Don't believe the News Corp bots, Pauline Hanson's One Nation failed dismally in South Australia — and will continue to fail in every subsequent election. Founder David Donovan sorts the facts from the fakery.
As Independent Australia reported on Monday (23/3/26), Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party failed dismally in the South Australian election on Saturday.
So dismally, in fact, election watchers were treated to the ignoble spectacle of Pauline Hanson belligerently talking about “setting landmines” for returning Premier Peter Malinauskas, whose Labor Government was re-elected in a landslide, winning 33 of 47 seats at the time of writing (likely 34, up from 27 in 2022).
This peculiarly graceless leader lapped up the ignorant jubilation of her supporters, seemingly oblivious to the fact her party had failed to secure even a single lower or upper house seat at that time (now one, likely to end up with three).
This result was especially dismal, since PHON had every advantage in the lead up to this election, including the mainstream media promoting it enthusiastically at every available opportunity, constantly overstating its poll results to increase the party's threadbare credibility.
More disturbingly, as Independent Australia has reported in two stunning exposés, Hanson’s Trumpian cheer-squad at Facebook and News Corp fraudulently and misleadingly misrepresented PHON’s poll results and even actively created fake news stories using AI to put Pauline Hanson and her party in a more favourable light.
This groundbreaking investigation was subsequently picked up by the ABC, although without crediting IA for the scoop (but what else is new?)
The fix was in. But even the fix was too much for Murdoch, Seven, Nine and Meta to cobble together any electoral success worth mentioning in South Australia.
There's a lot to be said about this, which cannot all be covered on these pages, as no one knows more about Pauline Hanson and her disreputable minions than the people who wrote a book about her colourful, convicted criminal chief of staff, James Ashby, in 2015: Ashbygate: The Plot to Destroy Australia’s Speaker. Since then,IA’s investigations editor Ross Jones has been painstakingly documenting every dodgy deed and unsavoury development.
The tawdry workings of the Hanson operation are impossible to easily encapsulate in one short article here, so we advise you to peruse our dedicated “Ashbygate” page and buy the book to be more apprised of the background to this latest episode.
This article is about why PHON, or “One Nation”, was never a realistic challenger in South Australia, and why it will almost certainly never seriously threaten to gain power in any territory or state — and most certainly not federally.
WHY PAULINE HANSON’S ONE NATION WILL NEVER GAIN POWER IN AUSTRALIA
Don’t believe the hype! There are two intersecting reasons why One Nation will never form government in Australia — and will probably never even manage to gain enough seats to be an official opposition. One of them is mathematical and the other sociological, but they go hand-in-hand.
Firstly, the mathematical reason
To gain power in a territory, state or nationally, a party or political grouping needs to win the majority of seats in that legislature’s lower house. The upper house, where there is one, is irrelevant to sitting on the “treasury benches”. Government sits on the so-called treasury benches because to form government, a political party or parties need to be able to guarantee supply: that is, pass its budget and any other appropriation acts necessary to finance its agenda, legislative and otherwise.
The South Australian State Election showed why Pauline Hanson’s party is unlikely to ever get close to gaining a majority of seats in the lower house of any Australian parliament. Because even with the backing of Gina Rinehart and her millions, along with numerous other billionaire backers; and even with the full-throated support of the mainstream media, led by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, but also Seven and Nine, supported by fake AI interviews on Facebook, it still only managed a mere 22% of first preference votes in the SA Lower House.
This resulted in One Nation achieving just a single seat in the Lower House — admittedly, their best ever result in that state.
In fact, even at the high-water mark in its history, when Hanson burst on the scene in 1998, it was only ever able to accrue 23% of the vote in Queensland, and win just 11 seats out of a total of 89 in Queensland’s unicameral (no upper house) Parliament. It lost all but four of those seats in the subsequent election in 2002, with its primary vote plummeting by 11%.
The reason why One Nation is unlikely to ever achieve much more than one-fifth of first preference votes – and thereby not garner more than a handful of seats in the lower house of any Australian Parliament – is due to our nation’s almost unique compulsory (for both houses) two-party preferred (for the lower house) voting system.
Compulsory, because voting is mandatory, and two-party preferred because, unless there is a clear majority for a candidate in primary votes, it usually comes down to which two candidates have received the most preferences.
In South Australia, even though the abysmal Liberal Party achieved fewer primary votes statewide on Saturday (19%), it still picked up four seats (at time of writing) to One Nation’s one. The reason for this is that the vast majority of voters preferenced One Nation below the Liberal Party.
Pauline Hanson and One Nation may be passionately supported by their zealous supporters, but everyone else seems to either dislike them or see them as a risk. That means that for One Nation to even get into second position, it needs to gain at least 35% of the primary vote and probably closer to 40%. This, it failed to do in all but a solitary seat so far and will end up with no more than three.
The mandatory nature of our voting system – as opposed to the feature of the UK and U.S. systems of getting people motivated to turn out – is also important here. Because it is very possible, with low voter turnout, with a highly vocal and motivated minority, such as One Nation appears to have, it might be enough to get it over the line in a first-past-the-post system — even with just 22% of the total voting population.
To absolutely nobody's surprise... pic.twitter.com/KCwipynyNL
— Kenny Devine (@TheKennyDevine) March 26, 2026
Now the sociological reason
Which is that, with compulsory preferential voting, the silent majority of voters restores decency and order in our system. Because the majority of the Australian public, IA contends, deplores the prejudice and bigotry of Pauline Hanson and her loudmouthed, prejudiced supporters.
As Darren Crawford wrote on Monday:
Pauline Hanson, who has spent almost 30 stuttering years in politics, has based her whole brand on the “fear of others”.
At first, in the late 1990s, this involved accusing Asian immigrants of taking over the country. She moved onto accusing Muslims of assaulting anything that moved in the early part of the new millennium.
This was followed by stating that African gangs are cutting every one with machetes in the mid-2010’s. She has always deplored Indigenous Australians. Recently, Hanson has returned to telling the gullible to be scared of Asians, as well as Muslims.
These "deplorables", as Hillary Clinton described Trump’s supporters – and Hanson is one of Australia’s biggest MAGA zealots, and a recent guest at Mar-a-Lago – are not popular with most Australians. And no number of bots, or millions from Gina Rinehart-style billionaires, or boosting from Rupert Murdoch and Facebook, is ever likely to make it so.
Moreover, Australians are not stupid, mostly. Why would they risk Pauline Hanson, a stammering, stumbling, invariably incomprehensible incompetent, with a party made up of clowns, misfits and criminals, which is utterly bereft of any coherent policies or governing credentials, with the precious levers of power? We have all seen what happened with Trump – and Hanson is not even half as intelligent as that cognitively-challenged, alleged paedophile grifter.
Australians – decent Australians, the majority – will never allow this laughable party of descention, offence and indignation to ever attain any more than a handful of lower house seats, IA contends. Not enough, IA further suggests, to even grant them a trial run on the opposition benches of any Australian parliament across our great brown land.
Thank goodness Australia has a system of democracy, which, although far from perfect, does not easily enable third-rate opportunists like Hanson to hoodwink enough of a disaffected minority to lead this country into a dystopian Trumpian Far-Right hellscape, easily observable to all even from far across the Pacific.
Well done South Australia. Well done Australia.
This is an abridged version of an article originally published in the weekly Independent Australia subscribers' newsletter of 26 March 2026. The original article may be accessed in the IA members-only area by subscribers.
David Donovan is the founder of Independent Australia and former vice chair of the Australian Republican Movement. Follow Dave on X/Twitter @davrosz and Bluesky @davrosz.bsky.social.
Follow Independent Australia on Bluesky @independentaus.bsky.social, X/Twitter @independentaus and Facebook HERE.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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