The Scorecard

On the night of 9 May 2026, One Nation won its first federal lower house seat. The journalists covered who won. Too few asked what winning means.

David Farley of One Nation defeated independent Michelle Milthorpe in the New South Wales seat of Farrer, making it the first time One Nation had won a seat in the federal House of Representatives under its own name. On Antony Green’s 12 May count, Farley led Milthorpe by 57.7 per cent to 42.3 per cent two-candidate-preferred. The Liberal primary vote, in a seat the Coalition has held since its creation in 1949, fell to 12.4 per cent, down 31.0 points. One Nation’s first preference vote rose to 39.7 per cent, up 33.1 points. Preferences overall were flowing 56 to 44 to One Nation. The Liberal and National how-to-vote cards placed Farley ahead of Milthorpe. The scoreboard, in other words, read: the conservative establishment has been dismissed by its own constituency in favour of something rawer, angrier, and far less interested in the polite conventions of parliamentary democracy.

The journalists covered the numbers. Too few covered what the numbers mean.

What they mean is this. The people of Farrer, of Albury, Griffith, Deniliquin, Hay, Narrandera and Wentworth, took their votes and placed them with a party whose founding proposition is that the established order has failed them.

They are not wrong. They are, many of them, precisely the people living in the wreckage of local journalism: towns whose papers have closed, shrunk, merged, vanished online or been reduced to a Facebook page and a capital city subsection, serviced by someone who may never have driven the Sturt Highway in January. Ever.

Over a quarter of Australian local government areas now have no independent local news outlet. Some have no local news of any kind. Out of 119 News Corp local and regional titles listed by the Australian Press Council, 86 have been shifted into News Corp’s digital-only model, reduced to social media pages and a subsection on a capital city daily’s website. Into that silence, the algorithm speaks. Into that stygian silence, One Nation spoke louder. Into that Cloud of Unknowing, the disinformation industry moved in like a landlord who had been waiting for the tenant to leave.

Here is the information ecosystem in which this election was conducted. Older Reuters Institute figures put News Corp Australia at 59 per cent and Nine Entertainment at 23 per cent of the metropolitan and national print media market, more than 80 per cent between them. More recent Australia Institute research puts 84 percent of newspaper revenue in the hands of four conglomerates: Nine Entertainment, News Corp, Seven West Media and Australian Community Media. This is the Fourth Estate. This is the institution whose unwritten constitutional function is to hold power to account.

It is owned, substantially, by a man who was born Australian, became an American citizen in 1985 to satisfy United States television ownership rules, and thereby gave up his Australian citizenship. In the technical sense, Rupert Murdoch is an American. In the meaningful sense, he is a power without a country, or rather, a power with an empire, which is not the same thing. The corporate symbolism is just as elegant. News Australia Holdings, tied to News Corp, generated $1.88 billion in income in 2022 to 2023 and had no tax payable, according to ATO data reported by Guardian Australia. The arrangement has a certain symmetry. The profits flow. The journalism thins. The towns are left with a Facebook page. The civic bill, like the proprietor, is elsewhere.

But the Murdoch operation does not work alone. It does not need to. It operates less like a single newsroom than an echoing claque: outlets taking cues, amplifying themes, turning campaign lines into the appearance of public common sense. During the Voice referendum, researchers studied 1,613 pieces of News Corp content across thirteen weeks, published or broadcast by The Australian, the Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and Sky News. They found that 68 per cent of Voice referendum arguments platformed by those outlets supported the No campaign, and concluded that the coverage went beyond partisanship into advocacy. The claque performs. The auditorium empties. Nobody notices that the play has changed.

Behind the claque sits the money trail. Coal Australia made almost $5.4 million in political donations in 2024 to 2025. Australians for Prosperity received $3.89 million in total political receipts, of which $3.68 million came from Coal Australia. Advance reported $13.5 million in receipts for 2024 to 2025, while the sources of only $5.3 million were disclosed. That left $8.2 million in dark money. Hancock Prospecting, Gina Rinehart’s flagship mining company, contributed $895,000 to Advance. Advance spent $1.7 million on social media advertising promoting anti-immigration policies and claimed credit for destroying the Greens. Dark money. The phrase has a bureaucratic flatness that obscures its operational meaning, which is simply this: powerful private interests funding the manufacture of public opinion without being required to tell the public they are doing so, or why, or in whose interest.

The think tanks complete the architecture. Free market institutes and party-aligned research centres supply the language, the talking points, the faux white papers, the policy costume jewellery. The circle completes itself neatly. The billionaire funds the campaign vehicle. The campaign vehicle buys the ads. The think tank produces the paper. The paper becomes the News Corp editorial. The editorial becomes the Sky News segment. The Sky News segment sets the agenda. Other outlets, stripped of their own reporting muscle, follow because following is cheaper than reporting. The people of Farrer scroll through their feeds and receive, without attribution, the tail. The conclusion of an argument they never heard made.

Now consider the collapse of the instrument’s audience. Social media has overtaken online news websites as Australians’ main source of news, according to the 2025 Digital News Report: Australia. One in four Australians now say social media is their main source of news. Among Australians aged 18 to 24, Instagram and TikTok are the top two platforms for news. The old newspaper economy is shrinking. The new information economy is not replacing it with local reporting, institutional memory or accountability. It is replacing it with speed, heat, grievance and the intimate little narcotic of being told that your anger is not only justified but cleverly informed.

The information revolution is real. The claim that it is universal is not. We speak of instantaneous global communication as though it were a completed human condition, a democratic dividend distributed equally across the species. The International Telecommunication Union’s 2025 update estimates that 6 billion people are online, about three quarters of humanity. Yet 2.2 billion remain offline. The divide remains brutal. The information age has two populations: those for whom instantaneous global communication is a banal daily condition, and those for whom access is slow, costly, fragile or absent. Much of the journalism covering the information revolution is produced by members of the first group, writing as though the second barely exists.

Into the connected world’s information vacuum, something specific has rushed. Not journalism. Not accountability. Not the slow, institutional accumulation of verified fact that a functioning democracy requires in order to make collective decisions about collective futures. What has rushed in is the palace.

The Palace of Lies is not a building. It is a practice. It operates out of Washington and Mar-a-Lago, across social platforms, friendly studios, donor rooms, policy shops and campaign databases. It does not merely lie. That would be too simple. It corrodes the distinction between the true and the useful. It teaches its courtiers that reality is not something to be reported but something to be performed.

Donald Trump is again the President of the United States. The nuclear football follows the office. That is the point.

Farrer is not America. But it is not sealed off from the same machinery either: grievance without repair, information without verification, power without accountability, spectacle without consequence. The same structural weather blows through different paddocks. In one country, it becomes a gold-plated palace with a cable news soundtrack. In another, it becomes a Tuesday night in Farrer, a seat the Coalition built its heartland on, where voters tired of being managed, ignored and harvested reach for the bluntest instrument within reach.

This is not conspiracy. It is convergence. Not a secret plan, but a set of incentives. Not one command centre, but a system in which money, grievance, media decay and political opportunism all flow in the same direction. The tobacco industry’s lawyers recognised the architecture fifty years ago. The fossil fuel lobby inherited the blueprints. The culture warriors supplied the theatre. The think tanks formalised the language. The claque amplified it. The algorithm distributed it.

The historians have seen this condition before, in courts that ran on flattery rather than counsel, in empires whose advisers stopped reporting what was true and began performing what was desired. What distinguishes the present iteration is the addition of nuclear weapons, social media infrastructure and an industrial-scale persuasion apparatus funded by interests whose continued profitability depends on the public not understanding what is being done to them.

In Farrer, the people voted. They voted with justified frustration at an establishment that has, over decades, extracted their resources, closed or diminished their newspapers, removed services, flooded their information environment with manufactured content, and occasionally dropped in before elections to promise things that did not materialise. They voted for One Nation.

One Nation will not fix the structural conditions that produced their anger. It is not designed to. It is designed to perform anger on their behalf, which is a different thing entirely, and a thing that the palace, in its distant and self-regarding way, understands very well.

The journalists covered who won.

Too few covered what is losing.

The liberal democratic project, not the conservative party of that name but the two-centuries-old proposition that free people with access to honest information can govern themselves wisely enough to prevent catastrophe, is losing. Not in a single night. Not in one by-election. Not in one electorate. It is losing in the long, patient, structural way institutions lose when nobody can remember what
they were for. It is losing in the way local papers become ghost pages. In the way newspaper markets become private estates. In the way dark money flows through campaign machinery while the people that money is designed to influence scroll through its conclusions believing they have formed their own opinions.

The scoreboard says: One Nation 1, Liberal Party 0, democracy ongoing.

The scoreboard is a category error.

The track is burning.

This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES 

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