The real secret of Secret Harbour is that One Nation’s national vote may actually be much higher than we think it is.
When you look at a federal poll and you take away half those who voted Coalition just as recently as 2019 and add it to Pauline Hanson’s 6.40 per cent at the last election you get very close to One Nation’s current vote.
The One Nation story thus far has been that the Coalition has moved so far to the left that around half their supporters no longer recognise the party they used to support, so they’ve shifted their allegiance to One Nation.
However, that’s not what happened in Secret Harbour.
In Secret Harbour, if you take the drop in the Labor vote of -22.17 per cent and add it to the Liberal’s drop of -7.67 per cent then you get very close to the 30-percentage point increase of the vote won by One Nation.
(This is a simplification for illustrative purposes as votes transfer in all directions, but it is substantially what happened.)
In this case, it is the Labor vote that has been cut in half. The total Liberal first preference vote in this seat, or its predecessor, has never been higher than 38.4 per cent, and that was 13 years ago. With 17 per cent remaining at this election there are only a potential 21 per cent disaffected Liberals, at the most generous estimate, that can contribute to One Nation’s 39 per cent primary vote.
That means that a fair proportion of the other 18 per cent has to come from normally Labor-voting constituents.
If Labor’s national primary were cut roughly in half, as it was in Secret Harbour, and most of those defectors went to One Nation, One Nation would be polling in the mid-40s.
The end result after distribution of preferences could be, depending on preference distributions, One Nation with somewhere around the same percentage of the vote as voted ‘No’ in the Voice Referendum.
Why aren’t we seeing these sorts of figures in the national polling?
Well, it could be because it was a state by-election and only state issues mattered.
Maybe, but the WA government of Roger Cook has been falling in the polls but still records something like a 53 per cent two-party preferred vote. Did voters really want to send him a message that hard?
Or is this by-election like the Penrith one in 2010 which rang in the end of the first chaotic Rudd prime ministership?
In Penrith, a formerly safe Labor seat, the Liberal Party achieved a 25.73 per cent swing to achieve victory with 51.5 per cent of the primary vote.
Kristina Kenneally was the Premier and the Labor government was on the way to an existential drubbing at the 2011 election, which had to be one factor, but the feedback from the booths was that there was a substantial anti-Rudd sentiment.
Five days later, Rudd’s colleagues removed him. Penrith wasn’t the sole cause, but a 25-point swing in Labor territory could hardly have calmed MPs already staring nervously at their own seats.
Everyone was shocked, apart from those paying attention, because polls had Rudd ahead on a two-party preferred basis by around 52 per cent to 48 per cent, which is not too different from Albanese’s margin against the Coalition today.
There is another possibility. Elections and opinion polls don’t ask voters quite the same psychological question.
When voters have just made a decision, particularly when they have just voted for the winner, they are unlikely to change them.
This is because they have been confirmed in their choice, and because, having just made a decision, they have other more important things to worry about and are not prone to revise it.
If you’ve backed the losing side your psychology is a little different. Because there is a loss you may dig in, resolved to fix it next time, or you may be disillusioned because of the loss.
What appears to have happened in Australian politics is that Coalition voters finished the last election disillusioned, and then since Christmas, and the Bondi Beach massacre, increasingly moved from the Coalition to One Nation.
Nationally, the polls have shown Labor losing support, but nothing remotely like the collapse in Coalition support. Secret Harbour raises the possibility that the next reservoir of One Nation votes lies on Labor’s side as well.
It’s also possible that there is a ‘shy’ One Nation voter. Is it the case that former Liberal and National voters are prepared to be more honest about their One Nation voting intentions than former Labor voters because it is socially more acceptable on the right to support One Nation?
When Labor leaders like Albanese and Chalmers characterise One Nation as a hard right threat to our democracy, and many in the belly of the Labor beast label One Nation as fascist, there is a huge reputational risk in admitting that you are thinking of voting for them.
Why would you share that possibility with an anonymous telephone caller, or an online researcher?
But when you are faced with a ballot paper to be inserted into a box and counted at arm’s length from you, honesty becomes possible.
Either way – whether because of not having had to make the decision yet, or for fear of being found out and socially ostracised – the real possibility of a defection of Labor voters to One Nation is no longer a secret, thanks to Secret Harbour.
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