In May 2025, the Liberal Party won 43 per cent of the primary vote in Farrer, the New South Wales seat it had held since 2001. A year later, at the by-election that followed Sussan Ley’s resignation, it won 12 per cent. One Nation’s David Farley took the seat with 39.5 per cent of first preferences and 57.6 per cent after preferences, and Labor did not stand a candidate.

On August 19, One Nation’s Luke Herdegen beat Labor’s candidate in Secret Harbour, on Perth’s southern fringe, with 57.2 per cent after preferences.

Canberra’s preferred explanation is that this is anger, and anger passes. It is a comfortable theory, because it asks nothing of the people who hold power. The better explanation is that Australians have watched what the major parties do, rather than what they say, and reached a rational conclusion.

On December 3, 2021, Anthony Albanese stood in Parliament House and announced that Labor’s plan would see electricity prices ‘fall from the current level by $275 for household by 2025’. When 2025 arrived, the Australian Energy Regulator lifted default prices for New South Wales households by as much as 9.7 per cent, or $280 a year. By January 2026, as the taxpayer-funded rebates ran out, the Bureau of Statistics recorded electricity costs 32.2 per cent higher than a year earlier.

On September 19, 2025, a journalist asked the Prime Minister whether he could guarantee that prices would fall, and when. ‘Well, the modelling is out there and you can see the modelling,’ he replied. Pressed again, he offered a different guarantee: ‘I can guarantee that the cheapest form of new energy is renewables.’ Families were promised $275 off their bills, and when they asked where it went they were handed a reading list.

Housing tax followed the same pattern. At a press conference in Cairns on April 9, 2025, asked to rule out changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax, Albanese replied: ‘Yes. How hard is it? For the 50th time.’ The Budget of May 12, 2026, changed both, and two days later he explained: ‘We have changed our position.’

In October 2024, the Prime Minister bought a $4.3 million clifftop home at Copacabana on the Central Coast. He is entitled to buy whatever he can afford, but voters are entitled to measure the distance between that purchase and their own children’s prospects. Census figures analysed by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show that in 1971 almost two-thirds of Australians aged 30 to 34 owned their home, and by 2021 only half did. Among 25- to 29-year-olds the rate fell from one in two to about one in three. Meanwhile net overseas migration reached 538,000 people in 2022-23, according to the Bureau of Statistics, before it eased to 306,000 in 2024-25. Nobody has to oppose migration to do that arithmetic.

Small business has had its own lesson in how the system regards it. There are 2,656,469 small businesses, and they employ more than five million Australians. By June 30, 2025, small businesses owed the Australian Taxation Office $35.9 billion, two-thirds of all collectable tax debt, and in 2024-25 the ATO issued more than 84,000 director penalty notices, which can make directors personally liable for certain company tax and super debts, along with more than 15,000 garnishee notices.

Since July 1, 2025, the interest the ATO charges on a late tax bill, compounding daily at more than 11 per cent when the change began, is no longer tax deductible. The 2026 Budget proposes a 30 per cent minimum tax on discretionary trusts, the structure through which many family businesses operate, from 1 July 2028. The Australian Public Service grew to 198,529 employees, its ongoing workforce up 8.4 per cent in a year.

Nobody argues that tax should go unpaid, but the question is one of proportion. The same government that charges the corner store daily compounding interest on a late bill could not deliver the $275 it promised off household power bills. A business owner can be forgiven for concluding that accountability in Australia runs one way: downhill, from Canberra to the counter.

Then there is the Parliament itself, where the hard questions go to be outvoted rather than answered. Labor’s pledge binds every member to vote as caucus decides, and the Parliamentary Library records that the last Labor member to break ranks, in 2005, could do no more than ask Hansard to note his dissent. Constituents can write all the letters they like, but on the issues that matter most the vote has been settled in a party room before the debate begins.

I have seen what that looks like from the witness table. The Covid years tested this culture hardest, as governments made employment depend on a medical procedure, often by executive order rather than a vote of Parliament. On March 13, 2024, I appeared in Canberra before the Senate committee examining terms of reference for a Covid royal commission. I was there for the vaccine injured, and for the workers who were told vaccination was their choice and then lost their jobs when they made it. They had already been left behind once, governed by mandates and edicts rather than rights, and I presented evidence so they would not be left behind again. Senator Malcolm Roberts and a few others wanted to hear and test it. Most of the seats that belong to the people’s representatives sat empty, and I found myself pleading their case to a bare chamber.

The committee still recommended a Royal Commission when it reported on April 19, 2024. The government rejected all four recommendations. When a bill for a commission of inquiry reached a Senate vote on August 22, 2024, only 36 of the 76 senators recorded a vote. Every Labor senator present voted no, every Greens senator was absent, and the Liberals who turned up split three each way. The bill failed 26 votes to 10, with Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts among the ten who wanted the questions asked.

Open government, or party loyalty? The division list answers that better than any press release.

Voters would normally punish all this by turning to the opposition, but many no longer see one. At the 2025 election the Coalition won just 32 per cent of first preferences, and the Australian Election Study found that voters who identify with no party at all now outnumber Liberal loyalists, 25 per cent to 24. By late 2025 DemosAU found that about one in five people who had voted Coalition that May intended to vote One Nation, rising to one in three among older regional voters without a degree.

That is why the uniparty jibe has stuck. It is the observation that on power prices, housing, small business, migration, and the pandemic, both have governed in ways many ordinary families never voted for, and both have closed ranks when asked to explain.

One Nation has an advantage no focus group can manufacture: it sounds like the people it wants to represent, and it turns up when the uncomfortable questions are put. Before she entered politics, Pauline Hanson ran a plumbing business and then a fish-and-chip shop, and for 30 years that shop has been treated as a punchline by people who have never had to meet a payroll. One Nation’s appeal is not about fish and chips. But every small business owner who watched the sneering learned something about how the political class regards people who work behind a counter.

Voters do not have to agree with every policy to reward a party that sounds as if it lives where they live.

For candour, I submitted my False Claims and family law bills to One Nation because it was among the few parties that gave a citizen the time to put them. That is what representatives are meant to do. The returning officers’ figures, however, do not care who returned my calls.

Critics will say by-elections are cheap protests and that One Nation has slipped from 29.5 per cent in Roy Morgan’s June polling to 22.5 per cent. Both are fair, yet neither answers the record. Labor stood in Secret Harbour and lost, and the collapse in party loyalty measured by the Election Study came before One Nation’s rise, so a dip in the polls will not cure it.

The major parties can still win these voters back, but only by keeping their word, explaining their spending and letting their members vote with their constituents when conscience demands it.

They did not abandon the major parties. They were left standing at the bus stop, and One Nation was the only driver who bothered to pull over.

Hold the line.

Tony Nikolic is a solicitor and Director of Ashley, Francina, Leonard & Associates.

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