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.  

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.  

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.  

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.

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.