Victoria 2026: Majority, Minority ... Or Blowout?

Victoria Aggregate Labor 22.0 Coalition 31.0 Green 14.6 One Nation 21.8 Others 10.6 

2PP estimate 54.5 to Coalition, shadow-2PP 50.5 to One Nation vs ALP (subject to Coalition recommending preferences to One Nation)

Currently Coalition would most likely win a majority, perhaps with 50-55 seats

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I last had time (sigh!) to write about the Victorian election polling outlook way back in July.  At that point the Coalition was the better placed of the two major parties but were still a few points off a high enough primary vote for majority government.

What has happened since then in polling overall is that Labor's leadership change from Jacinta Allan to Ben Carroll has delivered less than nothing for the government.  In fact Labor's polled primary vote share is down, One Nation's is also down, and both the Coalition and the Greens are up.  None of these changes are massive, but they don't need to be - as the Coalition pushes into the low 30s its chances of majority government become serious, especially if One Nation goes down.    In recent months the Coalition has gradually edged from being in the box seat but not yet up to a majority in live polling, to a majority being more seriously likely, and now there is even some focus on the potential for a blowout and for Labor's vote to be devoured on all sides.  Ben Carroll has continued to make the increasingly ludicrous claim that polling shows the Coalition cannot govern alone, even while polling suggests that if the election were held right now it almost certainly would.  No doubt at least three people in some focus groups somewhere have implied this scare campaign is solid but I wonder if what it's really doing is scaring voters who actually care to the Coalition as the only party that looks like it might get a majority.  

Steve Bracks this weekend made the even more ludicrous claim that the three main parties are all polling around 30% - neither Labor nor One Nation has broken 25 in any poll since August!  Labor's high for the year in any poll is 28 and One Nation's 27, and both of those were a long time ago.  Bracks also claimed this was the first genuine three-cornered contest in Victorian electoral history, which would be news to those who voted in pretty much any Victorian election between 1935 and 1955, or watched the formation of government in that time.  

In the polling in the last few months Victorian Labor has overall looked more and more like an ex-government, and there is a sense of chaos similar to the final days of Rudd 2 as the party tries to work out how you sell yourself after a messy leadership split when the new leader has not had time to get settled, nor the party to settle its campaign around him.  Much of their output seems to be chasing voters lost to One Nation with weird law and order policies that for anyone even listening are likely to be seen as too little too late.  That said, not all of the readings are bad and there have been some polls (especially the Resolves) where one could argue that if everything went well the government might survive on those numbers.  Overall though things have been getting worse, and it is historically not surprising.  A third term federally dragged state government, with the federal government's own polling increasingly iffy (no surprise there given high petrol prices, an interest rates rise and recession talk) and with the state government having made its second leadership change of the term only a few months out.  Ben Carroll is already polling very unflattering personal ratings with a Newspoll net satisfaction of -28; not as bad as Jacinta Allan's final -46, but still no precedent for survival.  

This is what my estimates of the implied Labor vs Coalition 2PP in particular polls have looked like for the government in the last few months.  This may tighten again in the final weeks as the Coalition comes under more serious scrutiny as the government-in-waiting but a recovery from here for Labor to form any kind of government would be remarkable.  Nonetheless if Labor do pick up a few points and the polls have them too low for some reason, it can't be totally ruled out.  

 

At the head of this post I have some aggregated estimates of polling, using basically the same methods as my federal aggregate except for the following variations.  Firstly I have set the decay period (in which a poll loses about 40% of its weighting) to 10 days instead of 7 because of the relative scarcity of polling (Labor's numbers would be even worse if I had not done this); I will reduce it to 5 for the final week.  Secondly while SMS polls are banned from my federal aggregate, here I am using them but downweighted by 50% and with a maximum of one per pollster.  Thirdly I am using an arbitrary 55% Others to Labor flow. 

Current Exclusion

I am currently not aggregating the Lighthouse Political Monitor tracking poll reported by the Herald-Sun and conducted by News Corp's Growth Intelligence Centre.  The reason for this is that the Herald-Sun has persistently displayed very poor poll reporting transparency and a lack of standards about what it calls a poll, and there is not yet sufficient public information to establish firmly that this is a scientific poll.  In all probability it is, but I can't be sure.  I will however test it in my post-election poll ratings, but for me to include it in an aggregate I need to at least know what polling method it employs (online, phone, etc) and to have some indication of the question framing.  I am also concerned that the Herald-Sun continues to allow its poll reporting to be done by James Campbell.  While he is not alone in being terrible at it (and often in precisely this manner, ie not enough basic methods details) he has what should in any sane business be a dealbreaking conflict of interest as the husband of a Liberal candidate for the election.   

There is a lot of uncertainty about what will happen with preferences from both One Nation and others at this election.  Respondent preference samples have at times found One Nation flowing to the Coalition as strongly as the high 80s (but a cautionary note that some low-grade polls had the same thing at the federal election and it turned out not to be the case).  On the other hand, the right wing of the Others vote could be so hollowed out by competition from One Nation, and the Others vote so dragged left by things like Victorian Socialists running everywhere, that the flow from Others to Labor might climb to something like 70%, or even more.

There was an interesting possible pointer to the latter in the most recent Newspoll, where a seemingly remarkable 77% of Others voters chose "Labor majority" or "Labor-Green" over "Liberals-Nationals-One Nation" or "Liberal-National majority" when asked who they preferred to govern.  Perhaps however the framing was a little harsh on the right as the option including One Nation could be read as strictly a formal coalition option that excluded an L-NP minority government supported by One Nation.  That at least might partly explain why a third of those with a Coalition majority as their first choice next preferred one of the Labor options over the Coalition-One Nation option.

For what it's worth though, only the Redbridge/Accent respondent preference polls are lately showing large differences to my last-election-ish estimates off the primary votes.  The last two Redbridges came out with 56-44 two-party leads to the Coalition off numbers that my estimates put around 53.4.  Other respondent polls have been landing within 1% of what I have.

Overall Picture

My model off 54.4% 2PP for the Coalition (Labor 22.2 Coalition 31.2 One Nation 21.6 Greens 15.0) puts them on about 53.7 2PP seat wins.   This model was rerun after today's DemosAU reading with Labor on an 18% primary and I expect Resolve shortly which may be more moderate.  The Coalition winning that many seats on 2PP doesn't mean they would necessarily win all those seats.  In some outer suburban and regional fringe seats, it's quite possible the Coalition would win the 2PP in seats that were actually won by One Nation.  But all else equal for the Coalition to not win a majority, One Nation would have to achieve this in a lot of those seats.  Considering, for instance, the seats that are at least considered to lean One Nation in William Bowe's model, my expected Coalition 2PP-winning 2PP total is currently 10.3 seats.  So One Nation would have to win nearly all of these, or win some seats in which it is an underdog, to stop the Coalition getting a majority.  

There is also an emerging possibility that even with a vote over 20 One Nation may not win more than a few seats.  Labor going down and the Coalition going up on primaries is bad news for One Nation.  To win seats they firstly need to be in the top two after preferences, but they also need either the Coalition to be third or to have a lead over the Coalition that will hold off Labor preferences.  And with the Coalition polling well and Labor poorly, and One Nation slipping down a bit, it's possible that those stars just won't align in any serious number of seats.  For sure if One Nation are getting over 20 statewide they will be breaking into the high 30s in some seats.  But if those seats are deep rurals where Labor is third or fourth and the Nationals are also around the same vote, One Nation doesn't generally win those seats.  Based on SA, however, it shouldn't be ruled out in vacant rural seats.

This I think is what Kos Samaras is getting at when he has One Nation getting just a single seat (Morwell) to the Coalition's 52 off quite similar primaries to my aggregate.  That could well be understating it because (i) Redbridge/Accent has very weak respondent flows to One Nation off the Coalition and will tend not to flag them as winners in any seats where the 3CP is Labor leads One Nation leads Coalition (ii) I would expect natural variability in the results from any projections such that One Nation randomly gets luckier than expected in a few seats.  Nonetheless there is an argument there.  

There is a common belief that Victorian Coalition voters are unusually moderate and hence very averse to preferencing One Nation.  Senate preference flows provide no evidence this is the case.  In 2025, of those Victorian Senate voters (above and below the line) indicating a preference between Labor and One Nation, 73.8% preferred One Nation.  This is lower than NSW (78.2%) and Queensland (77.1%) but the same as Western Australia, and higher than South Australia (71.2%), Northern Territory (70.3%) and Tasmania (63.4%).  We've already seen that Coalition voters in South Australia did quite readily give preferences to One Nation in the state election.  In cases where the Coalition finished third, 66.6% of Liberal exclusion preferences flowed to One Nation over Labor there, and this is a flow that includes votes the Liberals picked up from other sources, so the flow from 1 Liberal votes would have been stronger.  

It's true that Alex Antic and co have destroyed the Liberal brand in South Australia driving away many moderate voters, but that was also true at the federal election.  It's also the case that Labor in the SA state election were a far less offensive proposition for traditional Coalition voters than they are in Victoria.  So I don't think there's the slightest thing in this argument ... unless the Coalition decide not to recommend preferences to One Nation.  Predictably the federal seats where the flow of Coalition preferences to One Nation over Labor was weaker in the federal election were generally seats where Labor polled strongly and/or One Nation weakly.  Calwell was one exception but there a lot of Labor's support was taken by a very strong vote for Australia's Voice most of which returned to Labor as preferences.  In the Goldsteins and Kooyongs the flow was normal, but in seats of that kind One Nation will be eliminated anyway.  

I have not had the time yet to attempt a detailed Lower House seat model of One Nation prospects in Victoria; it is more difficult for me than it was in SA because One Nation polled so negligibly in the Victorian upper house in 2022.  Between various predictive enterprises out there (some are nowcasts, some are forecasts) it's interesting to look at the variations in where One Nation is considered favourite.  

(At the time of writing Australian Election Forecasts doesn't have One Nation as a forecast favourite in any seat but still has a median total of seven.)

The table above compares the Pollbludger model, Australian Election Forecasts nowcast, Kos Samaras' recent AFR assessment of the current polls, Swing Is On, Earth Elects and current betting.  For the Pollbludger column S equals Solid and L equals Lean.  For everyone else O indicates an odds-on favourite (after adjusting for bookie rake for the betting) and F is any kind of other favourite or favourite of unspecified probability.  In all, 24 seats have come up in at least one of these sources, but only the usual suspects of Bass, Melton, Morwell and Ripon in half or more of them.

The Greens are now pretty consistently polling 14 and above and are also lately on a very obvious surge in Victorian federal samples where they are averaging about 16.  Depending on just how bad the Labor primary is and the distribution of the swing there is a prospect Labor that could be knocked out of the count in a bunch of inner city seats handing the Greens several wins in their second tier targets.  However for those seats that do remain Labor vs Green we are still waiting to see what the Liberals do with their how to vote recommendations.  

The above is an overview that I will add updates to for polls that come out through this week, and I intend to move on to an article about the Legislative Council this week.  With the Coalition and One Nation clearing 50% combined in every lower house poll recently there is a high chance of a combined Coalition/One Nation upper house majority, but the Coalition could now do well enough that it could have legislation passed with the support of either Labor or the Greens instead.  However the Coalition tends to historically underperform in the upper house so I will have a detailed look at this when I have the full list of nominating tickets.

Update Resolve:  Previous Resolve polls were fairly benign for Labor but this week's was actually very close to my aggregate, which has been edited in the header.  I estimated the 2PP for this week's Resolve at 54.8 to Coalition.  With Labor scrapping for second on primaries with One Nation (and in DemosAU for third with the Greens) there has been renewed speculation about Labor doing so badly that it is not even the Opposition.  I should point out again that this is not something we can read off the primary votes alone, since so long as Labor is ahead of the Greens they will be boosted above One Nation and are therefore well ahead of One Nation on a 3CP basis.  But there are scenarios on some readings of the DemosAU poll in isolation where Labor does so incredibly badly that they actually win fewer seats than the Greens as much of the inner city turns into Liberal/Green contests - this at this stage remains a very extreme scenario.  

Tas Labor's Spending Caps Bill Kneecaps Independents

Tasmanian Labor wants to stop people from buying elections, but they're happy for independents to be senselessly outspent.  This is my conclusion from their Electoral Disclosure and Funding Amendment (Spending Limits) Bill 2026 (49 of 2026).  I'm not sure if they're trying to wedge the Liberals, wedge the independents, or if they actually really think what they've come up with here is fair for Tasmania; it's not.  

An issue of Hare-Clark spending caps having the potential to advantage parties over independents in a way that could inspire independents to create front parties to rort the funding caps is not new.  I raised it (and more in person) at the Tasmanian JSCEM inquiry into the Greens' Electoral Disclosure and Funding Amendment Bill 2024 (No. 9) just a couple of years ago. In that case I pointed out that a proposed spending cap of $83,000 for independents and $830,000 for parties created a perverse incentive for big-spending independents to register front parties in order to avoid the lower spending cap.  

I noted also that lifting a dollars-per-candidate model from the ACT was not a good idea for Tasmania, especially because parties in Tasmania tend to run filler candidates to get their list to seven for formality reasons, while minor parties in the ACT don't need to do that.   There is also another important difference between the ACT and Tasmania - ACT parties run five candidates per electorate, not seven.  

So what does Tasmanian Labor do?  They come along with a Bill that has a spending cap of $60,000 for independents (in 2026 terms) and $1,750,000 for parties, of which a party can spend up to $525,000 on campaigning directed at a particular electorate.  

Overall, Labor's Bill does seem closely modelled on the ACT's spending caps.  It is slightly more generous to independents in some ways in terms of allowing them 1.2 times the spending cap per party candidate, and also because it has a limit on party spending per electorate.  However the ACT is an inappropriate model for Tasmania because its system discriminates hugely against pure independents.  A pure independent in the ACT cannot get their own ballot column no matter how popular they are and is lumped in the ungrouped column on the right of the ballot with other such independents.  With that and the spending cap laws, intending serious ACT indies now register front parties like Fiona Carrick Independents or form parties of quasi-independents with policies and preselections such as the former "Independents for Canberra". 

What is the problem being solved by Labor's Bill?  It seems there are two different rationales.  The first is the hobgoblin of someone being able to "buy an election".  The idea that particular elections in Tasmania have been "bought" is an election denial trope and conspiracy theory, "bought" being just a soft version of "stolen", that pops up here every few cycles.  It especially appears in connection with elections like 2006 and 2018 where the oppositions' losses were self-inflicted on policy and tactical grounds but there were also expensive non-party campaigns in favour of the government.  I don't think any Tasmanian elections ever have really been won by a party just because more money was spent on its behalf.  But at the moment there's a big concern that somebody will try it: One Nation.

Voters aren't actually sucked in by big-spending campaigns (by major or minor parties) that are bad.  Money helps when the campaign is saying something voters are actually receptive to, but maybe not as much as people think. The strongest argument for not letting a Clive Palmer spend megabucks on a Tasmanian election isn't that it actually works, it is that such overt spending is annoying in a way that makes people feel democracy is being laughed at. But let's say that Gina Rinehart throwing $20 million at a One Nation Tasmanian campaign would be a big problem - fine.  Identify an amount of money that anyone but the most dogmatic libertarian would agree is way too much to spend on a Tasmanian election and ban anyone from spending more than that amount.  That problem's solved.

That concern in no way justifies limiting an independent to $60,000. There would be some amount that politics-watchers generally would agree is a silly amount for an independent to spend, and that amount would be several times lower than it would be for a party statewide.  But that amount would also be a lot higher than $60,000.  Indeed, a cap of $60,000 for an independent puts them on a similar level to the Legislative Council's very restrictive spending caps given that the lower house divisions are three times more populous.  And this is in an environment where there is expensive statewide party advertising everywhere.  

So the second idea here seems to be a general push for "getting money out of politics" by winding back what everyone is spending.  But that presumes that major parties and independents are overspending to a similar extent.  That might seem true and then some if one considers the major parties' spending on a per-candidate basis, but that's the wrong way to look at it, because there are so many uncompetitive, and in some cases blatant ticket-filler, party candidates.  Even if all a party's candidates were serious there are major economies of scale in promoting several candidates together compared to advertising a lone independent.  

The major parties and Greens always run full slates of candidates (at least) in each electorate because Tasmania's pointlessly strict formality rules mean that to run fewer invites your voters to not vote formally, and makes explaining what to do harder for the low-electoral-literacy end.  But on current vote shares a major party is no longer seriously competitive for more than four seats in one electorate, and even four is now uncommon.  Labor in particular had well-known problems filling out its slates of candidates for 2025.  

Why should a major party that on the best of days these days might yet scrape up 18 seats (in Labor's case, in the last two elections they won 10) have a spending cap that is just under thirty times that for a  sole independent?  Why should a party be able to outspend the indie by a factor of 8.75 in a particular electorate (at some detriment to its spending cap for others) if it is only seriously in the mix for two or three seats there - or in a minor party's case, maybe just one?

Here my concern is not only with giving the indies a fair go to whatever extent spending actually matters, but also with avoiding perverse incentives for ballot paper clutter.  There are already way too many unnecessary candidates running in Tasmanian state elections.  The Braddon ballot in 2025 was especially excessive and confusing for voters and the TEC was extremely lucky to avoid having to print double-decker ballot papers in any division. Under the Bill as it stands any indie who wants to can simply circumvent Labor's spending caps by registering a front party and running a bunch of non-serious candidates alongside themselves just to boost how much money they can spend on getting themselves elected.  But some indies will prefer just to run by themselves, and I don't see why they should be disadvantaged.

In the 2025 election Peter George ran a non-party ticket with six likeminded independents, who were so low profile in the campaign that a hypothetical "recount" (casual vacancy countback) for George's seat would most likely see it go to the Greens.  Under this Bill if this group were to be registered as a party they would then have access to the same spending cap per candidate as other parties, and could in realistic terms spend whatever they liked.  

Labor's response to such concerns - well so far, failed ad hominems not only aimed at me but also Jack Milroy instead of tackling the substance!  Very strange indeed!  

With the numbers in the parliament the way they are, this may well actually get somewhere, even if the government opposes it.  Parties and candidates who in principle support caps are likely to have a majority in the lower house.  Caps of any kind could well be welcomed by the upper house where members have long been displeased by being subject to strict caps themselves while the lower house is not.  The Greens - who are potentially greatly advantaged in fighting with lone indies by this Bill (but will probably never have enough money to fully realise that) - have called it "great electoral reform".  So we may yet see deals done in which this gets passed with amendments, even if the Liberals oppose it.  Perhaps if the multiplier for lone independents was simply much higher - say, 2.5 instead of 1.2, then that would be enough to solve the problems.

At the very least I suggest this at some point be referred to Tasmanian JSCEM for an inquiry as was also done with the Greens' Bill.  But an alternative would be to refer the general question of finding fair spending caps with a term of reference that any solution must respect distinctive aspects of Tasmanian electoral culture.  

For information, the Bill also includes a spending cap of $75,000 statewide for third party campaigners and associated entities.  I may discuss that further later.  

Candidates Matter: The Blues Strike Back On Hobart Council 2026

This is a review piece of some themes from the just concluded 2026 Hobart Council elections.  The election count just finished featured some very close multi-way battles for councillor positions with winners ducking in and out through the different distributions.  Then we had the crowning oddity of the non-election of Ben Lohberger to council after he won the Deputy Mayoral ballot, which means that he now cannot serve as Deputy and the position will be filled around the table.  This event has previously happened in three smaller councils, but never in a city.  I now expect a lot of debate about solutions, most of which won't have been thought through. The result will for sure be used by those who think we should just ditch direct Deputy elections, a proposal I can make strong arguments both for and against.  The problem has become more likely this year because of the reduction in the numbers of councillors and it could very well keep happening.  

The Poll Position pod had some comments about this election along the lines of "campaigns matter", coming from a winning perspective after Brad Stansfield worked on the winning Charles Wooley campaign.  And campaigns do matter, in that Wooley won the mayoralty by in effect 2.3% over a main opponent (John Kelly) who announced pretty late and then ran what looked to me like a pretty similar and lower profile campaign compared to 2022.  I think that under other circumstances this result might have gone the other way.  For sure Wooley had big advantages as a high profile outsider who was more able to sell himself ambiguously.  I'm also far from believing all he did on the campaign trail was brilliant (especially his line about being home from council for the six o'clock news was a gaffe for the few of us who know that council meeting work is hard) but his campaign did things to keep voters interested, had good signs and made lively use of social media to cover a wide range of issues.  By doing this he was able to get away with skipping a lot of the candidate questionnaires and forums as he had got the message across that he was genuinely trying and wasn't just hoping to lazily cruise in on his profile.  

There was some debate between the hosts about what kind of councillor Wooley will be politically and Alex Johnston was talking about voters who would vote for Wooley who would "never ever have described themselves as blue".  And it occurred to me that there was actually an obvious way to look at how many such voters there were and I should write an article about that and about how candidates matter in council elections.  Because it seems really obvious, but the mechanics are worth spelling out.  At this year's elections, the left side of Hobart council politics has been depleted and then failed almost completely at recruitment, and it's changed the face of the council.  It's not the only thing that's done it, but if the left had more good candidates, then they would still have won five seats.

Assuming everyone now votes the way their campaigns indicated they would, the "blue"/right side now has a 5-4 majority on the council, after the left held a 7-4-1 majority through the previous term.  This won't manifest on every issue (eg cable car) but it's a big change.  And that was close, too.  The count swung back towards the left in the last 50% with the combined Green vote going up 1.5 points, and had the left done about 1.1 points better at the end of the count then the fifth seat could have been saved.  

Yes there was a general swing in public mood towards the right/"blue" side (some of it demographic in nature as low income earners are increasingly pushed north of Creek Road - heck the Greens got pretty close to two in Glenorchy in the end!) but candidate effects on the results have been at least as big a factor.  From the 2022 election candidate lineup the left side has lost Lord Mayor and Deputy Anna Reynolds and Helen Burnet, while the right side has lost nobody who got that close to winning a seat then and added Charles Wooley and Harvey Lennon.  And the left side has only added one new competitive candidate, Tiffany Ashdown, who was low profile at the campaign start but worked very hard over a long time, without coming super close to winning at the end. 

Given that the holes created by Reynolds and Burnet not being there should have attracted more new serious left-wing contenders, where were they?

This article isn't to argue that having obviously right and left wing candidates on councils is good.  Indeed in my view the very high level of factionalism in the last term was bad for Council.  But it is a fact of life that many voters will want to see their side of politics represented better and this article explains a big chunk of why that, for the left, did not occur.

Why Having Good Candidates Works

One might think that having more good (in relative terms) right wing candidates or left wing candidates isn't really a big deal, after all those voters inclined to vote for either side will just spread their votes around more if there are more candidates, which might even be a bad thing?  Well no.

Many voters in council elections are actually not thinking ideologically, and some who might be don't even engage enough to find out who is on "their" side.  Voters can also be motivated by specific issues (Save Utas, cable car, dogs vs soccer are some recent cases) that cut across left/right lines.  Some voters will know things outside of council politics about candidates that cause them to see some candidates differently to how I might see them.  Some voters vote based on community or business connections to given candidates from across the spectrum.   Some voters may also prefer right or left candidates but draw the line at specific extreme, badly behaved or personally annoying examples.  

For any candidate that does even reasonably well, some of their voters would, had that candidate not stood, have voted 1 for the other "side's" candidates.  Candidates that do well have the following effects:

Firstly, a candidate who does so well that they get a quota on first preferences gets some votes that could have gone to the other side if they didn't run, uses most of those votes' value to get themselves elected, and only passes on a reduced value.  They're also reducing the value of votes that could have gone to others on the same side as themselves, but the net loss to their own side is less than the quota the candidate got in being elected.

Secondly, a candidate who doesn't get a quota but eventually gets in gets some votes (and preferences) that could have gone to the other side if they didn't run, and sucks out all those votes' value except for the exclusion they're elected on (which has a partial effect).  Again, they're taking more votes off their own side, usually, but the net loss to their own side is again less than a quota.  

Thirdly, even a candidate who does moderately well but loses can be useful.  All that candidate's preferences are flowing on to the next candidates just as if they hadn't run at all, but if they've hung around long enough in the count, some of the other side's stars will get elected in the meantime, and votes that are 1 for this candidate and 2 for a strong performer on the other side, are then free to flow, more likely flowing back to the original candidate's side.

There's also some potential for a good candidate to help just with getting out the formal vote for other candidates on their side.  Council ballots are bewildering for many voters and if a voter doesn't know or like any of the candidates they're more likely to vote informally, late or even not at all.  But if they like even one candidate they've got the motivation to cast a formal vote and they may well vote for others of a similar mind, especially if that candidate has obvious alliances.

However none of this means that running just any candidate is useful for a side.  If a candidate is low profile and only capable of getting, say, 200 votes or less, then their preferences won't display any preference discipline to speak of, and adding them to the field means that slightly more preferences are going to exhaust.  So I suspect there's some, modest, minimum level of support at which a candidate helps rather than hinders their side by running.  An obscure or low-effort candidate who gets no votes is worse than useless.

Voters and movements care about and are affected by the issues that councils deal with.  But there's no point leaving it til the last few months before noticing you don't have strong candidates running on those issues and hoping the incumbents will be OK.  At least from the middle of this term on, when we have an idea what this council has been like and what are shaping as the issues for 2030, people in the non-Greens left need to be looking for three or four strong new candidates to run.  

Who Voted For Wooley And Kelly

Fortunately we have a good handle on the politics of voters who voted for Charles Wooley and John Kelly because both those candidates got surpluses so we can see who they put next.  With one exception, we can't see how many voters for one put the other next, and I can say from scrutineering there were lots of those (maybe 20% or so of each of the two's votes).  In the case of a Wooley-Kelly or Kelly-Wooley vote, the table below counts the third preference.  This data has actually been available in rough form from the time the 20% count went up, but the final numbers are quite different to the 50% count.  

Below I've found what percentage of each of Wooley and Kelly's votes flowed to each other candidate except each other, ordered by the number flowing from Wooley.  I've also given an expected alignment based on issue positions and tickets, noting that we don't know how Wooley and Lennon will vote on council yet and either might be closer to centre than the campaign suggests.

Both Wooley and Kelly's voters sent preferences to left candidates that could have been full-value votes for those left candidates had neither of them stood.  Between them in the process of winning two seats they thereby took over half a quota out of the count that could have gone to left candidates, while also taking almost a quota and a half out that could have gone to other right candidates.  So these two running as opposed to both not running is in net terms worth more than a quota - ie a whole seat - for the right.  

The preferencing behaviour of Wooley voters is clearly broader with 31.2% flowing to a candidate I've flagged as left while in Kelly's case 21.5% did so.  Lohberger (who has a degree of cross-factional appeal because of his strong position on Save UTAS especially) did better off Kelly than off Wooley but every other substantially polling left candidate did better off Wooley.  Kelly's preference flow was more heavily concentrated with Zucco, Lennon, Elliot and Behrakis (the four main remaining "right" candidates) and also Bloomfield and Johnstone did better off Kelly presumably through Hobart business circle links.  So Wooley did draw a measure of support from all over the place - more so than 2026 model Kelly anyway.

In 2022 Anna Reynolds (left) and Kelly got quotas on the first count.  Noting again that these flows exclude preferences that flowed between these two, 18.9% of Reynolds' preferences landed with candidates who might (tenuously in a few cases) be placed on the right while 30.8% of Kelly's landed with the left.  If Reynolds had been available as someone who could get Kelly preferences, this figure would have been even higher.  So there is no doubt Kelly's voter base has shifted to the right for 2026, most likely by him losing some of the lefter end of his support base as his voting patterns on council became wider knowledge.  He probably picked up some new friends on the right at the same time.

Women and toxicity

In the end Hobart elected two women out of nine, but went within 64 votes of not electing any, and two out of nine is still not good (Glenorchy to our north elected five!).  One of the two is also facing possible dismissal, which could reduce the number of women on council to one depending on whether there have been other recounts in the meantime.  Two out of nine is the lowest female proportion on the council since before Doone Kennedy and Dee Alty joined Dora Thomson from the 1982 election.  Women recorded only 17.3% of the vote in 2026, down from 38.2% in 2022.  I do not know when that was last that low, perhaps a similar time ago.  

The new Lord Mayor created controversy by saying the result happened because women didn't vote for women, and said that he has "turned [the question] back on them" when women have asked him about it.  He seemed to be saying that female voters were very harsh on other women's failures and hence readily didn't vote for them if anything had gone wrong during the term.  In isolation, women mostly not voting for women this year must be true, but it ignores the fact that there were very few to vote for, and that in my view is the core of the problem.  There were only seven in a field of 32 (down from 14/42 in 2022 and 11/36 in 2018).  Of these two were controversial during the previous council and two were low profile, and most female voters won't just vote for any female candidate because they're female.  

Now this could be just isolated decisions in the face of the reduction deterring new candidates (though as it turns out plenty of new candidates around the state did win); the ratio difference from 2022 to 2026 is not statistically significant.  But alongside the financial cost of running, toxic political environments are one of the factors that can deter many women from running for local government, especially if they're not already there.  Women accounted for only 3/20 Hobart candidates without previous representative experience, compared to 10/29 in 2022.  And one of those three was a previous state candidate while another was a parliamentary staffer.  

Quite aside from (though not entirely independent of) the constant bickering between councillors and council incidents during the term, the social media environment surrounding council now seems way more intense and worse than even a few cycles back.  In particular, there's a coterie of misogynist trolls attracted to the cable car and stadium movements (some of these are also big fans of certain Liberal MPs, who might want to reflect on that a bit).  But I've also seen some left accounts say things about women on the right (particularly Elliot) that they'd not say in such terms about a man of similar views and actions.   

I don't know what the answer is here and I am always very wary of politicians seeking to exploit complaints about social media in order to suppress it.  I do however suspect in this term there will be more anger about council's performance and antics directed at blokes (yep it's starting already and the new Council hasn't sat yet) and the environment for new female candidates will not look so obviously hostile.  Will this council overall be behave itself?  We'll see. Many of the better behaved councillors in the last term were either voted off or retired. 

Governance Matters

Hobart council was long dominated by the "blues" on a councillor numbers level - for as long as my memory allows, and I suspect back even further.  This has been so even though they have often not held the leadership positions in recent decades.  In the 2014-8 term they had only a slight edge, 2018-22 was pretty balanced and 2022-6 was the council's first ever clear green/left majority.  The following is a rough assessment for the terms for which I've compiled voting patterns data.  

These things are relative - a right-wing councillor by Hobart standards could be centre or even moderate left in other parts of the country or even the state.  And they can be influenced by the mix of issues and motions that come up in a particular council.

In any case the left majority has coincided with a nasty and contentious term which has contributed to the swing against it, as well as the candidate factors described.  But one thing I will add to this is that the culture on the left side of the council, and at times seeping into some council staffers, too often gave the righties both on council and on social media free kicks.  Incidents like the blocking of Elliot's Town Hall booking on a spurious pretext, at least three separate issues on which councillors voted while conflicted at least by pub test standards, the Property Council forum incident and even the infamous if overblown "snackgate" reflected the lack of an overall culture that said, we're in effect the government here and we need to be not giving the other side this stuff for free if we would like to stay that way.  With one exception I don't remember past left Hobart councillors being prone to such things.  Of course, some of the "blues" (the notional opposition) behaved badly or worse, but the next time the voters elect what appears to be a left-majority council the first order of informal business should be working on the sorts of standards that will earn more respect across the spectrum (or at least not lose it from one's own side) and keep it there.   

This may conclude my council coverage for now; I really need to move to the Victorian election which I've lacked time to do things on!  As usual the interest level in the council coverage has been amazing and in fact there were slightly more page views here last Wednesday than on the Sunday after the 2025 Tasmanian election, which is extraordinary.  I was too busy to put in a donations reminder on the live count pages but donations to support the work I do are always welcome; details in sidebar (if viewing on mobile scroll down and click "view web version" to see it.)