One Nation has nabbed the final Senate spot from this month’s federal election, to equal its best standing in federal parliament.

One Nation’s Warwick Stacey won the sixth slot in NSW after the Australian Electoral Commission declared the results for the state on Friday.

Labor had been expected to pick up the final seat in NSW, but a strong flow of preferences meant Stacey got over the line.

It means Pauline Hanson’s party will have four senators in the next parliament. That is equal to its high watermark from 2016 and the same number as the Nationals.

Stacey will join Hanson alongside re-elected Queensland senator Malcolm Roberts and another new One Nation senator, Tyron Whitten from Western Australia.

Stacey is a former member of the British army, while Whitten helps manage a family civil construction company.

NSW’s five other senators are Labor’s Tony Sheldon and Tim Ayres, Liberals Andrew Bragg and Jessica Collins, and Mehreen Faruqi from the Greens.

An “elated” Pauline Hanson said her party’s policies had been a winner with voters, and drawn numbers from the Coalition.

“It’s about standing up for Australian values – what we need, looking after the farmers, industries, manufacturing, cut back on immigration, which is destroying home ownership in Australia.
These are things that we’re very adamant about,” she told Sky News Australia.

“The trouble with the Coalition was they never pushed back, they couldn’t state their case, they couldn’t debate the issues with the Labor Party and their lies they kept peddling.”

Labor will have 28 senators in the 76-seat upper house, with the Coalition having 27, the Greens with 11 and One Nation with four. The remaining six are independents or from minor parties.

A total of 39 votes is needed to pass laws in the Senate, meaning Labor can ensure passage of bills with the support of just the Greens or the Coalition.

It comes as the Australian Electoral Commission launched an investigation after almost half of all votes from one polling place were ruled informal.

Of the 111 people who voted at a polling booth in Missabotti near Coffs Harbour in the seat of Cowper, 50 lower house ballots were filled out incorrectly.

Locals told the ABC that election staff said they should number both ballot papers from one to six, despite there being 11 candidates.

Ballots for the House of Representatives must have all boxes numbered in order of preference to be deemed valid.

A minimum of six boxes must be filled out on the Senate ballot paper for the party of the voter’s choice.

The high informal votes would not have affected the outcome in the seat, which was won by the Nationals MP Pat Conaghan by more than 5000 votes.

Dumped senator vows to ‘straighten tiara’, move on

Liberal senator Jane Hume has vowed to straighten her tiara and get on with the job after being left out of Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s new shadow cabinet.

The Victorian senator was the highest profile demotion when Ley unveiled her leadership team earlier this week.

It came after Hume wore some of the internal blame for the Liberals’ disastrous election result after spearheading an unpopular return-to-work policy blamed for alienating women voters.

The Coalition was forced into an embarrassing backdown on the proposal to force public service workers back into the office mid-election campaign after severe backlash.

“Of course it hurts,” Hume told Seven’s Sunrise on Friday.

“It hurts professionally because I was a hard-working and prolific and high-profile member of the frontbench in the previous opposition.

“It hurts personally too because Sussan and I are friends.”

In her first public comments since the demotion emerged, Hume vowed to continue the fight from the backbench and speak her mind as she was no longer bound by the need to toe the party line as a member of the shadow ministry.

“There is something very liberating about being on the backbench and being able to speak without having to stick to the party line and without having to stick to talking points,” she said.

“The most important thing we can all do here now is get behind Sussan Ley, put our shoulders to the wheel because there’s a very big task ahead of us.

“As my very wise mother would say, ‘stop your nonsense, chin up, chest out, straighten your tiara and let’s get on with the job’.”

Ley has said Hume is an excellent performer and still has a lot to give to the party, regardless of what position she holds.

Two other prominent conservative Liberal senators, Claire Chandler and Sarah Henderson, were also dumped in Ley’s shake-up of shadow cabinet from the Peter Dutton era.

Outspoken senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who sent shockwaves across the Coalition when she defected from the National party room to join the Liberals in an ill-fated attempt to run for deputy leader, was also demoted.

Price has been relegated to the outer ministry from cabinet after stirring controversy during the election campaign by mimicking US President Donald Trump’s slogan when she pledged to “make Australian great again”.

-with AAP