CANBERRA — Lakemba does not usually open an Australian election fight. The southwest Sydney suburb, where more than six in ten residents are Muslim, is the kind of place Pauline Hanson once told breakfast television made her feel unwanted. This week, her party put it on a target list.
At a rally on Wednesday, the One Nation leader read out the Labor-held seats her party intends to come after at the next federal election. Among them sits Watson, the Western Sydney electorate that takes in Lakemba, Belmore and Greenacre, held by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke.
Burke did not reach for polling numbers when he answered on Thursday evening. “She hates my part of Sydney, and she said so,” he told SBS News, arguing that people “shouldn’t pretend to be patriotic if they hate modern Australia.”
The exchange matters because the ground beneath it has shifted. For the first time in One Nation’s 30-year history, the party is polling ahead of the governing Labor Party. A RedBridge Group and Accent Research survey published on June 1 put Hanson’s party at 31 percent of the primary vote, up four points in a month, with Labor sliding three points to 28 in the weeks after the May 12 federal budget. Anthony Albanese’s government holds 94 of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives and is in no immediate danger. What is in danger, three days into the loudest fundraising war in recent Australian politics, is Labor’s assumption that confronting Hanson head-on weakens her.
The list Hanson brandished at Wednesday’s rally named some of the government’s most senior figures: Energy Minister Chris Bowen in McMahon, Burke in Watson, and seats held by cabinet ministers Clare O’Neil and Madeleine King.
The money fight began with Labor’s own advertising. The party had been running social media ads asking supporters for $27 to help stop One Nation. At 6:04 on Wednesday morning, One Nation answered with a near-identical ad asking for $29 instead, under a slogan aimed squarely at the prime minister: “Fire the Liar.” The counter on the party’s donation page passed 1.8 million Australian dollars in just over 24 hours and $2.3 million by Thursday afternoon, money the party says is earmarked for billboards, television and radio in Labor-held seats. Sky News Australia reported that billboard trucks carrying the slogan had already left the depot, bound for Bowen’s electorate and the prime minister’s own.
Albanese’s response was to question whether the money exists at all. He asked publicly what evidence there was that the party had raised the funds, and Labor figures privately suggested to the Australian Associated Press that the online counter might be fraudulent. The prime minister also pointed to Hanson’s links to the mining billionaire Gina Rinehart, including her acceptance in April of a $2.1 million light plane donated by one of Rinehart’s companies, an awkward fit with the party’s small-donor framing.
Hanson’s answer arrived on Thursday evening in the form of a document she said proved the site and the money were “ridgy didge.” The review was written by Daryl Monnink, a software engineer who declared himself “satisfied that the fundraising total calculation currently includes only successfully received and validated donation payments.” It is not an audit in any accounting sense. Monnink examined the site’s source code and live databases alongside Peter Arvoll, the man who built the platform, and the document says nothing about how many individual donors stand behind the total. Whether the counter reflects a genuine small-donor surge or a thinner pool of large contributions cannot be verified from the outside.
The polling beneath the spectacle cuts both ways. The same RedBridge survey that put One Nation first on primary votes still has Labor ahead, 51 to 49, once preferences are distributed, and the party’s support is heaviest in rural and regional Australia, far from the urban seats Hanson named this week. In Watson, One Nation took 3.2 percent of the vote at the 2025 election, two points lower than three years earlier. In Bowen’s McMahon it managed 8.73 percent. Read that way, the hit list looks like theatre.
The party’s recent record argues against complacency. In May, One Nation won the New South Wales seat of Farrer at a by-election triggered by the former Liberal leader Sussan Ley’s resignation, with candidate David Farley taking 59.1 percent of the final count, Al Jazeera reported. It was the first lower-house seat the party had won in three decades of trying.
The Coalition may be squeezed hardest of all. Asked this week whether the Liberals would stand aside for One Nation in winnable seats, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor told reporters there would be “no carve-up of seats,” promising instead to go “toe-to-toe in every seat in this country.” The Victorian MP Tim Wilson ruled out “peace talks” and “surrender” to either Labor or One Nation after a South Australian colleague, Tony Pasin, floated an accommodation and was swiftly contradicted. The Liberals turned to Tony Abbott as their new federal president this month while staring at polling that suggests the party could be reduced to minor-party status.
In the suburbs on Hanson’s list, the contest is less abstract. In February, Hanson told ABC television she had felt unwelcome visiting Lakemba, saying, “You feel unwanted, you’re not wanted to be there,” and named it among suburbs she claimed people could not go into. In November she wore a burqa into the Senate chamber to protest the blocking of her bill banning face coverings. Watson, with a Muslim population above 61 percent in Lakemba itself, is among the most multicultural electorates in the country.
Inside Labor, the concern is now institutional. The Guardian reported on Friday that MPs have been handed fresh talking points on how to speak about One Nation, an acknowledgment that the government’s early instinct to starve Hanson of attention has given way to direct engagement. Whether the new approach serves Labor any better is the question the past 72 hours have not answered. Every public blow aimed at the fundraiser has been converted, almost in real time, into more money for the party it was meant to stop.
Burke sounded less like a man plotting a counterattack than one settling in for a familiar fight. “One Nation always run in my part of Sydney,” he said, “they’ll run again.” In Lakemba, the campaign has already arrived.
