Pauline Hanson's One Nation wins third seat in Western Australia's upper house
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has secured three seats in Western Australia’s upper house, meeting the party’s expectations after it failed to secure a single seat in the lower house.
The Western Australian leader, Colin Tincknell, secured a South West seat on election night and, a fortnight later, Robin David Scott won a seat in the Mining and Pastoral region, while Charles Smith grabbed an East Metropolitan seat.
Smith’s win was a surprise as some analysts were expecting the seat to go to the Liberal MLC Alyssa Hayden.
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He was among several One Nation candidates to speak out against the party’s preference deal with the Liberals, which both sides have said damaged them at the polls.
One Nation suffered a suite of disendorsements and resignations during the campaign, including Margaret Dodd, Dane Sorensen, Stephen Piper and Ray Gould.
Gould also nominated dishonesty about the preference deal as his reason for quitting.
In an email to candidates the week after the election, WA One Nation’s candidate liaison officer, Aidan Nagle, put a positive spin on the party’s results, noting it had scored 8.1% of the primary vote.
Labor won a decisive victory in the election, gaining 20 seats from Colin Barnett’s government and ousting four ministers, including the Nationals leader, Brendon Grylls, who was minister for housing and faced a sustained attack from the mining lobby over his proposal to increase the special lease rental fee paid by BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto on their two biggest iron ore deposits.
On Sunday the ABC reported final counting showed Labor had narrowly missed out on a working majority in the Legislative Council by one seat.
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The results mean Labor is likely to be reliant on the crossbench to pass legislation but that could change if it can court a Liberal MP to accept the president’s position.
After the election, Hanson blamed Barnett for One Nation’s result, saying he should have stepped aside or been given the boot before the election.
The week before the election Hanson backed penalty rate cuts, reasserted her respect for Vladimir Putin and described successive governments’ vaccination policies as blackmail, comments that were partly blamed for her party’s performance.