Western Australia 2025: Final Polls Predict Another Drubbing

Note for Saturday night:  I have a clash with a chess tournament on the weekend and it is not clear whether or not I will be able to do live coverage or how much, though the time difference helps. If there is live coverage it may start late.  If I can do live coverage there will be a thread that I will keep open for a few days and then aim to have a more detailed look at how the Legislative Council contest is going (if still interesting) on Monday evening or Tuesday.  

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This will be a pretty quick post but I should note the two polls released today re the WA state election.  The campaign opened with a 56-44 Newspoll and some degree of narrowing from there would not have been a huge surprise, but two polls out today have slightly more lopsided readings.  The two sets of numbers are in fact as good as identical:  Newspoll has 57.5-42.5 off primaries of Labor 44 Liberal 29 Nationals 5 Green 10 One Nation 3 others 9.  DemosAU has 57-43 off Labor 43 Liberal 30 Nationals 5 Greens 11 and others (which includes One Nation) 11.   So between them about a 12.5% swing back.  

WA Liberals Threaten To Bring Back Malapportionment

I'm aiming to have a federal polling roundup out tomorrow or so to deal with that Resolve 55-45, that YouGov MRP and other recent stories, but firstly I should comment about and condemn a disappointing development in the WA election campaign.  

Yesterday the WA Liberal leader Libby Mettam promised that the party would seek to reintroduce WA's regional Legislative Council system if elected.  This system was severely malapportioned, was an affront to one-vote one-value, and was an affront to democracy itself and to almost every Western Australian voter.  It has been the work of decades to evict the last cases of stone age malapportionment from the Australian state houses.  Any party that wants to go back there in 2025 is not merely unfit for Government.  It is also unfit for Opposition ... which suits the Liberals quite well at the moment, since they're not one.

WA has had a series of malapportioned Legislative Council systems where, in the supposed name of rural representation, rural areas were overweighted such that votes in them carried a few to several times the weight of those cast in Perth.  This was the case in the system of half-in half-out single-seat elections between 1965 and 1986, again for the first regional multi-seat system (1987-2005, 4x5+2x7 member seats) and somehow even worse in the second (2008-2021, 6x6 member seats).   

The effect of rural malapportionment in the Council through the multi-seat era has been to skew it in favour of the conservatives.  As an average of the nine elections held under such systems, Labor has won 41.1% of the vote and 41.4% of the seats.  The combined Liberal and National parties (sometimes running entirely independently, sometimes as joint tickets) have won 39.8% of the vote but 46.8% of the seats.  One expects that in a system with six members per electorate the major parties will each be over-represented by a few percent.  Instead, one side has been over-represented by 7%, the other barely at all.