The Flat Field: Another "Polls Are Wrong" Vid Gets It Wrong!

Five years ago I debunked a drippy poll denial video by the supposedly left wing West Media. Now here from Topher Field (not that he deserves that link) is the nearest right-wing equivalent to West's cavalcade of cluelessness.  In a video entitled "Preference Discipline is EVERYTHING" but advertised with images that say "THE POLLS ARE WRONG [AND WHY YOU ALREADY KNEW THAT]" Field, a glibertarian, sets out to show that polls that estimate One Nation vs Labor "2PPs" are underestimating One Nation.  The funny thing is that there are quite strong arguments that that is true.  He doesn't make them.  Within the first ninety seconds, Field has already showed he is totally out of his depth.

Field Doesn't Know How Polls Work

While talking in front of tweeted results of recent Redbridge and Morgan polls, Field says that these pollsters - and not just these pollsters but all the national and state polls - are using out of date data or guesses to calculate preference flows.  But in the case of One Nation vs Labor, neither of these pollsters does this.  Both calculate their preference flows simply by asking respondents which party they would preference higher.  This is hardly obscure information either - Morgan prominently states it uses this method in all its weekly polling reports, and reports on Accent Research's website make it very clear for Redbridge/Accent (see p. 3 on this one, where both methods have results shown for Coalition vs Labor but only respondent for One Nation vs Labor).   The funny thing is that very briefly some pollsters were attempting to use 2025 House of Reps preference flows but were dissuaded from doing so after I and others pointed out that this would make the flows to One Nation too high.

Currently five federal pollsters are releasing One Nation vs Labor federal shadow-2PPs - Morgan, Redbridge/Accent, YouGov, Spectre and Fox&Hedgehog.  All of them use respondent preferences.  Respondent preferences are actually problematic for estimating One Nation vs Labor because close to half of Coalition voters conventionally copy how to vote cards.  So if the Coalition recommends preferences to One Nation again then many of the Coalition voters who say they will preference Labor will actually end up preferencing One Nation.  This is the argument Field should be making if he wants to have a go at pollsters' One Nation vs Labor figures, but he hasn't bothered to do the most basic reading on how polls are actually working so he cannot do that.

He's therefore tilting at a strawman when he claims at around 2:20 that old preference flow data can't be valid when One Nation's primary has jumped fourfold, but even then he misses his imaginary opponent.  In the South Australian election despite the massive primary vote shifts, the flow of preferences involving the Coalition and One Nation was largely as expected based on modelling off the 2025 Senate election where One Nation polled a way lower vote.  And the reason his claim here is wrong is that while Coalition voters who used to rank Labor above One Nation could have become more inclined to put the now more popular One Nation ahead of Labor, that can easily be cancelled out by the Coalition voters who used to rank One Nation above Labor becoming straight 1 One Nation voters.  Every time a voter flips from the Coalition-ON-Labor ordering to ON-Coalition-Labor, the overall preference flow from the Coalition to One Nation vs Labor weakens.  Some people are quite obsessed with the idea that this means the Coalition to One Nation flows will actually be much weaker than implied by past Senate flows - as if only moderates are still voting Liberal - but I'm extremely unconvinced of that.  I think the two things roughly cancel out.

If Field had actually bothered to learn how polls actually do the One Nation vs Labor figures, he would have seen that a voter for some other party who had switched to putting One Nation above Labor without switching to voting 1 One Nation would have actually been picked up by the pollster based on the methods the pollsters are actually using.  And he would have realised that the fact that pollsters get relatively weak flows to One Nation - even if they are wrong in so doing because of how to vote cards - is actually fatal to his argument about why flows should have shifted.  So three minutes down, and two complete blunders by Topher.

Field Doesn't Know How Preferences Flow

From the fourth minute of the video he is going to tell us that the Secret Harbour results show that preferences are now flowing from the Liberals to One Nation in "unprecedented percentages".  This is in spite of the general psephosphere reaction to this by-election having been that the preference flows to One Nation were actually somewhat weaker than we were expecting!  (Something that may have been explained by many things including the Liberals having the donkey vote which flowed to Labor on a long ballot paper, overlapping federal MP Andrew Hastie's criticisms of One Nation, the Liberals picking up votes from Labor that then returned to Labor as preferences, the One Nation candidate being a former cocaine user and so on ... the reason doesn't matter, what does is that nobody has previously claimed the preference flow to One Nation from the Liberals was strong.) 

He claims he'll do this (while boasting about being "nerdy" - no mate, nerds don't get their numbers wrong, this is the difference between nerds and cranks) by comparing the data from Secret Harbour to data from Farrer to show that things are quickly changing to One Nation's benefit.  

After a few minutes of waffling Field claims that in Secret Harbour One Nation got about 89% of the preferences from the Liberals, Libertarians, Australian Christians and Shooters Fishers and Farmers combined.  Where did he get these numbers?  He's actually done this - and please remove any sharp objects from a radius of 20 metres before you read the next bit as you could well roll at least that far on the floor laughing - he's observed that One Nation went from 39.04% primary to 57.15% 2CP, a gain of 18.11 points.  He's observed that those parties together got 20.31% of the vote.  And he's divided one by the other!  

That would work if every other parties' preferences flowed 100% to Labor.  But they don't, and if Field had bothered letting even the slightest research get in the way of his theory he would have, like, looked at past elections to see what they do - just like he looked at Farrer.  So in Hunter 2025 Stuart Bonds (who scraped into the top two against Labor) got 48.5% of Legalise Cannabis voter preferences and 12.6% from the Greens.  But Field has set these both, as well as Animal Justice, four independents and even the fairly right wing Western Australia Party, all to a flow rate of zero!  

Suppose I set the flow rate from the Greens and Legalise Cannabis at the same as Hunter and implausibly assume everyone else flowed 70-30 to Labor, then suddenly Field's 89% preference flow from the mainly Liberal right wing sources falls to 69%.  Before too long we will see an actual preference flow from the Liberal exclusion point (which includes voters for other parties who put the Liberals above One Nation and Labor) and it will be nothing like 89% to One Nation.  [Edit: Antony Green has reported the flow from Liberal from a sample of about half the votes was in fact 70.2% - and that's a sample confined to the Secret Harbour prepoll place where One Nation did well (the sample included a small number of day votes).  On that basis it is likely that the overall flow from Liberal to One Nation was in the high 60s.]

The Problem With Poking The Bear

And oh dear.  I didn't know this was coming when I drafted the above text but eight minutes in Field has mentioned me, at length!  He starts by claiming that a psephologist is "an election forecaster and political pundit", which suggests he didn't do his work on that bit either - most of psephology is not forecasting, and all of it is the opposite of punditry.  

He then goes on to dispute my twitter bio claim to have "no party loyalties" but becomes yet another person to misunderstand it.  Amazingly it means exactly what it says: that I am not loyal to a party.  It doesn't mean that I am politically neutral, or have no views against any parties, or regard all equally.  If I meant to say "apolitical" I would have said it.  As I noted on the recent Poll Position pod, which Topher could have watched if he was so fascinated by me or had the slight interest in not making an even further twit of himself, the point of that line is just to warn people who are followers of any party that sooner or later I am going to have a go at it.  Some parties more than others of course, and currently One Nation about a dozen times a day, but you get that.  So Topher, you can take your advice about how to act while claiming to be neutral and give it to someone who actually makes that claim; I don't.  What I do claim is that I can have political views while also delivering neutral and accurate analysis of election results.  But thanks at least Topher for publicising my views, in particular on the rampant sookery of One Nation and the problem of fake patriots!

(He also suggests I treat Crikey as a reliable source.  In fact I treat all its pieces like any other media on their merits; he should see what I've said about Bernard Keane lately.)

Topher gets so fired up about his misinterpretation of three words in a microblogging bio that after a few minutes of this nonsense he declares that he has "no respect for [me] as a human being"!  Oh no I am so wounded, as if I would want the respect of anyone who is unable to read.  And then he declares I haven't done the work to understand myself, when he has so far showed that he has not done the work to understand: pollster preferences, the preference shift argument he is using, how preferences actually flow in elections, or what I mean by a term that actually means what it says.  And that's all in the first eleven minutes! To be accused of intellectual laziness by Topher Field, well ...

Now we're on to Field's next blunder.  Having blathered on about owning biases while failing to disclose that I have criticised him in the past and somehow ended up residing rent free in his head - accuses me of attempting to "control the narrative coming out of the Secret Harbour by-election" about One Nation's preference flows.  For some reason he does this by highlighting a tweet where I'm pointing out that One Nation's preference flows were actually not so bad as it looked earlier in the night, which is hardly the action of someone hellbent on claiming that their preference flows were crap.  Also if he actually bothered to read more of what I had said about the by-election, then far from using Secret Harbour to build a narrative of weak flow to One Nation, he would see I have repeatedly disputed attempts to generalise from it to predicting flows at other elections, and rejected calls to weaken flows in my own model because of it. So again, Topher cannot read, he doesn't do his research, and he doesn't care if he represents people he is criticising accurately.  

He goes on with some pseudomathematical babble about the 49% flow of preferences to One Nation being a supposed irrelevant denominator.  After several minutes of him again pretending to be a nerd with a brief break for flogging his merch, his complaint about this is that I am talking about an overall preference flow.  At present it's the only flow we have.  The fact is that overall flow to One Nation was somewhat lower than I would expect based on how the preferences of all the parties contesting have flowed in other contests.  And it's not just me who got that either - all the sources doing on the night projections were expecting the overall flow, given who the primary votes were for, to be over 50%.  In doing those models we were all already factoring in that voters for the Greens have very strong "preference discipline" to Labor.  But very strong is not 100%, or even nearly 100%, and even the difference between 100-0 and 90-10 can be a big deal in these cases.  As for the rest of the left, only Victorian Socialists nationally really display similar preference flows to the Greens.  Animal Justice were only 66% to Labor vs Coalition at the last federal election, Legalise Cannabis only 61% (and there is a lot of overflow between their support base and One Nation's, so the figure to Labor vs One Nation is probably weaker) and so on.  So Field just doesn't have a clue because, again, he hasn't done his research.  He has also chucked all the very random independents in this seat and even the WA Party in with the "left".

He gets back to Farrer where he claims the flow of 38.1% of preferences at the 3CP point from the Liberals to Michelle Milthorpe ahead of David Farley is evidence of preference indiscipline on the right.  But Farrer is a very local electorate and some people may have chosen the order Liberal-IND-ON based on which candidates they knew.  Another factor here is that the Liberals drew top spot on the ballot and the donkey vote flowed to Milthorpe.  Some Liberals may have been unconvinced that Farley was a real right winger anyway.  Candidate gender could have affected preference flows especially with Farley's past comments about Julia Gillard.  And so on.  Eventually he admits to some of these factors in one of the video's few moments of passing sanity, as well as noting that Farrer was independent vs One Nation and not a valid baseline for a Labor vs One Nation flow.  So, why did he even mention it?  I should also note on Farrer that breakdowns of preference flow by party voted for exist (and show the 1 Liberal flow to Farley was only 59% while the 1 Nationals flow was 69%); there is no need to just use the Liberal 3CP flow to talk about these things.  

26 minutes in he spells out what I'd already worked out - that he has assumed every single one of the preferences received by One Nation came from the right, although this assumption is patently ludicrous and shows him up as someone who should just shut up about election statistics forever.

Field then gets back to the Morgan poll.  He takes the 29.5 for Labor and adds the 13.5 from Greens (with their alleged 100% preference flow) and gets 42 (it's actually 43).  Then he queries where Labor gets the rest from.  And here he makes a still further blunder in thinking that Others is entirely other parties (left and right).  He ignores the fact that much of it is independents (or the ex-independents in Community Strong), whose preferences flow increasingly to Labor.  Indeed if he was being consistent with his Secret Harbour methods he would give Labor all the independent preferences, at which point Labor are getting more like three-quarters of others and even off his (wrongly low) 11% off the right Labor would get to something around 55-45 vs One Nation anyway.  Field wants to have his cake and eat it too - he wants to give Labor 8.8 points out of 11.8 for Others in Secret Harbour on a platter (a flow of at least 74.5%) but when it comes to the national polls he suddenly wants to cut Labor's flow from others down to half because he's forgotten that teals exist.   

This whole video by Field is a self-parodying shambles but it has somehow had a hundred thousand views.  I previously reviewed one of Field's marbles videos on here and while it had some serious flaws I think I gave it a fair go, and pointed out that Field at that time wasn't being angry and dumb about preferences and was at least trying to do the right thing by the so-called freedom movement.  But his latest video is angry and dumb about everything it touches and strongly recalls the crankery of the failed 2012 US Unskewed Polls movement - and such a waste when there was actually a valid point that was begging to be made against respondent preferencing.  Not one that would lift One Nation to victory at the moment, but one that could be worth, say, two points for them nationwide compared with the average of the respondent polls.

Libertarians for Fascism Unite!

One final thing I will say here.  I may not have that many libertarian bones in my body these days, but I do still have a lot more than One Nation.  And one thing I remember about this movement is that you're not supposed to hand it to the fash, or anything resembling fascism in any way.  A week after One Nation were whinging about the PM calling them dangerous, and on the same day of Topher's latest drooling about the rise of this party who he considers to be mostly freedom's friends, Cory Bernardi ripped off Trump (again) and tweeted "We will end the transgender movement."  Many within Australia's struggling libertarian movement made common cause with the alt-right and the far-right during the lockdowns.  If they are to stand true to the principles they claim they need to unmake it and fast.

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Updates 

Antony Green has published this.

I've been alerted to a second Topher Field video with more nonsense, posted to Youtube four days ago and Facebook yesterday.  In this one he starts by claiming One Nation outperformed their polling.  There simply was no seat polling for the Secret Harbour by-election (and as for betting markets being wrong, Sportsbet was wrong, Bet 365 was right, and who cares about betting anyway).  Field also wrongly says that no-one saw the result coming; local expert Martin Drum for instance correctly predicted that One Nation would win easily.  

Otherwise the video is just the nonsense I have dealt with above plus more tryhard attempts to call himself a nerd and general guff in favour of One Nation.  He also claims that 2-4% of voters cast donkey votes from top to bottom.  The donkey vote is generally at most 0.5% these days.   It was higher before party names appeared on the ballot.   If Field was actually capable of mathematical thought he would realise his claims were inconsistent here - if 2% of voters donkey vote then that caps the Liberal to One Nation flow at a maximum of 88.4% even if every other Liberal voter preferences One Nation, which of course wouldn't happen.  

10 Sep

Judgment day has come quickly for Field (who despite his thoroughly unchristian behaviour on this matter has been recently seen quoting Bible passages on twitter) in the form of the release of the actual preference distributions.  These show that at the exclusion of the Liberal candidate, a mere 59.3% of preferences flowed to One Nation (even lower than the same stage in Farrer!) and 40.7% to Labor.  However the flow rate from 1 Liberal voters would have been higher; 20.6% of the Liberal-exclusion votes came from non-Liberal candidates.  What is interesting here is that this caps the flow from 1 Liberal voters at a mathematical maximum of 74.7% - and to even get that high one would have to assume that the voters who voted for minor right parties with preferences to Liberal all then preferenced Labor.  So Field's estimate of the flow was wrong by a bare minimum of 14 points but probably low 20s.  

The distribution also shows Field's assumption of essentially zero flow from not-clearly-right candidates being falsified by One Nation gaining 1082 preferences at the exclusions of such candidates.  That's 22.9% of their combined primary vote and 3.9% of all votes, but the actual 2CP flow from such candidates to One Nation would be higher than 22.9% because some would have flowed to right candidates and then to ON.  If Field had assumed such a flow from the not-clearly-right candidates then his 89% flow from right candidates would have instead been capped at 70%.  

Hungry Lies: One Nation's Food Security Fibs

Please explain!

Yesterday I was posting some comments about how tweets on the Pauline Hanson twitter account mostly are not written by her, despite being frequently written in the first person.  Tweets signed "PH" or "-PH", the supposed signs that they are actually hers, seem to have largely dried up; after 23 in 2023 (mostly re the Voice) there were according to the advanced search function just two in 2024, none in 2025 and only two so far this year.  In the process I had a broader look at what else One Nation's social media was tweeting and came across a two-minute video for One Nation's current "Fire the Liar" campaign.  One claim, voiced in what appears to be Hanson's voice, caught my attention:

"Seven million Australians can only afford one meal per day.  In a country as prosperous as we used to be.  People are screaming out for change"

"Independent Australia": The Worst Website In Australian Politics?

In an article way back in 2015 I noted that the faux-progressive website "Independent Australia" was independent of "Quality control, consistency, accuracy and editorial skill."  Has it got better since?  Well no, if a recent attempt to soothe reader concerns about the One Nation surge is any guide, it seems to have got even worse.  I've decided to write a whole piece about this trainwreck to explain how abysmal IA's standards are and why nobody should be enabling their output in any way.

The most recent case is an article attributed - I have no idea whether correctly - to a Dr Jason Foster of RMIT.  Even the qualifications of the claimed author are something IA cannot seem to get straight.  The RMIT website states that Foster "holds a PhD in Media and Communication from RMIT, focusing on the representations of history in film and other media."  IA however claimed his PhD covered "media representations, politics and national consciousness", a claim that has since, without acknowledgement of error, been removed.

Before I deal with what is uniquely bad about this article and IA's failed attempt (?) to fix it, I will pick off a number of the low-hanging fruit, many of which are common myths about elections.

Begging For Debunking: A Silly Article Re Stafford Preferences

It was as sure as night follows day, as sure as daylight savings fading the curtains (oh wait) that the Stafford by-election result would see the Queensland right again beating the drum for optional preferences.  On cue we have an op ed by Morgan Begg from the IPA in the Courier-Mail trying to argue that compulsory preferential voting is some kind of aberration that has saved Labor's seat with the aid of obscure leftoids.  Begg's arguments contain a remarkable number of errors, but are also typical of the misguided and poorly debated push to return to full OPV in Queensland.

Begg is probably not responsible for the headline but for starters compulsory preferential voting is hardly an "Absurd Qld voting quirk".  Rather it is the standard form of preferential voting as it exists federally and currently (with very minor differences) in four states - and as it has existed federally, continuously, for 108 years.  (OK between 1984 and 1996 we did have a federal savings provision which allowed for a voter to deliberately exhaust their preferences, but few voters knew about that). 

The Urban Myth That "Sack Dan Andrews" Was A Labor Front

Does this look like a Labor front to you?

Group ticket voting in Victoria has again been in the news a lot lately - see my latest article about whether abolishing it would assist One Nation.  With this latest discussion has come a resurgence of a longrunning online urban myth concerning the shortlived Sack Dan Andrews party (or more formally Restore Democracy: Sack Dan Andrews Party) in the 2022 Victorian election.  The myth is that this party was set up to harvest the votes of people who hated former Victorian Premier Andrews and channel these votes back to Labor.  The reality is that while there is a disputed claim that Sack Dan Andrews (SDA) was a siphoning attempt of some sort, Labor gained no benefit from it anyway, and it had nothing to do with the party.  This article explores the reality of this short-lived party's preferences and its actual impact on the election in detail.  For those on twitter I also have a shorter version of events on a thread here.

Why Did One Nation Win 11 Seats In Queensland 1998 But None In 1998 Federal?

The One Nation party (which I am on the verge of restyling Wuss Nation after its sobbing about its poor supporters being traumatised by filling out ballot papers) has been attacking compulsory preferential voting in the leadup to the South Australian election.

Linked into this I came across a narrative from Pauline Hanson which I thought deserved detailed examination.  Interviewed on Sky (and yet again, where else) Hanson told the tale of how in 1998 her party won eleven seats from scratch in the 1998 Queensland election and noted that it was optional preferential voting.  Then she moved on to the 1998 federal election where although her party won over a million votes, all the other parties recommended preferences against One Nation and they didn't win any seats.  Famously she lost Blair where the major parties cross-recommended against her.  

She doesn't in this excerpt mention what became of those eleven Queensland seats.  Every single one of those MPs quit the party or the parliament by the end of the 1998-2001 term, though One Nation did retain two of those seats and win a third with different candidates.    But my interest here is, is there really any causal link between the current OPV/CPV debate and what happened in those two elections?  Or are the explanations different?  A warning that this article is very numbery and has been graded Wonk Factor 4/5.

The Low Impact Of Independent Preferences In Labor's 2025 Federal Win

At the 2025 federal election, more votes that were 1 One Nation or 1 Trumpet of Patriots (combined) finished up with Labor candidates as preferences than votes that were 1 Independent!

Among the various forms of whinging and nonsense I continue to see on social media about the election result, one of the commonest is that Labor were elected on "Greens and teal preference deals".  

Labor were, of course, ahead on primaries in 86 seats and would have won in any system (though well short of a majority without single-seat electorates) but the blaming of teals for the strength of their win reflects some limitations of looking at overall preference flows instead of examining the results seat by seat.

If one looks at the overall 2PP flow by party it appears that independents (particularly teals) were a huge contributor to the size of Labor's 2PP win and so must have had a lot to do with them winning so many seats.  After Labor's 5.35 million primaries and 1.67 million preferences from the Greens, independents (756K preferences) are easily the third biggest contributor, way ahead of the minority of preferences assigned to Labor from One Nation candidates (253K). 

This Person And Why They Are Wrong: Episode 1, Wasted Vote Guy

 

The gloriously cooked tweet above reminded me of a series I'd been intending to start where now and then I would cover someone known in the online psephosphere who has a particular gimmick that I haven't previously addressed in detail.  The rules for inclusion in this series are:

1.  the person in question needs to be a published author on elections and not just a rando twitter pest  (though this first one is really scraping the barrel on the first bit) 

2.  they need to have some defining pet argument or recurring MO that makes covering what they do in one article worthwhile and effective.

3. they need to be someone who I've not already written multiple articles debunking, so no Dennis Shanahans will feature in this series.  

I should note here that the subject of this article has written Substack articles unsuccessfully criticising my comments about his nonsense on multiple occasions.  (This did come after I blocked him on Twitter in May 2022 for bogus triumphalism and misrepresenting my arguments - he not long after deleted his side of that exchange.) He may be small fry, but from time to time I do come across someone who has taken his eccentric claims seriously.  Often these are well-meaning people who do share genuine concerns about the under-representation of the Greens in the House of Reps and just don't realise that this particular version of those concerns is silly.

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.

Yes Federal Parliament Should Be Expanded And No It Isn't A Partisan Fix

Federal JSCEM season is upon us and who knows I might manage to write a submission soon.  But for now on this site I want to comment on one issue that has been generating a fair amount of commentary, too little of it accurate.  The fact that JSCEM is again inquiring into the size of parliament has resulted in speculation that Labor is pursuing it for partisan benefit; some have even absurdly alleged the potential expansion is a form of gerrymander.  Nonsense from an already unhinged online right that fails to understand what even happened at the election has been fuelled by a Seven interview with pollster and strategist Kos Samaras that claims that because Labor is doing so well in the cities, an expansion will greatly benefit Labor and put the Coalition to the sword for good.

The fact is that while there is an internal harmony advantage for Labor in expanding the parliament now, it is not likely there will be any advantage for Labor proportionally. Indeed, if anything, there are very good reasons to suspect Labor will be getting a slightly lower House of Reps seat share for a given vote share with an expansion than without.  There are many good reasons for expanding the House of Representatives and I strongly support passing legislation to expand the Parliament in this term.  As with Senate reform in 2016 (an excellent and necessary change that Labor to its shame opposed with embarrassingly bad arguments) we again see nonsense arguments being made by the Opposition against something that is actually a good idea.  James McGrath has claimed that an expansion doesn't pass any sort of test let alone the "pub test".  Well it easily passes mine, and I am not known as an easy marker.  

There are not such strong reasons for expanding the Senate, but nor is there anything in particular wrong with doing so (but see below re Territory Senators), and that will come with any substantial increase in the House via the nexus provision, which I don't think is going away anytime soon.  

For the purposes of this article I am assuming the Coalition survives til the next election as a largely intact Opposition and electoral politics in this country carries on as normal.  I cannot at this time be completely sure this will be so. 

How Labor Won 94 Seats Off A Modest Primary Vote. It Mostly Wasn't Preferences

Example of a 2025 election whinge meme seen on social media

In the unhinging that has followed Labor's massive victory in the 2025 federal election, there has been a lot of scapegoating of preferential voting.  Some of this may be because the landslide seat result was unexpected.  In polls this mostly looked like a close election in terms of whether Labor could get a majority or not.  Many voices in the media made it worse by claiming Labor definitely or very probably would not get a majority, and continuing to claim it after the polls (such as they were) no longer supported that view.

Labor won 94/150 (62.67%) of seats with a primary vote of 34.56%.  Many people are saying this was caused by preferential voting.  In fact, it mostly wasn't.  This article explains how this 28.11% gap between Labor's seat share and their vote share was mostly caused by other factors.   I find it deeply unfortunate and concerning that many people are in response attacking our very fair voting system and supporting instead the pointless abomination that is first past the post without bothering to understand the arguments in favour of preferences and the extent to which the result was caused by other things.  If they really care about parties getting vote shares that match their seat shares, they should support multi-member electorates.  

Hare-Clark! Why Do We Have It? Are There Any Alternative Approaches?

It had to happen and was always going to happen sooner or later after the 2025 election; in fact I'm surprised it has taken so long.  The Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, or at least its chief executive Michael Bailey, has seen fit to call for the abolition or modification of Tasmania's Hare-Clark system.  I could just as easily see fit to bluntly suggest that they stay in their own lane.  I wouldn't expect to be taken seriously if I declared myself an expert in business regulation so I'm not sure why they expect to be so on this subject.

In the article in question, which is paywalled, the call is made to either replace Hare-Clark with single-member preferential voting or to switch from five seats of seven to seven seats of five.  

7x5, a zombie bad electoral take

Seven seats of five is an old chestnut that was roundly disposed of during the process of restoring the House from 25 to 35 members.  As the concept of restoring the House to 35 seats gained traction in the 2021-4 term there was some support for doing it by going to seven five-member electorates instead of going back to five seven-member electorates.  There was at the time only one Independent elected as such in the parliament, so the main motivation was to make things hard for the Greens.  Anyone who is remotely familiar with that debate would be aware of the TEC's discussion paper that showed significant problems with the 7x5 model.  One thing wrong with it is that it would require Tasmania to uncouple from the federal electoral boundaries and have its own state electoral boundaries process at an expense estimated at $2.5 million plus $300,000 per election.  Being almost as large as the federal divisions and overlapping with them extensively the state boundaries would then cause a lot of voter enrolment confusion; the TEC also suggests it would be difficult to avoid severely splitting up communities of interest by drawing a line through Hobart City.  (This said, it would get rid of the across-river divide in Franklin for state but not federal purposes, and drawing the boundaries of Clark in a completely sensible manner is getting more tricky anyway; more on this down the track).  

2025 Tasmanian Election: Pathways To Government

This article is part of my Tasmanian election 2025 postcount coverage.  

Link to tallyboard thread

Links to individual postcount pages: Bass Braddon Clark Franklin Lyons

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I did write a fair amount about the formation of the next government in the tallyboard thread but it's got somewhat buried in the postcount pages and I wanted to do a new thread to discuss the different pathways to government that might occur after the election. At this time we are starting to see what I suspect will be rather a lot of gnashing and wailing on the pages of The Australian (especially if Labor keeps trying to form government) but a lot of it is clueless.  (Just a note in case anyone thinks I am part of the gnashing and wailing for my tallyboard heading "Tasmania Remains Ungovernable" - nup, it was a reference to "become ungovernable"; I am celebrating the way Tasmanians collectively refused to be told what to do and gave the major parties back another mess.)

As I start this article the numbers sit at Liberal 14 Labor 10 Greens 5 IND 4.  The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers are strongly placed in Lyons and the last seat in Bass is a multi-party scramble with five or six contenders - we will know the outcome of that around August 2.

Meeting the House

The first thing I want to underline is that whatever the numbers, whatever the deals, whatever the deal-shaped objects, Jeremy Rockliff is the incumbent Premier.  As the incumbent he has the clear right by convention to be recommissioned in order to "meet the house" and enable it to decide his destiny.  Also he clearly intends to do it.   It is common for Premiers in minority governments who appear to have lost the election (and it is not clear this is the case for Rockliff yet) to do this, because in theory an MP who was going to back the opposition might change their mind in the middle of the debate, and because decisions about whether a Premier has lost confidence should be made by Parliaments and not by the Governor's reading of MP's letters.  The widespread misreading of Johnston's 2024 letters is a good example of why confidence needs to be determined on the floor.  It is only where the office of Premier is vacant that the Governor must make a provisional decision.  

So What's The Deal With Macnamara 2025?

I don't normally do articles about specific seats outside of my home state in federal leadups, but this one is a very special case.  The seat of Macnamara has seen excitement in the post-count at two of the last three federal elections.  First there was 2016, when Labor always looked most likely to retain but there was both a narrow margin to the Greens to make the final two and a narrow margin to the Liberals after doing so.  But that was just an entree to 2022 where the seat hung in the balance for over a week.  In this case the Liberals had no hope of victory but Labor needed to beat either the Liberals or the Greens at the three-candidate point to win the seat.  All three parties were astonishingly close at the tipping point and Labor's Josh Burns survived by just 594 votes.  The 2025 campaign for Macnamara again sees an unclear exclusion order which is leading to some strategic voting arguments.  One of them isn't very good.

The seat of Macnamara has become a commentariat obsession since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, soon followed by Israel's ongoing invasion of Gaza.  Attributing blame for and condemning these events is outside the scope of this article; if anyone must know my views, ask me somewhere else.  The resulting Gaza/antisemitism issues set is seen as extremely significant in Macnamara where 10% of residents describe their religion as Judaism.  Some others would be ethnically Jewish without self-describing as religious.  Given that there has been a rise in strong criticisms of Israel and also in antisemitic behaviour (the two are far from always the same thing) since October 2023 the line has been that Jewish voters will turn heavily away from the Greens for their pro-Gaza position.

Preferences Help Non-Majors Beat Major Parties Far More Than The Other Way Around

This article is about single-member electorates, and cases where preferences result in someone who did not lead on primaries winning the seat, and how this affects battles between the major parties and candidates from outside the major parties ("non-majors") for seats.  

I've written a few articles on here in which I discuss mistaken views held by many Australian supporters of minor right-wing parties on social media.  Many of them rail against preferential voting, which they claim helps major parties to maintain a "duopoly" or "uniparty".  They often support scrapping preferences, although this would make it pointless to vote for the parties they support.  I've pointed out in these discussions that actually in the 2022 election, nine non-major candidates were elected from outside the parliament by beating one major party with help from the preferences of the other.  If there were no preferences, such candidates would need to rely on very organised strategic voting for any chance of winning.  Probably many would have lost.

Despite this, people keep claiming that the major parties conspire to keep smaller parties out of parliament by doing preference deals with each other so that if a smaller party leads on primaries the majors can beat them on preferences.  The supposed prime example is the defeat of Pauline Hanson in Blair 1998.  But the fact is that Hanson's loss was actually an unusual case, and examples of both majors cross-recommending against a competitive opponent are nowadays rare.  Indeed, including state elections, even One Nation has more often beaten majors from behind thanks to preference flows than led on preferences and lost, by a margin of 9 cases to 4.

I thought I would compile a list of all the cases I could find in single seat elections since 1990 (state, federal and territory) where either a major party has led on primary votes but been beaten by a non-major, or the other way around.  What I find is that non-majors beating majors by overtaking a major party primary vote leader on preferences is about nine times more common than the reverse.  

Crying Wolf: More Embarrassingly Bad Tabloid Poll Reporting

 "Anthony Albanese could be on track to being a one-term Prime Minister, with a new poll showing Labor's primary vote crashing in three major states.  The federal government is in serious trouble in the eastern states - where most of the seats are - with Labor down to 24 per cent in Queensland, 28 in Victoria and 32 in NSW."

"Labor’s primary vote has crashed to just 24 per cent in Queensland, 28 per cent in Victoria and 32 per cent in New South Wales, the wolf + smith shows.  But Labor is dominant in South Australia, where its primary vote is 41 per cent, and 60 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis.  The poll – which measured both state and federal voting intention – suggests the government is in dire trouble in the eastern states, with just 43 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote in Queensland and 48 per cent in Victoria."

This is how the Daily Mail and the Murdoch tabloids (Courier Mail/Daily Telegraph etc) respectively wrote up a massive new poll by an initially mysterious outlet wolf + smith.  But this was in fact another example of laughably incompetent poll reporting from these outlets, one that again happened to be in service of the narrative their right-wing readers would want to see.  What the poll in fact found is very different.  The state-level figures these outlets were commenting were state voting intention not federal.  This was made so abundantly clear in the poll report that, among other subtle hints, the whole of page 10 of the poll report is devoted to making it clear that the rest of the report is state not federal.

Supporting First Past The Post For Australia Is Pointless

Lately I've been seeing a lot of social media griping about the current government and/or the Greens and teals, mostly from alternative right-wing accounts, in which the writer attacks the Government and says it was only elected because of preferential voting, and we should get rid of preferences by switching to first past the post.   I don't think there is much significant advocacy for first-past-the-post in Australia though Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner has unfortunately supported it (what, optional preferences is not enough for him?), as has Resolve pollster Jim Reed in 2022, and a steady flow of petitions to the Commonwealth Parliament generally with tiny signature numbers.  

The following alone is sufficient reason to dismiss all such calls: First past the post is a discriminatory system that violates the Australian value of a fair go.  Under first past the post, a voter whose most preferred party or candidate is unpopular must make a strategic decision between voting for someone who is not in fact their first preference and effectively throwing away their vote.  However a voter who is pretty sure their most preferred candidate will finish first or second does not have to face that strategic dilemma.  On this basis, having first past the post, in a country able to afford and count a fairer system, is not treating all electors fairly.   I do not think there is actually any valid excuse for keeping single-member first past the post anywhere (though the transition out of it needs to be carefully managed in those places that do have it) but this article is confined to the argument re Australia.  

Australia has a proud tradition of fair voting that started over 100 years ago when preferences were introduced to stop conservative parties from losing conservative electorates when voters were split between two different conservative candidates.  The famous case is the 1918 Swan by-election, but in fact the Hughes Government was working to introduced preferential voting months before it occurred but the legislation had not yet passed the parliament.   When I see supposed patriots with Australian flags in their social media profiles propose that we junk this fine tradition and replace it with unfair and primitive crud voting systems used overseas, I can only shake my head at their claims that they really love this country.   I am not going to let these people get away with it; to paraphrase a slightly different Doctor, this voting system is defended.  

Similar to my polling disinformation register, I've written this article mainly as a labor-saving device so that I don't have to keep making the same long replies on the same points but can simply say "see point 3 here" with a link.  I hope others find it interesting and useful, and more points may be added.

I should note that this article also applies to many criticisms of compulsory preferences made by supporters of optional preferencing - especially part 7.

Effective Vote Spreading: Labor's Hidden Hero At The 2022 Federal Election

This article is about two incorrect narratives about the 2022 election.  I commonly see false claims on social media that Labor only won the 2022 election - not just in majority but at all -because of Green and teal preferences.  These claims are made by certain right-wing posters, mostly of the silly and Trumpy variety, who seek to delegitimise the result because the primary vote winner didn't win the election and the winner's primary vote was unusually low.  But there is another narrative that is more mainstream, which is that while Labor's win was fair enough, the Coalition was hard done by in seat terms because of its seat losses to teal independents.  I show here that that narrative is not really true either, and that the real reason the Coalition's seat share was so bad compared to Labor's was that its vote was poorly distributed in the classic two-party seats.  Most of this article is very numbery so it's been graded Wonk Factor 3/5.

Of course, Greens voter preferences do greatly benefit Labor, and had Green voter preferences split 50-50 Labor would not have won ten seats that it did, and who knows who would have governed in that mess.  But Green preferences favouring Labor is simply part of the scenery, and some other parties' preferences assist the Coalition.  The Coalition only "leads" on primary votes because it is a coalition of two parties that, after decades of fighting each other in some states, choose to mostly work together instead of wasting resources competing everywhere.  Labor and the Greens could sort out their differences and make a similar arrangement if there was any strategic point in doing so, but in their case there currently isn't.  

As concerns teals (whether they won or not), while their 2PP preferences heavily favoured Labor, in most seats where they ran that did not help Labor since Labor failed to make the final two.  This included seven seats that teal independents won, and six where independents who were generally teal-adjacent made the final two but lost.  Yes there were some seats where such candidates were cut out and the contests finished as classic Labor vs Coalition contests, and yes teal preferences helped Labor in those.  But Labor mostly didn't win those anyway (Boothby is one they did win), and there is not a single one where Labor won but would have lost had the teal voters' preferences split 50-50.  In strategic terms the teals were a nuisance to the Coalition, forcing them to fight a second front and making criticisms that may have driven votes to Labor in other seats.  In terms of votes actually polled, however, all they did was take six seats from the Coalition in an election it had already lost outright.  Labor won 72 classic seats where it did not need an edge on their preferences, plus five seats where the Coalition was excluded in lopsided Labor vs Greens contests.

"Freedom Parties" Did Not Cost One Nation A WA Senate Seat

Sometimes I find items of interest in the oddest ways.  Today I was searching for tweets about WA Labor (as of 3:45 pm) Senator Fatima Payman in connection with her possible stance on a Greens motion that the Senate consider recognition of Palestine to be a matter of urgency.  I found this tweet by Mark Rowley, to which he links a video in which he tells Pauline Hanson how One Nation was diddled out of a 6th Senate seat by "freedom friendly" micro-parties, hence blaming them for the election of Payman.  

I thought this was an interesting thing to look into.  I find that minor right wing media is often a hotbed for incorrect claims about the electoral system and election results and this case is no different.  

Payman won the 6th Western Australian Senate seat over Filing by a margin of 23490 votes.  Rowley's video singles out three particular micro-parties, the Great Australian Party (led by former One Nation Senator Rod Culleton, who was disqualified from the Senate in 2017), the so-called "Informed Medical Options Party" (IMOP) and the Australian Federation Party.   These parties between them polled 27791 primary votes.  Rowley says that if these parties had voted for "the likes of One Nation" (are there any likes besides One Nation itself?) the party "would have been looking at a 6th Senate position".

Making Seats "Marginal" At By-Elections Is Meaningless

Last night saw the Labor government get the good end of the stick in the Dunkley by-election, easily retaining a seat that was precariously above the long-term average swing for government vacancy by-elections.  It's no disaster for the Liberals who have got a modest swing with some mitigating factors but they (especially Jane Hume) were out in force last night spinning the outcome as a triumph.  Together with the usual nonsense about first-term governments not in recent decades losing seats and governments not losing by-elections caused by deaths (both based on trivially small sample sizes) I heard a lot about how they had turned Dunkley marginal and they were coming for the seat.

Marginal seat status where a seat is retained is determined by general election results not by-elections (so Dunkley is no more a marginal seat than it was before), but this made me wonder, does getting a seat inside the marginal range at a by-election predict anything at all?  I've found that such seats have historically almost always been retained by the government at the next election, although on average the election-to-election swing has been worse than the national average in such cases.  The idea that the Liberals have put Dunkley in serious danger next time with a swing that is not even bog-average for a government vacancy by-election has no basis.