Supporting First Past The Post For Australia Is Pointless

Lately I've been seeing a lot of social media griping about the current government and/or the Greens and teals, mostly from alternative right-wing accounts, in which the writer attacks the Government and says it was only elected because of preferential voting, and we should get rid of preferences by switching to first past the post.   I don't think there is much significant advocacy for first-past-the-post in Australia though Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner has unfortunately supported it (what, optional preferences is not enough for him?), as has Resolve pollster Jim Reed in 2022, and a steady flow of petitions to the Commonwealth Parliament generally with tiny signature numbers.  

The following alone is sufficient reason to dismiss all such calls: First past the post is a discriminatory system that violates the Australian value of a fair go.  Under first past the post, a voter whose most preferred party or candidate is unpopular must make a strategic decision between voting for someone who is not in fact their first preference and effectively throwing away their vote.  However a voter who is pretty sure their most preferred candidate will finish first or second does not have to face that strategic dilemma.  On this basis, having first past the post, in a country able to afford and count a fairer system, is not treating all electors fairly.   I do not think there is actually any valid excuse for keeping single-member first past the post anywhere (though the transition out of it needs to be carefully managed in those places that do have it) but this article is confined to the argument re Australia.  

Australia has a proud tradition of fair voting that started over 100 years ago when preferences were introduced to stop conservative parties from losing conservative electorates when voters were split between two different conservative candidates.  The famous case is the 1918 Swan by-election, but in fact the Hughes Government was working to introduced preferential voting months before it occurred but the legislation had not yet passed the parliament.   When I see supposed patriots with Australian flags in their social media profiles propose that we junk this fine tradition and replace it with unfair and primitive crud voting systems used overseas, I can only shake my head at their claims that they really love this country.   I am not going to let these people get away with it; to paraphrase a slightly different Doctor, this voting system is defended.  

Similar to my polling disinformation register, I've written this article mainly as a labor-saving device so that I don't have to keep making the same long replies on the same points but can simply say "see point 3 here" with a link.  I hope others find it interesting and useful, and more points may be added.

I should note that this article also applies to many criticisms of compulsory preferences made by supporters of optional preferencing - especially part 7.

Why first past the post is pointless

The main point of this article is to point out that never mind how unfair a system it is, switching to first past the post in Australia would achieve very little of what those calling for it claim they want.  To the extent that it would achieve anything they say they want (point 7), the thing they want isn't useful anyway.  So while FPTP might seem like a good idea for some people on the right based on their political values, it actually isn't.  In fact, introducing FPTP could bite them.  

For the rest of this article I am abbreviating "first past the post" as FPTP; FPP is also often used. 

 

1. FPTP does not stop parties winning elections with low support levels

Australian FPTP supporters complain about the Albanese government winning a majority off 32.6% of the vote.  However, majority wins off much less than 50% of the vote occur frequently under first past the post.  A striking recent example was the Starmer government in the UK winning 63% of seats off 33.7% of the vote.  It's not a new thing either; Labour under Tony Blair way back in 2001 won 63.8% of seats off 35.2%.  Canada has had three majority governments with less than 40% support.  However unlike in Australia, where at least we have the 2PP as an indicator of how the government shaped up compared to its main opposition, in FPTP countries a government that wins off 35% could for all the numbers will tell us have been hated by all the other voters, providing a much weaker mandate.  

If one is concerned about parties being able to win a majority off 30-35% of the vote, then the solution is proportional representation of some kind - in a PR system a party needs close to a majority of the primary vote to win a majority of seats.  But FPTP supporters don't like that either, because it would increase the number and the power of the Greens.  

(And no, Labour's huge win in the UK 2024 election wasn't mainly because there happened to be vote-splitting between the Tories and Reform UK.  People who argue this tend to assume that if Reform UK had not run (or if there were preferences) their voters would have all switched to (or preferenced) the Tories.  But in fact based on polling, Reform voters only preferred the Tories over Labour by about 75-25, and probably without the party on the ballot many would have just stayed home.  Also, people arguing this view ignore that there was also vote-splitting on the other side.  My own rough simulations of the UK election using preferences suggest the Tories would have won about fifteen of the seats won by Labour, but also lost about ten where they defeated the Liberal Democrats.  Reform UK would have had lousy preference flows, and mostly came second in lopsided seats anyway, and would have been lucky to get any more seats on preferences.)

2. FPTP would not fix major-party domination

Australian FPTP supporters frequently blame "preferential voting" for the fact that the major parties win almost every seat in the House of Representatives.  However, as noted above, this also happens under FPTP.  The tendency for the major parties to win vote shares out of all proportion to their vote tally arises because while a third of the voters prefer some minor party or force to the majors, nowhere near that many voters prefer every alternative to both majors.  Right-wing minor party voters tend to put the Coalition at least above the Greens, and Greens voters often put Labor at least above minor right parties.

If every voter who didn't vote 1 for a major party in 2022 put both major parties last, then non-major-party candidates would have been in mathematical contention before considering the flows between the major parties in either 82 or 83 seats (Durack is ambiguous) and probably have won at least 65 of those.  But they didn't, and non-major-party candidates won 16 seats.

The claim that "preferential voting" entrenches the majors in a way that FPTP doesn't comes from a claim that no matter who you vote for your vote ends up with one or other of the majors.  But in fact that's increasingly not true, and would become even less true if more voters for minor parties disliked the majors more than they disliked all the other parties.  In 2022 about 9% of all votes finished with a non-major party candidate (a record high); this includes votes that flowed from a major party candidate to a non-major and stayed there. 

Many FPTP supporters have a dystopian view where minor party voter preferences are flowing to whichever major party such voters dislike the least (hence claims that only 32.6% supported Labor into government) but that's actually not true.  Both majors pick up lost of votes at number 2.  There are plenty of voters who like Labor but like the Greens, Animal Justice or whoever more, just like there are plenty who think the Coalition is good but some minor right party is better.  

FPTP supporters often claim that the major parties funnel preferences to each other, but that isn't often true either.  In the 27 seats where one major party failed to make the final two in 2022, the other major party recommended preferences to the non-major opponent in 23.  The exception was the four seats that finished Labor vs Greens and in all of those Labor was way ahead before Liberal preferences anyway.  

In fact, as far as single-seat systems go, preferences help to break down the dreaded "duopoly".  Ten new crossbenchers (six teal independents, Dai Le and three Greens) were elected from outside the parliament in 2022, and all of these except for Max Chandler-Mather (Green) won from second or third place on primaries.  Of the six continuing crossbenchers, Andrew Wilkie, Helen Haines, Adam Bandt and Rebekha Sharkie also all won from behind on preferences (in Wilkie's case from third) the first time that they got elected.  Several of the current crossbenchers may have also won under FPTP with a hand from tactical voting, but some probably wouldn't have done so.  

3. FPTP would not have stopped Labor winning 2022 (etc)

It's common for FPTP supporters to look at how Labor won 52.13% of the two-party vote despite trailing on primaries 32.58-35.70 and assert that Labor only won the 2022 election because of Greens and teal preferences.  But in fact in 2022 Labor won a remarkably low number of seats where it did not lead on primaries (7) and also lost one where it did.  Had the same votes been cast without preferences the seat winners would have been Coalition 73 Labor 71 Greens 2 CA 1 KAP 1 IND 3, and it's not certain whether the Coalition would have even governed off that (they would have needed Helen Haines or Zali Steggall to do so).  But without preferences voters would have voted differently anyway, and Labor would have at the very least picked up enough votes from tactical voting to win seats where they were only slightly behind on primaries such as Robertson and Tangney.  Some of the teals would also have easily won by the same method, and even if the Coalition had won several seats it lost, it would still not have formed government.

It's also important here that experience with optional preferential voting shows that it is minor left party voters such as Green voters who are most likely to give preferences, whereas One Nation type voters are prone to deliberately exhaust their votes.  Not all Green voters would compromise and vote Labor to stop the Coalition winning, but far fewer minor right voters would be likely to give up their vote to the Coalition.  In some seats the Coalition might even do worse under first past the post with organised strategic voting campaigns, rather than better.

A note also here that while FPTP supporters love to throw the teals in with the Greens and blame their preferences for electing a Labor government, that actually didn't happen.  Most teal votes were never distributed, those that were were mostly in seats the Coalition won, and there was no seat where getting more teal preferences than the Coalition won the seat for Labor.   

The attack on preferences descends to farce when FPTP supporters blame preferential voting for Labor winning the 2022 Victorian election.  Yes people actually do that!  In fact Labor outpolled the Coalition on the primary vote statewide in that election, and also did so in 55 of the 56 seats that they won!  (Labor also led on primaries in its most recent state wins in all the other mainland states, and hasn't won a state election from behind on primaries since Queensland 2015.)

4. FPTP wouldn't get rid of the Greens (and might even make them more powerful!)

Although FPTP seems to deflate Green votes in other countries, it clearly doesn't stop them winning seats in the UK and Canada, and at current support levels with intense support in inner cities, it wouldn't stop them winning seats here. 

FPTP in the specific context of 2022 could have resulted in a minority Labor government where the Greens had actual power on the Reps floor, even if that might have been only one or two Greens seats (exactly what FPTP supporters claim they do not want).  It also would have given the Greens great indirect power over Labor policy because the Greens could threaten to run hard against Labor in inner city seats and Richmond.  Most likely Labor would have to agree to run dead in a few seats with high Greens votes, or make policy concessions, just to stop the Greens from spoiling.  In contrast in our preferential system, in most seats all Labor needs to rely on is that Greens voters keep preferring them over the Coalition.  

It's also notable that much of the Greens' power in the federal parliament comes in the Senate, where they are generally elected based on proportional quota not preferences.  

5. FPTP wouldn't make voting simpler

One of the supposed selling points of first past the post is that it makes voting easy!  As Jim Reed put it in his article  "One person, one vote. Fair, simple and as elegant a solution as democracy itself."  Well, firstly, preferential voting is one person, one vote - except the vote is transferrable and always retains a value of one vote - whereas under FPTP if you vote for a minor candidate your vote has an effective value of zero. But also, FPTP is far from simple for many voters, and as a result it is neither fair nor elegant.  The kind of voter FPTP is simple for is mainly a major party voter who under preferential voting can simply copy their party's how to vote card if they want.  

As mentioned above, a voter in FPTP who wants their vote to be effective but is considering voting for a candidate who might not make the final two faces a strategic dilemma.  To make an informed choice about the chance of their vote being effective they need a pretty accurate understanding of how their electorate intends to vote - but seat polling is unreliable and national polling is too broad-scale to be useful.  (Individual breakdowns in MRP type forecasts can also be well off).  But worse than that, to the extent that there is an understanding of how voters will vote in an FPTP election, that understanding can itself change how voters intend to vote.   The complexity of tactical voting in FPTP has meant even that vote-trading websites have sprung up in the UK where a voter can match themselves with another voter elsewhere in the country, with each agreeing to vote for their second choice in order to defeat a common enemy.

Don't strategic dilemmas happen in preferential divisions too?  Yes they do, but they're much less common, they're often easier to resolve, and the relevant cases tend to still elect someone who is arguably representative of the seat and not someone who clearly isn't.  We've recently seen a new species of this in Fannie Bay (NT) where voters who voted Greens-ALP-CLP instead of ALP-Greens-CLP appear to have caused the CLP to win the seat.  Had Labor narrowly got past the Greens into second it would then have been the case that voters who voted CLP-Greens-ALP instead of Greens-CLP-ALP had caused the CLP to lose!  But serious cases of this are so rare that every one of them is celebrated by psephologists.  In the 2022 election there was some of this debate around the teal seats, but in  most cases it was obvious that Labor couldn't win the seat and the teal independent might, so a voter most concerned about an effective vote would have voted for the latter.  A few seats did have genuine strategic dilemmas for some voters - North Sydney where Labor and Kylea Tink were both competitive, for example.

6. FPTP wouldn't speed up elections (much)

FPTP fans often contrast the two-week wait for Reps seats to be decided with FPTP seats in the UK where the results of virtually all seats are known on election night, however late in the night that may be.  But most of the wait for Reps counts in Australia is for postal votes to arrive, because we give postal voters a fair go by letting them vote up til the day, whereas in the UK the vote needs to be received by counting day to count (compare US where first past the post type counts will drag on for weeks in some states).  Close seats where the top two were clear would remain close for almost as long if we scrapped preferences without also scrapping postals.

One difference is that voting (or at least booth attendance) in Australia is compulsory, while in the UK it isn't.  So if someone is too disorganised to get their postal vote in in time in the UK it's no big deal since voting wasn't compulsory anyway, while in Australia it undermines the effectiveness of compulsion.  Ignoring all of that, if we required all postals to be in on time and banned out-of-electorate voting (which would further damage turnout) then we would in practice know the winner of nearly every seat on the night, save for a few that would be subject to rechecking and preference distributions that I expect would take a few days.  Some of the time taken for counting in Australia is also down to the large amount of booth-level voting data that we retain.

7. FPTP would save you from preferencing candidates you hate, but ...

A common complaint from FPTP supporters is that you have to number every box and therefore you can't stop it if you cannot stand the remaining candidates.  Those who would be inclined to put the majors last on their ballot (or last but for the Greens) think that this (rather than the use of single seats, see point 1) is what makes the major parties win.  But they're mistaken.  Your preference can only get down to the candidates you can't stand if everyone you can stand is already out of the contest for that seat.  At this point, someone you can't stand will win your seat anyway, and exhausting your vote would not change that.  You might feel pure about it, but that is all.  

I don't really think the right to exhaust a vote is practically useful.  In a recent misleading argument for optional preferential voting (see below) Queensland LNP leader David Crisafulli said "But you shouldn’t be forced to have to vote for someone who you fundamentally do not believe is a fit and proper person."  FPTP supporters often say the same thing.  But you're not voting for anyone you put near the bottom, you are ranking them, and you are only ranking them in comparison to others who you've also put near the bottom.  The claim that you are being coerced to express approval for a candidate you don't like is just nonsense.  

At this point there are two possibilities.  The first is that you see some of those in these murky depths as a fair bit less appalling than others, in which case you should want the right to rank the lesser evils among the greater, and it makes a lot of sense to use it.  The second is that you really don't care, or want to act as if you don't - and in that case it doesn't matter which of these candidates gets your preference, so what's the problem?  Flip a coin or roll some fluffy dice if you want to.  

The other problem with this all as an argument for FPTP is that throwing away the right to preference anybody just because you might sometimes want to exhaust your vote prematurely is incredibly self-damaging!  It means that if there are two candidates you really like, you can only help one of them, even if picking the wrong one might cause the candidate you hate the most to win!  So if you have a problem with being forced to preference candidates you hate, you should support optional preferential voting (OPV), not FPTP.  Under OPV you can stop when you like, or you can keep going - the choice is yours!

(I do not personally support fully-fledged OPV (and I have more reasons for not doing so now than that article includes), but at least an OPV supporter will uphold the rights of voters to give preferences, so I can respect that position.)

8. FPTP does not stop parties that lose the "popular vote" from winning

FPTP supporters complain when Labor wins an election where the Coalition outpolled it on primary votes because of superior performance on preferences.  They try to insist that this means the Coalition was the more popular party, although in the case of 2022 the clear majority of voters preferred Labor to the Coalition, and a plurality of support that is way short of 50% is a lousy measure of popularity on any day.  But even under FPTP there is no guarantee the party that gets the most votes nationwide will govern - it might lose because of an uneven distribution of support, or because no party wins a majority and two parties with a lower national vote gang up on it.  (The party winning the most votes lost four elections in the UK in the 20th century.)  In the context of Australia, FPTP supporters fail to understand the extent to which Labor's majority was down not just to preferences but to effective vote distribution; despite being outpolled by over 3% on primaries, Labor topped the primary vote in only two fewer seats.  

9. FPTP does not represent the true mood of the electorate

FPTP supporters like to claim that the winners under preferential voting aren't who the electorate wants, with their vote tallies being a mix of enthusiastic support and preferences that might be coming from voters who actually don't like the elected candidate.  Hence they claim that FPTP represents what the voters really think.  But cases like Swan 1918 show why this can easily be false: the electorate might like two candidates but be unable to decide between them, and hence elect a third who most voters do not like and would have ranked last.  Also, because FPTP forces voters who care about their vote making a difference to vote strategically (and plenty of voters do so), you have no way of knowing whether an elected candidate was actually anybody's ideal first choice!  

10. FPTP wouldn't get rid of backroom deals

FPTP supporters like to say that a system without preferences would get rid of backroom preference deals and let the voters decide.  But in fact, the voters decide anyway: parties cannot distribute your preferences for you in a federal election, and in the House of Reps they never could (a lot of FPTP supporters don't realise this and think it is like the Senate in the Group Ticket Voting days).  Your preference goes only where you send it; a vote for the Greens only becomes a vote for the Labor Party if the voter gives Labor their preferences (and some don't).  Yes, there are how to vote cards, but they are only recommendations.  At most a third of voters these days still follow them, and most of the voters who do follow them are major party voters, most of whose votes never leave the pile they start in.  Only about 15% of Greens voters will copy a how to vote card, and even such preferences as are recorded on such cards don't necessarily result from deals but are often unilateral decisions by parties to recommend preferences to someone.  It's especially wrong for FPTP supporters to level complaints about "preference deals" against teals when teals often issue open preference recommendations anyway (and indeed took the Victorian Electoral Commission to court and won over the right to do so in a certain form.) 

Far from getting rid of backroom deals, FPTP and similar systems create a great incentive for deals because of the damage a candidate can do by running in a seat.  We saw a good example in France where in the second round many left and centre candidates withdrew to leave only one opponent to the far-right National Rally.  

FPTP Support And Election Denial

I think that minor right advocacy of FPTP for Australia (to be clear I am not talking about Reed's article here) is a form of soft election denial.  Minor right FPTP supporters mostly don't deny the official results (though a few of them will do that too, especially the ones who bang on about non-existent voting machines, ballot box storage and other conspiracy theories).  Rather they explain away the results as if Labor only won because of the lousy voting system, and then suggest that the voting system is designed to cause the left to win when in fact it was originally designed to save their own side from vote-splitting.  Indeed for much of the history of preferential voting it was Labor who wanted to avoid it or wind it back to optional, an attitude that changed since Labor started getting a clear benefit on preferences.  

Labor would have won the 2022 federal election under any of the main voting systems people talk about - compulsory preferences, optional preferences, FPTP,  proportional representation list systems, Hare-Clark, MMP (etc).  The only difference is whether they would have been in majority, in minority but close to majority, or with about a third of the seats to match their third of the vote.  In the latter case there would have been far more Greens and some kind of Labor-Green-minor left/centre government - which the minor right seems to be even more against than they are against Labor majorities.  It seems that what FPTP supporters in Australia would really often like, if they thought about it long enough, is not FPTP but rather some kind of proportional representation system except where the count started by throwing away all the votes cast for the teals and Greens.  

I may add more comments later.