One Nation Claims Historic Win in WA's Secret Harbour By-Election
One Nation has claimed victory in the Western Australian state seat of Secret Harbour, with candidate Luke Herdegen leading Labor's Georgia Tree 57–42 after preferences, on a count of 74.5 per cent of the vote. If the result holds through the remaining preference distribution and postal counting, it gives One Nation its first ever WA lower house seat and overturns what was a safe Labor electorate held on an 11.5 per cent margin.
One Nation's WA leader Rod Caddies declared victory at 9:30pm local time on Saturday 29 August 2026 (The Guardian). Herdegen, a gym owner, fronted supporters just before 10pm AWST to claim the win himself (The Australian). By 10:30pm, with 80 per cent counted, Herdegen had a primary vote of 39 per cent, ahead of Tree (WAtoday). The two-party-preferred count — the system where votes are redistributed between the two leading candidates until one passes 50 per cent — showed him ahead by 3.9 per cent, or 3,686 votes (ABC News).
The scale of the swing is the story. At the 2025 WA state election, One Nation polled under 9 per cent in Secret Harbour (ABC News). Herdegen's primary vote on Saturday was more than four times that. The seat was Labor's on paper. It had been held by senior minister Paul Papalia, whose mid-term retirement triggered the by-election. Sixteen candidates contested the ballot, including Ryan Robertson for the Liberals, Matthew Barton for the Libertarian Party, and Rhi Davies for the Greens, as confirmed by the WA Electoral Commission on 21 July 2026 (WA Electoral Commission).
The WAEC has stressed that election-night results are indicative only, with daily updates published by 9:00am. Early polling opened on 13 August at the Port Kennedy early voting centre, and the deadline for third-party campaigner registration fell on Thursday 27 August. But with Herdegen's lead at nearly 3,700 votes and the two-party-preferred margin at 3.9 per cent, the remaining count would need to break overwhelmingly for Labor to reverse the outcome.
The broader context here is that this result carries national weight. One Nation's performance in Secret Harbour was always going to attract attention beyond WA, and particularly in Victoria, which holds its state election in November. A minor party taking a safe Labor seat on the back of a primary vote that quadrupled in eighteen months is the kind of data point that reshapes internal polling and strategy meetings in every capital city. For Labor, the loss of an 11.5 per cent margin seat in a single by-election cycle will prompt uncomfortable questions about what the party's ground campaign missed and whether the Papalia retirement cost them more incumbency advantage than anyone modelled.
For the Coalition, the calculus is different and not straightforwardly favourable. The Liberal candidate was one of sixteen in the field and never featured in the two-party-preferred count. A One Nation win in a Labor seat does not automatically transfer into Coalition gains elsewhere, and the preference flows that delivered Herdegen his lead came from a crowded ballot where the Liberal primary was, on the available numbers, not the decisive factor.
What makes Secret Harbour genuinely striking is the speed of the movement. One Nation went from single digits at a general election to a primary vote near 40 per cent in the same seat, in the same term, without the benefit of an incumbent running under their banner. That is not incremental drift. It is a step change in a specific electorate, and the question for every party reading these results is whether the conditions that produced it are local or replicable.
