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: 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.  

WA 2021 Legislative Council Postcount

Note added 1 April: I have had no time to update this page because of the Tasmanian snap election.  Button press comments and final results comments are being added on a new thread.

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It seems a bit dubious to be calling what is going on in WA at the moment a "postcount" when on the Monday morning after the main count we are only at 43% counted in the lower house (about half the votes that will be included) and a similar level upstairs.  However, that's the convention so I'll stick with it, especially since I won't have time for anything I could flatter by calling it a live counting thread.

Anyway for now I have not started a lower house postcount thread for time reasons.  The lower house result currently looks like probably 53-2-4 or 52-3-4, with Liberal-held Churchlands most in doubt.  There is also some doubt about Liberal-held Carine and Nedlands (both of which Labor is leading), the Nationals' Warren-Blackwood (Nationals leading) and the ABC still has the Nationals' North-West Central (Labor leading) in doubt, possibly because the seat is so varied (Poll Bludger projects an easy Labor win).  I suggest keep an eye on PB for further developments in the Lower House; if a seat is still interesting once the percentage counted gets much closer to completion I may have more to say.

This thread will follow counting in the six Legislative Council threads, and I will gradually unroll them as my very limited time permits.  Just for starters I thought it was worthwhile putting up some general notes on the counts.  

One More Nightmare: Group Tickets And The 2021 WA Upper House

Sorry to be so ranty about this, but I think that it has to be said.  The 2021 Western Australian Legislative Council "election" is a bad joke.  Voting systems should give voters real choices about how they vote and should only reward parties with serious voter support.  WA politicians have failed and disrespected the voters by doing nothing at all to deliver this.  Instead voters are still coerced, eight years after the 2013 Senate farce, into propping up another dishonest Group Ticket grift party fest.  If you can do it without making a mistake, vote below the line.

As noted four years ago (sigh) Western Australia's upper house has the worst voting system in the country.  The chamber is grossly malapportioned, with votes in two bush regions being worth nearly four times more than votes in Perth suburbs.  

Voters can vote by putting a one above the line, in which case their vote may be sent goodness knows where as a result of backroom preference deals and deliberate preference harvesting.  They cannot give preferences between parties as they can in the Senate.  The only other way in which it is permitted to vote formally is to vote below the line.  If you do this you must number every box (about 54 on average) and if you leave any box blank or skip or repeat any number in the sequence, your vote is informal. 

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.