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The newly resurgent One Nation last weekend faced its first big real-world test at the South Australian state election – and passed with flying colours.
Not that the legacy media want you to know that: they’ve been busily touting Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas’s emphatic win. On seat counts, at least. While it’s true that seats in parliament is the only result that really matters, even a cursory examination of the election results shows that Labor, not just in SA, but across the country, and in Canberra especially, has a lot to be nervous about.
One Nation received a huge 22 per cent primary vote statewide, putting it in second place, ahead of the Liberal Party in third on 19.2 per cent.
This was driven by a seismic swing towards the right-wing party – of 19.4 points as of Sunday evening – mostly at the expense of the Liberals, which suffered a 16.5 percentage point swing away from it overall.
More importantly, One Nation is eating into not just Labor’s primary vote, but absolutely conquering its traditional heartland.
One Nation’s history-making leap past the Liberal Party on primary vote in the South Australian election was driven by massive swings in seats with higher-than-average numbers of people born in Australia, earning less than $800 a week and working in labourer jobs as well as, overwhelmingly, the lowest numbers of university postgraduates.
As one commentator put it, baristas voted Labor, boilermakers voted One Nation.
But the take-home is that this isn’t the end of One Nation’s renaissance: it’s just the beginning. To come from nowhere to capturing over one-fifth of the vote statewide, in just one term, is an astonishing result. So far, the party has only won a single lower house seat, but at least another three are likely to go their way. Their primary vote is well ahead of the Liberals, who have clung to just four lower house seats.
Of the 11 upper house seats up for election this time, One Nation have snagged four, just one behind Labor. Combined with the Liberals, One Nation will likely be able to block Labor in the upper house at their will.
Most notably, despite winning a massive haul of seats, almost everywhere swung against Labor. Where there were swings to the government, they were miniscule, on the order of one to two per cent.
Even the smallest swing to One Nation, by contrast, was 8.3 per cent in the inner city seat of Bragg, home to 12 per cent postgraduates. In working-class seats, especially outside Adelaide, One Nation absolutely barnstormed.
But at the other end of the scale, One Nation saw its second-largest primary vote swing in Narungga, at 33.1 percentage points, and the seat also has one of the lowest rates of postgraduate qualifications in the country according to census data. According to the Australian’s calculations based on the new electorate boundaries that applied at this election, 0.8 per cent of people in Narungga had postgraduate degrees.
There was also a strong correlation with incomes.
For example, the seat of Ramsay reported at the last census that 47.6 per cent of its residents earned less than $800 a week. That electorate saw one of the largest One Nation swings at 27 percentage points.
Another workforce pointer towards One Nation’s success was that, of the 18 seats where Pauline Hanson’s party exceeded 25 per cent primary vote, all were in the top 30 South Australian seats for the percentage of labourers, as well as holding the top four places.
In other words, Labor are the party of the rich. One Nation is the party of the worker. The Liberals are the party of… well, hardly anyone, basically. The post-war political order has been completely upended.
All of this in the state that is the contender with Victoria for Australia’s Wokest State.
Labor ought to be very worried, indeed.
While Labor looks set to gain seats, party leaders would see cause for concern in some mortgage-belt, outer-suburban seats where One Nation ate up a significant share of Labor’s previous electoral leads.
What should worry Anthony Albanese more than anything, though, is the obvious fact that Labor can’t even buy votes from working-class Australians any more.
The Malinauskas government last year funnelled millions into saving blue-collar jobs at GFG’s embattled Whyalla steelworks, scrapping its green hydrogen frolic and shifting all that money into propping up the factory and its workers.
In the Iron Triangle seat of Giles, Labor was belted by a 14.5 per cent swing to hold the seat by a 55-45 margin over One Nation.
Albanese and Treasurer Zippy Chalmers are preparing to throw billions of working-class Australians’ tax money back in their faces, as so-called ‘cost of living relief’. The South Australian result shows that the workers aren’t that easily fooled, any more. They know who the real party of the worker is, now – and it ain’t Labor.
