One Nation candidate Luke Herdegen won the Secret Harbour by-election in Western Australia on 29 August 2026, ending Labor’s hold on the seat and handing the party its first lower house seat in the state. With about 80% of the vote counted, Herdegen had 39% of the primary vote, ahead of Labor candidate Georgia Tree on 24.4% and Liberal candidate Ryan Robertson on 17.3%. The result came with a 30.6 percentage-point swing to One Nation. The machinery of parliamentary power shifted, and the people in Secret Harbour were the ones asked to absorb the consequences.
One Nation claimed victory on Saturday night, and WA leader Rod Caddies introduced Herdegen to supporters at a party function as “the next member for Secret Harbour”. Caddies told the crowd, “You’re witnessing a result they said was impossible,” and added, “A safe seat does not stay safe if you ignore it long enough. Tonight, Labor found it out the hard way. Secret Harbor did not send a protest, it sent a verdict. Western Australia just told the rest of the nation the two-party system is dead.” The language was triumphant, but the real story was simpler: another supposedly secure seat cracked under the weight of voter anger and the stale rituals of party rule.
Who Has the Power
Labor did not concede earlier in the night while it waited for vote counts from early polling booths. Tree arrived at her function at the Secret Harbour Surf Lifesaving Club just after 9pm alongside WA Premier Roger Cook. Cook said, “It is easy to be a small target, to be a party that deals in grievances, but delivery, delivery, the grind of getting hard things done is how Labor handles that responsibility.” He also said, “The voters of Secret Harbor have spoken and regardless of the outcome tonight, we will listen.” The promise to “listen” landed after years of rule, not before it. That’s how the apparatus works: first the seat, then the sermon.
Cook added, “This campaign has been a reminder that Western Australians are doing it tough. We know that this is a time of high interest rates and fuel prices. People are concerned about their lifestyles and their futures, and this campaign has been a reminder about how key our priorities are to this state: jobs, health, housing, and cost of living relief.” Tree said, “We always said this campaign was going to be a fight, and it has been a fight,” and, “We don’t know the result now, but I’ve been humbled by the support that I’ve received from everyone in the community; it’s been so amazing. No matter what, we’ve run such a good race, and I’m so proud of what we’ve done.” The language of delivery and gratitude can’t hide the basic fact that ordinary people are still left to navigate high interest rates, fuel prices, and the fallout from decisions made far above them.
Who Gets Crushed
The by-election was triggered by the resignation in July of former Corrective Services minister Paul Papalia, who quit politics to spend more time with an ill family member. Papalia had won the seat with a margin of 11.5 per cent in 2025. The seat had been held by Labor in its various iterations since the 1980s and was described as one of the party’s safest seats. Secret Harbour sits in Perth’s south and, federally, spans Liberal MP Andrew Hastie’s electorate of Canning and Labor MP Madeleine King’s electorate of Brand. It is also considered a litmus test for outer suburban seats nationwide where cost-of-living issues are driving voter discontent. Safe seats, like all the rest, are only safe until the people stop buying the script.
The ABC said the by-election was being watched as a test of One Nation’s growing support and of whether frustration with the major parties could translate into seats in parliament. It quoted Professor John Phillimore, director of the John Curtin Institute for Public Policy, saying, “From a Labor point of view, if the outer suburbs of Perth start falling to One Nation, that might ring some alarm bells in Victoria.” He also said, “For the Liberals, it is a big issue for them, these outer suburban areas are traditional swinging seat territory where if a government is going to fall, the opposition picks up those seats.” Phillimore added, “In Victoria, is the opposition picking up those seats going to be the Liberal Party or One Nation?” and, “There does seem to be momentum behind One Nation, so this will be a test of that momentum.” The ABC also reported that the poll was the first time this year Senator Hanson's party had gone up against an incumbent Labor government.
What They Call Representation
The ABC identified Georgia Tree as 34 and said she had been leaning into her working-class roots. It quoted her saying, “Labor built Medicare. My Mum's chemo would have bankrupted our family without it, and now Labor's building a brand new hospital in Mandurah,” and, “Dad's apprenticeship helped him turn his life around, and now Labor's made TAFE free.” Those are the kinds of reforms parties point to when they want to prove the system can still be managed from above. But the same article also said she had been criticised for living in Perth’s northern suburbs rather than her prospective electorate and that she told The West Australian she had tried to find a home in the area but was “not prepared to pay in excess of market value”. She published Old Boy in 2023, a biography of her father’s life, including his struggles with heroin addiction before turning his life around in WA’s mining industry.
The Liberals confirmed Ryan Robertson as their candidate. The ABC described him as a 35-year-old former submariner turned real estate agent and podcast host, and said he is a City of Rockingham councillor representing the Rockingham/Safety Bay ward since last year. It said his LinkedIn profile stated he served in the navy between 2009 and 2021 and was awarded Submariner of the Year. Robertson said, “I feel as if the people of Secret Harbour are not quite getting heard on issues that we truly believe matter to all of us,” and, “Lots of promises, no delivery, and that's not something that sits comfortably with me.” He said the three pillars of his campaign would be “listen, work hard, and deliver for the people of Secret Harbour”. The Nationals said they would not run in the seat and urged supporters to back the Liberals instead.
One Nation’s own pitch leaned hard on the same anger it fed. The ABC said its candidate was gym owner and former champion weightlifter Luke Herdegen, and that his LinkedIn profile showed he had worked in the fitness space since at least mid-2019, including as a coach and manager. It said One Nation had been active on social media attacking Labor over its “neglect of the seat”. In one post, leader Rod Caddies wrote, “Crime is up in the suburbs with the electorate, as is homelessness. Traffic for morning commuters is getting worse,” and, “And despite spending billions on Metronet, they have failed to deliver the train station they promised you years and years ago.” Herdegen thanked volunteers and said, “[Tree’s campaign] came with the big Labor machine. They came with their scare tactics. They came with their handlers on the polling booths, and we marched right through it. The days of WA Labor having a stranglehold on the outer southern suburbs; those days are over.” He also said, “There are no safe Labor seats in this state, or in this country any more.”
The ABC also identified Greens candidate Rhi Davies as an “active community organiser, defence spouse of many years and a local mum of three teenagers”. It said her bio raised concerns about the AUKUS submarine deal tying Australia to “Trump's war machine”, the average renter in Secret Harbour spending more than 30 per cent of their income on rent and the “climate crisis”. Davies said, “We want rents capped to give struggling families immediate relief, and we want housing built for local residents, rather than prioritising American AUKUS workers,” and, “We want cheap, clean energy delivered by a rapid transition to renewables. We want to stop AUKUS and Westport and protect Cockburn Sound.” The ABC said the Greens polled third in Secret Harbour at the 2025 election with 8.8 per cent of the primary vote, lower than their state-wide average of 11.1 per cent.
The ABC said Craig Buchanan worked in the office of the Legalise Cannabis party’s only MP, Brian Walker, as a research officer and senior adviser. It said he had recently resigned from Rockingham City Council after six years of service and held a PhD in literature from the University of Western Australia. Buchanan said he would campaign for “sensible, evidence-based cannabis reform”, and said medicinal cannabis had given him “freedom of choice” after he was diagnosed with bowel cancer two years ago. He said, “It's about the right to heal and function without the fear of outdated stigma or unfair legal repercussions,” and his policy positions included repealing driving laws that criminalise patients for driving with trace amounts of cannabis in their system if they are not impaired and protecting medicinal cannabis patients from workplace discrimination.
By 10.30pm, with 80 per cent of the vote counted, Herdegen had 39 per cent of the primary vote, Tree had 24.4 per cent and Robertson had 17.3 per cent. The preference count showed Herdegen ahead of Tree, with a two-party preferred margin of 3.9 per cent. Labor had refused to concede earlier in the night while it awaited vote counts from the early polling booth, and those counts dropped just after 10pm and sealed One Nation’s victory. The paper said Herdegen was a gym owner and that Caddies called him “the next member for Secret Harbour”. It reported that Tree lives the furthest away at 61 kilometres and that no major party candidates could vote for themselves because none of them actually lived in the electorate. Labor volunteers woke up to some of their signs at Secret Harbour Primary School slashed by a masked man on an e-scooter in the early hours of the morning, and police were notified. The state’s electoral theater rolled on, but the people at the bottom were left with the same bills, the same rents, and the same bosses in different colors.