New South Wales · on current polling

One Nation’s public funding in New South Wales

One Nation holds no seats in the New South Wales parliament today — at the 2023 election it won a single upper-house seat, and that member has since left the party. On Resolve Strategic’s current numbers, the state’s electoral-funding laws put it on track for about $23.0m in public funding across the March 2027 election and the term that follows.

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§ 1 — Resolve Strategic — May 2026

The current polling

One Nation holds no seats in the New South Wales parliament. At the 2023 election it took 5.9% of the Legislative Council vote — one of the 21 seats, held by a member who has since left the party. The Resolve Strategic poll (May 2026) puts One Nation at 22% of the statewide vote.

New South Wales votes on 13 March 2027. The chart shows that projected first-preference vote across the state. One Nation’s readings have varied widely — from 4% to 30% across the published polls — so switching between them above recomputes the wall. The sections that follow set out what such a vote is worth under the New South Wales electoral-funding laws.

§ 2 — If the poll holds: seats

17 seats

On this polling the model projects One Nation winning 5 of the 21 Legislative Council seats — 4.8 quotas on a 4.54% quota — and 12 of the 93 single-member Legislative Assembly seats, where its vote has to concentrate in the regions to win. From a current base of none, that is 17 members across the two houses.

Seats bear on the funding in two ways. The per-vote money below is paid whatever One Nation wins — but every member it elects, in either house, also draws on the ongoing Administration Fund. A party room spread across both chambers adds to the total.

§ 3 — Per-vote funding

Per-vote public funding

New South Wales pays parties public money for the votes they win. Its Election Campaigns Fund pays a fixed rate per first-preference vote — $5.30 for each Legislative Assembly vote and $3.98 for each Council vote — to any party that reaches 4% or wins a seat.

Applied to One Nation’s projected vote, the Election Campaigns Fund alone comes to $10,001,220 — and on this wall, where each brick is worth $20,000, that is a run of courses, paid on its votes in both houses. The fund works as a reimbursement of campaign spending, capped at a statutory limit — but a serious statewide campaign spends enough to claim the per-vote rate in full.

In NSW parties are now more dependent on public funding than some public sector agencies such as art galleries and museums – but with much less public accountability.
Bill Browne · The Australia Institute
§ 4 — Ongoing funding

Administrative funding, every year

Winning seats in either house unlocks a second, ongoing payment: the Administration Fund, paid every quarter for as long as a party sits in Parliament. On its projected 17-member party room across both houses One Nation draws $783,600 a quarter in the first year — $13,015,645 across the four-year term, the quarterly amount indexed each year.

Four more blocks, one for each year to the next election — public money for the running of a political party, drawn from consolidated revenue.

The system preserves the status quo for the established players and makes it harder for new voices to join our parliaments.
Bill Browne · The Australia Institute
§ 5 — The whole wall

$23.0m in all

None of this has been paid yet — the 2027 election is still to come. But if the Resolve Strategic numbers hold, One Nation collects $23,016,865 in public and administrative funding across the election and the term that follows: $10,001,220 on the vote and $13,015,645 for its party room.

A party with no seats in the parliament today would be funded back into contention on the strength of a poll, with that funding drawn from the state budget.

Funding sourceAmount
Election Campaigns Fund — 2027 election$10,001,220
Administration Fund — 2027–28$3,134,400
Administration Fund — 2028–29$3,212,760
Administration Fund — 2029–30$3,293,079
Administration Fund — 2030–31$3,375,406
Total over the period$23,016,865
This whole sordid saga is not about election results but a pure grab for money.
Rod Roberts · One Nation NSW MLC, 2023

One Nation holds no seats in New South Wales today — its last members left the party in a dispute over its electoral money. The state’s funding laws would return that money, and more, once the 2027 votes are counted. The funding follows from the party’s projected vote and the size of the party room it is projected to win, and is paid from the state budget irrespective of which party a given taxpayer supports.

More in this series

One Nation: public funding

How much public money One Nation receives from each contest, March 2026 to mid-2031.

Methodology

New South Wales votes on 13 March 2027. Its Legislative Council is a single statewide contest — 21 of 42 seats up each election, quota ~4.5%. The seat projection feeds the chosen poll’s statewide first-preference shares into a quota count with party-level preference transfers. One Nation is capped at 7 of the 21 — an assumption about how many seats one party’s ticket can realistically take, not a legal limit.

Lower-house seats are projected the same way as on the Victoria and Federal pages. One Nation’s statewide vote is spread across the 93 districts on a fixed demographic weighting: each state seat takes the AEC demographic class (Inner Metropolitan, Outer Metropolitan, Provincial, Rural) of the federal division it sits inside, and the weights are set steeper than One Nation’s 2025 federal NSW shape — a state-level surge concentrates in provincial and rural seats more than that low federal base did. Each district’s share is then raked so the statewide totals land exactly on the poll.

Every district is run through the optional-preferential count the Assembly uses: Coalition preferences flow to One Nation where the Coalition is squeezed out, but a large share of ballots exhaust. One Nation wins single-member seats where its vote tops the regional contests, and each win adds a sitting member who draws Administration Fund money. The 2023 baseline is the NSW Electoral Commission’s declared first preferences for all 93 districts.

Per-vote funding applies the projected One Nation vote — its poll share × the 2023 formal vote in each house, scaled up for enrolment growth to 2027 — to the Election Campaigns Fund rates: $5.30 an Assembly vote, $3.98 a Council vote, for a party clearing 4% or winning a seat.

The Election Campaigns Fund is a reimbursement of a party’s actual campaign expenditure, paid up to the per-vote entitlement and bounded by a statutory expenditure cap. Under the full-entitlement assumption One Nation is taken to spend enough to claim the per-vote entitlement in full; the cap is non-binding for a broad statewide campaign at these poll levels.

Winning seats in either house unlocks the Administration Fund — a quarterly entitlement scaled to a party’s sitting members, indexed annually — paid across the four-year term. A party that wins no seats draws the smaller New Parties Fund instead.

The six polls are published NSW state voting-intention polls that break out a One Nation primary (from October 2025). Where a pollster published only One Nation’s figure, the other parties’ shares are our estimates, completing the field for the seat count; they affect the seat split but not the per-vote dollars. Dollar amounts are entitlements claimed in full.

These figures are a point projection, not a forecast: the model takes the selected poll at face value and shows what the funding rules would pay if the 2027 election reproduced it — no margin of error or probability is attached.

Written, designed and coded by Simon Holmes à Court.