2022 Victorian Senate Election

• Re-elected 1 – Sarah Henderson (Liberal)
• Elected 2 – Linda White (Labor)
• Re-elected 3 – Bridget McKenzie (National)
• Re-elected 4 – Jana Stewart (Labor)
• Re-elected 5 – Lidia Thorpe (Greens)
• Elected 6 – Ralph Babet (United Australia Party)
• Defeated – Greg Mirabella (Liberal)

Party Outcome: Coalition (-1), United Australia Party (+1).

A table of final first preferences is included inside this post along with an analysis of the distribution of preferences sheets.

Commentary on Result

There were three Coalition, two Labor and one Green positions facing election in 2022. These were the positions allocated six-year terms after the 2016 double dissolution election.

Such is the turnover of sitting Senators since 2016 that Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie is the only Senator elected in 2016 who will be re-elected in 2022.

On the Coalition ticket, Liberal Sarah Henderson has been re-elected along with McKenzie. Henderson was a former member for Corangamite and was appointed to the Senate in September 2019 after the appointment of Mitch Fifield as Australia’s representative to the United Nations.

Greg Mirabella has been defeated from number three on the Coalition ticket. Mirabella was appointed in December 2021 in place of retiring Senate President Scott Ryan. Mirabella led United Australia Party candidate Ralph Babet early in the count but slipped behind as the count finalised. Babet’s lead was maintained by good flows of preferences from like-minded small right-of-centre parties.

Labor retains its two seats with two candidates who have not previously faced election. Lead candidate Linda White is elected in place of the retiring Kim Carr. Jana Stewart is re-elected to the second seat to which she was recently appointed in place of the late Kimberley Kitching.

Green Senator Lidia Thorpe is easily re-elected. She was appointed in September 2020 to replace retiring former party leader Richard Di Natale.

An analysis of the preferences is set out below the Results table.

Results Table

Enrolment – 4,344,208
Total Votes / Turnout – 3,960,958, 91.2% of enrolment
Informal Votes – 139,419 (3.5%)
Provisional Quota – 545,935
Below-the-line Vote – 5.2%
Last Update – Sunday, 19 June 2022, 08:52

The race for the sixth seat in Victoria began with five parties between 0.2036 and 0.2807 quotas. Which of the parties would win the sixth seat would be determined by preferences.

But first the fifth seat had to be filled. The Greens began the count with 0.97 quotas and eventually reached a quota at Count 293 after flows of preferences from Fusion and Sustainable Australia voters.

By count 324, only eight candidates remained in the race. Ralph Babet (UAP) was still slightly ahead of Greg Mirabella (LIB), though neither candidate had done well on preferences. Casey Nunn (ALP) and Elissa Smith (Legalise Cannabis) had both attracted more preferences. The table below shows the totals at Count 324, and the changes in party totals since count 1, comparing the one remaining candidate with the initial party total. The Labor and Coalition totals have been adjusted to set aside elect candidate quotas.

Counts 325-330 excluded Derry Hinch, preferences from his voters generally favouring Labor , Animal Justice and the Liberal Party, helping put Greg Mirabella back at the top of the list.

Counts 331-336 excluded Animal Justice’s Bronwyn Currie, and 33.1% of voters preferenced Labor at this point and 26.2% Legalise Cannabis. This boost pushed Labor’s Casey Nunn ahead of Liberal Greg Mirabella.

Next out was David Limbrick of the Liberal Democrats. Preferences from his votes flowed 28.1% to One Nation, 23.1% to United Australia, 21.7% to Liberal and only 10.9% to Labor and 5.4% to Legalise Cannabis. The totals at the end of Count 342 are shown in the table below.

Only five candidates and parties remain in the race for the final seat. These were the same five candidates that lay between 0.2036 and 0.2807 at the start of the count, and were now clustered even closer together between 0.3520 quotas and 0.3977 quotas.

Counts 343-348 excluded Elissa Smith (Legalise Cannabis). 31.6% of her votes had next preference for Labor, 29.4% exhausted their preferences at this point, and the other three parties received between 12.0% and 14.8%. As the totals at Count 348 below show, Labor now had 0.5089 quotas, Liberal Greg Mirabella on 0.4485 quotas, UAP’s Ralph Babet 0.4379 and One Nation’s Warren Pickering last on 0.4036 quotas.

The exclusion of One Nation’s Warren Pickering at Counts 349-354 was the critical exclusion that determined who won the final seat. Of Pickering’s 220,364 votes, 50.2% now flowed to Babet (UAP), 25.4% exhausted, 13.9% flowed to Mirabella (LIB) and 10.4% to Nunn (ALP). This pushed Babet into the lead, Mirabella to third and set to be the next candidate excluded. Labor’s Nunn now needed to win more of Mirabella’s preferences than Babet to win the final seat.

Mirabella’s distributed votes flowed as preferences 39.4% to Babet, 26.7% to Nunn and 35.0% exhausted. With no more candidates to excluded and only two candidates in the race for one seat, United Australia’s Babet was declared elected to the sixth seat with 0.8344 quotas ahead of Labor’s Nunn on 0.6855.

Babet’s victory was due to the strong flows of preferences he received on the exclusion of One Nation. This put Babet ahead of both Nunn and Mirabella, resulting in Mirabella being excluded. With Babet ahead of Labor at that point, the only way Babet could not win would be if Mirabella’s preferences had flowed to Labor. That was always unlikely given the Coalition’s how-to-vote recommended a second preference for United Australia.

At the start of the count, with the Greens close to one quota, there were few other parties on the ballot paper that could deliver strong preference flows to Labor. With a Liberal surplus and several other right-of-centre parties having their preferences distributed, it was always likely that either Mirabella or Babet would win the sixth seat. As the count unfolded, it was the strong One Nation flows to Babet that resulted in him rather than Mirabella being elected.