Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
13-05-2026
SYDNEY: Australia’s right-wing populist One Nation party, which wants to emulate US President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportations, vowed to focus on ending mass migration, after winning its first seat in the country’s lower house.
Saturday’s by-election win by farmer David Farley in the rural seat of Farrer, some 550 km (340 miles) south of Sydney, does not affect the majority of Centre-left Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, as the seat was previously held by a member of the Liberals, the biggest conservative group but it is a significant advance for One Nation, which has four Senate seats. The party is polling second this year to Albanese’s Labor Party in opinion surveys, ahead of the mainstream conservative coalition. One Nation’s leader, Senator Pauline Hanson, has higher approval ratings than Albanese or the Liberal leader.
“The people of Australia will not be forgotten. One Nation will fight for you on the floor of Parliament,” Hanson posted on social media late on Saturday. “We will fight to lower cost of living, end net-zero and stop mass migration.”
Immigration is a growing issue in Australia, where half the country’s 27 million people were either born overseas or have a parent who was. Thousands attended anti-immigration marches in major Australian cities last year.
Liberal shadow treasurer Tim Wilson said One Nation’s victory “showed there’s a lot of work we’ve got to do”. In televised remarks on Sunday, he said: “We need to outline very clearly a bold and confident vision for the country about where we want to take it.”
Albanese’s Labor, which has never held the Farrer seat and did not run a candidate in the by-election, has said One Nation is damaging to Australia’s social fabric.
The result is significant in that it marks the first time One Nation has won a lower-house seat since Hanson formed the party 30 years ago but it does not affect the parliamentary majority of the ruling Labor Party, which holds 94 of 150 lower-house seats.
The seat was left vacant when Liberals leader Sussan Ley resigned in February.
The Labor Party did not run a candidate in the contest for the seat that has been held by the opposition conservatives since it was formed more than half a century ago.
Party leader Pauline Hanson, a senator, standing beside Farley, said the result was “a win for Farrer but a bigger win for the nation”.
She knew her party was favored to win but when the first television station projected victory “I actually got a tear in my eye”, she said.
“You really don’t understand the journey I’ve been on,” she added.
Liberal leader Angus Taylor said at another televised event that the by-election was “always going to be a mountain to climb … and we have to take away some hard lessons from this”.
Taylor said his party would focus on immigration rates. “For too long we have been a party of convenience, not of conviction, and that must change,” he added.
Australia’s opposition Liberal Party elected former Energy Minister Angus Taylor as its new leader, replacing Sussan Ley, as the conservatives seek to rebuild less than a year after a heavy election defeat by the centre-left Labor Party.
Taylor, a leading figure in the party’s conservative wing and the son of a fourth-generation sheep farmer, defeated Ley in a ballot of Liberal members of parliament by 34 votes to 17.
Taylor now faces the challenge of reviving support for Liberals, which has continued to erode since the May election. Recent opinion polls indicate the opposition coalition has lost a significant number of its voters to far-right populist Senator Pauline Hanson and her anti-immigration party, One Nation. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
