The icing and the cake

Another milestone for One Nation: on Saturday it won its first lower house seat in the Western Australian state parliament, unseating Labor in the Secret Harbour by-election. One Nation took 57.0% of the two-party-preferred vote, off a primary vote of 39.1%; Labor’s primary vote of 24.4% was down more than twenty points from its 46.% in last year’s state election.* (Official results are here; Kevin Bonham’s commentary from Saturday is especially useful.)

In Friday’s preview I said that “One Nation doesn’t have to win the seat to meet expectations (although of course that would be icing on the cake), it just has to decisively beat the Liberals.” In the end it finished with both the icing and the cake, but the former was somewhat more convincing than the latter.

In order to win government, whether in Western Australia or anywhere else, One Nation has to do two things. First, it has to be part of a non-Labor majority, a (broadly speaking) right-of-centre alliance that outvotes Labor and its allies; second, it has to beat the Coalition for the dominant place in that alliance. As I argued on Friday, the latter is from its point of view the more important task.

The task of beating Labor can to some extent be left to look after itself; eventually Labor governments will wear out their welcome and their oppositions will be a shoo-in. But beating the Coalition is absolutely essential – it makes perfect sense for One Nation to treat that as the priority. (Not coincidentally, this is the same calculation that the hard right within the Liberal Party makes: internal control is what matters, winning elections can wait.)

In Secret Harbour, however, it was the beating Labor part that worked really well. Labor’s two-party-preferred vote in the seat has now dropped by an extraordinary forty points in five and a half years: 83.4% in 2021 (when it was called Warnbro), 61.5% last year and now down to 43.0%. But it’s a by-election; big swings in by-elections are not unusual. Nearby Rockingham swung 22.5% in a by-election just three years ago, with no One Nation factor. Just last year, in Werribee in Victoria, Labor’s primary vote dropped 16.5% in a by-election, also without a One Nation candidate.

So it’s reasonably likely that the Liberals would have beaten Labor anyway in Secret Harbour had One Nation stayed away. For One Nation, beating the Liberals was what mattered. They did so clearly, 39.1% to 17.3%, but given that the Liberals seemed to be running dead, that wasn’t as big as you might have expected. In comparable outer suburban seats in South Australia earlier this year, One Nation was generally outvoting the Liberals by three to one or more; in Elizabeth they actually hit five to one.

If Labor is on the nose (as, by and large, it wasn’t in South Australia), places like Secret Harbour are where it’s most likely to show up, especially if it does foolish things like choosing a gas industry lobbyist as its candidate. And people there who vote against Labor are more likely to choose One Nation than the Coalition. But the idea that One Nation poses a special threat to Labor – that it can win these seats in circumstances where the Coalition never could – is so far unsupported.

As Bonham put it, “The story of this by-election is mostly in the primary votes.” What doomed Labor was its very low primary vote; One Nation didn’t need anything much in the way of preferences from the Liberals (or anyone else) to win. But that won’t always be the case, so it’s important to understand how preferences behaved. The full preference distribution hasn’t yet been done (and we will probably never get the sort of detailed statistics that we get in a federal election), but we already know the basics.

In my post-mortem on this year’s Farrer by-election I quoted approvingly a remark by Antony Green that the Coalition preference flow to One Nation, which in Farrer was quite modest, “would have been higher in a final contest involving Labor rather than an Independent.” And indeed it seems it was higher in Secret Harbour, but not by much. Here are the total flows of all preferences to One Nation for the different categories of votes:

Early votes	13,264	53.3%
Postal Votes	5,255	50.5%
On-the-day votes	7,678	41.4%
Total	26,197	49.0%

Part of the difference between the categories is compositional: the Liberal vote is higher (and the Greens vote lower) for early votes than those cast on the day. But that’s not enough to account for all of it; it’s clear that Liberal voters who vote early are more inclined to preference One Nation than those who don’t, just as we saw in Farrer. Making some educated guesses, the former group seems to be running close to 64% and the latter rather less than 60%.

No doubt someone like Ben Raue will do some more serious statistical analysis of these numbers in days to come. But we can already say that there are a lot of Liberal voters who are not happy with the strategy of preferencing One Nation, and that (as a corollary), as long as the two are competing for the non-Labor vote, then the closer that contest is, the more difficult it will be for them jointly to win a majority.

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* There will be a few postal and provisional votes still to come in, but not enough to make any substantial change.