Gym Owner Wins Historic Seat for One Nation as Australia's Populist Surge Hits the Suburbs

PERTH — A gym owner who, by the count of his own campaign staff, “wasn’t even running until about three weeks ago” won Saturday’s Western Australian state byelection for Secret Harbour on a 30.6-point swing, handing One Nation its first lower-house member of state parliament and turning a quiet coastal corner of Perth into, in the words of one Labor insider, “the single most uncomfortable address in Australian politics,” a result that the state’s own tallies now describe in numbers rather than adjectives.

Luke Herdegen, whose background before Saturday was, according to the party’s own materials, “a lot of gym, some politics, and one very good year,” took the seat with 39.1 percent of the primary vote, up from a figure that, in March 2025, was more or less the statistical equivalent of a rounding error. Labor, which had held Secret Harbour with the kind of margin that allows a member to hold a second job without embarrassment, finished second at 24.4 percent, down 22.1 points, which is a swing that, in the language of the state’s pollsters, is not so much a loss as an evaporation.

The margin is the number that has done the work in the last two days. One Nation now sits, by the count of its own exit data, at close to 30 percent of the primary vote nationally, a figure that, for a party whose historical ceiling was described, in recent decades, as “a strong fifth,” is the kind of result that gets a party to start, very quietly, redrawing its own internal map of what it might become. The party’s rise, per its own strategist Marlow, has been credited to a series of “March For Australia” gatherings that began in 2025, a framing that the party has, in the days since, applied with a consistency that suggests the phrase is not a slogan so much as a methodology.

The political reaction has been, in the Australian manner, immediate and total. The Prime Minister, addressing his own faithful on Sunday, told them the party’s rise was “a matter for history” and that Labor owed it to history to stop it, a sentence that, in the language of the opposition benches, is a promise, in the language of the party’s own members, is a to-do list, and in the language of everyone else in the room, is a speech that has already been recorded. The Liberal heartlands, which until Saturday had been described as a “second wall” behind the Labor one, have since been described, by at least one prominent columnist, as having “a hole in the outer wall”, a metaphor that has since been applied, in the same breath, to three separate state borders and a shopping centre.

The practical significance of the result is, for now, mostly symbolic, in the way that most single-seat byelections are symbolic until they aren’t. One Nation does not hold a balance of power in Perth, and it is not, by the count of the state’s own political analysts, in a position to do so this term. What it has done, in a single weekend, is to demonstrate that a party whose previous electoral identity was a protest note on a ballot can, under the right conditions, become a line on a result, and that the line can be 39 percent wide, and that it can do so in a seat that was, until last month, described by its own former holder as “a safe Labor seat, as safe as a seat gets.”

At press time, the new member had not yet taken the oath, had not yet met the speaker, and had, by his own account, not yet been to the gym he owned, which he described, in a statement released on Sunday morning, as “a privilege I’m still processing.”