June 2026

Time Running Out for the Victorian Government to Abolish Group Voting Tickets

10 August – party lists updated

The long-term decline in support for Australia’s traditional parties, combined with surging support for One Nation, is creating uncertainty over who will form government after November’s Victorian state election.

Opinion polls show Labor, the Coalition and One Nation all under a third of the vote. It is difficult to translate this three-way split of votes into a seat prediction, but it points to defeat for Labor if the Liberal and National parties co-operate with One Nation on preferences.

Seats not votes determine who forms government and whether it is a majority or minority government. Turning votes into seats will come down to order of exclusion and preference flows between three or four competing candidates in each seat.

The outcome in the Legislative Council, the upper house elected by proportional representation, would be easy to pick if it was elected from a state-wide electorate like other mainland states.

But Victoria’s Legislative Council is divided into eight regions electing five members each. Five regions cover most of metropolitan Melbourne. Three others extend like spokes to the corners of the state, covering rural and regional Victoria but including some outer Melbourne suburbs.

Having only five members per region makes it very difficult to match members elected to party vote share. The high 16.7% quota makes preferences critical for turning surplus to quota votes into extra seats.

And there is another problem. Despite numerous warnings and recommendations, electoral law in Victoria still mandates that the discredited Group Voting Ticket (GVT) system will be used for November’s upper house election.

Unless the law is changed, as recommended by committee and as already changed elsewhere, the ‘preference whisperers’ will be back in business.

We have had four Federal elections since GVTs were abolished for the Senate. Since 2016 voters have grown used to numbering their own party preferences when voting above-the-line (ATL). But as it stands today, and as I explained before the last Victorian election in 2022, any ATL preferences will be discarded and replaced by the GVT of the voter’s first choice party.

Twice this term the Electoral Matters Committee has recommended that group voting tickets to be abolished. Despite support for the move from the Opposition and Greens, nothing has happened. The Electoral Act retains group voting tickets as the method by which above-the-line votes are handled in the count.

If something isn’t done in the next month, shady backroom deals will determine the composition of the Legislative Council. And if the past is anything to go by, there could be half a dozen crossbench members elected from unknown parties recording only a tiny first preference vote.

If no one party wins a majority in the lower house, the prospects of an upper house occupied by political unknowns can only complicate the task of trying to govern Victoria for the next four years.

The Legislative Council is meant to be elected by proportional representation. But with more than 90% of votes locked into pre-arranged group voting tickets, proportionality is distorted and political power is delivered into the hands of the small cabal of party negotiators who arrange the GVT preference deals.

To avoid the upper house election descending into farce, it’s time for the Allan government to act and abolish group voting tickets.

As I explain in this post, the Electoral Commission has set a deadline for changing the law ahead of the election. And as I also explain, the last minute rush of party registrations and proposed party name changes show that the preference harvesting game will kick off if GVTs are not abolished. Read More »Time Running Out for the Victorian Government to Abolish Group Voting Tickets

ABS Population Statistics confirm no change to State Representation for the Next Federal Election

(Update 23 July: the Electoral Commissioner’s determination has been published in the government gazette today. You can find it here.

The official calculations are the same as the ones in this post except the Territories have slightly higher numbers after adding in Norfolk Island and Jervis Bay to the ACT, and Christmas Island and Cocos Keeling Island to the Northern Territory.)

(Original post from 18 June follows)

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has today released state population figures for the last quarter of 2025. These numbers confirm that there will be no change to state representation in the House of Representatives for the next Federal election.

The interest had been whether Queensland would be entitled to an extra seat for its twice delayed redistribution of Federal electoral boundaries.

Under the 7-year rule, Queensland had been due to have a redistribution begin in March 2025. Clearly this wasn’t possible with a Federal election due.

The redistribution should have started after the election along with the redistributions in Tasmania, South Australia and the ACT.

The Queensland redistribution was officially deferred until after a determination on state representation by the Electoral Commissioner to be made in July 2026

If Queensland was going to be allocated a 31st seat, there was no point starting a redistribution for 30 seats. The Australian Bureau of Statistics figures released today confirm that Queensland will remain with 30 members.

No change in state numbers will become official in July when the Australian Electoral Commissioner Jeff Pope issues a formal determination of the number of House members to be elected form each state and territory. The determination is always made one year after the first sitting of the House of Representatives following an election.

Commissioner Pope has no personal choice in making the determination as the method is strictly defined in law. For states the Commissioner will apply the formula set out in Section 24 of the Constitution. For the Territories the Commissioner will use the formula set out in the Electoral Act. The Constitution also states that the Commissioner will use the “latest statistics of the Commonwealth”, a phrase the High Court and Parliament has determined will be the quarterly population statistics. Today’s ABS release of last December’s statistics is the population numbers that Commissioner Pope will use.

The precise calculations around how seats are allocated is explained inside this post.

Once the new numbers are officially announced at the end of July, a redistribution of Queensland federal boundaries will commence based on re-drawing the existing 30 seats. The new boundaries will be in place for the next election due in 2028.Read More »ABS Population Statistics confirm no change to State Representation for the Next Federal Election

The Financial Review’s Inaccurate Preference Analysis

One Nation’s polling surge has triggered an intense dissection of recent election results.

One Nation made the final preference count at the recent Farrer by-election. One Nation also finished in the final preference pairing in more than half of South Australian electorates at the state election in March. These results offer a mine of data where One Nation is a recipient of preferences rather than a provider.

Trying its luck dissecting the results on 7 June was the Australian Financial Review. It published an analysis piece on Farrer and South Australia headlined “How One Nation is winning the preferences war (with the Greens’ help)”.

As I will outline in this post, the article has confused published preference distribution data with more accurate but unavailable preference flow data. And the remark about Greens preferences isn’t backed by my analysis of the data.

The article was published three days before the Farrer flow data was released and the South Australian analysis has been attributed to preference flow data that is not available.

With the South Australian results, the article uses preference transfer data to draw some odd conclusions about Green preferences, and illustrates flows for other parties that aren’t justified given the quality of the data.

That the analytical problems, which I’ll explain in this post, have passed without much comment from anyone is due to the published chart included below. The chart tries to show SA preference flows from other parties to One Nation.

The chart’s meaning and data source are hard to unravel, but mirth has been the main reaction due to the inclusion of imaginary party names. It has caused the AFR to publish a correction and remove the chart from the on-line article.

LCP, an acronym for the Legalise Cannabis Party, is rendered as the Liberal Catholic Party. FGA, for Sarah Game’s Fair Go Australia, is transformed into the Family Guardian Association.

To the best of my knowledge, neither party name has ever been used in Australia.

It looks to me like a case of AI ‘hallucination’, AI asked to convert codes into party names and guessing it wrong. I doubt a human made those errors.

But enough cheap shots over party names. What I really want to explain is the article’s problems with data source and analysis.

With Farrer, I want to explain how the chart used to demonstrate the composition of One Nation’s winning vote uses the wrong data. It results in an incorrect emphasis on whose preferences were responsible for One Nation’s final margin.

With South Australia, the available data cannot be used to isolate the preference flows shown in the now deleted AFR chart. And the data that is available does not support the headlined conclusions about Greens preferences.

In both cases the problem comes down to limitations on how you can use preference transfer data from published distributions. The data must be treated with caution and can’t be automatically compared with more accurate preference flow data.Read More »The Financial Review’s Inaccurate Preference Analysis

2026 – Farrer By-election – Final Count Data Released

This morning the AEC finalised counting for the Farrer by-election with the release of detailed preference data.

It answers what I thought was a key question in the result – whether there was a difference between Liberal and National preference flows to One Nation. It was not possible to answer this question using the previously released full distribution of preferences.

Preference flow data tallies destination preferences from the primary votes for each excluded candidates to one of the final two candidates. In Farrer this data tallies preferences from ten excluded candidates to One Nation’s David Farley and Independent Michelle Milthorpe, the final pairing of candidates. Preference flow data ignores the intermediary stages published as part of the formal distribution of preferences.

The data released today reveals a difference in preference flows by supporters of the two Coalition parties . Liberal voter preference flows to One Nation were 59.0% compared to 69.1% for Nationals voters.

The flow data also reveals that One Nation’s David Farley did not need Liberal preferences to win. In the full distribution of preferences, Farley did not pass 50% until the Liberal candidate was the last excluded. Using the flow data where National preferences do not first flow through the Liberal candidate, Farley reached 50.2% on the flow of National preferences without the need for any Liberal preferences.

The question is whether the different flows tell us anything about how Liberal and National preferences would flow at a general election. In Farrer there was no Labor candidate in the final pairing. I suspect both National and Liberal preference flows to One Nation would have been higher in a final contest involving Labor rather than an Independent.

But it does suggest that Liberal preferences to One Nation will be weaker than those of National candidates. That was the case two decades ago in Queensland before the formation of the LNP. It in part reflects the different appeal of One Nation in rural electorates contested by Nationals versus the flows in urban electorates contested by Liberal candidates. One Nation polled a high enough first preference vote in Farrer for this difference not to matter. But a lower primary vote and weaker Liberal preferences would hamper One Nation hopes of winning urban seats.

Against this view, that the Liberal candidate drew top spot on the ballot paper with Milthorpe in second position suggests that the donkey vote may have played a party in the weaker Liberal preference flows to One Nation.

And it has to be remembered that preference flows from voters on the right of politics have always been weaker than from voters on the left. One Nation and the two Coalition parties rarely achieve the sorts of flows produced by the Greens in Farrer. Despite polling only 2.3% of the vote, Greens preferences flowed 91.8% to Independent Michelle Milthorpe. At general elections, Green voter preferences to Labor are consistently above 85%, a figure that the Liberal and National parties struggle to achieve from their supporters in three cornered contests.

I haven’t had time to pull apart the data by polling place, but the swing to One Nation was smaller in Albury, by far the largest regional centre in the seat. It was also in Albury where Liberal and Milthorpe support was strongest. Farley was better known in the west of the electorate where National support was also strongest. It may be the different preference flows reflect this familiarity with local candidates and the weaker One Nation support in Albury.

There’s more data on the preferences inside the post, along with an effort to graph the preferences data. Read More »2026 – Farrer By-election – Final Count Data Released