Begging For Debunking: A Silly Article Re Stafford Preferences

It was as sure as night follows day, as sure as daylight savings fading the curtains (oh wait) that the Stafford by-election result would see the Queensland right again beating the drum for optional preferences.  On cue we have an op ed by Morgan Begg from the IPA in the Courier-Mail trying to argue that compulsory preferential voting is some kind of aberration that has saved Labor's seat with the aid of obscure leftoids.  Begg's arguments contain a remarkable number of errors, but are also typical of the misguided and poorly debated push to return to full OPV in Queensland.

Begg is probably not responsible for the headline but for starters compulsory preferential voting is hardly an "Absurd Qld voting quirk".  Rather it is the standard form of compulsory preferential voting as it exists federally and currently (with very minor differences) in four states - and as it has existed federally, continuously, for 108 years.  (OK between 1984 and 1996 we did have a federal savings provision which allowed for a voter to deliberately exhaust their preferences, but few voters knew about that).  

Begg argues that preferences from Parry, the Animal Justice Party and Legalise Cannabis gave Labor's Luke Richmond the win.  Amazingly the words "Green" or "Greens" do not appear even once in his article yet in fact the gain Labor is making on preferences from Greens voters (3477) exceeds the LNP's primary vote margin of 3079.  Labor's gains from Parry (793), Legalise Cannabis (192) and Animal Justice (173) are far smaller, and are offset to well below Labor's victory margin by the 665 votes the LNP is gaining over Labor off the preferences from Family First, Libertarians and the independent GRPF candidate.  Begg wants to run the usual beatup about how to vote cards, but if one ignores the preferences of every minor party/candidate that even issued a how to vote card favouring either Labor or the LNP, Labor still wins the seat.  

The article claims that the "opaque workings" of compulsory preferencing saw Socialist preferences somehow "find [their] way" to Labor and that "that was the difference between Labor winning and losing."  In fact on current numbers this isn't even true; Luke Richmond is leading by 891 votes which is 98 more than his net gain off Parry.  But even if it were true or becomes true later on, so what?  There's nothing opaque or mysterious or needing long explanation about the way those preferences got there - they got there because over 80% of voters voting 1 for Parry gave the Labor candidate a better ranking than the LNP candidate.  It doesn't even matter if these voters had no idea that Parry was a Socialist or that he had been charged with talking about Middle Eastern water geography, just so long as they were expressing their view about which of the majors they liked more than the other.  And if they did this following Parry's how to vote card they would hardly not know that he was a Socialist. The card looked like this:

There is also the usual whinge that an outcome in which a candidate who is on currently 30.8% primary beats a candidate on currently 40.3% primary "absurd".  But 40.3% is nowhere near half.  Given that, it's reasonable to get a view from the rest of the voters about who two they prefer and it happens that they overwhelmingly prefer Labor.  To try to counter this Begg throws in the red herring that "[compulsory preferential] imagines that voters have perfect or complete knowledge of the suite of candidates on the ballot. In reality, most voters rank candidates they have little to no knowledge of."  But it doesn't matter in a seat like this what knowledge the voters have of any candidates except the top two, since everybody else gets eliminated and their preferences transferred.  What decides the seat is that the majority of voters preferred Labor to the LNP.  Is Begg really trying to tell us voters in a seat like Stafford don't know who those parties are or what they think of them? 

Begg tries to tie the result to how-to-vote cards, arguing that "Institute of Public Affairs research has found that most voters are not actually using their own judgment at all when deciding how to rank candidates. In a 2025 survey, 56 per cent of voters admitted to simply following how-to-vote cards issued by the candidates to fill out ballot papers"

This so-called "research" finding as written is utter nonsense, as it is contradicted by all other sources: for example inference from cases where parties have changed their recommendations or varied them between seats, Antony Green's detailed analysis of HTV concordance in certain state seats where it is possible to compile exact figures, and the Australian Election Study which has estimated HTV follow rates below one-third.

But even if it was an accurate figure, it is also the case that the voters most likely to follow how to vote cards are major party voters, whose preferences in Stafford never went anywhere at all.  In fact for Stafford the results already prove mathematically that at least 65.7% of the voters whose preferences affected the outcome were not copying how to vote cards. We'll never know but I suspect that the real share of non-major voters making their own decisions was about 95% (ie that only about 5% of all minor-candidate voters were following a card, if even that) .  Of all seats to try to blame how to vote cards for a result this is among the most glaringly failed examples in Australian electoral history because most of the minor candidate votes were for the Greens who, unusually, didn't recommend a preference!  And yet, despite much complaining from Labor and the Socialists about the Greens' decision the flow of preferences from Greens voters to Labor in fact increased, from 83.7% to 86.4%.  (The increased rate might be explained by left voters with reservations about Labor voting instead for other left candidates with weaker preference flows, none of whom ran in 2024 - but the important point is that it didn't go down.)

The source of the 56% figure turns out to be one of the IPA's rubbish polls through the Dynata platform, which has a very limited and poor track record when tested at elections.  And even here, Begg's article is oversimplifying the survey.   The respondents did not admit to "simply following how-to-vote cards" as if that was all they did; they said they "usually follow a ‘how to vote’ card to guide who I give second, third, fourth (and so on) preferences to." (My underline.)  The question is unfit for purpose in establishing how many voters' preferences at any given election are determined by following the card, as it could capture any voter who thinks they follow a card more than half of the time and also voters who are influenced by the card mainly for their top few rankings but later deviate from it.  

Begg makes the following claim:

"The logic of compulsory preferential voting falls apart because it gives some electors multiple votes. If your first preference goes to a minor party, you get to vote again and again until you express support for one of the larger parties."

This is misleading.  Compulsory preferential voting is often called instant-runoff voting because it simulates a runoff process in which an initial vote is held, the candidate in last place is excluded and the process repeats.  And in those sort of runoff elections, everybody has a vote in every round; it just happens that a voter whose preferred candidate is not eliminated will keep voting for that candidate every time.  The other problem with this nonsense is that this claim if true also applies to optional preferential voting - you get to send your preference to as many parties as you like, if you want to.  Indeed, the idea that some voters get "multiple votes" is a classic first-past-the-post trope that tries to tar all forms of preferential voting with not representing one vote one value.  In fact, everybody gets one vote in our system, but the vote is transferrable.

He goes on to say:

"[..] in the final tally, an electors’ second (or third or fourth or fifth) preference for a Labor candidate is treated exactly the same as another voters’ first preference for an LNP candidate. By failing to account for the intensity of the support, it produces the kind of result seen over the weekend in Stafford where candidates limp over the victory line thanks to reluctant voters."

But you can't know anything about intensity of support from the way the voters rank the candidates.  One voter might be desperately keen that their first place candidate win, another might be struggling to decide who to put first and desperate instead to put someone last.  A voter might think two different candidates are almost equally excellent, or they might hate all the candidates and just be holding their nose to vote 1 for the least worst.  Greens voters whose preferences reached Labor might have liked Labor or been lukewarm about them, we don't know, but there's always plenty of Greens voters who will put Labor 2 even if their party would rather they didn't.  

And we get the usual chestnut that "In most places, forcing people to vote for candidates they do not support would be considered profoundly anti-democratic."  Indeed, but compulsory preferencing doesn't do that, it merely requires the voter to rank all the candidates.  Requiring a voter to say that they must like a candidate who they don't like would indeed be anti-democratic, but requiring a voter to rank a candidate they don't like below candidates they do like hardly carries the same level of obvious moral repugnance, and nor is it "voting for" those candidates. (See here for previous comments about the Queensland Premier using this "vote for" nonsense.)

At the end there is a simple message where David Crisafulli is a noble warrior for the cause of greater voter choice, which is supposedly the "most important objective in electoral reform".  In fact the "choice" offered by full OPV is a fool's gold one that confuses voters far more than it benefits them and this has the potential to distort outcomes when voters don't express preferences they actually have (for technical detail on what's wrong with the philosophical case for OPV see here).  And sure the LNP is interested in choice, but that would be their choice and not the voters' - their choice to not have to make decisions about whether to preference One Nation ahead of Labor or vice versa.

Would Labor have actually lost?

For all this outrage about Stafford, it's not even clear-cut on current numbers that Labor would have lost it under OPV.  I think it could have been very close; 9.5% is not that far behind and there are cases where such margins are closed with optional preferences.  At present Richmond is winning by 891 while gaining a net 3477 from Greens voter preferences.  Probably under OPV, voters for Parry would have had lower exhaust rates than the other non-Greens minor candidates and so the non-Green minors would have had a similar combined impact on the total to the current 493 vote gain for Labor.  That being so, assuming those Greens not exhausting their vote stayed at the same preference rate, a 25.6% exhaust rate of Greens preferences would be needed for the outcome to change, slightly lower than the recent exhaust rate in NSW.  In an educated inner city electorate with a high Greens vote, that kind of exhaust rate is no sure thing at all - especially as I doubt the Greens would have run an open how to vote under OPV.  

So we're supposed to switch to OPV to stop outcomes that its advocates consider absurd, but there's no guarantee that OPV would stop this particular example anyway.  There are cases in compulsory preferencing where Labor wins from so far behind that it's unthinkable that they would win it with any real level of exhaust.  However, on current numbers, Stafford isn't one of them.  

I should also mention One Nation - while I doubt they would have got enough votes in Stafford to account for the LNP's 9.5% primary vote lead, had they run the primary vote gap would surely have been much smaller, greatly weakening the outrage about the primary vote totals.  More importantly, had One Nation run and had it been OPV, there's no doubt that some voters who voted 1 LNP would instead have voted for One Nation and stopped, which would have stopped the LNP from winning anyway. As it happens, One Nation also supports OPV, so their absence from the count is quite convenient.  

Ultimately Begg's article is another example of the classic problem with "think tanks" whether politically left right or centre - far too often, they don't.  Too many argue for pre-set positions instead of following where the evidence leads.