2025 Federal Post-Election Pendulum

As in 2022 I've decided to issue my own post-election pendulum for the 2025 federal election.  I've done this partly because post-election pendulums seem thinner on the ground than usual this year, but mainly for the same reason - pendulums like the Wikipedia version miss the point of what the pendulum is for by putting classic ALP vs Coalition marginal seats on the same axis as contests between the majors and the crossbench.  The seat of Wills is now very marginal on a two-candidate preferred basis between Labor and the Greens, but a swing against Labor in two-party polling (should one occur) will not predict whether that seat might fall. 

Also in doing 2PP pendulums one finds out things - such as that the Coalition is in even bigger trouble for the next election than the scale of the 2PP disaster makes obvious.  The inflated swings to Labor in marginal seats at this election have created a skewed pendulum where Labor could lose the 2PP and still win a majority.  

At this election claims of the demise of 2PP swing as a predictive tool were even harder to get away from than in 2022 ... and even less correct!  The overwhelming story of the election was the 13 classic seats that switched from the Coalition (ignoring defections) to Labor.  The six seats switching from a major party to a non-major candidate or vice versa were a sideshow, especially as for totals purposes two of them cancelled out.  There is a lot of hype about how "no seat is safe any more" but for all of that no safe seat held by a major party fell and the only 2CP-safe seat that fell at all was a Greens seat (Griffith) that was clearly marginal on a three-candidate basis.  And the odd 2CP-safe seat falling is nothing new.

2025 House Of Reps Postcount Summary, Links Hub And Classic 2PP Seats Page

FINAL SEAT TOTAL ALP 94 L-NP 43 IND 10 GRN 1 CA 1 KAP 1

SEATS APPARENTLY CHANGING (defections disregarded) 

L-NP to LABOR: Banks, Bass, Bonner, Braddon, Deakin, Dickson, Hughes, Leichhardt, Moore, Sturt, Forde, Petrie, Menzies (see below)

GREENS to LABOR: Brisbane, Griffith, Melbourne

L-NP to IND: Calare, Bradfield

IND to L-NP: Goldstein

SEATS IN SIGNIFICANT DOUBT - seats shown in bold have now been discusssed in detail either here or on one of the linked pages:

None anymore

Seats I am not currently considering in doubt that were in the lists above

Flinders, Monash, Forrest, Grey, Fisher, Longman: Liberal/LNP retains 

Wills, Fremantle, Bendigo, Bullwinkel, Bean, Calwell: Labor retains

Goldstein: expected Liberal gain

Melbourne: ALP gain

Ryan: Green retain

Kooyong:  IND retain

Bradfield: IND gain

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The Draft Boundaries Would Not Put Labor On The Edge Of Minority

The current round of draft redistributions is complete with the release of the NSW proposal today, following the Victorian and WA proposals two weeks ago.  While the Victorian redistribution led to an outbreak of unsound psephology with false claims that the Kooyong redistribution greatly favoured the Liberal Party (I wrote about this for Crikey), the NSW washup has been pretty sensible, for the first day at least.  One thing I have seen that seems hard to credit is the idea that Kylea Tink, whose seat is proposed to be abolished, would win the now even more marginal Bennelong off two major parties fighting tooth and nail for it.  This is a general article about the impact of the draft changes.  A note that I am not a primary source for redistribution margin estimates, and am here largely relying on the work of Ben Raue, William Bowe and Antony Green for those.

The Victorian draft proposes that part of the boundary of Kooyong expands to take in part of Higgins.  The key issue in the shortlived Frydenberg-comeback debacle was that there's no obvious way to project how an independent would have done if their seat is expanded into an area they didn't previously run in.  One can use the 2022 preference flows from the present Kooyong to distribute votes for Labor and the Greens et al between the Liberals and Monique Ryan (IND) as if Ryan had been running in the new bits, but that means assigning Ryan a primary vote of zero in the new part.  It's saying that voters who would vote 1 Ryan 2 Liberal, for instance, don't exist in the new bit, but we know they do exist in the old bit, or she would not have won the seat.