For the right the next election is about renovation

That might sound like very bad news for One Nation, but there is another model of what can happen, and that is Farrer.

Farrer is itself a very safe seat. Labor didn’t run, which complicates things a little, but there was a soft Labor proxy in the Teal-ish Independent Michelle Milthorpe, who won 28.1 per cent of first preferences.

In this case, Liberal candidate Raissa Butkowski won 12.4 per cent of first preferences and the Nationals Brad Robertson 9.8 per cent, further dividing the traditional Coalition vote, while the One Nation candidate, David Farley, won 39.5 per cent.

The important point is not simply the size of Farley’s lead. It is where the Coalition candidates sat in the order of exclusion. Both the Liberal and National candidates were behind Milthorpe. Once they were excluded, the contest was no longer One Nation versus Coalition, where centre-left preferences could have favoured the Coalition. It was One Nation versus Milthorpe, and Coalition preferences overwhelmingly favoured Farley.

That is the mechanism One Nation needs to reproduce elsewhere. It does not necessarily have to beat Labor on first preferences. It needs to beat the Coalition candidate and keep doing so until the Coalition is excluded. If Labor is first, One Nation second, and the Coalition third when the decisive three-candidate stage is reached, One Nation has a very strong chance of winning on Coalition preferences.

Which leads us to what this next election, in my opinion, should be about.

Why did Farley win? He was the right candidate for the right seat with the right issue. The election was won two months out at the preselection stage. Once the candidates were selected the seat was always going to swap hands.

(For what it’s worth, I backed my judgment at the time with a princely $30 on Sportsbet, so this is not a rewriting of history to shape it to the outcome.)

Water was the key issue in Farrer. Farley was the only candidate on the right side of that issue as far as electors were concerned. And he had the right personality and CV for just that sort of rural/urban seat.

Farrer therefore supplies the other half of the electoral equation. Preferential voting establishes the rules of the contest, but candidate selection can change the order in which the principal candidates are eliminated. Moving enough voters from Coalition to One Nation to put the Coalition candidate below Labor may be sufficient to change the winner of the seat, even without substantially changing the combined non-Labor vote.

The lesson from Farrer is that the next election will partly be about which non-Labor party can preselect the right candidates for the seats and for the Parliament.

If the parties of the right are smart, that is how they will also frame it.