Federal elections

One Nation and its Elected MPs

Since One Nation’s breakthrough at the 1998 Queensland election, the party has had a mixed record of maintaining parliamentary beachheads.

By half way through its first term in the Queensland Parliament, the party had lost all its elected members. There were numerous disputes between Pauline Hanson, her close party confidants and the elected members. It was not helped the legal action that led to the parties de-registration.

In the party’s first decade, there were 20 elected or appointed One Nation members of parliament. Seventeen split from the party, one was defeated, one disqualified and only one re-elected.

After Hanson’s departure in the early 2000s, the party became largely irrelevant. That changed when Hanson returned to the fold in 2013. The party elected its first new members of parliament at the 2016 Senate election and has reached new levels of success over the last year.

Since 2016, One Nation has had 31 members. 16 are current members, the party boosted by four new Federal members and seven members elected at the March 2026 South Australian election.

But until the last year, the pattern of losing elected members continued. Two members were re-elected but subsequently left the party with Mark Latham still in Parliament. Another eight left the party before facing election of whom three in addition to Latham remain in parliament. Four One Nation members were defeated while still in the party. One Senator resigned due to ill-health.

The party’s record of hanging on to members remains patchy, though surging opinion polls and the recent success of the party have certainly provided an incentive for elected members to stay with the party.

I’ve been keeping track of elected One Nation since that first election in 1998. When the party returned to the Senate in 2016 and began losing members to disqualification and resignation, I published a list of elected One Nation members and their fate in 2018.

When Pauline Hanson sacked the NSW Executive of One Nation and dismissed Mark Latham as the party’s NSW leader, I published a blog post on the party’s record of losing its parliamentary members.

I’ve been asked numerous times over the last year if I could update the list. I’ve finally done it and you can find all the details on the party’s 51 elected or appointed members of state and federal parliaments here.

Trying to pick apart whether members were expelled from the party or resigned can be a little difficult. I tend to use a generic ‘departed’ as the description to get around the participants in the departure having different views on what happened.

Inside the post I’ll publish the overall summary of representation from that document, but you can check the full detail using the above link.

And let me know if you spot any errors.
Read More »One Nation and its Elected MPs

Why Australia Doesn’t Have Novelty Candidates like Count Binface

As I wait to hear the result of the UK’s Clacton by-election, I thought I should ponder the question of why Australia doesn’t have novelty candidates.

The Clacton by-election was triggered by the resignation of Reform Party Leader Nigel Farage. The announcement came amid parliamentary scrutiny of Farage’s personal finances, and allegations concerning undeclared gifts and support. He is re-contesting the seat to, as he puts it, let the people rather than the establishment decide his fate.

It has rather backfired on Farage as none of the ‘establishment’ parties are contesting. His major opponent has turned out to be serial novelty candidate Count Binface, in real life known as Jonathan David Harvey, an Oxford classics graduate and television comedy writer.

The record field of 34 also includes Nick the Incredible Flying Brick, Howling Laud Hope and Baron Von Thunderclap, candidates for Britain’s ‘establishment’ novelty party, the Monster Raving Loony Party.

So how is this allowed and why doesn’t it occur in Australia?

Well, it sort of used to occur, but the law was tightened after several protest candidates representing the Abolish Child Support/Family Court Party adopted vvvveeerrrryyyy lloonngg names to contest the 1998 Federal election.Read More »Why Australia Doesn’t Have Novelty Candidates like Count Binface

FED2026 Redistributions – South Australian Boundaries Finalised

The South Australian redistribution of electoral boundaries has been finalised this morning. The Commission has abandoned a swap of suburbs between Kingston and Mayo, as well as the transfer of an area from Spence to O’Donoghue (formerly Grey). This means that Kingston and O’Donoghue retain their former boundaries without change.

The Draft boundaries released in March produced only minor changes to the boundaries used at the last three federal elections. Those changes have now been reduced with the Spence to O’Donoghue change reversed and the proposed suburbs swap between Mayo and Kingston abandoned.

South Australia was reduced from 11 to 10 House of Representatives seats by the 2017 redistribution. The current redistribution retains 10 seats and was triggered by the rule requiring boundaries to be re-drawn every seven years. The reason for periodic re-draws is to account for differing patterns of population growth, to bring all electorates back within permitted variation from quota.

Barker pushes closer to Adelaide and gains 3,365 voters around Woodchester from Mayo. Grey has been re-named O’Donoghue but proposed boundary changes abandoned. Population growth in the Adelaide Hills has seen Mayo shed voters to Barker and around 6,275 to Boothby. Adelaide’s outer north has also been growing rapidly and Spence has lost 14,043 voters in Brahma Lodge and Salisbury to Makin. Proposed changes to Kingston have been abandoned and Adelaide, Hindmarsh and Sturt retain their unchanged status from the draft phase.

The table below has been now re-calculated for the final boundaries.

South Australia Federal Redistribution – Summary of New Margins
District Old Boundaries New Boundaries Shift
Adelaide ALP 19.1% ALP 19.1% unchanged boundaries
Barker LIB 13.0% LIB 12.7% 0.3 to Labor
Boothby ALP 11.1% ALP 11.1% no change
Hindmarsh ALP 16.3% ALP 16.3% unchanged boundaries
Kingston ALP 20.7% ALP 20.7% unchanged boundaries
Makin ALP 14.7% ALP 15.3% 0.6 to Labor
Mayo (2-Party) ALP 5.0% ALP 4.8% 0.2 to Liberal
Mayo (IND v ALP) IND 14.9% IND 15.5% 0.6 to Independent
O’Donoghue (formerly Grey) LIB 4.6% LIB 4.6% unchanged boundaries
Spence ALP 15.3% ALP 15.2% 0.1 to Liberal
Sturt ALP 6.6% ALP 6.6% unchanged boundaries

Read More »FED2026 Redistributions – South Australian Boundaries Finalised

FED2026 Redistributions – Tasmanian Boundaries Finalised

The new electoral boundaries for Tasmania have been released today.

Reading through the proposed changes, the major changes to Clark, Franklin and Lyons in southern Tasmania have been agreed to. But there are changes in the north with Break O’Day council being moved into Bass.

There is also a proposed name change which has triggered the calling of a new round of comments specifically about changing the name of Franklin to Tongerlongter. As the proposal explains the name –

Following its deliberations, the augmented Electoral Commission proposes renaming the electorate of Franklin in honour of Tongerlongeter (c. 1790-1837), a Poredareme man of the Oyster Bay nation and a prominent Aboriginal leader whose Country encompassed much of south-east Tasmania, including areas within the reconfigured electorate boundaries. The name ‘Franklin’ is proposed to be retired.

Earlier I tweeted that the draft boundaries had been abandoned. That was confusion on my part by opening the wrong map and thinking that was the reason for calling a new round of submissions. It is rare for redistributions to engage in this extra consultation step. It appears the consultation is over the name change alone so the boundaries appear to be otherwise final.

The draft boundaries released earlier this year produced massive changes to the electorates of Clark, Franklin and Lyons. You can read more details in my post on the draft boundaries.

The table below summarises the two-party preferred margins between Labor and Liberal in the five divisions. I’ll go into more detail on the Independent positions in Clark and Franklin inside the post.

Tasmania Federal Redistribution – Summary of 2-Party Preferred Margin Changes
District Old Boundaries New Boundaries Shift
Bass ALP 8.0% ALP 8.3% 0.3 to ALP
Braddon ALP 7.2% ALP 7.2% Unchanged
Clark ALP 20.9% ALP 20.2% 0.7 to LIB
Franklin ALP 19.4% ALP 18.7% 0.7 to LIB
Lyons ALP 11.6% ALP 12.7% 0.9 to ALP

Read More »FED2026 Redistributions – Tasmanian Boundaries Finalised

FED26 Redistributions – Final Boundaries Released for A.C.T.

The final boundaries for the ACT have been released. Maps and numbers of voters transferred have not been released, but I have managed to estimate new margins using data published with the draft boundaries.

In short, nothing much changes. The table below summarise the margins for the ACT’s three electorates.

ACT Federal Redistribution (Final) – Summary of Margin Changes
District Contest Old Boundaries New Boundaries Shift
Bean 2-Party ALP 19.3% ALP 19.4% 0.1 to ALP
Canberra 2-Party ALP 26.4% ALP 26.4% No change
Fenner 2-Party ALP 22.1% ALP 22.1% No change
Bean ALP v IND ALP 0.3% ALP 0.2% 0.1 to IND
Canberra ALP v GRN ALP 19.5% ALP 19.5% No change

There’s more details on each electorate inside the post.
Read More »FED26 Redistributions – Final Boundaries Released for A.C.T.

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

SA2026 – huge win for Labor but a warning in the result

The result of the recent South Australian election was clear with Labor the biggest winner, the Liberal Party the biggest loser, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation the big improver.

In the aftermath Labor can bask in its massive majority and the smiting of its political opponents.

Division on the other side of politics eased Labor’s path to re-election, but the strong performance of One Nation in Labor’s safest seats has delivered Labor a serious warning.

Hidden in the detail of the results is that One Nation turned Labor’s side of the electoral pendulum upside down. Liberal seats and Labor’s most marginal seats swung to Labor, but many of Labor’s safest seats swung strongly to One Nation.

Much of this comes about because the South Australian election was not a two-party contest. Only 13 of the state’s 47 lower house seats finished as Labor-Liberal contests. The majority of seats, 25, finished as Labor-One Nation contests.

The result is the Electoral Commission of South Australia (ECSA) has abandoned past practice of undertaking alternative two-party preferred counts in contests that weren’t Labor-Liberal finishes. In 2026 the Commission will do a two-party re-count in seats where Labor did not make the final pairing, but in every other seat report a count that is Labor versus whoever finished second.

In the past there has been Coalition criticism of academics for analysing Australian elections as Labor versus Non-Labor. For the 2026 South Australian election, there is no other alternative.

It creates a post-election pendulum that is a mix-and-match of party contests, perhaps a portent of where Australian politics is heading. All swings since 2022 will compare a Labor-Liberal finish with whatever pairing is produced for 2026.

Which is where the Labor-One Nation swings in safe seats are startling. Sometimes a change in final pairing can create an artificially large swing caused by the vagaries of exclusion order and unexpected preference flows.

That’s not the case in South Australia. The two-candidate swing against Labor with these mix-and-match results correlates with the decline in Labor’s primary vote and the rise in support for One Nation.

The chart below shows the relationship between Labor pre-election margin and 2026 swing. Labor’s safest seats are to the right of the chart, and the array of points below the horizontal axis show how many of Labor’s safest seats swung strongly towards One Nation. The blue points for Labor-Liberal contests are all to the left and show a clear pattern of swings to Labor. But the swing against Labor increases as Labor’s pre-election margin increases.

The swing was to Labor in areas where the Liberal vote held up, but against Labor where the Liberal Party slipped to third and the swing is measured against One Nation. And this swing is heavily correlated with the decline in Labor’s primary vote and strong support for One Nation.

In safe Labor seats, there was a switch in primary vote from Labor to One Nation. There are safe Labor seats in northern Adelaide where One Nation polled above 30%, levels the Liberal hardly ever achieves.

The trend in the above chart stands out as starkly in the tables below which aggregate results for Labor seats based on pre-election margin. Labor came out of the election with a higher primary vote and after preferences vote in the seats it defended on margins under 15% than it recorded in the seats with margins above 15%. There was a 5.9% swing to Labor in seats with margins under 15%, but 6.7% away in very safe seats with margins above 15%.

Again, this is a mixed swing based on One Nation replacing the Liberal Party as the second placed in seats. But the swing occurred on primary votes as well as two-candidate preferred votes, so its not an artifact of the change in final pairing.

At a normal election both the above tables would swing in the same direction. But in South Australia in 2026, marginal seats swung to Labor and very safe seats against Labor. The seats of Elizabeth, Light and Taylor had margins above 19% before the election, but after the election are three of Labor’s four most marginal seats under 5%.

There’s more on the results inside the post with a link to a draft analysis I’ve prepared. It includes results for all seats, tables of preference flows and a new electoral pendulum.

But I’ll start with some comments on the looming Farrer by-election.
Read More »SA2026 – huge win for Labor but a warning in the result

SA2026 – Finniss – Will a candidate win from fourth place?

UPDATE: As outlined inside the post, the distribution of preferences today confirmed that Finniss was won by Independent Lou Nicholson from fourth place. To steal a pun from someone responding to me on X, the result brings new meaning to “crossing the Finniss line”.

The post starts with my comments on the count before it was complete. After that I outline how the full distribution unfolded when the detail was released.
Read More »SA2026 – Finniss – Will a candidate win from fourth place?

2026 Federal Redistributions – South Australia

Proposed new electoral boundaries for South Australia have been released. It is a bad day for me to try and analyse them as I have other commitments. But I have done a quick summary of the changes in this post.

The number of seats is unchanged at 10 on and at first glance the boundary changes are minor.

There is one change of electorate name. As the Redistribution Committee describes it –

The Redistribution Committee proposes renaming the electorate of Grey to the electorate of O’Donoghue. This is to honour the legacy of Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue AC CBE DSG (1932–2024), a Yankunytjatjara woman who was the first Indigenous nurse at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and became a distinguished public administrator, champion for health equity, and Indigenous rights activist. The electorate of Grey was chosen to be renamed due to Dr O’Donoghue’s strong connection to the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, which are largely located in the electorate of Grey.

More inside the post.
Read More »2026 Federal Redistributions – South Australia