January 2026

Statistics on Preference Flows between the Coalition and One Nation

This post is additional information on preference flows related to a post I published earlier today, “Liberal, National and One Nation – Friends, Enemies or Frenemies?”

With One Nation’s surge in support in recent polls, pollsters and election modelers have been looking around for information on preferences. Especially for examples of how Coalition preferences might flow when excluded in contests between Labor and One Nation.

I’ve managed to pull as much information as I can from recent Federal and Queensland elections. I hope you find it useful.Read More »Statistics on Preference Flows between the Coalition and One Nation

Liberal, National and One Nation – Friends, Enemies or Frenemies?

Current opinion polling may have One Nation leading the (former) Coalition parties on primary votes, but a strong non-Labor vote may not deliver victory if split across three parties. Achieving victory also requires voters for the three parties to be disciplined and deliver a tight exchange of preferences.

Polls indicate One Nation has attracted some Labor voters, but the party’s surge is largely at the expense of the Liberal and National Parties. One Nation’s rise is a re-arrangement of support amongst parties of the right, not necessarily a shift in the centre ground of Australian politics.

Last week I explained that if One Nation is polling 22% nationwide, its vote will be above 35% in some rural and provincial seats. With such high polling, One Nation is well placed to win some seats, and based on past results, mostly at the expense of the National Party.

But for One Nation to win seats, it will require good flows of preferences in seats where the party outpolls Liberal and National candidates. And equally, Liberal and National candidates will need good flows of One Nation preferences to defeat Labor in other seats. And in many rural seats, it will be Labor preferences that decide whether Liberal, National and One Nation candidates are elected.Read More »Liberal, National and One Nation – Friends, Enemies or Frenemies?

The Coalition Split and the Re-emergence of One Nation

Despite denials, I find it hard to believe that this week’s split in the Coalition doesn’t stem from the reported surge in support for One Nation. Perhaps this week is not all about One Nation, but what has been building for months is about One Nation.

Voting intentions in this week’s Newspoll recorded One Nation on 22% of the national vote, for the first time polling ahead of the Coalition on 21%. Labor’s support slipped to 32% with the Greens on 12% and Others 13%.

Similar results from lesser known pollsters released since the start of January were dismissed. But when Newspoll starts reporting a surge in One Nation support, it gets more attention from the political classes.

Newspoll also reported a two-party preferred figure of Labor 55% to the Coalition 45%. But does a national two-party preferred figure make sense when primary vote support on the conservative side is so fractured?

The 2025 election saw a record 35 seats finish with a contest that was not a traditional Labor-Coalition race. If the Newspoll figure were repeated at a general election, the number of non-traditional contests would shoot through the roof.

And everything we know from past elections tells us that One Nation’s support is strongest outside the nation’s capital cities, precisely where the Coalition’s remaining representation is concentrated after last year’s defeat. One Nation is now polling strongly enough to eat further into Coalition representation, particular National Party representation.

If One Nation is polling 22% in national polls, there are electorates across rural and regional areas where One Nation will be polling above 35%, that is leading on primary votes. The debate about One Nation preferences starts to become irrelevant if the party is topping the poll. We would be back to the 1998 and 2001 Queensland elections when Labor preferences were required to save some of the National Party’s safest seats.

The rise in One Nation support could hurt Labor in some of its own seats, but the record of elections over several decades is that whenever One Nation support surges, it tends to hurt the Coalition. It is too early to make predictions for the next election, but if the trend in this week’s Newspoll continues, Labor could be comfortably re-elected with the biggest change being the Coalition losing seats to One Nation.

Despite endless tweets on X about abolishing preferential voting, the split of support between the Coalition and One Nation suggests that there will be no moves away from the Coalition supporting full preferential voting.

In this post I’m going to dig back to the only election where One Nation polled above 20%, the 1998 Queensland election. I’ll look at where One Nation support was strongest, which opponent the party’s rise hurt most, and how an election with One Nation above 20% produced the least uniform electoral swing in Australian history.
Read More »The Coalition Split and the Re-emergence of One Nation

FED2025 – House Results in Queensland

Queensland followed the national swing to Labor at both the 2022 and 2025 elections, but only in 2025 did Labor gain seats. Despite Labor’s success, Queensland remained the only state where the Coalition (LNP in Queensland) remained as the dominant party in 2025, winning both a majority of the two-party preferred vote and a majority of the state’s seats. Queensland Labor continued to lag the party’s performance in other states.

Labor won 12 of the state’s 30 seats, its best performance since the election of the Rudd government in 2007. Labor gained seven seats, including two seats from from the Greens, and the seat of Dickson, held since 2001 by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. As elsewhere, Labor swept the state capital, pushing the LNP out of Brisbane.

Background

It is more than three decades since Wayne Goss led Queensland Labor out of the electoral wilderness and into government. Queensland state politics has since been dominated by Labor, in government for 30 of the last 36 years.

A very different Queensland political landscape is seen through the prism of Federal results. The Coalition (LNP since 2010) has dominated the state’s federal representation. At nine of the 11 elections since John Howard’s sweeping victory in 1996, the Coalition/LNP has won 19 or more Queensland seats, more than double Labor’s representation.

Queensland is the mainland state with the highest proportion of people living distant from the urban areas surrounding the state capital. Historically Brisbane has lacked the manufacturing industry that created concentrations of Labor voters in parts of Sydney and Melbourne. It leaves Queensland Labor with less political high ground to remain above highwater in the face of Coalition floods. When electoral fortunes turn against Labor, an ebbing national political tide has looked more like a rip in Queensland.

On Labor’s defeat under Gough Whitlam in 1975, Labor was reduced to just one seat north of the Tweed, and did little better with three seats in 1977. Labor retained just two seats on the defeat of the Keating government and election of John Howard in 1996. Labor’s worst state defeats have usually coincided with periods of unpopular Federal Labor governments.

At only two elections since 1996 have Labor’s seat holdings reached double figures. The first was 2007 when Queensland backed a son of the state in Kevin Rudd and and helped make him Prime Minister. Labor won 15 of the state’s then 29 seats in 2007. The pattern of single digit seat numbers resumed in 2010, but was finally broken in 2025 with Labor winning 12 of the state’s now 30 seats.

Political thinking had long been that Labor couldn’t form national government without improving its position in Queensland. That was certainly a dominant view ahead of the 2022 federal election, a view confounded by the election of the Albanese government.

There was a significant two-party swing to Labor in Queensland at the 2022 election, but the party went backward in representation. Labor finished third in three inner-Brisbane seats, losing Griffith to the Greens and seeing the LNP seats of Brisbane and Ryan fall to the Greens rather than Labor. Labor’s national victory in 2022 was due to vastly improved results in Western Australia and continuing dominance of Victoria, trends that overcame Queensland as an obstacle to Labor forming national government. But the Albanese government’s narrow first term majority shows that Queensland is still important if Labor hopes to have a secure grip on office.

In 1987 and 1990, the re-election of the Hawke government relied on gaining seats in Queensland to compensate for losses elsewhere. Labor’s Queensland surge at both elections owed much to the final death throws of the state National Party government after three decades of non-Labor rule. Queensland results at state and federal level since suggest Queensland Labor has always been more acceptable than “Canberra” Labor. So how should we to view the 2025 result? Read More »FED2025 – House Results in Queensland

Background on the Development of the NSW Legislative Council and its Electoral System

One of my post-retirement intentions for this blog is to bring together bits and pieces I’ve published on elections, politics and history over the past three decades.

In my career at the ABC I ran an election blog for around a decade as well as writing and publishing around 25 years worth of election guides.

This is a vast amount of material, a lot of which is no longer publicly available. The internet has undergone vast technical change over the past two decades, and the difficulty of keeping old websites in line with changing web standards has seen a lot of my older material disappear.

This post is the first of what I hope are many where I re-publish useful older material, sometimes with updates. Some of this was previously available through the ABC.

This first post is brief history of the NSW Legislative Council and its changing electoral system. I’m publishing it as background to a post under development setting out some of the stranger Council elections that took place under the indirect electoral system used between 1933 and 1978.
Read More »Background on the Development of the NSW Legislative Council and its Electoral System