It wasn’t even close. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation won the August 29 Secret Harbour by-election in Western Australia with 38.9% of the primary vote, up from 8.43% in the March 2025 state election.
With preferences, it secured 57% of the two-party preferred vote. Labor's primary vote slumped to 24.3%, down from 46.5%. The Liberals came in third with 17%.
The Greens ran a strong campaign, targeting the cost of living and AUKUS, but their vote dipped slightly from 8.82% to 7.64%.
The hope of some Labor party strategists after the South Australian state election that the nationwide surge in support for One Nation would mostly eat away Liberal or National Party votes was smashed.
Labor's candidate was Georgia Tree, a former lobbyist for oil and gas giant Woodside who no longer lived in the electorate. This did not help her credibility but the size of the swing indicates that this was a secondary factor.
There was as much dirt swirling around the One Nation candidate, whose party is even more explicit in its support for the fossil fuel industry.
There has been a four-decade decline in the primary vote for both Labor and Coalition. The thumping wins by WA Labor between 2017 and 2025 temporarily disguised this reality.
While Labor’s parliamentary majorities are real, they were and did not represent a new generation of “rusted on” loyal voters. That no longer exists like it did in the past.
Instability is the new normal in Australian politics.
In this turmoil One Nation’s bubble could also pop. However, neither the volatility nor the surge in toxic racist, sexist and anti-LGBTIQ scapegoating will go away by themselves.
This ugly reality grows out of three interrelated phenomena. They need to be understood separately and in combination because they all contribute to explaining why so many have turned to One Nation, but they each vary in importance depending on the individual.
The first is four decades of neoliberalism implemented by Liberal and Labor. This means policies that favour the rich at the expense of working people such as privatisation, deregulation, contracting out, corporate tax cuts and subsidies to landlords.
Together these policies have seen the wages share of national income fall to record lows even though Australian workers are more productive than ever, a loss in job security and now the ferocious damage done by the housing affordability crisis.
The statistics bear out the feeling that many Australians have that the system, the economy and politics, no longer works for them.
Second is the fact that implementing neo-liberalism depended on reducing the militancy and organisation of Australian workers.
In the US and Britain this was achieved by conservative governments unleashing full-frontal attacks on the unions in an attempt to smash them.
In Australia it was done by Labor but more drawn out, slowly strangling the traditions of self-organisation and industrial action by taming unions through the infamous Prices and Incomes Accord.
In the 1970s the majority of the Australian workforce had some experience of going on strike, of taking collective action with their workmates to make their own lives and the lives of others better.
Unless they’ve been lucky enough to connect with a vibrant community or social movement campaign, or been part of the recent upsurge in activism against the genocide in Gaza, most Australian workers have never been part of such collective action.
The vacuum is quickly filled by despair, individualism, scapegoating and “culture wars”; all of which erode social solidarity.
Third is the unrelenting campaign by the pro-capitalist parties and media over the last decades to deflect people’s anger and anxiety at refugees, Muslims and migrants in general.
The Labor Party has gone along with this, and most of the union movement acquiesced, doing terrible damage to working-class consciousness.
Labor is powerless to kill the monster it helped create, and does not have the will to do so. It’s determination to squash the Palestine solidarity movement is proof of that.
Of course racism in Australia didn’t begin with the assault on refugee rights or the ramblings of Pauline Hanson.
It has its origins in a colonial settler state based on the violent dispossession of Indigenous people and serving as a fortress for the British Empire, and now the US, in the Asia Pacific.
The world economy divides humanity into rich and poor. This system is both violent and requires violence to be maintained.
It creates relative privilege for working people in the countries of the Global North like Australia some of whom actively defend and identify with that privilege. Virulent hostility to the Palestine solidarity movement is a manifestation of this.
Furthermore, not all sections of the working class are suffering in the same way. Some workers still have permanent well-paid jobs and own their own home outright, even an investment property or two.
If it were just economic insecurity driving the One Nation surge then its support would be concentrated in people under thirty locked out of the housing market.
If Hanson’s rise is a product of demoralisation, division and a decline in social solidarity, the opposite is also true.
All of our struggles in the workplace, in our places of education, and on the streets are an indispensable part of the fight against One Nation. Even the most elementary expressions of progressive community organising help deprive One Nation of oxygen.
The lesson for Greens and socialists is that while the left can and must run bigger and better election campaigns, there is no exclusively or even primarily electoral strategy to defeating One Nation, precisely because its emergence is rooted in broader economic and social conditions.
[Sam Wainwright is a national co-convenor of the Socialist Alliance.]