The Coalition have a better chance of winning by chasing teal voters over One Nation voters | Australian politics

The latest moves by Coalition frontrunners Andrew Hastie and Barnaby Joyce have highlighted a major fault line within the Coalition between conservatives who want to eliminate net-zero emissions and restrict immigration, and moderates who believe they need to win back voters in urban seats where there is strong support for action on the climate emergency.

This fault line was ominously shaken further on Sunday afternoon when David Littleproud announced that the National Party was officially abandoning its commitment to reach net zero by 2050.

Assuming the coalition stays together, is it more likely to regain government by targeting voters who have moved to One Nation on the right or the turquoises in the centre?

Data from the 2025 elections show that targeting the center will be a much easier task.

One Nation vote returns to Coalition

This point is clear to anyone who looks at voter preferences in recent elections. The Coalition shouldn’t worry too much about losing voters to One Nation, as 2025 figures show One Nation voters are more likely to choose the Coalition over Labour.

In 2025, 68% of One Nation votes went back to the Coalition, while 25% of One Nation voters went Labor.

Of course, One Nation could expand its primary vote to more seats, enough to challenge the major parties directly. This took place in 2025 when One Nation opposed Labor in the seat of Hunter and the Coalition in Maranoa.

But the chances of One Nation actually winning these or other seats are historically unlikely. Even at the height of its popularity, One Nation has never won a seat in the lower house in a federal election.

There are more seats to be won from the teals

What would happen if the Coalition persuaded all One Nation voters to choose the Coalition, even those who preferred Labour?

Let’s compare this hypothetical scenario with one where the Coalition gets all the preferences from turquoise voters. Additionally, in seats where the Coalition faces teal or One Nation in the bottom two and so preferential votes cannot be converted to Coalition, let’s give the Coalition a 5% swing from One Nation or teal voters.

This is a rather crude assumption because it does not attempt to model changes in preference flows and preference counting order. While any community-backed, climate action-supporting independent candidate is referred to as teal for clarity, some candidates have reportedly rejected the label.

In this scenario, the Coalition picks up six seats by targeting teal voters, while it picks up four seats by targeting One Nation voters.

It seems there is more to be gained from recruiting teal voters than from One Nation voters. Also, given that all of the teal seats are held by the Coalition, it is not hard to imagine that these seats could be won back if the party made a real effort to address why voters in these electorates turned away from them in the first place.

But an increase of six seats will not help the Coalition form a government; this would only take them to 49 in total.

What if the Coalition targets the outer suburbs?

What if the Coalition abandons net zero and gets tougher on immigration and housing? Can they win enough seats from Labor to form government – ​​especially in areas where the One Nation vote is higher and people may be more open to these policies?

This is unlikely for several reasons.

Coalition I just tried the strategy An attempt to target Labor seats in the outer suburbs in the 2025 election has failed miserably. His policies on immigration and climate were already right on Labor’s side, and not only did they win seats, but they also lost votes in many seats.

This does not mean that these policies are the deciding factor in the 2025 election; Merely adopting more extreme versions is unlikely to change the vote in these areas.

The other reason why this strategy is a more difficult path is simple political calculation. The chart below shows all seat results in the 2025 election, colored by winning party, with the winning vote percentage on the vertical axis and the One Nation primary vote on the horizontal axis:

The coalition needs at least 33 Labor (red) or independent (pink) seats to form a majority and win government. The majority of seats held by marginal Labor and Independents are in the lower left, areas with lower One Nation votes.

By contrast, the areas to the right with the highest One Nation votes (areas where there are enough voters already willing to abandon net zero and reduce immigration) are either already in Coalition hands or in Labor hands by a wide margin.

It is worth noting that there were a number of seats where One Nation votes increased and Labor votes decreased at the last election, and many of these, such as Bullwinkel and Pearce, are in Western Australia. So it makes sense that Andrew Hastie, a West Australian politician, would want to capitalize on this change. But there still aren’t enough seats like this across the country.

Not all One Nation voters belong to the ‘right wing’

It is also a mistake to view One Nation voters as a single, cohesive group of voters on the left-right spectrum. There are a significant number of people who voted for One Nation as a protest vote against the major parties and who prefer the Greens, a much more left-wing party, to the Liberals or Labour.

We can see this most clearly in the preference figures for seats like Ryan in the 2025 election, which ends in a Greens-Liberals race. Around 18% of One Nation voters preferred the Greens to the Liberals:

Similarly, in contests where the two-party preference ratio is between Labor and the Greens, we see that One Nation voters prefer the Greens by up to 45 percent.