election

2026 Victorian Election Pendulum

(Update – Three days after this post was published, Jacinta Allan was replaced as Premier by Ben Carroll. The post has been left as originally published.)

Victoria’s state election on 28 November will see voters pass judgment on Premier Jacinta Allen’s unpopular government and 12 years of Labor rule.

Most recent Victorian opinion polls reveal a three-way split of support between Labor, the Coalition and One Nation. Several have reported One Nation with the highest primary vote.

These are extra-ordinary polls in a state where two-party politics has traditionally been strongest and One Nation’s electoral support weakest.

One Nation’s poll ratings are also remarkable given the party has no state leader, no announced state policies, one upper house member and just one lower house candidate.

Were it not for other results this year, I would dismiss One Nation’s ratings as unlikely to hold until November, especially if it doesn’t hurry up and announce a leader.

But polls proved right in predicting One Nation would outpoll the Liberal Party at the South Australian election. The party polled well at the Nepean state by-election in May, and a week later matched expectations by easily winning the Farrer federal by-election.

If current polls prove correct, the result in November will have greater consequences for the course of national politics than any state election in my lifetime.

Australia’s two-sided party system has been around for more than a century. The two major parties have always clustered left and right of the centre. Smaller parties have come and gone, the most significant until now being the Greens who have staked out a significant base to the left of Labor.

Other prominent minor parties, like the DLP and Australian Democrats, lasted two decades and never built a base that could transmit loyalties to another generation. In retrospect, both were parties of transition, pathways for voters to change major party loyalty.

Until now, no new political entrant has threatened the foundations on which Australia’s two-party system is built. But the surge in One Nation support suggests the Coalition is in danger of being supplanted as Labor’s major opponent.

Is the Coalition about to fade away and be replaced by One Nation? Or will the Coalition and One Nation grow closer together and a new type of coalition emerge on the right?

It may sound odd to predict problems for the federal Coalition when it is a deeply unpopular Labor state government facing defeat in Victoria.

But if the Liberal-National Coalition cannot capitalise on Labor’s woes by winning majority government in Victoria, if it is forced into some governing arrangement with One Nation in a state where the party has previously barely rated, then there are consequences across the country.

It raises serious question about the Coalition’s future in states where One Nation has a stronger base. First cab off the rank will be the NSW election next March where optional preferential voting will magnify splits between the Coalition and One Nation.

Under optional preferential voting, parties can’t rely on voters to complete preference sequences. Especially if NSW Labor fills the airwaves with “Just Vote 1” messages. Many Coalition and One Nation voters will exhaust preferences and help deliver a comfortable majority to the Minns Labor government.

One Nation capturing the balance of power in Victoria will force some form of governing arrangement on the Liberal Party and (whatever remains of) the National Party. For the first time One Nation would have a say on who governs a state and how.

To date One Nation has been a powerless crossbench upper house party that chucks metaphorical rocks at government. It will need to learn new ways to behave if the election result draws it closer to the levers of government. Chucking rocks becomes a dangerous pastime from inside the glasshouse of government.

Plus One Nation has a terrible record of keeping its elected members within the party. If instability were to strike while One Nation filled a starring or support role in Victorian government, every failing of the party would be highlighted across the nation by its political opponents.

I’ve seen the pressure of governing splinter third parties before. At the 1996 New Zealand election, a similar populist party to One Nation, Winston Peters’ New Zealand First, won the balance of power. After weeks of negotiation, the party joined with National to form government. Over the next three years New Zealand First splintered, popular slogans mugged by the reality of governing. Its more sensible members were lured away by its coalition partner, the less sensible ostracised.

If the polls prove right, converting a three-way split of primary votes into seats in parliament has a range of possible outcomes. Some could produce a majority Coalition government. If not a majority, the question will be how far short of majority the Coalition finishes and whether a government supported by One Nation is possible.Read More »2026 Victorian Election Pendulum

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 – South Australia Election Result Summary (rolling updates)

Count complete – Updated 5:00pm AEST Thursday 2 April March 2026.

Quick Summary – All deats declared. Labor has 34 seats, the Liberal Party 5, One Nation 4, Independents 4.

Who will be the Opposition Leader? With the Liberal Party winning a fifth seat it is clear Liberal Leader Ashton Hurn will retain the parliamentary position of Leader of the Opposition. But what if the Liberals had finished with the same number of seats as One Nation? Emeritus Professor Anne Twomey has produced a video on her Constitution Clarion YouTube site running through the known conventions on the subject.

Update on 2PP: I understand the Electoral Commission has chosen not to do alternate 2PP counts in every seat. That’s a sensible decision with only 13 Labor-Liberal finishes against 26 Labor-One Nation contests and one Labor-Independent finish. I understand the other seven contests where Labor is excluded will have an additional two-party preferred count done. So the state-wide after preferences count for the 2026 South Australian election will produce a state-wide contest between Labor and everyone else.

Notes on Preferences

So far preference distributions from around two-thirds of seats have been released. (Thursday – some final figures released today are yet to be added.) Looking at the point where only three candidates remain in the count, the preference flows we are seeing are –

  • In 6 Labor-Liberal contests where One Nation candidates were the last excluded, preferences are splitting 31% to Labor, 69% to Liberal
  • In 7 Labor-One Nation contests where Liberal candidates were the last excluded, preferences are splitting 32% Labor 68% One Nation.
  • In 5 Labor Liberal contests where Green candidates were the last excluded, preferences are flowing 85% to Labor, 15% to Liberal.
  • In 10 Labor-One Nation contests where Green candidates were the last excluded, preferences are flowing 81% to Labor, 19% to One Nation.
  • The only count so far available where Labor was the last excluded is Chaffey where Labor’s preferences split 71% to Liberal 29% to One Nation.
  • These statistics do not measure preference flows. They are from the distribution of preferences so all flows include preferences from other candidates excluded earlier in the count.

Read More »SA2026 – South Australia Election Result Summary (rolling updates)

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

Do How-to-votes Matter? Evidence from the 2022 SA Election

Too often I hear criticism that preferential voting is corrupted by the majority of voters simply copying how-to-vote (HTV) preference recommendations. The same critics tend to decry that preference “deals” determine elections.

Talk of preference “deals” is a hangover from the now abolished Senate group voting ticket (GVT) system. In the GVT era, 90-95% of ballot papers in the Senate were single ‘1’ above the line votes with preferences determined by the party’s registered preference ticket. Preferences became a tradeable commodity with parties delivering 90-95% of preferences by arranged deals.

Those arranged “deals” never applied to lower house elections and have not applied for Senate elections since the abolition of GVTs in 2016. So-called “deals” on lower house preferences are about what parties and candidates distribute as how-to-vote recommendations. Most so-called “deals” are more expressions of shared or common interest between parties.

HTVs can have an impact, but much less than opponents of preferential voting suggest. All available research on ballot paper completion shows that the majority of voters do not copy HTV preference recommendations.

The Victorian and South Australian Electoral Commissions regularly analyse ballot papers and have determined that around 40% of major party voters complete their ballot paper with their preferred party’s HTV preference sequence. The proportion following HTVs is even lower for minor parties and independents. The difference in follow rate is largely related to the proportion of voters who receive the HTV for a particular party or candidate. Obviously the probability of a voter copying a HTV recommendation is higher if they receive a HTV than if they don’t.

Most countries ban campaigning at polling places, but Australia permits campaigning and the distribution of how-to-vote material, if done politely.

Several years ago I wrote a long post on why candidates and parties distribute how-to-votes. Overwhelmingly the point of HTVs is to influence first preferences and to encourage the casting of formal votes. For minor parties being able to influence preferences may also be important, but the follow rate for minor party HTVs is low if they do not actively campaign.

The weakness in trying to assess the impact of HTVs is that not every voter receives their preferred party or candidate’s HTV. If we knew who received a how-to-vote, and how they completed their ballot paper, we would have a better measure of HTV influence. But the secrecy of the ballot makes it impossible to link a ballot paper to a voter.

Instead we are stuck with follow rates based on all ballot papers. But do we get a better measure of HTV influence if we are confident that most voters saw all candidate’s HTVs.

There is one Australian jurisdiction where we know that many more voters see HTV recommendations.

That is South Australia where there is a unique provision that allows HTVs for all candidates in a district to be displayed in front of a voter in a voting booth.

Let me explain the South Australian system and then go on to compare preference flow data from the 2022 South Australian election with the HTVs displayed in voting booths.

For those who want the data behind this post, you can find the full data by district, and summary tables by party, at the following link.

The preferences document is part of a longer publication I’ve prepared on the results of the 2022 South Australian election. You can find it here or read about it here in a post about the publication yesterday.

You can find my 2022 South Australian Election results publication at this link.

I also published a similar analysis of 2018 South Australian preference flows and HTVs at this link.

Read More »Do How-to-votes Matter? Evidence from the 2022 SA Election

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

TAS 2025 – Lyons – Tracking the Distribution of Preferences

Result links – Bass | Braddon | Clark | Franklin | Lyons

Final Figures

Table of Elected and Defeated Candidates

  • Re-elected 1 – Guy Barnett (Liberal)
  • Re-elected 2 – Jane Howlett (Liberal)
  • Re-elected 3 – Tabatha Badger (Greens)
  • Re-elected 4 – Jen Butler (Labor)
  • Elected 5 – Brian Mitchell (Labor)
  • Re-elected 6 – Mark Shelton (Liberal)
  • Elected 7 – Carlo Di Falco (SFF)
  • Defeated – Casey Farrell (Labor)
  • Defeated – Andrew Jenner (Nationals, formerly Jacqui Lambie Network)

Final figures published

Both Labor candidates reached quota. After the distribution of Labor surplus votes, many of which exhausted, only three candidates remained for two vacancies and Mark Shelton (Liberal) and Carlo Di Falco (SFF) were declared elected to the final two seats, Liberal Stephanie Cameron missing out on election.

Read More »TAS 2025 – Lyons – Tracking the Distribution of Preferences

TAS2025 – Franklin – Tracking the Distribution of Preferences

Result links – Bass | Braddon | Clark | Franklin | Lyons

Count Complete

Table of Elected and Defeated Candidates

  • Elected 1 – Peter George (Independent)
  • Re-elected 2 – Eric Abetz (Liberal)
  • Re-elected 3 – Rosalie Woodruff (Greens)
  • Re-elected 4 – David O’Byrne (Independent)
  • Re-elected 5 – Dean Winter (Labor)
  • Re-elected 6 – Jacquie Petrusma (Liberal)
  • Re-elected 7 – Meg Brown (Labor)
  • Defeated – Nick Street (Liberal)

Franklin Final Figures

Read More »TAS2025 – Franklin – Tracking the Distribution of Preferences

TAS2025 – Clark – Tracking the Distribution of Preferences

Result links – Bass | Braddon | Clark | Franklin | Lyons

FINAL FIGURES

Table of Elected and Defeated Candidates

  • Re-elected 1 – Kristie Johnston (Independent)
  • Re-elected 2 – Vica Bayley (Greens)
  • Re-elected 3 – Ella Haddad (Labor)
  • Re-elected 4 – Josh Willie (Labor)
  • Re-elected 5 – Helen Burnet (Greens)
  • Elected 6 – Marcus Vermey (Liberal)
  • Re-elected 7 – Madeleine Ogilvie (Liberal)
  • Defeated – Simon Behrakis (Liberal)

Final Figures

At the end of the count Madeleine Ogilvie was declared the winner of the seventh seat defeated party colleague Simon Behrakis 7,082 votes (0.885 quotas) to 6,902 (0.862 quotas). Below is the count after all preferences had been distributed.

Read More »TAS2025 – Clark – Tracking the Distribution of Preferences