the Liberal and National Parties. One Nation is a threat to their relevance, their chances of ever governing again, and to their continuing existence.

Labor’s current strength in the House of Representatives is from crushing the Liberal Party in urban seats over two Federal elections. The Liberal position was made even worse with the loss of previously safe seats to Independents.

Defeating Labor at the next election will not be achieved in rural seats like Farrer. It will be determined by whether the Liberal Party and One Nation can capture Labor seats in metropolitan areas.

Will the Liberal Party and One Nation co-operate to do this? Will they come to a non-compete arrangement as currently exists between the Liberals and Nationals? Will they swap preference recommendations, either by agreement or by disagreement but shared self interest?

In the last couple of weeks I’ve written several posts comparing One Nation performance at the 1998 Queensland election with recent results for the South Australian election, the Nepean by-election in Victoria last weekend, and now the Farrer result.

Post-Farrer, and looking towards the 2028 Federal election campaign, I’m moving forward three years to look at One Nation’s impact on the 2001 Queensland election.

In late 2000, the scandal-plagued Beattie Labor government adjourned parliament to avoid relying on the votes of Labor members expelled over various scandals. Beattie called a snap election for February 2001, and instead of being brought down by the scandals, achieved one of Queensland Labor’s biggest victories.

And in the week before election day, Labor released a campaign ad it called “Who’s driving”. I’ve included the ad inside this post. It played on the campaign chaos of the non-Labor parties and helped deliver the first Beattie landslide.

I would not be surprised if the message of this 2001 ad is replicated by Federal Labor over the next two years.Read More »Farrer By-election post-mortem – Where to now for the Coalition?

SA2026 – Some Early Observations on the Result

(UPDATE: I’ve started doing rolling updates of the overall figures that you can find in this post. For more details figures on each seat and regular updates my suggestion is use the ABC election site which will update results every time the Electoral Commission produces new data. I’m doing work on the site weeding out inconsistencies in the Electoral Commission’s data.)

The scale of the Liberal Party’s disastrous result at Saturday’s South Australian election is hard to comprehend for anyone with a background in Australian political history.

Australia has had a stable dominant two party system for eight decades since the formation of the Liberal Party in the 1940s. On one side of politics is the Labor Party, on the other the Liberal-National Coalition in Canberra, or the Liberal Party on its own in South Australia.

For one of Australia’s two major parties, the South Australian Liberal Party, to perform so badly is a political earthquake. The Liberal Party has been beaten into third place with just 19.0% of the first preference vote. (As of Monday afternoon with 65.0% of the first preference vote counted.)

The eight decade old Liberal Party has been outpolled by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, a party that has only twice reached double figures at a state election, both of those occurring in its home state Queensland.

In this post I’m going to run through some of the more startling statistics of the election. Most are good news for One Nation and bad news for the Liberal Party. The numbers also include warnings for the Labor Party.
Read More »SA2026 – Some Early Observations on the Result

2026 South Australian Election Preview

The Labor Party is set for a landslide victory at this weekend’s South Australian election. Yet despite its forgone result, the election is set to dominate national political debate in its aftermath. Not because of who will win, but rather over who will finish second.

The Labor government of Peter Malinauskas was first elected in 2022, winning a sweeping victory that added Steven Marshall to the list of his state’s one term Liberal Premiers.

Since coming to office, Malinauskas has dominated opinion polls and his Liberal opponents. Steven Marshall retired the leadership after the 2022 election. David Spiers and Vincent Tarzia have come and gone. Now it is Ashton Hurn, just 35, female and a first term MP, who has been left with under than 100 days to restore her party’s fortunes.

Hurn has taken over a Liberal opposition that has trailed Labor in the polls for four years. Labor has gained the seats of Hurn’s predecessors Steven Marshall and David Spiers at by-elections. It is less than a year since the Federal election when Labor swept every seat in metropolitan Adelaide.

And the federal situation has worsened since. Nationally the Coalition is stalked by the spectre of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Hanson’s party has undergone a massive revival as cost-of-living pressure has grown and the Coalition has descended into fratricide and internal division.

National polling has shown One Nation matching and even outpolling the Coalition. As the first quarter of 2026 has passed, even federal Labor’s primary vote has begun to slip with the rise One Nation.

South Australian polls have not shown a similar decline in Labor support, but they have replicated the shift from the Liberal Party to One Nation. With final polls agreeing that One Nation is now polling second, the question is – who will finish second on election day?

To date all we have is opinion polls. Are the polls measuring disenchantment or voting intention? Saturday’s South Australian election may finally tell us whether One Nation’s rise is real.

So dominant is state Labor that perhaps the election is not a true test of the national mood. But it is a measure of whether the polls are right.

If One Nation finishes second in the vote, and Liberal support follows the polls and drops below 20%, then the feverish spiral of recent Coalition politics may worsen.

Are voters going to turn out and vote for One Nation in numbers not seen since One Nation’s first electoral test at the 1998 Queensland election? And will this turn into seats?

Labor is expected to dominate Adelaide, but will we see One Nation poll strongly in the city’s north where Labor’s safest seats lie. Thirty three of the state’s 47 seats are in the metropolitan area. For One Nation to poll above 20% state-wide, it must poll strongly in Adelaide even if the result sees more second places than seat wins.

The collapse in Liberal support will see the party lose further seats to Labor with another metropolitan wipe-out possible. The One Nation threat will be greatest in rural seats where the Liberal Party is already challenged by Independents. Will One Nation further damage Liberal prospects?

And if One Nation matches its polling numbers, can its vote be turned into seats?Read More »2026 South Australian Election Preview

SA2026 – One Nation polling and its prospects of winning seats

The last few weeks have seen an opinion poll surge in support for One Nation at the expense of the Liberal Party.

Clearly opinion polls are measuring a real political phenomena with dramatic shifts in support on the right of Australian politics.

The question is, are the polling numbers reporting actual voting intentions, or is it just measuring between election disenchantment with the current course of politics?

We may be about to find an answer to this question with something better than an opinion poll – an actual election in South Australia on 21 March.

The working assumption for most of the last four years has been that the Labor government, led by popular Premier Peter Malinauskas, will be easily re-elected. Labor won 27 of 47 seats in 2022, has gained two more seats at by-elections since, and opinion polls have consistently shown Labor’s support higher than at the last election.

Which means that the story attracting most attention on 21 March might be the fate of the Liberal Opposition, and what a dreadful result means for the Federal Coalition.

The Liberal Party’s dreadful result in South Australia at last May’s Federal election, wiped out in all metropolitan seats, could portend an even worse fate at the state election. Recent polling has the Liberal primary vote collapsing and a surge in One Nation support. (See my previous post of the 2025 Federal result in South Australia.)

In this post I run through detail on how One Nation performed in South Australian federal seats in 2025, and in the Senate. I also look at the party’s performance in state seats at the 2022 election, including voting for the Legislative Council.

(See my previous post on the 2022 South Australian election which includes link to my publication summarising the result in both houses and including detailed analysis of lower house preference flows.)

In this post I also analyse One Nation preference flows at the 2025 Federal and 2022 state election. In complex three and four candidate contests, the order of candidate exclusion and complex preference flows could be critical.

I then run through some of the key contests at the election. In short polling says Labor will retain all its own seats and most likely make gains at the Liberal Party’s expense, possibly winning every seat in the Adelaide metropolitan area.

Which leaves how the contest will unfold in rural South Australia. Polling shows One Nation support surging at the expense of the Liberal Party and Independents. I have my suspicions that state-wide polling based on party vote overlooks that most regional SA seats will be contested by popular Independent members and candidates. I suspect some of the reported One Nation support will in fact be swept up by Independents.

Which is not to say the SA election on 21 March will prove the polls right or wrong. The polls are measuring disenchantment with politics, but perhaps are not capable of isolating the candidates that will benefit from a shifting voter mood.

For all the talk of whether there will by a preference arrangement, formal or otherwise, between Liberal and One Nation and against Labor, the presence of Independents creates more than simple binary preference contests. Options for voters to preference Independents ahead of the major parties and One Nation complicates the picture in regional seats and makes order of exclusion for preferences a complicating factor in turning party vote shares into elected members. Read More »SA2026 – One Nation polling and its prospects of winning seats

The Success of Local Independents – Kooyong

A key story of the last three federal elections has been the Liberal Party’s loss of once safe heartland seats to ‘teal’ Independents.

The list is a catalogue of seats once held by Prime Ministers and senior Liberal Ministers. In NSW there’s Wentworth, North Sydney (now abolished), Warringah, Mackellar and Bradfield. In Victoria it’s Goldstein (recovered in 2025) and Kooyong, and in Western Australia, Curtin.

These electorates top lists of the most affluent in the country. They encompass some of the most desirable and expensive real estate in each state. As recently as a decade ago, it was unthinkable they could leave the Liberal fold.

There are no Queensland or South Australian seats in the above list, but two could be. The Adelaide Hills seat of Mayo, held by Rebekha Sharkie since 2016, is effectively an independent as the only member of the Centre Alliance. Ryan, Brisbane’s leafiest and once safest Liberal seat, has been held by the Greens since 2022.

As well as being Liberal Party losses, these seats have seen a dramatic decline in their Liberal two-party preferred margins based on alternative preference counts versus Labor.

Indeed, Wentworth, Warringah, Ryan and Mayo recorded Labor two-party preferred majorities by alternative counts in 2025. Had a full two-party preferred count been completed in Bradfield, this once safest of safe Liberal seats could also have turned red.

The paradox is that Labor is achieving record two-party preferred results in these seats despite the party’s primary vote collapsing. The decline in Liberal two-party preferred results in these seats says more about Liberal support in its once safe seats than it says about Labor prospects.

Support for both sides of politics has declined since the high point of two-party politics in 1975. The decline has accelerated in the last two decades. Labor’s support is down sharply from its 2007 victory under Kevin Rudd. The Coalition’s collapse is an even steeper decline from a higher starting point at the 2013 election.

The loss for Labor has been in large part matched by rising support for the Greens. Much of Labor’s fall has also been in seats it doesn’t win, such as rural seats and Coalition seats contested by high profile Independents. This causes Labor’s loss of primary vote to have less impact on the number of seats it wins.

For the Coalition, and more particularly the Liberal Party, the destination of lost primary votes is less obvious. The Liberal Party has lost some support to Labor and to several conservative minor parties. But it is the loss of support in a limited number of seats to ‘teal’ and other centrist Independents that has damaged the Liberal Party by costing it once safe seats.

In this post I’m going to look at the loss of Liberal vote to the centre, to urban Independents. To illustrate the trend, I’m going to analyse one ‘teal’ seat in depth, the inner Melbourne seat of Kooyong.
Read More »The Success of Local Independents – Kooyong

One Nation’s Poll Surge – the first 25 seats to watch

With One Nation surging in the polls, the obvious question is – which seats can the party win.

The first cabs off the rank would be the seats where One Nation polled strongest in 2025.

There were only two seats where One Nation reached the final pairing of candidates after preferences, the Labor seat of Hunter in NSW, and Maranoa in Queensland held by National Party Leader David Littleproud.

In both seats the One Nation candidate finished third on first preferences but reached second place through preferences flowing from other right-of-centre parties. These included Family First, Trumpet of Patriots, Libertarians, Shooters Fishers and Farmers and Gerard Rennick’s People First.

Including Hunter and Maranoa, there were 26 seats overall where One Nation was one of the final three candidates during the distribution of preferences. This point of the count is commonly called the three-candidate preferred count (3CP).

Of these, 25 were Labor-Coalition-One Nation contests. A 26th seat was Indi, held by Independent Helen Haines. I’ve left Indi out of the analysis that follows as I would expect Haines to do well with preference flows from all other candidates in a contest versus One Nation.

There are many other seats beyond these 25 where One Nation’s poll surge will put the party into the three-candidate count. And some of these may be more winnable than those I list inside the post. In some of the seats I list, Burt being a good example, it may not be possible for One Nation to win given how strong Labor’s primary vote was in 2025.

Of the 25 seats I list, 12 are in Queensland, six in New South Wales, three in Victoria, two in WA and one each in South Australia and Tasmania.

Splitting the LNP into Liberal and National holdings, 12 of the seats are National held, seven Liberal held, and six held by Labor.

Two-thirds of the seats are outside the capital cities, the rest generally in outer parts of capitals.

The table is inside the post.
Read More »One Nation’s Poll Surge – the first 25 seats to watch