south australia

FED2026 Redistributions – South Australian Boundaries Finalised

The South Australian redistribution of electoral boundaries has been finalised this morning. The Commission has abandoned a swap of suburbs between Kingston and Mayo, as well as the transfer of an area from Spence to O’Donoghue (formerly Grey). This means that Kingston and O’Donoghue retain their former boundaries without change.

The Draft boundaries released in March produced only minor changes to the boundaries used at the last three federal elections. Those changes have now been reduced with the Spence to O’Donoghue change reversed and the proposed suburbs swap between Mayo and Kingston abandoned.

South Australia was reduced from 11 to 10 House of Representatives seats by the 2017 redistribution. The current redistribution retains 10 seats and was triggered by the rule requiring boundaries to be re-drawn every seven years. The reason for periodic re-draws is to account for differing patterns of population growth, to bring all electorates back within permitted variation from quota.

Barker pushes closer to Adelaide and gains 3,365 voters around Woodchester from Mayo. Grey has been re-named O’Donoghue but proposed boundary changes abandoned. Population growth in the Adelaide Hills has seen Mayo shed voters to Barker and around 6,275 to Boothby. Adelaide’s outer north has also been growing rapidly and Spence has lost 14,043 voters in Brahma Lodge and Salisbury to Makin. Proposed changes to Kingston have been abandoned and Adelaide, Hindmarsh and Sturt retain their unchanged status from the draft phase.

The table below has been now re-calculated for the final boundaries.

South Australia Federal Redistribution – Summary of New Margins
District Old Boundaries New Boundaries Shift
Adelaide ALP 19.1% ALP 19.1% unchanged boundaries
Barker LIB 13.0% LIB 12.7% 0.3 to Labor
Boothby ALP 11.1% ALP 11.1% no change
Hindmarsh ALP 16.3% ALP 16.3% unchanged boundaries
Kingston ALP 20.7% ALP 20.7% unchanged boundaries
Makin ALP 14.7% ALP 15.3% 0.6 to Labor
Mayo (2-Party) ALP 5.0% ALP 4.8% 0.2 to Liberal
Mayo (IND v ALP) IND 14.9% IND 15.5% 0.6 to Independent
O’Donoghue (formerly Grey) LIB 4.6% LIB 4.6% unchanged boundaries
Spence ALP 15.3% ALP 15.2% 0.1 to Liberal
Sturt ALP 6.6% ALP 6.6% unchanged boundaries

Read More »FED2026 Redistributions – South Australian Boundaries Finalised

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 – Legislative Council – Result Declared

This post provides an overall summary of the South Australian Legislative Council result. It includes tables summarising the party composition of the new Council, a list of elected and departing members, party totals including change of vote since 2022, and a breakdown of results by party and candidate. I also have some comments on the final stages of the distribution of preferences.
Read More »SA2026 – Legislative Council – Result Declared

SA2026 – it turns out the count ain’t over

Tuesday 21 April: To the acute embarrassment of ECSA, another story broke about “found” ballot papers. In fact the ballot papers were located a week or two ago, after the declaration of the polls but their existence only broke today. These are all absent votes, a small number taken at retirement homes in Newland, and absent votes taken on election day in Enfield polling places. This produced votes for other electorates, none of which were delivered to their home district in time to make the count. Hence ECSA’s press release being in a strange past tense with reference to the small number of ballots not having made it in to the count in other districts. The numbers involved are no more than a handful for any district and the districts involved had large margins.

Update – the votes have been counted and confirmed the victory of One Nation’s Chantelle Thomas. Here’s the text of the release by Acting Electoral Commissioner Leah McLay.

A count of Narungga ballot papers retrieved from the district of Stuart occurred at the Electoral Commission this morning.

The purpose of the count was for the Commission to determine whether the result in Narungga would have differed, had those ballots been included in the initial count and subsequent recount.

There were 81 ballot papers opened in the presence of scrutineers. Of those, 1 was rejected and 4 were deemed informal. Of the 76 votes counted in a two-party preferred count, 46 were for Chantelle Thomas, One Nation and 30 were for Tania Stock, Liberals. Had the ballot papers been included in the original count and subsequent recount, the margin in favour of Chantelle Thomas One Nation would have increased from 58 to 74.

I have therefore determined that the result in Narungga would not have differed had the ballots been included.

More info: An update on the votes. Liberal received 24 votes plus 6 preferences received for 30 votes after preferences. One Nation received 33 votes and 13 preferences for 46 after preferences. The votes were 57 Absent Early Votes and 19 Absent polling day votes.

My original commentary is now inside the post.

Read More »SA2026 – it turns out the count ain’t over

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 – 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

2026 Federal Redistributions – South Australia

Proposed new electoral boundaries for South Australia have been released. It is a bad day for me to try and analyse them as I have other commitments. But I have done a quick summary of the changes in this post.

The number of seats is unchanged at 10 on and at first glance the boundary changes are minor.

There is one change of electorate name. As the Redistribution Committee describes it –

The Redistribution Committee proposes renaming the electorate of Grey to the electorate of O’Donoghue. This is to honour the legacy of Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue AC CBE DSG (1932–2024), a Yankunytjatjara woman who was the first Indigenous nurse at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and became a distinguished public administrator, champion for health equity, and Indigenous rights activist. The electorate of Grey was chosen to be renamed due to Dr O’Donoghue’s strong connection to the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, which are largely located in the electorate of Grey.

More inside the post.
Read More »2026 Federal Redistributions – South Australia

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)

SA2026 – Some Early Observations on the Result

(UPDATE: I’ve started doing rolling updates of the overall figures that you can find in this post. For more details figures on each seat and regular updates my suggestion is 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.)

The scale of the Liberal Party’s disastrous result at Saturday’s South Australian election is hard to comprehend for anyone with a background in Australian political history.

Australia has had a stable dominant two party system for eight decades since the formation of the Liberal Party in the 1940s. On one side of politics is the Labor Party, on the other the Liberal-National Coalition in Canberra, or the Liberal Party on its own in South Australia.

For one of Australia’s two major parties, the South Australian Liberal Party, to perform so badly is a political earthquake. The Liberal Party has been beaten into third place with just 19.0% of the first preference vote. (As of Monday afternoon with 65.0% of the first preference vote counted.)

The eight decade old Liberal Party has been outpolled by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, a party that has only twice reached double figures at a state election, both of those occurring in its home state Queensland.

In this post I’m going to run through some of the more startling statistics of the election. Most are good news for One Nation and bad news for the Liberal Party. The numbers also include warnings for the Labor Party.
Read More »SA2026 – Some Early Observations on the Result

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