One Nation opened its Canning branch in Andrew Hastie's home town of Mandurah last Saturday

One Nation's Western Australian leader Rod Caddies opened the party's Canning branch at a Mandurah pub on Saturday afternoon, in the home town of the Liberal frontbencher whose seat it has spent three months preparing to take.

The launch was held at The Bridge Garden Bar and Restaurant on Pinjarra Road, four days after Andrew Hastie spoke publicly about his own prospects. The Shadow Minister for Industry and Sovereign Capability and member for Canning told News24 that "everyone who comes into this job has to have a sense of their political mortality, and if this is the end, this is the end". It also comes 20 days before voters in the state seat of Secret Harbour, which sits almost entirely inside Canning, hand down the first hard number anyone has on whether he's right.

Hastie holds Canning on 56.55% after preferences, but his own primary vote at the 2025 election moved less than 1%, and Labor's collapse did the rest. One Nation's vote in the seat grew by 6.79%, the largest movement anyone recorded there, and a Redbridge model already has the seat changing hands. The party now camped in his electorate has spent the year attacking him over the Ben Roberts-Smith litigation. In July his own party's senators voted to keep secret the one official report that asks what Australia's commanders knew in Afghanistan.

Andrew Hastie listed the new One Nation branches on Tuesday, and Canning wasn't one of them

In the same News24 interview, published on his own website on 4 August, Hastie named the seats where One Nation had been opening branches as Forrest, Brand and Durack, and said he was relaxed about the competition. "It's their right, and good on them," he said.

Four days later the party opened one in his own back yard. One Nation's WA team page still lists no Canning branch and says branches are being established, so Saturday's launch is the first it has put inside the seat. The event ran from 1pm to 4pm and the party's RSVP page lists it as sold out. One Nation still hasn't named a candidate to run against Hastie in Canning at the next federal election.

About 100 One Nation members turned out, among them the party's Western Australian senators, its state MPs and its Secret Harbour candidate Luke Herdegen, The West Australian reported on Saturday night. Caddies was blunt about Hastie's position when he spoke to the paper.

“You would be a fool not to be worried with the polling that's been done and the support we're getting on the streets. One Nation's momentum is massive.”

He said that if he were the member he'd be concerned about a change of representation in the seat, and that anyone claiming not to be worried could be taken at their word. He also played down the idea that the campaign was aimed at Hastie personally. The party had polled well around Mandurah and the south west corridor long before its numbers climbed nationally, he said, and he intended to target every seat in the state. He rated One Nation's chances in Canning as level with its chances in Secret Harbour, because the federal seat takes in part of the state district.

Hastie wasn't available for comment on Saturday, according to the same report. Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen said Labor would run its own candidate in Canning whatever One Nation did, and that the government would campaign on cost of living.

Caddies, who sits in the Legislative Council and was appointed WA state leader by Pauline Hanson, authorised the party how to vote card for Secret Harbour and has been fronting the campaign there. James Ashby, who became One Nation's party director this month, told The Conversation's Michelle Grattan in May the party had 430 registered, paid up members inside Canning. He named Canning, Forrest, Hasluck and Pearce as its four Western Australian priorities.

Taken out in a box in June, asking for Pauline Hanson's preferences in August

In June, Hastie told colleagues he'd rather be taken out in a box than bend the knee to One Nation, and reached for Sun Tzu to see the fight through. On 4 August he drew a line between a preference deal and a partnership, and put himself on the near side of it.

"We're in a two party preferred system, so preferences matter."

A formal arrangement, he said, was a different question, because "we have one coalition partner, and that is the National Party".

It's the same distinction Jane Hume and Angus Taylor have both been running, where the formal coalition gets ruled out loudly and the question of One Nation's support in a hung parliament gets left alone. Matt Canavan went further last week, telling News24 the Coalition had to work with whoever could turf Labor out.

Andrew Hastie's own primary vote moved less than 1% in 2025, and Labor's collapse did the rest

The figure that gets quoted about Canning is the swing of more than 5% to Hastie in 2025. It's a two party number, so it measures Labor's decline as much as his own support. These are the Australian Electoral Commission's official figures for the seat.

Hastie's own vote rose by 0.95% while Labor's fell by 5.08%, and that gap is where his margin came from. The largest movement in the seat belonged to One Nation's Fernando Bove, who put on 6.79% from a standing start and finished third on 11.41%. Canning had 122,999 electors on the roll at 30 June this year, and Bove's 11.41% was well above the party's Western Australian average, which The West Australian puts at under 7%.

Hastie ran that campaign in the election that wiped the Liberals out across metropolitan Perth, and he's a good deal of what's left of the party in the west. The numbers show a member carried home by the other side's losses rather than lifted by his own gains, in a seat where the insurgent vote grew faster than anyone else's. Canning hasn't left Liberal hands since the party won it in 2001.

Redbridge has Canning falling to One Nation, and it cut the Coalition to 12 seats nationally

The seat by seat analysis being cited against him is a Redbridge and Accent model, fielded from 29 April to 14 May from 6,015 responses. A model like this takes one big national sample and matches it against the demographics of every electorate, which lets a pollster project a result for each of the 150 seats instead of one national number. It lists Canning among the seats One Nation takes off Liberals outside Queensland, alongside Lindsay, La Trobe and Casey.

The same model cut the Coalition to 12 seats nationally, which is the context for Canning being on that list at all. A party heading for 12 seats has nothing spare to defend it with.

The same pollster's federal poll of 1,001 voters, taken from 27 to 30 July, has One Nation first on 31%, Labor down to 29 and the Coalition third on 22. The Coalition leads Labor 52 to 48 on the traditional two party count. As our poll tracker points out, that count only decides a seat once the Coalition makes the final two, and on 22% it sits nine points behind One Nation. Redbridge's director Kos Samaras is a former Labor campaign strategist, so a number this strong for One Nation isn't coming from a friendly house.

DemosAU has One Nation on 60 seats, the Coalition on 13, and its Western Australian vote climbing

The bigger and more recent projection is worse for the Liberals, not better. DemosAU surveyed 9,343 voters between May and July and ran the result through 20,000 simulations, producing the mega poll that had One Nation first on a 30% primary vote to Labor's 26 and the Coalition's 21. The seat projection on our tracker runs One Nation 60 of the 150 lower house seats, Labor 68 and the Coalition 13, with nobody reaching the 76 needed to govern.

In Western Australia it found One Nation's vote up 5 points, mostly at Labor's expense, cementing a lead in Bullwinkel. Head of research George Hasanakos said the party also had strong chances against Labor in Moore and Pearce. A Coalition holding 13 seats nationally has no reserves to send anywhere, and Hastie is defending a seat where his own vote hasn't grown.

Secret Harbour votes on 29 August, and Luke Herdegen has 11.5% of Labor's margin to eat through

The argument gets settled by a count rather than a model. Secret Harbour goes to the polls on Saturday 29 August with 16 names on the ballot, after Labor's Paul Papalia retired in July. Our full guide to the field sets out how the preferences decide it.

Labor holds the district on 11.5%, and Papalia won it in 2025 on 46.5% of the primary vote, so under half the people who turned out voted for him. One Nation's Liam Hall banked 8.4% there unaided at the same election, which is the party's floor in the district. DemosAU had One Nation on 18% of the Western Australian state primary vote in its most recent state poll, taken from 29 May to 11 June from a sample of 1,015. That is more than double what the party managed in Secret Harbour in 2025.

No public seat poll of the district has been published, and what exists instead is what Labor has been saying about its own chances. Labor sources put One Nation level with the government in the mid 30s in July and the Liberals in the high teens, figures Michelle Grattan reported at the time. Internal party numbers aren't a published poll, and a government has its own reasons to talk its position down. Labor's spending in the seat has run the same way. One Nation's candidate is gym franchisee and former national weightlifting champion Luke Herdegen, and the WA Liberals have already preferenced One Nation above Labor in the seat.

Because almost every voter in the district also lives in Canning, the 29 August result is the closest thing to a live preview of what One Nation can do to Hastie federally. His name isn't on the ballot, and in a by-election a vote for a minor party carries no risk of changing the government.

Roger Cook and Andrew Hastie are both claiming Karnup station was first promised by Labor in 2013

In the same 4 August interview, Hastie claimed credit for the Karnup train station, saying he'd pressured Labor into committing the money from opposition. Premier Roger Cook and Deputy Premier Rita Saffioti announced the $156 million station four weeks out from the by-election, 13 years after Labor first promised one. Only $10 million of that has actually been allocated, to finish planning and approvals, half the total is meant to come from land sales and the remaining $78 million has been asked of the Commonwealth. Works are not due to start until 2028. Labor's candidate Georgia Tree wasn't permitted to answer a question at the announcement.

Thirteen years after it was promised, two parties are claiming the same station in the month people vote on it, which is the argument Caddies has been making about safe seats all campaign.

Hastie gave evidence for the publisher that beat Ben Roberts-Smith, and now defends a case beside it

One Nation's argument against Hastie runs through Ben Roberts-Smith. The party has been an open backer of the former SAS soldier, who faces war crimes charges he denies and is yet to stand trial, with a hearing listed for September. Hastie gave evidence in the defamation action Roberts-Smith brought against Nine and lost, and expects to be called as a witness at the criminal trial. He has said publicly that everyone is entitled to the presumption of innocence and that no one is above the law.

His relationship with that company runs a good deal further than the one case. On 30 July, Hastie told the Western Australian Supreme Court he was the one who leaked a covert recording of Perth businessman Greg Poland to a journalist at Nine's WAtoday. Poland has brought a defamation action against Nine, two of its journalists, Hastie, two of his staffers and former WA Liberal leader Zak Kirkup. He admitted listening to the tape for a matter of minutes before sending it on, and told the court he couldn't recall much of the rest, including whether he or his media adviser sent the file. Our full report of that day in court sets out the sworn accounts against his.

In the Roberts-Smith trial in 2022, Roberts-Smith's barrister Arthur Moses SC put to Hastie that Nine was covering his legal fees in separate defamation proceedings and that he was "beholden" to the publisher. Hastie answered: "Absolutely not." He is now a defendant alongside that same company, in an action that has run more than 7 years and is still going.

Three Liberal senators voted to keep the Afghanistan command report secret, One Nation's three didn't

The other half of the Roberts-Smith argument sits in the Senate, and it went against Hastie's party. On 2 July the chamber divided 24 votes to 15 and refused to release the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force's report examining whether Australian commanders should have known their soldiers were allegedly murdering prisoners in Afghanistan.

The three Liberals were Wendy Askew, Jonathon Duniam and Maria Kovacic. One Nation's Sean Bell, Malcolm Roberts and Tyron Whitten all voted to force the report out, as did the 10 Greens, independent David Pocock and United Australia Party senator Ralph Babet. Duniam, the Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate, told the chamber the Coalition had been advised the evidence was highly classified. Releasing it, he said, could jeopardise the Office of the Special Investigator's ongoing war crimes investigations.

Three minutes later the Senate divided again on a different Defence document, a management study by the interim National Armaments Director, and passed it 33 votes to 21 with 18 Coalition senators voting in favour. The Coalition was willing to force Defence to hand over a file about how it buys equipment, and in the same room, minutes apart, wouldn't do it for the report on what commanders knew. Our full account of the division lists how all 39 senators voted.

Hastie sits in the House of Representatives and took no part in that division. It was his party's position, delivered by its Manager of Opposition Business, and he hasn't been asked about it.

The only number that settles this is the one Secret Harbour hands down on 29 August

One Nation has said since early July it would treat the by-election as a dry run against Hastie. It now has a branch in Canning, a candidate in the district next door, a Liberal preference and its state leader working the seat, and no result yet.

If One Nation clears Hall's 8.4% floor by a wide margin in a district Labor holds on under half the primary vote, Canning stops being a safe Liberal seat on paper and starts being a contest.