Dear Anti-Preferencers, November 21st For Australia Day !!!

Support for changing the date of Australia Day has really been on the skids in recent years.  Partly this has been because referendums have consequences and the failed sloppy Voice referendum push seems to have reduced interest in reconciliation generally.  Partly it's because the cost of living crisis that was especially acute during 2024 has created a strong sense of 'now is not the time' and that there are bigger problems than symbolic stuff that doesn't materially affect lives.  It's also likely that in the wake of the Bondi attack, there is an even stronger feeling that now is the time for 'coming together as a nation and not having that old argument again this year'.   As a possible fourth factor I wonder if support for Invasion Day agitation was stronger a few years ago just because the Coalition was in power.  

While a lot of the polling out there on this issue is of low quality and/or conflicted, polling for change the date has overall been in freefall in recent years and my estimate is that support for change could be down below 25% nationwide, from pushing 40% a few years ago.  (Resolve recently even had it down from 39-47 support-oppose to a pathetic 16-68 but I'm doubtful that the change has been quite that large. Morgan's SMS poll still had 39.5% for change on a yes-no basis, albeit after a question that asked if Jan 26 should be called "Australia Day" or "Invasion Day").    Whatever the exact numbers, Australia Day isn't going anywhere any time soon, and I cannot remember a time for decades when the change the date campaign seemed less visible.  

But things can change, and if there is to be a change in day someday, I find the alternatives so far suggested boring and lacking in spice.  January 1?  Already a holiday.  May 8?  Boganism!  And so on.  If Australia Day were to be moved my choice would be November 21st, to celebrate our great electoral history. This date would annoy people who don't like preferential voting.  They would be unable to "celebrate" that Australia Day without it telling them how much they've got this country wrong.  

In the final days of 2025 I continued to see a very high level of anti-preferencer fake patriot nonsense on twitter, even, for goodness' sake, on New Year's Eve.  The online fake patriot movement in Australia is characterised by three things:

* Affectations of patriotism (conspicuous flying of Australian flags in profiles etc. I am of course not saying nearly everyone who does this is a problem)

* Attacking preferential voting and wanting to replace it with first past the post 

* Liking Donald Trump and attempting to imitate his style and that of the MAGA movement

I call these people who tick all these boxes fake patriots because preferential voting is an embodiment of the Australian ideal of a fair go.  One just can't love this country and think first past the post would be good for it.  The first past the post system subjects some voters to tactical dilemmas about whether their vote could be a wasted vote, but not others, and therefore it is unfair to voters. Support for first past the post by those claiming to be patriots is a betrayal of our proud history of enabling new candidates and parties to compete for seats on a fair footing without having their vote suppressed by the wasted vote problem.  The anti-preferencer movement is also fake patriotism because it is not really concerned with Australia's wellbeing or history at all and is far more interested in making us a colony of Trump.

Anti-preferencers commonly make false factual claims about recent elections won by Labor (and sometimes about those won by the Coalition, though for some reason those are far less common).  The most common among these are:

* That Labor only won the 2025 election because of preferential voting.  (In fact Labor was ahead on primaries nationwide and in 86 seats.)

* That Labor only won the 2025 election because voters do not understand preferential voting.  (The evidence is that while individual voters may get confused, overall those voters whose preferences matter actually do use the system to correctly indicate their preferences between at least the major parties - Greens voters very strongly preference Labor, One Nation voters strongly preference Coalition, etc)

* That Labor only won because of migrants it imported.  (Migrants who arrived since Labor was elected in 2022 are in general not citizens yet and therefore not voters.  This claim is also usually accompanied by vastly over the top claims about how strongly migrants vote for Labor anyway, most of them riffing off a throwaway Kos Samaras line in a right-wing podcast that was later walked back after being widely debunked).

* That One Nation are disadvantaged by preferences because the major parties gang up against One Nation to stop them from winning seats.  (The Coalition has reliably recommended preferences to One Nation in the vast majority of seats recently and their preferences strongly favour One Nation in the Senate.  In 2025 had One Nation pulled just 5.2% more from the LNP in Wright, they would have won the seat on LNP and minor right preferences from third on primaries off a primary vote of just 21.5%!)

No amount of evidence that first past the post would be wrong for Australia - a crude overseas import that would not give those proposing it anything they actually want - seems to deter these people.  Even as I write the One Nation vote has been rising and the Coalition has been getting over half the estimated preferences in some polls for the first time since forever.  Or if One Nation replaces the Coalition as the main anti-ALP party it too could get more than half the preferences.  We could see widespread three or even four cornered contests where only compulsory preferential voting stops Labor winning, say, a hundred seats off 30% of the primary vote!  

On contining to see anti-preferencers tweeting their nonsense in such great numbers I decided I would set a goal.  If the number of fake patriot accounts that I saw talking nonsense about the 2025 election or preferential voting stayed below a certain level by the end of January 25th then I would not release this article promoting an alternative date chosen to offend them.  

I did everything I could to give them any chance to stay under the limit.  I doubled the initial target score from 50 to 100.  I excluded tweets by or in reply to accounts I had blocked or that had blocked me.  I excluded any tweet where I could detect any realistic chance that the person was genuinely curious about how Labor turned 34.56% of the vote into 94 seats or where they might be a proportional representation supporter who was unwittingly spreading anti-preferencer talking points (this is a big problem!).  I excluded repeat offences by the same accounts.  I probably even lost count a few times.  

But it was all in vain, by January 19 my count had passed 100 with still a week to go.

One Australian who does not understand our great history of electoral fairness is one too many.  A hundred is a hundred too many, and there are way, way more than that. 

So why November 21?

On the great day of November 21 1918 the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 received royal assent, initiating nation-wide federal preferential voting in Australia and binning the first past the post system which had been producing such absurd results as this:

Swan at the time was a conservative electorate but the conservative vote was split between the Nationalists (forerunners of today's Liberals) and the Country Party of Western Australia (also known  as Farmers and Settlers).  This splitting under first past the post enabled Labor to win an undeserved seat.  When preferential voting came in, Nationalist preferences in 1919 were to flow 87.5% to the CPWA/F+S candidate John Prowse, causing him to win 58-42.  After this the seat was not even contested in 1922 or 1925.  It didn't return to Labor hands until a 1940 by-election, at which time Labor was led by a Western Australian and the then UAP-Country coalition was not far off becoming as big a mess as our alternately half-alive and dead one is now.

November 21 1918 was the day when Australia formally cast off our imperial legacy of a crap electoral system and showed that we could stand on our own feet as a democracy that cared about the vote of every voter.  We overcame the obstacles to reform that other countries are still tripping over a century later.  This is a proud thing in the history of our nation and deserves wide celebration.

Two extra things are impressive and worth celebrating here.  Firstly unlike many governments today that use minor distractions such as global pandemics as excuses to ignore or delay pressing electoral reform concerns (looking at you here Victorian Labor), the Nationalists under Billy Hughes managed to get this change done in the tail end of the First World War.  Secondly, when the new system was put to its first test at the Corangamite by-election on December 14 1918, for a system passed only weeks before it went off remarkably smoothly, with an informal vote of only 2.0% in a five-candidate race.  Moreover despite fears that votes might "leak" to Labor if voters did not understand the new system, a staggering 96% of preferences flowed to the Victorian Farmers candidate with the cyberpunky name, and at its first attempt the new system had worked, with a third-party gain from a major party.  When I first thought about writing this article I thought about proposing December 14 for Australia Day instead to commemorate said by-election but several days later noticed that was ... not a good idea. 

(I should also mention that the 1918 Act created block preferential voting for the Senate; the less said about that one the better.)

There are a few common myths about 1918.  The first is that the Nationalists did it to stop Labor winning whole elections.  At the time they had no need to; they were dominant having won 53/75 seats at the previous election.  The issue was about particular seats where proto-Country forces wanted to run against them without handing seats to Labor.

The second is that the Swan by-election nonsense caused the Hughes Government to pass preferential voting.  It may well have accelerated it, but in fact preferential voting had already been working its way through parliament (with the second reading debate commencing a few weeks before the by-election) after being taken to the people at the 1917 election.  

Oh and what about that flag thing?

While we are at it we could also make a very minor fiddle to our flag!  At age twenty in the Mercury's letter of the month (that was a thing) I wrote that we should "expel the cancerous spider that lurks in the corner of our lifeless soulless flag".  Now I know some people like my old stuff better than my new stuff, but these days I think it's great that our flag educates Australians about the mother country and we should educate them more! Like this:

I'm flabbergasted that people who claim to be patriots about our flag cannot be bothered following electoral politics in the country that inspires a whole quarter of it!  They seem to think that the only elections that exist are in Australia and the United States and they are not aware that in the UK in 2024 Labour under Keir Starmer won 411 out of 650 seats off a vote of 33.7%.  The most cursory awareness of UK elections would tell our incurious Trump-loving anti-preferencers that governments winning seat landslides off modest vote shares is not a preferential voting thing but is a general property of single seat electorates.  So that they cannot ignore this reality any longer I propose we stick it on the flag they claim to love and in the process become, I think, the first country to include pseph lessons to a foolish movement on our flag.  I will, of course, withdraw this doubtless very serious proposal when the anti-preferencer movement realises the error of its ways, shuts up and goes away.  

It's Time!

Anti-preferencers are almost always anti-immigration, but the funny thing is they don't realise how easily their xenophobic compliants about migrants apply to them.  

Like this: anti-preferencers who follow MAGA values need to realise this is not their country.  They are trying to bring in foreign ideas and conflicts that our nation does not share.  They associate in online ghettos and refuse to assimilate with people who understand how the voting system operates.  They are ignorant of Australia's electoral history, its heritage.  They refuse to learn our electoral language and cannot be trusted to have our country's values at stake. Above all their constant attempts at election denial - accompanied often by calling political opponents "retards" and worse - are a clear threat to social cohesion and in cases an obvious stochastic terrorism attempt against our leaders and electoral authorities.  These people are abusing electoral value pluralism to spread dangerous nonsense in our country.  

It is time for it to stop.  It is time for them to love preferential voting, or leave.