The result for Labor in the Farrer byelection was truly ghastly. Labor did not field a candidate, so it has largely been ignored.

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The pertinent question to ask, though, is: What happened to the votes of those 15,551 people (15 per cent of the electorate) who voted for Labor at the general election in 2025?

You would think that if they were happy with the government and still general supporters of Labor and its values and thinking they would have voted for the Greens or the sensible-centre, climate-aware independent Michelle Milthorpe. But the figures suggest to the contrary.

Milthorpe increased her primary vote by 8.5 percentage points to 28.5 per cent.

Even if the whole 8.5 percentage points were former Labor voters, it still leaves 6.5 percentage points lost to Labor.

Virtually no former Labor voters went to the Greens because the Greens vote fell by a half. My guess is that most of the 2.5 percentage points the Greens lost went to Milthorpe as strategic voting.

That is 2.5 percentage points of her 8.5 that did not come from former Labor voters.

Also, we know that teal-type independents tend to keep their vote or add to it. We found that out when all but one of the independents re-contesting in 2025 won. And the one who lost retained her 2022 primary vote.

It suggests that at least some of Milthorpe's 8.5 increase came from Liberal and National voters. Again, suggesting that even fewer of the 2025 Labor voters did not stay on the progressive side of the ledger. Probably, only a third did.

So, where did more than 10 percentage points or more (two-thirds of the Labor vote) go? A lot (say, a bit more than half) went all over the place as you would expect when there is no candidate to anchor them.

Virtually none would have gone to the Liberals or Nationals. So, it leads to the inescapable conclusion that, say, half of that 10 percentage points (a third of the Labor vote) went to One Nation. Gulp.

It would be folly to dismiss this as an insignificant phenomenon that happened in a rural........

© Canberra Times