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: 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.  

Rockingham By-Election 2023: How Big A Swing Is Too Big?

Note for Tas audiences: Cassy O'Connor recount is covered here

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Rockingham (WA) (ALP 37.7%)

By-election for resignation of Mark McGowan (ALP), MP since 1996

CALLED 7:40 pm Magenta Marshall (ALP) retains, will probably just be taken to preferences

Second place after preferences TBD between Hudson (Lib) and Edwards (IND) (edit: Edwards was second.)

Not-A-Poll Reset: McGowan Resigns

Roger Cook was elected unopposed as the new WA Labor leader today as expected and is about to be sworn in as the new WA Premier following the resignation of Mark McGowan.  This means it's time to reset this site's Next Leader To Go Not-A-Poll, voting for which is open in the sidebar.

McGowan resigned citing exhaustion after just over six years as Premier and almost eleven and a half years as party leader.  His electoral legacy is a thumping win from Opposition in 2017 followed by turning WA for the time being into a one-party state in 2021.  Influenced as the latter result was by COVID politics, federal drag with a potent sprinkling of Palmer dust and a remarkably hapless state Opposition, I don't expect to see a 69.7% 2PP in a state election again in my lifetime.  It's surreal to realise that it was not always such - not only did Labor lose the 2013 election heavily (for which McGowan was generally not blamed) but in 2016 there was a semi-serious push to not have him as leader at all despite polling evidence showing that his numbers were such that few Opposition Leaders could even dream of.  

WA 2021 Live

WA 2021: Start position Labor 40 Liberal 13 National 6

(Includes Darling Range, notionally Labor occupied by Liberal via by-election, and Geraldton, notionally Liberal but incumbent switched to Nationals).

Labor has won the election overwhelmingly.  Nationals likely to win more seats than Liberals.  

Labor on track to win upper house majority.  Some prospect of micro-party wins.

Expected Labor gains from Liberal (9): 

Bateman, Carine, Darling Range,  Dawesville,  Riverton,  Kalgoorlie,  Hillarys,  Scarborough, South Perth

Expected Labor gains from National (1): Geraldton

Liberal seats at risk to Labor (2): Churchlands, Nedlands - both currently likely to fall

Nationals seats at risk to Labor (1): NW Central -  currently likely to fall

Latest updates appear below the line scrolling to the top.  Refresh every 10 mins or so once counting is well underway for the most recent comments.

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. 

WA 2021: How Lopsided Do You Want It?

The 2021 Western Australian lower house state election looks like the most lopsided state election for several years, and may be among the most lopsided ever.  A Premier with near-universal approval who won a large majority last time around takes on an opposition onto its third leader of the term amid a pandemic that has seen large polling boosts in most places that have not completely stuffed it up.  The comparison with the New Zealand landslide is impossible to avoid.  

Even with no COVID-19 and no Opposition disarray it would be a massive upset for the McGowan government to lose.  Two major patterns in predicting state results are "federal drag" (it is an advantage not to be the party in power in Canberra) and the age of the state government.  The last loss by a first term government that was in opposition federally in any state was back in 1930 and the historically expected result for WA Labor would be to gain about three seats.  That should be treated with some caution given that they have so many already, but to actually get near losing would be a massive outlier.

But there's been speculation that this might not be just a routinely heavy pasting of a hapless opposition (such as the crushings delivered by Labor Premiers Beattie, Bracks and Bacon at the end of their first terms in 2001-2) but rather something more spectacular.  Is the opposition heading for Tarago territory or worse?  The results of the opening Newspoll would suggest yes, while a uComms poll merely predicts an enormous but more manageable thrashing.  

Poll Roundup: Attack Of The Poll-Shaped Objects

2PP Aggregate: 52.8 to Labor (-0.8 since last week)
Labor would comfortably win election "held right now"

This week has been a confusing week for many poll-watchers, and an amusing week for those of us who watch the antics of the poll-watching partisans.  Newspoll was eagerly anticipated following its 55:45 to Labor three weeks ago, and widely expected to come out with more of the same if not then some, but pulled up at only 52:48.  Oh well, the line went, maybe it was never 55:45 to begin with, after all Essential had only got out to 53s and the odd 54.  But then Essential jumped to 55:45, so two polls not usually noted for volatility had delivered it not just in spades but also in opposite directions.  At the moment we don't have a third opinion, since the others are very inactive lately.

In trying to decide between these competing figures, it is worth bearing in mind that Newspoll is now administered by Galaxy.  Galaxy was the best pollster of the 2013 election, and the Galaxy/Newspoll stable triumphed again in 2016.  Essential was poor in 2013, and while its final poll in 2016 was very good, its tracking performance suggests it was probably lucky or herding.  So my aggregate comes down more on the side of Newspoll, crediting Labor with 52.8% 2PP.

Anyway, that is a recovery of sorts, but we have seen false dawns before.  Here's the smoothed tracking graph:

For anyone with an interest in my input values, this Newspoll went in at 45.1% for the Coalition after considering the primaries, and the last three Essentials have been 46.9 (published 47), 46.7 (47) and 45.2 (45).

WA Washup: Another One Bites The Dust

It's a familiar script.  Five conservative state and territory governments have sought re-election since the Coalition took power federally and only one of the five (NSW) has survived.  Western Australia joins Queensland, the Northern Territory and (less emphatically) Victoria as jurisdictions where Coalition incumbents have been given the boot in the last few years.

The outcome in WA has been on the cards for years, and the fact that the Barnett government lost breaks no new ground by itself.  Defeat could be predicted as probable based on a combination of what I call federal drag (being of the same party as in power federally), the age of the state government, and the federal government's poor polling.  Indeed even Colin Barnett's poor personal ratings alone suggested he was already likely to lose this election less than a year out from his very strong 2013 result.  There's a strong case that Barnett should have been removed at least a year ago. Those who failed to do so look quite silly now, but they are geniuses compared to those who wanted to replace Mark McGowan with someone not even in the parliament because McGowan was thought to be too boring to win the election!

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.

WA: Grim Newspoll For The Barnett Campaign

By any normal measure the Colin Barnett Liberal government in Western Australia is in its final weeks.  A weak economy, long incumbency, federal drag (and from an unpopular federal government at that), disunity, a disliked Premier and bad 2PP polling would together spell "GAME OVER".  It's actually not easy to find electoral precedents for a government with quite so many things against it all at once.

The close nature of some recent 2PP polling, however, has given some (but not all) Liberals serious hope that they can sandbag their way back into power, especially if they can get One Nation preferences.  The latest Newspoll has, for now, pretty much pulled that rug out from underneath their feet.  It's much too early to say that it's all over, but things do not look good.

WA: How Bad Is Barnett's Latest Polling?

I last covered Western Australian state polling in March, in an article called A New Species Of Strangeness In The West.  At that time, despite increasingly bad Newspolls for the Barnett Liberal government, there was a bizarre and very short-lived call to replace Opposition Leader Mark McGowan with former federal MP Stephen Smith.  Since then it is Barnett who has gone through the normal process of leadership speculation and challenge that strikes leaders who are actually polling badly.

It came to a head in mid-September when then Transport Minister Dean Nalder quit Cabinet and launched a leadership challenge, in which his proposal for a spill managed to get 15 votes out of 46 although there was almost no public support for him as leader (5.5% in ReachTEL) and a widespread perception that his challenge was hopeless from the start.  This would normally be the beginning of the end for an incumbent Premier, but the difference here is that if someone is going to throw Barnett under the bus, they will need to get a wriggle on.  It is just over four months til the election.

A New Species Of Strangeness In The West

It's a familiar polling story.  The long-serving government is looking rough around the edges and the Opposition has a moderate but handy polling lead.  The Premier is on the nose and has been rating badly for years, the Opposition Leader is well regarded and leads as preferred Premier.  There are rumours and rustlings, and finally a challenger indicates potential interest in the job, should his/her colleagues so desire it, and says that the current leader can't win the election.  We all know how this story ends.

Only in Western Australia, it's the Opposition Leader, not the Premier, who has been informally challenged - and even more strangely, the putative challenger isn't even in parliament.  In an extension of the Campbell Newman doctrine (in which a new leader can be drafted by the party from outside the parliament in order to take over), it is now possible for someone to raise an interest in the leadership when they:

* aren't in the parliament or serving in any current political role
* have no seat for which they are reasonably assured of preselection
* aren't being drafted by the party's current organisation or the parliamentary party, and whether anyone involved in the drafting is even a member of either isn't totally clear

Canning: The Anticlimax Live (Plus Post-Count)

CANNING (Lib 11.8%) - called, Hastie (Lib) retain.

Status

On-the-day votes and most prepolls counted.  Current 2PP 55.3% (-6.5% swing) to Liberal. Unlikely to change greatly after remaining postals and other votes.

Postcount

Thursday 1st Oct: There has been very little movement in the 2PP as remaining votes are added (I believe there are now only a few hundred left).  The major interest now is in the internal polling claims mentioned below.

We finally have more detail of these in a report from The West Australian, that says not only that the Liberal Party had Hastie on 57% the weekend before Tony Abbott was rolled, but also that Liberal tracking throughout never dipped below "about 53-47".  However, if the internal poll series really included both a 53 and a 57 then the most likely explanation is random noise, rather than voting intention actually changing that much.  Usually internal polling is less reliable than public polling, but public seatpolling has been so bad in recent years that it's hard to dismiss competing internal poll reports entirely.

Thursday: There hasn't been a lot to add here, but 755 prepolls split 58.4% to Liberal (a 7.5% swing). Although this is a point larger than the overall swing, it's not especially meaningful as the number of non-PPVC prepolls is much smaller than at the general election.

Tuesday:  Not much extra progress to report in the postcount.  However an article in The Guardian incorrectly reports that postal votes are showing only a 2.3% swing to Labor.  This figure is derived by calculating the swing on postals from the 2013 overall result for the electorate, and ignores the well-known trend that postals favour the conservatives.  The correct baseline for calculating the swing on postals is the result on postals last time, ie 65.1%.

The other thing to bear in mind is that the postals added so far will mostly include the early postals, and while these are more likely to have been cast in the Abbott era, they are also more likely to have been cast by slightly more conservative voters. All the same by whatever measure the impact of the leadership change on the by-election was small: my reading of the polls is that they were pointing to it being only a couple of points overall, and such an impact (if it happened) can easily be lost in the noise of shifting voting method patterns or strengths of postal campaigns in an actual election.

Canning By-Election: Prospects and Polls

Seat: Canning (WA, Lib, 11.8%)
By-Election 19 Sep 2015
2PP Contest: Andrew Hastie (Lib) vs Matt Keogh (ALP)
Current outlook (15 Sep): Liberal retain expected with modest swing against.

Note: Turnbull-era updates appear at the top of the article; the rest is archived below the break.

As of 19 Sep, Coverage has switched to Canning: The Anticlimax Live.

Turnbull PM: What Does This Mean For Canning?

Most of this article was written while Tony Abbott was still Prime Minister, and the surprise removal of Abbott prior to the by-election has made quite a mess of the analysis.  Abbott's Prime Ministership was the major risk factor to an expected Coalition victory because the bad polling endemic to it was likely to cause the swing to be larger than normal for a by-election caused by the death of a government MP.

What Kills State Governments: Age Or Canberra?

Note (2020): An updated sequel to this article has been published, see Age And Canberra Are Still Killing State Governments

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Advance Summary:

1. This article examines the influence of two factors on the fates of state governments at elections: the age of the state government and whether the same party is in office federally.

2. Results since 1969 show a moderately strong influence of which party is in office federally, but only a very weak impact of age of government.  A state government that is of the same party as the federal government is generally strongly disadvantaged.

3. In the 1970s and 1980s two very old state governments were repeatedly re-elected.

4. Since 1989, both the age of a state government and whether or not the same party is in office federally have been strongly connected to state results.  

5. It is rare, perhaps increasingly rare, for a state government that is the opposite party to the federal government at the time to lose.  When this happens there are very strong reasons for it, with leadership instability a common factor.

6. The strength of the impact of federal politics on state politics can predict otherwise surprise results like the 2014 South Australian election win by Labor.

7.  Furthermore, if the federal government is of the same party as the state government then there is a strong relationship between the popularity of the federal government and the fate of the state government.

8. Even without any knowledge of events or polling in this parliamentary term, models based on the history of these two issues still imply that a change of government in Victoria is likely.

WA Senate Take Two: Preview, Live Comments And Post-Count

Seats Called: 3 Lib 1 ALP 1 Green 1 PUP

Summary and general comments (edited to update as required):

Liberal Senators David Johnston and Michaelia Cash, ALP candidate Joe Bullock and Greens Senator Scott Ludlam are all elected based on party quotas.  Palmer United Party candidate Zhenya Wang is close to quota and will be elected on micro-party preferences.  Liberal candidate Linda Reynolds (who would have won in the first election had it not been annulled) and Labor Senator Louise Pratt were contesting the final seat as of election night.  Both Labor and the Coalition have little over half a spare quota in their own right and the outcome will be determined by the preferences of other parties including the surplus votes of the Greens and, once they cross the line, PUP.

The hope for Labor in the post-count was that the pattern of postal votes relative to ordinary votes would be different to how it was in the 2013 federal election, when the Liberals performed nine points better on postal than ordinary votes.  In particular, it might have been thought Labor's dire final week (with constant bad publicity surrounding Bullock) would have meant that its vote before the last week had been higher.  Postal votes in so far are very consistently showing that the Liberals' performance relative to booth voting is at least as strong as in 2013, possibly stronger, and for this reason Reynolds will win.