Tasmanian House of Representatives Seat Guide 2025

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This article gives a detailed discussion of the five Tasmanian House of Representatives seats, which will be updated and edited as needed up til election day.  A Tasmania Senate guide will follow much closer to polling day and will be linked here when up and there will be many other federal pages coming.   I will be doing coverage for The Guardian on election night.

One seat (Lyons, held by Labor) is hotly in play at this election.  Two others (Liberal-held Bass and Braddon) are volatile historically and of some interest though challenging for Labor to win this time around.  Franklin (Labor) is attracting more attention than normal because of a couple of independent attempts.  Clark (Ind) is not considered in play.  

National polling as I start this article has been suggesting the sort of swing to the Coalition that if uniform should see them win Lyons, with Bass out of serious danger and Braddon out of the question for Labor.  However Tasmania has become detached from national patterns in recent years with national swing only predicting Tasmania's two-party seat result perfectly once in the last 33 years (and in recent years Labor tending to do worse in swing terms than the national swing).   Long Labor's strongest state on a 2PP basis, Tasmania ceased to be so in 2022 as demographic transition in low-education and older-voter areas has favoured the Liberal Party.  

Poll Roundup: Outliers At Thirty Paces

2PP Aggregate (Last-Election Preferences) 50.4 to Coalition (-0.2 in last four weeks)

With One Nation Adjustment (recommended) 50.9 to Coalition
If polls are accurate, either side could win election "held now", probably well into minority

It was just about time for another one of these articles anyway but we've had some extra fun in the last few days with something we've not had for a while, big outliers!  Firstly a 55-45 to Coalition by respondent preferences from Resolve (52-48 last election) and secondly a 51-49 to Labor by respondent preferences from Morgan (53-47 last election). Resolve was the worst headline 2PP of the term for Labor by far, while Morgan was Labor's first headline 2PP lead from anyone since late November, and their first lead from anyone who wasn't Morgan since early October.   Morgan of course put it down to the interest rates cut.  Who to believe?  My aggregate says neither. The net impact of these two plus Freshwater was that Labor improved its standing in my estimate by 0.001%.  

Resolve had Labor on 25 Coalition 39 Greens 13 One Nation 9 Independent 9 others 4.  Resolve has typically had the Labor vote lower than other pollsters lately and this reading is the lowest I'm aware of Labor ever recording from anyone in a federal poll.  The primary vote gap of 14% is the largest of the term from anyone.  Resolve offers a generic Independent option everywhere between campaigns which tends to inflate the independent vote compared to what they'd actually get at an election, until we know who is actually on the ballot papers.  This probably affects their estimate of the ALP primary.  Resolve's One Nation estimate of 9% on the same basis may seem very large, but don't adjust your set, this is One Nation's third 9% in recent weeks, discussed further below.  

WA Liberals Threaten To Bring Back Malapportionment

I'm aiming to have a federal polling roundup out tomorrow or so to deal with that Resolve 55-45, that YouGov MRP and other recent stories, but firstly I should comment about and condemn a disappointing development in the WA election campaign.  

Yesterday the WA Liberal leader Libby Mettam promised that the party would seek to reintroduce WA's regional Legislative Council system if elected.  This system was severely malapportioned, was an affront to one-vote one-value, and was an affront to democracy itself and to almost every Western Australian voter.  It has been the work of decades to evict the last cases of stone age malapportionment from the Australian state houses.  Any party that wants to go back there in 2025 is not merely unfit for Government.  It is also unfit for Opposition ... which suits the Liberals quite well at the moment, since they're not one.

WA has had a series of malapportioned Legislative Council systems where, in the supposed name of rural representation, rural areas were overweighted such that votes in them carried a few to several times the weight of those cast in Perth.  This was the case in the system of half-in half-out single-seat elections between 1965 and 1986, again for the first regional multi-seat system (1987-2005, 4x5+2x7 member seats) and somehow even worse in the second (2008-2021, 6x6 member seats).   

The effect of rural malapportionment in the Council through the multi-seat era has been to skew it in favour of the conservatives.  As an average of the nine elections held under such systems, Labor has won 41.1% of the vote and 41.4% of the seats.  The combined Liberal and National parties (sometimes running entirely independently, sometimes as joint tickets) have won 39.8% of the vote but 46.8% of the seats.  One expects that in a system with six members per electorate the major parties will each be over-represented by a few percent.  Instead, one side has been over-represented by 7%, the other barely at all.

EMRS: New Poll More Similar To Last Election

EMRS Lib 34 (-1) ALP 30 (-1) Grn 13 (-1) JLN 8 (+2) IND 12 (+1) other 3 (=)
IND likely to be slightly overstated at expense of others.
Liberals would probably be largest party in election "held now"
Possible seat outcome for this poll Lib 15 ALP 11 Grn 5 IND 3 JLN 1

A new EMRS poll is up for Tasmania.  The November poll saw some signs of the long-struggling Labor opposition finally making some progress but this poll is more similar to the previous election.  Compared to the election, and after adjusting for the generic "independent" vote being somewhat overstated, Labor and the Jacqui Lambie Network are up slightly at the expense of the Liberals.  However the Lambie Network has imploded in the parliament and the most recent stated intention of Jacqui Lambie was to re-endorse only her sole remaining MP, Andrew Jenner.  Thus, it is not clear the robust polling for the JLN brand (which appeals strongly to a low-information cohort dominated by working-class blokes) actually means anything.

The leadership figures show that both Jeremy Rockliff and Dean Winter have taken a net favourability hit compared with the November poll, with Rockliff on a net rating of +10 (36-25 with the +10 being after rounding, down five points) and Winter on a net +6 (18-11 ditto, down 8).  These net numbers are still acceptable for both, but Winter still has a recognition problem especially in the north - something that is being picked up by EMRS's approach of not stating the role of the person who they are testing recognition for.  In fact, this sample has an even higher "never heard of" score for Winter (27%) than the previous 18%, which itself raised a few eyebrows.  This said, firstly it is possible some voters could have a strong opinion either way of 'the new Tasmanian Labor leader guy' without actually knowing his name, so the 27% may be an overestimate.  Also, it isn't catastrophic; the example I always quote is that 39% of NSW voters could not identify Barry O'Farrell as Premier in one poll after he had been Premier for a year and a half.  However this is consistent with a general issue of State Labor lacking profile and cut-through across the whole state that also dogged it during the 2024 campaign.  Jeremy Rockliff has also made a minor gain on preferred Premier (which favours incumbents), his lead now out to an acceptable 44-34 after shrinking to 43-37 last poll.

Preferences Help Non-Majors Beat Major Parties Far More Than The Other Way Around

This article is about single-member electorates, and cases where preferences result in someone who did not lead on primaries winning the seat, and how this affects battles between the major parties and candidates from outside the major parties ("non-majors") for seats.  

I've written a few articles on here in which I discuss mistaken views held by many Australian supporters of minor right-wing parties on social media.  Many of them rail against preferential voting, which they claim helps major parties to maintain a "duopoly" or "uniparty".  They often support scrapping preferences, although this would make it pointless to vote for the parties they support.  I've pointed out in these discussions that actually in the 2022 election, nine non-major candidates were elected from outside the parliament by beating one major party with help from the preferences of the other.  If there were no preferences, such candidates would need to rely on very organised strategic voting for any chance of winning.  Probably many would have lost.

Despite this, people keep claiming that the major parties conspire to keep smaller parties out of parliament by doing preference deals with each other so that if a smaller party leads on primaries the majors can beat them on preferences.  The supposed prime example is the defeat of Pauline Hanson in Blair 1998.  But the fact is that Hanson's loss was actually an unusual case, and examples of both majors cross-recommending against a competitive opponent are nowadays rare.  Indeed, including state elections, even One Nation has more often beaten majors from behind thanks to preference flows than led on preferences and lost, by a margin of 9 cases to 4.

I thought I would compile a list of all the cases I could find in single seat elections since 1990 (state, federal and territory) where either a major party has led on primary votes but been beaten by a non-major, or the other way around.  What I find is that non-majors beating majors by overtaking a major party primary vote leader on preferences is about nine times more common than the reverse.  

Western Australia 2025: Can The Liberals Get Back To 2017?

There hasn't been a lot of polling to talk about for the WA 2025 state election but I just thought I should do a quickish writeup on a general view of this election, which Labor is universally expected to win.  In 2017 the Barnett Liberal Government suffered what was at the time a historically lopsided dumping, losing the 2PP 44.5-55.5, with the new Labor government of Mark McGowan winning 41 seats to 13 for the Liberals and 5 for the Nationals.  Some people were more surprised when this outcome loomed than they should have been; the state government was eight years old and federally dragged, and signs of its doom had been growing in the polling over years. 

2021 then saw WA become a one-party state, with McGowan polling through the roof and then some and a rabble of an opposition hopelessly tied to unpalatable views on COVID management.  Now McGowan has moved on and COVID politics have faded, and now it's Labor who have an eight year old government that's facing the headwinds from Canberra.  And yet the polling picture so far is that the Liberal and WA National parties are not yet sure to get back to where they were in 2017.  

How Might Minor Right Parties Win More Federal Seats?

This article covers a few recent things I've had my eye on in terms of the Australian minor right movement's attempts to win more federal seats.  By "minor right" I primarily mean parties like One Nation, Libertarians, United Australia, the current version of Family First and so on.  In the broadest sense the term includes these parties plus Australian Christians, Australian Citizens, Gerard Rennick People First, Katters Australian Party, Shooters Fishers and Farmers, Great Australian Party, Trumpet of Patriots (yes that's a thing, nee Australian Federation Party), the federally unregistered Democratic Labour Party, the unregistered AustraliaOne and Reignite Democracy Australia and also unregistered "don't call us antivax" parties like HEART and Health Australia.  

That's a lot of parties.  Some of these parties have legitimate reason to exist independently - Australian Christians and Libertarians each represent an ideology (though how many Australian Libertarians actually believe in it as opposed to being random culture warriors or Liberal Right refugees is another question).  KAP at federal level is basically a vehicle for a single de facto independent and Shooters Fishers and Farmers represents a specific set of interest groups.  But most of the rest fall broadly into the same nationalist/populist/conspiracist/Trumpist/culture-warrior basket and have no reason for independent existence other than that they just can't bang the rocks together.   So this is one of the problems - the Australian minor right is a rabble.  So how do they become more successful?

Prahran and Werribee By-Elections Live

Prahran (Grn vs Lib 12.0%)
Vacancy for resignation of Sam Hibbins (Grn/IND)

Liberal gain from Green/IND (called Sunday 4:20 pm)

Werribee (ALP vs Lib 10.9%)
Vacancy for resignation of Tim Pallas (ALP)
Labor retain (called Thursday 3:30 pm)

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Distributions: Both preference distributions have been posted and I don't know if there is any scope for further changes so for now it looks like the Liberals have won the primary vote count in Prahran by one vote.  In Prahran, the lead changed a few times through the distribution, and going into the Lupton exclusion the Greens were still ahead. However, that exclusion flowed 63.7% to Liberal.  I have heard from scrutineers that the flow from 1 Lupton votes was 68-32.  

In Werribee, the Liberals gained slightly from the final (Paul Hopper) transfer; here I have heard that the split off the 1 Hopper votes was 60-40 to them but the preferences that had pooled with Hopper from other sources favoured Labor.  What is notable here is that far from the minor candidates preferences pooling with Hopper, he actually went backwards compared to both majors, and got only 27.8% of the preferences at the 3CP stage.  This means that while there was a very large vote for non-majors in Werribee, a lot of those voters were not consistently opposed to the major parties; they just liked someone else more.  The term "double haters" has been thrown around in reference to this result but the distribution doesn't suggest that's what the voters are.  

Friday 6:20 ALP lead in Werribee out to 639, there will be slight changes but I expect it to finish well within 100 of that.  

Friday: Labor has very reasonably claimed victory in Werribee but the result is not official until after the adding of final votes and the distribution of preferences, which I'd expect to happen sometime next week.  In Prahran, it's interesting to note the Liberal primary vote lead over the Greens has come down to seven votes; although the Liberals will win the seat thanks to their superior preference flow, it is still possible they will do so from second on primaries (that would be embarrassing for right-wingers who oppose preferential voting).  

Tony Lupton has been claiming credit for the result in The Australian and suggesting Labor should put the Greens last everywhere.  However not only did his vote not look very Labory in booth terms, but his how to vote card which was orange and said "It's Time For An Independent" was hardly pitched at Labor voters beyond the endorsement from Steve Bracks.  

Thursday 3:30: Recheck primaries have come through without any major changes to Labor's position; this plus the increased lead after postals counted so far makes it clear Labor has retained the seat.   (Update: I understand there are now only provisionals and the last postals to come.)

Thursday 3pm: A report that Labor has done well on primary votes on the late postals and are poised to pull further ahead on 2PP.  (Update: report from Labor that the lead is now 591.)

Thursday midday: Counting of about 2000 Werribee postals has been brought forward to today.  This plus rechecking of booths may put the seat beyond doubt.  

Tuesday: Rechecking in Prahran has not resulted in any significant changes.  Still waiting for rechecked primaries in Werribee.  

Sunday: Where The Lupton Vote Really Came From!

There has been some damage-control spinning from the Greens of a result that is simply very bad.  Among this has been a tweet by leader Ellen Sandell claiming that "Obviously it’s not the result we would have liked but with the unofficial Labor candidate sending their preferences to the Liberals, those Labor preferences have handed the seat to the Liberals this time."  Firstly, Lupton was not a typical unofficial "independent Labor" type candidate but one who'd got involved in some culture war issues and criticised the party.  Secondly, candidates don't send preferences anywhere (it's the lower house) and I'd be surprised if the follow rate for the Lupton card was that high anyway.  Thirdly the evidence is that where Lupton got his votes from tended not to be the ALP support base.  In booth terms, while his vote was pretty flat everywhere, he did worst in the good Labor booths from 2022 and better in the good Liberal booths from 2022 - even though the former had more votes up for grabs care of Labor not running!  Neither result is statistically significant but they do very strongly contradict the idea that the Lupton vote was a large chunk of the former Labor vote - it looks more like an independent conservative sort of thing:

Victorian Labor Kicks The Group Ticket Can Down The Road

(Coverage of Victorian by-elections tonight from 6 pm.  Live page will go up around 5 pm).

Victoria is the last place in Australia where Group Ticket Voting persists in upper house elections.  The system was invented in the 1980s because the Democrats, who are to blame for everything, forced the Hawke Labor government to retain full preferencing in Senate elections.  Because requiring voters to number all the boxes for Senate elections often caused extremely high informal rates, Group Ticket Voting was created as a way to retain full preferencing while cutting the informal rate.  A voter could vote 1 for a party and their party would allocate their preference for them.

Initially this system lacked obvious downsides but its potential for exploitation was obvious as early as the 1987 federal election, where a Nuclear Disarmament candidate with 1.5% of the primary vote was elected.  A series of farcical GTV elections around the country since led to the abolition of the system in NSW, federally, SA and WA leaving only Victoria.  Problems exposed with the system have included:

* parties winning off tiny vote shares defeating much more popular parties when they would not win under any other system

* confusing and deceptive GTV preference allocations that are beyond the understanding of most voters if they tried to follow them

* preference harvesting in which ideologically unrelated parties band together to try to secure election off each others' group ticket preferences

* creation of unnecessary tipping points that should be irrelevant to the contest, making it easier for elections to be voided (eg WA Senate 2013)

* creation of bogus near-100% preference flows between parties when, if asked to choose preferences for themselves, voters spread preferences in a much less concentrated fashion

* corruption of parliamentary voting behaviour, in the form of party votes on electoral reform being influenced by fear of losing the ability to work with Glenn Druery, as stated by Druery himself in the Angry Victorians sting video

* denying voters the ability to direct their own preferences between parties above the line (which they will be used to doing so having done so twice since the last state election) and throwing away their stated preferences and overwrites them with a group ticket vote if they do. 

*confusion between the Victorian system and the Senate system