The Low Impact Of Independent Preferences In Labor's 2025 Federal Win

At the 2025 federal election, more votes that were 1 One Nation or 1 Trumpet of Patriots (combined) finished up with Labor candidates as preferences than votes that were 1 Independent!

Among the various forms of whinging and nonsense I continue to see on social media about the election result, one of the commonest is that Labor were elected on "Greens and teal preference deals".  

Labor were, of course, ahead on primaries in 86 seats and would have won in any system (though well short of a majority without single-seat electorates) but the blaming of teals for the strength of their win reflects some limitations of looking at overall preference flows instead of examining the results seat by seat.

If one looks at the overall 2PP flow by party it appears that independents (particularly teals) were a huge contributor to the size of Labor's 2PP win and so must have had a lot to do with them winning so many seats.  After Labor's 5.35 million primaries and 1.67 million preferences from the Greens, independents (756K preferences) are easily the third biggest contributor, way ahead of the minority of preferences assigned to Labor from One Nation candidates (253K).  

But this is deceptive because a lot of Independent votes were cast in the 17 divisions where Labor failed to make the final two, or the six divisions where Labor made the final two against an independent.  There were a further 12 divisions where Labor made the final two against the Greens, Centre Alliance or One Nation, so in these cases an independent vote that flowed to them as 2PP may not have actually reached them.

The overall indicative 2PP flow from indepedents was according to the AEC 756,196 to 369,855.  This is likely to in fact be a slight underestimate of the flow to Labor based on the AEC's estimation methods for Bradfield.   (Had independent preferences split evenly, Labor's official 2PP would have been 53.84%, which is still a massive margin.) 

However this is where independent votes actually ended up in the seat-by-seat actual preference distributions:

Remained with original independent 619,564 (55.0%)

Labor 294,426 (26.2%)

Coalition 168,775 (15.0%)

Different independent 35,153 (3.1%)

Greens 7,217 (0.6%)

KAP 916 (0.1%)

So although Labor got a 386K legup over the Coalition from independents in the indicative 2PP, only 125,651 of that gain actually reached them (and some of that did so in seats where the Coalition were already out).  It's also worth noting that in seats that finished as classic seats, the independent to Labor flow was only 63.5%.  It was as high as 69.4% on a 2PP basis in those seats where 2PP did not determine the result - mostly these were votes for independents whose preferences never went anywhere.

And, as noted above, the number of independent preferences that actually reached Labor (294,426) is easily exceeded by the combined number that actually reached them from One Nation (244,177) and Trumpet of Patriots (98,934).  That is although the number of independent preferences that notionally reached Labor on the 2PP is more than twice as many as for these parties - because most of those notional preferences to Labor never went anywhere.  And it is although the overall 2PP preference flows from these parties (25.5% and 36.2%) were mostly not to Labor.  

In a seat sense, there were two seats where Labor won and would not have won had preferences from a specific independent split 50-50, this however being up from the 2022 figure for the same thing which was none at all.  These seats were Menzies and Solomon.  In the case of Menzies however the preferences came from voters for a former Labor candidate Stella Yee, who was not identified with the teal movement.  This leaves Solomon where the preferences of voters for Climate 200 endorsed candidate Phil Scott saved Labor from losing the seat.  But that's not to even say Labor holding the seat had anything to do with Scott running. Had he not run many of those voters would have voted Labor, or Greens with preferences to Labor, anyway, and it could well be Labor would have still held it.  

In fact the number of seats where Labor won but would have lost had teal voter preferences split 50-50 is smaller than that for the Liberal Party (both Wills and Melbourne would have been won by the Greens with an even split of Liberal preferences).  There were fourteen seats (including both Menzies and Solomon) where Labor would have lost had Green voter preferences split 50-50 and five where some combination of multiple candidates including the Greens splitting 50-50 would have caused them to lose.  However it should be clear enough by now that nothing any party could have possibly done in the 2025 campaign would have stopped most Green voters preferring Labor.  And furthermore, most Labor seat wins where they would have lost had Greens preferences split 50-50 are simply a result of Green voter choices not "preference deals", given that only about 15% of Greens voters follow how to vote cards and this number would probably have been more like 2% if the Greens had decided to preference a Dutton-led Coalition.  Something else to note here is that there were also seven Coalition winners who would have lost had preferences from some individual party or some combination of parties not helped them.  

There were a number of cases - mainly just because there were more teal-type candidates running than in 2022 (when teal preferences were only seen in about one seat that Labor won) - where independent preferences significantly fattened Labor's margin in a seat.  The most notable was Dickson, where Labor made a larger net gain off the preferences of Ellie Smith (IND) that they did from the Greens.  But even had Labor made no gain off Smith they would have still beaten Peter Dutton by 4405 votes anyway.  (The massive 82% flow from Smith is comical in view of Labor complaining about her not recommending preferences to anyone).  

Those banging on about "teal preference deals" often ignore the fact that teal independents (like the Smith example just cited) often refuse to recommend preferences to anyone anyway.  As with the 2022 election, what went on with teals in 2025 was a distraction to the Coalition and a sideshow to the mechanics of the election result.   

Poll Roundup: What Do We Do With A Split Coalition ... Or A Rampant One Nation?

2PP Aggregate 53.5-46.5 to ALP (-1.3 since end of 2025, +0.6 in two weeks)

Shadow-2PP Trend Estimate 54.3-45.7 to ALP vs One Nation.  One Nation has made accelerating gains.

Labor would easily win an election "held now", probably losing several seats

The last few weeks have been remarkably messy ones for Australian politics- and poll-watchers.  Following the Bondi massacre the Opposition pressured the Government to recall parliament as soon as possible to pass measures in response, only to end up wedging itself when it got what it asked for, with the result that the National Party has again broken away.  So should analysts and pollsters still treat these parties as the same entity, and if we don't, what especially do we do in the case of Queensland where Liberal and National party room members run in separate seats under the Liberal National banner?  In the meantime, One Nation has exceeded the ex-Coalition's total in three of the ten polls released so far this year and tied it in two others.  An election right now would make Queensland 1998 look somewhat orderly, with all manner of messy multi-way seats and probably One Nation making fifty or more 2CPs with perhaps something like twenty wins - though this stuff is very hard to model.  So is it time for a Labor vs One Nation "two party preferred" figure as well?

What do we even call a Labor vs One Nation national figure?  It's not a two-candidate-preferred because that is a term that refers to a single seat, while the term "two-party preferred" is reserved for Labor vs the major conservative force of the time (well, by the next election that might be clearly One Nation, but we're not there yet).  I've decided for now to call it a "shadow 2PP".

I decided that it was time to try to model an indicative national Labor vs One Nation figure.  I previously wrote about issues with modelling the ALP vs ON shadow-2PP here. I've used that work as the basis for a preference formula in which, all else being equal, One Nation does slightly worse on excluded party preferences vs Labor than the Coalition do (although they do do better on some groupings, such as non-Independent Others).  (Note also Antony Green's figures for Queensland 2017 and 2020 here, with flows to One Nation in the high 70s - as these would be among One Nation's strongest seats it again figures the overall flow would be somewhat lower).

That is, however, on the basis that preference flows stay the same as what I think they were in 2025 - that might not happen, in either direction.  At this stage, I don't have the time (or to be honest the motivation after how pleased I was to have got the normal aggregation design finished!) to do a full aggregation of Labor vs One Nation but it did occur to me that I could run conversions for all the polls released so far, and then of course that I could graph them.

The result (above) startled me for its similarity to the projection graphs I did a few years back for the Voice referendum, in that Labor's shadow-2PP vs One Nation at this stage shows much the same accelerating decline pattern as the Voice Yes vote did.  Now I am not (on current evidence!) saying that Labor are going to be smashed 60-40 by One Nation at the next election but that graph should be at least a little bit of a pause for thought for ALP triumphalists crowing about the split state of the conservative parties.  While the combined Liberal/National/One Nation primary vote is very badly split, it has also been quietly going up, and it is now averaging 45.8% in polls this year compared to just 38.2% at the election - something that seems to not have been generally noticed.  Some of One Nation's poll gains - perhaps as much as three points - are clearly coming from Labor.  

If anyone thinks that accelerating shadow-2PP poll gains for One Nation vs Labor are going to suddenly stop, or even that the more or less linear increase in the ON primary vote will not continue, well that could be true but I would ask them on what basis (apart from a Liberal leadership change - maybe!) is now the time to be so lucky.  This is especially as this sort of accelerating pattern can (and in the Voice's case I believe did) result from a sort of organically spreading social permission.  People who are resistant to an idea because they fear that it is socially unpalatable may become more open to it once they know that someone who they respect holds that same idea.  Voting no to the Voice and preferring One Nation to Labor are in a similar boat here because both carry the taint of perceived racism.  

It might be argued that with so many seats that would be a mess off the current voting intentions neither a conventional 2PP nor a shadow-2PP are going to be much use, but I don't agree.  For sure they should be treated with a great deal of caution for seat predictions but if Labor remains well ahead on both scores then the likelihood is that Labor wins a majority, probably a smaller one than normal because of cases where one conservative force has strong local support and can beat it.  If Labor is much worse placed versus one of the opponents than the other, that's probably because the better placed opponent is well ahead of the other on primaries and is more or less the serious opposition, so that measure is likely to be a good predictor of Labor's fortunes.  If Labor is 50-50 or so vs both, that would probably result in enough combined wins for the conservative parties to push Labor into minority. Below that some kind of combined right majority becomes likely.  

Pollster responses so far have varied.  In their most recent offerings now:

* DemosAU and apparently Essential have ditched two-party preferred.  DemosAU will instead be issuing seat total projections based off its quarterly MRPs.  These are distinctly on the bullish side for One Nation (even after adjusting their Coalition flow downwards) with the most recent finding the National Party could be reduced to only a few seats.  No wonder the Nationals are terrified.

* YouGov and Fox&Hedgehog have offered both conventional 2PP and Labor vs One Nation

* The most recent polls from Resolve, Morgan, Freshwater and Newspoll have continued traditional 2PP and have not offered an alternative figure (but I understand at least one of these to be working on one)

Morgan is (as it has long done, albeit often with a lag in publishing results) splitting off the standalone Nationals in its primary figures.  YouGov is splitting off both the standalone Nationals and the Queensland LNP.  At the moment I am simply adding together all parts of the former Coalition for aggregation purposes, and maintaining the usual approach to 2PP in which whichever is the strongest of the Liberals and Nationals is the 2PP candidate in each seat.  Things will get messy if we get to an election where the Liberals and Nationals are running as distinct parties and against each other in Queensland (and more than usual elsewhere), but that is a long way off if it happens at all.  

Ye Olde 2PP

This article will be long enough without going into particular polls in detail but here is an overall summary of where things stand on the Labor vs Coalition front.  Only one poll, the December Resolve, was released between the Bondi terror attack and the end of 2025.  Probably Labor was already below 54 2PP at that time, but because of the lack of data it wasn't obvious.  This was quickly corrected once polls resumed early in January with 53-47s from DemosAU Fox&Hedgehog (my conversions 52.6 and 52.8) and a 52 from Morgan (51.8).  A Newspoll 55-45 (55.4) cancelled out a very bad Resolve 51-49 (51.2).  Newspoll looked a bit of an outlier and has on average been a point better for Labor than my aggregate in this term, but the general conventional-2PP run of polls since has been mostly pretty strong for Labor:  Mogan 53.5/53 (respondent/last-election) (53.0) and 56.5/54.5 (54.1), DemosAU no official 2PP (54.2), YouGov 55 (54.6), Freshwater 53 (52.6) and Essential no 2PP (51.6) as the weakest.

All up my aggregate suggests Labor's position vs the "Coalition" may if anything have improved slowly over the last few weeks - but this is mainly because the "Coalition" vote is still crashing.

Leaderships

I also don't see the need here to repeat figures readily available at Poll Bludger but it's obvious Anthony Albanese has taken a modest personal hit with his net satisfaction ratings down into the negative teens (still far from awful historically, indeed every PM after Gorton has at some stage been polling worse).  There is a lot of variation in results for Sussan Ley who has terrible net ratings in Newspoll (-28) and YouGov (-31) but is beating Albanese on net rating in Freshwater (-5) and Resolve (-7).  Both these polls displayed similar behaviour at times in the last term with Peter Dutton.  Nothing much is happening on Better Prime Minister.

There has been more interest (and more complaining) re the entry of Pauline Hanson into these figures.  While Hanson has often been polled in the past, it has usually been in a net likeability context not a performance context.  Some confusion has arisen this year from some people (and a certain errant twitter AI account) comparing Hanson's net likeability scores with the approval ratings of Albanese and Ley.  DemosAU did ask a question to provide a net rating on the same footing for all three leaders but it was "What is your opinion of?" and not a specific question about performance; this may explain why Ley had a massive neutral rating.  (Albanese 27 positive 41 negative, Ley 15-33 and Hanson 35-40).

DemosAU's addition of Hanson to the preferred PM race (Albanese 39 Hanson 26 Ley 16) drew some complaints along the lines that Hanson is a Senator and not a putative Prime Minister and therefore shouldn't be included in such a poll.  There's a general view that Senators can't really be Prime Ministers even though they technically can - practicalities around Question Time and the media focus on the House of Reps meant that Gorton immediately relocated and no other Senator has been seriously considered as a potential PM since.  However, this is One Nation we are dealing with here, they really do not care about conventions or how people expect parliament to operate.  They'd probably get a kick out of making Question Time unworkable or irrelevant and show me anyone who would even claim to care who has not spent at least fifteen years saying that Question Time is terrible.  If they did somehow get into government, and Hanson was still a Senator, and their will was to make her PM, then I'm sure they would find a way.  This debut for Hanson in these questions is very unflattering for Ley but it's not so long ago that Nick Xenophon led in a three-way preferred Premier for South Australia and wound up winning zero seats.  

The air of unreality

For some observers what is going on at the moment is quite hard to comprehend.  Walk down a proverbial average town street in Australia and, if the polls are right, sometime in the last eight months one in every six voters in that street has been Pauline Hanson-pilled.  Which one is it? Can this and soon more be true? 

One Nation?  That joke of a party famous for having around 80% of its MPs through its history leave or be kicked out or disqualified within a term, which has never won a House of Reps seat or any single seat electorate outside Queensland in its own right?  That lot would presume to govern?  For those who are used to Australian politics in isolation this is hard to comprehend.  It's also worth remembering that at state level One Nation has a long history of threatening to win a raft of seats and usually (except to a degree for Queensland 1998) tanking as they get in sight of voting day.  Polls often pick up the tanking but even final polls have sometimes overestimated the party (eg Queensland 2020).  

One reason One Nation bubbles have tended to burst in the past is that they are very prone to candidate malfunctions when someone is discovered to be beyond the pale for even them.  However if One Nation were to run into a federal election with consistent polling in the twenties or higher it is likely they would attract a more prominent calibre of candidate, including several more ex-Coalition defectors.  Perhaps this would also head off the sorts of candidates who have run as independents and dented the ON vote in certain seats in the past.  

The UK is an obvious comparison with the rise of Reform UK to the polling lead, but Reform got there off the back of a far more prolonged and agonising Tory implosion coupled with the new Labour government being completely on the nose too - both sides of establishment politics being terrible at the same time in a nation with more locally severe socioeconomic issues.  While Reform still lead for now, their polling has dropped off by about five points in the last few months and the Tories seem to be recovering a little, so even there there may have been a ceiling.  Australia has in the past seemed unusually immune to the widespread erosion of the establishment right by nativist insurgents but perhaps our time is finally here.  

Is a return to normal for the Liberals and Nationals only a leadership change away, or is it already too late?  We may find out the answer to this very soon.  The problem is that the Liberals shouldn't have made Ley leader in the first place, not because she was too moderate but because she wasn't up to it.  (I was giving her some credit for exceeding my low expectations on that front til she followed Sharri Markson down the Joy Division beatup rabbit hole).  But now if they remove her it looks like it will be a boys' club rolling the party's first female leader at the behest of the National Party because the Nationals are curled up in the corner by One Nation.  Some interesting weeks ahead.  

Dear Anti-Preferencers, November 21st For Australia Day !!!

Support for changing the date of Australia Day has really been on the skids in recent years.  Partly this has been because referendums have consequences and the failed sloppy Voice referendum push seems to have reduced interest in reconciliation generally.  Partly it's because the cost of living crisis that was especially acute during 2024 has created a strong sense of 'now is not the time' and that there are bigger problems than symbolic stuff that doesn't materially affect lives.  It's also likely that in the wake of the Bondi attack, there is an even stronger feeling that now is the time for 'coming together as a nation and not having that old argument again this year'.   As a possible fourth factor I wonder if support for Invasion Day agitation was stronger a few years ago just because the Coalition was in power.  

While a lot of the polling out there on this issue is of low quality and/or conflicted, polling for change the date has overall been in freefall in recent years and my estimate is that support for change could be down below 25% nationwide, from pushing 40% a few years ago.  (Resolve recently even had it down from 39-47 support-oppose to a pathetic 16-68 but I'm doubtful that the change has been quite that large. Morgan's SMS poll still had 39.5% for change on a yes-no basis, albeit after a question that asked if Jan 26 should be called "Australia Day" or "Invasion Day").    Whatever the exact numbers, Australia Day isn't going anywhere any time soon, and I cannot remember a time for decades when the change the date campaign seemed less visible.  

But things can change, and if there is to be a change in day someday, I find the alternatives so far suggested boring and lacking in spice.  January 1?  Already a holiday.  May 8?  Boganism!  And so on.  If Australia Day were to be moved my choice would be November 21st, to celebrate our great electoral history. This date would annoy people who don't like preferential voting.  They would be unable to "celebrate" that Australia Day without it telling them how much they've got this country wrong.  

In the final days of 2025 I continued to see a very high level of anti-preferencer fake patriot nonsense on twitter, even, for goodness' sake, on New Year's Eve.  The online fake patriot movement in Australia is characterised by three things:

* Affectations of patriotism (conspicuous flying of Australian flags in profiles etc. I am of course not saying nearly everyone who does this is a problem)

* Attacking preferential voting and wanting to replace it with first past the post 

* Liking Donald Trump and attempting to imitate his style and that of the MAGA movement

I call these people who tick all these boxes fake patriots because preferential voting is an embodiment of the Australian ideal of a fair go.  One just can't love this country and think first past the post would be good for it.  The first past the post system subjects some voters to tactical dilemmas about whether their vote could be a wasted vote, but not others, and therefore it is unfair to voters. Support for first past the post by those claiming to be patriots is a betrayal of our proud history of enabling new candidates and parties to compete for seats on a fair footing without having their vote suppressed by the wasted vote problem.  The anti-preferencer movement is also fake patriotism because it is not really concerned with Australia's wellbeing or history at all and is far more interested in making us a colony of Trump.

Anti-preferencers commonly make false factual claims about recent elections won by Labor (and sometimes about those won by the Coalition, though for some reason those are far less common).  The most common among these are:

* That Labor only won the 2025 election because of preferential voting.  (In fact Labor was ahead on primaries nationwide and in 86 seats.)

* That Labor only won the 2025 election because voters do not understand preferential voting.  (The evidence is that while individual voters may get confused, overall those voters whose preferences matter actually do use the system to correctly indicate their preferences between at least the major parties - Greens voters very strongly preference Labor, One Nation voters strongly preference Coalition, etc)

* That Labor only won because of migrants it imported.  (Migrants who arrived since Labor was elected in 2022 are in general not citizens yet and therefore not voters.  This claim is also usually accompanied by vastly over the top claims about how strongly migrants vote for Labor anyway, most of them riffing off a throwaway Kos Samaras line in a right-wing podcast that was later walked back after being widely debunked).

* That One Nation are disadvantaged by preferences because the major parties gang up against One Nation to stop them from winning seats.  (The Coalition has reliably recommended preferences to One Nation in the vast majority of seats recently and their preferences strongly favour One Nation in the Senate.  In 2025 had One Nation pulled just 5.2% more from the LNP in Wright, they would have won the seat on LNP and minor right preferences from third on primaries off a primary vote of just 21.5%!)

No amount of evidence that first past the post would be wrong for Australia - a crude overseas import that would not give those proposing it anything they actually want - seems to deter these people.  Even as I write the One Nation vote has been rising and the Coalition has been getting over half the estimated preferences in some polls for the first time since forever.  Or if One Nation replaces the Coalition as the main anti-ALP party it too could get more than half the preferences.  We could see widespread three or even four cornered contests where only compulsory preferential voting stops Labor winning, say, a hundred seats off 30% of the primary vote!  

On contining to see anti-preferencers tweeting their nonsense in such great numbers I decided I would set a goal.  If the number of fake patriot accounts that I saw talking nonsense about the 2025 election or preferential voting stayed below a certain level by the end of January 25th then I would not release this article promoting an alternative date chosen to offend them.  

I did everything I could to give them any chance to stay under the limit.  I doubled the initial target score from 50 to 100.  I excluded tweets by or in reply to accounts I had blocked or that had blocked me.  I excluded any tweet where I could detect any realistic chance that the person was genuinely curious about how Labor turned 34.56% of the vote into 94 seats or where they might be a proportional representation supporter who was unwittingly spreading anti-preferencer talking points (this is a big problem!).  I excluded repeat offences by the same accounts.  I probably even lost count a few times.  

But it was all in vain, by January 19 my count had passed 100 with still a week to go.

One Australian who does not understand our great history of electoral fairness is one too many.  A hundred is a hundred too many, and there are way, way more than that. 

So why November 21?

On the great day of November 21 1918 the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 received royal assent, initiating nation-wide federal preferential voting in Australia and binning the first past the post system which had been producing such absurd results as this:

Swan at the time was a conservative electorate but the conservative vote was split between the Nationalists (forerunners of today's Liberals) and the Country Party of Western Australia (also known  as Farmers and Settlers).  This splitting under first past the post enabled Labor to win an undeserved seat.  When preferential voting came in, Nationalist preferences in 1919 were to flow 87.5% to the CPWA/F+S candidate John Prowse, causing him to win 58-42.  After this the seat was not even contested in 1922 or 1925.  It didn't return to Labor hands until a 1940 by-election, at which time Labor was led by a Western Australian and the then UAP-Country coalition was not far off becoming as big a mess as our alternately half-alive and dead one is now.

November 21 1918 was the day when Australia formally cast off our imperial legacy of a crap electoral system and showed that we could stand on our own feet as a democracy that cared about the vote of every voter.  We overcame the obstacles to reform that other countries are still tripping over a century later.  This is a proud thing in the history of our nation and deserves wide celebration.

Two extra things are impressive and worth celebrating here.  Firstly unlike many governments today that use minor distractions such as global pandemics as excuses to ignore or delay pressing electoral reform concerns (looking at you here Victorian Labor), the Nationalists under Billy Hughes managed to get this change done in the tail end of the First World War.  Secondly, when the new system was put to its first test at the Corangamite by-election on December 14 1918, for a system passed only weeks before it went off remarkably smoothly, with an informal vote of only 2.0% in a five-candidate race.  Moreover despite fears that votes might "leak" to Labor if voters did not understand the new system, a staggering 96% of preferences flowed to the Victorian Farmers candidate with the cyberpunky name, and at its first attempt the new system had worked, with a third-party gain from a major party.  When I first thought about writing this article I thought about proposing December 14 for Australia Day instead to commemorate said by-election but several days later noticed that was ... not a good idea. 

(I should also mention that the 1918 Act created block preferential voting for the Senate; the less said about that one the better.)

There are a few common myths about 1918.  The first is that the Nationalists did it to stop Labor winning whole elections.  At the time they had no need to; they were dominant having won 53/75 seats at the previous election.  The issue was about particular seats where proto-Country forces wanted to run against them without handing seats to Labor.

The second is that the Swan by-election nonsense caused the Hughes Government to pass preferential voting.  It may well have accelerated it, but in fact preferential voting had already been working its way through parliament (with the second reading debate commencing a few weeks before the by-election) after being taken to the people at the 1917 election.  

Oh and what about that flag thing?

While we are at it we could also make a very minor fiddle to our flag!  At age twenty in the Mercury's letter of the month (that was a thing) I wrote that we should "expel the cancerous spider that lurks in the corner of our lifeless soulless flag".  Now I know some people like my old stuff better than my new stuff, but these days I think it's great that our flag educates Australians about the mother country and we should educate them more! Like this:

I'm flabbergasted that people who claim to be patriots about our flag cannot be bothered following electoral politics in the country that inspires a whole quarter of it!  They seem to think that the only elections that exist are in Australia and the United States and they are not aware that in the UK in 2024 Labour under Keir Starmer won 411 out of 650 seats off a vote of 33.7%.  The most cursory awareness of UK elections would tell our incurious Trump-loving anti-preferencers that governments winning seat landslides off modest vote shares is not a preferential voting thing but is a general property of single seat electorates.  So that they cannot ignore this reality any longer I propose we stick it on the flag they claim to love and in the process become, I think, the first country to include pseph lessons to a foolish movement on our flag.  I will, of course, withdraw this doubtless very serious proposal when the anti-preferencer movement realises the error of its ways, shuts up and goes away.  

It's Time!

Anti-preferencers are almost always anti-immigration, but the funny thing is they don't realise how easily their xenophobic compliants about migrants apply to them.  

Like this: anti-preferencers who follow MAGA values need to realise this is not their country.  They are trying to bring in foreign ideas and conflicts that our nation does not share.  They associate in online ghettos and refuse to assimilate with people who understand how the voting system operates.  They are ignorant of Australia's electoral history, its heritage.  They refuse to learn our electoral language and cannot be trusted to have our country's values at stake. Above all their constant attempts at election denial - accompanied often by calling political opponents "retards" and worse - are a clear threat to social cohesion and in cases an obvious stochastic terrorism attempt against our leaders and electoral authorities.  These people are abusing electoral value pluralism to spread dangerous nonsense in our country.  

It is time for it to stop.  It is time for them to love preferential voting, or leave.  

What's the most federal electorates you have been to in a day?

A trip from Brisbane to Sydney in one day takes you through about 24 federal divisions.

This is a sequel to How many federal electorates have you visited?  The rules of that article don't count electorates one is just passing through for purely travel purposes, because you're not really visiting them as such.  This one is different.

For this article the challenge is to work out the most electorates you have ever been in in one day, excluding flying.  Any form of being effectively on the ground (or water) counts - driving, rail, walking, cycling, bus, boat if you are sailing through electorates with water boundaries and so on.  Flying doesn't count because flying over 14 extra seats in Sydney because your plane had to go around is just not interesting and unless you're paying insanely close attention to the flight tracker on a flight that has one you won't know which 14 anyway.  However, being on a plane that's on the ground for a stop en route is fine.  I also suggest defining "day" as a calendar day based on the current time in each electorate when passed through, but we could also count continuous trips within a 24 hour time period that don't include any overnight stopping.  

It didn't occur to me until I started looking at possible routes to collect lots of electorates that quite often major highways are electorate boundaries, so what to do about those?  There's no reason generally for the definition of an electorate to state exactly where on a highway the boundary falls, as nobody much lives in the middle of a highway.  I think it's best to count any electorate one travels along the defined road boundary of as a hit, otherwise we get people trying to determine whether their left hand broke the plane of Riverina while swerving to avoid a dead fox on the road, and so on.  (NB in some cases one might nick an electorate on the corner, a common route north-south through western Sydney does this with Fowler).  

As usual there's a question of redistribution vs current boundaries (it seems a little weird to say that one passed through Bullwinkel in 2010 since it didn't exist then) so people can count either the current boundaries or the boundaries at the time of the journey if (and it's a big if) they know what the latter actually were.

A way I've found to look up major journeys on this is to go to the Digital Atlas site, choose Layer and visualise data, choose Basic, click Add Layer, type Division in the search bar and add the electoral divisions layer, and one can also add layers like major roads or rail.  

The most productive route

I think the way quite a few people would be likely to get their highest score would be travelling in one day from Sydney to Brisbane or vice versa (actually, how many people these days do this?).  By my count this scores 24 on a centre to centre basis (typically Brisbane-Griffith-Bonner-Moreton-Rankin-Forde-Fadden-Moncrieff-Wright-McPherson-Richmond-Page-Cowper-Lyne-Paterson-Newcastle (just!)-Hunter-Dobell-Robertson-Berowra-Bradfield-Bennelong-Warringah-Sydney).  It would be easy to add on several at either end while coming from, eg the northern suburbs of Brisbane to the southern or western suburbs of Sydney, and so get into the 30s.  Sydney to Melbourne I get as a base score of only 19.  

Do people actually do Brisbane to Melbourne in one day (bypassing a few Sydney seats and collecting around 38 divisions)?  Apparently yes, a search for people doing it found a post on the Australian Ford Forums (of which I am actually a member, as a result of fallout from a failed false flag troll attack against Chesschat) where someone reported doing it in a Mazda 3 no less.  Might there be someone out there who has actually scored 50 in a day, or more?   

The highest score I can find for myself since age 15 (which I also used as a cutoff in the other article) is a mere 16 electorates, mostly comprising a long-ago train trip from Sydney to Maclean; I believe that day all up included (by present boundaries) Bradfield, Warringah, Sydney, Grayndler, Reid, Bennelong, Berowra, Robertson, Dobell, Hunter, Shortland, Newcastle, Paterson, Lyne, Cowper and Page.

Collect the full set in Tasmania!

One of the things that made me write this article was wondering a few years ago whether I'd ever been in all five Tasmanian electorates in one day.  I've certainly had days where I've been in all except Braddon or all except Franklin, and I think also all except Bass, but I'm actually not sure if I've ever been to all five in one day.

The main reason for this is that I live in Clark.  The main road to Braddon goes through Lyons into Braddon without passing into either Franklin (because it's partly to the south and partly on the wrong side of the river) or Bass (because Launceston is bypassed).  So typically a trip to the north-west for me only scores three. 

It's fairly common that en route to Braddon (or back) I've had reason to divert to one of Franklin or Bass.  For instance the intercity buses used to sometimes go through Launceston (Bass) instead of bypassing it.  Also I've been on trips where the driver detoured via Richmond (and after that through Franklin) on the way back to Hobart for a change of scene or to avoid bad drivers on the Midlands Highway, and sometimes someone might for some reason drive along the eastern side of the river instead of the west.  What I can't remember is if I ever diverted to both on the same day.  

In October 2023 I did fieldwork on King Island (Braddon) where I travelled by vehicle to Launceston (Bass) then flew to King Island.  If I had gone over to the Franklin side of the river on the same day I would have collected all five, but though I was working with colleagues who are based in Franklin, I may have just got a lift directly from Clark, so I doubt I did so.  There have been many other near misses like this.

For a voter living in the western/southern half of Franklin, a trip to Braddon goes through Clark and thus the voter scores all five if they happen to duck into Launceston on the way.  

I doubt many people would have cause to collect the full set in South Australia, but what is the most one would reasonably score? I suspect more than seven would be very unusual?  In WA, I've personally scored ten in one day (O'Connor (Pemberton) to Moore via Forrest) and I imagine one might get one or two more, but not easily more than that.  I expect a fair few ACT residents would at some stage have had cause to go through all three ACT electorates in one day.  And so on.  

One might also collect sets with unusual omissions (most seats in a state without going through a particularly well connected one).  For instance in Tasmania all except Lyons (this might be done by flying from Franklin to Bass then travelling to Braddon or vice versa, but highly unusual!)  I believe I've never done this, and have also never done all except Clark.  

Some other variants could include the most electorates visited by a slower than normal mode of travel (walking, cycling, horse etc).  Oh and I had this question: can you be asleep at the time?  Yes, so long as you're not driving.  

Important Medical Disclaimer

This site does not encourage deliberate record-setting attempts for this feat. 

Psephosphere Leaderboard

Here are my estimates of some high scoring totals claimed (or estimated by me) in response to this article:

34  Brisbane to Canberra

32 Jervis Bay to Brisbane

28 eastern Melbourne to lower North Shore Sydney

26 Sydney to Warrnambool 

26 Bronte to Mornington Peninsula

Why Hunter 2025 Can't Be Used To Do Last-Election Labor vs One Nation Preference Flows

With the very rapid rise of One Nation in recent national primary voting intention polling we are starting to see some pollsters offer a national alternative Labor-vs-One-Nation two-party figure.  DemosAU did this in its national Jan 5-6 poll where it found One Nation tied with Labor 50-50 while Labor led the Coalition 52-48, this off primaries of Labor 29 Coalition 23 One Nation 23 (more on that later) Greens 12 others 13.  A newish outfit curiously polling on the same dates, Fox&Hedgehog (founded post the 2025 election by a former Peter Dutton staffer) reported 56-44 to Labor vs One Nation off fairly similar primaries of Labor 29 Coalition 25 One Nation 21 Greens 14 others 11, compared to 53-47 for Labor vs Coalition.  So DemosAU has One Nation two points more competitive than Labor on a head to head with Coalition basis while Fox&Hedgehog has them three points worse.  (I'll add that by my last election preferences 48% 2PP for Coalition is pretty generous on the published DemosAU breakdowns, I get 47.4 as the average for their primaries.)

DemosAU attempted to use last-election preferences by using the flow in the seat of Hunter 2025 (the only federal case ever of a Labor vs One Nation finish) to model Coalition to One Nation flows, by assuming the Greens to One Nation vs Labor flow would be the same as the Greens to Coalition vs Labor flow, and also by assigning flows from Others 50-50 between Labor vs One Nation "As the composition of Others is not known".  (That last bit did strike me as a little curious unless they were also doing the same thing for Labor vs Coalition, given that the 2PP flow from others in 2025 was about 54.7% to Labor).  Fox&Hedgehog simply used respondent preferences.  

I happened yesterday to see a widely viewed episode of the YouTube Sloan Zone channel from last week that absolutely blasted DemosAU for using flows from Hunter to model nationwide flows of Coalition preferences to One Nation vs Labor.  (I should note the Hunter flow used by DemosAU was 82.9% to ON, not 88% as stated at one point in the video.  Also, the poll wasn't commissioned at all and was self-initiated).  Seeing this video and a high level of interest in this poll generally in online comments since it came out reminded me that I'd been meaning to crunch some numbers and try to get to the bottom of how representative Hunter really is or isn't.  So Hunter 2025 is the only seat to have produced this matchup in federal history, does that mean all we're left with is extremely wild guesses and people seeing what they want to see?  No of course it doesn't.  We can examine Senate preference flow data!

A standard relationship in House of Reps preference flows is that all else being equal if a candidate has polled a higher than normal primary vote in a booth, they will also receive a better than average preference flow in that booth.  Not every seat displays this pattern but it is so reliable that I use it every federal election to catch and draw attention to data errors in the booth counts.  It also tends to work at seat level too.  

So I went through every seat in NSW for the 2025 federal election and recorded a statistic that would combine the Senate strength of One Nation vs Labor in a given seat, which was (ON primary)/(ON+ALP primary) as a percentage.  And as a potentially dependent variable I found the above the line flow of Coalition preferences to One Nation vs ALP, with exhaust disregarded, using David Barry's Senate Preference Explorer.  (The very low rate of Coalition below the lines in NSW meant I didn't bother with the extremely fiddly business of including them.)  

Hunter is a very strong seat for One Nation but it's also a strong seat for Labor, so based on the usual relationship it should have a highish Coalition flow to One Nation but not among the very highest.  And that is what I got.  The relative One Nation vs (Labor + One Nation) primary vote strength figure ranged from 4.0% in Grayndler to 35.0% in Parkes, with a NSW-wide figure of 14.6% and a Hunter figure of 25.7%.  The One Nation share of Coalition preferences vs Labor ranged from 56.4% in Chifley to 91.5% in Page, with a NSW-wide figure of 78.3% and a Hunter figure of 86.2%.  The latter is reasonably similar to the Hunter Reps flow from Coalition to One Nation of 82.9% so all else being equal it's likely that the statewide Reps Coalition to One Nation flow would be several points lower than that, and probably quite similar to the statewide One Nation to Coalition Reps flow of 74.2%.

Here's a graph showing how this relationship operates across different NSW seats.  Seats where the primary Reps Coalition candidate was a National are shown in green, with Hunter marked with an H.

I was a bit surprised by Richmond (the leftmost green dot) as I thought the dampening of the Labor primary by the huge Greens vote there might mean Labor did better on Coalition preferences than their primary vote implies, but it seems Richmond Coalition voters really don't like Labor!  Overall though there's not much evidence for any National Party specific effect (the rightmost blue dot is Liberal Sussan Ley's seat of Farrer) - it's more that Nationals tend to be the Coalition candidate in rural seats where One Nation is strong and Labor often weak, and the voters who vote Coalition in those seats tend to have attitudes in common with and preference One Nation.  Plenty of rural Nationals voters would in fact vote for a Liberal in their seat if there was one to vote for.

There is clearly a quite strong overall relationship between the relative Senate primary votes of the parties and their preference flows from the Coalition, and for that reason alone Hunter needs to be treated as unlikely to be typical in the Reps.  The vast majority of NSW seats sit quite close to the trendline here - I should mention the few that don't in the lower left of the graph; these are the western Sydney seats of Chifley, Greenway and Fowler - three seats where One Nation doesn't poll terribly on primaries but does attract very weak preference flows from the Coalition.  This might be down to lack of Coalition how to vote card handout effort but I think it could also be that Coalition supporters would be more ethnically diverse and more suspicious of One Nation in these seats.  Contrawise, the teal seats tend to have somewhat higher Coalition to One Nation flows than would be expected given their parlous ON primary votes (and parlous even in the NSW Senate contest, where there are no teals).  

One might also ask how the NSW Coalition to One Nation preference flow with exhaust removed compares to other states.  Here comes a surprise: NSW, not Queensland, is actually the highest!  NSW 78.3 Qld 77.3 Vic 73.9 WA 73.2 SA 72.5 NT 70.6 Tas 63.2 (and Tas probably even lower after adding BTLs).  National 75.6%.  I am cautious about drawing too much from this because each state has its own ballot paper draw for the Senate, but we should not be too surprised from that if the national Reps flow from Coalition to One Nation was down around the low rather than the mid 70s.

I should also add that I looked at the Greens Senate flow and Greens preferences actually flowed more strongly to Labor vs One Nation than they did to Labor vs Coalition in every state, by an average of around 3.5%.  (Victoria is particularly striking with Greens preferences splitting 87.54-2.47 to Labor vs One Nation with remainder to exhaust).  So it's quite possible the national Greens to Labor vs One Nation Reps flow would be over 90%.  There are some minor right parties (especially Trumpet of Patriots) which had much stronger Senate flows to One Nation vs Labor than to Coalition vs Labor, but a lot of the Reps "others" votes is actually independents who would probably display the reverse pattern, especially in teal seats.   

My best guess at a last election Reps flow is that One Nation would have got something like 72% of Coalition preferences, something like 9% of Greens and maybe if lucky the same 45.3% of Others that the Coalition got, and if that's right then by last-election preferences the DemosAU comes out about 54.2-45.8 to Labor and the Fox&Hedgehog poll at 55-45 (not too different to their respondent preferences estimate).  

A further note about Hunter is the Stuart Bonds factor.  Bonds is a local candidate who polled very strongly for One Nation in 2019 and 2025; they fell in a hole when he ran as an indie in 2022.  It's likely he attracts preferences from some Coalition voters who wouldn't normally preference One Nation.  On the other hand, polling based speculation that One Nation would come second in Hunter may have driven a level of strategic voting for One Nation by people who would normally vote National, and so some of the people who would have normally voted National with preferences to One Nation may have just voted straight for Bonds, whose Reps primary was over 2.5% above the party's Senate primary. My overall view is that these two factors roughly cancel out.  

But Everywhere Is Hunter Now?

I would say based on the above that there's very little doubt that the Hunter Reps flow to One Nation would be unrepresentative of national House of Reps flows.  It is probably even worse than respondent preferences (shudder).

The counter-argument that the Reps flow from Coalition to One Nation could be Hunter's 82.9% next election or even higher comes from the Reps voting intention numbers.  My figures above use a range of relative One Nation vote strengths from 4% to 35% but in the DemosAU poll they're at 44.2% of the combined Labor/One Nation vote!  If One Nation become waaaaay more popular, won't that mean their preference flow from the Coalition rises?  

I'm not really convinced that it will.  Firstly this sort of relationship works for predicting preference flows within a given election, not necessarily between elections.  Secondly if there is a massive swing to One Nation at the Coalition's expense then this probably means the Coalition is losing a lot of its right flank voters who were the most likely to preference One Nation anyway; those who remain might be more inner-city and more resistant to doing so.  Indeed there's an argument that the reason One Nation did not already surge more in the 2025 election was that Coalition supporters flirting with One Nation were held back by Peter Dutton being Coalition leader.  And thirdly, it's not clear the flow to One Nation keeps rising as the strength of the One Nation vote flies off the chart; it seems to max out on average somewhere around the high 80s, and there will always be some seats where the party still polls badly.  

But people are welcome to whatever opinion they like on how preferences will really flow to One Nation in a world where they're polling over 20%.  It's one thing to have those opinions and another to treat the Hunter flow as a credible 2025-election preference flow.  It's simply not.  

I mentioned at the top that I'd say more about the 23% for One Nation.  One thing that is notable about DemosAU so far is that for whatever reasons it tends to get somewhat lower major party primaries than other polls.  The combined 52% in this poll was the lowest ever for any released poll, beating a 57% which was also by DemosAU.  It may well be that the combined major party primary is now several points below the 2025 federal election and it may even be that we will be seeing combined major party primaries like 52% or lower more often.  But for the time being this pattern requires some caution about exactly how large One Nation support is.  We will know more on that score when the more major pollsters return from the summer break.

PS (added 16 Jan): I should note that a risk with respondent preferences for modelling Coalition to One Nation flows is how to vote cards.  This is a bigger issue than for respondent preferences in Labor vs Coalition contests.  Coalition how to vote cards have quite high follow rates (around 40-45%) and at the 2025 election the Coalition recommended preferences to One Nation above Labor almost everywhere, exceptions being Banks, Bennelong, Chisholm, Goldstein, Kooyong, Menzies, Reid (and the ACT where One Nation didn't run).  There's a potential based on that for respondent preferences to underestimate the flow from Coalition to One Nation by something like 10 points, which at current polling levels is worth about 2 points to the bottom line (slightly undercut by a reverse of the same effect with the Greens).  My suspicion is that the Coalition voters who do follow the card are however at the conservative end and would be more likely to preference One Nation anyway so the impact may be not as large as this.    

This Person And Why They Are Wrong: Episode 1, Wasted Vote Guy

 

The gloriously cooked tweet above reminded me of a series I'd been intending to start where now and then I would cover someone known in the online psephosphere who has a particular gimmick that I haven't previously addressed in detail.  The rules for inclusion in this series are:

1.  the person in question needs to be a published author on elections and not just a rando twitter pest  (though this first one is really scraping the barrel on the first bit) 

2.  they need to have some defining pet argument or recurring MO that makes covering what they do in one article worthwhile and effective.

3. they need to be someone who I've not already written multiple articles debunking, so no Dennis Shanahans will feature in this series.  

I should note here that the subject of this article has written Substack articles unsuccessfully criticising my comments about his nonsense on multiple occasions.  (This did come after I blocked him on Twitter in May 2022 for bogus triumphalism and misrepresenting my arguments - he not long after deleted his side of that exchange.) He may be small fry, but from time to time I do come across someone who has taken his eccentric claims seriously.  Often these are well-meaning people who do share genuine concerns about the under-representation of the Greens in the House of Reps and just don't realise that this particular version of those concerns is silly.

Our subject here has been known under various usernames including djrobstep, wheelreinvent and similar, but in offline discussions he often just gets called "that wasted vote guy" or words to that effect.  The extremely blunt style with which he's pursued his argument on twitter over the years (though not so much in the last six months or so) is instantly recognisable, even when somebody else is describing it.  It has emerged in recent years that wasted vote guy is Robert Lechte.  He was published in Jacobin on his pet subject and then the editors of Crikey chose to put him in a cage match (shamelessly dubbed "Friday Fight") with William Bowe.  He doesn't usually use his full name and I'm not going to either; I'm going to keep calling him wasted vote guy (WVG for short) for the rest of this episode. 

WVG is a fanatical proportional representation supporter, but one who serious adherents tend to think gives it a bad name.  Aside from his argument being an unsound misapplication of theoretical concepts (proof that taking electoral theory articles on Wikipedia seriously will certainly rot the brain), there's another core problem with his output.   While he will sometimes say that preferential voting is much better than first past the post, he often attacks preferential voting with language that seeks to scandalise.  It's as if he wants to have his cake and eat it too by on the one hand claiming that our system is really terrible and corrupt and on the other hand trying to not appear stupid enough to miss the massive daylight between it and first past the post.   

The primary claim WVG makes is that most of the votes cast in House of Reps elections and other single-seat elections are "wasted".  Where this departs from a common argument made by PR advocates about the number of votes that end up with the loser, is that he also includes votes that end up with the winner over and above the loser's 2PP tally, which he refers to as excess.

Different conceptions of "wastage"

PR advocates who refer to unrepresented votes for the loser as "wasted" are using a term that also has a specific meaning in criticising first past the post and PR systems with threshholds.  That meaning is important and different and in my view the term should be largely reserved for that context.  

In first past the post, any vote for a candidate who does not finish in the top two in the seat not only has no effect on who wins the seat but also has no effect on the margin.  In terms of how much the winner won by, this vote may as well not have existed and the voter may as well not have bothered voting.  This creates a strategic dilemma for the voter thinking of voting for a candidate who appears unlikely to finish in the top two.  Should they vote with their heart and risk wasting their vote on the third placed finisher and thereby perhaps helping the nastier of the leading two candidates to win?  Or should they sell out and vote strategically for the more palatable of the expected top two, perhaps at the risk that if their ideal candidate does better than expected they might help the mediocre candidate beat the good candidate, or even cause the bad candidate to beat both?   It's in fact impossible for even expert level voters armed with polling-based models to be able to predict vote shares accurately enough to be sure of making the best strategic choice. The fact that this strategic dilemma applies to quite a lot of voters but nowhere near all means that first past the post discriminates between voters and means that it is a violation of what should be considered basic rights to equal treatment.  There may be excuses for some countries that have it to keep it, but there is no excuse for any country that has ditched it to go back.

In contrast, when some PR advocates try to call the votes that end up with the loser (or exhausted in a system where that's possible) "wasted", all they mean is that those votes did not finish up with anyone who won a seat.  This differs from FPTP in that there is not a "wasted vote problem" that subjects a voter to said tactical dilemma; it's just the case that elections have winners and losers, and single-seat systems have a lot of votes that are for, or in Australia's case finish with, losing candidates.

A better term to avoid confusion is "unrepresented" - in a PR system a much higher proportion of votes do end up directly with someone who wins than in any single seat system.  In 2025, on average the 2CP winner of each Reps seat finished up with 59.5% of the preferences in that seat and the other 40.5% finished up with the loser.  This figure doesn't change a great deal between elections.  In contrast in a Senate count it's normal for about 84% of vote values to finish up with a winner.  (In fact the proportion of voters whose votes at least partially contribute to electing someone is higher than 84%, and the proportion of voters whose votes entirely do so is lower, but never mind that for now.)  PR systems that use a very low quota can have even lower "unrepresented" vote levels than the c. 16% in Senate, though many such systems use threshholds that tend to result in about 10% of voters voting for parties that don't win a seat (these votes are then "wasted" just like votes for uncompetitive candidates in FPTP).

I actually don't think this unrepresented vote argument is a valid argument against our Reps system anyway. In a party system it's effectively a junk statistic.  It's true that about 40% of votes habitually don't end up with a seat winner, but in the case of votes for losing major party candidates there will (except in WA 2021 style wipeouts) be plenty of members of the party elected elsewhere, and the party may even win.  Every preference that reaches a major party that loses the seat contest in at least the competitive seats is a vote where the voter played a role in making the winning party work for that seat, which may in turn have helped the party that lost that seat to win elsewhere.  For some voters, not electing a specific major party candidate in their seat will seriously affect their view of the success of their voting experience, but the vast majority will care far more about the overall result.   The more effective argument for PR - which is not to say there are no counter-arguments - is overall disproportionality in single-member districts.   The leading party (in a close election both leading parties) gets a lot more seats than its vote share while minor parties with dispersed but reasonable support win few if any.  

Your Vote For The Winner Was Wasted??

Where wasted vote guy departs from the usual pro-PR complaint about votes that don't end up with the winner is that his conception of "wasted votes" includes many votes for the winner as well!  Specifically he regards the number of votes the 2PP winner gets above what they would have needed to beat the loser by one vote as "wasted", so if one side wins a seat 60-40, then he calls the 40% for the loser and also 20% from the winner's 60% "wasted", for a total of 60% supposedly wasted.  In optional preferential voting he includes all the exhausted votes as "waste" as well.

Now the first problem here is that this is simply absurd.  Someone who voted for the seat winner in our system is not going to think that their vote was wasted just because they could have voted for the other side and the result would have been the same.  They could (mileage varies) feel their vote for the winner was pointless if they live in an extremely safe seat where the result was never at any stage in doubt, but that's a smaller subset of the supposed wasted excess.  Victory for someone who really cares about their seat result is a collective experience and a win is a win is a win, especially if it's anywhere near a close one.  

There are some systems where a voter for the winner might have a genuine regret - if corrupt boundary drawers had deliberately put that voter in a seat their side was going to win anyway to stop them having more impact somewhere else.  The concept of wastage is useful in assessing deliberate gerrymandering of that sort (see below) but this does not happen in our system.  When one of the majors from time to time does slightly better than the other in terms of the point on the 2PP pendulum at which the two would break even on 2PP, this is because its vote is more efficiently distributed - through strategic, policy and campaign choices as well as personal vote effects, it just happens to be outdoing its opponent in bang for buck.  It is not because of any form of rigging.

In trying to avoid the absurdity of identifying individual "wasted votes" for winners, WVG has previously claimed that winning votes are "fungible", so that you know there are a certain number of wasted winning votes but nobody in particular's winning votes were identifiably wasted.  However WVG has also recently, perhaps out of rustiness as he's not been very active lately, claimed that "[..] 60% of voters receive literally zero representation (conceptually their votes are thrown in the bin due to being losing/excess winning single member votes)".  Well sure, if your concepualisation is daft and serves no purpose other than to prop up your own hostility to our system.  

A far more sensible way to look at it - and much more in keeping with WVG's "water" analogy - would be the way surpluses are distributed in the Senate.  When a candidate polls over a quota on primaries in the Senate every vote for the winner contributes an equal part of its value to electing that candidate, and the remainder of every vote is surplus to that candidate's requirements and flows on.  Likewise in the Reps, every voter whose vote contributes to the winner's election has equally helped the winner to win, and no winning voter is unrepresented.  As with a surplus over quota, it only makes sense here to talk about a surplus of total value over what is required.  It does not make any sense at all to say that there were any individual votes for the winner that did not contribute to the overall result.

A further issue I have raised with WVG's "wasted" mathematics is that if one assumes that all voters who voted formally were always going to do so, the excess in a compulsory preferencing election needs to be halved, because in that case if the voter didn't preference the winner they would preference their opponent, a net change of -2 to the margin.  

Herpetpsephology Fail!

As if dragging in the language of "wasted votes" from anti-FPTP theory is not bad enough, WVG also tries to pretend that the maintenance of our current single member system is a form of "gerrymandering".  The electoral map amphibian that is the gerrymander is widely misidentified in Australia (often being used to refer to malapportionment, for instance) so he is hardly unusual in this.  Gerrymandering is actually the manipulation of electoral boundaries to deliberately achieve certain results.  It is classically used as a pejorative for cases where, given a population relatively evenly split between two parties, the mapmaker might create five seats that fairly narrowly but comfortably enough favour one party and two that massively favour the others.  (It should be noted here that in some cases this kind of process can be used as a force for good - if an area too heavily favours one party it is sometimes good to draw a district that favours the minority so that they get some representation rather than none.)

Wasted vote guy has run a completely tinfoil (and IMO not completely intellectually honest) argument in which parties that vote to maintain the current Reps system are supposedly "engaged in the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage".  In fact they're not manipulating the boundaries, they're simply preserving a system that has that many boundaries, and that same number of boundaries could be put anywhere within practicable reason and WVG would still complain and allege it was all a wasted vote plot.  

A further point here is that WVG in 2023 complained about the Nationals and teals doing so well in seat terms relative to their vote, but failed to mention that this is not only down to concentration of support but is also down to both these forces not running everywhere and, in the Nationals' case, being shielded from a potentially effective competitor (the Liberals) by the latter's voluntary withdrawal from nearly all the seats they contest.  

PR Obsessives For First Past The Post!

Another characteristic of WVG is the way he quite often flirts with anti-preferencer talking points.  The tweet depicted on this thread is an example (suggesting Albanese didn't really win, making a big fuss about Labor's modest primary vote and attempting to stir up contempt for the Prime Minister) but the Jacobin article contained others.  Despite him being outraged by me pointing out that he was pushing FPTP tropes, he did in fact in his Jacobin article claim that the Coalition would have won in 2022 under first past the post (they only led on primaries in 73 seats, which might or might not have been enough to cobble a minority government together, and would most likely not have even won all of those with strategic voting at play).  

He also said that "when used in combination with single-member electorates, it nevertheless creates a mechanism that reinforces the two-party duopoly on power by funneling minor-party votes back to major ones." (This is not true, it is the single-member electorates by themselves that are the issue, preferences tend to counteract it).  

Finally the "so-called illegitimacy" comment deserves a response, because I've unfortunately seen a fair few left-wing posters retweet claims that Maduro was a legitimate President into my feed - no it does not follow that just because he was abducted by Trump he was therefore a good guy.  The Venezuelan Presidential election "won" by Maduro was a massive, blatant and comically inept case of vote figure fraud, as confirmed by rounding fraud evidence, collected vote total returns, polling, exit polling and the lack of satisfactory official figures.  Nobody who knows anything about elections would use "so-called" in this context.  

That's the end of episode 1 (beyond any updates I may add based on the inevitable reaction).  There are at least another two I have thought of that may appear in this series in the future!

Helen Burnet Quits The Greens!

Witnesses to political history

Tasmanian politics has seldom seemed sober for long since the day in 2023 when two Liberal backbenchers announced they were quitting the government over the Macquarie Point stadium and other things.  2025 was especially deranged but things did seem to have largely settled down once it became obvious that the Rockliff Government would continue in office as nobody could be bothered removing it.  Would 2026 be a sane and normal year in Tasmanian politics?  Nope, we were only on day two before the familiar cries of "go home #politas you're drunk" again rang out among politics tragics as the scene reeled from another shock announcement.  In this case, it's that Clark MHA Helen Burnet, a continuously elected Green at council or state level for a state record of over 20 years had fronted the media in the North Hobart wombat sculpture park to declare that she had quit the party.  There are now six independents in the parliament, the most since the 1909 adoption of statewide Hare-Clark.  

At local council level, it's a common career path for candidates to be elected as Greens then become independents (usually as the end of their first term approaches) but Burnet is the first of 18 state-level Tasmanian Greens MPs to leave the party while in state parliament.  Around the country such defections have not been all that rare and I count six others at state level and two in the Senate (one of these, Dorinda Cox, to Labor).  About half of those defections were triggered by personal controversies.  This also makes this the fourth term of state parliament in a row to witness a defection of some kind.  

2025 Site Review

At the end of each year I post a review of the activities on this site in that year and 2025 was a big one.  For the first time since I started this site in 2012 there were Tasmanian and federal elections in the same year.  Not only that but they were back to back with one being caused before the dust from the other had fully settled.  

The following graph tells the story of the year in terms of user numbers per week.  This spiked at over 20,000 during the federal election and there was another big lift for the Tasmanian state election.  There were also smaller lifts from the Victorian by-elections that seem like about five years ago and the WA state election.  From about September on though there wasn't much going on.

Site activity as measured in total events was up 98% on 2024, which was itself probably the second-busiest year in the site's history, making 2025 easily the biggest year to date, overtaking 2022.  (Comparing 2022 and 2025 exactly is difficult because of Google's disgraceful handling of the transition from Universal Analytics to Analytics 4).  

Australia's Worst Oppositions: Phase 2 Not-A-Poll Results

 Secular seasons greetings and goodwill to all readers.  As noted almost every year it's an almost annual tradition on this site to release something every Christmas Day.  Click the Xmas tag for previous random examples.  Why do I do this?  Partly it's a present for those who like Christmas, which in an often lethargic and non-religious fashion includes your host, but it's also a present for those who don't want to deal with this particular Christmas or even generally cannot stand Christmas and just wish it was a normal day when normal things happened.  And what could be more normal than the results of a Not-A-Poll in this website's sidebar?  Therefore, the campaign against compulsory Christmasing brings you again ... whatever this is.  

This one is a very token present to you all and I can report that there is something far more thoroughly wonky and distinctive re the 2025 federal election and other recent elections in the pipeline, but it's not ready yet.  In truth, I've spent the whole year trying to recover my spare time and the volume of 2025 election detail I'd like to be posting on here from that moment when just as I was getting other things back on track after the federal election came the initially bold and exciting news that Dean Winter had placed a no-confidence motion against the Rockliff Liberal Government on the notice-paper.