Why Hunter 2025 Can't Be Used To Do Last-Election Labor vs One Nation Preference Flows

With the very rapid rise of One Nation in recent national primary voting intention polling we are starting to see some pollsters offer a national alternative Labor-vs-One-Nation two-party figure.  DemosAU did this in its national Jan 5-6 poll where it found One Nation tied with Labor 50-50 while Labor led the Coalition 52-48, this off primaries of Labor 29 Coalition 23 One Nation 23 (more on that later) Greens 12 others 13.  A newish outfit curiously polling on the same dates, Fox&Hedgehog (founded post the 2025 election by a former Peter Dutton staffer) reported 56-44 to Labor vs One Nation off fairly similar primaries of Labor 29 Coalition 25 One Nation 21 Greens 14 others 11, compared to 53-47 for Labor vs Coalition.  So DemosAU has One Nation two points more competitive than Labor on a head to head with Coalition basis while Fox&Hedgehog has them three points worse.  (I'll add that by my last election preferences 48% 2PP for Coalition is pretty generous on the published DemosAU breakdowns, I get 47.4 as the average for their primaries.)

DemosAU attempted to use last-election preferences by using the flow in the seat of Hunter 2025 (the only federal case ever of a Labor vs One Nation finish) to model Coalition to One Nation flows, by assuming the Greens to One Nation vs Labor flow would be the same as the Greens to Coalition vs Labor flow, and also by assigning flows from Others 50-50 between Labor vs One Nation "As the composition of Others is not known".  (That last bit did strike me as a little curious unless they were also doing the same thing for Labor vs Coalition, given that the 2PP flow from others in 2025 was about 57.4% to Labor).  Fox&Hedgehog simply used respondent preferences.  

I happened yesterday to see a widely viewed episode of the YouTube Sloan Zone channel from last week that absolutely blasted DemosAU for using flows from Hunter to model nationwide flows of Coalition preferences to One Nation vs Labor.  (I should note the Hunter flow used by DemosAU was 82.9% to ON, not 88% as stated at one point in the video.  Also, the poll wasn't commissioned at all and was self-initiated).  Seeing this video and a high level of interest in this poll generally in online comments since it came out reminded me that I'd been meaning to crunch some numbers and try to get to the bottom of how representative Hunter really is or isn't.  So Hunter 2025 is the only seat to have produced this matchup in federal history, does that mean all we're left with is extremely wild guesses and people seeing what they want to see?  No of course it doesn't.  We can examine Senate preference flow data!

A standard relationship in House of Reps preference flows is that all else being equal if a candidate has polled a higher than normal primary vote in a booth, they will also receive a better than average preference flow in that booth.  Not every seat displays this pattern but it is so reliable that I use it every federal election to catch and draw attention to data errors in the booth counts.  It also tends to work at seat level too.  

So I went through every seat in NSW for the 2025 federal election and recorded a statistic that would combine the Senate strength of One Nation vs Labor in a given seat, which was (ON primary)/(ON+ALP primary) as a percentage.  And as a potentially dependent variable I found the above the line flow of Coalition preferences to One Nation vs ALP, with exhaust disregarded, using David Barry's Senate Preference Explorer.  (The very low rate of Coalition below the lines in NSW meant I didn't bother with the extremely fiddly business of including them.)  

Hunter is a very strong seat for One Nation but it's also a strong seat for Labor, so based on the usual relationship it should have a highish Coalition flow to One Nation but not among the very highest.  And that is what I got.  The relative One Nation vs (Labor + One Nation) primary vote strength figure ranged from 4.0% in Grayndler to 35.0% in Parkes, with a NSW-wide figure of 14.6% and a Hunter figure of 25.7%.  The One Nation share of Coalition preferences vs Labor ranged from 56.4% in Chifley to 91.5% in Page, with a NSW-wide figure of 78.3% and a Hunter figure of 86.2%.  The latter is reasonably similar to the Hunter Reps flow from Coalition to One Nation of 82.9% so all else being equal it's likely that the statewide Reps Coalition to One Nation flow would be several points lower than that, and probably quite similar to the statewide One Nation to Coalition Reps flow of 74.2%.

Here's a graph showing how this relationship operates across different NSW seats.  Seats where the primary Reps Coalition candidate was a National are shown in green, with Hunter marked with an H.

I was a bit surprised by Richmond (the leftmost green dot) as I thought the dampening of the Labor primary by the huge Greens vote there might mean Labor did better on Coalition preferences than their primary vote implies, but it seems Richmond Coalition voters really don't like Labor!  Overall though there's not much evidence for any National Party specific effect (the rightmost blue dot is Liberal Sussan Ley's seat of Farrer) - it's more that Nationals tend to be the Coalition candidate in rural seats where One Nation is strong and Labor often weak, and the voters who vote Coalition in those seats tend to have attitudes in common with and preference One Nation.  Plenty of rural Nationals voters would in fact vote for a Liberal in their seat if there was one to vote for.

There is clearly a quite strong overall relationship between the relative Senate primary votes of the parties and their preference flows from the Coalition, and for that reason alone Hunter needs to be treated as unlikely to be typical in the Reps.  The vast majority of NSW seats sit quite close to the trendline here - I should mention the few that don't in the lower left of the graph; these are the western Sydney seats of Chifley, Greenway and Fowler - three seats where One Nation doesn't poll terribly on primaries but does attract very weak preference flows from the Coalition.  This might be down to lack of Coalition how to vote card handout effort but I think it could also be that Coalition supporters would be more ethnically diverse and more suspicious of One Nation in these seats.  Contrawise, the teal seats tend to have somewhat higher Coalition to One Nation flows than would be expected given their parlous ON primary votes (and parlous even in the NSW Senate contest, where there are no teals).  

One might also ask how the NSW Coalition to One Nation preference flow with exhaust removed compares to other states.  Here comes a surprise: NSW, not Queensland, is actually the highest!  NSW 78.3 Qld 77.3 Vic 73.9 WA 73.2 SA 72.5 NT 70.6 Tas 63.2 (and Tas probably even lower after adding BTLs).  National 75.6%.  I am cautious about drawing too much from this because each state has its own ballot paper draw for the Senate, but we should not be too surprised from that if the national Reps flow from Coalition to One Nation was down around the low rather than the mid 70s.

I should also add that I looked at the Greens Senate flow and Greens preferences actually flowed more strongly to Labor vs One Nation than they did to Labor vs Coalition in every state, by an average of around 3.5%.  (Victoria is particularly striking with Greens preferences splitting 87.54-2.47 to Labor vs One Nation with remainder to exhaust).  So it's quite possible the national Greens to Labor vs One Nation Reps flow would be over 90%.  There are some minor right parties (especially Trumpet of Patriots) which had much stronger Senate flows to One Nation vs Labor than to Coalition vs Labor, but a lot of the Reps "others" votes is actually independents who would probably display the reverse pattern, especially in teal seats.   

My best guess at a last election Reps flow is that One Nation would have got something like 72% of Coalition preferences, something like 9% of Greens and maybe if lucky the same 43% of Others that the Coalition got, and if that's right then by last-election preferences the DemosAU comes out about 54.2-45.8 to Labor and the Fox&Hedgehog poll at 55-45 (not too different to their respondent preferences estimate).  

A further note about Hunter is the Stuart Bonds factor.  Bonds is a local candidate who polled very strongly for One Nation in 2019 and 2025; they fell in a hole when he ran as an indie in 2022.  It's likely he attracts preferences from some Coalition voters who wouldn't normally preference One Nation.  On the other hand, polling based speculation that One Nation would come second in Hunter may have driven a level of strategic voting for One Nation by people who would normally vote National, and so some of the people who would have normally voted National with preferences to One Nation may have just voted straight for Bonds, whose Reps primary was over 2.5% above the party's Senate primary. My overall view is that these two factors roughly cancel out.  

But Everywhere Is Hunter Now?

I would say based on the above that there's very little doubt that the Hunter Reps flow to One Nation would be unrepresentative of national House of Reps flows.  It is probably even worse than respondent preferences (shudder).

The counter-argument that the Reps flow from Coalition to One Nation could be Hunter's 82.9% next election or even higher comes from the Reps voting intention numbers.  My figures above use a range of relative One Nation vote strengths from 4% to 35% but in the DemosAU poll they're at 44.2% of the combined Labor/One Nation vote!  If One Nation become waaaaay more popular, won't that mean their preference flow from the Coalition rises?  

I'm not really convinced that it will.  Firstly this sort of relationship works for predicting preference flows within a given election, not necessarily between elections.  Secondly if there is a massive swing to One Nation at the Coalition's expense then this probably means the Coalition is losing a lot of its right flank voters who were the most likely to preference One Nation anyway; those who remain might be more inner-city and more resistant to doing so.  Indeed there's an argument that the reason One Nation did not already surge more in the 2025 election was that Coalition supporters flirting with One Nation were held back by Peter Dutton being Coalition leader.  And thirdly, it's not clear the flow to One Nation keeps rising as the strength of the One Nation vote flies off the chart; it seems to max out on average somewhere around the high 80s, and there will always be some seats where the party still polls badly.  

But people are welcome to whatever opinion they like on how preferences will really flow to One Nation in a world where they're polling over 20%.  It's one thing to have those opinions and another to treat the Hunter flow as a credible 2025-election preference flow.  It's simply not.  

I mentioned at the top that I'd say more about the 23% for One Nation.  One thing that is notable about DemosAU so far is that for whatever reasons it tends to get somewhat lower major party primaries than other polls.  The combined 52% in this poll was the lowest ever for any released poll, beating a 57% which was also by DemosAU.  It may well be that the combined major party primary is now several points below the 2025 federal election and it may even be that we will be seeing combined major party primaries like 52% or lower more often.  But for the time being this pattern requires some caution about exactly how large One Nation support is.  We will know more on that score when the more major pollsters return from the summer break.