One Nation has done it, winning a federal lower house seat for the first time since Pauline Hanson was elected to the House of Representatives way back in 1996, before she even officially founded the party.

Tonight, One Nation claimed victory in the federal seat of Farrer early, at about 8pm, when it had won 42 per cent of the primary vote. It is clear that the minor party has trounced Liberal, National and quasi-teal candidates amongst a field of 12 contenders. The party was ahead on the two party vote at about 58 per cent.

The win gives One Nation a lower house foothold and proof of a strong primary vote in a seat the Coalition should never have lost. It also gives Hanson something she has wanted for three decades: evidence that her party can do more than influence the Senate or frighten Coalition MPs from the outside.

The next step will be for Hanson to shift to the House of Representatives at the general election due before May 2028, so that she can vie for the opposition leadership, assuming Labor is returned to power.

The One Nation win is politically significant because it’s not simply another Senate victory or a win up in Queensland where the party is at its strongest. 

The seat of Farrer was created in 1949 and has never been won by Labor. A safe conservative seat that has passed between Liberals and Nationals over the years has now defected to the Hanson brand.

Tonight, she warned that she's 'coming after those other seats', with Barnaby Joyce, the party's second-most-high profile MP, suggesting the party will target western Sydney electorates.  

The win in Farrer tells us a lot about One Nation's potential for success across the country.

At the 2025 election MP Sussan Ley survived a serious independent challenge, winning 56 to 44 per cent on the two party vote after a sizeable swing against her. But that was before the surge in support for One Nation that’s been picked up in polling over the past six months.

A vast electorate of more than 126,000 square kilometres, stretching across south west NSW and taking in the population centre of Albury, Farrer also takes in communities along the Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers. Former MPs include Nationals leader and deputy PM Tim Fischer, and Ley, whose departure forced the by-election.

Liberal and National infighting didn’t help the Coalition’s cause. Running against each other in a seat both sides of the Coalition regard as naturally theirs was an act of strategic self-harm. 

It’s allowed under the Coalition agreement, but there was nothing wise about it in the current context. Doing so always results in some preferences flowing elsewhere, and it drains scarce party resources.  

Labor’s decision not to contest the by-election also changed the shape of the field, leaving anti-Coalition and soft Labor voters to choose between One Nation, the teal-leaning independent Michelle Milthorpe and others.

Milthorpe, who ran strongly at the last election, was meant to be the main non-Coalition alternative at the beginning of the campaign. She picked up some of the vote Labor vacated, and she had Climate 200 support behind her, but it wasn’t enough. Her campaign also exposed the contradictions of the teal model when transplanted into a regional seat like Farrer.

Having attracted support from Simon Holmes à Court’s Climate 200 network, Milthorpe nevertheless came out against net zero during the campaign, calling the 2050 target untenable. That was presumably designed to blunt attacks from the Liberals and Nationals. 

But it also suggested something revealing about the Holmes à Court’s project: defeating Liberals and Nationals appears to matter more than whether or not candidates actually hold the climate positions once said to define the movement.

One Nation’s candidate and soon to be new MP, David Farley, isn’t an uncomplicated figure either. His political history, including attempts to find a home across more than one party over the years, made him vulnerable to attacks. But in the end that didn’t matter. 

Voters either didn’t care or cared more about what One Nation and Hanson represented. Anger at the major parties, distrust towards the traditional political class, and frustration over issues such as cost of living, immigration, energy, water and regional neglect came together in a potent mix to snatch a safe Coalition seat for the first time.

For Angus Taylor, this is a poisonous inheritance from Ley’s exit. The opposition was already depleted, now it is down another seat. Worse, One Nation has shown that its polling can translate into federal lower house success. 

That follows recent state level evidence in South Australia that the Hanson brand is no longer just a nuisance on the right. It is becoming an alternative home for conservative voters who once parked their support with the Liberals or Nationals by default.

The suggestion that Sussan Ley should somehow share the blame for this result - which has been doing the rounds within the Liberal Party for weeks in anticipation of a loss - is absurd. She held Farrer for 25 years, winning it nine times across vastly different political circumstances. 

And the party never even asked for her help during the campaign: no email to voters, no mailout, no robocall featuring her voice, no ads with Ley alongside the new candidate, no local campaign material featuring the former MP passing on the baton. While team Taylor might have assumed Ley wouldn’t want to help out, the question was never even asked. 

The Farrer result may come to be seen as step one in the overthrow of the Coalition as the alternative party of government. But it’s very early days before that history can start to be written.

This result is certainly evidence that One Nation is becoming a serious threat to the Coalition across regional Australia, and potentially in outer metropolitan seats where cost of living pressures, housing stress and cultural resentment combine.

Taylor’s budget reply next Thursday now matters even more than it already did. He needs to set out serious economic guard rails, especially on spending, tax, inflation, housing and migration. 

He needs to show that the Coalition can offer discipline and competence in a way that One Nation can’t. A failure to do so risks the Farrer result being replicated around the rest of the regions, if not wider metropolitan areas as well.