If you have ever played with dominoes, you will know that once you get the angle right and the first one falls, the subsequent dominoes come down with a speed and ferocity that rip through in a flash.
The so-called "orange tsunami" — the One Nation blitzkrieg raging across the country — feels like it is doing just that.
Once seen as mainly a threat to the Coalition, this weekend One Nation proved it could take seats off the Labor Party.
The damage it inflicts will not just involve shifting votes from one political column to the next on the right-wing side of politics. The damage is coming for the establishment — blue and red.
The Albanese government has not missed the memo coming out of the Secret Harbour loss — if this momentum can be maintained going into the federal election, that could be as soon as next year — the political tsunami is not just hyperbole, it is a reality that must be reckoned with.
Taking the fight to Albo
One Nation winning the Secret Harbour state by-election in Perth's south, with gym owner Luke Herdegen now set to be the party's first representative in Western Australia's lower house, is a very big deal.
Labor's political dominance in the west is fraying. Even after a week when the prime minister visited WA — and was dubbed "WA's daddy" for backing in its clearly unfair GST largesse — the backlash still came to smash Labor.
Even after a week when the One Nation brand was pulled apart due to its messy and contradictory messaging on its Net Overseas Migration target, the party swept to power in Secret Harbour.
Voters did not listen to all the noise; they backed One Nation, and its many contradictions amounted to little. They wanted to smash the establishment regardless.
Pauline Hanson is at the zenith of her political rise, and she is proving she won't play by the rules.
Most political leaders spend by-election evenings at a local RSL, bowls or footy club function room, with two speeches ready — one for a win that usually consists of telling the assembled rank and file the result was a vindication of their world view.
The second, a more subdued tone, is full of gratitude and gently reminds the crowd the wishes of voters must be respected.
Insert some language around learning more from the losses than the wins, thanking the candidate and high-tailing it out of said venue.
Yet on the night One Nation finally came for Labor, Hanson wasn't brushing up on the list of volunteers to thank; she was busy using a mallet to hammer a nail into a coffin marked "net zero".
She later posted online that Labor losing Secret Harbour would show there was "no safe seat in Australia".
She claimed online that One Nation had taken a seat where the Liberals had never been able to challenge Labor.
"We are the only party that can take the fight to Anthony Albanese where the Liberal Party never could," she said.
"We're not splitting the conservative vote. We're taking on the political establishment."
Hanson is now messaging that she can smash Labor and, given the anger in the community, perhaps that messaging is resonating.
Speaking to media on Saturday night, West Australian federal Liberal MP Ben Small described the result as "kicking Labor in the teeth".
He said voters used the by-election to pass judgement on the Cook government, but when pushed on what the result meant for Andrew Hastie, Small quickly shifted the interview to what the results meant for Labor's federal Resources Minister Madeleine King, whose electorate also overlaps Secret Harbour.
He repeated that Labor's primary vote had fallen around three times as much as the Liberal vote.
Labor's primary vote did fall almost three times as far. But the Liberals still went backwards and finished third.
A primary vote of 17.3 per cent is not the kind of result that will see Angus Taylor roll around WA next federal campaign.
The result should send a jolt through Victorian Labor, too.
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Victorian Labor in trouble
Secret Harbour is the exact electorate Labor should be worried about. It is full of young working families, mortgage holders and people with vocational qualifications rather than university degrees.
The population has grown, but local services and infrastructure have struggled to keep up.
Redbridge's Kos Samaras says the result should worry Labor in Perth's outer suburbs.
However, he says it should worry Victorian Labor more because "unless something changes, a swag of Melbourne seats with the same profile as Secret Harbour will go the same way".
Samaras argues the profile matters because: "Secret Harbour is outer urban, but it is not diverse. It ranks fourth of WA's 59 electorates for residents nominating British or Australian ancestry.
"Just under 30 per cent of residents were born overseas, below the state figure of 32 per cent, and the overseas born are overwhelmingly from England, New Zealand and South Africa. English ancestry sits at 49.5 per cent against 37.6 per cent statewide, while Chinese and Indian ancestry are under 1 per cent each."
Secret Harbour is a mortgage-belt seat of "young working families, far more vocational qualifications than degrees, and average incomes despite high workforce participation", he says.
"That is the seat One Nation just took off a popular third-term government … given the current mood towards Labor in Victoria, we can almost safely call them lost."
The implications for Hastie are also big and complex. Secret Harbour sits largely inside his federal seat of Canning, which One Nation is openly targeting.
Money and organisers are already being tipped into what will become an ideological arm wrestle over far more than shade cloth.
Hastie is a strong local campaigner and retained Canning with a 6.6 per cent margin last year.
But when One Nation can lift its primary vote by more than 30 points in his political backyard, pretending this is solely Labor's problem is taking optimism a little too far.
