elections

One Nation and its Elected MPs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Record of Late-Term Succession Premiers

Multi-term periods of party government in Australia have usually come to be associated with the leader that brought the party to office. We often call these periods of government eras.

The less common type of era is multi-term governments with the same Prime Minister or Premier from first election to defeat. In this category we have the Fraser era (Fed 1975-83), the Howard era (Fed 1996-2007) and the Kennett era (Victoria 1992-1999).

One term government don’t qualify for eras so there is no Steven Marshall era (SA 2018-22) or Campbell Newman era (QLD 2012-15).

Some eras become associated with more than one leader, such as the Hawke-Keating era (Fed 1983-1996). Some of the long periods of post-war party government, such as Labor in NSW and Tasmania, or several times in Queensland, never attract the name of a single Premier.

The Menzies era (1949-1972) is different simply because of how long Menzies served as Prime Minister. He was succeeded by three Prime Ministers of diminishing stature before the Coalition lost office two elections after his retirement.

The current leadership ructions in the Victorian Labor Party ahead of a likely defeat in November fits the long-term pattern of Australian elections. Parties that come to power under one Premier who wins re-election at least once, is often succeeded by a new Premier, sometimes several, who lead the party to defeat.

The current period of Labor government in Victoria will be remembered by history as the Andrews era, whoever leads the party to probable defeat in November. Daniel Andrews led Labor to office in 2014 and won landslide re-elections in 2018 and 2022 before resigning two years ago. His indelible mark remains on the current government.

If Jacinta Allan is deposed this week, it will be one of the latest in term change of leader before an election. Julia Gillard became leader on 24 June 2010 and called an election for 21 August, 58 days. When Kevin Rudd returned as Prime Minister on 27 June 2013, he lost the election called for 7 September which was 72 days. These two changes took place in the first and second term of a government and are not relevant for comparison with longer term governments.

Among short term state Premiers, Russell Cooper became National Premier of Queensland 73 days before losing the 1989 election. Eric Willis became NSW Premier on 23 Januay 1976 and called an election for 1 May, a little over three months in office at the end of 11 years of Coalition government. Steven Miles took over as Queensland Premier a little over 10 months before an election was due.

SA Premier Rob Kerin took over as SA Premier after John Olsen resigned and just five months before losing the March 2002 election. Des Corcoran could have been in office longer after taking over from Don Dunstan but called a snap election for September 1979, just seven months into office. Eva Lawler became NT Chief Minister in 2024 eight months before an election and lost.

If Ben Carroll or someone else takes over before the election, it will be a rare case of three Premiers in a single term or Parliament. It happened in Queensland 1986-1989) with Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Mike Ahern and Russell Cooper, and NSW 1973-76 with Bob Askin, Tom Lewis and Eric Willis. There another in NSW 2007-2011 (Morris Iemma, Nathan Rees, Kristina Keneally) and the Northern Territory 2020-2024 (Michael Gunner, Natasha Fyles, Eva Lawler). All four of these government were defeated.

(Someone pointed out another three leader term. Northern Territory 1983-87 with Chief Ministers Paul Everingham, Ian Tuxworth and Steve Hatton.)

Let me me walk down memory lane and look at the record of ‘era’ governments and how they so often come to an inglorious end under a new leader.Read More »The Record of Late-Term Succession Premiers

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

10 August – party lists updated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SA2026 – Does the SA Ticket Vote Savings Provision Matter

One Nation was accused of using South Australia’s ticket vote savings provision to harvest preferences at the state election. In fact One Nation’s tickets were entirely in line with the party’s promise of no deals on preferences. But it appears that registered how-to-votes should be clearer in saying number all squares.

As I explained earlier this week, South Australia has a unique provision in its Electoral Act that applies registered preference tickets to ‘save’ votes that would otherwise be informal.

Misunderstanding of the provision generated commentary during the election campaign about parties controlling preferences through the tickets. In particular there was criticism of One Nation’s how-to-votes that did not recommend preferences. The how-to-votes recommended voting ‘1’ for the One Nation candidate before saying to number all the other squares.

Was this just a way of encouraging One Nation voters to vote ‘1’ and then grab control of the vote’s preferences through the application of the ticket vote?

I’ll get on to the mechanics of the One Nation how-to-vote in 2026 inside the post, but first want to look at how the provision has worked in the past .

The purpose of the registered tickets is not to grab preferences. It is to ‘save’ votes votes that would otherwise be informal, to count votes that would be informal at a Federal election.

Some confusion is understandable as any mention of ‘ticket voting’ invokes memory of the now abolished group voting ticket system that distorted Senate elections until abolished in 2016.

The two systems are not comparable. Senate ticket voting turned preferences into a tradeable commodity allowing the engineering of election results with parties electing Senators despite tiny first preference vote shares.

That was possible because Senate ticket votes represented around 95% of all votes. In stark contrast, the South Australian ticket system applies only to a small percentage of votes, votes that would otherwise have been informal. The percentage of formal votes that have had tickets applied has been, wait for it, between 3% and 6% over the past 40 years.

And of those ballot papers that were saved, more than two-thirds were never counted out as preferences. They were saved by the ticket vote provision and only their first preferences were counted.

(For more information on the tickets, read this backgrounder produced by the Electoral Commission of South Australia.
Read More »SA2026 – Does the SA Ticket Vote Savings Provision Matter

Updates on the South Australian Election Result

(UPDATE: This was written on Sunday to try and explain how the count would unfold after election night. After a few days rest and recovery, I’ve started another post with rolling updates of the result which I will update at least once each day. For more regular updates I suggest you use the ABC election site which will update results every time the Electoral Commission produces new data. I’m doing work on the site weeding out inconsistencies in the Electoral Commission’s data.)

I’ve been in Adelaide this week working for the ABC on the state election coverage. I may have retired from on camera work, but I’m still involved in analysis off camera.

And last night was one of the most challenging coverages I’ve worked on. I estimate that half of the state’s 47 electorates had a choice of preferences that did not reflect the primary results that arrived on election night. One Nation finished in the top two in around half of the state’s seats. This was very many more seats than the Electoral Commission had prepared for.

That’s not a criticism of the Electoral Commission. It must nominate a pairing of candidate before the count is known, and is guided by history as much if not more than by opinion polls.

But that’s all about last night. Let me describe how the count will unfold from here.
Read More »Updates on the South Australian Election Result

2026 South Australian Election Preview

The Labor Party is set for a landslide victory at this weekend’s South Australian election. Yet despite its forgone result, the election is set to dominate national political debate in its aftermath. Not because of who will win, but rather over who will finish second.

The Labor government of Peter Malinauskas was first elected in 2022, winning a sweeping victory that added Steven Marshall to the list of his state’s one term Liberal Premiers.

Since coming to office, Malinauskas has dominated opinion polls and his Liberal opponents. Steven Marshall retired the leadership after the 2022 election. David Spiers and Vincent Tarzia have come and gone. Now it is Ashton Hurn, just 35, female and a first term MP, who has been left with under than 100 days to restore her party’s fortunes.

Hurn has taken over a Liberal opposition that has trailed Labor in the polls for four years. Labor has gained the seats of Hurn’s predecessors Steven Marshall and David Spiers at by-elections. It is less than a year since the Federal election when Labor swept every seat in metropolitan Adelaide.

And the federal situation has worsened since. Nationally the Coalition is stalked by the spectre of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Hanson’s party has undergone a massive revival as cost-of-living pressure has grown and the Coalition has descended into fratricide and internal division.

National polling has shown One Nation matching and even outpolling the Coalition. As the first quarter of 2026 has passed, even federal Labor’s primary vote has begun to slip with the rise One Nation.

South Australian polls have not shown a similar decline in Labor support, but they have replicated the shift from the Liberal Party to One Nation. With final polls agreeing that One Nation is now polling second, the question is – who will finish second on election day?

To date all we have is opinion polls. Are the polls measuring disenchantment or voting intention? Saturday’s South Australian election may finally tell us whether One Nation’s rise is real.

So dominant is state Labor that perhaps the election is not a true test of the national mood. But it is a measure of whether the polls are right.

If One Nation finishes second in the vote, and Liberal support follows the polls and drops below 20%, then the feverish spiral of recent Coalition politics may worsen.

Are voters going to turn out and vote for One Nation in numbers not seen since One Nation’s first electoral test at the 1998 Queensland election? And will this turn into seats?

Labor is expected to dominate Adelaide, but will we see One Nation poll strongly in the city’s north where Labor’s safest seats lie. Thirty three of the state’s 47 seats are in the metropolitan area. For One Nation to poll above 20% state-wide, it must poll strongly in Adelaide even if the result sees more second places than seat wins.

The collapse in Liberal support will see the party lose further seats to Labor with another metropolitan wipe-out possible. The One Nation threat will be greatest in rural seats where the Liberal Party is already challenged by Independents. Will One Nation further damage Liberal prospects?

And if One Nation matches its polling numbers, can its vote be turned into seats?Read More »2026 South Australian Election Preview

NSW2027 – Parties Registered to Contest the 2027 Election

The next NSW election will be held on Saturday 13 March 2027. The date has been brought forward by two weeks from the fixed term date specified in the Constitution to avoid a clash with Easter.

Under NSW Electoral Law, a party must be registered 12 months in advance of an election to have party names printed on ballot papers and to use central nomination of candidates. This registration date has been passed and there are 20 parties registered to contest the election.

Rather than list them in alphabetic order, I’ll list them in descending order of me knowing them from previous elections.
Read More »NSW2027 – Parties Registered to Contest the 2027 Election

Do Green Voters Follow How-to-Votes?

Headline Summary – Strong flows of Green preferences to Labor are often cited as being due to preference “deals”. When you examine the data, the flows are due to the instinctive inclination of Green voters to put Labor second. Even in seats where the Greens recommend preferences to other candidates before Labor, many Green voters still preference Labor. It’s how Labor narrowly defeated Independent challengers in Fremantle (WA) and Bean (ACT) at the 2025 election.

One of the legacies of Senate group voting tickets (GVTs) is that political observers continue to talk about preferences as “deals”. Show and tell preference meetings and parties registering preference tickets at the same time were all part of Senate deal making with GVTs. And those deals stuck as GVTs could deliver preference flows above 90% by taking control of a voter’s ballot paper.

The GVT system was rightly abolished in 2016, ending deals that guaranteed preference flows. The Senate is now like the House where parties can only recommend preference, not direct them. With the exception of one brief experiment in Western Australia (see my previous post on the subject), lower house preferences have always been about recommendation rather than control.

What might be termed a “deal” is no more than agreement on printing preference recommendations. This can occur without an agreement as parties often have mutual self-interest in recommendations. For obvious ideological reasons, parties and candidates tend to recommend preferences within left or right blocks rather then recommend preferences across the political divide.

And whatever negotiations do occur, they have no impact unless most voters receive a party’s how-to-vote, and that voters choose to follow the recommendation. Voters can have their own views on where the preferences of their vote should flow, whatever is on a how-to-vote.

Many voters never see the how-to-vote of their first choice party, especially with minor parties. Without seeing a how-to-vote, a voter’s preferences can only match a how-to-vote by guesswork. Follow rates are always higher with fewer candidates on a ballot paper and when a how-to-vote recommendation follows an understood ideological order.

There are discussions between party representatives about preferences. But even without “deals”, it still makes sense for Labor and the Greens to recommend preferences for each other before parties of the right. It still makes sense for the Coalition and small right-of-centre parties to recommend preferences for each other before the left.

With the Coalition always attacking Labor for working with “radical left-wing Greens”, it also makes sense for the Coalition to recommend preferences for Labor before the Greens. That said, the Coalition has at times been flexible on whether to preference Labor or the Greens.

So what about the Coalition and One Nation? That may be a current hot topic, but it’s not the purpose of this post. All I’ll say for now is that strategy, tactics and practice on Coalition-One Nation preferences have changed depending on political circumstances.

This post looks at data on whether voters follow Green preference recommendations. At the 2025 Federal election, 88% of Greens preferences flowed to Labor before the Coalition. For the past 15 years, the percentage flow of Green preferences to Labor has drifted higher as shown in the chart below.

Increased candidate numbers may have removed some “random” Green votes cast as an objection to the major parties. I believe Coalition attacks on the Greens may have led to a decline in conservative voters giving a first preference to the Greens. Not being Greens helps explain why ‘teal’ Independents have had success attracting former Liberal voters.

The last time the Greens issued open how-to-votes without a recommendation to Labor was in 2010. It made little difference to the flow of preferences to Labor as I wrote about in 2011.

What about if the Greens recommended preferences for the Coalition ahead of Labor? Unfortunately data is very thin on the ground, down to a single case, the 2020 Johnston by-election for a seat in the NT Parliament. Even that was a preference throw between Labor and the short-lived Territory Alliance rather than the Country Liberal Party and was due to NT Labor policy on fracking. Preferences flows were much weaker but still 56% to Labor.

But the Greens putting Labor ahead of the Coalition does not mean Labor is placed second. As I will discuss in this post, there were several examples at the 2025 election which show that strong preference flows from Green candidates is not just a matter of voters following a how-to-vote.

If you look at Coalition-Independent contests, Green preference flows match those seen in Labor-Coalition contests. But the path by which Green preferences reached Independents was not a simple case of following a how-to-vote. And the situation is even more revealing in Labor-Independent contests with Labor retaining two seats in 2025 due to Greens voters making up their own minds on preferences.
Read More »Do Green Voters Follow How-to-Votes?

Where are they now? Who now holds the seats of former Liberal Leaders.

The success of Independents at recent elections has cost the Liberal Party some of its safest seats. They are losses that have toughened the Coalition’s path back to office.

The seats lost, Bradfield, Mackellar, Warringah, Wentworth, Goldstein (recovered 2025), Kooyong and Curtin, have long been bastions of the Liberal Party. They are the sort of seats once held by Prime Ministers, Party Leaders and senior Ministers.

And then there are the losses to Labor in 2025 with the Liberal Party suffering its worst ever election defeat. The losses to Labor and Independents and a near wipe out in the state capitals has left Liberal Party with few of the urban seats traditionally occupied by the party’s leadership.

Of the 13 seats held by former Liberal Party Leaders, only two are currently held by the Liberal Party.

Newly elected Leader Angus Taylor is the Liberal party’s 17th leader since Robert Menzies formed the party eight decades ago.

Of the 16 previous leaders, eight won elections – Robert Menzies, Harold Holt, John Gorton, Malcolm Fraser, John Howard, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison. Of those, four won elections that took the Liberal Party from opposition to government – Menzies, Fraser, Howard and Abbott.

Five led the Liberal Party to an election and lost – William McMahon (who was the 9th leader to serve as Prime Minister), Billy Snedden, Andrew Peacock (twice), John Hewson and Peter Dutton.

Three others lost the leadership before having the chance to fight an election – Alexander Downer, Brendan Nelson and the recently deposed Sussan Ley.

At the next election we will learn which list Angus Taylor’s name will be appended to.

The scale of the Coalition’s defeat in 2025 increased the number of former Leaders’ seats that are no longer held by the Liberal Party. Of the 13 seats once held by former Liberal Leaders –

  • 5 are now held by Independents (including the Centre Alliance in Mayo)
  • 3 are Labor held
  • 2 were lost to Labor and later abolished
  • only 2 are still held by the Liberal Party

The fate of the 13th leadership seat will be decided on 9 May at the by-election in Sussan Ley’s former seat of Farrer. I previously published posts on the Farrer electorate, and also on whether the seat is more naturally a Liberal or National seat.

The Liberal Party will be under threat from Coalition rivals the National Party, 2025’s second placed Independent Michelle Milthorpe, and surging national polls that give One Nation a chance of victory.

But enough on Farrer. In this post I list the fate of seats once held by Liberal Leaders. I also have a whimsical trawl through the list of seats named after Prime Ministers but now held by representatives from the other side of politics.Read More »Where are they now? Who now holds the seats of former Liberal Leaders.