2025 Senate Notes Part Two

This is part two of a detailed review that I write after each Senate election.  See part one for a general introduction and coverage of proportionality, winning vote shares, preferencing impacts and the curse of Inclusive Gregory.  This part covers Senate 2PP, How to Vote cards, just-voting-1, exhaust, informals, below the lines, and poor performances.

Senate 2PP

Senate 2PP is useful especially for looking at personal votes in the House of Representatives - how an MP does in Reps 2PP relative to their party's Senate 2PP in similar seats may give an insight into how popular they are.  I determine Senate 2PP by adding the above-the-line two-party preferred vote between the two major parties to the below-the-line two-candidate preferred vote between the lead candidates of the two parties.  It has only been a useful measure to calculate since Group Ticket Voting was abolished.

Because preferences in the Senate are semi-optional, Senate 2PP can tend to amplify a clear winner because of exhausted votes, and it also tends to favour Labor in that the 2PP exhaust rate off Greens votes is very low compared to other parties.  The previous election Senate 2PPs were: 2016 50.08 to Labor,  2019 52.66 to Coalition and 2022 52.93 to ALP.  At this election Labor won the Senate 2PP 56.76-43.24, a 3.83% swing.

NSW 56.54 (+5.34)
Vic 57.13 (+1.21)
Qld 52.12 (+4.55)
WA 58.16 (+0.96)
SA 60.42 (+6.67)
Tas 64.00 (+8.96)
ACT 72.34 (+6.00)
NT 54.97 (+2.16)

Senate 2PP doesn't gauge the performance of other parties; thus Labor won three seats in Victoria with a lower 2PP than WA where it missed out.

Greens, One Nation and Trumpet of Patriots 2025 Reps How To Vote Cards

This article is mainly a resource page for studying the preference flows of the Greens, One Nation and Trumpet of Patriots after the election, following a similar one I did in 2022, and in order to compare with 2022.  I was going to do one for the Senate as well but at this stage I am only aware of the ALP varying its how to vote cards between seats in a state, and that only in seven seats (Macnamara, Goldstein, Hunter, Paterson, Capricornia, Flynn and Dawson) so for now I haven't bothered.  [EDIT: Greenway also, see comments.]

Before I start this article, I want to say this.  Some parties put out how to vote cards that do not list the parties with the candidate names.  It makes me want to see their registrations fired into the sun.  I'm busy and I've got articles to write and you - this means you One Nation, you Trumpet of Patriots, you Liberals and you Nationals - think it is acceptable for me to have to waste hours comparing lists of names with lists of candidates by party because you are too ashamed or too lazy to display which parties you are preferencing on your online how to vote cards.   In future I want display of party names on how to vote cards to be required by law.  Grrrr.  Kudos to Labor and the Greens for doing the right thing by our democracy here.

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.

"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".

Ralph Babet Was Elected Fair And Square. I Know It's Hard But Try To Deal With It

For the avoidance of any doubt at all, I'll start with my view of the subject of this article.  Most of what I see of United Australia Party Senator Ralph Babet is his social media output, and it is awful.  He delivers dumbed-down denser-than-even-Sky-News versions of what were in general stupid ideas to begin with (MAGA nonsense, supposed conspiracies against Christians and western culture, whining about "wokeness", gender, sexuality and multiculturalism, and baiting people who would rather at least try not to get COVID).  Babet is perhaps our purest yet elected example of what happens when you spend way too long inhaling what Christopher Hitchens called "the exhaust fumes of democracy", and then attempt to breathe them out. His Senate career so far has been even cringier than very early Jacqui Lambie.  As with Bob Katter, the concussed-sounding nuttiness of Babet's output frequently leads to debates about whether he's just harmlessly insane or whether some of what he's saying might dangerously affect a few impressionable chaps out there.  Think you can tell I'm not a fan.  

2024 Dunkley By-Election

DUNKLEY (VIC, ALP, 6.27%)  By-election March 2
Jodie Belyea (ALP) vs Nathan Conroy (Lib) and others
Cause of by-election: Death of previous incumbent Peta Murphy
Outlook: interesting; seat margin is just above average swing for government vacancies

Early this year we'll get the first electoral test for the Albanese Government on its own turf when the division of Dunkley goes to the polls in sad circumstances after the death of popular previous MP Peta Murphy.  Last year Labor sensationally captured Aston from the Liberals during a period of honeymoon polling, while the Coalition had a pretty good swing result when it retained the uncompetitive seat of Fadden in Peter Dutton's home state.  By-elections are more random and a lot less predictive than politics junkies tend to think they are, but an outer-suburban seat, on a loseable margin, with the honeymoon gone, seems much more significant.  

The by-election has been announced for March 2.  The writ will be issued Jan 29 with close of nominations Feb 8.

Firing Blanks: The Victorian Teal Open How-To-Vote Cards Dispute

 Update Nov 17: Teals Win (for now)!  It is being reported that teals have won their VCAT appeal against the VEC's refusal to register various cards.  This follows events yesterday where the VEC ordered various candidates to desist from distributing these forms of cards, an order it may now turn out the VEC had no business making.  A link to the judgement will be posted when available.  The VEC can appeal to the Supreme Court if it wishes.

Disallowed proposed Frederico how-to-vote card

Yesterday there was significant publicity about the status of some proposed open how to vote cards for various Victorian election teal independents including Felicity Frederico (Brighton), Mellissa Lowe (Hawthorn), Sophie Torney (Kew), Nomi Kaltmann (Caulfield) and Kate Lardner (Mornington).  The Victorian Electoral Commission has disallowed the proposed card above on the grounds that it shows blank boxes.  Despite the card twice saying the voter needs to number all the boxes, the VEC is concerned that the imagery may result in a voter voting 1 for Frederico and then stopping (which is informal in Victoria).  The VEC points to the 2018 VCAT decision in Sheed v Victorian Electoral Commission while the teals and their supporters point to the lack of any problems (in either law or formality) with similar cards for Monique Ryan at the federal election.  Legal challenges are being mooted.

Senate Reform Performance Review And Senate Notes 2022

The results of this year's half-Senate election are all in so it's time to observe how our still relatively new Senate system performed at its second half-Senate test.  For previous assessments see 2016 part one, 2016 part two and 2019 (single article).  I have changed the title mainly so I am at liberty to add pointless fluff about candidates who finished last.  On the agenda for this issue are: proportionality, blocked Senates, how dreadful this election would have been under Group Ticket Voting, winning vote shares (with a focus on Babet and Pocock), preferencing impacts, just-voting-1, exhaust, informals, below the lines, How to Vote cards, blank above the line boxes, and a special schadenfreude section at the bottom.

Senate voting was reformed in 2016 to remove the problems caused by preference harvesting under the old Group Ticket Voting system, under which Senators were being elected off very low vote shares as a result of networked preference deals and a system that coerced voters into sending their preferences to parties they did not support.  This was not only discriminatory and wrong, but also a threat to the integrity of the electoral system because of the ease with which minor issues could cause a count to collapse.  A great many alarmist predictions were made by defenders of the (no longer defensible) GTV system, and most of those have been debunked already.  However in 2022 there are two new opportunities to test predictions about the new system.  Firstly it is the first time we have had a Senate composed entirely of half-Senate election results.  Secondly, it is the first time Labor has come to power in the House of Representatives under the new system.  

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

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

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

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

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

The Overrated Impact Of Party Preferencing Decisions

Advance Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Most Tasmanian Senate Votes Were Unique

Over the last week or so I've been looking at some statistics relating to the uniqueness (or not) of Senate votes in Tasmania, and some other aspects of Tasmanian Senate voting.  At the moment I'm only doing this for Tasmania, but it can be extended to other states if anyone else wants to do so.  This article has been rated 4/5 on the Wonk Factor scale - it is obviously out and out wonkcore but the maths is not as tricky as in some of the stuff on this site.

All Senate votes are scanned by optical character recognition and the scans are verified by human data operators.  The AEC publishes files of all formal Senate preference votes that can be used by outside observers to verify that the AEC is getting the right results and computing the count correctly.  This year's formatting of these files is a lot more user-friendly than in 2016.  On downloading the files one can find all the numbers recorded as entered in the system for any vote recorded as formal.  Sometimes this includes both above the line preferences and below the line preferences (if both are formal, below the line takes precedence, an issue I will come to later on.)
One minor change is that ticks and crosses are no longer indicated by special characters, an aspect that was the source of some confusion among the easily confused at the last election.

Senate Reform Performance Review 2019

The results of this year's half-Senate election are all in so it is time to observe how our new Senate system performed at its first half-Senate test.  Australian Senate voting was reformed in the leadup to the 2016 election to abolish Group Ticket voting and the preference-harvesting exploits it had become prone to, and give voters more flexibility in directing their own preferences either above or below the line.  In the leadup to that election, many false predictions about Senate reform were made and were then discredited by the results.  I reviewed how the new system went back then: Part 1, Part 2.  Some of the predictions that were made by opponents of Senate reform concerned the results of half-Senate elections specifically, so now we've had one, it's a good time to check in on those, as well as on how this election compared to 2019.  One unexpected issue with the new system has surfaced, concerning above the line boxes for non-party groups, but it is one that should be easily fixed.

Fraser Anning, How-To-Vote Cards And Bad Electoral Reform Proposals

Senator Fraser Anning has not endeared himself to most of Australian politics in his short Senate career.  Elected on a special count as a replacement for One Nation's Malcolm Roberts, he left One Nation amid mutual distrust very soon after his arrival.  He then joined Katter's Australian Party before being kicked out of that for being too extreme.  His scorecard includes use of the term "final solution" in his maiden speech, blaming the Christchurch massacre on the fact that Muslims were allowed to migrate to New Zealand (huh?) and proudly attending neo-Nazi rallies.

I've seen a lot of discussion about Anning and how he got into the Senate, and I've noticed two trends that I think need to be dealt with.  One is that a commentator, hellbent on preventing any future Annings from getting into the Senate, comes up with an electoral or parliamentary reform proposal that would either have prevented Anning getting into the Senate the way he did, or else at least allowed for his expulsion as soon as he got there.  Then, because they've found something that would get rid of future Annings, they promote this idea without thinking through any greater problems it might cause.  The second, though I haven't seen so much of it just yet, is that a commentator who already has some electoral reform proposal they want to support, looks for some way they can argue for it by making a point about Fraser Anning.

2018 SA Election Late Polls And Other Comments

SA: Newspoll and ReachTEL 34-31 on primary votes to Liberal
No predicted winner - too close to call

On Saturday night I will be attempting to live-comment the SA state election and the federal Batman by-election at the same time starting from 6:30.  Really this shouldn't be too hard, since Batman is just one seat, so I hope it will be useful.  They will be on separate threads and I will be trying to give each about equal attention to start with, though if Batman can be called quickly I will wind it down and switch to focusing purely on South Australia.

The Senate: Button Press Week

This week if all goes according to plan, the buttons will be pressed on the remaining Senate races in ACT, WA, SA (Tuesday), Victoria (Wednesday), Queensland and finally NSW, and the makeup of the Senate should be known.  I'll be posting some comments about these races and the results as time permits, but I'm rather busy this week, so feel free to add thoughts about any of the races in comments.

I haven't had the time I would have liked to analyse these races in detail, and really you have to sample preferences in scrutineering to have a really confident handle on what's going on in a given state under the new Senate system.  You also can't do it on the night, as you have to know what the main races are to know what you need to look for.  I used scrutineering-based modelling to successfully predict the result in Tasmania (though there was very nearly an upset for the final seat) and it surprises me that I have not seen any detailed public attempt at a scrutineering-based model for any other state.

Tasmania Senate 2016 Button Press And Analysis

Result

Order 1 Abetz (Lib) 2 Urquhart (ALP) 3 Whish-Wilson (Green) 4 Lambie (JLN) 5 Parry (Lib) 6 Polley (ALP) 7 Duniam (Lib) 8 Brown (ALP) 9 Bushby (Lib) 10 Singh (ALP) 11 Bilyk (ALP) 12 McKim (Green) 
Colbeck (Lib) was passed by McKim and McCulloch and excluded
5 Labor 4 Liberal 2 Green 1 Lambie

I would like to thank all the AEC staff in Hobart for all their help with information on the count and congratulate them on their efficient and punctual delivery of the Tasmanian outcomes.

List of Senate How-To-Vote Card Preferences

Introduction

This is a resource piece that will be updated as information comes to hand.  It is simply a list of the Senate preference recommendations on party how-to-vote cards by state, with some comments as I feel inclined to add them.  I will not be writing a similar piece for the House of Representatives.  Note that the ABC Senate Guides also show HTV card scans for many parties (indeed a lot more than listed here) though at the time of writing they are missing some that I have.

Senate how-to-votes are of interest because in the new Senate system, voters decide their own preferences, but many will follow how-to-vote cards in so doing.  Typically something like half of major party voters are likely to follow cards (more accurate assessments are probably available elsewhere in the psephosphere) but the card-follow rate among Greens voters is very low.  Under the new Senate system it is possible voters will be more reliant on these cards than normal.  Knowing who these cards preference may be important in projecting the outcome early in the post-count, as will high-quality scrutineering (but I doubt that there will be too much of that.)

Following a how-to-vote card and then stopping after six boxes weakens the power of your vote and I strongly recommend voting beyond six boxes if voting above the line.  See How To Best Use Your Vote In The New Senate System.

Poll Roundup and Seat Betting Watch: National Poll Drought Edition

2PP: 50.3 to Coalition (same as end of last week, +0.5 in two weeks)
Coalition would probably win election if everyone voted now, probably with small majority (seat projection 78-67-5)

The 2016 federal election is underway! Prepoll voting has already started and we're just sixteen days away from the main game.  And yet, courtesy of a long weekend and perhaps media disinterest in splashing out on polls this time around, the evidence of what is going on in nationwide voting intentions is very limited indeed.  (We do have evidence of who is paying attention though.  Check out Morgan's very believable list of the most and least engaged electorates.)

For all that trendy stuff about how we're being swamped with polls, as I write we have just one national sample that is entirely less than one week old, and that will stop being true some time tonight.  Unless the overdue Morgan finally appears (which apparently it will sometime), we may be left with the infamously trend-averse Essential as the only poll with any data less than one week old until ReachTEL and Ipsos come along on Friday night.  The non-appearance of Newspoll this week makes this the first time since 1990 that the Newspoll brand has gone this late into a campaign before switching to weekly polling.

So if federal voting intention has changed significantly in the last week, we may well not even know. It doesn't seem like it has based on seat poll results and murmers from party insiders, but it's hard to tell which of these sources of knowledge is least reliable.

Polls ... you don't know what you've got til its gone! (I dislike that song, by the way.)

Victorian Election Postcount: Prahran

 

(Correct prediction posted to tallyroom.com.au . Notice date.)

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UNDECIDED SEAT: Prahran (Lib, 4.7%) 
SUMMARY: Contest between Clem Newton-Brown (Lib) and either Neil Pharaoh (ALP) or Sam Hibbins (Green)
RESULT:  Hibbins (Green) wins seat - awaiting formal declaration

This article followed the post-count in the undecided seat of Prahran, won by the Greens (subject to official confirmation) on preferences from third on primaries after eleven days of counting, including a recount.

The original (after reworking) article appears at the bottom of the post with updates scrolling to the top.  However, there was a surprise in the prepoll count - Labor did much better than projected on within electorate prepolls, which I'm told they targeted heavily - so much of the original modelling for questions 1 and 2 soon became irrelevant.  The modelling for question 3 turned out to be slightly pessimistic for the Greens compared to the reality.

The results of the three key questions, after recounting, are being reported unofficially as:

1. Does Pharaoh stay ahead of Hibbins?  Hibbins knocked out Pharaoh by 31 votes.

2. If the final count is Newton-Brown vs Pharaoh, who wins? Newton-Brown led by 25 based on the quick throw.  This margin remains to be confirmed (and is presently irrelevant.)

3. If the final count is Newton-Brown vs Hibbins, who wins?  Hibbins has won by 277 votes thus apparently winning the seat.

Assuming these results are now officially confirmed, Hibbins has won the seat for now.  It is possible that there will be a court challenge, but even if there is one Hibbins will be able to sit in parliament until such time as a court might decide otherwise.

The result is a major success for the Greens, who have unseated a Liberal in a single-seat electorate for the first time in any Australian state or federally, who have won both lower house seats they targeted, and who will hold more than one seat in an Australian parliament elected under a single-seat system for the first time.  Indeed, they have only previously won four seats in single-seat elections (one of them twice) and two of those wins were in by-elections.