Colleen Harkin has described her decision to abandon more than two decades of loyalty to the Liberal Party and join Pauline Hanson’s One Nation as “death by a thousand cuts”, saying years of disappointment over principles eventually convinced her that the party she had served was no longer the one she believed she had joined.
Harkin, who has been announced as a One Nation upper house candidate for Victoria’s November 28 state election, outlined the reasoning behind her political defection during an interview with Rita Panahi on News24.
Her departure carries greater significance than that of an ordinary party member switching allegiances.
Harkin spent more than 20 years inside the Liberal Party, worked as a volunteer, stood as a federal candidate and served on the Victorian division’s administrative committee. She had been involved not simply as a voter or rank-and-file supporter, but as part of the organisation itself.
Asked why someone with that history would now stand for Hanson’s party, Harkin said there was no single dramatic moment that pushed her out.
“I guess I’m like thousands of other Liberals, it was death by a thousand cuts,” she told Panahi.
“It wasn’t a quick or immediate decision. It was a long period of being disappointed in a lack of core principles and sticking to what you think a Liberal Party would do.”
That explanation goes directly to one of the central contests in Victorian conservative politics: whether One Nation can persuade disaffected Liberal voters that it now represents principles they believe the Liberal Party has abandoned.
Pauline Hanson formally unveiled Harkin among One Nation’s Victorian election candidates on August 3 as the party accelerated preparations for its state campaign.
The Victorian election will be held on Saturday, November 28, with all 88 Legislative Assembly seats and 40 Legislative Council positions to be contested.
Harkin has been presented by One Nation as its lead upper house candidate in South-Eastern Metropolitan Region, an area covering a large and politically diverse stretch of Melbourne’s south-east.
Formal candidate nominations do not open until November 4 and close on November 9, meaning the current announcements are party endorsements ahead of the official Victorian Electoral Commission nomination process.
For One Nation, however, the campaign is already well under way.
The party used its Melbourne launch to introduce a group of candidates that included former Liberal figures, community representatives and candidates with professional profiles beyond the party’s traditional activist base.
Harkin is among the most strategically interesting recruits because she brings direct knowledge of the Liberal organisation One Nation increasingly hopes to challenge for conservative votes.
She also arrives carrying unresolved political baggage from one of the Victorian Liberal Party’s most damaging internal disputes.
Harkin became publicly associated with opposition inside the party to financial arrangements arising from former Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto’s defamation battle with Moira Deeming.
Deeming successfully sued Pesutto after he expelled her from the Liberal parliamentary party following the controversial 2023 Let Women Speak rally outside Victorian Parliament, which was gatecrashed by neo-Nazis.
The litigation and its aftermath consumed the Victorian Liberals for years, contributing to leadership turmoil, factional warfare and disputes over who should bear the financial consequences.
Harkin became involved in legal action challenging decisions connected with the party’s handling of the affair.
The dispute over financial support for Pesutto became, for critics inside the organisation, a symbol of a deeper problem: whether the Victorian Liberal Party’s governing bodies were acting properly and whether members were receiving sufficient transparency over major financial decisions.
For Harkin, that conflict sat within a much longer accumulation of grievances rather than being the sole reason she left.
Her description of “death by a thousand cuts” is therefore politically important.
It allows her to present the move to One Nation not as a sudden reaction to losing an internal battle, but as the end point of a lengthy ideological separation from the party she had served.
That distinction is central to One Nation’s attempt to use Harkin as more than a high-profile defector.
Hanson wants her party to become a destination for conservatives who once regarded voting Liberal as almost automatic but now believe the Coalition has compromised too often on issues including energy, immigration, culture, government spending and institutional reform.
Harkin fits that argument unusually well.
She is not approaching the Liberal Party as an outsider who has spent decades attacking it.
She knows the organisation from within.
Her political history therefore gives One Nation a way of arguing that dissatisfaction with the Liberals is not confined to angry voters on social media or people who were never likely to support the party.
It can also exist among former candidates, volunteers and officials who once invested years of their lives in it.
That is why Panahi raised the question of whether Harkin should be regarded as a “trophy candidate”.
Political parties have long sought high-profile defectors partly for the symbolic damage they inflict on opponents.
A former Liberal standing for One Nation can be used as evidence that Hanson’s party is penetrating territory previously dominated by the Coalition.
But Harkin’s usefulness will ultimately depend on more than her former party membership.
One Nation is trying to convert a period of unusually strong polling into parliamentary representation, and Victoria’s upper house offers an important opportunity.
The Legislative Council is elected across eight regions, with five members returned from each.
That structure gives smaller parties a more realistic path to representation than individual lower house contests, where a candidate must ultimately defeat all rivals in a single electorate through preferential voting.
One Nation already has a Victorian parliamentary presence through Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell and is seeking to expand that footprint.
Its August candidate announcement demonstrated that the party intends to contest the election far more seriously than as an occasional protest vehicle.
Hanson has said One Nation wants candidates across Victoria, while the party is campaigning on crime, government spending, education, opposition to Indigenous treaty arrangements and criticism of major infrastructure projects.
Its challenge is turning broad dissatisfaction into votes for identifiable local candidates.
Recruiting people such as Harkin is part of that transition.
A party can rise quickly in opinion polls because voters recognise its national leader and want to punish the major parties. Winning seats requires something more: candidates, campaign organisations, volunteers, funding and enough credibility for voters to entrust those candidates with parliamentary power.
Harkin’s experience inside the Liberal organisation potentially helps One Nation on several of those fronts.
Her defection is also uncomfortable for the Victorian Liberals because it arrives during a broader fight over the direction of the party.
The Liberals are attempting to recover after repeated state election defeats while simultaneously containing internal disputes that have consumed significant political attention.
The Deeming and Pesutto conflict became one of the most destructive examples.
It began after the March 2023 Let Women Speak rally, developed into a battle over Deeming’s treatment by the parliamentary party, produced a Federal Court defamation case and continued through disputes about legal bills, party finances and Deeming’s political future.
Whatever individual Liberals believe about the rights and wrongs of those events, the political cost has been substantial.
For voters who wanted the opposition focused on Labor’s record in government, repeated internal battles risked reinforcing an impression of a party preoccupied with itself.
For members such as Harkin, the same period appears to have reinforced concerns about principles and internal governance.
One Nation is now attempting to harvest that frustration.
Hanson’s Victorian campaign has repeatedly attacked both Labor and the Coalition, arguing that replacing one major party with the other will not produce the scale of change many voters want.
That strategy is significant because One Nation’s growth creates different problems for the two major blocs.
Labor risks losing working-class and outer-suburban voters attracted by Hanson’s positions on immigration, cost of living and cultural issues.
The Coalition risks losing conservative voters who believe the Liberal Party has become insufficiently conservative.
Harkin speaks directly to the second group.
Her criticism is not that the Liberals have become too ideologically rigid.
It is that they have stopped consistently behaving like Liberals.
That argument has appeared repeatedly within conservative parties around the Western world as populist challengers have grown.
Traditional centre-right parties face pressure from voters who want stronger positions on immigration, energy, national identity and culture while simultaneously needing to compete for moderate metropolitan electorates.
Moving towards one group can alienate the other.
Victoria makes that tension particularly acute.
The Liberal Party must compete in affluent metropolitan seats where independent and moderate candidates have proved competitive while also holding regional, outer-suburban and conservative voters vulnerable to One Nation.
Hanson does not face the same balancing requirement.
She can target voters who want a sharper ideological alternative and accuse the Liberals of compromising in pursuit of constituencies that may never support them anyway.
Harkin’s defection gives that criticism a human face.
She can tell conservative Liberal members that she once made the same argument from inside the tent, remained loyal for more than two decades and eventually concluded the fight was no longer worth continuing there.
Whether large numbers follow her is another question.
Recent Victorian political analysis suggests One Nation remains a significant force but that its support has softened from some earlier highs as scrutiny of the party and its candidates increases.
That is not unusual for minor parties experiencing a rapid polling surge.
Voters can express frustration through an opinion poll months before an election and then return to a major party once the campaign sharpens the choice of government.
One Nation’s task is to prevent that from happening.
It needs candidates who can survive scrutiny and persuade voters that supporting the party is not merely a protest but a viable parliamentary choice.
Harkin’s organisational experience could help with that objective, but her prominence also means her own history will receive greater examination.
Her involvement in Liberal internal litigation will be part of that scrutiny.
So will her work as education director at the Institute of Public Affairs, a free-market think tank with longstanding involvement in Australian conservative policy debates.
Those credentials make her ideological shift less dramatic than the party label suggests.
Harkin has not travelled from the political left to Pauline Hanson’s movement.
She has moved from an established centre-right party to a populist conservative party while arguing that the former moved away from principles she continued to hold.
That is precisely why the defection matters.
If One Nation’s Victorian growth came only from people who had never voted Liberal, the Coalition could treat Hanson largely as somebody else’s problem.
If experienced Liberal members and candidates begin moving with the voters, the threat becomes organisational as well as electoral.
The November election will show how far that process has actually progressed.
Victoria’s political environment remains volatile.
Labor is defending a long period in government amid concerns over debt, major projects, crime and cost of living. The Liberals are attempting to rebuild themselves as a credible alternative. One Nation is trying to exploit dissatisfaction with both.
The upper house could become particularly important if voters fragment across parties and independents.
A stronger One Nation presence in the Legislative Council could give the party influence over legislation even without winning significant numbers of lower house seats.
That makes candidates such as Harkin more consequential than their individual profiles might initially suggest.
She does not need One Nation to form government for her defection to matter.
If Hanson’s party wins enough upper house representation to influence the balance of power, former Liberals such as Harkin could find themselves voting on legislation introduced by a government and negotiated with a Liberal opposition they once served.
Harkin’s interview also suggests she does not regard her Liberal history as something to minimise during the campaign.
Quite the opposite.
Her two decades inside the party form the foundation of her argument for leaving it.
She can say she volunteered, stood for election, participated in the organisation and attempted to influence it internally before concluding that departure was the only option left.
That is a stronger narrative than simply announcing that she has changed political teams.
It also creates a challenge for Liberal figures who want to dismiss One Nation defectors as opportunists.
Twenty years is a long apprenticeship for an opportunistic exit.
At the same time, voters are entitled to ask whether Harkin’s dissatisfaction reflects broad ideological change within the Liberal Party or the bitterness of specific internal disputes in which she was personally involved.
The answer may contain elements of both.
Her public explanation is that the process began long before the latest legal and factional battles.
The Victorian campaign will test whether voters believe her.
One Nation clearly thinks they might.
By placing Harkin prominently in its upper house team, the party is making her political journey part of its wider sales pitch: that Australians who once considered themselves natural Liberals no longer have to remain there simply because they always have.
The Liberals, meanwhile, have less than four months to demonstrate that dissatisfaction with the party does not require abandoning it.
That contest is bigger than Colleen Harkin.
But after more than 20 years inside the Liberal Party, her decision to campaign for Pauline Hanson provides a particularly vivid example of what One Nation hopes is happening across the conservative electorate.
