Australia's bulwark against populism is cracking

Right-wing populism finally registers at the federal ballot box with One Nation win, collapsing Coalition takes notes

One Nation MP David Farley (left) and party leader Pauline Hanson (right) celebrate victory in the Farrer by-election. (AAP: Bianca de Marchi)

The right-wing populist wave that broke over much of the democratic world with Brexit and the first Trump presidency in 2016 barely lapped at Australia’s shores. The island nation’s compulsory, preferential voting system and homogeneous, middle-management style politics formed a bulwark against the global tide. Now, that bulwark is starting to crack.

Over the weekend, the populist-right One Nation Party won its first seat in the federal House of Representatives in the Farrer by-election, ending nearly 80 years of unbroken Liberal–National rule in the southern New South Wales electorate.

One Nation’s David Farley took 39.45 percent of the primary vote, and 57.4 percent on a two-party preferred basis. Climate 200-backed independent Michelle Milthorpe took 28.4 percent, while the conservative Coalition parties, Liberals and Nationals, finished third and fourth with 12.4 percent and 9.7 percent, respectively. Labor did not contest the seat.

The federal win follows victory for One Nation in South Australia, with the minor party going from zero to seven seats; four in the lower house and three in the upper house.

It’s a stunning double act from a party that previously only held a small presence in the federal senate and a smattering of state seats, signalling that One Nation now poses a genuine electoral threat to the collapsing Coalition.

The Coalition has already taken notes from the Farrer beating, with shadow treasurer Tim Wilson talking tough on One Nation’s pet issue of immigration in the past few days.

One Nation’s changing fortunes

For nearly 30 years, One Nation has been a ‘cult of personality’ party, its wins and woes mostly driven by surges and dips in the fortunes of its abrasive but ‘fair dinkum’ founder and current leader Pauline Hanson, whose previous life as a fish and chip shop owner and tendency to stumble over her words provides salt-of-the-earth credentials.¹

During the 2016 populist wave, the ‘common sense’ party secured four federal senate seats, its most impressive sweep to that point in time, but it was not able to break past that ceiling.

A few things changed that. After the Liberals suffered a humiliating election defeat in 2025, wealthy Australians started shifting their support from the Coalition to One Nation.

Supporters include Australia’s richest woman, billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart, and Sydney stockbroker Angus Aitken, who told Radio New Zealand last week,

"The biggest change I reckon you'll see in the next 12 to 18 months is the groundswell of business and wealthy people supporting One Nation who have been frustrated with the Coalition.

"People are just sick of all the red tape and shit across their individual segments of business. They think this is the person and the party that's going to cut through some of that.”

In December last year, former leader of the Nationals and deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce defected to One Nation, gifting the party its first federal lower house seat and lending it the gravitas of a seasoned politician who has been in government.

Federal MP Barnaby Joyce defected from the Nationals to One Nation in December 2025.

Joyce cited concerns over the pursuit of renewable energy and Australia's immigration policies as reasons for joining the party, giving voice to conservative voters who were no longer seeing their politics represented by the ‘Labor-lite’ Coalition.

One Nation wants to significantly reduce immigration and scrap net zero, which the party says is “destroying Australia” and is “pseudo-speak for global wealth transfer.”² Comparatively, the Coalition proposes moderate immigration reform and only formally abandoned net zero late last year, too little too late for many conservative voters.

Critics have also derided the Coalition for partnering with Labor in enacting some of the most draconian pandemic measures in the Western world, and for supporting rushed hate speech legislation in the wake of the Bondi massacre of 15 people at a Jewish holiday celebration in December.

Then in January of this year, polling revealed that One Nation had pulled ahead of the collapsing Coalition in the primary vote for the first time ever, at 22 percent compared to the Liberals’ 21 percent. Liberal leader Sussan Ley resigned, triggering the Farrer by-election and leading to One Nation’s first lower house win.

Anti-majors sentiment has bubbled for several election cycles now, but had failed to convert at the ballot box for three main reasons.

The first is Australia’s two-party preferred system. An alternative party has to consolidate a fair whack of the primary vote to benefit from preferences waterfalling to them. Otherwise, preferences go to the majors.

That’s why Labor was able to win a ‘landslide’ election victory in 2025 despite being led by a weak tea bag, taking two thirds of lower house seats with only a third (34.5 percent) of the primary vote. The election before that, in 2022, Labor won with the lowest primary in almost a century, at 32.6 percent.

Labor election results in the UK, Australia and New Zealand show that in a two-party preferred or first-past-the-post system, the winning party can take far more seats than is representative of its popularity. Source: The Australia Institute.

Campaigns like ‘Put the Majors Last’, hoping to alchemise Covid-era discontent into political change, achieved very little when it came to ballots cast, despite idealistic content telling voters they could eject majors by preference-funnelling alone.

Outside of the Greens (Labor’s most reliable voting partner) and the Teal independents, in recent history small alternative parties have only managed to capture a few percent of the vote, with One Nation pulling five percent in 2022 and 6.4 percent in 2022.

It was astonishing, then, when One Nation garnered 22.9 percent of the primary vote in the recent South Australian election, and 39.45 percent in Farrer. If One Nation continues to pull a quarter of the primary vote or more, it will become a real threat to the majors, especially the Coalition.

The second reason is the lack of a viable, stable alternative. On the left, the Greens typically secure around 12 percent of the vote and have enough representation in both houses to make a reliable bargaining partner for Labor.

In the centre, the Climate 200-backed Teals upset the applecart in the past two federal elections, gutting the Coalition’s urban, affluent base with approximately 10 seats held, mostly in the lower house. But as the socially liberal and fiscally conservative Teals are nominally independents and not a formal party, their collective impact is to undermine the Coalition.

On the right, the alternative political scene is reactionary, fragmented and under-funded. Serious alternatives, like the Libertarians or Gerard Rennick’s People First Party, get almost no cut-through in the media and have no track record in government.

One Nation typically attracts more votes than the other small right-wing parties, but as mentioned above, with only five to seven percent of the vote, it has been unable to break through.

The landslide Farrer victory consolidating high-profile donor support and the Joyce defection is being taken by some commentators to signal that One Nation is emerging as a viable right-wing option for co-governance in a conservative government.

Third, dirty tricks. The majors and their mates use all manner of tactics to suffocate the smaller parties, sometimes resorting to underhanded measures.

Former Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbot played a key role in the legal pursuit of Hanson for electoral fraud, establishing the Australians for Honest Politics Trust to help bankroll civil court cases against the One Nation Party and Hanson herself. Hanson was convicted of electoral fraud, spending eleven weeks in prison before the conviction was overturned.

In another high-profile case, ‘preference whisperer’ Glen Duery was secretly filmed admitting to setting up a fake Sack Dan Andrews party to split the alternative party vote and bolster the incumbent Dan Andrews Labor Government.

And in a move that appeared to be a bad-faith effort to strike out competition from small parties, Labor and the Coalition passed laws in August 2021 that tripled the membership requirement for federal party registration from 500 to 1,500 members and made changes to party name rules. This came into effect just months before the May 2022 federal election, meaning small parties had to quickly triple their registrations and some had to change their names, causing confusion.

That One Nation have been hit with dirty tricks yet remain standing and surging in the polls speaks to their resilience, and Hanson’s in particular.

Despite the obstacles, the timing and conditions for One Nation’s rise are just right.

For the past forty or so years, Australians have been drifting away from the major parties in their allegiances, and they have become increasingly likely to switch teams if they feel another party has something better on offer.

In the 1950s through to the late eighties, the major parties typically attracted over 90 percent of the primary vote. By the 2025 federal election, just 66 percent of voters gave their first preference to Labor or the Coalition. Meanwhile, the share of Australians reporting no alignment with any political party has increased from 14 percent in 2010 to 25 percent in 2025.

This partisan dealignment has slowly eroded the majors’ primary votes, and the centre-right Coalition has been the first to crater. One Nation fills this vacuum, for now.

Institutional trust is also in decline. According to the TrustWatch report from April 2026, only 48 percent of Australians say they trust our national institutions, down from 55 percent last year. In such times, authenticity has caché, and for all its foibles, One Nation has plenty of authenticity. Notably, only 28 percent of One Nation supporters said they had institutional confidence.

Immigration is a pain point in Australia as it is in most Western democracies. The recent Islamic terror attack at Bondi has fuelled anti-Islam sentiment and renewed focus on immigration screening. One Nation has always had a strong position on immigration and keeping Islamic extremists out of the country, and they’re not afraid to say it.

During a cost of living crisis and housing shortage, the fact that One Nation eschews luxury belief politics for straight talk about the issues that economically vulnerable Australians care the most about is appealing.

One Nation has also proved adept at crafting campaigns for the social media era. Through a humorous South Park-style ‘Please Explain’ series — the title is borrowed from a 90s radio hit lampooning Hanson — an anti-woke film, and a pop song topping the Australian iTunes chart, the party has cultivated both viral momentum and a counter-cultural edge that is only amplified when opponents attempt to suppress it.

Looking ahead

Latest national polling has One Nation coming in with 24 percent of the primary vote, second only to Labor (30 percent), and ahead of the Coalition (21 percent).

Polls are one thing: the ballot box is another. The South Australian election in March and now the federal by-election over the weekend mark an upheaval in Australian politics as One Nation’s popularity in the polls translates to actual votes.

If this trend continues, pollsters predict that One Nation could win 12 seats at the next election, enough to become a genuine force in parliament.

On Monday, One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce said that’s exactly what the party intends. On his press rounds after the historic Farrer win, Joyce said the party will target the traditional Labor stronghold of western Sydney next and rejected the idea of a coalition with the Nationals and Liberals, stating that One Nation wants to “go for government.”

1. Hanson was expelled from the party in 2002 due to internal divisions and in 2003 spent 11 weeks in jail after being found guilty of election fraud. The judgement was overturned, and Hanson then ran in several state and federal elections as leader of the United Australia Party and as an independent. She rejoined One Nation in 2013, becoming leader again the following year. After winning four seats in the 2016 federal election, Hanson secured an amendment in the party’s constitution to secure her spot as leader until she chooses to leave, and allowing her to choose her own successor.

2. Ironically, One Nation, which believes that net zero is a scam, now holds both lower house seats in prime wind and solar regions, called Renewable Energy Zones.