In late February, Sussan Ley, the then-leader of the Liberal Party and opposition leader, succumbed to internal and media pressure and resigned her position. Rather than retreat to the backbench, she also decided to resign from Parliament itself. In doing so she left a little present for those in the party who had undermined her leadership – a by-election the Liberals were almost certain to lose. Over the weekend that loss came in a dramatic fashion that created an enormous shift in the Australian political landscape.
The seat of Farrer sits in southern New South Wales, along the Murray River which forms the border with Victoria. It contains the small city of Albury (population: 60,000) but is otherwise mostly farming communities reliant on irrigation from the Murray – a highly contentious issue given that three states share the river. Since the seat’s formation, it has only ever been held by the Liberal Party or its coalition partner the National Party. Ley herself had held the seat since 2001.
Yet when the by-election results concluded both parties had been decimated. The Liberals managed to secure just over 12 percent of the vote and the Nationals even less. What bested them is a dual assault on both parties, but especially the Liberals – the rise of the nationalist-populist One Nation party, and the Community Independents Project, a loose collection of independent candidates who share a mode of political organization, but are heavily focused on local issues.
One Nation won the seat, their first elected seat in the House of Representatives. The party won just short of 40 percent of the vote, but both the Liberals and Nationals directed their preferences toward the party over an independent candidate, allowing it to secure a comfortable victory. It may seem odd for these parties to direct their preference to the party that is now their biggest threat. But their calculation was that once an independent wins a seat they are incredibly difficult to remove and given One Nation’s internal chaos and authoritarian leadership, they presumed that the party is likely to implode by the next federal election in 2028.
That was a risky bet to make. Instead of protecting themselves from an independent, it now looks like the Coalition are legitimizing the party intent on replacing them. Through this greater legitimacy, One Nation has a far greater incentive to professionalize itself and prevent the internal division that has previously been a major weakness.
This could prove to be a major restructuring of Australia’s party system, although it has its limits. It is unlikely that One Nation could make inroads into urban Australia, where most seats are. However, there now looks to be enough persistent grievance and discontent in regional Australia for One Nation to become the dominant party outside of the major cities.
This will prove disastrous for the Liberal Party. Of the 88 seats in the House of Representatives that the Australian Electoral Commission classifies as “metropolitan,” the Liberal Party won only nine in the 2025 election. The party has lost its traditional wealthy, highly educated urban seats to independents, and these seats are unlikely to be impressed with the Liberals boosting One Nation by directing their preferences to the party.
This means that the Liberals need to go searching for seats in regional Australia, where they are now in a triple bind. The first bind is their agreement with the National Party, meaning that the Liberals cannot field candidates in seats currently held by the Nationals. The second bind is the strength of independent candidates in many regional seats where voters are attracted to authenticity, independence, and local knowledge. And the third bind is now a sense of abandonment and grievance in regional Australia that One Nation is capitalizing on.
The major structural shift here may be the terminal decline of the Liberal Party, a party that has governed Australia for 60 percent of the time since its founding in 1944. It is a party that no longer knows who it represents, or how to convince voters it is speaking to them. What this may also create is wall-to-wall Labor governments at federal and state level – as the only political party capable of winning the cities where the vast majority of Australians live.
This could have a profoundly destabilizing effect on the country, as it will intensify the grievance of those who are hostile to the Labor Party, but lack the political power to dislodge them from office. When large minorities feel permanently locked out of power, they don’t become more moderate – they radicalize, finding expression through more aggressive political movements, media echo-chambers and on-the-street politics that operate entirely outside the parliamentary frame.
A democracy in which one party wins elections indefinitely doesn’t produce stability; it produces a politics of rage that Australia’s institutions may be ill-equipped to contain. Australia’s compulsory voting was designed to protect the country from such a scenario; it was seen as an institutional bulwark that gave people a voice and moderated those voices. Yet when grievance reaches a critical mass, radical political parties can use compulsory voting to capture large chunks of the electorate, and then use this platform to ferment greater division. This may now be Australia’s fate.
