Tag: Farrer By-Election

10 May 2026

The big victory by David Farley of One Nation in the Farrer by-election of Saturday 9 May was hardly a surprise.

The polls had predicted this, and the fact that both the Liberal and the National put One Nation ahead of the Independent, Michelle Milthorpe, virtually guaranteed the result. I will have to analyse the results to see if the preferences were decisive. It may be that they were not.

But either way the LIberals preferenced One Nation ahead of the Independent because Independents tend to become entrenched, whereas One Nation candidates and MPs tend to leave the party in a blaze of bad publicity, and the Liberals think that they will have a better chance of retaking the seat at the next general election.  One Nation seems never to be held to account. Pauline Hanson accepted a fortune and then a private plane from mining billionaire Gina Rinehardt. David Farley, the candidate, was shown to have sought Labor party preselection. One Nation has no real policies. Yet it does not seem to matter.  A poll showed that 70% of One Nation voters were angry and wanted to send a message to the two major parties.  So it is a protest vote, just as it was for Trump, who similarly was not held to account.

Meanwhile in the UK, Reform this week swept the local Council elections to become the largest party. Its leader, Nigel Farage led the Brexit campaign that has been a major cause of Britain’s economic woes.  It seems that politics is no longer about considered policies; it is about emotional reactions and people are voted out, not voted in.

The Liberals have not had a serious policy idea for years, and answer most questions by criticising Labor, as Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson did today on ÁBC Ínsiders. He would not rule out having One Nation in as Coalition government, and would not be drawn on what he thought about the Budget, which is due on Tuesday, deflecting the questions about his attitude of negative gearing of property or changes to capital gains tax. He merely said that he would see what the government did and respond, chucking in a few barbs as usual.  The LIberals did put out a policy last week on Immigration, which said that it depended what country migrants came from, so was roundly criticised for not allowing dissidents to flee from very bad countries.  The point  is that the Immigration policy was similar to One Nation’s, so the Liberals ares merely ‘One Nation Lite’ with no real direction.

The problem is that neo-liberalism and capitalism are going to their logical conclusion. The world has been turned into a market with everything for sale and all the stress on individual ownership. Taxes have been minimised and the idea that the government is responsible for the welfare of all citizens gets  lip service but no dollars. Where once we had a Housing Dept that built suburbs of houses for the post-war migrants, we now have negative gearing and capital gains concessions on the assumption that the private market would build the houses. Wrong. We have a 2 tier education system with subsidies to the top tier, and the same happens in health.   We used to have free universities, but now students leave with huge HECS debts. The welfare system is such that pensioners and unemployed can barely live, as they cannot pay rents set by the private market, which follows house prices, with housing now an idiot-proof commodity investment, rather than a human right.

Labor talks about fixing all this, but are scared to raise taxes, as the Liberals would criticise them, so it is  impossible to fix the above problems. They have become ‘Liberal-Lite’ as they fail to even acknowledge the fundamental problems, much less address them.

We used to congratulate ourselves that we would not elect Trump, and that the foolish Brexit vote would not happen here, but One Nation have now won Farrer and did very well in the recent South Australian election where they were largely kept out by the compulsory preferential system. They are polling well in NSW and it will be interesting to see what difference the Optional Preferential voting system makes in NSW. (You may recall that I did an analysis of the difference it made in the last NSW election, which can still be found on my website, chesterfieldevans.com).

It seems to me that the western democracies are in relative decline, but the major change is increasing inequality across the world due to unregulated capitalism, sending jobs overseas and technology replacing labour. There are not enough jobs, and governments seem unable to acknowledge the problems or take responsibility for their consequences. The security industry is booming at a national, international and defence level.

The Trump, Farage and One Nation voters are right to be angry, but their champions have no solutions. The sad part is that the conventional major players do not seem to either.