The Orange Wave That Wasn't

How a Billionaire's Jet, a Halloween Party, and a Nation of Pollsters Got It Spectacularly Wrong

For 3 months, Australian political media has been in the grip of a collective fever dream.

One Nation, we were told, was about to reshape the political landscape. The orange wave. The end of two party politics. A watershed moment in Australian democracy.

Every major pollster fed the machine. Roy Morgan had One Nation at 28% primary vote in South Australia, up from 2.6% in 2022. YouGov’s final poll put them at 22%. Newspoll at 22%. DemosAU went further, releasing a federal MRP model projecting One Nation would win between 46 and 55 seats if a federal election were held today, making them the official opposition and relegating the Coalition to the crossbench.

The commentary class ate it up. Adelaide University’s Professor Clem Macintyre said One Nation’s rise had the potential to create “a watershed moment in Australian politics” and “the end of two party politics at a federal level.” Flinders University’s Josh Sunman praised One Nation’s “discipline” and “targeted messaging” as the surprise story of the campaign. Hours after he said that, a UK court issued an arrest warrant for One Nation candidate Aoi Baxter on sexual assault charges. Discipline.

Sky News ran it wall to wall. 7NEWS brought in analysts to game out the “orange wave” scenarios. The Nightly, SBS, Crikey, the ABC, InDaily. Everyone. The question was never whether One Nation would make a breakthrough. The question was how big.

Tonight, early counting in South Australia has Labor storming to a record landslide and One Nation looking like it couldn’t win a chook raffle at a country pub with only one ticket left on the board. The count will go on. They might scrape a regional seat. They’ll probably grab something in the upper house. But the orange tsunami that was supposed to rewrite Australian political history? On early numbers, it’s a puddle in a pub car park.

The Setup

To understand how every major institution in Australian political media got this so wrong, you have to understand what they were actually measuring.

They weren’t measuring a political movement. They were measuring anger. And anger is real, but anger doesn’t fill in a ballot paper.

YouGov’s own data contained the tell that nobody wanted to read. Of One Nation’s supporters, 52% said they felt “unrepresented by the major parties.” Only 10% said they actually supported One Nation’s policies. That’s not a voter base. That’s a scream into the void.

The pollsters were asking people, essentially, “are you unhappy?” And people said yes. And the pollsters wrote that down as “One Nation 22%.”

Meanwhile, the structural reality of Australian elections, preferential voting in single member electorates, was sitting right there the whole time. Antony Green, to his credit, kept carefully pointing out that strong One Nation polling didn’t automatically translate to seats. That independents would likely cannibalise One Nation support in regional areas. That state wide polling based on party vote “overlooks that most regional SA seats will be contested by popular Independent members and candidates.”

Nobody wanted to hear the boring structural analysis. The orange wave was a better story.

The Grift

Here’s where it gets properly insulting.

While every media outlet was breathlessly reporting on One Nation’s surge as though it were some organic, grassroots uprising of the Australian battler, the actual mechanics of the operation told a very different story.

In October 2025, Pauline Hanson and her chief of staff James Ashby climbed aboard Gina Rinehart’s private Gulfstream G700, one of the most expensive private jets money can buy, and flew from Brisbane to Perth to Osaka to Palm Beach, Florida. They stayed at Rinehart’s $66 million mansion. They attended Donald Trump’s Great Gatsby themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago. Pauline spoke at CPAC, where tickets cost between $5,000 and $25,000, praising Trump’s mass deportation program and calling for Australia to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

Views that, as the Guardian noted, closely align with Rinehart’s business interests.

They then failed to declare any of this for over 2 months, breaching Senate disclosure rules that require updates within 35 days. When caught, Hanson’s office quickly amended the register. Then the Guardian found ANOTHER undeclared Rinehart flight, from Melbourne to Sydney after an event at a college partly funded by Rinehart. Asked about it at a press conference in Adelaide, Hanson first denied receiving flights from Rinehart, then said she “can’t remember.”

She updated the register the same day.

Then, in March 2026, it emerged she’d charged taxpayers nearly $9,000 for a private plane to an event honouring a Rinehart donation.

This is the battler’s champion. The voice of the forgotten. The woman who was going to smash the “uniparty” and fight for the little guy. And she’s literally being ferried around the planet on a mining billionaire’s jet to attend parties at a foreign president’s private club, praising his authoritarian immigration policies, while parroting the mining lobby’s position on climate, and then failing to tell anyone about it.

And then Barnaby Joyce, who left the Nationals to join One Nation, used that same Rinehart Gulfstream to tour flood affected Queensland, then told reporters it was “saving taxpayers money.” The man of the people, on a $75 million jet, telling you he’s doing you a favour.

This is not a populist movement. This is an influence operation with a flag on it.

The MAGA Test

This is the part the coverage has been dancing around for months, so let me just say it plainly.

South Australia tonight was not a test of One Nation. It was a test of MAGA in Australia.

The entire One Nation resurgence of 2025 and 2026 has been built on the Trump template. The rage against “elites.” The immigration panic. The climate denialism. The strongman worship. The culture war grievance. The media ecosystem that amplifies it all.

Pauline didn’t just admire Trump from afar. She went to his house. She spoke at his conference. She praised his policies. She flew there on the jet of a woman who is a member of Trump’s female support network, the “Trumpettes,” and who holds a $4.7 billion US stock portfolio including investments in Trump Media and Technology.

Gina Rinehart’s most senior executive, former NT Chief Minister Adam Giles, publicly backed One Nation and told the media he was “encouraging my friends to be donating all they can.” At CPAC, Hanson praised Trump’s deportation policies, trashed net zero, and positioned herself as the Australian franchise of the global populist right. Rinehart, who has been openly disappointed with the Liberal Party for not adopting Trump style policies, appears to have decided Pauline was a better vehicle for her interests.

The whole thing was an attempt to transplant MAGA onto Australian soil. Funded by mining money. Amplified by Sky News. Validated by pollsters. And the question was whether Australians would fall for it the way a certain segment of Americans did.

Based on early results from South Australia tonight, we’re getting our answer.

What the Polls Got Wrong

There’s going to be a lot of soul searching among Australian pollsters after this, and they can start with this.

You measured anger, not commitment. You measured people who were pissed off at their electricity bills, not people who were going to number 47 boxes for a party whose own state member quit because she couldn’t stand the brand. You measured disillusionment with politics, then attributed that disillusionment to a specific party that 90% of its own supporters didn’t actually agree with on policy.

Crikey’s William Bowe noted that polls have “often proved less than precise with respect to One Nation, most recently when the party underperformed at last year’s federal election.” He was right. At the 2025 federal election, One Nation managed 6.4% nationally. A solid result, but a country mile from the numbers that followed in state and federal polling through early 2026.

Associate Professor Rob Manwaring from Flinders University was closer to the truth than most when he told SBS that One Nation’s support was “something that’s happening to them, rather than necessarily the way they’ve been campaigning.” In other words, One Nation wasn’t building support. They were just the nearest bin for people to throw their frustration into.

But a protest vote in a phone poll is free. A protest vote in a preferential ballot has consequences. And when it came time to actually fill in those boxes, early indications suggest South Australians looked at the One Nation column and decided they’d rather put their frustration somewhere else. Or nowhere at all.

The Hype Machine

Let’s just take stock of what the commentary class told us was about to happen.

Barnaby Joyce went on ABC’s Insiders and said he could “absolutely assure you that One Nation will poll number one in many seats.” DemosAU modelled 46 to 55 federal seats. Roy Morgan had them polling 28% in SA. Adelaide University professors were writing about the death of two party politics. 7NEWS told viewers an “orange wave is expected to crash over rural South Australia.” InDaily mapped the “orange hotspots.” The New Daily asked whether the “orange wave” would hit. Even Crikey, which at least had the decency to note One Nation’s history of underperforming its polls, spent weeks running analysis treating the surge as a given.

And on the other side of that hype, the actual facts were screaming.

One Nation’s own elected SA member quit the party because the brand was toxic. Their candidate for Adelaide had a UK warrant out for sexual assault. Their leader was jetting around on Rinehart’s Gulfstream, failing to declare flights, and then claiming she “can’t remember” whether she received them. Their policy platform was so thin that even the Liberal leader, who is having an absolute shocker of her own, said she couldn’t name a single policy One Nation had proposed to implement.

Somehow all of that got lost in the noise. The story was too good. The polls were too dramatic. The prospect of a right wing insurgency replacing the Liberals as the official opposition was too compelling for a media industry that thrives on disruption narratives.

So here we are. The “biggest story of the campaign” is looking like a bust. The “watershed moment” is a trickle. And the question that should be asked of every pollster, editor and commentator who spent 3 months building this thing up is pretty simple: did you at any point ask yourself whether Australians would actually vote for a party run by a woman who attends Halloween parties at Mar-a-Lago on a mining billionaire’s jet?

Where This Leaves Us

The count will go on. One Nation will probably get something in the upper house, where proportional representation gives minor parties a fighting chance. They might even scrape a regional lower house seat as more votes come in. But the story of this election is not the one that was written in advance.

The story is that Peter Malinauskas just romped to a historic second term. That Labor’s two party preferred vote is tracking towards the highest in SA Labor history. That the Liberal Party has been reduced to a rump so small it might struggle to form a functional opposition. And that One Nation, after the most favourable set of conditions any minor party could dream of, appears to be walking away with sweet bugger all.

If these early results hold, every federal projection based on One Nation polling needs to be thrown in the bin. That DemosAU model showing 46 to 55 federal seats? Fiction. The breathless Sky News coverage of the “orange tsunami” heading for Canberra? Bollocks. The Victorian polls showing One Nation at 23 to 24%? Get back to me when someone actually votes.

Pauline Hanson has been in Australian politics for 30 years. She has never built a durable political organisation. She has never developed a serious policy platform. She has never maintained a stable parliamentary team. Her own members leave. Her own candidates get arrested. Her chief contribution to Australian political life has been to give angry people someone to cheer for without ever delivering them anything in return.

What she has built is a very effective mechanism for turning that anger into media coverage, which gets turned into polling numbers, which gets turned into more media coverage. It’s a perpetual motion machine of hype that works brilliantly right up until someone actually has to vote.

Tonight, South Australia is calling time on the con. Not on the anger. The anger is real. But on the idea that Pauline Hanson, Gina Rinehart’s favourite passenger, Donald Trump’s Australian admirer, the woman who can’t remember whether she flew on a billionaire’s jet or not, is the answer to it.

The MAGA experiment in Australia just had its first proper election night. And based on early counting, it couldn’t win a chook raffle.

The orange wave crashed on the shore and left nothing but sand.

~Gman