Labor risks learning the wrong lesson from One Nation's Secret Harbour win

Labor risks misreading One Nation’s Secret Harbour victory and repeating its old mistake of chasing the populist Right, writes Wayne Hawkins.

ONE NATION has just won its first lower house seat in Western Australia.

Secret Harbour, held by Labor in various forms since 1989, most recently on an 11.5 per cent margin, fell to a gym owner who's lived in the state for three years and campaigned partly on bin collection schedules. Premier Roger Cook had called the by-election a “fight for our lives”. He lost it.

Somewhere in Canberra, this result is already being turned into a policy brief. And that is precisely the problem.

The read Labor will make

Watch what happens next. Some strategist will present a slide showing the swing, point at “immigration” as the presenting issue, and argue that Labor needs to move right on borders and migration numbers to close off One Nation's flank. It will be framed as pragmatism — meeting voters where they are. It will feel, to the people in the room, like the responsible thing to do.

It will also be a category error and Labor has made this exact error before.

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A pattern, not an accident

This isn't the first time a minor scare from the populist right has sent Labor lurching rightward on an issue it once owned from a position of confidence. The Tampa affair and the “Pacific Solution” reset a generation of asylum policy on the assumption that toughness, not clarity, was what voters wanted.

The Rudd Government's PNG resettlement policy followed the same logic a decade later — outflank the right by adopting the right's language and hope the base doesn't notice what's been traded away.

Each time, the short-term political read seemed sound. Each time, it hollowed out the thing that made Labor worth voting for in the first place: a party that could hold a position because it believed in it, not because a marginal seat panicked.

Why the diagnosis is wrong

The mistake is treating Secret Harbour as a mandate when it's a protest. Curtin University's John Phillimore was cautious about reading too much into the result even before polls closed, noting One Nation's WA support was soft compared to the east coast and the swing wasn't chiefly about federal migration settings — it was about local housing pressure, cost-of-living anxiety and years of a safe seat being taken for granted.

Voters who feel unheard don't need Labor to sound like One Nation. They need Labor to notice them before the count comes in, not after.

There's also the small matter of what One Nation actually is once you look past the result. This is a party whose leader has, at various points, been confidently and spectacularly wrong on matters of substance — including, memorably, asking Defence officials in Senate Estimates whether the nation's new submarines could only remain submerged for 20 minutes, only to be corrected on the spot.

Its press conferences have the improvised energy of people who met an hour earlier. It is not being rewarded for competence, policy rigour, or organisational discipline. It is being rewarded for being the loudest available vessel for a protest vote in a seat that felt ignored.

Chasing that vote by adopting its substance is like recalibrating your business plan because a competitor with no product still made a sale. The lesson isn't “sell what they're selling”. The lesson is “find out why the customer walked past you to get to them”.

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What the actual lesson should be

If Labor wants to read this correctly, the question isn't “how do we sound tougher on immigration?” It's “why did outer-suburban, mortgage-belt voters in a seat we've held for 36 years decide we'd stopped listening?”

That's a different diagnosis entirely and it points to a different prescription: material relief on housing and cost of living, visible local investment and a return to being the party that leads on conviction rather than the party that triangulates in a panic every time a protest vote lands somewhere embarrassing.

The Prime Minister's own government has form here — the “practical payment” for students undertaking mandatory work experience is a useful microcosm of the wider problem: a genuinely good idea, means-tested, restricted to four disciplines, paid at roughly $8 an hour and delayed well past when it might have mattered. That's not caution. That's a party that has learned to flinch before it's even been hit.

Labor's 2025 landslide wasn't proof the electorate loves it. The Australian Election Study found voters preferred Labor's policies on nine of ten major issues — but the deciding factor was cost-of-living pain and a Coalition that spent the campaign fighting itself.

Labor didn't win hearts. It won by default against a worse alternative. Secret Harbour is what happens when a government mistakes a default win for a mandate and then stops doing the work that default wins were never going to sustain.

The backfire

If Labor moves right to chase One Nation's voters, it will not out-Hanson Hanson — nobody can and trying only legitimises her framing while conceding the argument was hers to win. It will alienate the voters who backed Labor in 2025 because they preferred its actual policies, without gaining the protest voters who were never voting on policy substance to begin with.

That's the worst of both outcomes: lost ground on the Left, no ground gained on the Right and a party that increasingly resembles the thing it used to define itself against.

Secret Harbour sent a message. The question is whether anyone in Canberra is capable of reading it correctly — or whether, as history suggests, they'll hear “move right” when the message was actually “come back”.