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 four 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 25 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 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.   This 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 (and re-elected twice!) 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!