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.
Not All First Term Governments Lose Votes
In my election preview for the ABC, I wrote that the Albanese government’s biggest problem in retaining majority government was that all first term governments in the last half century have lost votes on re-election. I also pointed out that the Albanese government had been elected with only 52.1% of the two-party preferred vote, lower than for any new government in the same period.
The graph below shows that the Albanese government defied history’s guide.
The record of 50 years is that governments get their highest vote on election to office. The downward slopes in the above chart highlight that governments tend to lose support once in office. Except the Albanese government defied the trend and its result line slopes up to the right between 2022 and 2025.
2025 is only the fifth election out of 23 since 1966 where two-party support for a government rose. The other four were Paul Keating’s victory in 1993, John Howard’s in 2001 and 2004, and Scott Morrison’s in 2019. Only Anthony Albanese’s government has achieved a swing in its favour on seeking re-election after one term of party government.
And what a vote. As I write on Friday 30 May, my estimate is that Labor is on track to record 55.2% the national two-party preferred vote. The AEC’s figure as I write is slightly higher but is missing two-party results for several seats where the Coalition will record a majority.
A two-party preferred vote of 55.2% is the best result since Malcolm Fraser’s post-Whitlam dismissal victory in 1975. The Albanese government recorded a higher two-party preferred vote than at Fraser’s landslide re-election in 1977, Bob Hawke’s victory in 1983, John Howard’s in 1996, Kevin Rudd’s in 2007 and Tony Abbott’s in 2013.
Winning re-election in a landslide doesn’t have quite the same political impact as an election that produces a change of government. But a landslide vote and defying the trend of government’s losing votes is detail about the result that is worth highlighting.
Votes into Seats
The Albanese government’s victory is also a landslide based on seats won. Labor won 94 seats in a 150 seat House, the same number as John Howard in 1996 in a slightly smaller 148 seat House of Representatives.
The Albanese government has won 62.7% of seats compared to John Howard 63.5% in 1996 and Malcolm Fraser 71.7% in 1975 and 69.4% in 1977.
For Labor it is the second largest seat haul in percentage terms, the best having been 49 of 75 seats (65.3%) for John Curtin’s re-election in 1943.
Assuming the Coalition win Bradfield and achieve 44 seats, the presence of a crossbench will mean the Coalition is the smallest opposition in percentage terms ince 1975. 44 seats represents 29.3% of House seats compared to Labor’s 36 or 28.3% in 1975.
Primary Votes versus Two-Party Preferred
Where the 2025 result differs from the past is Labor’s lower primary vote compared to past landslides. But that’s a function of the general decline in major party support compared to the glory days of the two-party system.
At Malcolm Fraser’s 1975 victory, the Coalition polled a primary vote of 53.3% and support for ‘others’ was only 4.1%. Labor under Bob Hawke in 1983 polled 49.5% with only 6.9% for minor parties and independents. John Howard’s 1996 victory was from a Coalition primary vote of 47.3% and 14.0% with minor parties and independents.
As the chart below shows, Labor’s primary vote in 2025 was 34.6% and vote for third parties was at 33.6%. For the first time combined major party support attracted less than two-thirds of the vote, and support for minor parties and independents was higher than for the Coalition.
Labor’s primary vote has held roughly steady since its defeat at the 2013 election, but Coalition support in the same period has dived from 45.6% to 31.8%.
Some criticised Labor’s 2022 victory for the party polling only 32.6% of the primary vote, less than for the Coalition. No such criticism in 2025 with Labor’s vote rising 2.0% and Coalition’s falling 3.9%, Labor outpolling the Coalition on first preferences by 2.8%. It is only the second time since the turn of the century that Labor has outpolled the Coalition and is the biggest first preference lead by Labor since Bob Hawke’s victory in 1983. And Labor’s lead widened to 10.4% after preferences, Labor attracting around 62% of preferences from the huge (and growing) pool of votes for minor parties and independents.
What is odd is that the declining level of support for major parties has seen some call for the abolition of preferential voting. It seems nonsensical to abandon a system designed to elect a winner representing majority support in an electoral district, for a system that would produce minority winners from an ever declining level of major party support.
Disproportionality between first preference votes and seats won is not caused by preferential voting. The same would occur if preferences were abandoned and we flipped the calendar back more than century and reverted to simple majority voting.
The cause of disproportionality is not the counting system but rather the use of single member electorates. If you want a proportional outcome you use multi-member electorates and a proportional electoral system. Single member system only deliver proportional outcomes by accident.
Labor has won 62.7% of seats from 34.6% of the vote, though the better votes figure to use would be 55.2% two-party preferred. It is little different from the UK Labour Party’s result in 2024 under simple majority voting that delivered 63.2% of seats from a vote of 33.7%. Single member electorates are the cause of this problem, not preferential voting.
Would the 2025 Result have been different under Simple Majority Voting?
This is a question on which it is impossible to be definitive. Preferential voting allows Labor and Green candidates, or Liberal and National candidates, to compete against each other and by preferences deliver victory for candidates of the left or right. Or as we increasingly see these days, an alternative candidate from the centre such as an Independent.
The difficulty of trying to work out a simple majority winner if preferential voting were abandoned is illustrated by the the new WA seat of Bullwinkel. On first preferences Labor polled 31.9%, Liberal 24.3%, National 15.8%, Greens 11.2% with 16.8% split across three other candidates. After preferences Labor won with 50.5%. On those numbers Labor would win under simple majority voting.
But if the election was held under simple majority rules, would all those candidates have been on the ballot paper?
Preferential voting was introduced to allow the predecessors of the Liberal and National Parties to compete against each other without splitting the vote in an electorate and delivering victory to Labor. Under simple majority voting, would there have been both a Liberal and national candidate? That could have delivered victory to the single Liberal or National candidate.
But on the other side of politics, would the absence of a Greens candidate have delivered victory to Labor? And under simple majority rules, would we have seen voting patterns as in the UK where support for third parties is often squeezed in favour of the two main contestants?
As in the Bullwinkel example, preferential voting allows voters to be offered a wider range of candidates without vote splitting impacting the result. Preferences produce a majority winner with a higher vote than would be produced by simple majority voting.
But if for this exercise you ignore this point about nominations, you can calculate the number of seats where the leading candidate on primary votes was not the winner after the distribution of preferences. Using this crude measure, there were 14 seats where the leading primary vote candidate was not the winner after preferences. The seats were –
- Coalition led, Labor won (8 seats) – Aston, Banks, Brisbane, Deakin, Dickson, Menzies, Petrie, Solomon
- Coalition led, Independent won (3) – Calare, Curtin, Kooyong
- Coalition led, Greens won (1) – Ryan
- Labor led, Independent won (1) – Fowler
- Greens led, Labor won (1) – Melbourne
Using this crude measure, the 2025 election under simple majority voting might have seen Labor’s seat numbers reduced from 94 to 87 seats, the Coalition might have risen from 44 to 55 and the crossbench might have been down from 12 to eight. But again, this is a crude measure of the impact of preferences.
Non-Traditional Contests
When a third of votes are cast for ‘others’, then the consequence is an increase in the number of electoral districts that do not finish as traditional Labor-Coalition contests.
The high ‘other’ vote caused a record 35 contests to have non-traditional finishes. There were 21 districts where a Labor candidate finished in a race against an ‘other’ candidate, and 14 involving a Coalition-other finishes. The chart below plots the increasing number of such contests since 1987. The data excludes a small number of Liberal-National final contests.
On the simple numbers this looks like ‘others’ have been a bigger problem for Labor than the Coalition, but the picture changes when you look at the the seats that were won by crossbench candidates.
Of the 12 seats won by crossbenchers, six recorded an alternate two-party preferred Labor majority and six a Coalition two-party majority. Assuming the Liberal Party will win both the Bradfield and Goldstein re-counts, the seats are –
- Labor majority – Clark, Fowler, Mayo (!!), Ryan, Warringah (!!), Wentworth (!!)
- Coalition majorioty – Calare, Curtin, Indi, Kennedy, Kooyong, Mackellar
My exclamation marks are to highlight the three traditional Liberal seats that recorded alternative count Labor two-party preferred majorities. In the absence of an Independent I doubt that Labor would win these three seats, so a better split of the crossbench would be that nine hold Coalition seats and three hold Labor seats.
The Liberal Party polled so badly in Mayo that Labor made the final pairing after preferences. Ryan is also an oddity as it was actually a Liberal-Greens finish but would have been won by Labor if Labor had passed the Green candidate to reach second place. And Ryan was once a Liberal heartland seat in Brisbane.
But there is also an imbalance between the threat the two major parties face from non-traditional contests.
In 11 of the 21 Labor-Other contests, the Coalition actively recommended preferences for Labor, so lessening the chances of Labor losing. Nine were Labor-Green contests – Canberra, Cooper, Fraser, Grayndler, Griffith, Melbourne, Newcastle, Sydney and Wills. Labor was also favoured by Liberal preference recommendations in two Independent contests, Franklin and Watson.
Five contested districts where the Liberal Party recommended preferences for Labor’s Independent challenger were bigger problems. Clark had already been lost in 2010 and Fowler in 2022, but the Liberal decision to preference Labor’s Independent opponent nearly cost Labor the safe seats of Bean and Fremantle and made Calwell a closer contest.
Compare that to the 14 seats where the Coalition was under threat from minor parties and Independents. Only in Maranoa, where One Nation finished second after preferences, did Labor recommend preferences to the Coalition. In every seat where Coalition candidates faced a serious Independent challenger, Labor recommended preferences for the Independent.
Surely, nothing about this election result can be said to be a ‘fair go’ when a part with a third of the vote wins two thirds of seats, and another party with 12% of the vote only wins one seat. Electoral systems that deliver such grossly disproportionate results are simply unfair, broken and in dire need of reform.
In addition to multi-member electorates, proportional representation systems can also work with a mixed member system with two votes, one for single member constituency seats, and one for a party list, from which members are elected to top up the seats won in direct proportion to the votes received. As the Kiwis were able to fix their broken First Past the Post electoral system in the 1990’s with Mixed Member Proportional Representation, why couldn’t we fix ours?
Nonsense. Labor’s simply attracted more support in more seats and on top of that, more of the preferences of people in more seats. It had 55% of the vote at 60% of the seats. Seems reasonable to me. Your argument suggests that the votes of a tiny fraction of the nation’s communities (a handful on inner city seats) should matter more that the wider nation. It is the Australian Parliament – not the Cafe Late Parliament LOL
Justin: If anybody’s votes appear to matter more than everybody else’s it’s those in regional areas that elected members of the National party, which achieved 10% of HR seats on 3.8% of the nationwide primary vote. What’s your misspelled and dismissive pejorative for those people?
If you abolished preference voting which is very undemocratic in the sense that a vote made for someone may unknowingly be given to someone else in a deal you were unaware of then not only would the coalition had won the 2022 election but they would have increased their majority in the 2025 election, basically if we had the same voting system as the USA labour would be in opposition today.
COMMENT: Your description of how preferential voting works is completely wrong. Your vote cannot be “given to someone else in a deal you are unaware of”. The only preferences that count are the ones written on your ballot paper by you. If you vote for an order of candidates 1, 2, 3 and so on the preferences are counted in your written order. Candidates and parties cannot alter the preferences of any ballot paper. Preferences are always determined by the voter by the numbers they write next to candidates.
Candidates and parties may try to influence what voters write on their ballot papers by distributing recommendations on how-to-votes, but it is entirely up to the voters to choose whether to copy a recommended sequence. We know from ballot paper data that the majority of voters do not simply copy how-to-votes. So Labor won the 2022 election on the preferences of voters, not on votes re-directed by preference deals.
I think you mean the same voting system as the UK, simple majority voting. The US has so many differences to Australia I don’t think they are comparable.
The system is not broken. We have proportional representation in the Senate. The House of Representatives has nothing to do with proportional representation, it is about choosing 150 individuals to represent their local area in parliament.
Fat lot of good proportional representation does in the senate. The party that controls the lower house just has to refuse to agree to any amendments in the senate, then if the parties on the crossbench that only have the power to approve or block legislation use that single piece of leverage available to them to try and get an amendment to improve the legislation they are labelled blockers/obstructionists, and supporters of the party that controls the lower house blindly repeat the narrative instead of critiquing their own party for refusing to negotiate with the “proportional” senate.
COMMENT: Amendments to legislation almost always come about through the actions of the Senate, not the House. The House hardly ever sends bills to committee for inquiry and public comment where the Senate sends almost all bills to committee. The House hardly ever appoints select committees to inquire into matters though under pressure from the Senate the House often agrees to joint house committees. The House has no budget estimates committees, the Senate does. All those powers of the Senate have come about since the adoption of proportional representation and from the period in the mid-60s when governments began to lose control of the Senate.
If you look back at the supine Senate that existed before 1949 when it was almost always under the complete control of the government, you can see how important proportional representation in the Senate has been to the function of national politics.
Except that they are not representing local policies and issues. The system is broken because it’s open to abuse in a more sophisticated world. ‘Single policy’ and ‘not truly independent’ parties are rife because they can be established purely to draw votes from a chosen party on the back of a researches single appealing pillar – even to the point of that pillar being ‘anti-establishment’ (don’t vote for a big party), which has forever been a beacon to young impressionable people, less likely to fully understand and research how the whole system works.
Powerbrokers like Climate 200 are absolutely using that strategy to draw votes away from a major party. Supported candidates are only funded in Liberal party strongholds. That is abuse of the system, and why it is broken.
Tell me you don’t understand the principles of full preferential voting without telling me you don’y understand the principles of full preferential voting. How would you do it differently? Maybe have multiple elections and eliminate the least successful candidate each time until you end up with an election between 2 candidates, one of which will have >50% of the popular support? Would that be fair? In fact, that’s EXACTLY what full preferential voting achieves. The genius and beauty of it is that it is done at a single election and on a single ballot paper. It doesn’t need fixing just because you didn’t get the result you wanted.
I suspect the presence of crossbench incumbents did indeed boost Labor in the notional TPP in Mayo, Warringah, and Wentworth, but only in the case of the latter is the figure all that close. Much like your FPTP hypothetical, it’s impossible to know truly how the campaigns in these seats would have played out if Sharkie or Steggall didn’t run, but would it really have been worth the 4 or 5 percent the Liberals would have needed to win Mayo or Warringah? I think in some of these crossbench seats, the nonclassic status has obscured a shift in demographics and/or voter attitudes and we may see surprises yet once their MPs retire.
Labor’s relative strength in Mayo may be due to Leon Bignell whose state seat of Mawson overlaps with parts of Mayo. He frequently gets swings to Labor even when state wide swings go the other way. His seat has been redistributed to make it marginal Liberal on 2 occasions but he keeps winning it.
He currently sits in parliament as an Independent as required by the state constitution because he is the Speaker.
COMMENT: I think the choice of Liberal candidate played a part in the result as well.
Antony,
You expressed great doubt before the election that the voters of Lane Cove and Hunters Hill, having voted I IND 2ALP in North Sydney in 2022 would vote 1 Labor now, yet Labor got a 9% swing. So I think it’s time to let go of that base assumption and actually let the data tell the story, as you have for the rest of the piece.
And also you have put this review piece out before the 2PP in Bradfield is known- how many asterix are you going to put beside that if Labor gets >50%
Canada just had an election a week before Australia and featured an incumbent government that was trailing in the polls and came around to win an historic fourth term (albeit a strong minority one) in part on the basis of the effect Trump has had on the world politic since returning to office. Of course Canada, bordering the US, was in a unique situation compared to most other countries but to say that Dutton wasn’t negatively affected by Trump would be an understatement. The Liberal campaign was shambolic. As Bill Shorten said on 730 it was shizenhausen. Trump didn’t kill the Liberals but he basically disconnected the life support machine. That said, Labor had one of its better campaigns in modern history, up there with Hawke in the 80s. The Liberals have completely missed the plot – unless you were a rural dweller, a pensioner, or otherwise a man at war with the world the Liberals offered you nothing of interest.
In this election, Labor probably would have won a significant victory with FPTP or many other methods. Perhaps the final seat count would have varied somewhat but they almost certainly would have came out on top. We can look to Canada to see what would have happened. Canada is FPTP and the voters knew that they had to choose one of two and voted tactically. The two party vote in Canada was 85% reflecting the binary choice that faced the voters an outcome unseen since the 1950s. I suspect absent preferential or proportional voting Australian voters probably would have ended up doing the same. It absolutely killed the smaller parties in Canada it would have done the same.
COMMENT: I agree with most of your comments in the first paragraph, but as I said, I wasn’t intending to write about the campaign. Canada was under direct attack from Trump so he was massively more important to the Canadian election result. It was abvious in Australia that a 2024 conservative habit of repeating Trumpian turns of phrase certainly became less successful as the DOGE process and Tariff free for all created negative headlines in Australia.
I also agree with your comments on the impact of first past the post. The example a gave of the contest in Bullwinkel shows how difficult it is to try and model first past the post using Australian election results. If the Coalition move on electoral reform I suspect it will be advocate optional preferential voting. How the system worked with a recommended minimum preference in the Senate is instructive. But there is always concern by some that optional preferential voting will lead to ‘just vote 1’ campaigns. Looking at the wording of ballot papers instructions would be useful.
> In the absence of an Independent I doubt that Labor would win these three seats
Why?
COMMENT: It’s my opinion. In the absence of an Independent in a seat like Warringah, many Independent voters would go back to the Liberal Party and they would back in greater proportions than is suggested by alternative two-party preference counts. Voters are more tribal about their first preferences than later preferences. And many people voting for people like Zali Staggall would know that it doesn’t matter who they give second and further preferences too, they won’t be counted out to determine a winning candidate.
“In the absence of an Independent in a seat like Warringah, many Independent voters would go back to the Liberal Party and they would back in greater proportions than is suggested by alternative two-party preference counts.”
I respectfully disagree Antony. In fact, the enormous primary and 2PP swing towards Labor in the part of Bennelong that was in North Sydney in 2022 shows that your assumption that independent voters would go back to the Liberal Party in greater proportions than is suggested by the alternative two-party preferred count is wrong. Under your assumption, most voters in this area who voted for independent Kylea Tink in 2022, including some who preferenced Labor, would have returned to the Liberal Party in 2025 and boosting the Liberal Party’s primary and 2PP in this area.
This could not be further from reality. All polling booths in this area recorded primary and 2PP vote swings away from the Liberal Party. All but one polling booths in this area recorded a primary vote swing towards Labor of more than 20% and many booths in this area recorded double-digit 2PP swing towards Labor. This shows most ex-teal voters in this area who voted for independent Kylea Tink in 2022 switched to Labor in 2025 in the absence of an independent, including many who preferenced the Liberal Party over Labor in 2022. Peter Dutton’s Coalition was extremely unpopular among these 2022 independent voters, even more unpopular than Scott Morrison. In the absence of an independent, voting for Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party is not an option for most of these voters, therefore most of them switched to Labor.
For the same reason, it would be reasonable to assume that most independent voters in Warringah and Wentworth would have switched to Labor in the absence of a strong independent candidate and deliver Labor victories in these seats, because voting for Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party is not an option for most of these voters. As Dryhad has said, in many formerly blue-ribbon seats now held by crossbenchers, the non-classic status has obscured shifts in demographics and voter attitudes. The realignment away from the Liberal Party in the traditional Liberal heartland of Northern Sydney has accelerated at federal and state elections since 2019. In reality, there will likely be other independents succeeding Steggall and Spender in their seats once they retire, preventing Labor winning Warringah or Wentworth. “In the absence of an Independent in a seat like Warringah, many Independent voters would go back to the Liberal Party and they would back in greater proportions than is suggested by alternative two-party preference counts.”
I respectfully disagree Antony. In fact, the enormous primary and 2PP swing towards Labor in the part of Bennelong that was in North Sydney in 2022 shows that your assumption that independent voters would go back to the Liberal Party in greater proportions than is suggested by the alternative two-party preferred count is wrong. Under your assumption, most voters in this area who voted for independent Kylea Tink in 2022, including some who preferenced Labor, would have returned to the Liberal Party in 2025 and boosting the Liberal Party’s primary and 2PP in this area.
This could not be further from reality. All polling booths in this area recorded primary and 2PP vote swings away from the Liberal Party. All but one polling booths in this area recorded a primary vote swing towards Labor of more than 20% and many booths in this area recorded double-digit 2PP swing towards Labor. This shows most ex-teal voters in this area who voted for independent Kylea Tink in 2022 switched to Labor in 2025 in the absence of an independent, including many who preferenced the Liberal Party over Labor in 2022. Peter Dutton’s Coalition was extremely unpopular among these 2022 independent voters, even more unpopular than Scott Morrison. In the absence of an independent, voting for Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party is not an option for most of these voters, therefore most of them switched to Labor.
For the same reason, it would be reasonable to assume that most independent voters in Warringah and Wentworth would have switched to Labor in the absence of a strong independent candidate and deliver Labor victories in these seats, because voting for Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party is not an option for most of these voters. As Dryhad has said, in many formerly blue-ribbon seats now held by crossbenchers, the non-classic status has obscured shifts in demographics and voter attitudes. The realignment away from the Liberal Party in the traditional Liberal heartland of Northern Sydney has accelerated at federal and state elections since 2019. In reality, there will likely be other independents succeeding Steggall and Spender in their seats once they retire, preventing Labor winning Warringah or Wentworth.
As for Mayo, Sharkie voters are not as hostile to the Liberal Party as teal independent voters in Northern Sydney, however considering the large swings away from the Liberal Party in SA in both federal and state elections, it’s not unthinkable for Labor to win Mayo once Sharkie retires. Mayo will certainly become a Labor target once Sharkie retires.
COMMENT: My assumption that voters would go back to the Liberal Party at an election without an Independent candidate is a reference to a future contest when a 2PP for this election will hardly be relevant. On the Bennelong comparison, the Labor Party ran an intensive campaign in the seat. If there had not been an Independent in Bradfield, Warringah or Mackellar, I doubt the Labor Party would have devoted anything like the Bennelong resources to campaigning in those seats and in my view would have struggled to win. The story might have been different in Wentworth which has clearly become a marginal seat and will become more marginal with each redistribution. Given candidate and campaign affects, I do not believe you can simply remove a high profile Independent candidate with cross-party appeal from a contest and assume in their absence and with a much lower profile campaign you would have produced the same two-party preferred result.
Thanks Antony, approximately what 2PP in a LIB-IND contest do you estimate would lead to a 50-50 result in a LIB-ALP contest?
COMMENT: There isn’t a relationship between a 2PP and a 2CP result. There is a relation between the 2PP and the primary votes and the flow of preferences.
Say you have three candidates, a Liberal on 40%, an Independent on 40% and a Labor candidate on 20%. Say that the preference flows Independent to Labor and Labor to Independent are both 80%.
The 2CP for the Independent would be 56%, the Labor 2PP% 52%. The relationship between the numbers is a function of the different primary votes and the preference flows. You can probably work out a formula, I suspect using simultaneous equations, by my memory of algebra has faded over the decades.
I am in Mackellar and generally agree with Antony, although Labor. There are many who would vote independent but not Labor against a lifetime of habit.
Even though the union bogey isn’t that much any more. It’s what my dear old Mum cites for being a lifelong Liberal voter until she shifted to being “left wing” as she jokes.
Although the long-standing/suffering Labor candidate did get a good swing as a proportion, but to 12%.
Dear Antony – your opinion on the mater Luke enquired about is nothing more than speculation. It is appropriate that you stated that it is simply your opinion, and that is acknowledged, but it borders on an inappropriate level of bias for someone in your position to continue to state it when you know that it has recently been proved incorrect, without bringing that to the attention of the reader. I refer to my comment a few above regarding Bennelong.
Labor just won the Warringah 2PP by a relatively considerable 4.5% – you have NO basis for stating a view that they would not win the seat if an IND did not run, or more likely if they did run, but people voted accordingly in their inherent preferences and did not vote “strategically”. An outcome where Labor was to get say 28% of the PV and the IND say 26% (equal to the 54% combined vote of the actual result) would result in Labor winning under the preference flows from IND to Labor that produced the 2PP result.
This whole notion that you and many amateur commentators push, that voters, particularly Teal IND voters, do not care about where they send their lower preferences is quite insulting. No one says that about Green voters?!
Ben Raue recently demonstrated on his blog that >75% of Teal IND voters preferenced Labor above Liberal in ALL teal contested seats – this does NOT happen by chance. It is clearly the will of the voters.
COMMENT: If you insist, here are my reasons. The Teals won their seats originally because they were not Labor candidates. None of those seats could have been won by a candidate standing as a Labor candidate. The Independents won because they ran their own campaign on their own collection of issues as providing an alternative voice that was not Labor and not Liberal. When next those seats have no Independent candidate running and a Labor candidate has to run as the only alternative to a Liberal candidate, and run on a Labor Party platform rather than the position of an Independent, I do not believe there will be a replication of the alternative two-party preferred results. I’m also assuming here the Liberal Party will pick a candidate acceptable to these sort of electorates.
I happen to think the way the Liberals attack the Independents in contests so turns off voters they won’t give preferences to the Liberal Party.
The preferential counting system assumes voters hold all preferences in order equally which is why the vote has the same weight at every point of the distribution. In the real world voters give greater weight to their first preference over all further preferences. There is an argument in voter theory that pairwise comparisons of candidates is more relevant than rank orderings. If the choice for winning a seat like Warringah is a pairwise comparison between Liberal and Independent candidates you get a different outcome than if it is Liberal versus Labor. And you don’t measure those pairwise comparisons by examining rank order preferencing for an alternative election count that wasn’t the result of the election.
On your example of Warringah which corresponds to a primary vote swing of 14% from Independent to Labor, why do you assume the Independent preference flows would be the same on a substantially lower Independent vote? Some of the strength of the Independent flows to Labor is because of strategic voting by Labor and Green voters. If there was a swing back to Labor from the Independent, I would presume it to be those Labor voters going home and I would expect the Independent preference flows to be weaker. But this is all a game of preferences and my basic argument is that voters make a different choice on first preferences based on the competing candidates.
The fact that the Liberal first preference percentage has fallen from the mid 60s to 38% in a decade while Labor’s has hardly moved tells you most of what you need to know here. “That my enemy’s enemy is my friend” tells you the rest. Almost all of the non-Liberal vote will preference the IND second. Clearly that is a failure of the Liberal offer and a question for Andrew Hirst. I am sure that fact is not lost on someone in that party but what they can do about it is another question. Politics is always about the art of the possible and until the party adjusts their message to meet the voters where they are this is what we will be talking about. You have to fish where the fishes are as they say. Ms. Boele was an acceptable compromise candidate for at least half of the electorate. Redistribution made this seat more competitive this go round than before but the Liberal party did get lucky in one aspect, they preselected the more moderate candidate of the two. Had they preselected the conservative alternative, all else being equal, this seat might have been wrapped up on election night.
I am someone who swapped between addresses in Bradfield and Berowra during the campaign. Seeing your responses to other commenters on the issue of the TPP in Teal seats has made me want to chime in.
Berowra had a highly visible Teal campaign. The candidate publicly received $150,000 from Climate 200, along with a significant amount of local donations—much more than what the Greens and Labor typically receive in Berowra. Yet, despite that, she didn’t make it past fourth place. A study conducted by The Guardian found that four out of five Teal voters were Labor and Green supporters tactically voting Teal, while only one-fifth truly believed in the Teal movement. This trend is evident in electorates where the seat is closely contested between Labor and Liberal but has a Teal candidate. Where there is a perception that Labor won’t win, i.e., in safe Liberal seats, voters switch to the Teals. The Teals also actively promote tactical voting themselves.
In my opinion, Nicolette Boele in Bradfield and Tina Brown in Berowra did not campaign on real, local issues. Instead, they focused on telling voters to support them simply because they were not the Liberals, arguing that a minority government was inevitable and that a crossbencher would be valuable. In 2022, Nicolette Boele had a campaign war chest of $300,000 and also benefited heavily from the strong presence of Teals in neighbouring Mackellar and North Sydney.
In all the Sydney Teal seats, the Labor primary vote in the Senate is significantly high, whereas the Liberal vote closely matches their House of Representatives primary vote. The idea that Teals are ‘disillusioned Liberals’ rings true in Mackellar, which is a seat that I believe is genuinely a Teal stronghold. The Liberals in Mackellar had a primary vote of 35% in the House of Representatives but 39% in the Senate.
“I happen to think the way the Liberals attack the Independents in contests so turns off voters they won’t give preferences to the Liberal Party.”
I agree with this statement but believe it goes both ways—it turns off Labor voters from the Teals and leads them to preference the Liberals ahead of them. For every voter who puts Teal first and Liberal second, another voter places Labor first and Liberal second in these seats. It is difficult to assess this fully without the official results, but in Berowra, the Labor candidate attracted 70% of the total preference flows, whereas in Bradfield, the Teal candidate only attracted 65.8% (where as she got 75% in 2022). Partly the reason I think is because the swing from the Liberals went to Labor and then back to the Liberals. I also think her argument of “the major parties are both the same” in a seat where only one major party was in power and in an election where Labor is at its most popular since 1943 isn’t the best campaign talking point when you need to rely on Labor’s preferences. There will likely be a strong flow of preferences from independents to Labor this time around, probably even stronger than in 2022.
Given that Bradfield has a high Senate primary vote—36.45% for Labor and around 12% for the Greens—I believe that if the Teal candidate loses to the Liberals, Labor would have won the seat. So far, the TPP count has shown Labor matching the Teals in booths, while the current count of postals is unrepresentative and has not been processed in batches.
Speculating on the impact of Teals, I actually believe the opposite of the common assumption: in 2022, if the Teals hadn’t run, North Sydney and Bradfield would have gone to Labor, and Kooyong would have gone to the Greens. The reason is that disillusioned Liberal voters needed an avenue to protest against Morrison and the Liberal Party. If their only choices had been Labor or the Greens, they likely would have gone in that direction. This is similar to how One Nation voters lack discipline when preferencing the Liberals compared to the Greens—they often protest against the Liberal Party by putting them last, even if their vote ultimately benefits Labor. Instead of asking, “what if the Teal candidate didn’t run?”, I think we should consider, “what if the Teal candidate doesn’t make the final count?” Mackellar provides a clear answer: Labor would lose, likely because the Northern Beaches have a strong independent ideological history. It is highly likely scenario to think of in Bradfield for 3500 tactical voters that would’ve otherwise voted Labor but put Boele as their first preference went back to Labor instead and therefore Labor makes the final 2CP.
The demographics in Bradfield, Berowra, Bennelong, Warringah, and Wentworth have significantly changed. Unlike Mackellar, these areas have experienced substantial new developments and housing expansions, bringing in a more diverse population. Mackellar, on the other hand, has remained demographically stagnant. (It is ironic that Kylea Tink and her supporters opposed development yet were surprised when her seat was abolished due to falling below the population cap.)
There is an argument that state election results don’t reflect federal ones, but the Teals performed poorly on the North Shore. Victoria Davidson in Lane Cove received extensive press coverage as the strongest contender to defeat Anthony Roberts, yet she didn’t even place second. Eighty percent of her votes flowed back to the Labor candidate, though the full count remains unclear due to optional preferential voting (OPV). Hornsby saw an 8% swing to Labor, Wahroonga an 8.5% swing, and Davidson an 11% swing, all despite highly visible Teal campaigns in those electorates (except Hornsby).
What do you think about Rebekha Sharkie saying that, because her seat was a safe Liberal seat nine years ago, she expects her voters would want her to side with the Coalition in a hung parliament? Her seat is convincingly Labor on the TPP. Crikey interviewed her and attempted to show her that today’s situation is vastly different from nine years ago. They repeatedly highlighted the Labor vs Liberal count, yet she seemed confused, continuing to insist that Labor’s primary vote was too low and not acknowledging that the AEC conducts classical contest counts for informational purposes.
We’re all speculating here, but I think Labor deserves more credit in these seats—especially considering their high primary Senate vote. Historically, where seats went to the Liberals on the TPP in past elections but were lost to a local independent, the Liberals had a higher Senate vote than their House of Representatives vote. Teals carry a different public perception compared to traditional independents. The lack of a proper, credible local campaign was the main reason why Nicolette Boele underperformed in Bradfield, a 2.4% swing after spending approximately $2 million in an election where the Liberals suffered heavy losses isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.
If your argument that voters don’t care where their preferences go beyond the first is correct, then why does Labor only receive 40% of the TPP in Cowper?
COMMENT: I find your notes about the Senate results more persuasive than arguments about two-party preferred. I also think that whatever the results in these seats, Labor would never have put the sort of effort into these seats that the Independents did do I still remain dubious that Labor would have won these seats in a straight out two-party contest.
Hi Antony, fantastic analysis both here and onscreen. Like Johnson, I also did a little bit of senate-based simulation, and “predict” that the 2pp for Labor in Goldstein will be 48.0%, and Bradfield will be 51.6% to Labor, with a 2.1% RMS error based on predicting the other 148 seats. The model I used was pretty simplistic, so I wouldn’t place any bets on them, but I thought it was interesting (I mentioned some details in comments on William Bowe’s blog, and these numbers are a slight update). The gist is using Labor/Coalition senate 2pp, and fitting a simple weighting to the exhausted votes (which were only ~5% for these two seats).
I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I do think Labor has at least some chance to outshoot Boele in 2pp terms (i.e. each vs. Lib). While I think you have a point in saying that Labor would have lost in a non-tealed contest due to funding, I think Bradfield is a specific case where Labor are stronger than in other teal seats (perhaps due to the issues in Boele’s campaign). So in the now seemingly-less-likely case that the seat is voided, I think that Labor would have more of a shot than one might expect (though I’d hesitate to call them favourites).
Also, did you have any thoughts on non-IRV preference systems? In single-member electorates, I like the Ranked-Pairs method (as well as other Condorcet methods). While I’d be extremely surprised if it were ever practically implemented, it would at least in theory avoid some of the issues in n-cornered contests where the Condorcet winner loses — e.g. Ryan, formerly Brisbane and Griffith, potentially Grey, and maaaybe Calwell (if my wild suspicion is right that Youhana would have beaten Labor if he’d made it). Then again, Calwell mightn’t have even had a Condorcet winner.
Slight correction to myself — meant to say 51.2% to Labor in Bradfield. Goldstein turned out to be 46.03% to Labor, and there’s a bit of precedent for the teals to underperform relative to my model, so good chance it’ll be down to the wire (much like the actual distribution of preferences).
“What is odd is that the declining level of support for major parties has seen some call for the abolition of preferential voting.”
Not that odd by those being disadvantaged by it!
There is also a rise in calls for optional pref voting a la NSW. This is mostly because it’s disfavouring the Liberals in teal electorates from what I’ve seen.
OPV would allow the Liberals to run the cynical gambit they did in the 2023 NSW election in my seat of Pittwater (Mackellar federally). They told everyone (signs, on the day) they only needed to number one square. True, but irrelevant for Liberal voters who were always going to finish first.
It was to encourage Greens and Labor voters to exhaust their votes and more than enough did to elect the Lib narrowly over the teal independent (50.6% from memory). I see this as a sort of disenfranchisement.
Postscript: Jacqui Scruby won the by-election pretty easily after the resignation of the Lib MP. Labor and Greens didn’t run.