Polling booth analysis teaches key lessons for Liberal Party after One Nation win

Blighty Pub is so far away that its owners wrote its name in giant letters on the roof so that people flying over wouldn’t miss it. There is no city center in Blighty, which consists mostly of irrigation canals and agricultural lands. Just on the highway along the area’s main canal is a bar and, a few blocks behind, a school to serve the area’s 190 residents.

This school’s polling booth recorded the top result for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party in Saturday’s by-election for the south-western NSW seat of Farrer. Of the 113 votes cast in Blighty Public School, 101 eventually went to One Nation’s David Farley, or nearly 90 per cent of the vote.

Analysis of polling booth data shows Farley’s victory was won in places like Blighty, small farming communities, towns and villages dotted throughout the Murray River Valley and the southern NSW Riverina.

Those voters helped One Nation take the lead against second-placed candidate, community independent Michelle Milthorpe, who recorded her strongest results in the seat’s largest city, Albury.

In a blow to Liberal leader Angus Taylor and National Party leader Matt Canavan, none of the Coalition parties that have held the seat throughout its 77-year history even made it into the race. For the first time in more than half a century, the top two candidates in an election were not from a major party.

There are three lessons that can be drawn from these results.

Lesson One: Coalition strongholds may be expelled

The most obvious result of Saturday’s results was that voters rejected the Coalition.

In Farrer, just over two in 10 people wanted to choose one of the Coalition parties; The Liberals took 12 per cent of the primary vote on Sunday, while the Nationals nudged in 10 per cent. Almost eight in 10 voters rejected them; as a clear signal that frustrated voters wanted to send a message.

Every stand that recorded the strongest result for former Liberal leader Sussan Ley just a year ago was staunchly opposed to the Liberals 12 months later.

In 2025, Ley’s best result was in Euston, a grape-growing town of about 500 people on the Murray River, where she won 66 percent of the primary vote. On Saturday, Liberal candidate Raissa Butkowski received 11 per cent of the vote, a 55-point drop. The Nationals were at 14 percent.

In other words, the Coalition received only a quarter of first preferences on the stand it won outright last year. Meanwhile, One Nation’s primary vote in Euston increased sevenfold, from 7 per cent to 49 per cent.

These fluctuations were reflected in all stands that specifically selected Ley last year.

At Murray Downs, a collection of houses and a riverside golf resort, Ley recorded his second-highest result with 63 per cent of the primary vote; Butkowski’s vote share fell to single digits on Saturday, at 8 percent. Farley won the primary, increasing One Nation’s share of the vote from 9 percent to 52 percent of the primary vote.

The Liberal vote suffered an even more catastrophic decline in Coleambally, an irrigation village where the population has fallen by almost a fifth since the turn of the century. The party’s primary support fell from 62 percent to 7 percent, while One Nation’s support increased from 5 percent to 57 percent.

Lesson Two: Urban and rural divides persist

On Australia’s larger electoral map, this plays out as capital cities are now painted Labor red and regional voters are the last holdout for the Liberals and Nationals.

The Coalition was wiped out of one of these seats with the defeat in Farrer, but the gap in voting patterns between urban and rural segments of the electorate remains.

This was evident in Saturday’s by-election, with One Nation dominating polls in rural areas such as Blighty, while Climate 200-backed Milthorpe won the seat’s most urban polling stations.

This pattern is most clearly seen in the city of Albury, population 60,000, which has more in common with Sydney and Melbourne than with surrounding rural towns. At last year’s election, Milthorpe won booth after booth against Ley in Albury, in a Liberal-independent dynamic that resembled a showdown between Liberals and teal independents in the capitals.

Saturday’s strongest results were again in Farrer’s largest city. This imprint’s analysis of nearly 32,000 votes across Albury’s 14 stands shows Milthorpe won 41 per cent of the primary vote. One Nation came in second with 34 percent. The Liberals won 16 per cent of the vote in their old stronghold and the Nationals 8 per cent.

Milthorpe beat Farley in Albury by 52.3 per cent to 47.7 per cent, according to the two candidates’ preferred count. This shows that Liberal and National votes flowed to both candidates despite the parties’ preference for One Nation.

Milthorpe’s only two stands outside Albury were in Farrer’s second largest population centre. The independent party won Griffith North (52.7 to 47.3) and Griffith West (51 to 49), coming closest to One Nation with more than 45 per cent of the two candidates at polling stations in the towns of Narrandera and Leeton, among Griffith’s other booths.

But everywhere else One Nation stood out.

Lesson Three: One Nation is making progress everywhere

Hanson’s One Nation even made progress in the city of Albury. This is the third lesson from Saturday’s byelection that contains a warning for Labor in the cities.

Albury is similar to the nation’s capital cities, where higher-income residents with higher education live closer to the city center than those living on less money.

In the northern outskirts of Albury, about 10 percent of Springdale Heights residents have a bachelor’s degree, while the median household income is around $1,200 a week. Milthorpe won the Springdale Heights stand easily last year, 57.7-42.3. He could barely hold out against Farley this year, going 50.8-49.2.

As you get closer to Albury city centre, incomes rise, educational qualifications improve and Milthorpe cable cars are supported.

In central Albury and neighboring East Albury, Milthorpe secured a 60-40 victory over Farley, with the two candidates favored. Weekly incomes in both areas are about $300 higher than in Springdale Heights. Around a third of residents in central Albury also have an undergraduate degree; This is well above the average for all of NSW.

These results point to the suburban divide that One Nation could exploit in Australia’s capital cities.

Labor’s outer suburban seats, such as Hawke, Bruce and Holt in Melbourne, or Werriwa and Macarthur in Sydney, which resemble the demographics of these parts of Albury, could be in One Nation’s sights at the next election.

It’s not just that Labor will be in trouble. Coalition seats such as Lindsay in Sydney and Longman in Brisbane’s north could also be under threat.

Dig deeper into One Nation’s big victory

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