Pressure mounts on Angus Taylor as Pauline Hanson declares One Nation ‘here for the long haul’

A triumphant Pauline Hanson has declared One Nation is “here for the long haul” after a historic Farrer byelection win that has ignited internal rumblings about Angus Taylor’s leadership just three months into his tenure.

The rightwing populist party won its first federal lower house seat on Saturday night, after David Farley defeated the independent, Michelle Milthorpe.

In a catastrophic result for the Coalition, which had held the seat for its entire 76-year history, the Liberals suffered a swing of more than 30%. Its primary vote sank below 13%, amid what the opposition leader on Saturday night said was an “existential situation for the Coalition”. The Nationals polled just under 10%.

The result validates the opinion polls that have shown surging support for One Nation since the 2025 federal election, eroding the Liberal and National vote and creating an existential threat for the establishment conservative parties.

“It’s not just a win for One Nation or Pauline Hanson – that’s not the big picture here. What I’m looking at is the win for Australia,” Hanson told Sky News on Sunday morning.

“We are now taking on the major political parties. [They] have been so arrogant for too long, disregarding, disrespecting, taking the voters out there for granted and knowing that they run this country into the ground. I want my country back. I want to bring back prosperity.”

In a message to critics who note Hanson’s historically dysfunctional party has unravelled before, the One Nation leader said: “People say, you know, you know they won’t last long. I’m telling you now, we’re going to be here for the long haul.”

The Liberals were expecting to lose Farrer due to One Nation’s popularity and an expected backlash from locals to the ousting of Sussan Ley, who had held the seat for 25 years.

But the scale of the collapse in the primary vote shocked and alarmed some MPs, who were privately questioning Taylor’s leadership as the postmortem started on Sunday morning.

The opposition leader said the Liberals would take “hard lessons” from the result, which he attributed in part to the chaos of the two Coalition splits and a “shift away” from traditional values.

The comments appeared to pin blame on Ley, who oversaw two breaks with the Nationals during her nine months in the role.

Ley issued a pointed statement on Saturday night that suggested the Coalition was in a worse position now than when Taylor unseated her.

“On the day the leadership spilled in February, the new leader said the Liberal Party needed to ‘change or die’,” Ley’s statement read.

“Three months later, the result in Farrer demonstrates that statement to be far truer today than it ever was then.”

One Liberal MP said the Farrer result was the “price of undermining and destroying the leadership of Sussan Ley”.

The same MP criticised the party’s decision to preference Farley ahead of Milthorpe on how-to-vote cards as a “betrayal of Liberal values” that gave permission for supporters to switch to the rightwing party.

Taylor defended the decision on Saturday night, saying it’s what Liberals in Farrer wanted.

The defeat has renewed doubts among moderate MPs about Taylor and the direction of the party under his leadership, which appears focused on stemming the exodus to One Nation rather than re-positioning the Liberals in the political centre.

Liberals fear the party has become “reactive” to One Nation’s agenda, including on immigration.

Two MPs said while there was no immediate threat to Taylor’s leadership, colleagues – in particular those in the lower house – would start to get “agitated” if the situation didn’t improve.

“The loss [in Farrer] will fire the starter’s gun on more leadership speculation with the Coalition,” one MP said.

The former Liberal senator Hollie Hughes – a supporter of Ley and vocal critic of Taylor – used social media to mock the opposition leader.

“Guess when you knife someone, country people don’t reward you …,” she posted on Facebook.

The shadow treasurer, Tim Wilson, who, like Andrew Hastie, has been touted as a future leadership contender, said the Liberals needed to be “bigger, better, bolder” in response to a “serious situation”.

Speaking on the ABC’s Insiders program, the Liberal moderate did not shut down the prospect of working with One Nation in a minority government after the next election.

The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, said the Farrer result was a “bloodbath” for the Coalition that casts doubt on Taylor’s future.

“Angus Taylor went big on division and lost really badly,” he told Sky News.

Chalmers said the result showed the Coalition would need to join forces with One Nation if it wanted to return to government, leaving Labor as the only party left in the “sensible centre of Australian politics”.