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?
The form guide is as follows. Aside from KAP, none of the current minor right parties have ever won a House of Reps seat in their own name. Where they have had incumbents, those incumbents have been defectors who have then lost their seats. In the Senate, the minor right won six seats at the 2016 double dissolution (the lower quota helped them to four One Nation, one Liberal Democrat and one for the old version of Family First) but since then only one in 2019 (Malcolm Roberts for One Nation) and two in 2022 (Pauline Hanson for One Nation and Ralph Babet for United Australia). One Nation also came quite close to winning the final Senate seat in Western Australia in 2022, but the minor right apart from Katter was nowhere near winning any House of Reps seats that year.
It sure aint changing the electoral system
It is very common to see Australian minor right posters on what used to be Twitter whinging about preferential voting and blaming it for the dominance of "the uniparty" (by which they mean Labor and the Coalition, though they tend to hate Labor more). The One Nation/UAP/Rennick types tend to be (but not all are) far more the problem here; the Libertarians more often understand the system. I wrote a whole article about how stupid this anti-preferencing nonsense is, but it was way over the heads of the culprits.
Scrapping preferences would render voting for minor right parties strategically pointless, driving down their support and stopping them from getting public funding. It also wouldn't necessarily broadly help the right, since the core supporters of minor right parties would still vote for those parties (thereby wasting their votes rather than helping the Coalition win) while left voters would be more likely to vote strategically. This is one of the big problems with the Australian minor right - too many of their online supporters are angry ants who rail against the voting system without realising that what they propose instead would be signing their own parties' electoral death warrants. Switching to optional preferences might help minor right parties in a case like Blair 1998 (where Pauline Hanson lost to the Liberals on Labor preferences from well ahead) but minor right support at present is nowhere near enough for such a case to occur in any federal seat.
Minor right supporters of this anti-preferencing nonsense tend to take succour from the Reform Party in the UK winning a handful of seats in the 2024 election and now topping some UK voting intention polls. But the first - which amounted to less than 1% of the parliament anyway - happened because the Conservative vote crashed to 23.7%. It's quite likely that if the Coalition vote fell so low here with a direct swing mostly to the minor right then the minor right would be winning seats in our system too (Flynn and Capricornia for example). Reform's current polling results from the Conservative vote collapsing (the extent of the collapse being partly down to the UK's far longer terms) and then a new Labor government being rapidly unpopular. The majors in the UK are struggling to poll 50 between them; if there was such a crisis in major party support there would be a big surge in minor right support here too.
Short of this sort of collapse in Coalition support here (which is unlikely any time soon) the only structure that would help minor right parties in the Reps to win seats in numbers close to their actual support is to change to proportional representation. However, irate minor righties online generally don't support this, because they would rather keep whinging about their parties losing to "the uniparty" than allow a parliament where they could actually win seats but that had more Greens.
Building preference flows?
Not all minor righties are angry and dumb about preferences and among those who are trying to educate the movement's voters, a significant source is Libertarian Topher Field's marbles videos. In these, Field uses marbles to explain how vote transfers under preferential voting work.
The "FF" letters stand not for Family First, but for "Freedom Friendly". This term emerged during the 2022 leadup as a uniting term for parties that opposed COVID-19 vaccine mandates and COVID-related lockdowns. Parties generally classed as "Freedom Friendly Minor Parties" included the then Liberal Democrats (now Libertarians), One Nation, United Australia, Great Australians, Federation Party (now party with very silly name) and IMOP (now deregistered), but the classification also sometimes included unregistered fringe parties like AustraliaOne. In fact, on issues other than COVID, the attitudes to "freedom" of those who might be grouped under the term ranged from libertarianism to national fascism; some parties were anything but "freedom friendly" on anything beyond COVID and political correctness, and most were at best a mixed bag.
In Field's example, the major parties lead the race on primaries for a seat, but an extremely strong preference flow between the various "freedom friendly" parties results in one eventually overtaking the Liberal Party and then winning on Liberal preferences. The point being attempted here is that when minor right party voters vote 1 for their own party and 2 for the Coalition - perhaps as a result of disinfo from Coalition supporters (I see a bit of that stuff too) they snuff out the chances of the other minor right parties. The claim is that if the minor right party voters could band together and get preference flows approaching 100% within their parties ahead of the majors they could win.
Is this actually realistic? At the moment, no. Despite 2022 being a big election for the minor right because of COVID disenchantments and an on-the-nose Liberal government, the "FFMPs" actually didn't have enough votes between them to win any seats in this manner even with perfect preference flows (nothing near which would happen anyway). A minimum condition for Field's scenario to work is that the combined primary vote for the "FFMPs" exceeds the Coalition primary. But it actually wasn't close to doing so in any seat. For the six parties listed as the main "FFMPs" above the combined vote did not reach the Coalition primary in any seat. The seats where it was the highest proportion of the Coalition primary were:
Scullin 84.8%
Solomon 82.9
Spence 75.2
Calwell 74.8
Werriwa 74.1
Richmond 72.7
Fowler 72.3
Blair 65.9
Hawke 64.3
Lalor 64.2
(One might ask why Solomon appears in the above list of what are mostly outer-suburban Labor seats - Solomon had a very high Liberal Democrat vote that appears to have been linked to the campaign by disendorsed CLP Senator Sam McMahon to retain her Senate seat as a Liberal Democrat).
These were all seats where Labor won the 2PP pretty easily anyway (though they did lose Fowler to Dai Le) and in none of these seats would the "FFMP" candidate have won even if they got over the Coalition. I have to go down to Capricornia and Flynn in 17th and 18th places with the "FFMP" vote on 59.0% and 57.5% of the Coalition primary respectively to find seats that the Coalition won.
Now take all this and throw in the 2025 situation: a rising Coalition primary vote, the COVID politics of the previous term retreating from memory, and Peter Dutton as a Coalition leader more likely to draw preferences if not primaries from the minor right, especially in Queensland, and the "FFMPs" would have to be feeling very lucky to think they will outpoll the Coalition anywhere even if they could then get the preference flows needed to overtake them.. At the moment, barring a freak situation like a major party candidate not nominating in time, it doesn't look realistic that "FFMPs" would win any Reps seat in 2025. The marbles video, while informative about how preference throws operate, is therefore false hope. The best voters for these parties can do is get them above 4% so that they get public funding and take public funding away from the majors. I haven't here even considered the possible impact of the UAP not running following its failure to gain reregistration under the same name.
Ah, but there was a case where these parties exceeded the Coalition primary in a seat recently, and that was Hunter 2019. A spectacular performance by One Nation's candidate Stuart Bonds saw the combined One Nation and UAP primary vote exceed the Coalition's. In that case it was not enough to get Bonds into second, and it wouldn't have been quite enough on 2022 preference flows either, but here is a seat where One Nation were a real shot at making the final two in a seat Labor had a marginal hold on, which could well have made them competitive for 2025. What happened? Well it's One Nation, of course! Their star candidate was dumped after criticising their vote for Coalition IR legislation. Less than half of his votes as an independent returned to them as preferences and the 3CP gap to the Coalition blew out from 1.9% to 14.7%.
Senate coalitions?
Field also has a Senate component in his video, but it's again unrealistic (as I said in a Senate guide on here, "literally a few marbles short"). He only has what looks like just over six quotas of marbles instead of seven and as a result has the major parties getting about two quotas each, the Greens one, and another pooling to one of the "FFMPs" after it beats a rival (this pooling doesn't actually happen for the final two candidates, by the way) with only a very small level of exhaust. On this basis he suggests with strong enough preference flows the "FFMPs" can win in every state.
But what actually happened in the mainland states besides Queensland in 2022 was that the majors got well over four quotas between them (4.46 to 4.70 in 2022) and thus instead of a race between two "FFMPs" for the final seat we got a race between a major party and a minor party, which the major party usually wins. Victoria 2022 was an exception and the much stronger flows between right-wing minors assisted that. (See here for a full description of how Ralph Babet won). It's true that the Babet scenario is capable of occurring in other states (One Nation in WA is possible in 2025 if their support level from lower house polling holds up), but it's not likely to occur in lots at once. As for Tasmania, in that case the majors are only good for four quotas between them but the sixth quota is presently sucked up by the Jacqui Lambie Network, which pulls a lot of potential votes from One Nation and makes a "FFMP" victory very difficult.
Attention has logically turned to the possibility of a strategic coalition between the various right-wing minor parties. Recently there have been reports of a collapse in negotiations after the Libertarians and Family First wanted to support a coalition but One Nation were not interested. The suggested mechanism was that the minor parties proposed to be involved (One Nation, Libertarians, Family First, UAP and SFF) would each be assigned contests to run in and at each of these contests all the other parties wouldn't run and would back the coalition party that was running. A diagram of how this might work has been circulated:
The strange form of the name at the top seems to be based on the idea that spuriously hyphenating words works as a way of getting around the six-word limit for party names (which I rather doubt), and even if it did work the title has seven "words" not six. However as the document notes there is no limit to how many parties can form a coalition and run under a composite name, and I can't find any limit on the length of such a composite name. (The proposed name at the bottom is "Lib-Dems ON SF&F UA FP Coalition" - this is before the Libertarians got their new name.) If the coalition wanted to run with a dog's breakfast name that described all its component parties, the scheme would need to be modified so that a chosen party supplied the lead (or, given Section 44 issues, top two) candidates in each state with the other parties supplying down-ticket candidates. However I can't see anything in the Act stopping it beyond that, for the five minutes it took the major parties to decide that this was silly and amend the Act to limit the size of composite party labels. What might be difficult then would be to stop supporters of the down-ticket parties from voting below the line, especially in Tasmania. (It may be there is some length limit for coalition labels that I'm not aware of - this is a very obscure area of the legislation that I haven't studied before).
The advantages of such a coalition would include that component parties would not be wasting resources competing against each other. Then again, for the UAP this is evidently not an issue anyway. The hope would be that voters who liked one of the under-parties would vote for the coalition as a whole, or that even if they voted below the line for a component party that wasn't campaigning, their vote would still stay within the ticket.
One question about this is whether voters for these parties would really buy it. For ideological libertarians who are mainly interested in economic freedom, parties like One Nation are anathema, stretched attempts to call them follow travellers notwithstanding. What would Ayn Rand say? It was for this sort of reason that the minor right in Australia could long be divided into three strands that might be considered as the libertarian faction, the religious faction and the redneck faction.
Even if this alliance worked I doubt it would be able to win a seat in every state (defeating Lambie in Tasmania looks especially difficult on recent JLN vote shares, although JLN has had a lot of chaos in this term and it's not clear its vote would hold). But it does again raise the question of why there are so many pointless minor right wing parties and what has to happen for their number to reduce.
I think also that the constant internal chaos in One Nation over decades - with its MPs continually quitting the party or being kicked out - shows that One Nation is hard to work within, let alone with. The minor right may become more cohesive and a threat in more Senate seats when Pauline Hanson's influence eventually fades and a new leader of a broader movement might then emerge.
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