Populist Power: Preferential Voting and the Limits on One Nation

Introduction: The Surge and Its Limits

Something extraordinary is happening in Australian federal politics. Roy Morgan polling conducted in the week of 8–14 June 2026 places Pauline Hanson’s One Nation at 29.5 per cent of the primary vote – ahead of both the ALP at 28 per cent and a collapsed Liberal-National Coalition sitting at 17 per cent. For a party that won 6.4 per cent of the House of Representatives vote at the May 2025 federal election, this represents a transformation with few precedents in Australian political history. The commentariat has been scrambling to absorb it. Some have reached for the language of insurgency; others for the language of collapse, meaning the collapse of the two-party system that has ordered Australian federal politics since Federation.

But before the significance of these numbers can be assessed with any rigour, a prior question must be answered: what does a 29.5 per cent primary vote actually mean under Australia’s electoral system? Can One Nation form government? And if not government, what power can it realistically exercise? The answer to those questions requires understanding not just where One Nation stands today, but the structural features of Australian democracy that determine whether primary support can be converted into parliamentary seats – and ultimately, into executive power.

The Preferential System as Structural Ceiling

Australia’s House of Representatives uses compulsory preferential instant-runoff voting in 151 single-member electorates. This system does something that first-past-the-post systems do not: it requires voters to express preferences across all candidates, and those preferences are distributed until one candidate holds a majority. The practical consequence is that a party with strong primary support but broad community hostility can win a large share of first preferences and still lose in nearly every seat it contests.

This is not a theoretical concern for One Nation – it is the defining feature of its electoral history. In 1998, the party won 8.4 per cent of the national House vote and returned zero House seats. Pauline Hanson herself lost Blair on preferences despite leading the primary count. The party’s sole federal parliamentary return from that election was a single Senate seat. The reason was preferences: voters who supported Labor, the Coalition, the Democrats, and most independents consistently directed their lower preferences away from One Nation candidates. The party accumulated votes without accumulating seats, because preferential voting ensures that second, third, and fourth preferences matter as much as firsts.

Roy Morgan’s June 2026 polling makes the same structural point explicit. Despite One Nation leading on primary votes, when preferences from Coalition, Greens, independent, and other party supporters are distributed between the ALP and One Nation in a two-candidate preferred count, the ALP leads 53.5 per cent to 46.5 per cent. The primary vote surge does not translate into an anticipated majority of seats. The preferences wall holds, even as One Nation’s primary share approaches 30 per cent.

To form government in its own right, One Nation would need to win 76 of 151 House seats. Under current polling and preference flows, achieving this would require not just leading on primary votes but winning outright majorities in individual electorates – or coming second in enough electorates that preferences from other parties flow to One Nation rather than Labor. Neither condition appears remotely achievable. The probability of One Nation forming majority government at the next federal election is, on any honest assessment, effectively zero.

Understanding the Demand Side: Why One Nation Specifically

Any serious analysis of the One Nation surge must grapple with a question that supply-side explanations – Coalition collapse, Rinehart money, Labor’s budget failures – do not fully answer: why are voters choosing One Nation specifically, rather than simply staying home or distributing their disillusionment across the minor party spectrum? A polling surge of this magnitude is not merely the passive residue of major party failure. It reflects active choices by millions of Australians, and those choices deserve to be understood on their own terms before being characterised.

The available evidence points to several overlapping concerns driving the One Nation vote. Cost of living is the most consistently cited: successive surveys find that working-class and lower-middle-class voters feel economically squeezed in ways that neither major party has addressed with credibility. Housing affordability, energy prices, and grocery costs have combined to produce a material anxiety that populist politics translates into a politics of betrayal – the sense that established institutions have stopped serving ordinary people. One Nation’s ‘Fire The Liar’ campaign, raising over four million dollars from 70,000 donors at an average of sixty dollars each, reflects a genuine groundswell rather than a manufactured one. These are not oligarchic donors; they are people with sixty dollars to spare making a political statement.

Immigration levels constitute a second and more contested driver. Net overseas migration reached record highs in the years following the COVID reopening, and public debate about housing supply, wage competition, and cultural change has intensified. Mainstream political parties have struggled to engage these concerns without either inflaming them or dismissing them – a failure that has left political space for One Nation to occupy. It is worth being precise here: concern about immigration levels is not equivalent to racism, even when One Nation’s preferred policy responses are. Many voters who have shifted to One Nation on this issue are expressing a legitimate interest in democratic deliberation about migration settings, not an endorsement of ethnic scapegoating. Conflating the concern with the party’s more nativist framing is analytically lazy and strategically counterproductive for those who want to contest One Nation’s ground.

There is also a cultural dimension that polling consistently captures but mainstream commentary finds uncomfortable: a significant minority of Australians feel that their values, experiences, and concerns are treated with contempt by a media and political class they perceive as metropolitan, progressive, and insulated from material consequence. One Nation gives that feeling political form. Whether that perception is accurate is a separate question from whether it is real as a political force – and it is unambiguously real.

The Forces of Supply: Money, Defection and Organisational Capacity

If the demand side explains why voters are available to One Nation, the supply side explains why One Nation is better positioned than at any point since 1998 to capture that availability. Three structural developments stand out.

The first is the collapse of the Liberal-National Coalition as a credible centre-right alternative. The Coalition’s 17 per cent primary vote represents an extraordinary implosion. Barnaby Joyce’s defection to One Nation in December 2025 – following the Liberal Party’s leadership disruptions and the Nationals’ breakdown – accelerated that collapse, carrying with him a significant bloc of rural conservative voters who had nowhere else to go. Joyce’s presence also gives One Nation a degree of institutional credibility and policy familiarity in regional Australia that the party lacked in its earlier iterations.

The second is Gina Rinehart’s financial patronage. Mining billionaire Rinehart’s funding since late 2025 has given One Nation organisational capacity it has never previously possessed: professional campaign infrastructure, media buying power, and candidate recruitment at a national scale. This represents a paradox worth naming directly. One Nation presents as anti-establishment, channelling genuine working-class anxiety. But it is now funded by Australia’s richest person, whose policy interests – deregulation, reduced environmental oversight, concentrated resource extraction wealth – are not obviously aligned with the material interests of the people whose votes One Nation is seeking. The populism is the vehicle; the destination is something else.

The third force is the ‘Fire The Liar’ fundraising campaign itself, which signals that One Nation has developed the capacity for independent, small-donor digital fundraising at significant scale. This matters structurally because it means the party is no longer solely dependent on Rinehart or other large donors for financial viability. A party that can raise four million dollars from 70,000 donors in days has built something qualitatively different from the One Nation of 1998.

The Hung Parliament Scenario

If forming majority government is structurally foreclosed, the more relevant question is whether One Nation can exercise power through other means. The answer is yes – and the mechanism is a hung parliament.

DemosAU’s research director assessed that if current polling were reproduced at a federal election, the most likely outcome would be a hung parliament. In a three-way contest where One Nation holds 29.5 per cent, the ALP holds 28 per cent, and the Coalition holds 17 per cent, the distribution of seats across 151 electorates becomes extraordinarily unpredictable. One Nation is likely to win outright in a handful of rural and regional electorates where its primary vote is highest and where preferences from a weakened Coalition flow toward it rather than Labor. In many others, One Nation candidates will finish second or third and be eliminated before preferences are distributed. The result would likely be a House in which no party holds a majority and in which One Nation, with perhaps fifteen to thirty seats, holds the balance of power.

Under those conditions, One Nation would have genuine leverage – not over who forms government, since Labor would almost certainly seek supply from the Greens and independents rather than One Nation, but over the legislative agenda. The price of passing individual pieces of legislation could include demands on immigration, First Nations policy, environmental regulation, and resource sector governance.

First Nations Communities: Risk Without Caricature

For First Nations communities, the prospect of One Nation holding crossbench leverage is a concrete policy risk, not an abstract ideological concern. One Nation has historically opposed native title expansions, the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and Voice-type structural reforms. Hanson’s 1996 maiden speech set a template the party has broadly maintained: scepticism of targeted Indigenous programs, opposition to land rights as a vehicle for economic development, and a rhetorical framing of First Nations policy as preferential treatment at the expense of other Australians.

It is worth engaging the strongest version of the counter-argument here rather than dismissing it. Critics of the current policy architecture – not only from the right – have raised legitimate questions about whether existing programs have produced outcomes proportionate to their cost, whether centralised bureaucratic models of service delivery work in remote communities, and whether the political class’s preferred solutions address root causes or substitute symbolic progress for material change. The incarceration rate for First Nations people has not improved despite decades of policy attention. Child removal rates remain elevated. These are not outcomes that defenders of the status quo can be satisfied with.

The problem is that One Nation’s critique of Indigenous policy – to the extent it engages outcomes at all rather than resentment – leads not toward better-designed intervention but toward withdrawal: the position that targeted programs should be abolished because they constitute unfair preference. That conclusion does not follow from the evidence of policy failure, and the communities bearing the cost of that failure would bear additional cost from a policy environment shaped by One Nation’s crossbench leverage. The critique of existing programs and the critique of One Nation’s alternative are not mutually exclusive. Both can be correct simultaneously.

Historical Precedent and the Preference Quarantine

The 1998 federal and Queensland elections offer the most instructive precedents. At the federal level, One Nation’s 8.4 per cent primary vote returned zero House seats, as already noted. In Queensland, eleven state seats shocked the political establishment before targeted preference deals in subsequent elections reduced the party to a rump. The lesson is that the Australian electoral system can generate spectacular primary vote surges for minor parties while simultaneously containing them through the preference mechanism – but containment requires a coordinated response that does not emerge automatically.

One Nation’s 2026 position is in some respects stronger than 1998: the primary vote is higher, the Coalition is weaker, the organisational capacity is greater, and there is no direct equivalent to the Australian Democrats as a centrist preference destination. Against that, the same incentive structure that produced preference quarantine in 1998 is present today: Labor, the Greens, and the teal independents all have strong reasons to preference-direct against One Nation, and a Coalition reduced to 17 per cent may calculate that preferencing Labor ahead of One Nation is preferable to enabling a competitor on its own right flank. Whether that calculation prevails, or whether preference deals fracture under the complexity of a three-way contest, will determine much of the next election’s outcome.

Conclusion: A Ceiling, Not a Floor

One Nation will not form government at the next Australian federal election. The structural barriers imposed by preferential voting, adverse preference flows, and the geographic distribution of its support make majority government mathematically implausible. Roy Morgan’s two-candidate preferred figures – Labor leading 53.5 to 46.5 when preferences are distributed – illustrate the ceiling clearly.

What this analysis should not do is collapse into complacency. A 29.5 per cent primary vote, even if it converts to a fraction of that in seats, reflects something real in Australian political life: millions of people who feel economically abandoned, culturally dismissed, and politically unrepresented by the institutions that are supposed to serve them. Those concerns will not be answered by pointing out that One Nation’s preference flows are unfavourable, or that Rinehart’s money is not aligned with the material interests of One Nation voters, or even that the party’s historical record on First Nations issues is deeply harmful. Those things are all true. They are not sufficient.

The question for Labor, for the Greens, for the teal independents, and for First Nations advocates is whether they can address the underlying conditions – cost of living, housing, the democratic deficit, the sense of institutional contempt – in ways that are credible to the people currently choosing One Nation. If they can, the preference ceiling holds and One Nation’s primary vote surge becomes an electoral curiosity rather than a governing force. If they cannot, the surge consolidates, the hung parliament becomes likely, and the policy consequences for the most vulnerable communities fall accordingly.

Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.

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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.

© Bakchos, June 2026

BLAK AND BLACK  |  MEDIA AND ADVOCACY  |  EST. 2010