It’s just a by-election. For a long time, I and a few others have been warning against over-interpreting by-elections. Most of them produce routine results, and those that don’t often prove to be unrepeatable: recall, for example, Cunningham in 2002, when the Greens won their first seat in the House of Representatives. They were unable to hold it, have never come close there since, and didn’t win another one until 2010.
Yet sometimes they do matter. There was Bass in 1975, which foreshadowed Gough Whitlam’s landslide defeat later the same year. Canberra in 1995 did much the same for the Keating government. And Aston in 2023 heralded the disaster that was waiting for the Liberal Party two years later. Farrer, which voted on Saturday, looks more like them: like the end of an era, or the beginning of something new and troubling.
Yet globally the result seems very similar to last year’s federal election. Independent Michelle Milthorpe (Teal-adjacent) – whose campaign I worked for as a volunteer – lost with 42.6% of the two-candidate-preferred vote, just slightly worse than last year’s 43.8%, although in the absence of a Labor candidate her primary vote was up 8.4%. And she got her votes in substantially the same places: up in Griffith, down quite sharply in rural areas at the south-eastern end of the seat, much the same elsewhere.
What’s changed, of course, is the identity of her opponent. Milthorpe lost last year to incumbent Liberal MP Sussan Ley, who went on to briefly lead her party before being disposed of earlier this year. This time, the Liberals were never in the hunt: their candidate, Raissa Butkowski, came a distant third with 12.4%. Instead the winner was One Nation’s Rick Farley, who led with a primary vote of 39.5% and beat Milthorpe by more than 14,500 votes after preferences. (See official results here; a handful of postal and provisional votes are yet to be counted.)
Even counting in the Nationals (who didn’t run against Ley), the Coalition vote has almost halved, falling from 43.4% to 22.1%. It’s not just about losing the seat to One Nation: it’s about being positively crushed by them. One Nation won seats in South Australia in March, but none of its victories were like this.
And the Coalition parties have only themselves to blame. By recommending preferences to One Nation and moving towards its policies (including the knifing of Ley) they gave the far right legitimacy and effectively handed their voters permission to shift. After all, why bother to vote Liberal if you’re going to get One Nation anyway? Why not just go straight to the source?
But many Liberal voters evidently didn’t like the idea. Although it will be a while before the electoral commission publishes details of the flow of preferences, we can already tell that they did not go to One Nation with the reliability that one normally expects from the Liberal vote. At Albury public school, the polling place where I was scrutineering, only 52% of Liberal preferences ended up with One Nation, as against 48% to Milthorpe. Nationals preferences weren’t much better, running 60.5% to One Nation.
The Nationals are the ones with the bigger existential crisis. Their heartland is also One Nation’s heartland, and if One Nation has three or four times their support then they have no plausible reason to give why their voters should not desert to the larger outfit – especially since the Liberals have signalled pretty clearly that they will accept it as a coalition partner. All the Nationals can do is try to tread water while waiting for One Nation to self-destruct: very possibly it will, but staying afloat until then will be a big task.
For the Liberals the situation is different, since at least in theory they have an alternative. They could make a principled stand against One Nation, reverse their position on preferences and try to retain or re-create an urban base. That would mean working for reunification with the Teals and admitting (if only to themselves) that they went the wrong way under John Howard thirty years ago when they turned their back on free markets and social progress and decided to become the party of white resentment.
There is plenty in the party’s history that could support such a move: John Hewson and Malcolm Turnbull were leaders who believed in progress, and Robert Menzies himself would be shocked at what his party has become. But it has become utterly unthinkable. The party’s leaders dare not defy their increasingly old, narrow and bigoted membership, and both are captive to the rabid fantasies of News Corp, which is pushing them into an ever more explicit alliance with One Nation.
And the disaster in Farrer is nothing compared to what awaits them if they go into urban seats with a promise to serve as junior partners in a Hanson government.
The World is Not Enough 