One Nation's WA Sweep: How Far Can the Surge Go?

One Nation has achieved something it has never done before: wrested a state lower house seat directly from Labor. The Secret Harbor by-election result sent shockwaves through Western Australian politics, prompting renewed debate about whether the two-party system has fundamentally broken down — and what forces, if any, can now check One Nation's momentum.

The numbers out of Secret Harbor are startling by any measure. At the 2021 state election, Labor claimed 77 per cent of the primary vote in the electorate — an extraordinary figure reflecting the COVID-era popularity of premier Mark McGowan, whose own seat approached 90 per cent support. That landslide was so dominant that the National Party finished with more lower house seats than the Liberals, inheriting the role of formal opposition.

What followed was one of the sharpest electoral collapses in recent Australian political history. By 2024, Labor's primary vote had fallen 31 points to 46 per cent — enough to make the seat competitive but not enough to alarm the party. Then came the by-election, stripping away a further 22 points and handing One Nation the seat with roughly 39 per cent of the primary vote. From 77 to 22 in five years.

That 39 per cent figure is not accidental. Political analyst George Mikloinis, whose new book Three Shocks: Who We Are Becoming in the 21st Century examines Australia's shifting social and demographic landscape, notes that One Nation has repeatedly landed near that threshold when it is competitive. Pauline Hanson herself polled just under 40 per cent at the 1998 federal election in Blair — and still lost, because every other party directed preferences against her.

The difference now, Mikloinis argues, is that the two-party system which coordinated that preference wall in 1998 has since fragmented. When minor parties and independents scatter their preferences, One Nation — finishing first with 35 to 40 per cent — can collect enough flows to win outright. That dynamic played out identically at the federal seat of Durack (formerly Farah), where One Nation picked up 39 per cent of the primary vote and defeated both the Liberals and a strong independent candidate.

Back-to-back wins against all comers — first the conservatives, now Labor — suggests One Nation can now compete across the ideological spectrum wherever it can approach that 40 per cent ceiling.

Yet Mikloinis cautions that Secret Harbor also reveals structural limits. Drilling into the demographics of the electorate, he points to Australia's broader generational shift: for the first time since federation, the population is majority migrants and their Australian-born children. In his "family tree" framework, he distinguishes between "old Australians" — those with both parents born here, representing at least three generations on the country — and "new Australia," comprising first and second-generation Australians regardless of background.

That new Australia bloc, concentrated in outer-suburban and growth-corridor electorates, tends to vote differently from the Anglo-Australian working class that historically anchored One Nation support. Secret Harbor, as a newer coastal growth suburb south of Perth, sits at an interesting crossroads — enough disaffected working-class voters to deliver One Nation the seat, but a demographic profile that caps how replicable that result is across metropolitan WA.

For Labor, the lesson is grimmer than any single by-election loss. A swing of 55 points over one electoral cycle is not volatility in the ordinary sense — it is a signal that a core constituency has fundamentally reconsidered its allegiance. Rebuilding that base will require more than a policy adjustment.