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.
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