Treason in the ranks?

Two weeks later, we have final figures for the Secret Harbour by-election, won by One Nation candidate Luke Herdegen. He beat Labor with a two-party-preferred vote of 57.2%, up slightly from the 57.0% reported at the time due to the effect of postal votes: a comfortable margin of not quite 4,000 votes. Turnout was 79.0%, better than average for a by-election.

Preferences were a wash. Out of the total preference pool from the other 14 candidates, One Nation received 48.9% and Labor 50.6% (a handful of votes exhausted). The more interesting question, though, is the fate of preferences from those who voted for the Liberal candidate – recall that in the Farrer by-election back in May, only 59% of Liberal voters preferenced One Nation rather than its Teal opponent.

Of the 6,018 votes that were in the Liberal pile at the three-party-preferred stage in Secret Harbour (that is, the second-last count), 3,549 went to One Nation, or 59.0%. But that tempting equivalence with Farrer is misleading, because about a fifth of that pile didn’t start out as Liberal votes but reached the Liberal only after the exclusion of other candidates, more than half coming via the Greens.

So all we can say with mathematical certainty is that the flow from the Liberal to One Nation was somewhere between 48.3% (if all of those votes received from lesser candidates also went to One Nation) and 74.3% (if none of them did). But of course the real figure will be nowhere near either of those two extremes. If we assume that the additional votes in the Liberal pile broke 50-50 between Labor and One Nation – surely not a wildly unrealistic assumption – then the Liberal flow to One Nation would be 61.3%.

That estimate may still be a bit low. Antony Green has unearthed another piece of data: in a different section of its website, the Western Australian electoral commission has published the actual flow of preferences for Secret Harbour’s pre-poll centre. There One Nation received just on 70.0% of Liberal preferences. In Farrer, the flow to One Nation in the pre-polls ran about seven points ahead of that in the on-the-day vote; if that relationship holds, it would mean the flow to One Nation in the on-the-day votes this time would be around 63%, and the average as a whole (since the pre-polls were about half of the total) something like 66 or 67%.

So it looks as if about two-thirds of Liberal voters are either supportive or indifferent about their party’s decision to preference One Nation ahead of Labor, and about one-third are opposed to it. If the alternative to One Nation is an independent rather than Labor, as it was in Farrer, then the proportions will be a bit more even – although of course there are other features of the two seats that could account for some of the difference.

Coincidentally, that substantial fraction of Liberal supporters who look less kindly on the far right may have found their champion very close to Secret Harbour. In my preview of the by-election I noted that One Nation would “relish the achievement [of beating the Liberals] all the more because the seat mostly falls within the federal seat of Canning, held by Andrew Hastie.” If Hastie’s status as a One Nation hate figure was not clear then, it certainly is now, after a One Nation cartoon that portrayed Hastie as a “traitor”, to which he responded with understandable outrage.

While the episode adds to Hastie’s credentials as an opponent of One Nation, it’s not clear that it will make that position any more popular among his party’s rank and file. Back in 2020, when the crimes of Ben Roberts-Smith were first making headlines (and attracting comparisons with Breaker Morant), I remarked on Facebook that “I’d like to think that making people feel better about war crimes is an esoteric interest in the Liberal Party branches; alas, I feel it may be closer to a core interest.”

I’d be happy to be proved wrong, but I think that instead of listening to Hastie you’ll get a better idea of Liberal Party sentiment by reading last week’s reports on the funeral of Ratko Mladić. Mladić was a more serious war criminal than Roberts-Smith by orders of magnitude; he died in prison while serving a life sentence for genocide. Yet thousands of Serbs turned out to mourn him, describing him as “a heroic defender of the nation.”

No doubt they thought that those who testified against him were “traitors”, too. Crime, even the most atrocious of crimes, doesn’t matter to the “law and order” forces as long as it’s committed by the right sort of people.