The Secret Harbour result may reflect less a sudden embrace of far-right ideology than a deeper mix of economic anxiety, political alienation and collapsing trust.

The recent by-election result in Secret Harbour, Western Australia, is a genuine and deeply unsettling wake-up call. It forces us to confront a fragile new reality that the old political assumptions we once relied upon for comfort are beginning to crumble and the very concept of a ‘safe seat’ might be disappearing before our eyes.

Seeing a seat that Labor held for so many years swing so decisively to One Nation makes the phrase ‘safe seat’ feel like a relic of a bygone era and I suspect there are quite a few nervous politicians and citizens around the country looking at their own electorates right now and wondering whether their supposedly secure majorities are built on anything more substantial than ‘shifting sand’, leaving them vulnerable to a wave of populist anger they didn’t see coming.

It’s incredibly tempting to look at a result like this and conclude that the average Australian is moving dramatically and deliberately to the far right, but I don’t believe that’s the full story. I think we’re witnessing a growing, desperate preference for change, because One Nation has become highly effective at giving a voice to raw, unaddressed frustrations over immigration, housing unaffordability, cost of living, world politics and a major-party political establishment of perceived ‘suit and tie elites’ who simply won’t listen and have perhaps become too comfortable in their own sense of invincibility.

However, this doesn’t mean ordinary voters have suddenly embraced Pauline Hanson’s........

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