Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has returned to the top of Australia’s primary-vote polling as Anthony Albanese launches an increasingly direct political offensive against the party, declaring Labor has a responsibility to defeat what he describes as “dangerous, divisive, and downright dishonest” populist politics.
The latest Newspoll has One Nation on 30 per cent of the national primary vote, narrowly ahead of Labor on 29 per cent and substantially ahead of the Coalition on 19 per cent.
The Greens are on 13 per cent, while other parties and independents collectively account for 9 per cent.
It is an extraordinary position for a party that spent much of its history on the margins of Australia’s federal political system.
It also creates a complicated challenge for both major political blocs.
Labor is facing a minor party capable of taking votes directly from its traditional working and outer-suburban constituencies.
The Coalition, meanwhile, is confronting something potentially more fundamental: One Nation is currently polling well above it nationally and has demonstrated that dissatisfaction with Labor does not necessarily translate into Liberal votes.
Those pressures have intensified after One Nation’s historic victory in Western Australia’s Secret Harbour by-election.
Newspoll puts One Nation narrowly ahead of Labor
The national Newspoll was conducted between August 24 and 28 with a sample of 1,243 voters.
One Nation gained one percentage point from the previous Newspoll to reach 30 per cent.
Labor remained unchanged at 29 per cent.
The Coalition increased one point to 19 per cent, while the Greens fell one point to 13 per cent.
The combined support for One Nation and the Coalition therefore reached 49 per cent of the primary vote.
But One Nation’s position within that conservative and right-of-centre vote is particularly striking.
Hanson’s party is polling 11 percentage points higher than the Coalition.
That represents a dramatic reversal of the political hierarchy Australians have been accustomed to for decades.
It does not mean One Nation would automatically form government if an election were held now.
Australia’s preferential electoral system means national primary-vote support has to be converted into victories across individual House of Representatives electorates.
The geographical distribution of votes and preference flows would be decisive.
But 30 per cent is high enough that neither Labor nor the Coalition can reasonably treat One Nation as a peripheral force.
Albanese still has a major advantage as preferred prime minister
Other figures within Newspoll provide an important qualification to Hanson’s primary-vote lead.
When voters were offered Albanese, Hanson and Liberal leader Angus Taylor in a three-way preferred prime minister question, Albanese remained comfortably ahead.
The Prime Minister was preferred by 46 per cent of respondents.
Hanson received 31 per cent.
Taylor was on 23 per cent.
That suggests dissatisfaction with the traditional party system is not automatically translating into a desire to replace Albanese with Hanson as prime minister.
It also highlights the unusual predicament facing the Liberal Party.
Its leader trails both Albanese and Hanson in the three-way leadership measure while the Coalition trails both Labor and One Nation on primary votes.
A second poll offers a more cautious picture
Newspoll is significant, but it should not be treated as an election result or considered in isolation.
A separate RedBridge poll released at around the same time produced a somewhat different picture.
That survey placed Labor on 29 per cent, One Nation on 28 per cent and the Coalition on 22 per cent.
When respondents’ preferences were distributed between Labor and One Nation, Labor led 52–48.
The two polls therefore disagree about which party narrowly leads the national primary vote.
But they agree on something much more consequential.
One Nation is now competing at roughly the same primary-vote level as Labor and substantially above the Coalition.
That is the structural political development that matters more than a one-point difference between individual polls.
The poll came before Secret Harbour
The timing of Newspoll is particularly important.
Its fieldwork ran from August 24 to August 28.
Voting in the Secret Harbour by-election took place on Saturday, August 29.
That means One Nation had already reached 30 per cent in Newspoll before its historic Western Australian victory was known.
The poll cannot therefore be explained as a temporary surge caused by publicity surrounding the win.
Instead, the two events represent separate indications of the party’s growing political strength: one measured through a national opinion poll, the other through an actual ballot box.
Secret Harbour converts momentum into a seat
One Nation’s Luke Herdegen has secured the Perth outer-suburban electorate of Secret Harbour, giving the party its first lower-house seat in Western Australian history.
The significance of the result comes partly from the territory in which it occurred.
The electorate in its current form was created for the 2025 state election, largely from the abolished seat of Warnbro.
But the area and its predecessor electorates had been held by Labor in different forms since 1989.
Former Labor minister Paul Papalia represented the area and its predecessors from 2007 until his retirement triggered the by-election.
Labor went into the contest defending an 11.5-point margin.
It lost.
The Liberals did not take advantage of Labor’s collapse either.
They finished third, leaving One Nation as the principal beneficiary of the anti-government swing.
That result poses separate but equally serious questions for Australia’s two traditional governing blocs.
Labor can no longer assume One Nation is mainly a Coalition problem
For years, the conventional political calculation was that a strong One Nation primarily damaged the Coalition by splitting the conservative vote.
Secret Harbour challenges that assumption.
ABC election analysis found that while One Nation appeared to have taken votes from the Liberals, it had peeled substantially more support from Labor.
Labor’s primary vote almost halved.
That creates a potentially important pathway for One Nation in outer-suburban electorates populated by working families, mortgage holders and voters frustrated with housing, living costs and infrastructure pressures.
Those communities have traditionally been highly competitive between Labor and the Coalition.
If One Nation can establish itself as a third credible choice rather than merely a preference-distribution factor, the electoral mathematics becomes much less predictable.
Secret Harbour alone cannot prove such a national realignment is underway.
By-elections are particularly susceptible to protest voting and voters know they are not choosing a new government.
But the result demonstrates that One Nation can, under favourable circumstances, take Labor voters directly and convert them into a lower-house victory.
Albanese chooses confrontation
The Prime Minister’s response makes clear Labor is no longer prepared to watch One Nation’s rise from a distance.
Addressing the Queensland Labor State Conference in Brisbane on Sunday, Albanese described the political moment as crucial for the Labor movement.
“Across the world hard right populists are on the march,” he said.
He accused them of “peddling politics that is dangerous, divisive, and downright dishonest”.
Then came the declaration that defined the speech.
“We simply must defeat them. We owe it to history.”
“And we will defeat them.”
Albanese accused populist movements of being willing to “say anything and do anything to win votes”, including bending facts, spreading misinformation and disinformation and turning “Australian against Australian”.
He then identified One Nation directly.
“Parties like One Nation have no serious answers to our problems,” he said.
Labor attacks One Nation on work and multiculturalism
Albanese’s argument was not simply that One Nation is electorally dangerous to Labor.
He attempted to make the case that its policies would be dangerous for Australians.
The Prime Minister accused the party of opposing the interests of working people and attacked positions associated with Hanson on workplace entitlements, working from home and multiculturalism.
He also raised comments relating to domestic violence.
Albanese contrasted One Nation’s approach with Labor’s support for multicultural Australia.
“We unequivocally support multiculturalism because we know it’s part of Australia’s strength,” he said.
He added that Labor believed every Australian was equal, whether “Australian by birth or Australian by choice”.
The strategy is becoming clear.
Labor wants voters to move beyond dissatisfaction with the government and examine what a much more powerful One Nation would actually do.
Labor reaches for One Nation’s history
Albanese also invoked the party’s dramatic breakthrough at Queensland’s 1998 state election.
One Nation won 11 seats in that contest before its parliamentary representation fractured and disappeared.
The Prime Minister used that experience to argue electoral success had historically led to instability within the party.
For Labor, this provides an obvious line of attack.
The government can acknowledge that voters are frustrated while arguing that One Nation is not capable of delivering stable solutions.
For Hanson, the counterargument is equally obvious: the modern party is not the organisation that existed in 1998.
The success or failure of that claim will increasingly be judged by the performance of One Nation representatives actually elected to parliament.
Hanson says Labor’s attacks reveal fear
Hanson has portrayed the intensity of Labor’s criticism as evidence that the government is frightened by One Nation’s momentum.
On Monday she escalated the dispute further, accusing Albanese of inciting political violence through his description of One Nation as dangerous.
She said she had been receiving numerous death threats and argued a prime minister should understand that political language could have consequences.
Labor rejected the accusation.
Assistant minister Patrick Gorman defended the government’s rhetoric and continued to describe One Nation as dangerous, populist and dishonest.
There is currently no evidence establishing that Albanese’s speech caused threats against Hanson or directly encouraged violence.
Her incitement claim should therefore be understood as a political allegation rather than an established fact.
But the dispute demonstrates how rapidly the confrontation between Labor and One Nation is escalating.
The Coalition may face the most difficult strategic problem
While Labor and One Nation exchange increasingly aggressive attacks, the Coalition faces an uncomfortable question of its own.
Newspoll has it at just 19 per cent.
That puts the Coalition 11 points behind One Nation and 10 behind Labor.
Secret Harbour produced another warning.
A large number of voters abandoned Labor, yet the Liberals still finished third.
For decades, the Coalition could expect significant anti-Labor sentiment to eventually benefit it.
That can no longer be assumed.
One Nation is competing for conservative voters while simultaneously attempting to penetrate outer-suburban and working-class electorates traditionally contested between Labor and the Coalition.
If that continues, the Liberal and National parties will need to decide whether to confront Hanson, accommodate some of her policy agenda or attempt to win voters back through a distinct alternative.
Each approach carries risks.
Primary vote does not equal government
One Nation’s Newspoll result is historic in political terms, but Australia’s electoral system makes interpretation essential.
Governments are formed by winning enough seats in the House of Representatives, not by finishing first in a national primary-vote poll.
A party can accumulate millions of votes nationally without winning a proportional number of electorates if its support is distributed inefficiently.
Preferences also matter enormously.
That means describing One Nation as Australia’s “most popular party” is accurate only in the narrow sense that it leads the primary vote in this particular Newspoll.
It is not evidence that Hanson would currently win government.
The alternative RedBridge result — with Labor narrowly ahead on primary votes and leading 52–48 after preferences against One Nation — reinforces the need for caution.
But something fundamental has still changed
The caveats should not obscure the larger political development.
One Nation is no longer polling in single digits.
It is not merely taking votes from one ideological corner of the electorate.
It has reached approximately 30 per cent in multiple measures of national support and has just demonstrated an ability to take previously safe Labor territory.
At the same time, Coalition support has fallen to levels that would once have seemed almost unimaginable for Australia’s traditional centre-right governing force.
That creates the possibility of a substantially more fragmented political system.
The major parties will now compete not only against each other but against a One Nation organisation attempting to become a durable national alternative.
The next test is whether momentum becomes structure
One Nation’s challenge is different from Labor’s or the Coalition’s.
It already has evidence of voter dissatisfaction.
What it now needs is evidence of durability.
That means recruiting credible candidates, maintaining internal discipline and developing detailed policies across the full responsibilities of government.
Migration and cultural issues may attract attention, but a party aspiring to national power will also be judged on taxation, health, defence, housing, industrial relations, energy and economic management.
Secret Harbour gives One Nation a new opportunity to demonstrate its capacity in a lower house.
Future state elections will test whether that breakthrough can be repeated across multiple electorates.
Albanese has acknowledged the new political reality
Perhaps the clearest indication of One Nation’s transformation is not the 30 per cent Newspoll figure itself.
It is the Prime Minister’s response to it.
Albanese is no longer treating Hanson as a politician who can be ignored or dismissed as a fringe figure.
He is asking Labor members to prepare for a direct ideological and electoral contest.
His argument is that populist politics offers grievance and division where Labor offers practical government and social cohesion.
Hanson’s argument is almost the mirror image: that Labor and the Coalition have failed ordinary Australians and are attacking One Nation because voters are finally looking elsewhere.
Both arguments will now be tested at the ballot box.
Newspoll shows One Nation narrowly leading on primary votes.
Secret Harbour shows the party can win previously safe Labor territory.
Albanese still holds a substantial advantage as preferred prime minister, while preference polling indicates Labor remains highly competitive against Hanson.
No single result proves Australia is about to abandon its traditional political system.
But taken together, the polling and the Western Australian result make one conclusion increasingly difficult to dispute.
Australia’s political competition is changing — and neither Labor nor the Coalition can safely assume the old rules will continue to protect them.
