One Nation’s rise may not stop Labor winning the House of Representatives, but it could reshape Senate preferences and leave a future Labor government unable to legislate.
Since the recent rise of One Nation, pollsters have had to deduce not just a Labor-v-Coalition two-party-preferred tally but also a Labor-v-One Nation two-party preferred tally. In recent polls, Labor has come in front in both tallies and the pollsters have therefore predicted that Labor will “win” the next election.
By “win”, they mean getting a majority in the House of Representatives. The Senate in hardly mentioned. But without getting legislation through the Senate, an Australian Government is merely managing, not governing.
Former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, called the Senate “unrepresentative swill”. Nonetheless, it holds the power to make Labor legislatively impotent after 2028 and that is looking increasingly likely.
Present polling has Labor is on 27-28; the Coalition is on 23; One Nation on 22-23; and Greens between 10 and 14. Nearly all House seats therefore are likely to be decided on preferences. In the House of Representatives, preferences flow all over the place. Even with a preference deal between the Coalition and One Nation, there will be enough leakage to give Labor a lot of seats where its primary vote is quite weak.
The Senate is different. In the Senate count, preferences flow two ways: from the bottom up, when shrapnel candidates with a small percentage of the vote get excluded and from the top down, when the over quota of elected major-party candidates gets distributed. The quota is 14.3 per cent – one seventh of the vote plus one to get one of the six seats in each state up for grabs.
As far as the Senate is concerned, the big difference since the One Nation surge has been the fall in Labor’s vote from the mid-30s to the high 20s. When Labor’s vote was in the mid-30s, in most states 28.6 per cent would be used to elect two Senators with a quite a few percentage points of over-quota preferences nearly all of which would go to the Greens. With Labor now only in the high 20s, that over-quota distribution to the Greens will shrink significantly.
(The over-quota preferences are allocated by counting all the second preferences of all the votes and then allocating them at a value according to what percentage of the candidate’s total vote they make up. For example, if Labor got 250,000 votes in a state where the quota was 100,000, it would get two quotas or two seats and the second preferences of all the 250,000 would be transferred at a value of one-fifth of a vote – 50,000 divided by 250,000.)
At the 2025 election the Greens won a seat in each of the six states, but in only one of those, Tasmania, did it get a full quota of votes. In the other five states they relied on preferences. In the Senate the preferences are not just from excluded shrapnel candidates, but also from the over-quota of major parties – in the Greens case, a lot from Labor. This number of over-quota preferences has now shrunk, perhaps to the extent that the Greens lose Senate seats in 2028 and that the Labor-Green Senate group loses its Senate majority and Labor becomes legislatively impotent.
At present, Labor and the Greens have 39 senators, which is a majority of one. They cannot afford to lose any seats at all. The loss of one seat would cut them to 38 of the 76 seats and a tied vote in the Senate means the vote is not passed.
Worse, with the loss of two seats, Labor could face a whole lot of annoying Senate inquiries into things it would prefer left alone.
On the conservative side of the fence, we have One Nation and the Coalition. Together they are polling about 46 per cent of the vote. In the Senate this is significant because 46 per cent is more than the 43 per cent needed to achieve three quotas.
In the Senate, preferences are much tighter than in the House of Representatives. This is because more than 80 per cent of voters vote 1 to 6 above the line, usually following a how-to-vote card or the advertised preference of the party of their first choice. It makes things easier for the voter.
It means the Coalition and One Nation’s 46 per cent support could translate into three Senate seats in each state. It does not matter much whether it is one Coalition and two One Nation seats or the other way around. They are still anti-Labor seats and will still make it difficult for a Labor-Greens majority to emerge.
With this prospect in mind, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese might want to attend to the legacy he wants his government to leave. To secure something worthwhile, he will need to act in the next 702 days before the senators elected at the next election (whenever it is) take their seats on 1 July 2028.
Just as the House of Representatives system helps Labor with its leaky preference system, the Senate system with its tight preferences and quota system will hurt Labor as it struggles to hold two quotas in each state, let alone have anything left over for the Greens to pick up or get anywhere near the 43 per cent of first preferences needed to pick up three Senate seats in any state.
A big unknown is whether the sensible centre – the so-called teals and other independents – makes a coherent run for Senate seats in 2028. There is obvious voter appetite for such candidates. In the ACT, Independent David Pocock topped the Senate poll in 2025 with 39.1 per cent of the vote compared to Labor’s Katy Gallagher on 31.8 per cent and the Liberals 17.8 per cent. Pocock has taken a lot of votes from the Greens as well as the major parties.
Of course, sadly many in Labor might be content with just managing rather than governing. Managing means exercising executive power to hand out cash and make appointments under various Acts of Parliament that are already in force. Last weekend’s National Conference certainly showed a preference for managing over acting. But that attitude is not what dominate our politics.
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 28 January 2026.
Republished from Crispin Hull
Crispin Hull
Crispin Hull has written for The Canberra Times for 30 years on a huge range of topics, but mainly legal and constitutional. He was Editor for seven years. He taught journalism at the University of Canberra, and is the author of ‘The High Court of Australia 1903-2003’ and ‘Canberra – Australia’s National Capital’. He is also a marine rescue skipper on the Great Barrier Reef with Marine Rescue Queensland.