The real secret of Secret Harbour

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.