Western Australia, February 2026

01

One Nation's seventeen points came out of the Liberal column, not out of a residual

Adding a party to a ballot usually empties the category that was absorbing it. In Western Australia that category barely moved, and the opposition's share fell nine points instead.

The November figures come from a question that did not list One Nation. The February figures exclude 10 per cent of voters who were undecided, against 5 per cent in November, so the two waves draw their shares from differently sized answered bases.

The four falls sum to seventeen, which is One Nation's figure exactly, and the largest single contribution is the Liberals' nine. The any-other-candidate category gives up one point. That is the opposite of the New South Wales pattern, where the same change took thirteen of its twenty-one points from an undifferentiated other box that collapsed from 20 to 7; ACE-IU-2026-025 sets that case out. The two jurisdictions added the same party to the ballot in the same months and recorded roughly the same share for it, and the events are not comparable.

Two cautions belong with that reading. A changed ballot is a changed instrument, so no movement measured across it is clean, and the nine points are a difference between two questions rather than a measured swing. The undecided share also doubled, from 5 per cent to 10, which means February's shares are struck on a smaller answered base and some of the apparent fall in both major parties may be voters moving into that category rather than to One Nation. What survives both cautions is the comparison itself: whatever the November other-candidate box was holding, it was not a hidden One Nation vote, because it was still holding nine points of something in February.

02

The two-party figure did not notice

Labor's primary vote fell five points and its two-party share rose one. Western Australia's 2025 flows send 68.5 per cent of One Nation preferences to the Liberals, which is a weaker return than Queensland's 74 and nothing like New South Wales's exhausting 62.

The flow rates are DemosAU's, printed in its methodology statement: Nationals 77 per cent to the Liberals, Greens 76.5 per cent to Labor, One Nation 68.5 per cent to the Liberals, others 54 per cent to the Liberals. Western Australia uses full preferential voting for the Legislative Assembly, so the two columns sum to 100 and nothing exhausts. Each cell is rounded to one decimal place and the totals are struck on unrounded values. The reproduction gives 56.4 against a published 57.

The three jurisdictions in these two batches now give three different answers to the same question. In Queensland a One Nation point is worth about half a point of two-party preferred to the conservative side, because 74 per cent of its preferences return and 26 cross over. In Western Australia it is worth about 0.37 of a point, because the return is 68.5 per cent. In New South Wales it is worth nothing at all to either side for 62 per cent of its voters, because their ballots exhaust. The same national movement is a windfall, a modest help and a dead loss depending only on which state line the voter lives behind.

That is why Labor's position here looks untouched by a nine-point collapse in the party opposing it. The Liberals lost nine points of primary vote and received 11.6 points of preferences back from One Nation, which is more than the nine they gave up. A two-party figure that moves one point in Labor's favour while the opposition's own vote falls by nine is not evidence that nothing happened; it is evidence that the two-party measure cannot see what happened.

03

Labor takes 48 per cent of the highest income band and the Liberals take 15

DemosAU publishes no cohort sample sizes for this wave. If the three-way splits each hold about a third of the effective sample of 668, a gap between two of them carries roughly ±8.3 points.

These figures are read from the demographic chart on the report's page 9. The report draws the WA Nationals segment in every row but prints its label only where the bar is wide enough; an en dash marks a cell whose figure the report does not state, and the residual implied by the other five columns is between 0 and 3 points in each case. Every row with a complete set sums to 100. Cohort figures rest on subsamples and carry wider margins than the ±3.8% statewide topline.

Labor's 48 per cent among voters earning over $125,000 against the Liberals' 15 is a 33-point gap and the widest division in the wave. It is also the reverse of the pattern the same income band shows in Queensland, where the LNP takes 50 per cent of it. Labor's position in Western Australia is strongest exactly where a conservative party would expect to be strongest, and the Liberal vote is instead concentrated among outright owners at 29 per cent and the over-55s at 28.

One Nation's distribution is unusually flat. It runs between 13 and 21 per cent across all seventeen cohorts, and its highest figure is outer metropolitan rather than regional, where the WA Nationals take 17 per cent and One Nation 16. That is a different shape from Queensland and New South Wales, where the party is concentrated in regional and TAFE-qualified cohorts and close to absent in the inner cities. A party polling within four points of its statewide figure everywhere has no base to speak of and no weakness to exploit either.

04

February against November and the March 2025 election

Percentage points, first preferences. The November column is from a question that did not list One Nation, so the middle comparison crosses two different ballots.

The November any-other-candidate figure of 10 was measured against a baseline of 14.3, the 2025 others and One Nation combined, because that question had no One Nation box. The February column measures others against the 10.3 others alone, which is why the two waves' others figures are close and their stated changes are not comparable.

Eleven months after an election it won with 57.1 per cent of the two-party vote, the government holds 57 per cent of it. Underneath, its own primary vote is down 5.4 and the opposition's is down 7.0, with 13.0 points sitting with a party that took 4.0 at the election. Western Australia has arrived at the same destination as Queensland by a different route: a two-party figure that has not moved, resting on a primary vote that has fragmented.