By Byron Kaye
SYDNEY, May 9 (Reuters) – Australian far-right populist party Pauline Hanson’s One Nation won its first seat in the country’s House of Representatives in a byelection on Saturday, a preliminary vote count showed.
The result is in line with a surge of electoral support for far-right populist parties globally. Britain’s ruling Labour party this week suffered a widespread loss of seats at council elections.
David Farley, a former agribusiness executive, won the rural seat of Farrer, some 550 km (340 miles) south of Sydney and 320 km (200 miles) north of Melbourne, for the anti-immigration party with 59.3% of the vote, defeating the incumbent centre-right Liberal Party, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
One Nation’s first preference vote in the byelection was 42%, the ABC said, compared to the 6.6% first-preference vote it got at a federal election last May.
“We’re like a mason with a chisel and we’re carving letters into Australia’s democracy,” Farley said at a televised election event. “One Nation has reached the end of its beginning.”
FIRST LOWER-HOUSE SEAT SINCE PARTY FORMED
The result is significant in that it marks the first time One Nation has won a lower-house seat since Hanson formed the party 30 years ago.
But it does not affect the parliamentary majority of the ruling Labor Party, which holds 94 of 150 lower-house seats.
The seat was left vacant when Liberals leader Sussan Ley resigned in February.
The Labor Party did not run a candidate in the contest for the seat that has been held by the opposition conservatives since it was formed more than half a century ago.
Party leader Pauline Hanson, a senator, standing beside Farley, said the result was “a win for Farrer but a bigger win for the nation”.
She knew her party was favoured to win but when the first television station projected victory “I actually got a tear in my eye”, she said.
“You really don’t understand the journey I’ve been on,” she added.
Liberal leader Angus Taylor said at another televised event that the byelection was “always going to be a mountain to climb … and we have to take away some hard lessons from this”.
Taylor said his party would focus on immigration rates. “For too long we have been a party of convenience, not of conviction, and that must change,” he added.
(Reporting by Byron Kaye; editing by Barbara Lewis)
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