Stafford By-Election: Prospects and Live

Stafford (ALP 5.32%)

Luke Richmond (ALP) vs Fiona Hammond (LNP) and others

Cause of by-election: death of Jimmy Sullivan (ALP/IND)

ALP retain with c. 4.4% swing to LNP

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Monday:  Not much more to see

Casey Briggs has tweeted that he understands there are not more than (and probably less than) 2000 postals to come, so further changes to the current 51.2-48.8 margin will be in tenths of a percent if that.

Sunday: Excuses excuses...

Steven Miles has been quoted offering a bizarre excuse for his party's poor result, claiming it was due to One Nation not running and saying "We will never know what the result would have been if they had run and not directed their supporters to vote for the LNP,".  Stafford is one of One Nation's worst seats in the state, had they run I estimate they would have got about 8%.  Most of their voters would have preferenced the LNP anyway.  Care of the 2017 election we have a window on what happens when One Nation recommends preferences to the LNP in some seats and Labor in others - the flow difference was around 10-12%.  So for an open ticket, half that.  This argument if it works at all isn't worth half a percent, it might be worth a tenth of the swing if that.  In fact not all One Nation voters would have even been aware that their party recommended (not "directed") its voters to vote for the LNP, so probably even less.  And some of those who were aware would not have obeyed.

Miles has also referred to Fiona Hammond's local profile, but that was already present in the baseline since she was the candidate last time.  Indeed her time as a councillor was more recent then.  

Another excuse quoted by The Australian is “Right-of-centre voters, after the deal with One Nation, weren’t left with many alternatives in a field of nine candidates, and so we have seen a splintering of the vote amongst other left-of-centre parties.’’  But in fact there were four right wing candidates (up one from 2024) and the three minor righties between them got a 0.3% swing on the combined One Nation and Family First primary from 2024.  It is true that Labor's primary suffered from the extra competition on the left - but that does not explain half of the primary vote swing against Labor flowing through to 2PP swing as well.  

Helen Burnet Quits The Greens!

Witnesses to political history

Tasmanian politics has seldom seemed sober for long since the day in 2023 when two Liberal backbenchers announced they were quitting the government over the Macquarie Point stadium and other things.  2025 was especially deranged but things did seem to have largely settled down once it became obvious that the Rockliff Government would continue in office as nobody could be bothered removing it.  Would 2026 be a sane and normal year in Tasmanian politics?  Nope, we were only on day two before the familiar cries of "go home #politas you're drunk" again rang out among politics tragics as the scene reeled from another shock announcement.  In this case, it's that Clark MHA Helen Burnet, a continuously elected Green at council or state level for a state record of over 20 years had fronted the media in the North Hobart wombat sculpture park to declare that she had quit the party.  There are now six independents in the parliament, the most since the 1909 adoption of statewide Hare-Clark.  

At local council level, it's a common career path for candidates to be elected as Greens then become independents (usually as the end of their first term approaches) but Burnet is the first of 18 state-level Tasmanian Greens MPs to leave the party while in state parliament.  Around the country such defections have not been all that rare and I count six others at state level and two in the Senate (one of these, Dorinda Cox, to Labor).  About half of those defections were triggered by personal controversies.  This also makes this the fourth term of state parliament in a row to witness a defection of some kind.  

Tasmania 2025: Confidence Position Tracker

Premier Rockliff recommissioned pending meeting the House on 19 Aug
Labor or an independent expected to move constructive no confidence motion 

If motion passes, Labor expected to form government

If motion fails, Liberals remain in office for time being

At this stage neither side has or seems likely (with current position) to get 18 votes in secured long-term confidence and supply agreements

Article current as of 19 August 5:30 pm

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Provisional tally on constructive no-confidence vote

As of 19 Aug if no changes in declared positions, constructive motion will not pass in its intended form.  

Yes: Labor (10)

No: Liberals (14)

Confirmed (8): David O'Byrne, Greens (5), Kristie Johnston, Peter George

Stated on floor (3): George Razay, Carlo Di Falco, Craig Garland

Motion was defeated 10-24 (Liberal Speaker not voting)

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 Tasmanian Election Guide: Main Page

TASMANIAN STATE ELECTION 19 JULY 2025

SEATS AT ELECTION LIB 14 ALP 10 GREEN 5 IND 4 NAT 2 (1 IND and 2 NATs were elected as JLN at 2024 election)

CAUSE OF ELECTION: No confidence motion passed in Premier Jeremy Rockliff, no alternative government could be formed

This election has been run and the Liberals have won the most seats - Click here for tallyboard page with links to postcount pages

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Welcome to the main page for my 2025 Tasmanian state election coverage.  Yes we are really here again! This page will carry links to all the other articles about the election that I write prior to the close of polling, and will contain general big-picture stuff and links to all the specialised articles (once these are written).  It will be updated very frequently.  Each electorate will soon have its own guide page, to be rolled out in the next few days. These are my own guides and I reserve the right to inject flippant and subjective comments whenever I feel like it; if you do not like this, write your own.  This guide and all the others will evolve over coming weeks.  

Very pleased to annunce I will be covering the election counting night for Pulse Tasmania, presumably from the tally room; this coverage will not be paywalled.  All post-count coverage will occur on this website.  

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2025 House of Reps Postcount: Melbourne

MELBOURNE (Green 6.9% vs ALP)

Adam Bandt (Green) vs Sarah Witty (ALP)

Labor win after 2CP realignment

WARNING: Explaining what is going on with the Melbourne count is complex.  This page is rated Wonk Factor 4/5

Click here for link to Reps postcount hub and tallyboard page.  

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I am doing postcount threads in a capricious order as something provokes me to jump to a different seat next and en route to the fine mess that is Monash, the ambulance has been rerouted to Melbourne.  This follows the ABC projecting the seat as 52-48 to Labor after projecting it as 51.5 to the Greens last night.

Why are we even here?  For some reason the AEC preset the Melbourne count 2CP as Greens vs Liberal, a baffling decision when Labor beat the Liberals at the 3CP point by 8.6% in 2022 and when a Greens vs Liberal 2CP is about as informative concerning who will actually win the seat (even post-redistribution) as the 2CP between One Nation and Tim Smith.   This is the single worst 2CP preset decision by the AEC that I have ever seen - generally I am a great fan of all the work done by the AEC but this one's an exception; this has let election watchers down and needs to not happen again.  

As a result we had no useful election night preference estimate between the Greens and Labor in the Greens Leader's seat. We now do have a preference count for 3926 postals and 150 hospital votes, which shows a massive Labor lead, but the postals are unrepresentative.

Greens, One Nation and Trumpet of Patriots 2025 Reps How To Vote Cards

This article is mainly a resource page for studying the preference flows of the Greens, One Nation and Trumpet of Patriots after the election, following a similar one I did in 2022, and in order to compare with 2022.  I was going to do one for the Senate as well but at this stage I am only aware of the ALP varying its how to vote cards between seats in a state, and that only in seven seats (Macnamara, Goldstein, Hunter, Paterson, Capricornia, Flynn and Dawson) so for now I haven't bothered.  [EDIT: Greenway also, see comments.]

Before I start this article, I want to say this.  Some parties put out how to vote cards that do not list the parties with the candidate names.  It makes me want to see their registrations fired into the sun.  I'm busy and I've got articles to write and you - this means you One Nation, you Trumpet of Patriots, you Liberals and you Nationals - think it is acceptable for me to have to waste hours comparing lists of names with lists of candidates by party because you are too ashamed or too lazy to display which parties you are preferencing on your online how to vote cards.   In future I want display of party names on how to vote cards to be required by law.  Grrrr.  Kudos to Labor and the Greens for doing the right thing by our democracy here.

So What's The Deal With Macnamara 2025?

I don't normally do articles about specific seats outside of my home state in federal leadups, but this one is a very special case.  The seat of Macnamara has seen excitement in the post-count at two of the last three federal elections.  First there was 2016, when Labor always looked most likely to retain but there was both a narrow margin to the Greens to make the final two and a narrow margin to the Liberals after doing so.  But that was just an entree to 2022 where the seat hung in the balance for over a week.  In this case the Liberals had no hope of victory but Labor needed to beat either the Liberals or the Greens at the three-candidate point to win the seat.  All three parties were astonishingly close at the tipping point and Labor's Josh Burns survived by just 594 votes.  The 2025 campaign for Macnamara again sees an unclear exclusion order which is leading to some strategic voting arguments.  One of them isn't very good.

The seat of Macnamara has become a commentariat obsession since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, soon followed by Israel's ongoing invasion of Gaza.  Attributing blame for and condemning these events is outside the scope of this article; if anyone must know my views, ask me somewhere else.  The resulting Gaza/antisemitism issues set is seen as extremely significant in Macnamara where 10% of residents describe their religion as Judaism.  Some others would be ethnically Jewish without self-describing as religious.  Given that there has been a rise in strong criticisms of Israel and also in antisemitic behaviour (the two are far from always the same thing) since October 2023 the line has been that Jewish voters will turn heavily away from the Greens for their pro-Gaza position.

Queensland 2024 Postcount

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Donations welcome!

Cleaning up the mess in Queensland postcounts is hard work!  Donation links for PayID, paypal, bank transfer in sidebar - please only donate if you can afford to do so (poll deniers and Courier Mail editors excepted, they should both give me everything they have)

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Final result LNP 52 ALP 36 KAP 3 GRN 1 IND 1

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Aspley (ALP vs LNP), has been won by ALP, covered below 

Gaven (ALP vs LNP) has been won by ALP, covered below

Mirani (LNP vs KAP) has been won by LNP, covered below

Mulgrave (LNP vs KAP), has been won by LNP, covered below

Pine Rivers (ALP vs LNP) has been won by ALP, covered below

South Brisbane (Green vs ALP) has been won by ALP, covered below

Estimated final result if current leads/expected favourites hold LNP 52 ALP 36 KAP 3 GRN 1 IND 1 

This is my postcount thread for the 2024 Queensland election which has been very decisively won by the LNP, the scale of their victory becoming more apparent late in the night as the prepoll swing was higher than the day booths.   I will be unrolling seats of interest through the day.  With only 66% of enrolment counted on the night it may well be that more seats become more competitive than they looked as counting continues.  I note for instance that Labor's apparent miracle retain in Bundaberg has tightened late at night and is still awaiting a major prepoll.  (Edit: Labor has survived that)

Queensland 2024: The Polls Aren't Getting Much Better For Labor

Recent polling LNP leads approx 55.5-44.5

Possible seat result of this 2PP LNP 56 ALP 29 Green 4 KAP 3 IND 1 

I last wrote about the Queensland polling leadup back five months ago - was it really that long? - in The Tide Is Going Out For Queensland Labor.  At that time, there had been a few polls out showing Labor trailing about 45-55 two-party preferred, which as I explained in the article is historically not surprising in the slightest.  Five months on and less than one to go til the election, they're still there.  

However it's not as if nothing at all has happened in the meantime.  Since my last article (which mentioned the 44-56 April YouGov and the 46-54 March Newspoll), things may have got worse and then got better for the Government.  There's no need for me to repeat all the details of polls that are recorded and linked to on Wikipedia but there was a string of shockers for the government through to early September.  On 2PP they had only 44.5% (est) in Resolve February to May, 43% (converted estimate) in Redbridge February+May (two waves, not a continuous sample), 43% in YouGov July 8-15, 45.5% in Redbridge May+August, 43% in Wolf + Smith 6-29 Aug (Wolf + Smith is a sort of Resolve spinoff), and 42% (est and possibly generous) in Resolve July through September.  

While the Resolve type polls in this mix have the Labor primary lower than others because of their handling of the independent vote, none of these six polls had the Labor primary with a 3 in front of it, and Redbridge's first sample had the LNP as high as 47.  The average major party primary gap across these polls was 17.5 points.

Tasmania Embraces Chaos: 2024 Election Tallyboard And Summary

TASMANIA 2024: Liberal Minority Government Expected (Subject to will of the parliament)

Labor appears to be not seeking to form government 

Rebecca White resigned leadership, Dean Winter to contest, Josh Willie and others may contest

FINAL RESULT  LIB 14 ALP 10 GRN 5 JLN 3 IND 3

Links to seat postcount pages Bass Braddon Clark Franklin Lyons

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Friday 5 April

Dean Winter has publicly announced that he is running for leader, with what he believes is the support of the Labor caucus. 

Informal Vote: Not Good Enough!

Ahead of the release of primary figures the TEC has advised that the informal vote increased from 5.13% in 2021 to 6.31%.  This suggests the informal vote rose with more counting as, eg, cases of duplicate numbers that had been missed on the night were spotted.  6.31% is a bad, though not catastrophic, result.  I warned that an increase in informal voting was likely because votes that were formal at the last election (1-5 with errors later) were informal at this election if the errors were at 6 and 7, but a full review will be needed to detect the specific causes of the increase - which might also be partly down to deliberate informal voting, an increased number of columns, etc.  Certainly I saw some informal votes that should have been saved under transitional savings provisions that I recommended.  In one case a voter had voted 1-6 within the Franklin Greens ticket, leaving a 7th Green blank, then numbered 8-31 in other columns.  The result of this is that their vote did not count at all, whereas in the ACT it would have been good for their first six candidates.  I can only hope that the increased informal rate does not change any outcomes (often it doesn't).   Incidentally, 2024 is the second highest informal vote ever, behind 1946 when for some reason 10.08% of votes were informal (possibly caused by confusing ballot instructions around the introduction of columns).  

The parliament - primarily the government - is to blame for not trying to fix this problem by at least allowing that a vote that was formal in 2021 would be formal in 2024.  However the TEC is also to blame because it has advised the government against measures that might increase exhaust and hence 

"reduce the effectiveness and accuracy of the Hare-Clark counting process".  This stance is addressed in my submission (Hare-Clark Is Not A Rolls-Royce System section) - what really reduces the effectiveness and accuracy of the system is excluding votes from it for no good reason. 

2024 Tasmanian State Election Guide: Lyons

This is the Lyons electorate guide for the 2021 Tasmanian State Election.  (Link to main 2024 election preview page, including links to other electorates.)  If you find these guides useful, donations are very welcome (see sidebar), but please only donate in these difficult times if you can afford to do so.  Note: if using a mobile you may need to use the view web version option at the bottom of the page to see the sidebar. 

Lyons (Currently 2 Liberal 2 Labor 1 IND). 

(2021 Election Result 3 Liberal 2 Labor)

Most of the state

Rural, outer suburban and forested.  

Lots of tiny dispersed towns that take many years for an MP to work

2024 Tasmanian State Election Guide: Franklin

This is the Franklin electorate guide for the 2024 Tasmanian State Election.  (Link to main 2024 election preview page, including links to other electorates.)  If you find these guides useful, donations are very welcome (see sidebar), but please only donate in these difficult times if you can afford to do so.  Note: if using a mobile you may need to use the view web version option at the bottom of the page to see the sidebar.  

Franklin (Currently 2 Liberal 1 Labor 1 Green 1 IND)

(Elected at last election 2 Liberal 2 Labor 1 Green)

Eastern shore Hobart (Clarence City), much of Kingborough, Huon Valley, D'Entrecasteaux Channel

Urban/outer urban/treechange/rural

2024 Tasmanian State Election Guide: Clark

This is the Clark electorate guide for the 2024 Tasmanian State Election.  (Link to main 2024 election preview page, including links to other electorates.)  If you find these guides useful, donations are very welcome (see sidebar), but please only donate in these difficult times if you can afford to do so.  Note: if using a mobile you may need to use the view web version option at the bottom of the page to see the sidebar.  

Clark (Currently 2 Liberal 1 Labor 1 Green 1 Independent)

Western shore Hobart, primarily Hobart City and Glenorchy City

Inner and outer urban

2024 Tasmanian State Election Guide Main Page

POSTCOUNT

No party has won a majority but the Liberals are the largest party.  

Seat postcount pages will be linked here when written.

Bass

Braddon

Clark

Franklin

Lyons

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Welcome to the main page for my 2024 Tasmanian state election coverage.  This page will carry links to all the other articles about the election that I write prior to the close of polling, and will contain general big-picture stuff and links to all the specialised articles (once these are written).  It will be updated very frequently.  Each electorate will very soon have its own guide page.  Note that these are my own guides and I reserve the right to inject flippant and subjective comments whenever I feel like it; if you do not like this, write your own.  This guide and all the others will evolve over coming weeks.  

I will be covering the election counting night for the Mercury from the tally room; all post-count coverage will occur on this website.  

Do Greens Do Badly At By-Elections When Both Major Parties Run?

(This article has been graded Wonk Factor 3/5.  It contains plenty of number-crunching and the odd statistical concept.)

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Today's article is a test of a hypothesis I thought was worth looking at.  In the recent Fadden federal by-election, the Greens were among the obvious losers, copping a 4.56% swing against them and falling to fifth on primaries behind Legalise Cannabis.  Then came the Rockingham state by-election in which the Greens were again smoked by the dope party despite having outpolled them at the previous upper house contest for the seat. The Greens did pick up a swing there (currently standing at 1.7%) but that was nothing but crumbs given that Mark McGowan's departure left a 33.4% swing for other parties to feast on.  On the other hand, there was a significant local-government based independent, Hayley Edwards, running.

Social media has been awash with Labor stans and the occasional op ed or media hack claiming that one poor result and one ambiguous result are clearly all about the party's stance on the Housing Australia Future Fund bill and are a portent of incandescent doom for the Greens at the next Senate election!  Given the variability of by-election outcomes and the fact that the Green vote is stable at its election level in national polling, those involved could as always improve the standard of Twitter psephology by desisting from this untestable game and deleting their accounts.   

On the other hand, I have seen a theory that the Greens will often do badly in by-elections because their by-election campaigns tend to be token attempts in seats they can't win and without the accompanying upper-house focused campaigns to drive up the vote.  So is there any truth in this overall, or is it really just the case that the Greens vote easily goes soft when there is even modest new competition?

Cassy O'Connor Resignation, Recount And Run For Hobart

Clark recount for seat of Cassy O'Connor (Green)
Vica Bayley (GRN) wins recount but it has been closer than expected.

1:01 Bayley wins 5380-4649 (53.6% to 46.4%) with 592 exhausted (mostly on the final exclusion).  That result highlights some problems for the Greens in terms of fracturing of candidate preferences among their voters, with so many preferring Taylor (who has run for Council but is far from a household name) but it is also an opportunity: if they can split their vote this evenly it will improve their chances of winning two!

12:11 I have heard that Bayley is going OK on the final exclusion and should survive. (Update: more than OK, he will gain by over 200 here and win by several hundred.)

1951 And A Reason To Avoid An Early Double Dissolution

In recent weeks there has been a lot of speculation about a possible early federal double dissolution, after the Greens and Coalition deferred Labor's Housing Australia Future Fund Bill 2023 until October.  The Albanese government says that this deferral constitutes a first "failure to pass" the Bill for the purposes of Section 57 of the Constitution and that if the Senate were to block or defer the Bill again, then the Bill would become a trigger for an early double dissolution election whenever the government wished to call one.  The Greens dispute that the deferral is a "failure to pass", but it would be a brave Governor-General who refused an election to a government that had an even arguable case that that box had been ticked, and in my view the government's case would be more than merely arguable.  There are questions about the mechanics regarding whether the Bill needs to be withdrawn before the Senate could fail to pass it again, but in some form or another it seems to me the HAFF Bill could become a double dissolution trigger if it is not passed in October or shortly afterwards.  

This article concerns not the mechanics of whether and how Labor can acquire an early double dissolution should it be unable to pass the HAFF Bill (though I am happy to have that discussed in comments), but whether it is a good idea strategically. 

EMRS: Liberals Crash But Labor Doesn't Pick Up The Pieces

EMRS Lib 36 (-6) ALP 31 (+1) GRN 15 (+2) IND/OTHER 18 (+3)
Election held now would deliver a very hung parliament
Rebecca White retakes Better Premier lead, most probably as a result of disapproval of Jeremy Rockliff's performance

An eagerly awaited EMRS poll is up and as you would have been nuts to not expect, the Rockliff Liberal Government has been harshly whacked over its recent collapse into minority and its pursuit of a controversial AFL stadium.  After over a year in which basically nothing happened in this quarterly series the Government has slumped six points to 36%.  I have this as the Liberal Party's third-lowest primary since February 2011 (when it was also at 36), beating only a 35 and a 34 polled during 2017, a time when the poll had serious issues that it later addressed with overestimating the Green vote.

For a long time I have been wondering what it would take to lift the Labor Opposition above the low 30s and put it on to numbers where it could at least push for being the largest party in the parliament, if not for majority.  Surely this would be it?  According to this poll, no!  Remarkably the poll finds Labor up just one point to a feeble 31% with the slack being picked up by Greens (up two) and independents/others (up three).  So is the latter a boost in support for the recent defectors Lara Alexander and John Tucker?  The seat by seat breakdown is extremely granular because EMRS in its dashboard presents the numbers as a share of the overall state vote (and the sample size is tiny anyway) but the combined Ind/Other share hasn't moved upwards in either the Bass or the Lyons sample (a lot of the gain was in Clark).  

Insane In The Balmain: Does Labor Really Need To Win This Seat?

 

A Labor flier from Balmain (source)

The district of Balmain (Green 10.0% vs ALP) would normally be of little interest at this NSW election given that it is on a large margin and the Greens have so far never lost a single seat electorate that they won at a previous general election.  What makes Labor think Balmain is worth taking a tilt at is the retirement of 12-year incumbent Jamie Parker, the first Green at state or federal level to retire from a single-seat electorate.  

One of the reasons the Greens have 14 wins from 14 attempts at defending state or federal single-member seats won at a general election (by-elections and multi-member seats are different stories) is that there tend to be oversize swings to them in subsequent elections.  For a first defence at state and federal levels the average swing is 2.9% on primary vote and 4.0% on two candidate preferred.  For a second and later defences it is 3.0% and 4.8% per election.  (The 2CP figures are affected in varying directions by Liberal preference recommendation changes, and a 2CP swing is not always available).  The obvious explanation for this is demographics, but another possible explanation is that sitting Greens may receive unusually high personal votes.  And if they receive them when they defend their seats, maybe they also lose them when they retire?