This week I have written about the South Australian election result, and about the NSW census data that shows which communities are most exposed to One Nation’s surge. The picture that emerges from both pieces is of a party whose political moment has genuinely arrived. Or has it?
One Nation finished ahead of the Liberal Party on the primary vote in South Australia. A Resolve Strategic poll has them at 23% in New South Wales. The Farrer by-election in regional NSW on May 9 could deliver them a federal lower house seat.
On the numbers alone, this looks like a breakthrough. So let me now make the argument that One Nation’s own record should temper that conclusion. Because there is a profound difference between winning votes and being ready to govern. And the evidence of the past three decades suggests One Nation has not yet crossed that line.
The defection record is damning
Since the party’s first major electoral breakthrough at the 1998 Queensland state election, over 35 distinct individuals have been elected to Australian parliaments as One Nation members. Of those, approximately two thirds have left the party while still a sitting member.
The details are worse than the headline. In New South Wales, the defection rate is 100%. Every single person ever elected to the NSW parliament under the One Nation banner has walked out before their term ended. In Queensland, all eleven MPs elected in 1998 had departed within two years. All three Western Australian upper house members elected in 2001 quit the party mid-term. In the federal Senate, five of eight senators left before completing their first terms, including one who resigned from the party on the day he was sworn in, before he had even entered the Senate chamber.
The reason given in each case is strikingly consistent. Mark Latham and Rod Roberts cited a “money grab” by the national party. Tania Mihailuk said she could not remain the public face of a party whose financial administration was not transparent to her. Brian Burston left after a public dispute with Hanson, defecting to Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party in June 2018. The WA trio fell out with national headquarters within two years of their election. David Oldfield was expelled after a power struggle for control of the NSW branch. This is not ideological drift. It is the same organisational failure, repeated across every jurisdiction, across three decades.
Why this matters right now
The communities driving One Nation’s 23% in NSW deserve this point to be made clearly. The people in Cessnock, Wyong, Campbelltown and the Hunter Valley who are turning to One Nation are not wrong to be angry. Cost of living is real. The sense that both major parties have stopped listening is real. Their frustration is legitimate and their desire for change is reasonable.
But there is a difference between a protest vote and a mandate to govern. Australia is a Westminster parliamentary democracy. Governing in that system requires caucus discipline, institutional competence, and elected members who trust the organisation behind them enough to stay in it when things get difficult. One Nation has consistently demonstrated, in every state and at the federal level, that it cannot deliver those things once the campaign is over and the governing begins.
A party that loses two-thirds of its elected members to defection is not a party with a platform. It is a vehicle for a single personality, and it treats the people elected under its banner as subordinates rather than colleagues. That structure might win seats. It cannot build a government.
Three things One Nation needs to change
If the party is serious about converting its current polling into lasting political power, rather than another cycle of surge, defection and collapse, three things need to change.
It needs to attract a different calibre of candidate. The defection record suggests the party has consistently attracted people who either clash with its leadership culture or who discover, once elected, that the organisation cannot support them properly. Serious candidates require serious internal structures before they will put their names forward.
It needs genuine internal governance. The disputes that have cost One Nation two-thirds of its elected members follow a recurring pattern of financial opacity and centralised control. A modern political party must have transparent financial administration, democratic preselection, and mechanisms for resolving internal disputes that do not end in public warfare and defections. Every split has cost the communities that voted One Nation their representation mid-term. The most recent example is Sarah Game, the sole One Nation member in the South Australian Legislative Council, who resigned in May 2025 and founded a new party, citing the reputational cost of the One Nation brand as an obstacle to her policy work.
Fundamentally, it needs to become something other than only Pauline Hanson’s party. Hanson’s ability to identify and articulate genuine community discontent is not in question. She is one of the most effective political communicators in Australia. But no democratic movement survives or grows when it is the personal expression of one individual. The Liberal Party outlasted Menzies. The Labor movement outlasted Chris Watson. One Nation, as currently constituted, has not demonstrated it can outlast a single parliamentary term without haemorrhaging the people elected to represent it.
A beginning, not a mandate
Twenty-three per cent in the polls is a significant number. The SA result is a genuine political event. One Nation has been at this point before, most dramatically after the 1998 Queensland election, when they won 22.67% of the primary vote and eleven seats, and the cycle that followed was one of rapid collapse driven entirely from within.
The track record of representation for communities turning to One Nation is not good. If the party wants to move from protest vote to political force, it needs to reform itself from within. Afterall how can we expect a party unable to manage its internal affairs to be able to effectively govern the nation?
Chris Hall is CEO, Primary Comms Group, and Chair at Sport NSW
