One Nation wins Farrer, taking first lower-house seat in Coalition rout

David Farley won the Farrer by-election in inland southwestern New South Wales on Saturday, delivering Pauline Hanson’s One Nation its first directly elected seat in Australia’s House of Representatives and ending a Coalition hold on the regional electorate that had stood for almost eight decades.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation called the contest by Sunday morning. With most ballots counted, Farley took 57.3 per cent of the two-candidate-preferred vote against independent Michelle Milthorpe on 42.7 per cent, according to analysis from The Conversation. One Nation’s primary vote climbed to 39.4 per cent, a near sixfold rise from the 6.6 per cent the party recorded in the seat at the 2025 federal election.

As the count firmed, ABC election analyst Casey Briggs called the result for One Nation. “It’s very clear, the next member for Farrer is David Farley. It’s not a close result,” he said.

The collapse of the Coalition vote in a seat it had treated as safe since the late 1940s now sits at the centre of Liberal leader Angus Taylor’s first electoral test since he ousted Sussan Ley in February. Ley, the previous Liberal leader and the sitting member for Farrer, resigned from parliament after losing the leadership ballot, triggering the by-election.

Liberal candidate Raissa Butkowski drew 12.4 per cent of the primary vote, against the 43.4 per cent Ley took at the 2025 election. The National Party finished on 9.7 per cent, psephologist Antony Green wrote in his post-mortem. About 60 per cent of Coalition preferences flowed to Farley after their candidates were excluded from the count.

What the winner said

Farley, a former agribusiness consultant with a Nationals background, told supporters One Nation’s momentum had “reached the end of its beginning” and was “going through the ceiling.” He moved to soften the harder edges of his party’s migration platform.

“We’re not going to implode any of our industries that are reliant on good quality, assimilating migrants,” he said. He added that any future legislative work would have to be domestically anchored. “We’re going to have policy that fits Australia, not the world.”

One Nation’s stated policy is to cap net migration at 130,000 a year, well below the current annual figure of about 306,000. Asked whether the present rate was too high, Farley said “probably not.”

Local grievances ran beneath the national result. Voters in the seat have spent the past year arguing over Albury hospital funding and the Albanese government’s water buybacks, which farmers say have raised costs for downstream irrigators along the Murray.

Milthorpe, who ran as an independent and finished second, summed up the mood. “They will successfully reflect the anger we feel out here,” she said of One Nation. “But that is the easy part. The hard part is doing something about it.”

The Coalition reaction

Internal pressure on Taylor began within hours of the result. Hanson, who founded One Nation in 1997 and has held a Senate seat through most of the period since, said the party was “here for the long haul.” Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce signalled that One Nation would target lower-house seats in Western Sydney at the next federal election.

Green described the result as an existential threat to the Nationals and to rural Liberal members, arguing One Nation now posed a greater structural danger to Coalition survival than head-on contests with Labor. The Guardian’s Tom McIlroy wrote that Taylor needed to “change or die” if the Coalition was to recover ground at the next general election.

Labor sits comfortably for now. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government holds 94 of the 150 seats in the lower house. National polling at the time of the by-election put One Nation on roughly 29 per cent of the primary vote, a level it has not previously sustained.

How the result compares

Green compared Farrer to two earlier by-elections that preceded broader political shifts. Aston in 2023 saw Labor take a Liberal-held Melbourne seat from opposition, an unusual outcome that proved an early indicator of the Coalition’s federal weakness at the following election. Wentworth in 2018, lost by the Liberals to independent Kerryn Phelps after Malcolm Turnbull was removed as prime minister, foreshadowed the moderate-independent revolt that cost the party further seats in 2022. Farrer fits the same template on Green’s reading, with the disruption now coming from the right of the Coalition rather than the political centre.

What happens next

The Victorian state election in November becomes the next test of whether the Farrer result can be replicated. Josh Sunman, an associate lecturer in public policy at Flinders University, wrote in The Conversation that “One Nation’s surge can no longer be seen as a blip or an aberration.”

Historic precedent cuts both ways for the party. After One Nation’s 1998 Queensland breakthrough, none of the 11 members the party elected to the state parliament remained inside the organisation by the end of the term. Farley’s own political record, which spans a prior Labor affiliation, a National Party background and a 2025 endorsement of Milthorpe, fits the pattern of fluid allegiances that has historically been the party’s structural weakness.

Counting in Farrer is expected to firm over the coming days as postal and pre-poll votes are processed. The seat is due to return its first non-Coalition member of parliament since the late 1940s.