Andrew Hastie has spent a fortnight telling anyone who will listen that One Nation will have to blast him out of Canning. Pauline Hanson's party is about to find out how many rounds that actually takes, on a live-fire range that sits entirely inside his own electorate.
The resignation of West Australian Labor minister Paul Papalia, confirmed on Monday, triggers a by-election in his state seat of Secret Harbour, 60km south of Perth. Papalia, the Cook government's corrective services minister and a former navy diver, is quitting after 19 years in parliament to care for a family member with a serious illness. Every voter in his seat also lives in Hastie's federal seat of Canning, and as The Australian reported, One Nation intends to treat the contest as a dry run for a seat it has quietly decided it can take.
The man who declared the war now gets the test
Remember how we got here. It was Hastie, not One Nation, who lit the fuse, telling colleagues he would rather be taken out in a box than bend the knee and vowing to "do them slowly." He reached for Sun Tzu to see it through. One Nation's answer was to point out it wasn't running any campaign against him at all, and then, with the patience of a party that can read a poll, to line up a seat inside his own electorate and wait for him to hand them the numbers.
Now Secret Harbour gives them the range. The overlap is the whole point: it sits wholly within Canning, so whatever One Nation polls there is a live preview of what it can do to Hastie federally. Chief of staff James Ashby has already said One Nation will stand a strong candidate against Hastie in Canning. Secret Harbour is where they get to test-drive it for free.
Hastie has spent a fortnight making their case for them
If One Nation wanted to soften Hastie up before the vote, he has saved them the trouble. In a single fortnight the member for Canning has:
- Gone to war with One Nation, the fastest growing party on his own side
- Branded Pauline Hanson "MAGA first" without apparently realising the same four letters spell 'Make Australia Great Again'
- Mocked her on the ABC by reaching for a Neighbours character most of the country needs Googled
- Been thrown out of Question Time under 94A
- Waved a Treasury paper with TOXIC scrawled on it at a Sky News camera
- Collected a public "good on you" from Comrad Anthony Albanese, who rose in the House to applaud him for attacking One Nation
When the Labor Prime Minister is your loudest cheerleader, the conservative base starts to wonder who's side you're on.
It has left him fighting the wrong enemy on the wrong front, holding his Book of War upside down, or maybe just doodling over the important pages in red texta.
One Nation has spent months peeling Coalition voters away right across the country, and Hastie's answer has been to attack them rather than win them back. A by-election is the cheapest place in politics to vote for who you actually want, which makes Secret Harbour the ideal place to find out whether a base that keeps hearing him rubbish One Nation is still listening to a word he says.
Paul Papalia won Secret Harbour on under half the vote
On paper the seat is Labor territory. Strip it back to the actual 2025 result, though, and the by-election is working with softer ground than the label suggests. The figures below are the WA Electoral Commission's official count.
- Labor won on 46.5% of the primary vote. Paul Papalia topped the seat, but with under half the people who turned out actually voting for him.
- The two party result was 61.5% Labor to 38.5% Liberal. That is a margin of about 11.5%, not the 31% notional figure sometimes thrown around for the redrawn seat.
- One Nation already polled 8.4%. Candidate Liam Hall banked that on his own in 2025, the party's real floor here, and well above the 2.5% its predecessor scraped in old Warnbro years ago.
In plain terms: Labor holds the seat on under half the vote, and One Nation already has a base to build on. In a by-election, where a vote for One Nation carries no risk of changing the government and the sitting party usually cops a hiding, that is a far softer target than the raw margin makes it look.
Which is exactly why a strong One Nation showing would be an earthquake, not a tremor. In Western Australia, Hastie effectively is the Coalition now, mostly because there is barely anyone else left. The Liberals were wiped out across metropolitan Perth at the 2025 election, and he is a good deal of what remains. He held Canning with a swing of more than 5% his way, 42.5% of the primary and 56.6% two party preferred, running a campaign that, as The Australian noted, barely mentioned his own party.
So One Nation now gets to stress test that vote in a seat sitting entirely inside his own electorate, where his name is not even on the ballot. What it is really measuring is whether the Coalition has anything left in the west at all. If One Nation surges on his home turf, the "blast me out of Canning" line stops being bravado and starts being a forecast.
Roberts-Smith, and why the base is not with him
None of this is only about postcodes. Where Hastie has chosen to plant his flag runs straight through Ben Roberts-Smith. Hanson and One Nation have been unapologetic backers of the former SAS soldier, who was charged in April with five counts of war crime murder, denies the charges and is yet to stand trial. Hastie served alongside him in Afghanistan and, far from staying out of it, gave evidence against him and features in the documentary made about the case, which is the part he conveninetly never mentions. He offers the line that everyone is entitled to the presumption of innocence but no one is above the law.
Ask One Nation's base and you get an argument they find easy to follow, and it starts with whose law it is. The charges Roberts-Smith faces are Australian, but they only exist because the Howard government signed Australia up to the International Criminal Court's Rome Statute in 2002 and wrote its war crimes into our own Criminal Code.
The United States looked at the same treaty and walked the other way. Washington signed it under Bill Clinton, then withdrew the signature under George W. Bush, and has never joined, precisely to keep its own soldiers out of a court it could not control and answerable instead to their own military justice system. Australia bound its diggers to a framework the world's most powerful military would not touch.
The result, his supporters argue, is a decorated SAS soldier facing a civilian criminal court over decisions made in an Afghanistan, judged by people who were never in the fight, against an enemy that wore no uniform and fought by no rules of its own.
And running the whole apparatus is the Office of the Special Investigator, stood up in 2020. The decade of inquiry and investigation behind it has cost taxpayers hundreds of millions and left veterans waiting years, and thousands have now signed a petition to shut it down, calling what it delivers delayed and selective justice.
None of that decides Roberts-Smith's guilt or innocence, which is a matter for the court. He denies the charges and is yet to stand trial. But it explains the politics. For a conservative base that reveres its Victoria Cross recipients and remembers who was actually shooting at them, standing by Roberts-Smith is the easy sell. And it is One Nation, not Hastie, doing the selling.
What to watch on the range
Three things will tell the story. First the timing: Papalia sits until 10 July, and the by-election itself is still weeks away, with no date locked in. Second, whether One Nation stands the strong candidate it has promised or keeps its powder dry. Third, and the only number that matters, the primary vote it lands.
Clear the low bar and the threat Hastie keeps waving away suddenly has teeth. Lift well off that 8.4% base, in a seat where Labor already governs on under half the primary vote, and every "sugar hits" jibe Hastie has thrown at One Nation curdles into a warning he ignored.
Either way, the first real scoreboard in a war Andrew Hastie started is about to be switched on, and it is being bolted to the wall inside his own back yard. He asked for the fight. He is about to get the reviews.
