pendulum

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

NT2024 – Analysis of the Northern Territory Election

Eight years and two terms after Labor defeated the Giles government and reduced the Northern Territory Country Liberal Party to just two seats, the tables were turned on 24 August this year. The Lawler Labor government suffered a massive defeat, swept from government and expelled from the greater Darwin metropolitan area, Labor retaining just four seats, all in the NT’s pastoral and remote regions.

And in another parallel with eight years ago, the 2024 election saw the government swept from office and the Chief Minister lose their seat. In 2016 it was CLP Chief Minister Adam Giles who lost his previously safe seat of Braitling. In 2024 Eva Lawler lost her marginal seat of Drysdale after a massive swing of 20.4%.

Lawler’s predecessor as Labor Chief Minister, Natasha Fyles, was also defeated. Fyles’ seat of Nightcliff had been Labor’s safest seat before the election, but was lost to the Greens who finished third on the primary vote before leap frogging to victory on preferences.

New Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro took office at her second election as leader, having lifted the CLP from two seats to eight in 2020, and going further to win 17 of the 25 seats in the Legislative Assembly at the 2024 election.

For the first time since self-government, Labor won no seats in greater Darwin. The party retained only four seats, Arafura, Arnhem, Daly and Gwoja. All four are rural and remote seats with a much higher than average percentage of Indigenous residents, and all four re-elected Labor members are themselves Indigenous.

The 2024 result is a reversion to Labor’s dire period between 1977 and 2001 when the party mainly held remote districts and struggled to break the CLP’s hold on Darwin seats.

As I wrote in my election preview, Northern Territory elections are won and lost in greater Darwin, and more particularly in Darwin’s northern suburbs. The 2012 election won by the CLP remains the only Northern Territory election where the party forming government did not electorally dominate Darwin. The three elections since, including 2024, have reverted to the long-term trend of Northern Territory politics.

The CLP’s victories in northern Darwin were not as sweeping as elsewhere in the Territory with two of Labor’s losses going to the crossbench, Independent Justine Davis winning Johnston and the Greens Kat McNamara winning Nightcliff. The CLP’s narrow victory over the Greens in Fannie Bay was an oddity with the alternative two-party preferred vote revealing a Labor majority.

I’ve prepared a summary of the results which you can find at this link. The summary also includes alternative two-party preferred counts made available by the NT Electoral Commission.

There is much detail on the results in the results summary, but I’ll go through some of the main points inside this post.Read More »NT2024 – Analysis of the Northern Territory Election

2019 Federal Election – Post-Election Pendulum

This post is unfinished business from the 2019 Federal election, setting out a post-election pendulum of the results. A pdf version arranged on two sides of an A4 page can be found via this link.

While this pendulum is current on publication in January 2020, new electoral boundaries will see it superseded before the next election, due to be held between August 2021 and May 2022.

Read More »2019 Federal Election – Post-Election Pendulum