The Liberal Party Did Not Lose Last Night. It Was Absorbed.

The views are naturally and deliberately my own.

Labor won easily last night. That is the least important part of this story. Do not get distracted by the celebration.

One Nation took almost 22% of the primary vote statewide. Not in pockets. Not in protest seats. Across the state. Up from 2.6% four years ago. The Liberal Party, one of the two parties that has alternated government in this country for the better part of a century, finished third. In around half the state’s 47 seats, One Nation finished in the top two. The electoral commission abandoned its own preference counts mid-count because it had prepared for an election that no longer exists.

ABC elections analyst Casey Briggs called it a political earthquake. That is the right word. The ground has moved.

This is a story about the right reorganising around a new centre of gravity. But it is also a warning to Labor. Both matter, and they are connected by the same failure.

What Actually Happened to the Liberal Party

One Nation did not build its percentage from scratch. The Liberal vote fractured in two directions simultaneously. Moderate Liberals moved toward Labor. Conservative Liberals moved to One Nation. Among voters who supported the Liberals at the last federal election, 10% shifted to Labor and 29% shifted to One Nation.

What remains is 18% of the primary vote. That is not an opposition. It is a remnant. The moderate wing found a more credible home. The conservative base found a more honest one. And the right of Australian politics has reorganised itself around a new centre of gravity that nobody elected, but that every future conservative government will now have to deal with.

One Nation did not rise. The Australian right reorganised around it. That is a different and more consequential thing.

One Nation Was Not Born Last Night. It Was Accelerated.

Before we talk about what One Nation’s result means, we should talk about how it got here. Because this did not happen in a vacuum. Twenty percent of the South Australian vote did not materialise because Pauline Hanson suddenly became more persuasive. It happened because One Nation was given reach, credibility, and sustained visibility that its organisational strength on its own would never have produced.

Australia’s conservative media landscape is concentrated in ways that most comparable democracies would find uncomfortable. The outlets that shape breakfast tables, radio drives, and online feeds in this country have not treated One Nation as a fringe party for some time. They have treated it as a legitimate voice of outsider sentiment, given its candidates airtime out of proportion to its support, and run sustained coverage of progressive policy failures, real and exaggerated, that builds the emotional permission structure for a protest vote. Throw enough mud, frame enough stories around elite contempt for ordinary people, and eventually the mud finds somewhere to land. Not because it is all true. Because people are already looking for somewhere to put their frustration.

Then there is the broader pattern. What happened in South Australia last night did not happen in isolation. Across comparable democracies, hard-right movements have built momentum not just through grassroots anger but through media amplification, well-funded messaging networks, and the kind of sustained narrative pressure that normalises positions which would previously have sat well outside the mainstream. Australia is not immune to that pattern. Anyone watching the language, the talking points, and the social media behaviour around One Nation’s recent resurgence, and concluding it emerged entirely from the Australian bush on its own terms, is not paying close enough attention.

None of this means One Nation’s voters are wrong to be angry. They are not. Their frustration is real and in many cases entirely justified. But One Nation did not win those voters on the strength of its policies or the quality of its candidates. It won them because it was given a platform, handed credibility it had not yet earned through the ballot box, and accelerated by forces that understood exactly what they were doing.

The 22% last night is not where this story started. It is where the accelerated version became a reality. And realities, once established, are much harder to reverse than the conditions that created them.

This Was the Pilot. Victoria Is the Test.

South Australia was always going to be the rehearsal. A dominant Labor government under a popular premier was never going to lose. But the result was never about who won. It was about what the votes underneath the winner’s tally were saying.

An 19 point swing to One Nation. The Liberal Party’s worst result since federation, beaten into third place by a party the political establishment spent years treating as a regional irritant.

This is not a South Australian story. It is a national story with a South Australian data point. And the next data point is Victoria.

Victorian Labor does not have Malinauskas’s personal standing or a government still in its first flush of goodwill. It governs a state where cost-of-living pressure is acute, where small business frustration runs deep, and where genuine achievements in workplace rights, equality frameworks, and public infrastructure are increasingly invisible to people worried about their mortgage, their energy bill, and whether any of it is going to get better.

The gap between Labor’s record and the lived experience of ordinary Victorians is wide enough to drive a movement through. And there is a movement looking for exactly that gap.

A Direct Message to Labor

If you are a Labor member, a staffer, a supporter reading this, set aside the instinct to explain why last night was actually fine. It was not fine.

You are about to lose people. Not the rusted-on conservatives who were never yours. The people you are about to lose are the small business owner who voted Labor because she believed in fair wages and still does, but who cannot get through a pay run without something going wrong that costs more than it should. The tradie watching his margins disappear under award complexity, payroll tax thresholds that have not kept pace with reality, and energy costs that have made his operating expenses unrecognisable. The migrant family who built something from nothing, who believed in Labor’s story about a fair go, and who now feels that the party claiming to represent working people has never once asked what it actually costs to employ one.

They are not anti-worker. They are drowning. And in their experience, the party that is supposed to understand economic stress has made it harder to stay afloat.

It is impossible to continue doing business in this environment. That is not a talking point borrowed from the other side. That is what people are saying at their kitchen tables and in their car parks. When they raise it with their local Labor member, too many walk away feeling lectured about what the law was designed to achieve rather than heard about what it is actually doing to them.

Labor’s values are not the problem. Labor’s connection to the material reality of people trying to build something is the problem. If that gap is not closed, urgently, specifically, and without spin, the Victorian election will not be a celebration. It will be a reckoning.

And If You Work in Diversity, You Already Know This

There is another group missing from this morning’s commentary. They do not show up in the swing seat modelling or the focus group transcripts. But they have spent years doing the quiet, unglamorous, essential work of holding communities together, and they are exhausted in a different way, because they are exhausted and invisible at the same time.

I am talking about the people doing the work between policy and reality, in multicultural communities, in social cohesion, in the spaces government does not reach.

They vote Labor. They have built careers around the values Labor claims to represent. And if you sit with them long enough, past the diplomacy, they will tell you they feel taken for granted. Not occasionally. Structurally.

The grants do not always go to the most experienced or the most credible. Sometimes they go to large, well-resourced organisations led by people who are distant from the communities they are funded to represent; organisations that know how to navigate funding systems but are not embedded in the lived reality those systems are meant to support. And sometimes they go to organisations that appear from nowhere, stood up in time to meet a funding round, with no history in the community, no track record of delivery, and no real accountability to the people they claim to represent. They win because the application was clean, because someone made a phone call, or because they reflected back exactly what the funder wanted to hear.

This is not about the organisations doing it right. They exist, and the communities they serve know who they are.

Meanwhile the actual community leaders, the people who grew up in these communities, who speak the languages, who show up when there is no funding attached, watch from the outside. They are operating on scraps, on goodwill, and on a sense of purpose that is wearing thin. And they have stopped being surprised by it.

Government is funding the architecture of inclusion while the substance hollows out.

The multicultural communities that Labor has counted on, quietly, without asking, are not monolithic, and they are not guaranteed. They are made up of people watching their cost of living rise, their small businesses struggle, their community organisations underfunded, and their concerns met with the particular condescension of being celebrated in a press release and ignored in a budget meeting.

They are scared. Not in the abstract way that word gets used in political commentary. In the way people are scared when they have family histories that include what happens when social cohesion breaks down. War. Displacement. The slow normalisation of language that stops treating people as people. They have seen where this goes. They are watching the same signs. And they are doing the work of holding communities together at the exact moment the world is pulling them apart, with less support than they have ever had. Not the well-funded organisations with government relations staff. The people. The actual communities. And they are not being heard.

So this is a direct message to every ministerial adviser in a Labor government who works on multicultural affairs, on social cohesion, on diversity and inclusion:

when your phone rings, pick it up. The person calling is not asking for a favour. They are calling because they still believe someone in government is listening. That belief is more fragile than you think.

And once it breaks, the person on the other end does not disappear. They go somewhere else. They talk to someone else. They tell their community what they told me, that the people who are supposed to represent them are not available, and perhaps never were.

You do not have to agree with everything they say. You do not have to fund everything they propose. But you have to be in the room. You have to be on the phone. You have to make the basic, human gesture of showing up for people who have spent their careers showing up for the values your party claims to hold.

If you do not listen, someone else will. Last night is what that looks like.

This Is Not About One Nation

Here is what most of the commentary today will miss: the people who shifted to One Nation last night are not ideologues. Most of them could not tell you what One Nation’s policy platform is. What they can tell you is that they are exhausted.

Sit with someone genuinely stressed about their cost of living. There are a great many of them. They cannot tell you exactly what they are angry at. They move from grocery prices to rent to a compliance notice from a government agency to something a colleague said.

The anger is real and it is legitimate. The target is not fixed.

That is the thesis of last night’s result, and it is the most dangerous thing in Australian politics right now. Because unfixed anger is available anger. It goes to whoever shows up and says: I see you.

Right now, One Nation is showing up. Not to solve anything. To collect. Survey data from the campaign suggests that nearly 30% of voters who supported the Liberals at the last federal election shifted to One Nation. These are not rusted-on Hanson voters. These are people who tried the mainstream and felt ignored by it. They are not lost forever. But they are gone for now, and the longer they stay, the more normal it becomes.

The Coalition Nobody Voted For

One Nation in its current form disrupts parliaments. It does not run them. But that framing is dangerously out of date.

A One Nation that polls above 21% and finishes in the top two in half a state’s electorates is a different animal to the party of five years ago. The Liberal Party won 35% of the primary vote in South Australia in 2022. They are now below 19%. Those voters did not drift to the centre. A significant portion went harder right, and they did not go back.

A Liberal Party that has lost its moderates to Labor and its base to One Nation faces a question that goes beyond strategy. It is about whether the party, in its current form, has a reason to exist. There are Liberals who understand that accommodation with One Nation finishes whatever is left of their credibility. There are others who will look at last night and conclude that the base has already moved, and the only path forward is to follow it.

That is the conversation this result forces inside Liberal Party rooms.

Most reasonable voters understand that government needs to be centrist. When Labor and the broad Liberal tradition found enough common ground on institutional norms and economic management, the system held. That common ground did not produce harmony. It created a vacuum on the flank. The disruption, when it came, came from the right. Last night confirmed it has well and truly arrived.

The Warning

This is not a Labor advertisement. But it is written by someone who believes that what currently replaces Labor, if Labor does not do the work, is far worse than anything Labor has done wrong.

Last night, one in five South Australians voted for a party whose agenda would make their cost of living worse, lock in inequality, and erode the institutions that stop power from being used against ordinary people. They voted for it anyway. Not because Pauline Hanson has answers. Because they are tired enough to stop demanding answers and start demanding to be seen.

That is not a fringe result. That is 22% of the vote and rising.

The people behind those numbers are not data points. They are voters who are angry at everything and cannot tell you exactly why, and who are entirely correct to be angry. They will keep moving until someone stops managing them and starts listening to them.

South Australia was not a vindication. It was a warning dressed up as a victory.

Right now, she already is. And this time, she is not going anywhere.

First published on Substack, 21 March 2026.