One Nation has broken through a decades-old Labor stronghold in Western Australia, with Luke Herdegen claiming a historic victory in the Secret Harbour by-election after an extraordinary surge in support across Perth’s outer south.
The result gives Pauline Hanson’s party its first elected member in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly and transforms what began as a mid-term state by-election into a result with potentially significant implications for both Labor and the Liberals.
With 74.5 per cent of votes counted in the ABC’s updated tally, Herdegen had secured 39.1 per cent of first preferences — an extraordinary 30.6 percentage-point increase on One Nation’s result at the 2025 state election.
Labor’s Georgia Tree had fallen to 24.4 per cent, a 22.1-point decline, while Liberal candidate Ryan Robertson was running third on 17.3 per cent.
On the two-candidate-preferred count between One Nation and Labor, Herdegen was leading by 57 to 43 per cent.
That represents a swing of about 18.6 percentage points away from Labor.
The seat has been called for One Nation and Tree has conceded defeat, although the Western Australian Electoral Commission says the published count remains indicative until eligible postal votes have been received following the September 3 deadline.
A historic breakthrough for One Nation
The importance of the result goes well beyond the size of the swing.
One Nation has never previously elected a member to Western Australia’s lower house.
It has now done so by taking territory that has been represented by Labor under different electorate names and boundaries for decades.
Herdegen declared the result a warning to Labor across Australia.
“There are no safe Labor seats in this state or in this country anymore,” he told supporters after victory became clear.
He said voters had sent a message that would produce “shock waves across the entire country” and described One Nation’s advance as an “orange tsunami”.
Those statements are victory-night political rhetoric rather than predictions established by the result.
But the numbers explain why One Nation is confident.
At last year’s state election, the party attracted only 8.4 per cent of the primary vote in Secret Harbour.
Herdegen has now pushed that figure above 39 per cent.
Labor’s history in the area stretches back decades
Secret Harbour is a relatively new electorate name, but the area’s Labor history is much older.
The seat was created for the 2025 election as the successor to Warnbro after a redistribution shifted boundaries south and transferred the suburb of Warnbro into neighbouring Baldivis.
Warnbro itself had succeeded an earlier configuration of Peel.
The former electorate of Peel was held continuously by Labor from its creation in 1989 until it was abolished.
Paul Papalia first entered Parliament after winning the Peel by-election in February 2007.
He then represented Warnbro from its creation in 2008 before becoming the first MP for the renamed Secret Harbour electorate following the 2025 election.
His retirement in July triggered Saturday’s contest.
That history explains why One Nation is portraying the victory as the destruction of a Labor fortress.
The 31.3 per cent margin needs some explanation
One figure circulating after the result is a Labor margin of 31.3 per cent.
That figure is real, but it was not the margin One Nation actually confronted on Saturday.
Before the 2025 election, ABC election analysis calculated that the redistribution creating Secret Harbour reduced Labor’s notional margin from 33.4 per cent to 31.3 per cent.
But the 2025 state election dramatically changed the position.
Papalia’s primary vote fell to 46.5 per cent and Labor’s two-party-preferred result against the Liberals was 61.5 per cent.
That left the new seat with an actual Labor margin of 11.5 per cent heading into the by-election.
It was still a safe Labor seat by conventional electoral standards.
But it was no longer the 31.3 per cent fortress implied by its pre-election notional figures.
That distinction makes the scale of Saturday’s result clearer without exaggerating it.
Herdegen emerged from a field of 88 applicants
One Nation’s candidate selection was itself unusual.
Herdegen, a 39-year-old Rockingham business owner and former national weightlifting champion, was selected from a pool of 88 applicants, according to WA One Nation leader Rod Caddies.
He operates several fitness businesses across Perth’s southern suburbs and had only recently emerged as a political candidate.
One Nation then mounted an intensive local campaign, presenting Herdegen as an alternative to both established parties and repeatedly accusing Labor of neglecting the electorate because of its traditionally safe status.
That argument had obvious political potential.
Some residents had complained that their community received less attention precisely because Labor had been so dominant.
By-election conditions allowed One Nation to turn that frustration into a direct challenge.
Sixteen candidates produced a remarkable ballot
Herdegen also emerged victorious from an unusually crowded contest.
Sixteen candidates nominated for the by-election.
According to ABC chief elections and data analyst Casey Briggs, that was the largest field to contest a Western Australian lower-house seat since at least 1990, and potentially the largest ever.
The WA Electoral Commission confirmed voters had to number all 16 boxes for a formal vote.
By comparison, seven candidates contested Secret Harbour at the 2025 state election.
The enormous field reflected the level of political attention attracted by a contest that initially appeared to be a routine vacancy in safe Labor territory.
As One Nation’s polling strengthened nationally and in Western Australia, the by-election became an increasingly important test of whether that support could translate into an actual lower-house victory.
It did.
Labor threw substantial resources at defending the seat
Labor clearly recognised the danger before polling day.
Premier Roger Cook and senior ministers made repeated visits to the electorate as the campaign intensified.
A series of funding announcements followed.
Among them was a commitment to immediately spend $10 million progressing planning, design and approvals for the long-awaited Karnup railway station, part of a proposed $156 million project.
The government also promoted investment in local schools and training facilities.
Labor’s Georgia Tree said during the campaign that she had secured funding for projects in the electorate.
That strategy drew accusations of pork-barrelling from opponents.
ABC reporting examined the issue and found a more nuanced picture.
Some funding had already moved through government processes, while other announcements were deliberately promoted during the by-election campaign.
Cook himself acknowledged the government was taking advantage of the contest to highlight what it was doing for the community.
No finding established that the announcements breached electoral rules.
But politically, the sudden concentration of government attention reinforced One Nation’s argument that Secret Harbour had become important to Labor only when the party feared losing it.
The Medicare battle became one of the campaign’s sharpest disputes
Health policy also became a campaign weapon.
Labor circulated material attacking One Nation over Medicare and health policy, including claims about the party’s historical position on the public health system.
One Nation responded aggressively, accusing Labor of running a Medicare scare campaign and disputing the accuracy of its advertisements.
The competing claims formed part of a broader campaign in which both sides attempted to define what a One Nation victory would mean.
Labor wanted voters focused on the risks it associated with Hanson’s party.
One Nation wanted the election to be a referendum on Labor’s record and the electorate’s sense of neglect.
The result suggests the second message proved more effective with enough voters to change the seat.
It does not, however, establish that every Labor campaign allegation was false or that every One Nation rebuttal was correct.
Those policy claims must be assessed individually rather than inferred from the election result.
The Liberals were squeezed into third place
One of the most consequential features of Secret Harbour is that Labor’s losses did not simply flow to its traditional major-party opponent.
The Liberals finished third on the primary count.
That creates a significant strategic problem for the WA opposition.
In the conventional two-party model, a large anti-government swing would ordinarily be expected to strengthen the Liberal Party.
Instead, One Nation became the principal beneficiary.
That suggests at least some dissatisfied Labor voters were willing to bypass the Liberals entirely.
At the same time, One Nation appears capable of competing for voters who previously leaned towards the Coalition.
The result therefore places pressure on both sides of Australia’s traditional political divide.
Why voters were receptive to a challenger
Secret Harbour has characteristics that make the result particularly interesting to political strategists.
It is an outer-suburban coastal electorate containing many younger working families and mortgage holders.
Housing affordability, household bills, transport infrastructure and access to services are important concerns.
These are precisely the communities where higher mortgage repayments and sustained cost-of-living pressure can translate rapidly into political frustration.
One Nation also campaigned heavily on migration and the argument that population growth was increasing pressure on housing and infrastructure.
Local issues mattered as well.
The long-delayed Karnup station became an obvious symbol of whether the area had received sufficient government attention.
Even the frequency of household red-bin collections became a campaign issue.
The by-election therefore combined national frustration with intensely local grievances.
One Nation says the seat is now part of its heartland
After the result, the party immediately began looking beyond Secret Harbour.
Herdegen and senior One Nation figures identified neighbouring areas including Kwinana, Baldivis and Rockingham as potential future targets.
The party’s ambition is to transform a single breakthrough into an outer-suburban electoral base.
That strategy will now be taken more seriously.
Opinion polling can fluctuate rapidly and minor parties have previously enjoyed surges that disappeared before elections.
Winning an electorate is different.
It provides an MP, parliamentary resources, local visibility and evidence that the party can build enough concentrated support to survive Australia’s preferential voting system.
Secret Harbour has given One Nation all four.
The result has implications for federal politics too
The electorate sits largely within the federal seat of Canning, held by senior Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie.
That means One Nation’s breakthrough has immediate implications beyond WA Parliament.
Hastie warned supporters after the by-election that divided support on the right could create a risk of Labor winning Canning.
His concern demonstrates the complexity of One Nation’s rise for the Coalition.
A strong One Nation vote can hurt Labor in some working-class communities.
But it can simultaneously weaken Liberal primary support and create unpredictable preference contests.
The old assumption that One Nation’s growth is automatically good news for the Coalition is therefore increasingly difficult to sustain.
Labor now faces a different kind of challenge
For Cook’s government, the defeat is particularly confronting because Labor did not sleepwalk into polling day.
It campaigned hard.
It sent senior figures into the electorate.
It announced projects.
It attacked One Nation.
And it still lost.
Tree formally conceded on Sunday and congratulated Herdegen, while stressing that Labor’s campaign commitments to the electorate would still be delivered.
Cook acknowledged that Western Australians were doing it tough and said Labor would listen to the message from voters.
At federal level, Anthony Albanese responded to One Nation’s broader rise by telling the Queensland Labor State Conference that hard-right populists were peddling politics that was “dangerous, divisive and downright dishonest”.
He said Labor had to defeat them.
That sets up an increasingly direct confrontation between Labor and One Nation.
A warning against extrapolating too far
For all its significance, Secret Harbour remains one by-election.
By-elections often produce unusually large swings against governments because voters can register dissatisfaction without changing who governs.
Local candidates and local issues can carry much greater weight than they would in a general election.
Labor had also committed to delivering its campaign promises regardless of who won, potentially making it easier for some voters to experiment with One Nation without fearing the loss of local projects.
For those reasons, Herdegen’s victory does not prove One Nation will reproduce a 30-point primary-vote surge across Western Australia or nationally.
Nor does it establish that every safe Labor seat is suddenly vulnerable.
What it does establish is still substantial.
A party that won just 8.4 per cent of first preferences here last year has surged to more than 39 per cent.
Labor has lost a seat it entered with an 11.5 per cent margin.
The Liberals have been pushed into third.
And One Nation has secured its first elected lower-house representative in Western Australian history.
The count continues, but the political verdict is already clear
The Western Australian Electoral Commission has cautioned that the current numbers are not yet final certified results.
Eligible postal votes can continue to be received until 9am on Thursday, September 3, after which the full count can be completed.
That means precise percentages may still move.
It does not mean the identity of the winner remains genuinely in doubt.
The ABC has called the seat for Herdegen and Labor has conceded.
Election-night commentary originally put One Nation’s two-candidate-preferred share at about 53.9 per cent.
Later counting has strengthened Herdegen’s position, with the ABC tally now showing approximately 57 per cent.
That is why the updated numbers matter.
The first figures suggested a historic upset.
The subsequent count has made the scale of that upset even clearer.
Whether Secret Harbour becomes the beginning of a sustained One Nation expansion or remains an exceptional by-election result will be decided in future contests.
But one part of the story no longer requires speculation.
A Labor stronghold has fallen, the Liberals failed to capture the protest vote, and One Nation has crossed a threshold it had never previously crossed in Western Australia.
For the state’s political establishment, Secret Harbour can no longer be dismissed as just another safe Labor seat.
