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.

How Might Minor Right Parties Win More Federal Seats?

This article covers a few recent things I've had my eye on in terms of the Australian minor right movement's attempts to win more federal seats.  By "minor right" I primarily mean parties like One Nation, Libertarians, United Australia, the current version of Family First and so on.  In the broadest sense the term includes these parties plus Australian Christians, Australian Citizens, Gerard Rennick People First, Katters Australian Party, Shooters Fishers and Farmers, Great Australian Party, Trumpet of Patriots (yes that's a thing, nee Australian Federation Party), the federally unregistered Democratic Labour Party, the unregistered AustraliaOne and Reignite Democracy Australia and also unregistered "don't call us antivax" parties like HEART and Health Australia.  

That's a lot of parties.  Some of these parties have legitimate reason to exist independently - Australian Christians and Libertarians each represent an ideology (though how many Australian Libertarians actually believe in it as opposed to being random culture warriors or Liberal Right refugees is another question).  KAP at federal level is basically a vehicle for a single de facto independent and Shooters Fishers and Farmers represents a specific set of interest groups.  But most of the rest fall broadly into the same nationalist/populist/conspiracist/Trumpist/culture-warrior basket and have no reason for independent existence other than that they just can't bang the rocks together.   So this is one of the problems - the Australian minor right is a rabble.  So how do they become more successful?

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.  

Party Registration Tracker 2: The Term After The Crackdown

Note added March 31: No more parties can be registered in time for the election so 32 (-6) is the final tally.  

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Parties registered for 2022 election: 38

Parties registered since 2022 election: 8 (1 since deregistered, 1 previously deregistered)

Parties deregistered since 2022 election: 14 (1 tactical deregistration, 1 reregistered under new name,  excludes 1 overturned deregistration)

Parties currently registered: 32

Net change for term: -6

Parties applying for registration: 0

Parties being considered for deregistration: 0

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Introduction (December 2023)

In the 2019-2022 term the then Coalition Government introduced two major changes to party registration law. The first was an increase in the registration threshhold from 500 to 1500 members (parliamentary parties excepted).  The second was a ban on parties using words that were contained in the name of an earlier registered party.  I monitored the impacts of these laws in a resource piece called Party Registration Crackdown Tracker.  

I've decided a sequel is warranted because it appears that the 1500 member rule is having ongoing impacts in its second term in operation and that the party list for the expected 2025 election could be smaller than that for 2022, so I think it is worth a similar level of monitoring.  Of the eight parties that climbed Mount 1500 to be newly registered for the 2022 election or shortly afterwards, five are already deregistered and a sixth being considered.  As a result the first half of the expected 2022-25 term has so far seen the largest net decline in parties of any first half of a term.

I Threw It All Away: The United Australia Party Self-Deregisters!

I keep an almost daily watch on the AEC's party registration page, but it's been a pretty boring vigil lately.  So imagine my surprise when a newly minted Twitter account alerted me today to the news that the United Australia Party had up and jumped into the billabong of voluntary deregistration for the second time.  As a result, the UAP is not now a registered party for the purpose of contesting federal elections.

This has a precedent.  The original Palmer United Party was registered in the leadup to the 2013 election and voluntarily deregistered on  5 May 2017.  The United Australia Party was then registered in December 2018.  However, the PUP had flopped miserably in the 2016 Senate election (polling below 1% in every state in the absence of a big-spending campaign), unlike the 2022 election at which it polled much better and won a Senate seat.

The deregistration came as a surprise to the UAP's Senator Ralph Babet.  When contacted by the SMH's Lisa Visentin today, he initially didn't remember what it was about, then said he had forgotten because of the death of the Queen, and produced such lines as:

2022 House Of Reps Figures Finalised

Yesterday the 2022 House of Representatives figures were added to the archive of election results, making lots of the usual preference flow goodies available. Although all the preference throws had been completed and uploaded in rough form some time ago, the final figures importantly include the two-party preference flows by party and two-candidate preference flows by party per seat.  As well as this piece I will also be putting out a full analysis of polling accuracy, I expect within the next few days.

Some of the ground that I normally cover in this article was already covered in Two Party Swing Decided This Election (Plus Pendulum).  That article showed that Labor won the election on normal two-party swing in classic Labor vs Coalition seat contests, with changes in the seat share for the major parties pretty much exactly matching historic patterns, and that the groundbreaking defeats for the Coalition at the hands of six new teal independents and two Greens were nonetheless a sideshow in terms of explaining how the election was won.  

2022 Senate Button Press Thread

This thread will follow the Senate button presses as they occur, with details of the results and timing etc.  As I start this thread the button has been pressed in ACT with Katy Gallagher and David Pocock winning as expected.  The distribution of preferences is expected shortly. 

States will be added to this thread as they reach zero unapportioned votes, which is a sign that the button press is imminent.  Until then any further assessments for states will continue to be posted on the Senate postcount thread.  Based on 2019 I was expecting the button presses to occur around June 21 but some races have been significantly faster this time.

ACT

The button has been pressed and the winners as widely called are 1. Katy Gallagher (ALP) 2. David Pocock (David Pocock), with Zed Seselja (Liberal) defeated.  Detail on the distribution later today.

The distribution is here.  Pocock as expected won very easily, defeating Seselja by 7.76% (22133 votes) having caught up to within 1235 before the final Green exclusion (from around 10000 behind after accounting for support candidate votes).  The exhaust rate was higher than usual for the ACT because of the structure of the count, reaching 1.75%. (4986 votes).

2022 Election Day: Newspoll Says Labor Really Ought To Win This Time

2PP Aggregate: 53.2 to Labor (-0.3 since Wednesday) (not a prediction)
(Weighted for time only, no house effects or quality weightings)

Cross-poll average of polls released in last week: 52.8 to Labor 
If polls are right (they may not be), Labor should win outright, with a median 82-83 seats
Historically, Labor has underperformed slightly on average when it leads in final week polling

We've finally reached the end, and after seeing yet another nonsense article from Nine claiming that "If current polling is replicated at the federal election, a hung parliament is the most likely outcome" the end cannot come soon enough.  If there is a hung parliament, then it will be because the polls weren't replicated (at least not on primary votes for those at 51-49.)  But the end is only the start of weeks of post-counting and projection fun ahead.

The final Newspoll has arrived and it has Labor with a 53-47 lead from primaries of Coalition 35 Labor 36 Greens 12 One Nation 5 UAP 3 IND/others 9.  In the past Newspoll has sometimes rounded final poll 2PPs unusually (to halves of a point in 2013 and 2019 and even to tenths in 2010) and I don't know whether the 2PP was rounded to the nearest point or the nearest half-point.  However it matters little.  Scott Morrison is on a poor but not terrible -13 net satisfaction (41-54) and Anthony Albanese picks up six points to -5 (41-46).  For the first time ever in a final Newspoll, the two leaders are tied on the skewed Better Prime Minister indicator, 42-42.  This puts Albanese above John Howard, who trailed 45-40 when he won heavily in 1996.  

Greens, One Nation and UAP Reps How-to-vote Cards

This article is mainly a resource page for studying the preference flows of the Greens, One Nation and United Australia after the election.  It is often difficult to find how-to-vote card material online after elections, but where a party's recommendations vary between seats, it can be useful for getting a handle on how many of that party's voters copied the card.  It's not always that simple, because (for instance) an independent who the Greens choose to recommend preferences to is usually one their supporters would have liked anyway.  But there are some interesting cases with One Nation and UAP at this election.  

I should add the usual disclaimer that most voters don't actually copy how-to-vote cards.  For minor parties it appears to be around 10-15% of their voters in the Reps and even fewer in the Senate.  Not only do minor party voters think for themselves, but they're less likely to be handed a card in the first place.

And I should add the strong disclaimer that how to vote cards are only recommendations.  No matter where a party puts another party on the card, the voters for that party decide where to send their preferences.  

Additions and corrections welcome.  In the case of UAP I'm especially interested in sightings of cards that put significant independents or Labor above the Liberals.  

A Vote For A Party Is Not A Vote For Any Other Party

I am hoping to put out a much-belated Poll Roundup later today or overnight (in short, Labor is currently ahead to such an extent that a polling failure at least as large as 2019 if not larger is probably now the Coalition's best remaining chance of winning, and a lopsided result is a growing chance.)  But I have been distracted yet again, this time by the need to comment on a form of electoral misinformation that I've found especially annoying at this election.  

Tasmania Senate 2022: Prospects and Guide

 SUMMARY: 

Likely 2 Liberal 2 Labor 1 Green 1 JLN if Lambie Network vote mostly holds up
If Lambie Network vote crashes then multi-party contest for final seat

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Tasmania's list of Senate candidates has been released.  Tasmania has 39 candidates in 14 groups with two ungrouped, down from 44 candidates in 16 groups plus four ungrouped in 2019.  Of the groups that ran columns last time, two have disbanded, two are not running and one (Garland) has switched to the Reps.  Three groups that did not run last time are running, one of which (Local Party) is new for this election.  None of the groups that ran last time were direct victims of the recent cull of ballot clutter.  One recognisable impact of the 1500 member rule to Tasmania is that Steve Mav has joined One Nation instead of founding his own party.  

The Overrated Impact Of Party Preferencing Decisions

Advance Summary

1. For all the noise about preferencing strategies and preference flow changes, changes in the relative primary votes for the major parties are a much bigger factor in most recent federal election results.

2. The widespread claim that United Australia preferences caused the Coalition to win the 2019 election is false.

3. Labor is much more dependent on preferences than the Coalition and routinely wins many seats from behind.

4. No party's preferences will ever flow 100% to any other party and there is nothing anyone can do about that - whether it is Greens or Labor being excluded, some preferences will always go to the Coalition.

5. The preferences of climate-concerned independents in city seats tend to flow to Labor, although not quite as strongly as the other way around.

6. In many cases the preference flows from climate-concerned independents are irrelevant, since they will rarely be eliminated in seats that are closely contested between the majors.  

7. How to vote cards mainly exist to protect against informal voting.  Their impact on outcomes is minor.

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Migrants Voting For One Nation and UAP? (Plus Some Polling Comments)

A Few Pointed Words About Polling

Before I start this article, a quick four paragraphs regarding polls, in lieu of a formal roundup.  Firstly and mainly for Tasmanian readers, there has been some (disappointingly uncritical in some cases) media coverage of a poll commissioned by The Australia Institute (Tas) concerning proposals for a Tarkine National Park.  Unfortunately the poll is simply totally unsound.  It uses a loaded preamble that gives arguments for one side of the debate, quantifying a claimed total clearance area while not quantifying how much of the area included is really old growth or rainforest, and further leading the respondent with a comment about claimed community and business support for a National Park.

Having been presented with just one side of the argument, respondents may well be led to give the answer that suits the sponsor, or may well be driven to just hang up if they don't agree with the statements made.  The poll report also provides no data whatsoever on other questions asked, disconnection rates or on the methods and extent of any weighting used to obtain the final results.  The question design also fails to establish whether any support for a National Park would be in addition to some logging activity or as an alternative to it.  Maybe voters really do support a Tarkine National Park of some kind, maybe they don't (the risible voter support for the Greens in Braddon in recent years is not the most promising sign)

I have been trying to write about polling more generally but it is very difficult to get the job done with any motivation when leading pollsters, with the sole exception of YouGov's Queensland polling, have thus far done virtually nothing about the pressing need for a major improvement in polling transparency following the 2019 Australian polling failure.  As such there is no basis for confidence that Newspoll's current picture of a close federal race is in any way accurate (the Coalition's 51-49 leads might really be 54-46 or more, or alternatively Labor might be in front, though that is much less likely.)  And since Essential keeps suppressing its voting intention figures although its unsatisfactory reason for doing so long ago expired, there is no way to benchmark any of its leadership polling, and its issues polls are often problematic.  

Media coverage of commissioned polling also continues to be as awful as before.  Some recent amusing nadirs were rival YouGov poll results being cited and uncritically reported by friendly media on both sides of the NSW abortion debate, and also the Your Right To Know campaign claiming to have Colmar Brunton polling supporting their position, but failing to publish the details of the polling.  If you want to scrutinise it, you can't - you just don't have the right to know.  Media are rightly, if in some cases hypocritically, concerned about laws that can unduly limit what public interest information they are allowed to report. But the claim of media outlets to be servants of the public in reporting public interest information is undermined when they so frequently fail to report relevant information or cautions about their stories when they could and should, largely for reasons of laziness and the back-patting of sources who have fed them material for easy articles.

On to the main course ...

There has been quite an amount of interest in an ABC article by Stephanie Dalzell that claims that migrant voters are increasingly voting for populist right outfits like One Nation and the United Australia Party. Of course, some migrants will vote for these parties, but the article is not a useful contribution to establishing how many.  

2019 House of Reps Figures Finalised

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If you find my coverage useful please consider donating to support the large amount of time I spend working on this site.  Donations can be made by the Paypal button in the sidebar or email me via the address in my profile for my account details.  Please only donate if you are sure you can afford to do so.
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The 2019 House of Representatives results have been finalised, a joyous event that tends to arrive unheralded two to three months after every federal election.  Although all the preference throws had been completed and uploaded some time ago, the final figures importantly include the two-party preference flows by party.  Normally I say that this is very useful for assessing the performance of polls.  At this election the polls failed dismally, mainly because of failures on the Coalition and Labor primaries (except for Ipsos which failed on the Greens primary instead of Labor); nonetheless there will be a final review of them here fairly soon.  This article is a general roundup of other matters regarding the House of Reps figures.

Preference Shifting

The final 2PP result is 51.53% to the Coalition and 48.47% to Labor, a 1.16% swing to the Coalition.

There was a very large shift in the preferences of Pauline Hanson's One Nation.  One Nation preferences flowed only 50.47% to Coalition in 2016 but 65.22% to Coalition in 2019 (even more than the 60-40 split believed to have been assumed by Newspoll after considering state election results).  Overall, preferences from parties other than the Greens and One Nation also flowed more strongly to the Coalition by a few points (53.93% compared to 50.79%) but this was caused by the United Australia Party flowing 65.14% to the Coalition.  Excluding the Greens, One Nation and UAP, Others preferences (50.7% to ALP) were 1.5 points stronger for Labor than in 2016.  It is also interesting that Katters Australian Party preferences flowed 14 points more strongly to the Coalition, very similar to the shift for One Nation.

Poll Roundup: Make Newspoll Preferences Great Again!

2PP Aggregate: 51.9% to Labor (last election preferences) (-0.5 since last week)
51.6% with One Nation adjustment
Labor is still winning, but at present polls imply only a modest majority (c. 80 seats) 
Betting markets don't think it's that close

I didn't put out a Poll Roundup last week because there were no major polls.  This week there is a lot more to discuss, starting with United Australia.

UAP Surge - Is It Real?  

After languishing at around 1% in those polls that included them until not long ago, Clive Palmer's United Australia Party has made major inroads in polling in the last month, helped by problems for One Nation, which is not running in every seat anyway.  At the current level, team yellow (unless you're in Tasmania where there are two team yellows) isn't threatening to win Reps seats, but it looks very competitive for the Queensland Senate at least.  That said, media are overplaying the value of the very useful Coalition preferences there, since the Coalition might not get that much over two quotas given the added competition from UAP, and only 30% or so of its voters will follow the card anyway.  The surge is being linked to Newspoll switching to including UAP as a distinct option in its results, which is being interpreted as the party being added to the readout (something which has been thought to overestimate minor party votes).