Two years out from the next federal election, the Labor Party machine is effectively in campaign mode, ramping up a new strategy to repel One Nation, acknowledging that the far-right party is now its all-but-official opposition.<\/p>\n
A senior Labor insider says the electoral map has changed in the year since the last election, and they\u2019re taking the scale of the challenge \u201cvery, very seriously\u201d. While they won\u2019t be drawn on specific seats at risk, pollsters indicate there\u2019s concern over swathes of regional Victoria and the New South Wales Central Coast and Hunter regions.<\/p>\n
The landscape for the 2028 federal election is going to be \u201cvolatile\u201d, the source says. Labor\u2019s organisational wing and key ministers are aware of major vulnerabilities in areas such as regional electorates where One Nation is currently polling primary votes in the low to high 40s.<\/p>\n
Says another senior figure, in cabinet: \u201cWe will need to do some very good research about who our primary opponent is in each seat and that\u2019s probably a different approach to what we\u2019ve had to take in the past.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re two years away and things can change, but if things continue as they are, it is going to be a seat-by-seat contest.\u201d<\/p>\n
This month\u2019s historic Farrer byelection win for One Nation and the March 21 South Australian state election, which saw the party secure seven seats across both houses of parliament, have been catalysts for Labor\u2019s campaign strategists. One Nation is currently polling better federally than it was in Queensland in the late 1990s, when it won 11\u00a0seats in the state election.<\/p>\n
Related Reading<\/p>\n
Labor is working on the expectation that a significant number of battles in 2028 will be Labor versus One Nation, starting with some of its outer metropolitan regional seats that previously saw National Party contests. There was only one final match-up between Labor and One Nation in 2025: the mining-heavy seat of Hunter, NSW.<\/p>\n
A Labor stronghold since 1910 and currently held by Olympian and Special Envoy for Men\u2019s Health Dan Repacholi, Hunter has seen Labor fight off Hanson\u2019s party since 2019. Last year, One Nation was the runner-up after the right-wing vote was split and the party passed the Nationals.<\/p>\n
\u201cLabor\u2019s opponent is no longer the Liberal Party,\u201d RedBridge pollster and former Labor strategist Kos Samaras tells The\u00a0Saturday Paper. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t rule out post the next election, you\u2019re going to have an orange opposition and a red government.\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019s not seeing Labor derailed, but it\u2019s \u201cvulnerable in certain parts of the country versus One Nation. The Liberal Party\u2019s vulnerable in terms of its existence.\u201d<\/p>\n
This government, he says, \u201cdoesn\u2019t stay and wait for the wrecking ball to hit.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey know they\u2019ve got a problem with certain constituencies around the country, particularly in their regional electorates.\u201d<\/p>\n
A focus is voting record and candidate research, as well as voter and electorate profiling to locate the highest concentrations of Labor voters who are thinking of turning to One Nation.<\/p>\n
The playbook will draw on state election campaigns in Western Australia in 2017 and Queensland in 1998, 2001 and 2017, and especially the latter two in which One Nation polled strongly but was unable to translate voter intention into wholesale success at the ballot box.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople who are currently voting or considering One Nation, 60 per cent of\u00a0those people identify as working-class. Labor is in a contest for the working-class vote.\u201d<\/p>\n
Multiple Labor sources say they are focusing on working-class voters, on One Nation\u2019s consistent failure to back workers\u2019 rights, and on the party\u2019s internal chaos and the rupturing influence it brings to the Coalition.<\/p>\n
The idea is to run One Nation down in potency, as Labor has repeatedly done at the\u00a0state level, well before the next election in\u00a02028.<\/p>\n
The senior minister describes the vision of a three-way governing coalition between the Liberals, Nationals and One Nation as particularly helpful, \u201cboth in terms of really locking in some of those urban seats that we won last time off the Liberals or the Greens and potentially even picking up extra seats from the Liberals in urban areas\u201d. They point to Berowra in Sydney, held by Julian Leeser, and Alex Hawke\u2019s nearby seat of Mitchell.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we do see the Liberal vote continue to fall beyond what it was at the last election \u2013 which is highly possible on the back of One Nation \u2013 but also some Liberals repelled by that kind of growing coalition between the three right-wing parties, I think that potentially moves more votes to us as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
The union movement is also mobilising. It ran very effective public campaigns such as \u201cYour Rights at Work\u201d from 2005 to 2007, opposing the Howard government\u2019s controversial WorkChoices laws.<\/p>\n
In social media posts, Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus has\u00a0 already highlighted One Nation\u2019s parliamentary record of voting \u201cevery single time\u201d against improvements to workers\u2019 conditions, including its opposition to penalty rates, criminalising wage theft and bans on toxic engineered stone products.<\/p>\n
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McManus also emphasises the role of One Nation donor Gina Rinehart, saying Australia\u2019s richest person was among the big business leaders who fought laws to give pay rises to labour-hire workers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat did One Nation do? They sided with the wealthy elite and not the struggling Aussie worker,\u201d the union leader says over vision of Hanson boarding a luxury Rinehart plane.<\/p>\n
Such campaigns have proved effective, says Samaras. \u201cWe know that, through extensive research, that actually does hurt Pauline Hanson.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt did in the 2017 Western Australian election, where One Nation was threatening Labor there, and Labor collapsed the vote by basically running a narrative about her early industrial relations history.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is the group that is more likely to come back to Labor off the back of Hanson\u2019s history on industrial relations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Labor insiders also point to pushing back One Nation in Queensland over a series of state elections since the party\u2019s high-water mark in 1998, of getting 11 MPs elected to the Legislative Assembly.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have had some experience in this,\u201d the senior minister says. \u201cAnd we have had some experience in what works to hold Labor voters back from going to One Nation.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do think that we have done more than people may acknowledge when it comes to pitching for working-class voters.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, the budget we\u2019ve just handed down, you couldn\u2019t really argue that it was aimed at upper middle-class people. It was aimed at younger people and more traditional Labor-voting people to make sure that they have opportunities to get a house, so I think that we do more of that than we may be given credit for.\u201d<\/p>\n
Post-budget polling by Resolve, Newspoll and Roy Morgan all have One Nation ahead of the Coalition on primary vote. Both Resolve and Roy Morgan have a small drop for Labor, to 29 per cent and 29.5 per cent respectively, attributed to the \u201cbroken promises\u201d campaigns against the negative gearing and capital gains discount changes. Newspoll has Labor steady at 31 per cent.<\/p>\n
The major polls haven\u2019t published two-party preferred figures for months, as One Nation\u2019s rise makes it difficult to distribute preferences. The Sky News Pulse has Labor 52\u00a0to 48 against the Coalition and 53 to 47 versus One Nation.<\/p>\n
One Nation\u2019s primary vote is as high as 27 per cent in Newspoll, but its strength is overwhelmingly in conservative regional electorates. Its primary vote weakens in urban settings where the electorate is more diverse and Labor is strong.<\/p>\n
Of Labor\u2019s 94 seats, recent polling suggests those most at risk to One Nation in 2028 include Hunter, Robertson and Paterson in NSW, Bendigo and Hawke in Victoria, Oxley and Blair in Queensland and Hasluck in Western Australia. One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce has also declared that Western Sydney is the party\u2019s \u201cnext stop\u201d \u2013 despite the obvious challenge of selling its proposed ban on Muslim migration in suburbs where as many as 60 per cent of residents follow Islam. Its best chance is deemed to be the Liberal-held seat of Lindsay.<\/p>\n
Paul Smith, the director of public data and affairs at polling group YouGov, says federal Labor should focus on workers\u2019 rights to reassure voters who are thinking about One\u00a0Nation.<\/p>\n
Whereas Labor was seen as the party of workers and the working-class in the past, many of those voters are heading to One Nation, he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe underrepresented political base in Australia is working people,\u201d says Smith.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur polling shows that people who identify as working-class are the majority of people in the majority of federal electorates. People who are currently voting or considering One Nation, 60 per cent of those people identify as working-class. Labor is in a contest for the working-class vote. We find that 59\u00a0per cent of people who say they\u2019re currently voting Labor identify as middle-class.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a wealthy country and people want to see a benefit from that. This is not about giving people $200 off their energy bill, it\u2019s whether the energy company should actually be publicly owned or not.\u201d<\/p>\n
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While Labor decided against a popular proposal to increase taxes on the profits of gas exporters in its latest budget, One Nation on Thursday announced it would scrap the current petroleum resource rent tax and replace it with a 10 per cent wellhead royalty on all offshore gas and oil production.<\/p>\n
The proposals were quickly rejected by both Labor and the Coalition.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, in Hunter, One Nation has been making serious inroads since 2019, when former Labor cabinet minister Joel Fitzgibbon last ran. The margin of Repacholi\u2019s 2025 win was 59 per cent to 41 per cent for One Nation\u2019s two-time candidate Stuart Bonds, who received strong preference flows from a group of right-wing parties.<\/p>\n
One Nation\u2019s climate denial adds to the pressure on Repacholi to square Labor\u2019s net-zero stance with his voters in the coal industry.<\/p>\n
The cost-of-living crisis, made worse by the Middle East war, is front of mind, and so are their jobs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m all for coalmining, I\u2019m all for mining, I\u2019m all for resources, I\u2019m all for workers\u2019 rights. It\u2019s exceptionally hard for [One Nation] to target me, because I\u2019m very open and upfront about what we\u2019re going through in the Hunter,\u201d Repacholi says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Greens side of the people hate it when I say this, and it\u2019s usually a trigger warning for them. I tell them, we have the cleanest coal in the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf they don\u2019t burn our coal for their power generation, they\u2019re going to burn other coal, which is shit, and they\u2019re going to burn three to four times as much and \u2026 get the same output from what you get from the Hunter Valley\u2019s clean, clean green coal.\u201d<\/p>\n
He takes heart from the view that incumbency should help.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been told ever since I started running for the seat of Hunter in 2021 that \u2018One Nation\u2019s coming\u2019, \u2018One Nation\u2019s going to beat you\u2019, \u2018You\u2019re going to lose to One Nation\u2019, and this and that. We haven\u2019t lost.\u201d<\/p>\n
With Hanson\u2019s party now polling far better, Repacholi remains in campaign mode.<\/p>\n
\u201c[We are doing] mobile offices, we\u2019re having the street stalls, we\u2019re doing the doorknocking, we\u2019re doing the phone banking,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s much smarter people than me involved in this that are in head office and in all those right areas that get all the data. What I know works is being on the ground, having the conversations, and just being active and available for people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two years out from the next federal election, the Labor Party machine is effectively in campaign mode, ramping…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":688970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-688969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=688969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/688970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=688969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=688969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=688969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}