Continued from Part 2
One Nation has won Farrer.
Let’s dwell on that a while.
From the top end of town, David Farley, a Narrandera‑based agricultural commodity trader and former CEO of the Australian Agricultural Company, has taken a seat the Liberal Party held without interruption since 1949. Primary‑vote figures put One Nation’s swing into Farrer at about 35 points and the Liberal collapse at roughly 31 points. The Coalition, in a deliberate move widely criticised by the Prime Minister, preferenced One Nation ahead of the independent candidate Michelle Milthorpe on its how‑to‑vote cards. Barnaby Joyce and Pauline Hanson appeared together at the election‑night party in Albury. The Abbott suppository riff came earlier in this series, but if ever a week needed two, this was the week.
Australia’s Regime Media calls it historic. It is historic, in the way that a Category 4 cyclone making landfall in a location where cyclones do not usually make landfall is historic: worth noting, worth studying, but not self‑evident proof that the climate has permanently changed. Commentators at The AIMN, The Conversation and Crikey, who have been tracking this pattern since the South Australian state election in March, argue that voter anger and fragmentation can produce spectacular by‑election results, but that history suggests the insurgency rarely lasts.
One Nation has been here before. In 1998, after its Senate breakthrough, the machine moved against it. Optional preferential voting was introduced in Queensland in 1992, as part of the Fitzgerald Inquiry driven electoral reforms, well before One Nation existed. The real anti‑One Nation manoeuvre came in 2001, when former premier Peter Beattie ran a Just Vote 1 campaign to exploit OPV and exhaust Coalition‑One Nation preferences. That, in effect, worked for a time.
The structural problem for One Nation is the same structural problem it has always had. Australia’s electoral geography does not favour populist insurgencies. Roughly 85 per cent of the population lives in cities. The seats where One Nation polls strongest are rural and outer‑suburban. DemosAU’s October‑November 2025 MRP central forecast projected 12 lower‑house seats for One Nation: eight clearly rural, one outer‑metropolitan (Canning, in Perth), and three others in the broader regional band. All 12 are currently held by the Coalition.
What One Nation is doing, in other words, is not breaking through to new territory. It is cannibalising the conservative vote in seats the conservatives used to own. That is a very different thing from becoming a governing force.
And here is the structural trap that no one in the mainstream coverage seems willing to name plainly.
One Nation cannot grow into a major party without being taken prisoner. This is not a prediction. It’s what happened in the US. There is more than a cautionary tale, written in the history of the American Republican Party.
The Republicans once had a base that overlapped significantly with One Nation’s: rural, deindustrialised, culturally conservative, economically abandoned, and angry about it. The billionaire donor class, beginning with the Koch brothers and accelerating through the Citizens United era, identified that anger as a vehicle. They did not share the anger. They funded it. They directed it. They ensured it remained pointed at immigration, at cultural elites, at the cosmopolitan cities, and away from the boardrooms and the tax arrangements and the wage suppression that had actually stripped those communities of their economic dignity. The Republican Party did not take over the billionaires. The billionaires took over the Republican Party. What remained was a vessel: the rage was genuine, the politics was purchased.
The process is already underway in Australia.
In December 2025, when Barnaby Joyce announced his shift to One Nation, he publicly confirmed that Gina Rinehart, Australia’s wealthiest individual, was providing funding to the party. Rinehart has also lent Hanson use of her private jet for campaign travel, including flights connected to the South Australian election campaign. Those arrangements have been reported as raising questions about compliance with South Australian donation laws, and former senator Cory Bernardi has said he would repay the cost of the flights he took. The party that presents itself as the voice of the battler, the small farmer, the forgotten Australian in the long‑grass seats of regional New South Wales, is now partly funded by the nation’s richest mining billionaire.
Rinehart is not the Veblen‑style voter she is funding. She is not the man in the long white shirt, nursing a grievance about the cities and the elites. She is the elite. Her interests, on wages, on resources taxation, on environmental regulation, on labour law, are structurally opposed to the interests of the people pulling the One Nation lever in Farrer. She is not an aberration in this story. She is the story. She is what happens when populist anger becomes an investable asset.
The tech‑billionaire class of the United States, Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and the rest, figured this out earlier and with greater sophistication. They are what Gordon Gekko becomes when he has had 30 more years to compound, when he has moved from junk bonds to platform monopolies, when he has decided that democracy itself is an impediment to the rate of return. Gekko at least had the honesty to say greed is good in a room full of shareholders. This cohort funds the demolition of regulatory frameworks, the capture of political parties, the purchase of influence over governments, and they do it while presenting themselves as disruptors of the very establishment they have long since absorbed. They are atavistic, the robber baron stripped of his top hat and dressed in a hoodie, still extracting, still consolidating, still moving the levers so that the cost falls on the workers and the return accrues to the capital.
Australia has not caught up to this yet. But Rinehart’s funding of One Nation is the early signal. The private jet to South Australia. The donor network that Barnaby Joyce brought with him from his National Party years. The corporate interest in a party that will deregulate water, deregulate labour, and deregulate the resource extraction that Rinehart’s fortune depends on, while its voters are told their problem is immigration.
As Crikey’s analysis of the South Australian result put it cleanly, when the commentariat expresses shock at One Nation’s rise, it reveals a faith in a fantasy version of Australia. This country has always had this constituency. The party that represents it has always been vulnerable to corporate capture, because its voters, legitimately aggrieved and economically precarious, have neither the resources nor the institutional backing to resist it. The anger is theirs. The direction of the anger is up for purchase.
Bernard Keane’s earlier observation still holds. This is as good as it gets for One Nation as a genuinely populist force. From here, the trajectory is either stagnation or capture. The seats it can win in a general election are limited by electoral geography. The money it needs to compete nationally comes with conditions attached. And the conditions, as the Republicans discovered, eventually consume the party.
David Farley has won Farrer. One Nation has its first lower‑house seat won at a general election. Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce celebrated in Albury. Gina Rinehart’s private jet was elsewhere.
The roughie, it turns out, got up.
The question is who owns it now.
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A couple of observations:
Pauline Hanson was elected as a One Nation Queensland Senator and is paid to focus on the needs of the Queensland electorate – the report card is not looking good!
Barnaby Joyce was elected as a National Party Lower House Member on behalf of the electorate of New England – he then jumped ship and joined One Nation and instead of resigning his seat and bringing about a by-election he stayed on posing as the elected memer for New England but not actually doing anything for that electorate – the report card looks even worse.
A large part of the swing away from the Liberals in Farrer was a protest vote on how Sussan Ley had been treated by the Liberals after serving twenty-five years in that electorate.
A SKY News commentator stated that the swing way from the Liberals was a protest vote against Anthony Albanse and Labor, yet they didn’t even have a candidate in that seat. Go figure!
“The question is who owns it now.”
I think that we will have the answer to that sooner than later.
More popcorn.
This Farrer show impels me to thunk up a story.., of a raging party at midnight, drunks, shitsounds and stomps, getting it inya, first flirts, tries, all fun and it will proceed. Next day, there will be complaints, crook heads, lost items, nasty piles of…ejected allsorts (ugghh) and a swing to gloom, strain, “neveragain flashes” and ” did I? No!” So Farrer is at about one a. m, and no shit has hit the fan, yet. When the Farrer folk wake up, they will have a self focussed party hopper, a “foreign” Q’land inarticulate broom jockey schemer, a drunken fornicating insincere slob “advising,” water manipulator schemers and little hope of even one thing, if Ley could not achieve progress. Canavan and Taylor? Warts on the willy.
“One Nation cannot grow into a major party without being taken prisoner. This is not a prediction. It is a law of political physics, written in the history of the American Republican Party.”
The Pauline Hansen One Nation party (PHONeys) has already been taken prisoner by Auntie Gina with brazen generous gifts of a four seater aeroplane, valued at about $1.5 MILLION plus a $1 MILLION ”political donation”. Two Hancock employees each donated $500,000.00 while another married couple donated a further $1 MILLION.
Yet all three conservative candidates whinged about the $20,000.00 campaign donation to Michelle Milthorpe (Independent)from the Climate 200 organisation which supports educated women standing as Independents with policies addressing human- caused climate change.
The Murdoch Media Manipulation Monopoly continuously ignored these facts in their reporting before polling day and continue this deliberate blindness.
So what does the future hold for Farrer voters expecting relief from the craziness of MDB water policy, poor health infrastructure and inadequate services, absent nursing, teaching, policing and emergency services staff??
Probably no change because all these matters are NSW jurisdiction for funding and action rather than the federal jurisdiction of Farrer.
Then there is the likely early move by the 69 year old successful PHONey candidate out of the dictatorship of the PHONeys and into retirement.
Sometimes rustic Dad & Dave characters require a long time to realise that they have been conned by self-serving millionaires playing the political game for their personal advancement.
REGIONAL INDEPENDENTS GET THINGS DONE FOR THEIR COMMUINTIES.
“The Crikey analysis of the SA result put it cleanly: when the commentariat expresses shock at One Nation’s rise, it reveals a faith in a fantasy version of Australia.”
Crikey has missed the point.
Not even close.
The fantasy in play here is a fantasy about liberal democacy.
It rests on the relentlessly promoted lie that liberal democracy might not be perfect, but it leaves for dead every other alternative political/economic option.
That lie has worked for decades, but the ascendancy of liberalism since the end of the Cold War has allowed the true inner workings of the system to come to the fore.
The system is inherently exploitative and is now devouring its domestic constituency because more regulated economic options, as we see for example in China, do not permit exploitation from the West, and actually work for the national good rather than the corporate good.
The fact that a representative of the corporate good has won in Farrer is a salutary reminder that when the struggles of the people are not addressed they will flock to any ratbag who promises a way out.
That way out is historically fascism.
And the corporate capture, (Mussolini’s fascism) has begun.
I’m in the Farrer electorate and after being a life-long Labor voter I switched sides. I voted for Michelle Milthorpe.
@ Roswell: An excellent candidate who hopefully will run again in 2028 because Farley is likely to have absconded into retirement and the electorate will be disillusioned with the absence of any change that they require.
The publicity, however limited by editorial direction, has made her a well known name in Farrer and Australia. This huge advantage would be lost if they were to retire from politics now,
Remember Malcolm Fraser took three (3) attempts before he was elected to Parliament and went on to become Prim Monster ”in difficult circumstances”. Then I seem to remember that Little Johnnie Howard made three attempts at Liarbral$ leader before the party ran out of options.
REGIONAL INDEPENDENTS GET THINGS DONE FOR THEIR COMMUNITIES.
NEC, I remember Howard being called “Mr 14%” – so called because of his 14% approval rating while in opposition.
The little bastard turned it around. The turning point was an interview he gave with Mike Willesee. He – for the duration of the interview – smiled a lot and acted friendly, swiping away his normal Mr 14% personality.
He later went back to being a bastard.
Someone mentioned Milthorpe. A good candidate, so the electorate rejected her.
As I said here a week or two ago, the manipulated masses are heartily sick of the Duopoly and the refusal to do real issues.
Having just picked myself up off the floor after reading the continuing rubbish reporting of the Farrer bye-election in the SMH, complete with crowing about how the PHONeys (Pauline Hansen One Nation) had won Two Candidate Preferred Count (2CP) with 57.36% of the total votes cast, compared to 42.64% for Independent Michelle Milthorpe, I note that there seem to be 18,834/124,447 voters registered in Farrer who failed to vote (or have votes cast for them). A small post-election mystery for the AEC to solve.
Looking forward through the hullaballoo, this shows that the present COALition is strongly on the nose with the family farm voters in predominantly agricultural Farrer electorate. So, continuing to preach reduced immigration limits of 130,000 may prove unpopular during any harvest season, while fixing the health, nursing, teaching, emergency services staff and housing shortages in infrastructure and services that are state, rather than federal responsibilities.
There is an old dog back in the manger dealing with MDB water policy (what was Farley’s position while managing AA Co cotton interests in the N MDB?). Perhaps the PHONeys will look at investing in trading water futures currently at prices that Farrer family farmers cannot afford.
More important at a federal level, the NOtional$ leader will not be too worried despite his obvious inadequacy for that position, because the next best candidate has yet to be found. Yet Tim ”Zionist” Wilson is already squawking a PHONey Liarbral ”Coalition”, with or without the NOtional$?? Perhaps the writing is finally on the wall for the ever lazy representation by NOtional$ MPs looking headed towards the politically irrelevant door.
The Liarbral$ are looking to prop up their insipid leader with a Shadow Opposition Leader, none other than Toxic RAbbott, the suppository of wisdom who commented, “I want the Liberal Party to be the best version of itself and in any capacity at all will be striving to make Angus Taylor Australia’s 32nd Prime Minister.” Et tu, Tony??
Perhaps this whole Liarbral$ President thinggy is just a ploy to ”encourage” the party to pre-select RAbbott for a fresh electorate in 2028 elections, and let more capable moderate hands take the administrative reins.
One by-election win does not make One Nation a power in Government. If it wasn’t for Liberal preferences being directed to Farley, his win would not have been so great. I can’t see Farley toeing the line under Hanson and Joyce’s direction for long. Farley is not likely to be a puppet.
I was wrong on my prediction of Michelle Milthorpe being successful in Farrer. Maybe it comes back to the cynical adage that “in a democracy, too often the electors vote for the candidate they deserve”.
Yep, and this ‘What One Nation is doing, in other words, is not breaking through to new territory. It is cannibalising the conservative vote in seats the conservatives used to own. That is a very different thing from becoming a governing force.’
One grew up in Farrer when all farmers were Country now National Party with Tim Fischer the MHR.
However, if I was a voter or member of the Libs or Nats I would be well p*ssed off that they rolled over by preferencing ON, to harm the Libs &/or Nats….permanently…..?
These are the same cohorts who lost it with the ‘family values’ of Abbott and Joyce, but now being usurped by ageing townies and smorgasboard of RW parties including SusPopAus, then wall to RW and white Christian nationalist agtprop.
The largest cohort in Farrer, like most regional electorates are 70+ years of age with ‘the great replacement’ approaching, and losing demographic powder…..every day….
Think the indie candidate could be in with a strong chance next cycle, as conservatives cannablise themselves; think they wanted to avoid the Indi situation ih NE Vic with independent &/or Teals becoming natural choice.
‘I note that there seem to be 18,834/124,447 voters registered in Farrer who failed to vote (or have votes cast for them). A small post-election mystery for the AEC to solve.’
That may gel with historical turnouts around low 90%, imagine some oldies not making it, but worse is young not voting, when outnumbered.
Wouldn’t hold my breath in the AEC, now ex boss turns up in media still, doing PR for the AEC. However, the latter has not investigated why offshore postal votes for ‘The Voice’ referednum didn’t arrive to many voters offshore, vs some (RWNJ) voters had courier delivery and then many voters had vote discarded, based on AEC claim of incorrect validation etc.; no feedback from AEC.
What are you proposing?
Following One Nation tradition, pop-up PHON candidate David Farley will soon quit the party and declare himself an Independent. Yes, folks, more than two-thirds of all elected One Nation members have exited before the end of their term! As for Ms Milthorpe, she’s just a pissed-off former LP foot soldier. Farrer will never really change.
https://maximgrosky.substack.com/p/out-of-the-cistern-and-into-the-sewer
@ Andrew Smith: To whom are you referring? Evicting the PHONeys from Farrer will take a concerted campaign across ALL the huge geographic area of the electorate. This is the same problem also found in New England and Parkes (federal electorates) and the NSW Barwon electorate which is about 42% of NSW land area.
The fresh information of Farley being a ”agricultural trader” suggests that manipulating the MDB water market will not occur in favour of family farmers, rather the corporate heavy water usage almond farmers will be smiling, as their city accountants write off the purchase cost of water as a production cost.
Is there a bookmaker anywhere taking bets on how long Farley will tolerate Porelein’s dictatorial tantrums? The pay for an Independent sitting on the cross-bench is exactly the same as for any Parliamentarian.
No need to panic folks, she only needs 74 more Reps seats, one of them being herself, to get to the PM’s role. Not sure any of us will live that long !!
It’ll be a miracle if Farley is still a PHON next election.
Cocky is on track to “investigate” the slutty party hopper Farley. Water will be “sold” to the nation’s “traders” for extraction, maggoting, taking, all One Nation actual policy and money can be made in connections, manipulations, re-directions. Family type farming in Farrer may be doomed, bigger environment bashing will rise, e g,. almonds and water will be sold to our long term detriment. Population thinning will lead to evermore loss of people, businesses, services. Whining will rise again, “Come back Sussan”. The harpy is no answer, nor (hick) Joyce.
One further observation:
One Nation was created by Hanson in 1997 so it is close to thirty years old. During that time it has achieved precisely nothing beyond posturing and disrupting Senate processes.
The media is now swooning that One Nation has won its first seat in the Lower House – that is after thirty years of trying.
They are not big on achievement are they?