Western Australia 2025 Legislative Assembly Postcount

SEATS WON ALP 46 LIB 7 NAT 6 

(Liberal win in Kalamunda subject to recount)

This is a relatively brief thread to update where the WA 2025 lower house postcount is at.  Because I was playing chess all weekend and then spent a day recovering from dehydration (oh yes chess is a sport) I have been slow getting onto this, but given how slow the counting is, I've hardly missed anything! 

As I start there are 51 seats the ABC has called (42 ALP 5 Lib 4 Nat).  I don't see any reason to doubt any of these (there is some weirdness in Geraldton where the Independent Shane van Styn might be more of a threat to the Nationals had not both the Liberals and Labor recommended preferences against him).  Of the eight the ABC shows as in doubt, I am also firmly expecting Labor to win:

Fremantle (ALP vs GRN 14.4%)  Here independent Kate Hulett won the ordinary booths 51.9-48.1 vs Labor's Simone McGurk but her chances have been wrecked by absent votes (56.8 to ALP - "absent" in WA includes out of electorate prepolls) and postals (59.8 to ALP).  These are common weak spots for independents but this is an extreme case because the Liberals recommended preferences to Labor.  Hulett is 342 behind (50.8 to ALP) and isn't likely to break even on remaining postals either.  She has flagged a possible challenge, I believe over voting day issues such as booths running out of ballot papers.  [Update Friday: 491 votes the margin now.]

Western Australia 2025 Legislative Council Postcount

WA LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL: 37 SEATS

EXPECTED SEATS ALP 15 LIB 10 NAT 2 GRN 4 ON 1 LCP 1 AC 1

Apparent final three seats battle: Labor (16), Moermond, Animal Justice, One Nation (2), Liberal (11), Greens (5), perhaps Sustainable Australia.  

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Updates (Scrolling to the top)

Aprl 18th: After several delays the count finally finished.  The winners of the seats in doubt were One Nation, Labor and Animal Justice.  One Nation zoomed on preferences (especially SFF) while Animal Justice beat Moermond for the final seat by 1391 votes (0.09%, not particularly close given how close the parties were).  

Wednesday 2nd: After several days of inaction a sudden dump sees the count advance to 83.14%, suggesting something around 2.3% could be BTLs which is more in line with expectations.  This has seen the Liberals jump back into 36th place ahead of Moermond but with the reservation noted by Antony Green.

Western Australia 2025 Live

WA 2025 - STARTING POSITION (Notional) ALP 54 Nat 3 Lib 2

LABOR RE-ELECTED, Lib/Nat on track for about 13 seats

Seats appparently changing: 

Lib/Nat gain from ALP: Churchlands (2.2%), Carine (4%), Kalamunda (15.1%), Albany (10.7%),  Geraldton (9.3%),  Nedlands (3.0%)

Labor projecting behind in own seats: Murray-Wellington (17.3%), Warren-Blackwood (2.2%)

Interesting: ALP vs IND Fremantle (I project ALP ahead)

Updates will appear below the dotted line, scrolling to the top.  Refresh every 10 mins or so for updates

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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.

Western Australia 2025: Can The Liberals Get Back To 2017?

There hasn't been a lot of polling to talk about for the WA 2025 state election but I just thought I should do a quickish writeup on a general view of this election, which Labor is universally expected to win.  In 2017 the Barnett Liberal Government suffered what was at the time a historically lopsided dumping, losing the 2PP 44.5-55.5, with the new Labor government of Mark McGowan winning 41 seats to 13 for the Liberals and 5 for the Nationals.  Some people were more surprised when this outcome loomed than they should have been; the state government was eight years old and federally dragged, and signs of its doom had been growing in the polling over years. 

2021 then saw WA become a one-party state, with McGowan polling through the roof and then some and a rabble of an opposition hopelessly tied to unpalatable views on COVID management.  Now McGowan has moved on and COVID politics have faded, and now it's Labor who have an eight year old government that's facing the headwinds from Canberra.  And yet the polling picture so far is that the Liberal and WA National parties are not yet sure to get back to where they were in 2017.