Tag: One Nation

4 April 2026

There has been a lot of interest in One Nation after they got 23% of the primary vote and 4 lower house seats in the South Australian elections of 21 March. It was commented that they had no MPs and no real policies. This is true, and it indicates how unhappy people are with the status quo and the two major parties in particular. They are seen as not being able to solve our problems. So people voted for One Nation because it was a change and because it criticised the status quo. They may have got more seats if there had not been compulsory preferential voting in South Australia- I have not done the analysis.

A vote for One Nation is still largely a protest vote in that the specifics for their policies are vague. It is clear what they are against, but not clear what they would do in most portfolio areas.

Trump was elected with 50% of the 65% of the eligible voters who bothered to vote. That is a bit under 33% of the total voters. The polls and figures in NSW have One Nation with a real chance in the (Federal) Farrer by-election (especially with a lot of money from Gina Rinehart). They also have quite a good chance in some NSW country seats, especially National Party ones, where the Nationals have abandoned farmers for the miners. The ‘optional preferential’ voting system in NSW may also favour them, as it favours parties with big primary votes. 23% would give them 4 of the 21 seats in the NSW Upper House election, as a quota is 4.5%. I did an analysis of the 2023 NSW election and found that if we had had compulsory preferential voting rather than optional preferential Labor would have had an extra 6 seats and there would have been an extra 3 Independents in the lower house. (Amazingly, Labor has not tried to change the system to compulsory preferential).

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Yri-zkB3w8ZVH44ZLPYAsQ-2ghyXU0j1E55lwuJsBEU/edit?tab=t.0

Compulsory preferential voting tends to disfavour radical parties because it takes account of what people prefer as well as what they want as a primary vote, so it tends to move towards the political centre. Australia is not as different from the USA as we might think. The radical Right protest solution has Trump at 33% and One Nation at 23%. The Australian Electoral Commission, which stops gerrymandering, compulsory voting, and the compulsory preferential system give us some margin of security against the outcome of a protest vote electing a government, but we need to acknowledge our problems and fix them more effectively that we have been doing if we are to stop the progress of protest without solutions.