Last week, on his 45th visit to Western Australia, Anthony Albanese promised his government would never alter the outrageously generous GST deal that hands extra cash to Australia’s richest state.
West Australians (barely) thanked him for the guarantee, and then on Saturday handed Labor a thrashing in a byelection for the state seat of Secret Harbour.
While some may argue that One Nation’s thumping win in Secret Harbour means little for federal politics, that would be a mistake.
Albanese did not visit Secret Harbour, claiming last week that he didn’t campaign in state byelections – never mind that he opened a Medicare urgent care clinic in the WA state seat of Rockingham during a 2023 byelection – and will probably play down the federal implications of this result.
WA Labor has been in power at a state level for nearly a decade, which made it harder for the party to hang on, and it’s true that state and federal issues don’t overlap perfectly.
But the fact that the winning candidate, Luke Herdegen, campaigned without any substantial policies and a pitch that amounted to “if you’re fed up, vote for me” – as my colleagues Hamish Hastie and Michael Philipps noted – has to be a concern.
Speaking after the win, the first time Labor had been beaten by One Nation in a head-to-head contest, Herdegen declared “there are no safe Labor seats in this state or in this country anymore”.
The swing against Labor was savage, with Herdegen defeating Labor’s Georgia Tree 57-43 in the two-party preferred vote.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country in western Victoria, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce were attending a wild One Nation rally that included props such as a coffin with a giant nail in it and inscribed with the words “Net Zero”.
One Nation’s meteoric rise in the polls, which began quietly last September before accelerating rapidly from December, has been fuelled by people who are fed up with the old two-party system and are struggling with high interest rates, inflation and rent, and other cost-of-living concerns.
Albanese is acutely aware of that. And it’s very much the case that cost-of-living concerns cut across state and federal politics.
Perhaps most telling was that on Sunday morning, Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers both took aim at Hanson during speeches at the Queensland Labor Party’s state conference.
“This is a crucial time for our movement because across the world, hard-right populists are on the march, peddling politics that is dangerous, divisive and downright dishonest,” the prime minister told party members.
“They’ll say anything and do anything, bend any backs, peddle misinformation and disinformation, turn Australian against Australian.”
Those are not the words of a Labor prime minister who thinks there are no federal implications from the Secret Harbour result, or who is unconcerned about the rise of One Nation.
But the result is also a blow to the Coalition.
While Secret Harbour, in its various iterations and under different names, has been solidly Labor since the 1980s at the state level, the seat sits in the federal seat of Canning, which is held by Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie. The Liberals stood a candidate in this contest, too, but he finished a distant third.
Hastie is already facing blowback for testifying against his former SAS colleague, Ben Roberts-Smith, in court while Hanson has taken up the mantle of one of Robert-Smith’s chief defenders.
This result will, at a minimum, have Hastie pondering his own political mortality.
Secret Harbour is older, whiter and more British than the average federal seat, and the anger with the Albanese government on the ground is palpable, as my colleague Paul Sakkal reported.
It’s a state version of the sort of outer-suburban seat that Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison before him have tried to win over at the past two federal elections in the outer suburbs of Australia’s major cities and mostly failed to claim, though Hastie was one of few Liberals to increase their margin at the 2025 federal election.
So the fact that voters have skipped past the Liberals and cast their vote for One Nation is a blow to the opposition.
The Secret Harbour result confirms One Nation’s rise is far from done. And that’s a problem for both major parties.
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James Massola is Chief Political Commentator. He has previously been National AffairsEditor and South-East Asia Correspondent, and has won Quill and Kennedy awards and is the 2026 Press Gallery Journalist of the Year. Connect securely on Signal @jamesmassola.01Connect via X or email.
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