Standfirst: The Georgia Tree Secret Harbour by-election was a difficult contest and a sharp wake-up call for Labor. The party campaigned hard, but early message control, questions about residency and wider economic frustration made it harder for voters to get to know its candidate.
Result note: The ABC called Secret Harbour for One Nation on election night. At 5:30pm on Sunday, with 74.5 per cent counted, Luke Herdegen led Georgia Tree 57–43 on the indicative preference count. The WA Electoral Commission says the official count will not be complete until eligible postal votes received by 9am on 3 September have been counted.
What the Georgia Tree Secret Harbour by-election revealed
The Georgia Tree Secret Harbour by-election campaign delivered a serious warning to WA Labor, but it should not become a search for one person to blame. Tree entered a difficult contest shaped by cost-of-living pressure, frustration over local services, a familiar by-election protest dynamic and One Nation’s growing appeal to voters who feel ignored by the major parties.
Labor also made a genuine effort to hold the seat. It spent heavily, knocked on thousands of doors and promoted funding for transport, schools and training. Those facts matter. This was not a campaign in which the party simply gave up.
Yet effort and effectiveness are not always the same thing. At crucial moments, the campaign’s tight message control made it harder for Tree to introduce herself on her own terms. Senior Labor figures often became the public face of the campaign, while arguments about Tree’s address and her earlier advocacy on workplace sexual harassment crowded out her personal story.
That does not mean Tree would have won with a different strategy. Labor’s 22.2-point fall in its primary vote was too large to explain through media management alone. It does suggest, however, that she was never given the clearest possible opportunity to show voters who she was and how she would represent them.
The useful question is why a well-resourced campaign still struggled to build trust.
Georgia Tree had a story worth hearing
Tree, 34, had worked as an adviser to federal Resources Minister Madeleine King and, more recently, in government relations for Woodside. Those connections left her open to the “political insider” label, but her background was more complicated than that description suggested.
ABC’s candidate profile reported that Tree’s mother died when she was nine and that her father raised her on one wage. He overcame heroin addiction and later built a career in the mining industry. Tree wrote Old Boy, a book about his life.
She also had a genuine connection to the broader area. Tree spent part of her childhood in Port Kennedy and said she had lived or worked in the community throughout her life. Her campaign linked that background to Medicare, TAFE, health care, education and equality of opportunity.
This could have helped Labor speak to working families without pretending their economic anxiety was imaginary. It could also have challenged One Nation’s claim to be the only party that understood voters who felt left behind.
Instead, Tree was often presented as the candidate who could secure government funding. That is a legitimate argument when a party holds office, but it is not a substitute for a candidate’s own identity. Voters needed to hear what had shaped her, where she differed from the party and what she would fight for if elected.
The early campaign restricted Georgia Tree’s voice
The most damaging early image was simple: Tree was at media events but was not allowed to answer questions.
Reporters were prevented from questioning her at two consecutive press conferences while senior Labor figures spoke. Tree later described the situation as “not ideal”. There may have been practical explanations at both events, and it would be unfair to claim that she remained silent throughout the campaign. She gave a local radio interview, later answered media questions and challenged the other candidates to a debate.
Even so, first impressions carry unusual weight in a short by-election campaign. The ABC’s post-election analysis said the episodes helped opponents portray Tree as a “silent cog” in a larger Labor machine.
That impression was damaging because it conflicted with the job she was seeking. Labor wanted voters to trust Tree to speak for Secret Harbour in Parliament, yet the opening phase of the campaign did not consistently show her speaking for herself.
This was probably an error of campaign caution rather than evidence that Labor lacked confidence in its candidate. Political parties try to keep announcements focused and avoid unscripted distractions. In this case, though, the caution created the distraction. Giving Tree more room from the beginning would have made the campaign feel more local and less managed.
The sexual-harassment controversy needs careful language
The phrase “sex scandal” is misleading in this case. Tree was not accused of being involved in a personal sexual scandal, and credible reporting has not established that she concealed one.
The issue concerned comments she made on a podcast in July 2021, during the national reckoning over sexual harassment and assault in Parliament House. Tree criticised a political culture in which staff felt pressure to stay quiet and parties handled complaints internally to protect their reputations.
Her language was blunt. She compared the instinct to protect a party brand with the Catholic Church’s institutional secrecy and recalled people worrying about “skeletons in our closet”. The point of her comments, however, was to argue for greater openness and accountability.
Tree had helped organise a parliamentary staff sit-in and advocated for the review led by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins. The resulting Set the Standard report found that one in three people then working in Commonwealth parliamentary workplaces had experienced sexual harassment there.
When the podcast comments resurfaced during the Georgia Tree Secret Harbour by-election campaign, Tree said she stood by them and was proud of the reforms staff had helped achieve. ABC reported that she pointed to new human-resources support, training and confidential assistance for parliamentary staff.
A missed chance to show independence
This history could have demonstrated that Tree was prepared to challenge unhealthy behaviour, including inside her own political party. Labor instead appeared uncomfortable with the old comments. Premier Roger Cook emphasised that the party had changed and said he was sure Tree no longer held the same view of it. Cook was entitled to defend reforms made since 2021. The stronger response, however, would have been to acknowledge that Tree’s criticism was justified in its historical context and that political organisations improve when staff can speak honestly.
There is no published evidence that Labor stopped Tree from speaking at the earlier press conferences to suppress the podcast story. The media events occurred before the comments became a major campaign issue. The connection is therefore an irony, not a proven conspiracy: a candidate known for criticising political silence began her campaign with too little control over her own public voice.
Residency was a weakness, but the full picture was complicated
Tree’s home outside the electorate did not help. She owned a property in Perth’s inner north and said she would stay in Port Kennedy during the campaign. She also said she had tried to find a local home but would not pay above market value.
There is no legal requirement for a WA MP to live in the electorate. Tree was not alone either: none of the main candidates lived within the seat’s precise boundaries when the issue first emerged. Former Labor MP Paul Papalia also lived outside the electorate, according to parliamentary records examined by the ABC.
Still, voters can reasonably prefer a representative who experiences the same transport, housing and community pressures that they do. In an outer-suburban electorate waiting for infrastructure, an address well outside the seat made Tree easier to portray as distant from local life.
Labor knew about the issue before selecting her. The campaign could have addressed it early, while explaining her childhood and working connection to the area. It could also have noted that Herdegen had moved to Western Australia only three years earlier, while Tree had grown up locally. ABC later observed that Labor barely made that case.
Residency did not disqualify Tree, but it placed a greater burden on her to demonstrate local understanding. A campaign built more strongly around her personal history may have helped her meet that test.
Labor campaigned hard, but attention arrived late
WA Labor put substantial resources into the contest. A senior party figure estimated spending of about $400,000. Roger Cook said volunteers knocked on 19,000 doors, held 8,000 voter conversations, sent 210,000 pieces of mail and installed about 1,000 signs.
The government also announced or promoted funding for the long-awaited Karnup train station, electrical training at Rockingham TAFE and local schools. These were not trivial concerns. Better transport, education and training can make a real difference in a fast-growing outer-suburban community.
The difficulty was timing. ABC analysis during the campaign raised questions about whether the burst of attention amounted to pork-barrelling. Tree’s claims to have “secured” funding soon after her preselection also invited scepticism when parts of that funding were already in the budget or had previously been promised.
That does not erase the Cook government’s broader record. As TheWokely’s earlier assessment of Roger Cook discussed, his government can point to substantial investment in railways, roads, hospitals, housing and energy infrastructure while maintaining comparatively strong finances.
The lesson from Secret Harbour is narrower. Even a government with real achievements can struggle when residents believe their community receives serious attention only after a seat becomes politically vulnerable. Ministers and funding announcements made the campaign visible, but they sometimes crowded out the candidate asking for local trust.
Liberal preferences gave One Nation an advantage
The Liberal Party’s role also deserves scrutiny.
Its registered how-to-vote material placed One Nation’s Luke Herdegen third and Georgia Tree tenth. Under WA’s full preferential voting system, voters control their own preferences and do not have to follow a party card. Nevertheless, the recommendation clearly placed One Nation ahead of Labor.
That mattered politically as well as mathematically. It signalled to conservative voters that One Nation was an acceptable alternative, even while the Liberals said they were contesting the seat themselves.
State Liberal leader Basil Zempilas argued that a One Nation win could create an opportunity for the Liberals by weakening Labor. Federal Liberal MP Andrew Hastie disputed that strategy. His federal seat of Canning overlaps Secret Harbour, and he argued that the Liberals should fight for every vote rather than regard another party’s victory as their own.
Preferences did not create the result on their own. With 74.5 per cent counted, One Nation had 39.1 per cent of first preferences, Labor 24.4 per cent and the Liberals 17.3 per cent. The decisive movement began with a large fall in Labor’s primary vote and a surge to One Nation.
The preference card nevertheless helped One Nation finish the journey. Readers interested in the winning candidate can also read TheWokely’s earlier examination of Luke Herdegen’s background and One Nation’s vetting.
Voters had reasons to be dissatisfied
Campaign presentation cannot explain the entire result. Secret Harbour includes many young families facing high housing costs, congestion and stretched services. Residents had watched the proposed Karnup station stall for years. One Nation campaigned on concerns ranging from red-bin collections to migration and the cost of living.
Labor had also suffered a sizeable swing in the seat at the 2025 state election. The warning signs did not begin with Georgia Tree. By-elections give people a relatively low-risk opportunity to punish a government because the result does not decide who governs the state.
Some voters rejected the Cook government’s local record. Others may have wanted to disrupt a political system they felt had stopped listening. One Nation provided a clear destination for that anger.
Labor should take those concerns seriously without accepting every explanation offered by One Nation. Housing supply, infrastructure, wages and public services are legitimate subjects for debate. Blaming migrants as a group is not a substitute for solving them. The distinction matters, as TheWokely’s analysis of fear-based politics has argued.
Did negative gearing influence the Georgia Tree Secret Harbour by-election?
Negative-gearing reform may have contributed to the result, but the available evidence does not show that it decided the Secret Harbour by-election.
The Albanese government’s May budget limited negative gearing on residential investments to new builds from July 2027 and changed capital gains tax arrangements. The announcement gave Labor’s opponents a strong trust argument because Albanese had ruled out negative-gearing changes during the 2025 federal election.
The issue entered the local campaign. In a campaign video, Zempilas accused Albanese of breaking his word on negative gearing and capital gains tax. Days before polling, an ABC Perth interviewer challenged the prime minister on whether those reversals would make other promises harder to trust, then asked why he had not campaigned with Tree.
Secret Harbour was receptive territory for an argument about housing and household wealth. Western Australian Parliamentary Library data show that about 75 per cent of households were buying or fully owned their home in 2021. Many households in a mortgage-belt electorate will pay close attention to any policy described as affecting property.
What the evidence can and cannot show
Home ownership is not the same as owning an investment property. The government’s budget explanation says properties held before the 12 May announcement remain grandfathered under the negative-gearing changes. Investors can still negatively gear eligible new builds, and the family home remains exempt from capital gains tax. The new capital-gains arrangements apply only to gains accruing after 1 July 2027. The government estimates that roughly 1 per cent of tax filers acquire negatively geared properties in a typical year.
There is also no published exit poll or voter survey isolating negative gearing as a cause of the result. On polling day, Herdegen identified the cost of living and immigration as the national issues driving his support. Other reporting focused on housing pressure and missing community amenities.
The most defensible conclusion is that the reforms may have hurt Labor indirectly. They supported a wider opposition story about broken promises and economic insecurity. Labor also struggled to explain who would be affected, why the change favoured new housing supply and how prospective first-home buyers might benefit.
The trust argument may therefore have influenced some votes even if the direct financial effect of the reforms would be limited for most households in the electorate. Without voter-level research, anything stronger would be speculation.
Georgia Tree Secret Harbour by-election lessons for Labor
The Secret Harbour by-election should be a wake-up call, not a reason for Labor to abandon its values or panic about every policy disagreement.
The party should first recognise that a historically safe seat does not remain safe through history alone. Outer-suburban voters expect steady progress on transport, housing, health care and ordinary council and state services. A rush of election-period announcements cannot instantly repair a belief that attention arrived late.
Labor also needs to explain difficult federal decisions more clearly. Voters do not keep separate ledgers for state and federal branches of the same party. Changes to negative gearing or capital gains tax can land on a state candidate who had no role in designing them.
Honest explanation matters here. If circumstances lead Labor to change a position, it should say what changed, who will be affected and how the policy serves a wider public purpose. Leaving those details to opponents almost guarantees that the change will be heard first as a broken promise.
The answer is not to copy One Nation’s rhetoric or redirect economic frustration towards migrants. Labor can acknowledge that rapid population growth places pressure on housing and infrastructure while still rejecting collective blame. It can defend inclusion and take seriously the people waiting for a home, a train station or an affordable power bill.
Finally, local candidates need room to be recognisable human beings. They should be able to answer difficult questions, acknowledge where governments have fallen short and explain what they would do differently. Message discipline has a place, but it cannot replace trust.
Georgia Tree deserved a clearer opportunity
Tree was not a flawless candidate. Her address invited legitimate questions. Her work as an adviser and Woodside government-relations professional made it easy for opponents to present her as an insider. She also carried the record of a government that had held the area for years.
She had real strengths too: a working-family story, a connection to the broader community, experience inside government and a record of calling for better treatment of parliamentary staff.
A better campaign would have placed those qualities in front of voters from the beginning. It would have let Tree answer questions about Woodside, residency and sexual harassment in her own words. It would have relied less on ministers to carry the public argument and more on the person who wanted to become the local member.
None of this proves that she would have overcome the wider swing. Secret Harbour made its choice, and that choice should be respected. The result was shaped by genuine dissatisfaction, One Nation’s strong primary vote, Liberal preferences and national debates that reached far beyond a single candidate.
But the Georgia Tree Secret Harbour by-election still leaves Labor with a fair question: did voters receive enough opportunity to know Tree before being asked to judge her?
The answer appears to be no. That is not an excuse for the defeat. It is one of the lessons Labor should carry into the next campaign.
References
- ABC election results: Secret Harbour by-election 2026
- WA Electoral Commission: 2026 Secret Harbour by-election results
- ABC: Time will tell what One Nation’s WA victory will mean
- ABC: WA premier defends Georgia Tree over old comments
- ABC: Do MPs need to live in their electorates?
- WA Electoral Commission: registered how-to-vote cards
- Australian Human Rights Commission: Set the Standard
- Australian Government: negative gearing and capital gains tax reform
- Prime Minister of Australia: ABC Perth interview
- WA Parliamentary Library profile: housing tenure in Secret Harbour
