A WA by-election that should have been a golden chance for the Liberal Party is instead shaping up as another gift to Labor, courtesy of Pauline Hanson. With One Nation splitting the conservative vote and preferences unlikely to flow cleanly, the safely margined seat of Secret Harbour looks set to stay red on 29 August.
Tucked away in the area where Andrew Hastie is the federal member, there is a Western Australian state seat named Secret Harbour, called after the principal suburb located in this electoral district.
Secret Harbour used to be a very safe Labor seat when it was on different boundaries to the present. It was then known as Warnbro, named after a south Perth suburb that was then part of the seat. A redistribution in 2023 removed the suburb of Warnbro, so the name of the seat was changed to Secret Harbour.
This used to be a safely Labor seat. According to my pendulum, based on the March 2017 general election adjusted for the 2019 redistribution, Warnbro was the second strongest Labor seat in WA and the Liberal Party needed a swing of 23.8% to take it.
Following the March 2021 landslide Labor general election win under Mark McGowan, Warnbro was Labor’s seventh strongest seat, and the Liberal Party needed a 33.5% swing to win it. That buffer was reduced by 2% at the 2023 redistribution when the name was changed. The buffer was further reduced by a hefty swing to Liberal of 19.7% in March 2025, so it now is “only” 11.6%, making it Labor’s 24th strongest seat out of the 33 seats Labor retained in March 2025.
The above information is relevant because the Labor member for the area since 2007, Paul Papalia, resigned the seat on 6 July, creating a by-election, which will be held on 29 August. It will be a big test for Labor, Liberals and the One Nation Party.
With by-elections normally producing significant swings against governments, one might have imagined that the Liberal Party would have been in with a good chance to win on 29 August. Alas, the spectre of Pauline Hanson has appeared, and she is the gift that keeps on giving for Labor, which looks likely to win the seat again because there won’t be the tight exchange of preferences between Liberal and ONP needed to defeat Labor.
There are 16 candidates standing for the by-election and one thing going for the Liberal Party is the luck of its candidate, Ryan Robertson, in winning the top spot on the ballot paper. He is an articulate candidate, a young businessman previously an RAN submariner, and a Rockingham City Councillor.
Labor’s candidate, Georgia Tree, has drawn sixth spot and she is a good candidate with a big problem, namely that she lives in the Perth northeastern suburb of Inglewood, located in the state electoral district of Maylands, north of the Swan River. Given that electors these days are pretty disgruntled her non-residence has become an issue. The Labor machine has been seen to micromanage her media exposure, which has made her look feeble.
The ONP candidate, Luke Herdegen, is a tattooed gym owner and he finds himself at 14th place on the ballot paper. Given that there would be plenty of Liberal voters who greatly dislike the way One Nation has spoilt the lunch of the Liberal Party, given that Greens preferences solidly favour Labor and given these ballot paper positions another Labor win on preferences is a pretty good bet.
This is the very kind of outer metropolitan seat where One Nation will perform well, possibly even winning, at Victoria’s November state election. However, this seat is in WA and all that will likely happen in Secret Harbour is that Herdegen comes second but finishes up seen as cheating the Liberal Party out of winning the seat.
For the Liberal Party, the truly bad thing about One Nation is that it seems determined to take Canning from Hastie. Some 75% of Secret Harbour electors are enrolled for Canning federally (including the suburb of Secret Harbour itself) with 25% enrolled in the safe Labor seat of Brand to its north. As to why One Nation wants to defeat Hastie, the answer is simple. He gave evidence against Ben Roberts-Smith in the failed defamation case BRS launched. One Nation has declared BRS to be innocent in every way so Hastie, in their eyes, committed a crime by giving evidence against him.
At the 2025 federal election Labor had less than 54% of the two-party preferred vote in the eight polling places within Secret Harbour. Indeed, Hastie won four of the six that are within Canning. It was the large suburb of Port Kennedy, in Brand, that produced the strong overall Labor vote. For Hastie a win for Herdegen would be a disaster. He wouldn’t admit it publicly but he would be hoping for a Labor win if the Liberal Party is not able to take the seat.
This kind of attitude is why I think there will be a very poor exchange of preferences between the two conservative candidates thus enabling Tree to become the new member. Although she lives elsewhere her family originally lived in the Secret Harbour area and, if she wins, she would be well advised to move back to Secret Harbour, which is a lovely place to live anyway.
