"Independent Australia": The Worst Website In Australian Politics?

In an article way back in 2015 I noted that the faux-progressive website "Independent Australia" was independent of "Quality control, consistency, accuracy and editorial skill."  Has it got better since?  Well no, if a recent attempt to soothe reader concerns about the One Nation surge is any guide, it seems to have got even worse.  I've decided to write a whole piece about this trainwreck to explain how abysmal IA's standards are and why nobody should be enabling their output in any way.

The most recent case is an article attributed - I have no idea whether correctly - to a Dr Jason Foster of RMIT.  Even the qualifications of the claimed author are something IA cannot seem to get straight.  The RMIT website states that Foster "holds a PhD in Media and Communication from RMIT, focusing on the representations of history in film and other media."  IA however claimed his PhD covered "media representations, politics and national consciousness", a claim that has since, without acknowledgement of error, been removed.

Before I deal with what is uniquely bad about this article and IA's failed attempt (?) to fix it, I will pick off a number of the low-hanging fruit, many of which are common myths about elections.

1. Pauline Hanson does not have to switch to the House of Representatives to become Prime Minister.  Although it is a convention that Prime Ministers sit in the lower house there is no reason why a disruptor party would need to follow that convention. indeed I can easily imagine One Nation - if they ever somehow won - keeping her in the Senate as PM and by so doing thumbing their nose at political class spectacles like House of Reps Question Time.   In fact, finding a way to have PM Senator Hanson would be totally on brand if One Nation somehow did win enough seats.  

2. Hanson would not have to run in "her own seat" of Blair (which I believe is no longer where she lives anyway).  A candidate can run for the Reps wherever they like (more's the pity) and there has already been widespread speculation that Hanson could contest Wright or Capricornia.  But even if Hanson did run in Blair, the argument given as to why she would struggle is wrong.  Firstly she would eliminate the LNP candidate and benefit from preference flows from them provided the LNP did not recommend preferences to Labor, and secondly Legalise Cannabis preferences would not flow as even nearly a block to Labor.  (There is considerable overlap between LCP and ON voters and very few LCP voters follow how to vote cards, so preference flows above the 60s and 70s from them are rare).  

3.  If Hanson ran and failed for the Lower House even that would not necessarily stop her becoming PM.  The party could in theory arrange for an incumbent to resign from the Senate then reinstate Hanson via the casual vacancy.  

4.  Nobody cares that Allegra Spender "only beat Liberal candidate Ro Knox by 129 first-preference votes" because we have preferential voting in this country and Spender's actual winning margin was 18,457 (58.3-41.7) after preferences.  Though if Redbridge's polling had been overly focused on Spender's seat in a way that mattered, that would only suggest One Nation were likely to do better nationwide than claimed, not worse.

5. "Nor is Farrer some magical One Nation win — Labor did not even bother to post a candidate." Sheesh, Labor has not got a 2PP over 45% in Farrer in a regular election in its 77 years of existence; if they had run in the by-election they would have embarrassed themselves even more than they did in Fadden and probably not even made the final three.

6. One Nation have not said they want to abolish preferential voting.  Rather, they want to switch from compulsory to optional lower house preferencing.

Where the article really goes beyond even extraordinary levels of clueless clutching at straws is in its attempt to discredit pollsters who have found One Nation to be capable of forming a solid Opposition bench for at least fifteen earth minutes.  Some now edited sections contained these errors (thanks to Leo Puglisi of 6 News for posting screenshots, of course Puglisi knew this was nonsense while IA's journalism PhD apparently did not):

The DemosAU claim was hilarious given that the DemosAU poll having One Nation on 13 seats was in fact from October-November 2025 and published nearly seven months after the election.  That bit's gone and replaced with a correction, but not what any outlet with any class would also include - an apology to the pollster.  

However as concerns the Redbridge claim, it has been replaced with this:

This is not only false, it is worse!  Redbridge did conduct polling of the seats of Wentworth and Parramatta in 2022, but everything else about those polls is wrong.  The polls had a combined sample size of 1735 (who would pay for an issue seat poll with an n of 3000?) and not only did they not predict anything about One Nation success at any election, but One Nation was not even listed as a party.  And anyone who clicks on the link can see what the 2022 poll actually is - a commissioned issue poll about LGBTIQ+ issues.  

The 2025 poll the correction has invented doesn't exist! The "poll" that put One Nation on a median of 53 seats and potentially as high as 59 was a Redbridge/Accent MRP model released in May 2026.  And the sample for that MRP was nationwide.   And 6015 is hardly an "only" in sample size terms - it is actually a massive sample - though some connoisseurs believe MRPs ideally should have even 10,000.

It's hilarious that an Independent Australia article accuses the mainstream media of not doing a deep dive when the article itself has merely tried a backflip in the shallows and hit its head on a rock - which is what AI have been doing frequently on polling themes for over a decade now.  This repeats what happened in 2015 when they "corrected" their article only for it to still be wrong, though in that case at least they didn't add new false content.

This article is so bad that it would be charitable to Foster - if he is indeed in even a loose sense the author - to assert that he wrote it using a heavy dose of AI rather than making all these mistakes himself and putting them to print with such disregard for the reputations of pollsters and such inability to read their reports.  But I don't know.  Certainly this sort of mangling of facts and linking to irrelevant sources is something AI has form for, but maybe there are humans who can do this badly too.  It is staggering if a lecturer in anything, let alone journalism, would actually produce an article this bad, with or without AI.  Is it possible the article is misattributed and was actually written by some other Jason Foster who IA merely thinks is the journalism lecturer?  

This article is merely the dirtiest tip of a large iceberg of poll denial and copium I am seeing in the wake of One Nation's recent numbers (because that worked so well with the Voice, didn't it?).  It was way worse than Chris Wallace's Conversation piece the same day which tried to compare recent One Nation polling with the herded 2PP poll values seen before the 2019 election, and that is saying something. (Pollsters all agree that One Nation is going up, but in fact the estimates they are getting for the One Nation primary are slightly more dispersed than random, not much less as with 2PP estimates in 2019, so there simply isn't any herding at the moment.)

In fact, for all the panic following the second post-Budget ON surge, there are valid reasons to be cautious about whether One Nation will keep this form together all the way to the election, or exactly how many seats it will win them if they do.  On the other hand, they could go a lot higher.  (No sympathy here for Bernard Keane who on May 5 declared One Nation's rise had peaked at an aggregated 25% because they had maxed out the angry white male cohort; since his article One Nation's primary vote has gone up in all 17 national polls released by nine different pollsters and they are now on 28%.)  Having too strong a prior in any direction about where all this is going because of bad arguments and wishful thinking is a recipe for disaster.  

Independent Australia has a serious claim to be the very worst website in Australian politics. If anyone supports or enables said website, and they have got this far in this article, I do hope that they will now stop.  

Begging For Debunking: A Silly Article Re Stafford Preferences

It was as sure as night follows day, as sure as daylight savings fading the curtains (oh wait) that the Stafford by-election result would see the Queensland right again beating the drum for optional preferences.  On cue we have an op ed by Morgan Begg from the IPA in the Courier-Mail trying to argue that compulsory preferential voting is some kind of aberration that has saved Labor's seat with the aid of obscure leftoids.  Begg's arguments contain a remarkable number of errors, but are also typical of the misguided and poorly debated push to return to full OPV in Queensland.

Begg is probably not responsible for the headline but for starters compulsory preferential voting is hardly an "Absurd Qld voting quirk".  Rather it is the standard form of preferential voting as it exists federally and currently (with very minor differences) in four states - and as it has existed federally, continuously, for 108 years.  (OK between 1984 and 1996 we did have a federal savings provision which allowed for a voter to deliberately exhaust their preferences, but few voters knew about that).  

Begg argues that preferences from Parry, the Animal Justice Party and Legalise Cannabis gave Labor's Luke Richmond the win.  Amazingly the words "Green" or "Greens" do not appear even once in his article yet in fact the gain Labor is making on preferences from Greens voters (3477) exceeds the LNP's primary vote margin of 3079.  Labor's gains from Parry (793), Legalise Cannabis (192) and Animal Justice (173) are far smaller, and are offset to well below Labor's victory margin by the 665 votes the LNP is gaining over Labor off the preferences from Family First, Libertarians and the independent GRPF candidate.  Begg wants to run the usual beatup about how to vote cards, but if one ignores the preferences of every minor party/candidate that even issued a how to vote card favouring either Labor or the LNP, Labor still wins the seat.  

The article claims that the "opaque workings" of compulsory preferencing saw most Socialist preferences somehow "find [their] way" to Labor and that "that was the difference between Labor winning and losing."  In fact on current numbers this isn't even true; Luke Richmond is leading by 891 votes which is 98 more than his net gain off Parry.  But even if it were true or becomes true later on, so what?  There's nothing opaque or mysterious or needing long explanation about the way those preferences got there - they got there because over 80% of voters voting 1 for Parry gave the Labor candidate a better ranking than the LNP candidate.  It doesn't even matter if these voters had no idea that Parry was a Socialist or that he had been charged with talking about Middle Eastern water geography, just so long as they were expressing their view about which of the majors they liked more than the other.  And if they did this following Parry's how to vote card they would hardly not know that he was a Socialist. The card looked like this:

There is also the usual whinge that an outcome in which a candidate who is on currently 30.8% primary beating a candidate on currently 40.3% primary is said to be "absurd".  But 40.3% is nowhere near half.  Given that, it's reasonable to get a view from the rest of the voters about who two they prefer and it happens that they overwhelmingly prefer Labor.  To try to counter this Begg throws in the red herring that "[compulsory preferential] imagines that voters have perfect or complete knowledge of the suite of candidates on the ballot. In reality, most voters rank candidates they have little to no knowledge of."  But it doesn't matter in a seat like this what knowledge the voters have of any candidates except the top two, since everybody else gets eliminated and their preferences transferred.  What decides the seat is that the majority of voters preferred Labor to the LNP.  Is Begg really trying to tell us voters in a seat like Stafford don't know who those parties are or what they think of them? 

Begg tries to tie the result to how-to-vote cards, arguing that "Institute of Public Affairs research has found that most voters are not actually using their own judgment at all when deciding how to rank candidates. In a 2025 survey, 56 per cent of voters admitted to simply following how-to-vote cards issued by the candidates to fill out ballot papers"

This so-called "research" finding as written is utter nonsense, as it is contradicted by all other sources: for example inference from cases where parties have changed their recommendations or varied them between seats, Antony Green's detailed analysis of HTV concordance in certain state seats where it is possible to compile exact figures, and the Australian Election Study which has estimated HTV follow rates below one-third.

But even if it was an accurate figure, it is also the case that the voters most likely to follow how to vote cards are major party voters, whose preferences in Stafford never went anywhere at all.  In fact for Stafford the results already prove mathematically that at least 65.7% of the voters whose preferences affected the outcome were not copying how to vote cards. We'll never know but I suspect that the real share of non-major voters making their own decisions was about 95% (ie that only about 5% of all minor-candidate voters were following a card, if even that) .  Of all seats to try to blame how to vote cards for a result this is among the most glaringly failed examples in Australian electoral history because most of the minor candidate votes were for the Greens who, unusually, didn't recommend a preference!  And yet, despite much complaining from Labor and the Socialists about the Greens' decision the flow of preferences from Greens voters to Labor in fact increased, from 83.7% to 86.4%.  (The increased rate might be explained by left voters with reservations about Labor voting instead for other left candidates with weaker preference flows, none of whom ran in 2024 - but the important point is that it didn't go down.)

The source of the 56% figure turns out to be one of the IPA's rubbish polls through the Dynata platform, which has a very limited and poor track record when tested at elections.  And even here, Begg's article is oversimplifying the survey.   The respondents did not admit to "simply following how-to-vote cards" as if that was all they did; they said they "usually follow a ‘how to vote’ card to guide who I give second, third, fourth (and so on) preferences to." (My underline.)  The question is unfit for purpose in establishing how many voters' preferences at any given election are determined by following the card, as it could capture any voter who thinks they follow a card more than half of the time and also voters who are influenced by the card mainly for their top few rankings but later deviate from it.  

Begg makes the following claim:

"The logic of compulsory preferential voting falls apart because it gives some electors multiple votes. If your first preference goes to a minor party, you get to vote again and again until you express support for one of the larger parties."

This is misleading.  Compulsory preferential voting is often called instant-runoff voting because it simulates a runoff process in which an initial vote is held, the candidate in last place is excluded and the process repeats.  And in those sort of runoff elections, everybody has a vote in every round; it just happens that a voter whose preferred candidate is not eliminated will keep voting for that candidate every time.  The other problem with this nonsense is that this claim if true also applies to optional preferential voting - you get to send your preference to as many parties as you like, if you want to.  Indeed, the idea that some voters get "multiple votes" is a classic first-past-the-post trope that tries to tar all forms of preferential voting with not representing one vote one value.  In fact, everybody gets one vote in our system, but the vote is transferrable.

He goes on to say:

"[..] in the final tally, an electors’ second (or third or fourth or fifth) preference for a Labor candidate is treated exactly the same as another voters’ first preference for an LNP candidate. By failing to account for the intensity of the support, it produces the kind of result seen over the weekend in Stafford where candidates limp over the victory line thanks to reluctant voters."

But you can't know anything about intensity of support from the way the voters rank the candidates.  One voter might be desperately keen that their first place candidate win, another might be struggling to decide who to put first and desperate instead to put someone last.  A voter might think two different candidates are almost equally excellent, or they might hate all the candidates and just be holding their nose to vote 1 for the least worst.  Greens voters whose preferences reached Labor might have liked Labor or been lukewarm about them, we don't know, but there's always plenty of Greens voters who will put Labor 2 even if their party would rather they didn't.  

And we get the usual chestnut that "In most places, forcing people to vote for candidates they do not support would be considered profoundly anti-democratic."  Indeed, but compulsory preferencing doesn't do that, it merely requires the voter to rank all the candidates.  Requiring a voter to say that they must like a candidate who they don't like would indeed be anti-democratic, but requiring a voter to rank a candidate they don't like below candidates they do like hardly carries the same level of obvious moral repugnance, and nor is it "voting for" those candidates. (See here for previous comments about the Queensland Premier using this "vote for" nonsense.)

At the end there is a simple message where David Crisafulli is a noble warrior for the cause of greater voter choice, which is supposedly the "most important objective in electoral reform".  In fact the "choice" offered by full OPV is a fool's gold one that confuses voters far more than it benefits them. It has the potential to distort outcomes when voters don't express preferences they actually have (for technical detail on what's wrong with the philosophical case for OPV see here).  And sure the LNP is interested in choice, but that would be their choice and not the voters' - their choice to not have to make decisions as a party about whether to preference One Nation ahead of Labor or vice versa. 

Would Labor have actually lost?

For all this outrage about Stafford, it's not even clear-cut on current numbers that Labor would have lost it under OPV.  I think it could have been very close; 9.5% is not that far behind and there are cases where such margins are closed with optional preferences.  At present Richmond is winning by 891 while gaining a net 3477 from Greens voter preferences.  Probably under OPV, voters for Parry would have had lower exhaust rates than the other non-Greens minor candidates and so the non-Green minors would have had a similar combined impact on the total to the current 493 vote gain for Labor.  That being so, assuming those Greens not exhausting their vote stayed at the same preference rate, a 25.6% exhaust rate of Greens preferences would be needed for the outcome to change, slightly lower than the recent exhaust rate in NSW.  In an educated inner city electorate with a high Greens vote, that kind of exhaust rate is no sure thing at all - especially as I doubt the Greens would have run an open how to vote under OPV.  

So we're supposed to switch to OPV to stop outcomes that its advocates consider absurd, but there's no guarantee that OPV would stop this particular example anyway.  There are cases in compulsory preferencing where Labor wins from so far behind that it's unthinkable that they would win it with any real level of exhaust.  However, on current numbers, Stafford isn't one of them.  

I should also mention One Nation - while I doubt they would have got enough votes in Stafford to account for the LNP's 9.5% primary vote lead, had they run the primary vote gap would surely have been much smaller, greatly weakening the outrage about the primary vote totals.  More importantly, had One Nation run and had it been OPV, there's no doubt that some voters who voted 1 LNP would instead have voted for One Nation and stopped, which would have stopped the LNP from winning anyway. As it happens, One Nation also supports OPV, so their absence from the count is quite convenient.  

Ultimately Begg's article is another example of the classic problem with "think tanks" whether politically left right or centre - far too often, they don't.  Too many argue for pre-set positions instead of following where the evidence leads.  

Pre And Post Budget Federal Poll Roundup

2PP Aggregate 52.4 to Labor vs Coalition (term low, -0.8 since last week)

Shadow-2PP 52.9 to Labor vs One Nation (-0.6 since last week)

Labor would win election"held now" but most likely with only a small majority

This is my usual annual post about federal voting intention polling after the Budget, plus a summary of what's been happening in the months leading up.

The briefest summary of what happened in the months leading up is "not much".  In terms of my Labor vs Coalition two-party preferred aggregate, Labor dipped down to the high 52s in mid-January (off not a lot of polling at the time) but got back above 54 during Coalition leadership tensions in early February.  Since Angus Taylor replaced Sussan Ley Labor's 2PP has bobbed around the 53s with no real evidence of signal.

EMRS: The State Where No Party Has Votes

EMRS Lib 25 (-4) ALP 24 (+1) ON 19 (+5) GRN 14 (-1) IND 16 (+1) others 2 (-2)

Seat estimate off this poll if election "held now" Lib 8-9 ALP 10 ON 8 Grn 4-5 IND 4 others 0

The funniest thing about this week's EMRS poll is that it was taken before.  Before we found out on Friday that, in proof of assurances that TT Line couldn't possibly be insolvent because the government could just keep throwing it money, the embattled shipping company would be flicked a lazy half a billion dollars to keep it afloat.  Or perhaps I should better say, adrift.  Before we found out, also on Friday in federal budget week, that TasInsure, a "state-backed insurance company" floated out of nowhere in the 2025 election campaign in a desperate attempt to talk about anything at all except the stadium, had gone to the great bus mall in the ground and was being refashioned as a watchdog-shaped object.  And perhaps most significantly of all, before whatever lurks in this week's state Budget.

Stafford By-Election: Prospects and Live

Stafford (ALP 5.32%)

Luke Richmond (ALP) vs Fiona Hammond (LNP) and others

Cause of by-election: death of Jimmy Sullivan (ALP/IND)

ALP retain with c. 4.4% swing to LNP

---

Monday:  Not much more to see

Casey Briggs has tweeted that he understands there are not more than (and probably less than) 2000 postals to come, so further changes to the current 51.2-48.8 margin will be in tenths of a percent if that.

Sunday: Excuses excuses...

Steven Miles has been quoted offering a bizarre excuse for his party's poor result, claiming it was due to One Nation not running and saying "We will never know what the result would have been if they had run and not directed their supporters to vote for the LNP,".  Stafford is one of One Nation's worst seats in the state, had they run I estimate they would have got about 8%.  Most of their voters would have preferenced the LNP anyway.  Care of the 2017 election we have a window on what happens when One Nation recommends preferences to the LNP in some seats and Labor in others - the flow difference was around 10-12%.  So for an open ticket, half that.  This argument if it works at all isn't worth half a percent, it might be worth a tenth of the swing if that.  In fact not all One Nation voters would have even been aware that their party recommended (not "directed") its voters to vote for the LNP, so probably even less.  And some of those who were aware would not have obeyed.

Miles has also referred to Fiona Hammond's local profile, but that was already present in the baseline since she was the candidate last time.  Indeed her time as a councillor was more recent then.  

Another excuse quoted by The Australian is “Right-of-centre voters, after the deal with One Nation, weren’t left with many alternatives in a field of nine candidates, and so we have seen a splintering of the vote amongst other left-of-centre parties.’’  But in fact there were four right wing candidates (up one from 2024) and the three minor righties between them got a 0.3% swing on the combined One Nation and Family First primary from 2024.  It is true that Labor's primary suffered from the extra competition on the left - but that does not explain half of the primary vote swing against Labor flowing through to 2PP swing as well.  

Farrer By-Election Live

Farrer (Lib vs IND 6.2%, Lib vs ALP 12.9%)

Raissa Butkowski (Lib) vs Michelle Milthorpe (IND), David Farley (ON) and others
Cause of by-election resignation of Sussan Ley (Lib)

CALLED (7:46 pm) Farley (One Nation) gain from Liberal

-------------------------

Live comments will appear here from 6 pm - once counting gets going from around 7, refresh every 10 minutes or so for latest comments.

Monday 11th: We don't quite know the flows by party yet but what we can track is the proportion of Coalition voters whose votes would need to be switched by a different HTV recommendation for the Coalition parties' decision to preference One Nation to have decided the seat. Currently that number runs at 33.6% (this is Liberal and National combined).  As noted below, while normally it's quite feasible that an HTV decision would carry that much weight, in this case I think probably not.

Although David Farley has obviously won Farrer very easily the mathematical proof that he has done so will require a distribution of preferences meaning he's a fortnight or so from taking his seat.  See here.

The Urban Myth That "Sack Dan Andrews" Was A Labor Front

Does this look like a Labor front to you?

Group ticket voting in Victoria has again been in the news a lot lately - see my latest article about whether abolishing it would assist One Nation.  With this latest discussion has come a resurgence of a longrunning online urban myth concerning the shortlived Sack Dan Andrews party (or more formally Restore Democracy: Sack Dan Andrews Party) in the 2022 Victorian election.  The myth is that this party was set up to harvest the votes of people who hated former Victorian Premier Andrews and channel these votes back to Labor.  The reality is that while there is a disputed claim that Sack Dan Andrews (SDA) was a siphoning attempt of some sort, Labor gained no benefit from it anyway, and it had nothing to do with the party.  This article explores the reality of this short-lived party's preferences and its actual impact on the election in detail.  For those on twitter I also have a shorter version of events on a thread here.

Would Scrapping Group Ticket Voting In Victoria Help One Nation?

On this website I have frequently covered Victoria's ongoing failure to repeal the use of Group Ticket Voting in state Legislative Council elections.  Victoria is now the last state that still has this system, which has been scrapped everywhere else after being gamed by preference-harvesting.  In the current cycle the Electoral Matters committee in an outstanding report recommended the scrapping of Group Ticket Voting way back in July 2024, and the government has still not responded officially to that recommendation.  The clock is ticking in terms of time for the Victorian Electoral Commission to implement the changes required to move to a different system, and the Commission has said the decision must be made by August.  After recent issues involving service delivery by state electoral commissions I suggest the sooner the better.

Last week there was reporting by the Guardian this week that one Labor MP had said current Premier Jacinta Allan "had appeared reluctant to [scrap GTV] as it would benefit One Nation."  Separately I understand that the view that scrapping GTV would benefit One Nation is also espoused by some Labor lower house MPs.  Irrespective of who actually holds that view, this article is to explore this claim.  

The Guardian's article does not say why anyone holding this concern might hold it, and in the absence of any actual claimed mechanism it is not that easy to counter.  However there are at least three well known myths about how Group Ticket Voting is supposedly bad for One Nation in the modern age.  Here they are and here is why they are wrong.

Legislative Council 2026: Huon and Rosevears Live And Post-Count (Plus Nepean!)

Huon: Clare Glade-Wright (IND) elected, gain from Dean Harriss (IND)

Rosevears: Jo Palmer (Lib) retain. 

NEPEAN (VIC): CALLED 8:30 pm Marsh (Lib) retain

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Donations welcome!

If you find my coverage useful please consider donating to support the large amount of time I spend working on this site.  Donations can be made by the Paypal button in the sidebar or by PayID (details in sidebar) or email me via the address in my profile for my account details.  Please only donate if you are sure you can afford to do so.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Live comments (scrolls to top)

All numbers here are unofficial, check the TEC and VEC sites for official numbers

Refresh every 10 mins or so after 6:30 for latest updates

3:03 All over, Palmer wins 52.8-47.2 after a 79-21 split to Labor on the Greens exclusion. A very respectable result for Labor in the north despite losing.

12:00 Palmer didn't cross off Monson but needs a trivial 7.8% of Greens preferences. Based on the scrutineering estimates she will probably end up with a 52-54 2CP which is reasonably close. Maybe at or above the higher end because the Monson-McLennan prefs will be weaker for Labor.