One Nation didn't just win — Australian politics is deeply disrupted

After Saturday's win in Farrer, Barnaby Joyce will have a seat-mate in the lower house. (AAP: Bianca De Marchi) Link copiedShareShare articleOn Saturday night, Australians witnessed a full-blown coronation of One Nation, and its victory in the seat of Farrer could not have come with more ominous timing. While One Nation was humiliating the Liberal and National parties, back in the mother country, Nigel Farage's Reform UK was smashing the Labour Party. The stories are remarkably similar. Voters are flexing their electoral muscle and repudiating the majors. For some time, the growth in populism was seen as an overseas occurrence. The conventional wisdom was that One Nation would find it hard to break the dam wall in the lower house and translate growing support in opinion polls into bums on seats in parliament. But the dam wall is now officially broken, and the messages are lethal for not only the Liberal and National parties, who carry the most immediate and existential burden from the One Nation freight train, but also Labor. That same voter wrath could be dished out to Labor if people keep feeling like times are tough and getting tougher. For years, Pauline Hanson has had her eyes on the prize of a lower house seat in the federal parliament. When she recruited former Nationals leader and deputy PM Barnaby Joyce to her ranks, it gave her a psychological edge that has proved to be a political game-changer. Angry at a political system they feel is broken and unfair, the voters of Farrer walked into polling booths ready to inflict electoral pain. Drafting Joyce created a permission structure that has allowed conservative or swing voters to support and, it turns out, vote for One Nation. The sentiment it created was clear: if the bloke who was deputy prime minister thinks the Coalition has lost its way, something in the system must be broken. Saturday night's win for One Nation may have triggered a sense of dread amongst Labor and Liberal operatives, but Hanson is just getting started. Seizing the regional NSW electorate of Farrer from the Liberals has removed it from Coalition hands for the first time in its 77-year history. Liberal leader Angus Taylor is now nearing three months in the job. He argued that a year of chaos for the Coalition since the 2025 election, including two break-ups with the Nationals, had damaged his chances of retaining Farrer, which Sussan Ley vacated after being dumped as leader. Hanson's candidate, David Farley, leapt ahead of community independent Michelle Milthorpe as the seat turned from blue to orange. But some Liberals are privately arguing that the result in Farrer also demonstrates that Taylor, who vowed to stop the bleeding to One Nation in his pitch to colleagues to become leader, has not been capable of cutting through and reclaiming its so-called base. In fact, last night's result was so dire for the Liberals that the party recorded a first preference count of just 12.4 per cent. To put that in context, at the 2013 election, when Labor was thrown out of office, it still managed to get 17.24 per cent of first preferences in Mackellar, one of the safest Liberal seats in the country, then held by Bronwyn Bishop. We did not have to wait long on Saturday night to see grievance turn into electoral success for One Nation. The political landscape is suddenly deeply disrupted. The ABC's politics podcast, Politics Now, dives into the biggest stories, giving you a balanced look inside the strategies and decisions behind the headlines. This is no longer a case of angry voters parking their vote in an opinion poll with One Nation to send a message that they are pissed off. This result heralds the collapse of the Coalition's vote and raises an existential question about where its heartland now resides. Following the Liberals' losing a swathe of city seats in the past two elections, the conservative wing embarked on an outer suburban strategy to lock in the regions. The regions have now followed the urban centres' precedent and rejected them, by heading in the opposite direction towards One Nation. With both heartlands now smashed in fundamentally different ways, the question for the Coalition is where and what base is left? Patricia Karvelas is the host of ABC News Afternoon Briefing at 4pm weekdays on ABC News Channel, co-host of the weekly Party Room podcast with Fran Kelly and host of politics and news podcast Politics Now. Copy linkFacebookX (formerly Twitter)Top StoriesInside the course targeting young tradies with get-rich schemesTopic:Social Media

One Nation didn't just win — Australian politics is deeply disrupted

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One Nation didn't just win — Australian politics is deeply disrupted

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