November 2025

“Past Present Future” Podcast from the UK on Compulsory Voting

The “Past Present Future” podcast is hosted by David Runciman, former Professor of Politics at Cambridge University and one of the more erudite and readable writers on politics and political philosophy.

In the episode I link to below, published in early October, Runciman is joined by political historian Dr David Klemperer to talk about compulsory voting. Obviously the episode draws deeply on the Australian experience.

It also makes a couple of points about the impact of compulsory voting on the result of the 2025 Australian election. In particular, its role in increasing turnout amongst younger age groups and more marginalised groups in society.

Given post-election discussion on the Liberal Party’s lack of appeal to younger age groups, it is nice to be reminded by overseas commentators that compulsory voting allows Australian political parties to build winning political platforms around appealing to younger and less advantaged groups in society. It is a point that doesn’t get a mention in Australian 2025 post-election analysis because compulsory voting is a given in the conduct of elections in Australia.

The two David’s compare the Albanese victory with UK elections over the last decade where talk of ‘youthquakes’ shaking results have fizzled out due to low turnout by younger age groups.

This is a direct link to the episode at Apple podcasts, but you can also find it amongst many other episodes at “Past Present Future” on Spotify and at the Past Present Future website.

But I do think there is one point they missed on why compulsory voting has worked in Australia and why it would be harder in countries like the UK.Read More »“Past Present Future” Podcast from the UK on Compulsory Voting

Greens Preferences Flow to Labor – 2010 and 2025 Compared

Over the past three decades, the Australian Greens have grown from a collection of state-based parties overshadowed by the centrist Australian Democrats, to being the largest of Australia’s minor parties.

Once minor parties were viewed as bit-players in Australian politics, mere preference conduits for the major parties. Today the Greens are important in their own right electorally, and through elected representation play an important role in Australian Parliaments.

Greens support is now high enough to guarantee the election of a Senator from each state at half-Senate elections. Were it not for party defections, the Greens would have a permanent team of 12 Senators in the 76 seat Senate.

As was highlighted by winning four House seats at the 2022 Federal election, the Greens are now competitive in up to a dozen House seats. Despite being reduced to one House seat in 2025, the Greens remain competitive with Labor and the Coalition.

The Greens won their first general election seat in 2010 on Liberal preferences, and would have won more seats since were it not for the Coalition’s decision since 2013 to put Labor candidates ahead of the Greens on how-to-vote preference recommendations.

In this post I’m comparing two elections 15 years apart, 2010 and 2025, and examining how support for the Greens and the party’s preference flows have changed.

The 2010 election was the first where the Greens passed 10% of the vote. Led by Bob Brown, the Greens were still seen largely as an environment party, and Brown helped Labor and Julia Gillard form government after the election. Adam Bandt won the electorate of Melbourne in 2010, coming from behind to win after receiving three-quarters of Liberal preferences.

As Greens leader at the 2025 election, Adam Bandt lost his seat at an election where the Greens vote was roughly the same as in 2010. But 15 years had seen the development of differences in the geographic pattern of Greens support, and an increase in preference flows to Labor.
Read More »Greens Preferences Flow to Labor – 2010 and 2025 Compared

Time to Change the Electoral Act to Fix Faults in Senate Counting

When NSW Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi reached quota and was declared elected at this year’s Senate election, something very odd happened with her votes.

Faruqi’s total of 761,249 votes on election included 3,145 Coalition first preference votes. These votes had been distributed to Faruqi based on the preferences Coalition voters had written on their ballot papers. These Coalition votes represented just 0.4% of Faruqi’s total vote.

The quota for election was 712,405, so the next step in the count was to distributed Faruqi’s surplus of 48,889 votes.

At which point the count went weird.

Suddenly the number of Coalition first preference votes increased to 7,549, an inflation of 140%. Instead of Coalition votes representing 0.4% of Faruqi’s surplus, they represented 15.9%.

Of Faruqi’s total vote on election, 72.4% were first preference votes. But this was reduced to 61.0% in her surplus. On the distribution of Faruqi’s surplus, Green votes and preferences received from all other candidates were crowded out and replaced by Coalition votes. And those Coalition ballot papers that were worth 3,145 votes on receipt, suddenly became 7,549 votes when distributed as preferences.

Only two candidates remained in the count after Faruqi’s election, One Nation’s Warwick Stacey leading Labor’s Emilija Beljic in the race for the final seat. Preferences split 31,233 to Labor and 4,117 to One Nation with 13,539 votes exhausting. This narrowed Stacey’s eventual margin of victory over Beljic to just 17,326 votes or 0.35%.

The distortion in Faruqi’s surplus was not responsible for Beljic failing to pass Stacey. But everything we know about preference flows for Green and Liberal voters tells us that the final margin would have been narrower without the distortion.

The threat of this problem altering the result in close Senate contests remains. But why does it happen? In this post I’ll try to explain the problem and outline how the Electoral Act should be changed.Read More »Time to Change the Electoral Act to Fix Faults in Senate Counting

FED2025 – Evidence on Labor Supporters Voting Strategically for Independents

It has long been a given of Australian politics that support for the two major parties is higher in the House than the Senate.

But that rule was broken at the 2025 Federal election when Labor polled half a percent higher in the Senate, 35.11% to 34.56% in the House.

The lower rate of informal voting for Senate elections means there were an additional 380,953 formal votes in the Senate. But of those extra votes, Labor recorded more than half, polling 218,890 more Senate votes than House votes.

More telling was where Labor’s Senate vote was stronger.

Labor’s higher Senate vote is down almost entirely to the 14 divisions that finished as contests between Coalition and Independent candidates. In these seats Labor recorded just under 250,000 more Senate votes than House votes.

Compare this to the other 136 divisions where Labor recorded around 31,000 fewer votes in the Senate than the House.

In these 14 contests, Labor’s Senate vote was 2.1 times its House support, Greens support 1.8 times higher. Compare these ratios to the Coalition polling roughly the same vote at both elections in these seats.

There are only two seats in the country where Coalition supporters showed similar rates of split voting. In Independent held Fowler in western Sydney the Coalition’s Senate vote was 1.7 times its House vote. In Calwell where Labor was challenged by an Independent, the Coalition’s chamber ratio was 1.4.

The pattern of support reveals clear evidence of Labor supporters changing their House first preference vote to engage in strategic voting. Labor voters backed Labor in the Senate, but in the House voted for Independents with a better chance of defeating the Coalition.

Strategic voting has long been a feature of simple majority voting elections in countries such as the United Kingdom. At UK elections, in seats where a voter’s preferred party can’t win, voters have learnt to vote strategically. They cast a vote for the candidate most likely to defeat their least preferred candidate rather than vote for their preferred party’s candidate who can’t win.

The UK Conservative Party has at times suffered from UK Labour and Liberal Democrat supporters switching party with the intent of defeating the Conservative candidate.

In Australia, preferential voting has allowed parties to compete against each other without splitting the vote. Liberal and National candidates, and Labor and Greens candidates, can compete for votes with preferences then reducing the contest to a left versus right contest.

But the emergence of Independent candidates, especially so-called ‘Teal’ candidates, has created a different dynamic. Independents have shown an ability to poll well and defeat Coalition candidates on strong flows of Labor and Green preferences.

But to do so, Independents must first outpoll the Labor candidate on primary votes. Which is where strategic House voting by Labor and Greens supporters in voting Independent is flipping contests against the Coalition.

The seat-by-seat difference in Labor and Green support in the two house is clear evidence that strategic voting exists in Australia, and it is becoming a major problem for the Coalition, in particular the Liberal Party.Read More »FED2025 – Evidence on Labor Supporters Voting Strategically for Independents

FED2025 – Party and Voter Reactions to the Senate’s Electoral Changes

The 2025 Federal election was the fourth held since the introduction of major changes to the Senate’s electoral system. The changes were to deal with the rapid increase in nominations, their impact on ballot paper and font size, and the distortion of results produced by increasingly labyrinthine preferences deals under the now abolished Group Voting Ticket (GVT) system.

For overseas (and local) readers unfamiliar with the Senate’s electoral system, I’ll start this post with a brief background on the Senate’s electoral system and explain the changes introduced since 2016.

I will then look at the four elections since the changes and to assess how parties, candidates and voters have reacted to the new system with main focus on the 2025 result.

To do this I am analysing the Senate ballot paper data released by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC).

There is more detail inside the post, but I’ll quickly summarise my findings –

  • The 2016 changes, and a 2022 increase in party members needed to register a political party, have seen the number of parties contesting Senate elections decrease from 52 at the last election using GVTs in 2013, to 28 at the 2025 election.
  • The average number of groups on Senate ballot papers rose from 7.7 at the first divided Senate ballot paper election in 1984 to 33.7 at the last GVT election in 2013 before falling to 17.2 in 2025. The result has been smaller ballot papers and a return to larger and more readable font sizes.
  • At the 2025 election, 81.2% of voters completed their Senate ballot papers with a 1-6 sequence of preferences above-the-line (ATL). 5.8% completed fewer than 6 ATL preferences, 6.6% filled more than 6 ATL preferences, and 6.3% of ballot papers counted as ‘below-the-line’ BTL votes. There has been little change over four elections in the percentage of ballot papers in each completion category.
  • Fewer groups and smaller ballot papers are likely to have played a part in the decline in the number of ballot papers with “exhausted” preferences at the end of the count.

Read More »FED2025 – Party and Voter Reactions to the Senate’s Electoral Changes