Federal elections

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

FED2025 – House Results in Victoria

I felt a certain sense of deja vu ahead of the 2025 election when it appeared the fate of the Albanese government could swing on the unpopularity of a Victorian state Labor government.

At the first Federal election I covered in March 1990, Victoria was Labor’s weak state. It was still eight months until Paul Keating uttered his ‘recession we had to have’ line, but already in March the economic failings of the Victorian Labor government had tipped the state’s economy into recession.

In March 1990 the full scale of the Victorian government’s financial disasters were still months from being known, but the souring electoral mood was to cost the Hawke government ten seats south of the Murray. It took gains elsewhere for Labor to win a narrow re-election.

The narrative ahead of the 2025 election had similarities. As I wrote in my election preview, “The question for 2025 is whether the Albanese government can distance itself from the state Labor government, or whether the Liberal Party can successfully tie the two together. Peter Dutton will also need to rally the factionalised and dispirited Victorian branch of the Liberal Party, not an easy task for a Queenslander.”

Yet it was in Victoria that Labor had gained an extra seat at the April 2023 Aston by-election. It was in Victoria that Labor retained the marginal Labor seat of Dunkley at a March 2024 by-election. At both by-elections, Peter Dutton was perceived as a negative for the Liberal Party with Victorian voters, compounded by on-going fratricide within the Liberal Party’s state branch.

Federal Labor’s wariness of its state brethren could be gauged by the scarcity of joint campaign events featuring Anthony Albanese and Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan. It contrasted with high rotation appearances with Labor Premiers Roger Cook (WA), Peter Malinauskas (SA) and Chris Minns (NSW).

But as elsewhere in Australia, election night shredded pre-election perceptions. Labor increased its Victorian vote and number of seats held. Labor’s Victorian two-party preferred vote was higher than in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia. Victoria joined Western Australia at the low end of swings to Labor, but both both states started from a high Labor vote in 2022.Read More »FED2025 – House Results in Victoria

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 – Western Australia House Results

In 2022 it was the huge swing to Labor in Western Australia that delivered majority status to the Albanese government.

In 2025 the WA result was less dramatic, more a case of Labor’s position firming as the rest of the nation caught up with the west’s trend.

WA’s 2022 swing to Labor was a whopping 10.5% compared to 2.9% east of the border. Western Australia produced the smallest state swing to Labor in 2025, just 0.9%, but against a larger 3.3% swing in the rest of the nation.

Over two elections since 2019, the two-party preferred swing to Labor in Western Australia has been 11.4% against 6.2% in the rest of Australia. In six years Western Australia has gone from being a bulwark for the Coalition to being a bastion for Labor at both state and federal elections.Read More »FED2025 – Western Australia House Results

FED2025 – Tasmanian Federal Election Result

This post is the second in my series looking at the results of the 2025 Federal election by state.

In short Tasmania produced an emphatic victory for Labor with a state-wide two-party preferred swing of 9%.

Former state Labor Leader Rebecca White easily retained the central seat of Lyons for labor with a 10.7% swing in her favour. Big swings delivered the state’s two northern seats to Labor, Bass gained on a 9.4% swing and Braddon a massive 15.2% swing.

Given current events that look set to send Tasmania to a state election in July, some have suggested the move by Labor to force an election has been to capitalise on the Liberal Party’s disastrous Federal result.

That suggestion ignores two critical facts. The first is that Tasmania uses the proportional Hare-Clark electoral system to elect the lower house of its Parliament so Labor’s huge two-party preferred result is irrelevant. Second, Labor’s huge two-party preferred result was constructed from a Labor primary result of 36.6% that would not deliver majority government if repeated at a state election.

That the Federal Liberal Party polled a primary vote of only 24.5% suggests that Labor could emerge as the largest party at a state election, but not as a majority government.

The most recent EMRS poll of state voting intentions reported party standings at Liberal 29 per cent (down 5), Labor 31 (up 1), Greens 14 (up 1), Jacqui Lambie Network 6 (down 2) and Independents an impressive 17 (up 5). A significant caveat on the poll is whether is was picking up washover from Federal voting intentions.

The two big Tasmanian issues are the state of the budget, and the related burden of paying to build an expensive AFL stadium at Macquarie Point. There is clear public support for the state to have an AFL team, but support for the proposed stadium is much weaker. Both major parties currently support the stadium, but the majority of cross bench members do not and opposition to the proposal is particularly strong in the state’s north.

I’ll come back to the Federal result inside the post, but first a brief diversion to the events currently unfolding in Hobart.Read More »FED2025 – Tasmanian Federal Election Result

FED2025 – South Australia House Results

With a state election due in March 2026, the Liberal Party’s disastrous Federal result in South Australia is bad news for the party’s state prospects.

Since losing state government in March 2022 after just one term in office, the SA Liberal Party has gone on to lose two further state seats to the Labor government of Premier Peter Malinauskas. The by-elections in both seats had been caused by the departure of former Liberal leaders.

And now the party has suffered a 5.2% two-party preferred swing against it at the Federal election, retained just two of the state’s 10 seats, neither in Adelaide, and polled only 28.0% of the first preference vote.Read More »FED2025 – South Australia House Results

FED2025 – Four Graphs on Labor’s Landslide Victory

The ‘L’ word hasn’t featured much in post-election coverage, but it’s time to be clear about the result. The re-election of the Albanese government has been a landslide victory for Labor.

The size of the swing, the national two-party preferred vote and the number of House seats won by Labor add up to make the 2025 election one of the more one-sided results in Federal election history.

In the post-mortems, much of the attention has been devoted to what the Coalition got wrong rather than what Labor got right. That is not surprising given the Coalition had led the two-party preferred vote in most opinion polls in late 2024 and early 2025.

But only two polls in that time ever reported the Coalition on more than 52% two-party preferred. A Morgan poll in the first week of January reported the Coalition on 53%, and a Resolve Strategic poll in mid-February reported 55%. Apart from those two polls, few other polls if replicated on election day would have produced a majority Coalition government.

Polls were largely in agreement before the campaign in reporting Labor’s two-party preferred vote down since 2022. The polls before the campaign were pointing to Labor losing its majority but probably retaining government.

It is clear there was a mood shift as election day approached. The final week’s polls by a range of different polling organisations reporting Labor two-party preferred results between 51% and 53%. While the final polls varied in value, every company reporting in the last week had detected a shift towards Labor in the campaign. And given the final result, the shift in opinion may have continued through to polling day.

Whether this was down to Labor’s campaign being brilliant, the Coalition’s a dud, or concern over instability created by the peculiarly chaotic governing style of President Trump, is hard to disaggregate. In my opinion it is a combination of all three.

But I’m not writing this post to to dissect the rights and wrongs of the campaign. Nor to get into the extensive analysis since election day about where the Coalition went wrong.

This post is about adding historical context to the scale of of Labor’s landslide victory and comment on the breakdown of two-party politics.Read More »FED2025 – Four Graphs on Labor’s Landslide Victory