The Farrer byelection may have shocked the political establishment, but the real story is not just that One Nation won its first ever federal lower-house seat – it’s that the Liberal Party’s political base has collapsed. One Nation candidate David Farley secured a decisive victory, while the Liberal Party’s primary vote crashed from 43 per cent at the 2025 federal election to just 12 per cent barely a year later. That scale of decline is almost unheard of in modern Australian politics and points to a much deeper structural crisis inside Australian conservatism.
For years, support for the Liberal and National parties has been eroding across regional and outer-suburban Australia as voters face housing stress, stagnant wages, declining public services and growing distrust in political institutions. The Farrer result exposed how much anger is now directed towards the conservative parties themselves. While byelections are often protest votes, this result reflected something larger: a growing sense that the Liberal Party no longer stands for anything beyond opposition and internal conflict. Leadership changes alone are unlikely to fix that problem.
At the same time, One Nation’s rise has been carefully cultivated over decades. Pauline Hanson has maintained an enormous public profile through sustained exposure across commercial television and right-wing media, helping transform One Nation from a fringe protest movement into a permanent force in Australian politics. Backed by wealthy conservative interests and sections of the media, the party has become a vehicle for pushing culture wars, anti-immigration politics, climate scepticism and neoliberal economics further into the mainstream.
But One Nation’s growth is also creating a dangerous fracture on the political right. Much of its support is coming directly from former Liberal and National voters, particularly in regional areas, and there are now open discussions among some conservative MPs about defecting to the party altogether. The result in Farrer suggests the biggest threat facing the Liberal Party may no longer come from Labor – but from the political forces emerging from inside its own collapsing coalition.
