False Declaration: Minor Right Nonsense About Senate Reform

Huge if true, but ...

Recently my attention was drawn to an article on the Canberra Declaration website by one Dave Pellowe.  Pellowe is better known for being on the receiving end of a later dropped 2024 Queensland anti-discrimination complaint over comments he made about Indigenous religious beliefs while explaining why he would not include a Welcome to Country in a Christian religious event.  (I'm vaguely curious about what exactly he said, as my home state has a long history of potentially interesting complaints like this being made then almost always dropped - but not curious enough yet to find it.)  The Canberra/Daily Declaration site was better known to me through the involvement of one Julie Sladden, an anti-COVID-vaccine retired doctor and right-wing culture warrior who was bizarrely endorsed by the Tasmanian Liberals for not one but two state elections.  

I'm not sure I'd come across Pellowe talking nonsense about Senate voting before but this is not the first time he's done it.  His Twitter bio reads "Solomon prayed: Give me an understanding heart so that I can (steward democracy) well & know the difference between right and wrong. 1 Kings 3:9".  I hope that he will see this article and realise that having an "understanding heart" to "steward democracy" requires understanding the facts and consulting reliable sources rather than just former UAP and One Nation figure Lex Stewart.  Stewart and Pellowe have been making very similar complaints about Senate reform and the 2016 election, and they're both wrong.

2025 Senate Notes Part One

This is the latest in a string of articles that I write after each Senate election tracking certain themes in the Senate races.  Previous volumes in the series were called Senate Reform Performance Review, referring to the 2016 Senate changes that got rid of Group Ticket Voting.  I think now we've reached the point after four elections where it's very clear that the new system works very well indeed and needs no longer to be considered on probation, hence the shorter title.  For previous instalments see 2016 part one, 2016 part two, 2019 (single article) and 2022 (single article).  On the agenda for this issue are:  proportionality, winning vote shares (with a focus on the One Nation wins from behind), preferencing impacts, and the curse of Inclusive Gregory.  Part two covers Senate 2PP, How to Vote cards, just-voting-1, exhaust, informals, below the lines,  and the fun bit about people who we wonder why they bother.   And yes that includes the ACT Liberals! 

I've decided again to split the article into two because the volume of material this time is a bit much for one go.  At least for my own feeling that I'm spending a lot of time on a single article that I haven't released anything from yet.  

In this article I treat Labor, Greens and Pocock as comprising the left of the Senate (in relative terms, this should not be taken as me declaring Labor to be an outright left-wing party) and Coalition, One Nation and UAP as the right (with Jacqui Lambie treated as neither though these days there is a case for treating her as left if anything).  

Ralph Babet Was Elected Fair And Square. I Know It's Hard But Try To Deal With It

For the avoidance of any doubt at all, I'll start with my view of the subject of this article.  Most of what I see of United Australia Party Senator Ralph Babet is his social media output, and it is awful.  He delivers dumbed-down denser-than-even-Sky-News versions of what were in general stupid ideas to begin with (MAGA nonsense, supposed conspiracies against Christians and western culture, whining about "wokeness", gender, sexuality and multiculturalism, and baiting people who would rather at least try not to get COVID).  Babet is perhaps our purest yet elected example of what happens when you spend way too long inhaling what Christopher Hitchens called "the exhaust fumes of democracy", and then attempt to breathe them out. His Senate career so far has been even cringier than very early Jacqui Lambie.  As with Bob Katter, the concussed-sounding nuttiness of Babet's output frequently leads to debates about whether he's just harmlessly insane or whether some of what he's saying might dangerously affect a few impressionable chaps out there.  Think you can tell I'm not a fan.  

Senate Reform Performance Review And Senate Notes 2022

The results of this year's half-Senate election are all in so it's time to observe how our still relatively new Senate system performed at its second half-Senate test.  For previous assessments see 2016 part one, 2016 part two and 2019 (single article).  I have changed the title mainly so I am at liberty to add pointless fluff about candidates who finished last.  On the agenda for this issue are: proportionality, blocked Senates, how dreadful this election would have been under Group Ticket Voting, winning vote shares (with a focus on Babet and Pocock), preferencing impacts, just-voting-1, exhaust, informals, below the lines, How to Vote cards, blank above the line boxes, and a special schadenfreude section at the bottom.

Senate voting was reformed in 2016 to remove the problems caused by preference harvesting under the old Group Ticket Voting system, under which Senators were being elected off very low vote shares as a result of networked preference deals and a system that coerced voters into sending their preferences to parties they did not support.  This was not only discriminatory and wrong, but also a threat to the integrity of the electoral system because of the ease with which minor issues could cause a count to collapse.  A great many alarmist predictions were made by defenders of the (no longer defensible) GTV system, and most of those have been debunked already.  However in 2022 there are two new opportunities to test predictions about the new system.  Firstly it is the first time we have had a Senate composed entirely of half-Senate election results.  Secondly, it is the first time Labor has come to power in the House of Representatives under the new system.  

"Reignite Democracy" Cooks Up Some Senate Preference Myths

Yesterday my attention was drawn to a flier that had been circulated by Reignite Democracy Australia, a fringe right anti-mandates group, and also to a course they are offering.  The website is promoting online sessions in "how the electoral system works", how it supposedly favours the major parties and the Greens, how it supposedly works against "freedom loving and independent candidates" and how voters can "turbocharge their vote".  There's a bit of a push around for voters for parties like Liberal Democrats, One Nation and United Australia to preference each other, with supporters of the idea labelling all those involved "freedom parties" or "freedom friendly", even though some of the parties involved hardly have a libertarian bone in their bodies on any issue that isn't COVID-related.

I believe that everyone, whatever their politics, should have access to the facts about the electoral system and how they can make best use of their vote to represent their views.  Unfortunately what we have with this flier and may get with the presentations is some eccentric claims about the Senate specifically by one Peter Newland (apparently a veteran JSCEM correspondent, though not one I have noticed before). The claims sound plausible because of the detailed discussion of electoral systems, and indeed received a fairly friendly response on Twitter yesterday when tweeted, perhaps because they were more interesting than the usual RDA paranoia about voting in pen, stylising 1s and 7s and so on.  However, they still contain serious errors and unsound strategic voting advice.  It appears that RDA may be about to give a platform to junk psephology and recommend it to children.  

Senate Reform Performance Review 2019

The results of this year's half-Senate election are all in so it is time to observe how our new Senate system performed at its first half-Senate test.  Australian Senate voting was reformed in the leadup to the 2016 election to abolish Group Ticket voting and the preference-harvesting exploits it had become prone to, and give voters more flexibility in directing their own preferences either above or below the line.  In the leadup to that election, many false predictions about Senate reform were made and were then discredited by the results.  I reviewed how the new system went back then: Part 1, Part 2.  Some of the predictions that were made by opponents of Senate reform concerned the results of half-Senate elections specifically, so now we've had one, it's a good time to check in on those, as well as on how this election compared to 2019.  One unexpected issue with the new system has surfaced, concerning above the line boxes for non-party groups, but it is one that should be easily fixed.

Senate Voting: Another Poor Article By Richard Denniss

It's a shame to have to be distracted from more important things (like counting all the candidate malfunctions this election) in order to deal with an article by Richard Denniss in the Guardian.  I wasn't going to do this, having already done so on Twitter, but unfortunately an email has been seen by me suggesting that a voter took it seriously.  I can scarcely believe this is so, and wonder if I should refer the email to the AFP as a hoax, but the thought of people being Wrong on the Internet about this needs addressing.  Rant warning applies.

To start with, let's declare on Richard's behalf what he failed to admit in his latest article.  Richard Denniss is a former sceptic of Senate voting reform who defended the coercive, corrupted and dangerous Group Ticket Voting system.  In that system, abolished prior to the 2016 election (but still extant in the WA and Victorian upper houses) voters' preferences were being sent they knew not where, and parties could be elected off tiny vote shares based on a weighted lottery of preference deals and effectively random events.  In defence of this old system,  Denniss, of the left-wing Australia Institute, made the ludicrous claim that "the vast majority of Australian voters trust parties to allocate preferences and opt to vote above the line."  Really, Australian voters trust political parties when politicians are among the least trusted occupations?  (OK, the link is only Morgan, but with effect sizes that large, even Morgan can be trusted here!)  We saw exactly how much Australian voters really trusted parties in 2016 when only about 30% of Coalition above-the-line voters, 14% of Labor ATL voters, and 10% of Green ATL voters (and single figures for most minor parties) followed their party's Senate how-to-vote card.  In Tasmania, voters didn't even trust the Labor Party to pick its own candidates properly, and overturned its preselection.

Group Ticket Voting Wrecks 2018 Victorian Upper House Election

The buttons have been pressed on the Victorian upper house election.  In the end, none of the results were all that close, and all regions have been declared.  If anyone can find a legal basis for challenging the results, they will now have to do so in court.  On that, it would be nice if professional preference harvesting could be deemed to be a bribery offence under Section 151 (3) (d) but I  suspect that it doesn't work like that, and that that section is aimed at bribery connected with how-to-vote cards.  I can only assume what has happened is all legal, but history should record it as another upper house election that was trashed by Group Ticket voting. 

I should add that this post is not intended as an attack on the calibre of those elected to represent parties with small vote shares.  They may turn out to be excellent MPs.  Rather the point is that they were not elected by a proper electoral system and those elected on very small vote shares do not have a proper mandate.

Will The Future See An Even Bigger Senate Crossbench?

It's a long way from the next Senate election to be talking about the future of the Senate, and also a strange time to be doing it with most observers far more fixated on the goings-on downstairs.  But someone is talking about it, so I thought I'd have a detailed look at what they are finding.  The Australia Institute has released a report that attempts to use polling to predict what the Senate might look like in 2019 and 2022.  (There's also a report in AFR, which was originally paywalled but at the moment I can access it OK.)

That another double dissolution "held now" would so flood the Senate with new crossbench Senators as to make the 2016 result look tame is really not worth contesting, and I'm not going to bother with double-dissolution projections off the current numbers.   What is of interest is that the report claims that even if the next two elections were half-Senate elections, on current polling the size of the non-Green portion of the crossbench would increase.  The report's headline projection for 2019 is an extra two non-Green crossbench Senators, and for 2022 after two half-Senate elections, an extra four.  Based on the averageing of two poll results, the report suggests that after two half-Senate elections, there could be a non-Greens crossbench of fourteen Senators, dominated by One Nation with six.

Groundhog Day: Group Ticket Nonsense Returns To WA

Glenn Druery will not say exactly what he's been paid to help micro-parties use preference-harvesting to win Upper House seats they don't deserve at the WA State Election. If it was only $5,000 per party plus a $50K win bonus as claimed (and denied), then his services have come pretty cheap.  The game is the same as it ever was: to give parties with very little support a chance at winning they don't deserve, by exploiting inflexible voting systems to create preference flows that have nothing to do with the intention of voters.  Druery trollishly describes this as an "outbreak of democracy".  I will bet that he can scarcely believe his luck to still be in this business.

After the debacle that was the 2013 Senate election in WA, one would have thought WA would be the last place on earth that would let Druery still ply his trade.  Alas, it looks like it will instead be the last place on earth that ever stops him.  It was in WA in 2013 that Wayne Dropulich of the Australian Sports Party (whatever that was) surfed from 0.2% of the vote to a Senate seat as a result of preference-harvesting, only for his election to be annulled because the loss of some ballot papers caused an irrelevant tipping point to become irresolvable. (This, in turn, was a product of the group ticket system.)  And it was then WA where the whole state's Senate election had to be rerun from scratch in 2014 at immense cost.

It seems quite a damning indictment on the Barnett government that it has had three and a half years since the 2013 debacle to clean up the state's similar Legislative Council voting system and hasn't even introduced a bill to that effect.  By comparison, the model being considered in South Australia is pretty bad, but at least South Australia's government is trying.  Whether WA's has just had too many other problems to care about democracy, or else has kept the system to deliberately salt the earth for its successor, I don't know.

WA's upper house has the worst state electoral system in the nation.  It is badly malapportioned in favour of rural electorates, it has Group Ticket voting, and it has a ridiculous lack of savings provisions for votes that stray off the narrow path of exact formality.  What we will see in the WA Upper House next weekend is barely even fit to be considered an election.

Unicameral By Stealth: Tony Abbott's Senate Referendum Call

The Australian (Tony Abbott calls for Senate referendum, warns 'we are turning into Italy') reports that relevance-deprived ex-PM Tony Abbott has called for a referendum to reduce the power of the Senate to obstruct government legislation.

As outlined, the plan would allow for a deadlock between the Houses to be broken by a joint sitting of both Houses without the need for a prior double-dissolution election.  It appears that this follows one of two options outlined in this 2003 discussion paper on resolving deadlocks.  These options were:

1. A joint sitting can be convened after a bill has been rejected twice with three months between rejections
2. A joint sitting can be convened after every election for the full House and half the Senate, rather than requiring a double dissolution

It appears Abbott favours the first option, but this is not yet totally clear.  The 2003 proposals were killed off based on a finding that they would not pass a referendum.

2016 Ehrlich Awards For Wrong Predictions

It's time for the fifth annual giving of the Ehrlich Awards, which round the start of each year go to the most amusingly or staggeringly wrong predictions I observe in any field of interest relating to the previous twelve months.  The Ehrlichs are named for Paul Ehrlich, the evangelist of ecological end-times who put me on a path to a lifetime of health scepticism of dark green gloomery when he not just lost a famous bet with economist Julian Simon but also gave poor excuses for the defeat. For the past editions click the Ehrlich Awards tab at the bottom, and for the ground rules see the 2012 edition.

As usual I should note my own predictive efforts are hardly perfect, but I had a pretty good year in 2016, missing by only two on the Coalition's national Reps seat tally (for example).  I did wrongly predict two Reps seats in my own home state, which was embarrassing, though I did indicate those were quite uncertain.

Two areas of widespread predictive failure that will dominate these Awards were the US election and Senate reform.  They weren't the only ones I noticed.  For instance the late Bob Ellis made a bold bid for posthumous glory with "It is likely, though not certain, that Malcolm Turnbull will lose his seat" - Turnbull won his seat 68:32 with a trivial 1.2% swing against him.  But I think the two I've mentioned are the most interesting ones and I've decided to make the US election case the dishonourable mentions, saving Senate reform for the medals.

SA's Voter Choice Bill Could Be Better

Earlier this year, the Australian federal parliament successfully passed Senate voting reform, which abolished the Group Voting Tickets that had trashed the 2013 election, and returned control over preferences to the voters.  I've had plenty to say already about how successful that was (performance review part 1, part 2, JSCEM sub (PDF) etc).  However, while Group Ticket Voting has been put in the bin at federal level, hopefully to remain there for good, it remains in place in the upper houses of Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. (For completeness, NSW fixed its system after the 1999 debacle, Tasmania has a single-member-per-seat Upper House and Queensland has no Upper House at all).

I'm not going to expend a huge amount of energy on trying to get state upper house systems reformed in states other than my own.  But with South Australia the first state where a move away from GVTs is the subject of legislation since the 2016 Senate outcome, I think it's interesting to have a look at what is being proposed.  In attempting to get rid of Group Ticket Voting, the SA Labor government has come up with a near-polar opposite.  The proposed alternative, while still much better than keeping GVTs (as is just about anything really) is so inferior to the Senate and NSW systems that I wondered for a moment if it was built to be voted down.  It appears this isn't the case, so hopefully parties in the SA Upper House (where the Government holds just eight out of 22 seats) will be able to amend the legislation to improve it.  An interview with the Attorney-General in July did suggest he was open to different models provided that preference harvesting got the chop, which is commendable.

Senate Reform Performance Review Part 2

In this piece I continue the roundup of the performance of the new Senate voting system that I started in part 1.  Part 1 covered proportionality, half-Senate projections, winning vote shares, the impact of preferencing, just-vote-1 rates and exhaust.  This part covers  informal votes, the One Nation question, below the line rates, the two most unusual victories (Lisa Singh and Malcolm Roberts), the impact of the fixed quota, the question of verification and areas for improvement. (There's also a brief note about Inclusive Gregory that isn't relevant to reform, but that I thought I should mention anyway).  Anything else I think of may be tacked onto the end.  I have already discussed donkey-voting, proximity preferencing, the abject failure of most parties' how-to-vote cards, and preferencing patterns by state on the Button Press Week thread. Also, lots of Tasmanian-specific stats can be found on the Tasmanian button press thread.

Senate Reform Performance Review Part 1

The results of the Senate election are all in and so it is timely to review how the new Senate system performed in full detail.  No system should be expected to perform flawlessly on its first attempt.  However, the new system has generally exceeded the expectations of its most ardent supporters (save any who supported it for the wrong reasons) and made its opponents' pre-election arguments look very silly indeed.

Two major models of reform were canvassed in the Senate reform debate that ran through the last term of parliament.  The original JSCEM model released in 2014 allowed for fully optional preferencing above the line with semi-optional preferencing (six squares for a half-Senate election, twelve for a double dissolution) below the line.  The revised model released in 2016 initially allowed for semi-optional preferencing (1-6) above the line, but essentially maintained compulsory full preferencing if voting below the line.  After many complaints from the psephosphere (and I especially give credit to Michael Maley and Antony Green here) the final version as amended allowed semi-optional preferencing (1-12) below the line as well.  This change, in the end, allowed Tasmanian voters to overturn the contentious demotion of a sitting high-profile Senator.

Gaynor's Clueless Call For Senate Recount

A reader today drew my attention to this piece by Bernard Gaynor claiming apparent irregularities in the Tasmanian Senate count, and calling for a recount, even including a petition to the AEC to that effect.  Gaynor's concern is that as a result of this outcome Australia will have one less Pauline Hanson and one more Sarah Hanson-Young.  Luckily for those who think one of either or both in the Senate is one too many, both these Senators are actually unique. Neither is affected by the outcome in Tasmania.

In this piece I'll examine the basis for Gaynor's call in some detail, but firstly I should point out that the call for a recount is in itself misconceived.  The reason for this is that it comes too late.  The time for calling for a recount in a seat is before the declaration of the poll (S278 Commonwealth Electoral Act).  In 2013, requests for a recount in Western Australia were granted (on appeal) because of a much closer apparent margin (14 votes) at a tipping point during the preference distribution and the declaration of the poll was delayed while the recount was conducted.  I followed the progress of that recount in an article at the time.

Tasmania Senate 2016 Button Press And Analysis

Result

Order 1 Abetz (Lib) 2 Urquhart (ALP) 3 Whish-Wilson (Green) 4 Lambie (JLN) 5 Parry (Lib) 6 Polley (ALP) 7 Duniam (Lib) 8 Brown (ALP) 9 Bushby (Lib) 10 Singh (ALP) 11 Bilyk (ALP) 12 McKim (Green) 
Colbeck (Lib) was passed by McKim and McCulloch and excluded
5 Labor 4 Liberal 2 Green 1 Lambie

I would like to thank all the AEC staff in Hobart for all their help with information on the count and congratulate them on their efficient and punctual delivery of the Tasmanian outcomes.

2016 Tasmania Senate: A Model Of What Might Occur

Button press imminent - results and discussion will be posted on a new thread.  Thanks all for the comments - this has been the most commented thread in this site's history by a long way!

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Tasmanian Senate model

Outcome of model based on current data: 
Likely outcome 5 Labor 4 Liberal 2 Green 1 Lambie
Next most likely outcome is 5-5-1-1.
Nick McKim and Richard Colbeck main contenders for final seat. McKim appears somewhat better placed on my sampling but contest is too close to call.
Significant chance of Colbeck not making final two and final contest being McKim vs McCulloch

Outside chance of McCulloch (One Nation) win, other micro-parties don't appear competitive.

Note: updates added through count including second model run from Thursday 21 July  - scroll to bottom.

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2016 Senate Postcount: A Very Long Way Still To Go

This thread contains some general comments about the overall state of the Senate race and the campaign.  There is one thing I want to make clear about the Senate race right now before I get any further:

We still have an extremely long way to go!

What we have at the moment are primary vote counts that are often little more than halfway complete and may still move around a lot based on votes still to be added.  We have a new Senate voting system and no past-data experience of how voters use it.  People are trying to pick from this which micro-parties might win seats when we don't know what the final votes are let alone what they mean.

I understand the media's desire to communicate information to readers, but this stuff is hugely complex and I just want people to accept that it is going to take a long time to know who will be winning particular seats, and in some cases we won't know what is going to happen until the pressing of The Button when all the votes have been entered.

List of Senate How-To-Vote Card Preferences

Introduction

This is a resource piece that will be updated as information comes to hand.  It is simply a list of the Senate preference recommendations on party how-to-vote cards by state, with some comments as I feel inclined to add them.  I will not be writing a similar piece for the House of Representatives.  Note that the ABC Senate Guides also show HTV card scans for many parties (indeed a lot more than listed here) though at the time of writing they are missing some that I have.

Senate how-to-votes are of interest because in the new Senate system, voters decide their own preferences, but many will follow how-to-vote cards in so doing.  Typically something like half of major party voters are likely to follow cards (more accurate assessments are probably available elsewhere in the psephosphere) but the card-follow rate among Greens voters is very low.  Under the new Senate system it is possible voters will be more reliant on these cards than normal.  Knowing who these cards preference may be important in projecting the outcome early in the post-count, as will high-quality scrutineering (but I doubt that there will be too much of that.)

Following a how-to-vote card and then stopping after six boxes weakens the power of your vote and I strongly recommend voting beyond six boxes if voting above the line.  See How To Best Use Your Vote In The New Senate System.