Australia’s far-right party wins first Lower House seat
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Mr David Farley won the rural seat of Farrer for One Nation with a projected vote of 59.1 per cent.
PHOTO: REUTERS
SYDNEY – Ms Pauline Hanson’s fat-right populist party, One Nation, won its first seat in the House of Representatives in a by-election on May 9, a preliminary vote count showed.
The result is in line with a surge of electoral support for far-right populist parties globally. Britain’s ruling Labour Party this week suffered a widespread loss of seats at council elections.
Mr David Farley, a former agribusiness executive, won the rural seat of Farrer, some 550km south of Sydney and 320km north of Melbourne, for the anti-immigration party with 59.3 per cent of the vote, defeating the incumbent centre-right Liberal Party, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
One Nation’s first-preference vote in the by-election was 42 per cent, the ABC said, compared with the 6.6 per cent first-preference vote it got at a federal election in May 2025.
“We’re like a mason with a chisel, and we’re carving letters into Australia’s democracy,” Mr Farley said at a televised election event. “One Nation has reached the end of its beginning.”
First Lower House seat since party formed
The result is significant in that it marks the first time One Nation has won a Lower House seat since Ms Hanson formed the party 30 years ago.
But it does not affect the parliamentary majority of the ruling Labor Party, which holds 94 of 150 Lower House seats. The seat was left vacant when Liberal Party leader Sussan Ley resigned in February.
The Labor Party did not run a candidate in the contest for the seat, which has been held by the opposition conservatives since it was formed more than half a century ago.
Party leader Hanson, a senator, said while standing beside Mr Farley that the result was “a win for Farrer but a bigger win for the nation”.
She knew her party was favoured to win but when the first television station projected victory, “I actually got a tear in my eye”.
“You really don’t understand the journey I’ve been on,” she added.
Liberal leader Angus Taylor said at another televised event that the by-election was “always going to be a mountain to climb... and we have to take away some hard lessons from this”.
Mr Taylor said his party would focus on immigration rates. “For too long we have been a party of convenience, not of conviction, and that must change,” he added. REUTERS
