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One Nation is no longer just a headache for the conservative side of Australian politics – it poses a clear and present danger to Labor too.
That is the message sent loud and clear at the Secret Harbour byelection on Saturday night from the sleepy little coastal electorate in the mortgage belt about 50 kilometres south of Perth’s CBD.
By 10.30pm, the populist right-wing party candidate, gym owner Luke Herdegen, had sealed his victory as the first-ever lower house One Nation MP in WA parliament with a primary vote swing of 30 per cent, carved from both Labor and the Liberals.
It was a stunning loss for Labor, which has firmly held various iterations of the seat since the 1980s, and confirms suspicions that One Nation has made inroads into outer suburban Australia and can draw votes away from Labor heartlands.
With a caveat that byelections often draw votes away from incumbent governments when the stakes around who will actually govern the state aren’t as high, this result has serious lessons for the state and federal MPs whose electorates straddle Perth’s urban fringes.
One Nation had a primary vote of 8 per cent in Secret Harbour at the 2025 state election.
Any other state MP who saw the same kind of result should be sweating – Armadale, Darling Range and Thornlie are some notable examples.
Federally, the results are an even more pressing lesson. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and federal political issues loomed during the campaign, despite Albanese’s absence from the battleground.
Most fuel stations yesterday in Secret Harbour were selling ULP 91 for more than $2 per litre. Coupled with big mortgages and high grocery prices, it bubbled to the surface during the campaign as discontent with the Albanese government.
This was not a byelection fought on a policy battlefield. One Nation didn’t have any, which Herdegen and party leader Rod Caddies often reminded journalists.
Their argument boiled down to, “We don’t need policies yet, it’s not a state election”. The pitch was: “If you’re fed up, vote for me.”
“Have you ever tried to sleep with a mosquito in your room?” Caddies told this masthead, noting that Herdegen’s main job was to be a thorn in Labor’s side.
On the booths, former state Liberal candidates were now donning the orange, as well as candidates from other fringe parties like Legalise Cannabis who saw One Nation as their great hope of upending the current political status quo.
One Nation volunteer and Secret Harbour voter Trevor Hale said he’d voted mostly Liberal, but in the past few elections he had switched to Hanson’s party because of federal Labor’s performance.
“We only joined the party formally just recently, but we’ve been following Pauline for some time, and we voted One Nation at the last two or three elections, federal and state,” he told this masthead.
“I’ve had enough of Labor. I’ve only voted twice for Labor in my whole life. Normally Liberal, but Liberals no longer are a threat to anybody, and Labor is just destroying the country, both state and federal.
“To me, this is more a vote against Albanese than it is against Roger [Cook].”
Migration remained a constant bugbear of voters who saw the current rates as contributing to the housing crisis in the state.
Federally, urban fringe MPs, particularly Liberal Canning MP Andrew Hastie, and Labor’s Madeleine King and Matt Keogh, will be looking at the results closely.
It may even move Labor’s migration changes up the priority list a few spots.
Labor’s dissection of its campaign will reveal plenty of missteps.
It got off to a shocker by selecting candidate Georgia Tree, who may have grown up in the area but now lived in a $1.4 million house 61 kilometres away in inner-city Perth.
Byelections are hyper-local by nature, and that fact was hammered home during the campaign.
Some awkward moments during press conferences, where Tree was hurried away before answering questions, made for great social media fodder by the Liberals and One Nation.
The Liberals unearthed a potential future star of its party in Ryan Robertson, but the results show the party’s existential crisis is still raging, and they have no idea how to grapple with One Nation.
With a federal election potentially 18 months away and the next state election in 2029, both major parties have some homework to do.
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Hamish Hastie is WAtoday’s state political reporter and the winner of five WA Media Awards, including the 2023 Beck Prize for best political journalism.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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