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).  

In 2025 I released 101 articles, up 22 on 2024 and second only to 2018 so far in the history of this site.  This included 31 posts about the federal election and 28 about the Tasmanian election, leadup and aftermath.  There were five about Tasmanian polling outside of election leadups, four about the WA election and five about the Tasmanian Legislative Council elections.

Ah if only there was time ...

I have been severely spare-time-deprived this year as a result of the back to back federal and state elections and then an upswing of unrelated paid work in the second half of the year.  This has resulted in more pieces I would like to write - especially about the 2025 Reps results - having not been started let alone completed.  Here are some titles of pieces that I started but either didn't finish or didn't release.

Division Hell: Australia's Latest Dumb Culture War Attempt 
The Tasmanian Legislative Council Should Change Its Standing Orders On Divisions
People Must Stop Asking Grok For Information About Elections
Statement Re Relations With The ABC*
Myths About Above And Below The Line Voting In Federal Elections

(* this pertained to an item where I was disrespectfully and misleadingly described on national news, which nearly resulted in me boycotting almost everyone at the ABC).  

Top ten

According to the hybrid formula I use to compare GA-4 stats to old Universal Analytics stats, these were the most popular articles in 2025:  

1. 2025 Late Postcount And Expected Recount: Bradfield

A surprise winner perhaps, but with all the attention having gone away from other seats, this piece following the Bradfield recount action came out on top on the conversion formula I use to compare pre-2023 to post-2023 articles, and sixth (only just short of fifth) on that formula in site history.  Teal independent Nicolette Boele won the initial 2PP count by 40, trailed by 8 after the distribution of preferences, and won by 26 after the recount.  

2. 2025 House Of Reps Postcount: Coalition vs Teals (Goldstein, Bradfield, Kooyong etc)

This piece followed counting action in Kooyong, Goldstein and Bradfield until such time as the latter two seats got a partial recount and a full recount respectively.  Monique Ryan retained Kooyong despite a scare on postals, Zoe Daniel very narrowly lost Goldstein after a particularly lumpy postcount, and for Bradfield see above.  I am most pleased about the coverage of Bradfield in this piece because unlike I think every other significant source covering this count, I never actually called the seat for the Liberals, though at some points I gave Boele very little chance and said that it looked over.  

3. 2025 House Of Reps Postcount Summary, Links Hub And Classic 2PP Seats Page

The hub and classic postcounts page had the most individual views for the year but did not score as highly as the 2022 version, most likely because only a few classic seats (Bendigo because it needed realignment and Longman and Bullwinkel because they were actually close) remained in any level of suspense for long.

4. 2025 House of Reps Postcount: Melbourne

The dramatic demise of Greens Leader Adam Bandt, masked on election night by a strange AEC decision to count the 2CP as Greens vs ... Liberal?  This article had more individual readers than any other but fewer return visits than the other leaders as it was all over and called in a few days.

5. 2025 Tasmanian Postcount: Bass

An unprecedented and strange Hare-Clark postcount saw nobody end up with anything much in the race for the final seat in Bass between the Liberals, Greens, Labor, Shooters Fishers and Farmers and two independents.  The race was complicated by within-ticket splits that nearly saw Labor snatch a freak third seat, leakage and the impact of the Macquarie Point stadium proposal on preference flows.  Independent George Razay started the postcount as an underdog just hanging in there but got motoring near the end and won from notionally fourth place on raw quotas.  Somebody had to.  

6. 2025 Tasmanian Election Guide: Main Page

The usual main page for a Tasmanian state election, outscoring the 2024 equivalent by 7%.  The only page in this list that isn't a postcount page.

7. 2025 Senate Postcounts: National Thread

Thread that followed the Senate postcounts with Labor vs One Nation races of interest in four mainland states (finishing in a 2-2 scoreline).  I was incredibly busy with Reps postcounts this election and wasn't able to give some of the Senate ones the attention they deserved, so this article's attempts to forecast the results were below my normal standard.  Especially I didn't think One Nation could win in NSW.

8. 2025 Tasmania Senate Postcount

Unexpected drama in the Tasmanian Senate postcount as the Liberals polled so badly and Labor so well that Richard Colbeck and Jacqui Lambie were at risk of losing to a completely off the radar third ALP candidate.  In the end normality prevailed and the incumbents were re-elected.

9. 2025 Late Postcount: Calwell

The vacant Victorian federal seat of Calwell saw a postcount so unusual that even a 3CP count wouldn't be enough to solve it, the first recent time the AEC has needed to conduct a full preference throw to decide the final two and the winner.  Ultimately Labor's Bassem Abdo succeeded off a low primary vote without much trouble.

10. Tasmania Remains Ungovernable: 2025 Election Tallyboard And Summary

Main postcount page for the 2025 Tasmanian election count, which finished in a pretty-much-no-change hung parliament.  The title caused some misunderstandings but was actually a riff on "become ungovernable" with a suggestion that Tasmanian voters had deliberately re-endorsed chaos and positively refused to be told what to do. 

Often the pieces I am proudest of or consider most important aren't particularly high-scorers (the postcount pieces and guide pieces generally tend to get the most visitors).  For this year I was particularly proud of my efforts in exclusively covering the Tasmanian Nationals' preselection of a candidate with a notorious past.  

Other stats

The ten biggest days of the year (measured by "session starts") were May 6, 7, 5, 4 (federal election), July 20 (Tasmania), May 8, May 9, June 4 (Tasmania triggered), May 23 (federal/LegCo overlap; oddly the most visited page that day was Bradfield though it had no updates that day) and July 19. 

The most visited pages from pre-2025 were the Tasmanian stadium polling page, the ancient bio page, the Ginninderra Effect page,  the 2024 Tasmanian election voting advice page and 2PP Federal Polling Aggregate Relaunched.

The most clicked tags were apparently Longman, voice referendum, Tasmania 2024, pseph, 2025 federal, debunkings, Tasmania, Cassy O'Connor, LegCo 2025 and Not-A-Poll.  Hmm, I got nothing, that's a weird list there.  As noted previously the "pseph" tag is being very slowly decommissioned.

By "engaged sessions" the most visiting countries were Australia, USA (+1), UK (-1), NZ, Singapore (+5), China (re-entry last seen 2015), Canada (-2), Ireland (re-entry), France (-2) and Thailand (new).  I'm a little suspicious of whether the Singapore and China entries here are fully genuine as these countries have a lot of bot traffic to my site.

168 "Google countries" visited in 2025 (smashing the previous record of 155) and at least 194 have now visited in total, though it may be a few more than that as I have some records of countries appearing on the old Analytics that later dropped off (an example is Botswana which was missing from last year's 186 but has visited before). Genuinely new this year were Belize, Greenland, Guam, Libya, Niger, St Kitts and Nevis and St Martin.  Niger was previously the most populous country never to have appeared.  That list is now headed by North Korea, Burundi and Togo.  

The ten most visiting cities were Melbourne, Sydney, Hobart, Brisbane, Adelaide (+1), Perth (+1), Canberra (-2), Launceston (re-entry), London (re-entry) and Central Coast (-2)

The top hit sources were Twitter, Google, Bluesky (+7), Facebook, Reddit, Pollbludger (-3), The Guardian (re-entry), Bing (-2), The Conversation (-1) and Pulse Tasmania (new).  Taking out search engines the next two were Threads and Tally Room.

Orders of the year

2026 looks like a quieter year than for a while in some ways but will feature two state elections.  In March, the Malinauskas Government in South Australia is universally expected to secure a second term easily, the issue being whether the Liberal opposition can be even remotely competitive.  The Victorian election in November is a much less certain prospect for the by then twelve-year old Allan Labor Government.  My dearest hope for this election is that it will be conducted democratically by putting upper house Group Ticket Voting in the bin before it is held.  If that doesn't happen I'll be encouraging Victorian readers to put all guilty parties in the bin instead.   Reform really should have happened during 2025, and 2026 is Victoria's last chance to avert another joke election.  Movement on this issue needs to happen fast when Parliament resumes.

Tasmania will have elections for two Legislative Council seats in May.  The Liberals' Jo Palmer won Rosevears by a whisker in 2020 but her opponent Janie Finlay has since been elected to state parliament in Bass (three times!) and it will be interesting to see if there is any serious challenger.  In Huon, independent Dean Harriss ran down Labor on preferences in the 2022 by-election. I think that he has had a good term and we'll see if anyone thinks they can beat him.

Also in Tasmania, local government elections come around in October 2026 and I'll again be covering Hobart in detail with some level of coverage of other councils and general themes depending on available time.  And the counts as well, to the extent that I'm allowed to!  (Apparently my sampling outrunning the very slow official figures ruffled a few feathers in 2022).  

In the known unknowns department there's always the potential for federal or interesting state by-elections, though the vultures circling the seat of Isaacs haven't had a lot to say in recent months.  I'm hoping during this year to get on with a lot more of the fine detail from the 2025 Reps election as mentioned above.  There may also be action on expanding the federal parliament and perhaps other reforms. The federal polling story should heat up and 2026 should give us a good handle on where the recent trends on the right are going - a One Nation bubble, a genuine realignment or something that's in between.

Finally as well as hoping that Victoria gets rid of Group Ticket Voting this year, I also hope this year sees a dramatic decline in the anti-preferential-voting rubbish that has abounded on social media since the election, much of it from people who pretend to be patriots.  The support for first past the post by these people should be a national embarrassment. It shows a failure to understand what actually happened at this year's election, a disrespect for over a century of history of providing fairness to voters in a way that embodies the Australian value of a fair go, and a lack of appreciation that first past the post would actually be a futile and stupid vandalism of our system.   

Together with the FPTP nonsense, I've seen far too many of these fake patriots engage in a form of election denial by claiming that the result happened because voters don't understand preferential voting.  In fact it's clear enough from 2PP preference flows that voters for left parties strongly favour Labor and voters for right parties favour the Coalition, suggesting that in broad terms most voters whose preferences matter know exactly what they're doing.  And no, they're mostly not following how to vote cards.  So yes, some people didn't like the result and wanted to sook about it, but wrongly blaming the electoral system is off limits.  2026 is high time for this nonsense to end. 

Thankyou!

A huge thankyou to readers for the interest level this amazing year, to sources who provide me with scrutineering numbers and gossip about dubious candidates, and especially to the many readers who have donated generously to support my work here.  I always hope to find the time to thank everyone personally; but it's only intermittently possible at the moment, and these days with PayID enabled on this site I get some donations where I don't have any contact details for the donor anyway.  

Happy New Year to all readers!

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.  

Running against an 11-year old state government that had been knocked into minority by its pursuit of an unpopular stadium then spent much of its short 2024-5 term mired in scandal over a droppingly inept ferry birthing fiasco, Tasmanian Labor somehow contrived to lose primary support and not gain any seats, oh and the stadium ended up passing parliament!  However they were far from unusual round the country in being an Opposition who endured a lousy 2025, and reflection on the sad state of Oppositions round the country caused me to write this.  I also ran two Not-A-Polls, one to vote on who actually was the country's worst Opposition (a plurality win for the Victorian Liberals, then still led by Brad Battin) and the current round which very conveniently expired about 9:30 am today.  Amazingly, two voters actually voted today, one at about 2am presumably while stuck in a chimney somewhere and the other about 7, presumably looking too early for the Christmas article. 

I am impressed by the original Worst Oppositions article's kill rate!  Of course I didn't really do it but since I declared Australia to be living in a golden age of terrible Oppositions, a whole four of them have realised it is true and disposed of their leaders!  This has led to an amazing situation in which Selena Uibo, NT Opposition leader since her party were turfed and rendered leaderless last August, is Australia's most senior Opposition Leader!  Steven Miles is the only other survivor of 2024 vintage and the other seven, amazingly, were all installed this year.  This included one forced change after Peter Dutton lost his seat in May, and two others that followed election defeats.  Of the more recent four, those in Victoria and the ACT can be seen as significantly inflicted by internal decisions that backfired against the incumbent leader.  The other two, NSW and SA, mainly reflect that the party was polling awfully at a time when that really should not be the case.  In SA, the factional inability of the party to present itself as politically mainstream is a very big part of the problem.  

Remarkably, three of the state Liberal Oppositions are now led by first-term female MPs, two of whom were born in the 1990s.  History will tell whether these were inspired choices or the party's last desperate attempt to save itself from terminal brand damage.  Perhaps both.  SA will be the first test for this concept, but one where expectations are so low that anything but the Liberal Party being turned into rubble will be seen as okay.  

Anyway, the Not-A-Poll results:

The most popular prediction overall was that precisely one of the current nine oppositions would win; 53.8% had this. 25.4% had more than one (usually two) saluting with 20.8% predicting that the lot would lose.  

Because one is such an easy pick I made it harder for those picking one by asking them which one.  Here Queensland was by far the most popular choice making 1 (Qld) the plurality winner of the options chosen.  My view on this is that there is a difference between how terrible an Opposition is and its chances of winning. Qld Labor has a strong claim to be the least bad state Opposition around, but it's up against a government that is in its first term and that is likely to have federal drag on its side when it goes to the polls in late 2028.  It's true that the last two conservative governments in Queensland were one-termers, but this was extremely self-inflicted in Campbell Newman's case (with a large assist from Tony Abbott as well), while the Borbidge government never won an election in its own right anyway, and so far I think the LNP are doing "don't be Campbell Newman" reasonably well.  They even may be resisting the One Nation polling surge that is happening in most other places.  

Conversely while the Victorian Liberals' squalid reputation is particularly well deserved, they have by far the strongest historical hand - up against a government that will be 12 years old at next year's election, that is federally dragged and that has a Premier polling appallingly - I discussed this further here.  The WA Liberals are not polling well but also have time on their side in that they will be up against a 12 year old government that could well also be federally dragged, and that's still over three years away.  But do the normal rules apply or are there parts of the country under Labor hegemony where the Coalition brand is now too dead to take advantage of them?  My aim is to revisit this article when all of these oppositions have been to an election (I think that's,er, March 2029) and check how many succeeded and why.

Secular season's greetings and Happy New Year to all readers!  As usual my next scheduled event is my annual site review that typically appears on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day and there are, as noted, other goodies being worked on.  

2025 Polling Year In Review

2PP Average For Year 53.9 to ALP (+3.0)

At the end of each year I release a review of the year in federal polling.  See the 2024 article here (ah, those days when the Coalition still seemed competitive!) and/or click on the "annual poll review" tab for all articles back to 2014.  As usual if any late polls arrive I will edit this article to update the relevant statistics.  

2025 was overall not a good year for the Australian polling industry.  The year started well with good results for the two main pollsters in the field for the WA state election but this was followed by a rather serious federal election miss, where pollsters had the right winner but were almost as far off on the 2PP and primary votes as when they were wrong in 2019.  As they had the right winner anyway there was little media interest in the error; there has also been precious little visible introspection from the industry since and none of the attempts at review processes we saw following 2019.  The Tasmanian state election was then a mixed bag with a good result for local firm EMRS but a big shocker for YouGov.  On the plus side, we are seeing more diversity in Australian polling, but still the average transparency level is ordinary.

This year welcomed one new entrant, Spectre, and also saw a low-key and unsuccessful return from Ipsos and a great step up in activity from DemosAU.  

The state of play

As I write, 2PP polling since the election has shown on average a very slow decline, including months where it was arguably static, since a post-election peak which I have at 57.2 in mid-July.  I currently estimate Labor's 2PP at 54.8% (recently dipping marginally below their election result finally for the first time after seven months) though it would be still at 55.4% but for my decision to treat Morgan's recent split sample as two readings.  I made this decision because the second portion of the sample still had a sample size well over 1000 and aggregates function better using fresh data collected over relatively short windows than they do with data pooled over a month.  

Morgan attributed the poor numbers for Labor in the second part of their sample to the travel rorts saga which was the first scandal of such a sort for this government.  It is very common for Morgan to attribute any movement in their polls to anything whatsoever that is in the current news cycle; that said my perception is also that Morgan respondents for whatever reason actually do respond more to news cycle events than respondents to other polls.  With all this being overshadowed by the Bondi terror attack days later we will never know whether the travel rorts matter was really a serious dampener of Labor support.  And given the time of year at which it broke (when polls tend to be scarce on the ground around Christmas) we would probably not have known anyway.  The previous poll to Morgan, a Redbridge/Accent poll that came out of field on Dec 12 with a 56-44 2PP for Labor, had not been visibly affected.  The other polls out in December were an Essential that by last-election preferences was a term worst for Labor (I converted it at 54.3 though Essential's "2PP+" comes out at only 52.1) and a Resolve that was quite strong for Labor (55-45 but I converted it at 56.1).  Newspoll was last out in late November and has never in 40 years appeared as late in December as now (but I'll keep an eye out on Sunday night just in case).  

However the 2PP picture has been a relative sideshow in recent polling to the rise and rise of One Nation, lately running at about 17% primary and with no sign yet that their rise is stopping.  Depending on swing models this suggests they would win from a few to several seats in an election "held now"; a DemosAU MRP had them on for as many as twelve though a difficulty here is in gauging Coalition to One Nation preference flows.  In Hunter, Coalition preferences flowed 83% to One Nation but that was with Stuart Bonds as One Nation candidate, and Bonds is a local figure whose appeal is broader than the party (as can be seen from the Reps/Senate primary vote differences).  In the DemosAU figures Calare would be retained by an independents, and at least Riverina and Lyne also look to me like Coalition wins on Labor preferences; other seats such as Groom and Hinkler might fall to indies before One Nation won them (there is a strong effect of indies on the One Nation vote in such seats).  So I think for the moment something like seven seats is more plausible.  But if they keep going upwards, that can increase rapidly.  

We still don't know whether this is heading for a realignment on the conservative side (in which the Liberals are supplanted by a new main force on the right), a fracturing of the conservative forces into multiple parties or if this One Nation surge is mostly a protest bubble that can deflate if the Coalition starts looking more competitive and probably changes leader.  

How many polls?

This year I counted about 107 federal voting intention polls, some of which doubled as MRP models.  Despite this being an election year, this is down 25 on 2024, which partly reflects some polls becoming less frequent after the election (in some cases retreating to lick their wounds, in others a deliberate decision).  My count includes 27 Morgans (18 before the election and nine after, one of which was split into two subsamples), 15 Newspolls (9 before 6 after), 13 Essentials (9 and 4), 12 Redbridges or Redbridge/Accents (5 and 6), 12 YouGovs (11 and 1), 12 Resolves (5 and 7), seven Freshwaters (6 and 1), six DemosAUs (4 and 2), three Spectres (1 and 2) and a lone Ipsos just before the election.  

2PP Voting Intention

All of the polls in my records released a 2PP voting intention figure of some sort this year.  Prior to the election Labor scored 40 2PP wins, six ties and 21 losses.  They lost every released 2PP in January, lost nine of thirteen in February but had only three losses from 16 polls in March and won all 29 in April and May.  Since the election Labor has won all 38 2PPs.

However a lot of the story of Labor's losses early in the year came from preferencing methods and assumptions that did not end up matching what happened at the election.  Using the released primaries and 2022 election preferences, Labor lost only nine 2PPs if rounded to the nearest whole number, or fifteen if rounded to one decimal place.

I have said plenty before about the pattern before the election in which Labor's 2PP support, which had been declining gradually through 2024, turned the corner early in 2025, at almost exactly the same time that Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term as US President.  There was a steep climb in support for Labor from early March which national pollsters stopped finding evidence of in the final weeks.  Had their finding been that it was continuing through this time, the final polls would have been far more accurate.  

Prior to the election Labor's worst released 2PP was a 45 by respondent preferences from Resolve in February and their best was a 55.5 from Morgan in the third week of April (the only poll to even marginally exceed the actual result).  By my last-election conversions the February Resolve was still the worst, but at a less outlying 47.3.  

Since the election Labor's best released 2PPs were 59s from DemosAU in early July and Resolve in August.  The lowest was a 52.1 (after conversion) from Essential in early December, but it's not possible for me to take Essential's mostly respondent preferences (or for that matter their perennially very low Ind/other primaries) seriously.  By my last-election preferences the DemosAU at 58.9 was Labor's highest while the lowest was a 52.9 from the last week subsample of the December Morgan.  Excluding that, the next lowest were 53.9s from Redbridge/Accent in late Sept-early Oct and in the current Resolve.

As an average 2PP aggregated figure for the year (by last-election preferences) I have Labor on 53.9 for those times my aggregates were active but this is divided into 50.7 before the election and 56.3 since it.  The 53.9, up three points on 2024, is not as high as the 54.9 that Labor averaged for 2022 or the 54.8 for 2023.

Leaderships

This year Anthony Albanese averaged a net -7.5 personal satisfaction rating in Newspoll, but this was divided into -11.7 pre-election and -1.3 after it, with a low of net -21 in February and a high of +3 in August.  Both Coalition leaders fared badly with Peter Dutton averageing net -18.1 and Sussan Ley -19.1; Albanese led Dutton as Better PM by an average 10.6 points (increasing as the election approached) and Ley by 22.7.  It is not unusual for new Opposition Leaders to struggle on such scores, especially when their party is losing the 2PP; indeed historically Ley could easily be behind by more and my sense is that the house advantage to incumbents on Preferred Leader scores has reduced.

Dutton actually beat Albanese as preferred PM in two Resolves early in the year and tied him in one Freshwater.  Dutton was also ahead on net approval in all polls by anyone in January or February, but only in 3 out of 32 readings thereafter.  Ley had a better rating than Albanese for "performance in recent weeks" in all Resolves through to October and also the late December Resolve, but no-one else except the lone Freshwater.  Resolve's early December net rating for her of +3 was a massive house-effect-fuelled outlier compared to Redbridge (-20), Essential (-19) and Newspoll (-29).  While her net rating was down to -4 in the late December Resolve, it was still very different to others.  

The path ahead

2026 will be a big year in terms of where Australian politics and polling is going.  If the One Nation surge stabilises or recedes then we may get back to something more normal.  If the Coalition then doesn't get supplanted or collapsed then Labor's already very long re-election honeymoon is likely to end sometime, perhaps sooner rather than later.  On the other hand the upheavals on the right could overshadow the normal ups and downs of an incumbent government.  

There is much speculation about the impact of the Bondi attack but a lot of it is coming from the same sources that believed antisemitism would be a very salient issue at the election (outside a few of the non-classic contests in Melbourne - and not even all of those either - it basically didn't register).  Obviously the reality is far more significant than the speculation but will voters blame the government and shift their voting intentions or will they take the view that these things are not so easily avoided and that the government is trying to respond constructively?  My own view is that whatever one thinks of the government's response so far, anything is better than US-style "thoughts and prayers".  

Update 22 Dec: this article has been updated for the December Resolve, which found a 1% 2PP hit to the government post-Bondi (and post most of "travel rorts") though on my last-election preferences estimates this goes up to 2.4%.  Albanese took a net ratings hit of 15 points on "performance in recent weeks" and 14 on "net likeability" but his ratings were still far from awful, and Ley was down 7 on each for no obvious reason.  This brought my aggregate down from 55.1 to 54.8; text above has been edited.