At the weekend, a by-election in the Division of Farrer in New South Wales produced a striking political upset. In a seat that had been held by the Liberal Party or its Coalition partner the Nationals at every election since 1949, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, a party frequently compared to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, stormed to victory.

The result comes barely a year after the 2025 general election, in which the Liberals secured just 28 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives — the lowest tally in the party’s history. Following this by-election defeat, that number now stands at 27.

The seat of Farrer was vacated by former Liberal leader and prominent moderate Sussan Ley. During her leadership, the party backed rushed “hate speech” legislation introduced after the Bondi massacre, despite initial resistance. As I argued for UnHerd in January, these laws expanded state control over ordinary Australians, particularly by restricting free speech. By the time Ley lost the leadership to Angus Taylor, the Liberals had sunk to record-low polling of 18%.

Since Tony Abbott was removed as prime minister in 2015, the Liberal Party has, like its Conservative counterparts in the UK, increasingly functioned as a center-right party in name only. It has embraced a mix of big spending, expanded government and technocratic managerialism, most clearly seen in its strong support for stringent Covid-era lockdowns and vaccine mandates. It has also adopted Net Zero commitments, despite earlier campaigning against them.

This pivot to the Left has allowed One Nation to outflank the Liberals on the Right. The party has tapped into concerns about immigration, energy, industry, jobs, agriculture, housing, Islamic extremism and the cost of living. Pollsters say voters have never been so disillusioned, negative and lacking in hope for the future.

Could One Nation launch a Reform-style insurgency in Australia? Since the 2025 election, Hanson’s party has consistently polled neck and neck with the Liberals, often in the high 20s, and has now begun translating that polling strength into electoral gains. The win in Farrer follows on from the election in South Australia in March, where One Nation won four seats in the state’s upper and lower houses of parliament, respectively.

Even so, like Reform, One Nation does not currently have the votes to win a general election outright. The more probable scenario is that the Liberals, Nationals and One Nation form a conservative coalition to oust Labor from power. But the scale of the Farrer by-election loss cannot be overstated. It was, after all, in this Division that Sir Robert Menzies founded the Liberal Party in 1944 as a “chance to give a means of expression to the deepest feelings to hundreds of thousands of Australians who are frustrated by the present and who are seriously alarmed about the future” — those he called the “forgotten people”.

The Farrer result suggests that those forgotten people have now crossed the Rubicon to One Nation.