6:00 – Polls have just closed in the federal by-election for the NSW seat of Farrer. I won’t be posting here tonight because I’ll be livestreaming via the link below on YouTube! Please join me from 6:30pm with a number of guests.

This work is made possible thanks to the support of my donors on Patreon. Please consider signing up as a Patreon donor for $8 + GST per month. If you do so, you can join tonight’s conversation about Farrer on the Tally Room Discord.

I won’t be posting any analysis during the day tonight, but please bookmark this YouTube video and join us from 6:30pm when we will be livestreaming the results. Tonight I’ll be joined by William Bowe, Phoebe Hayman, Kevin Bonham, and Emily Foley.

This is the third election in South Australia since the state abolished group voting tickets (GVTs) for the Legislative Council prior to the 2018 election. In all three elections, the eleven candidates who won were those who were leading on primary votes. Preferences have not changed any result.

For this blog post, I am going to look at how the position of each party shifted during the count, and compare the size of the margin to 2018 and 2022.

Nine seats were decided on primary votes, and One Nation’s third candidate Rebecca Hewett held over 0.9 quotas, and was in no doubt of winning the tenth seat. Those ten seats split 4 ALP, 3 ONP, 2 LIB, 1 GRN, with one left in play.

Based on the primary vote count, Labor’s fifth candidate Clare Scriven was leading in the race for the eleventh seat on primary votes, with 0.42 quotas. Trailing behind her was Legalise Cannabis on 0.29 quotas, Family First on 0.25 quotas and the Greens’ second candidate on 0.22 quotas.

At all three of the elections conducted under this electoral system, Labor has been in the lead for the final seat, with less than half a quota. And in all three cases, Labor won that last seat.

To compare this position to the last two elections:

• In 2018, Labor was on 0.47 quotas, with the Conservatives on 0.42
• In 2022, Labor was on 0.44 quotas, with the Liberal Democrats on 0.40 quotas and Family First on 0.37 quotas

So Labor’s lead was substantially bigger in 2026 than at the previous two elections.

This chart shows the position of the last few parties in the count – starting with their primary vote position, and then their position as each party was knocked out late in the count.

The Greens slowly closed the gap, first on Legalise Cannabis and eventually on Family First, overtaking the latter party on Legalise Cannabis preferences.

While Labor started out 0.13 quotas ahead of their closest rival, and 0.2 quotas ahead of the Greens, by the end the Greens only trailed by 0.11 quotas – or just over 10,000 votes.

It appears that South Australia has a similar phenomenon to what we’ve seen in New South Wales – parties of the left tend to gain more preferences, with their voters more enthusiastic about filling out preferences. It is this tendency that led to candidates of the left overtaking and defeating candidates of the right in 2011, 2015 and 2019. In New South Wales, we’ve seen voters marking more preferences over time – it will be interesting to see if the same is true in South Australia.

Of course this left-leaning preference bias hasn’t produced any changes in South Australia, which is partly explained by the election of just eleven members. A bigger election would likely see some seats flip under the effect of preferences.

In 2018 and 2022, parties of the left started in the lead and then increased their lead over parties of the right:

• In 2018, Labor’s lead over the Conservatives increased from 0.06 to 0.08 quotas
• In 2022, Labor’s lead over the Liberal Democrats increased from 0.07 to 0.09 quotas

This year was a bit different – Labor did gain ground over Family First, but faced a rival on the left in the Greens. In the end, it wasn’t exceptionally close, but it does show that Labor may not always be the beneficiary of this trend.

It’s also the first time I’ve seen the Greens get close to winning a second seat in a South Australian upper house election, and could light the way for future campaigns.

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Ben: Welcome to the Tally Room podcast. I’m Ben Raue.

This weekend’s federal by-election for the seat of Farrer is the most highly anticipated by-election we’ve had for quite some time in Australia. As One Nation surges in support across regional Australia, this Liberal seat is the perfect test case for their ability to turn polling into results. My guest today is Mark Riboldi. Mark is a political sociologist at the University of Technology, Sydney. Hello, Mark.

Mark: Hi Ben.

Ben: So Farrer is a vast seat in southwestern New South Wales, stretching from Albury west all the way to the South Australian border. The seat was won in 2001 by the Liberal Party’s Sussan Ley, defeating her National Party rival by barely 200 votes. But in the absence of a Nationals challenge, the seat has been fairly safe for Ley for most of her tenure. Lee did face a serious challenge by independent Michelle Milthorpe in 2025, winning by a 6.2 % margin.

Mark, the government won’t be changed by this by-election, indeed Labor isn’t even standing, so does this by-election really matter?

Mark: In terms of who forms government now and even for the outcome of the next federal election, probably this by-election doesn’t really matter. However, the Farrer by-election matters for, I think, two important reasons. First, we’re seeing a primary contest between two non-major party candidates, independent Michelle Milthorpe and One Nation’s David Farley, in a seat that has never not been held by the Liberal-National Coalition. And that’s not politics as usual in Australia.

And second, I think this by-election matters because it’s at the heart of a big question at Australian politics at the moment. If the Australian Labor Party is the government, who is the opposition? The LNP have been eroding votes and seats from their left and right for over a decade now, to independents and now one nation. The Liberal Party in particular are in a fight for their survival and whoever wins this by-election will send a really strong signal to the Liberal Party about where they are in that fight.

Ben: Well, maybe we can start by going through who the candidates are. There’s probably four worth mentioning. The ones that we think either have a chance of winning or parties that have held the seat in the past. Raissa Butkowski, she’s running for the Liberal Party. Obviously, they’re the incumbent. They’ve held the seat before and it would be a big blow for them if they were to lose the seat.

Mark: Yeah, I think, interestingly, Raissa Butkowski looks like she could be a Climate 200 backed independent candidate, she could be a Greens candidate, y’know, she’s a local lawyer, she works at the local community legal centre. So I think in terms of that contest of where the Liberal Party’s head at, that this is kind of a signal towards their left flank in terms of who they’re picking as their candidate.

Ben: And then we have One Nation’s David Farley. Now One Nation has always done okay relative to their national support in Farrer. Farley, the story has come out recently, apparently has previous links to the Labor Party. He was with the Australian Agricultural Company, so he’s a farmer. He’s got all those kind of agricultural links as well. And there’s been a bit of reporting in last few days kind of going, oh, you know, how loyal is he to One Nation?

Will he stick with the party? The funny thing about that, I think, is like, I’m not sure the voters, even the One Nation voters particularly care about that. Like,

Do they care about party discipline of One Nation sticking together? I think they probably just care about sticking to the major parties, but like if he gets elected and he becomes an independent, I’m not sure those voters will be that upset. But I think it’s probably a bit premature to kind of determine that he’s already on his way out of the party.

Mark: Yeah I agree. I think Farley in a way looks like a regional independent. He looks like someone who’s kind of been shopping around for a political vehicle in order to get elected. I’d say there’s a pretty good chance that, If he gets elected, he won’t be a One Nation MP by the time of the next federal election.

To me looks like a, you know, that kind of regional independent like a Joe McGirr, Helen Dalton, Roy Butler in the New South Wales Parliament. Y’know, Dalton and Butler were elected on a party vehicle for the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers and then they didn’t last until the next election. I’m not a betting man, but I would put money on David Farley if he gets elected, not being in One Nation for very long.

Ben: You mentioned Helen Dalton. She is one of the state MPs who covers this electorate, particularly covers the non-Albury, more rural areas to the west. And there was speculation for a bit that she would run as an independent or that she would even run as a One Nation candidate, which didn’t quite seem to fit. But I think it does reflect how One Nation has been kind of, as their vote has been surging, they’ve been looking a little bit further afield for candidates who maybe have a bit more credibility, but maybe are a bit more ideologically flexible compared to where the party has been before.

And then we have Michelle Milthorpe. She stood last time. She’s one of those rural independents. She’s had, you know, support from the kind of groups that support independents now. She did, respectably last time. I think she got about 20% of the primary vote, got to 43.8% after preferences. And her vote, unsurprisingly, is strongest around Albury.

You know, at least on the election day booths, she won all the booths in Albury herself on the two candidate preferred vote over Sussan Ley, whereas Ley was generally winning the Booths further west in more rural areas. And probably the picture would be a little bit less favorable to Milthorpe if you include like postal votes and pre-poll votes cast in those areas. But she definitely is strongest in Albury.

One thing about her that I’ve been fascinated by is people talking about her being a teal or not. You get pushback if you describe her that way. I think the term teal sometimes has value. It has value I think when you’re talking about generic support for these independents in urban areas. You know, when I say all the teal areas on the north shore or something, but I think there’s a reason we stick to the word independent because particularly in the rural areas, they don’t all fit the same mold.

And I think supporters of Milthorpe would say a much better comparison would be the independents who’ve held Indi. Helen Haines, Cathy McGowan before her. And it’s worth remembering that the biggest town in Indi is Wodonga, the biggest town in Farrer is Albury and Albury and Wodonga are basically the one city so my understanding is lot of Helen Haines volunteers have been helping out with Milthorpe’s campaign.

One element with that which I’ve been really fascinated by, I’m interested in your thoughts on this, there’s been a bit of a campaign on the right to try and make it out to be some kind of scandal, some kind of untoward activity that Milthorpe’s campaign is using the color orange, which is also what One Nation is using, that they’re not using the colour teal, that’s somehow misleading. But like, lots of people use orange and independents have been using orange for a really long time.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think it’s particularly a scandal there. I agree with you about the teal categorisation and how Milthorpe has been, I think, trying to distance herself from Climate 200 generally. I generally prefer to talk about these independents as Climate 200 backed independents rather than teals, which is generally used as a pejorative. I don’t think that they refer to themselves as teals. I see Milthorpe as a bit closer to rather than those kind of inner urban independents, someone like Caz Heise who ran for Cowper a couple of times was not successful. So I think this is a really good test for can independent candidates backed by Climate 200 win outside of those inner urban metropolitan areas.

Ben: Well, there’s a bunch of these rural independents who ran in 2022 and then ran again in 2025. And to be honest, they’d come close in ’22 and they didn’t really make any further progress in ’25. And I think it does partly show that a competent, well-run independent campaign can overtake the Labor Party and do respectably, but getting those last couple of percentage points to win is really difficult, particularly once the Coalition is aware of the threat and they respond to the campaign.

And so Milthorpe is just one of those candidates, you know, like there’s a whole bunch of them. And she’s just the one who happens to be in a seat where the sitting MP has resigned. And so she’s had this opportunity. you know, clearly the dynamics now are very different to what they were last year.

Mark: And when you’ve got a credible threat with a populist message about cost of living like One Nation has, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for that independent candidate.

Ben: Well, maybe, but I think there’s also an element where that same narrative, that same story maybe plays well for One Nation in some areas, the independent in other areas, and they kind of end up both benefiting from that trend. Like, I don’t think it’s mutually exclusive. Clearly for any one voter, it’s mutually exclusive, but I think across the electorate, they can probably both benefit.

Now, we probably should briefly mention Brad Robertson, who is the Nationals candidate. The National Party held this seat from ’84 to 2001 under Tim Fischer who became the leader of the party and the first Deputy Prime Minister under John Howard. Now I was looking into the history of Farrer. Before Tim Fischer this was a Liberal Party seat. But what happened in 1984 was that prior to ’84, Farrer had been Wagga Wagga, Albury and not much else.

So it was mostly dominated by two large regional cities. And then in ’84, it got redrawn. So Wagga Wagga had its own electorate, Albury had its own electorate, but neither one were big enough to have their own electorate on their own, but they were kind of too big to both be in one seat together. And so that’s when Farrer gained all those rural areas and that’s when it became a National Party seat. Indeed, the sitting Liberal MP ran for the Wagga Wagga based seat and won it. I think it was the seat of Hume at the time.

So effectively this configuration of Farrer has only existed since ’84 and in that time it’s had two MPs, one National, one Liberal. And Sussan Ley barely beat the Nationals. So if this was not a moment where the Coalition vote was crashing like we’re seeing right now, I think this would be a Liberal versus National contest and both parties would be competitive. Matt Canavan is clearly in the electorate a lot.

They’re not giving up on it. But I think probably the One Nation surge is going to be more painful to the Nationals than the Liberals if you look at the areas within the electorate where the National vote has traditionally been higher versus the Liberal.

So let’s look at the geography of this electorate. We’ve kind of touched on it a little bit. Albury makes up about 30% of the population. So it’s, it’s not nothing, but this is not an electorate that’s mostly Albury. The rest of the electorate really does matter. Generally, Albury is more progressive. You know, it’s not a particularly progressive town. You know, it has a Liberal state MP.

In 2001, Antony Green did a good blog post about this, the Liberal vote was higher in Albury, the National vote was higher in the west, but also since 2001, Farrer has expanded in that rural west to take in areas that weren’t in the electorate in 2001, and those areas have always traditionally been National Party seats. Probably on these boundaries, the Nationals would have won and not Sussan Ley in 2001, because she only beat them by about 200 votes.

So my first assumption here is that the One Nation vote, I’m pretty confident in this, will be higher in those rural areas and that would hurt the Nationals more. But it’s also the case that in that Liberal-National contest, the Liberals probably would have been depending on Albury a lot more. And their vote has also eroded there, you know, with the Independent and with Albury kind of moving towards Milthorpe. So it’s actually kind of hard to say, like, which of these coalition parties would be the one left standing. I think the Liberals have the benefit in incumbency, but this is probably going to be an element where there’s going to be multiple stages of this count where things could go one way or the other.

Mark: Absolutely. And I think that it’s the Liberal Party who are in the electorate more on the nose than the Nationals. It’s the Liberal vote and the number of seats that the Liberals have that is collapsing, not the Nationals one. So I think it’s going to be pretty interesting on the night. I mean, I would expect that the Liberals will poll higher than the Nationals. But as you say, it’s going to be interesting who finishes where.

I think you were saying before, the Liberal Party somehow comes in second behind One Nation, there’s a fair chance that they could win the seat.

Ben: You say that the Liberals have been the ones that have been losing seats, and that was absolutely true right up until 2025, right? Like the Nationals have been almost entirely untouched by the collapse of support and the collapse of seats. But I think probably the One Nation surge now is going to be hitting harder in those National Party areas.

The Nationals were in a good position until last year, but perhaps not anymore. Now we have two opinion polls that have come out. They’re both from uComms. You know, it is harder doing individual seat polling, but they both show kind of a similar trend.

In the first poll, they included Labor because Labor hadn’t yet announced they weren’t running and Labor polled 9% and Milthorpe was on 23, One Nation was on 28.7, Liberals on 19. So that was already a Milthorpe versus One Nation contest, but they didn’t try and calculate any kind of two candidate preferred count.

Interestingly, and I want to talk about this in the context of Labor not standing, in the second poll, that 9% for Labor is gone. Milthorpe is up 6.7 but One Nation is also up by 2 while the Liberal vote is down by 3, the National vote is up by 2. I think part of what we’re seeing here is a majority of the Labor vote is progressive independent, but not entirely.

And there is still a small remnant in this electorate of Labor voters who are actually right leaning, who probably would have preferenced One Nation, but now they’re just One Nation voters.

I mean, David Farley is basically that kind of person. And I think that would have been really interesting dynamic if Labor had stood, because I think they would have had pressure to appeal to that kind of traditional Labor voter that sort of left the party. You know, there was a bit of talk from some former Labor premiers going, we need Labor to stand so they can stop One Nation from getting elected. But I feel like Milford might be a more steadfastly not One Nation progressive than like a Labor candidate who is the kind of Labor candidate who would run here in Farrer would have been.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. I think for Labor, maybe part of the thinking is to avoid running against One Nation in this kind of context for as long as possible. They’re getting information, they’re seeing how they do. I don’t think in an election contest at the moment, Labor wants to go up and test their policies against One Nation’s, particularly on immigration. We know in Australia that the immigration debate is never really a pretty one and yes, I would think Labor leadership would want to avoid that and collect as much information as possible before they really wade into that territory.

Ben: Something else I find fascinating about these by elections because they’re not very accurate. You’re an academic. When you do surveys, when you do research, you try and get them in the best conditions.

Opinion polls aren’t perfect, but they’re designed to capture the population as a whole, to ask the actual question which is, how will you vote at the next election? And this by-election doesn’t have any of that, right? It’s far from an unbiased sample. Farrer is not representative of the country. Maybe it’s representative of a certain kind of electorate where the coalition is now struggling, but it’s not representative of the country.

The voters know that they’re not electing a government. They can choose someone who isn’t going to influence who’s the Prime Minister. And so in that sense, you know, it’s an interesting political moment, you know, it can have implications for how these parties will perform in the future. But one thing I find that is really fascinating is often politicians in particular, it is easier for them to dismiss opinion polls, to go, we’ll work it out. Everything will be sorted before the next election. Just give us time to work. I’m not sure I really believe the opinion polls, any of kind of stuff.

Whereas when real voters vote and real people lose seats, often things get taken a lot more seriously. I think South Australia was the first step in that, but I think Farrer would be another example. If the Liberal Party was to lose this seat, that would have implications for them.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, polling day, as they say, is the only poll that matters. And it’s those voters, what voters actually do on the day that is sending the most strong signal to the government, to the Liberal Party.

As I was saying before we started recording, I think there’s a comparison here between the Gorton and Denton by-election in the UK where it didn’t really matter in terms of who formed government with the results of the election, but it was sending very clear signals to the government, the Starmer Labour government, about what voters were responding to in terms of cost of living crisis, which is the biggest issue in the UK and probably the biggest issue in Australia. And there it was again two non-major party candidates who were really fighting it out. One was the right-backed and again, billionaire-backed Reform UK versus the UK Greens here, who are kind of a resurgence populist left there.

So I think that Labour insiders in the UK were following that really closely to see where is the electorate and what kind of direction might UK Labour need to go in order to hold on to government in the May elections that are coming up there. I think similarly here, even if Labor is not contesting it, they’re going to be watching very closely to see what voters think about the different types of message that Milthorpe and the Independents are putting forward compared to what One Nation is putting forward and what people are reacting to there. And I think that is what the major parties are going to be paying very close attention to.

Ben: This is probably a good point to bring up the other by-election that’s just happened. We’re recording this on Monday. There was a by-election on Saturday in the state seat of Nepean in Victoria. Now, you mentioned independents versus One Nation. There was also two seats in the South Australian election where the two parties ended up going up against each other and that was the first time that had happened since 2001.

So, you know, this is a rare dynamic, but clearly it is probably going to happen repeatedly now with the collapse of the Coalition vote. In Nepean though, the Liberal vote was a little bit higher. It wasn’t probably the best area for an independent, wasn’t the best area for a one nation candidate, you know, it wasn’t deep in the rural outback area, but it also wasn’t the inner east of Melbourne where the Teals have done their best.

And early on the night, there was an interesting dynamic that faded a little bit later on where the Liberal vote was in the low thirties, but they were clearly in first place and they clearly going to be in the top two. And it looked at the time like the independent was going to come second, but One Nation wasn’t out of it. Now, whether independent or One Nation gets in the top two, it’s very, very close run thing. One Nation has a lead on the primary vote, but the independent probably will get more preferences.

So you had this situation where the leading candidate was on quite a low primary vote. We don’t know who the top two is going to be, but they’re going to win the preference count easily against whoever they’re up against. If it ends up being Liberal versus One Nation, all those voters who fall in behind the independent up to the 3CP count when the independent is knocked out will favor the Liberal Party. Likewise, if One Nation is knocked out, the voters who end up with One Nation will favour the Liberal Party.

And so because the Liberals are in this middle point on the preference spectrum, they were easily going to win. And I can’t find another example. Before we started recording, we were looking at South Australian election and there were some seats where the Liberal won and they would have won against a Labor candidate or against One Nation, but they’re usually well out in front. We’re not having ones like this where you’re in the low thirties, you know.

And so I was jokingly comparing it to the Three Stooges syndrome from the Simpsons where you know Mr. Burns has every illness and they all kind of somehow balance each other out and he’s fine. But the Liberals do have this element and you know they’re probably not in the middle of the political spectrum at a national level but in these more conservative electorates where they’re in trouble and I think Farrer is an example of this.

If they can be in the top two they have an advantage and there’s been a conventional wisdom in Farrer, I think that it’s going to be independent versus One Nation and that may be the case. But I think if the Liberals can stay in the top two, they still have a good chance of winning.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. The Liberals might not be in the centre nationally, but they’re definitely in the centre when it comes to the contestation of who is the opposition and what is the largest non-Labor voice in Australian politics.

For me, there’s two questions around One Nation at the moment. One is, are they a real threat to the two party system? And then what the alternative, if they are, what the alternative to One Nation might be. The test for One Nation at the moment doesn’t seem to be winning seats. They can win them. They’ve won them in South Australia. There’s a decent chance that they can win Farrer this coming weekend.

So the test for One Nation isn’t being a party that can win seats, it’s a party that can mount an opposition. And the evidence here historically is not good. The majority of One Nation MPs, particularly, I think all the One Nation MPs who’ve been elected in the lower house, did not stand as a One Nation MP at the election afterwards. So whether or not Barnaby Joyce is a figure who can galvanise a party around him, again, evidence suggests that he’s more about ego than he is about building a party mechanism. So does One Nation exist beyond egos, does Gina Rinehart’s money mean that there can be a party infrastructure around One Nation? Evidence doesn’t say it’s good.

The second part then for me is, is there an alternative to One Nation? I think we know from polling that a lot of people who are voting for One Nation, it’s very much an anti-politics, anti-system, anti-establishment vote. In places like the US and UK, the response to that kind of far right populist insurgency is coming from left figures. So there’s the newly resurgent Greens in the UK very much around, I guess, a left populist message countering that cost of living narrative. Zohran Mamdani in New York is very much again, kind of a more of a left populist, socially democratic message.

In Australia, the Greens in Australia are very much an establishment. They’ve had their moment of being that kind of insurgency and they don’t really present now, I don’t think, as a popular type figure. Greens MPs are lawyers, they’re academics, they’re human rights campaigners. They’re not a lesbian plumber from Manchester.

Ben: In theory it’s possible that the new generation of One Nation activists, the people they brought over from the Liberal Party, the extra resources they have, I think they did have an improvement in the caliber of their MPs getting elected in South Australia, but that’s not a universal thing.

I mean, they got a hairdresser elected who apparently didn’t realise that she would have to actually physically attend parliament in Adelaide. So that’s not a good sign. In theory, they could get better at this, and I think that’s possible to be aware of, but they haven’t proved it yet. you know, who else has come along with Barnaby Joyce? We don’t really know. Like, who else? Names that we don’t know of activists and volunteers and people who know how to run campaigns, we’re not really sure.

Mark: Absolutely. I there’s probably a critical mass moment where if One Nation wins enough seats, they’ll probably start attracting defectors from the Liberal and National parties that might bring some of that infrastructure with them. And I think that’s why it’s important to understand that the Liberal party are trying, they’re not trying to win government, they’re trying to win opposition at the moment. Once One Nation have more seats in parliament than them, there is resources that come with that.

What resources the opposition gets from government is not baked in. It’s it’s something that’s negotiated each term. There’s a bit of convention around it. But you know, once the Liberal Party starts losing some of those resources, there’s a danger that the whole thing falls apart and some of those resources go elsewhere.

Ben: We’ve talked about this on other podcasts. I do think part of the story with the One Nation surge was there was a kind of voter who was voting Coalition even though ideologically maybe they get along quite well with One Nation, they have a lot of sympathy for One Nation because the Coalition can win elections, they could possibly form government. Peter Dutton seemed credible and they seemed to have hoped that they could beat Albanese or at least be competitive.

And then they were beaten so badly in the last election. One Nation did okay, they got a couple of senators elected, they won that fight over who is the main right-wing party apart from the Coalition. They won that argument last year basically, that those voters started to peel away. And as more and more of them did, other people did the same.

And you know, there probably is an element of the Labor support base who agrees with the Greens on a bunch and they kind of grit their teeth and vote Labor because they care about the practicality and the pragmatism of winning elections.

But if Labor lost that demonstrated ability to win elections and no longer seemed like a serious party of government there would be probably a bunch of those voters who would peel away and so that is a real danger for the Coalition, right.

You know one thing i’m really interested in from Farrer is that it’s a bit of a microcosm of the two different ways in which the Coalition is being squeezed, right? They’re being squeezed now post 2025 in rural areas by One Nation. And I think we will see in the voting trends.

I mean, I’m sure plenty of One Nation voters in Albury, I’m sure, but their vote will be particularly catastrophic for the Coalition in the rural parts of the electorate. But there’s also the element that the Liberals have been losing seats to independents, losing seats to Labor, a little bit to the Greens in the cities. And Albury has that element as well. You know, it’s too small to be a city electorate on its own, but they’re losing ground there as well.

But I think it’s interesting that right now their focus is much more on protecting themselves from One Nation than from the Independent. I think the decision to preference One Nation quite high on their how to vote card reflects the fact that they see right now that it’s more of an immediate emergency to hold off the One Nation surge. And they’ll worry about winning back the centre ground and winning back the cities later. You know, like they can’t even think about that right now.

And so in that sense, if they’re losing voters to Milthorpe, they’ve probably made an estimation It seems right to me that right now they’re probably losing more voters to One Nation than they are to Milthorpe.

In the sense that Milthorpe got to 44% of the 2CP last time. And that is probably the traditional teal independent model of you get a lot of the Labor and Greens voters and you peel a few extra liberals away. So she’s already done that. She needs to peel a few more liberals away again. Whereas One Nation is cutting into the liberals like at an earlier point in the preference count. you know. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. The Liberal Party is in a contest with One Nation now and you can see that from Taylor’s policy announcements, the hard line on immigration. The quite nationalist rhetoric that he’s putting forward. It’s very clearly designed to contest One Nation’s vote. They need to shore that up before they even think about trying to contest government.

Ben: So that’s about it for this episode of the Tally Room podcast. Thank you Mark for joining me.

Mark: Thanks Ben.

Ben: Now Mark, you’re one of the editors of a special edition of the Australian Journal of Political Science that I’ve got a research note that I’m working on for which is around like minor parties and independence. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Mark: Yeah, thanks Ben. I’m co-editing that volume with Ben Spies-Butcher and Phoebe Hayman, a couple of colleagues who I’ve been working on around the rise of independent and minor party votes in Australia for a while now. So that volume is going to have a collection of established and emerging Australian political scientists.

Where I’ve got people like Shaun Ratcliff and Jill Sheppard looking at kind of, and yourself looking at that kind of macro level of the votes, the seats. Who is voting for independents in minor parties? What do these mean at a structural level? And then people looking at more of the individual parties within that, or not necessarily parties, know, people looking at the community independent movement, people looking at One Nation, people looking at
even Bob Katter. Katter is the most successful independent in Australian political history, along with Clover Moore, for example. So looking at Katter and the way that he’s projected authenticity over time. So yeah, the volume’s gonna start coming out in the next few weeks and yeah, it should be really exciting to look at some of those dynamics and how they’re playing out.

Ben: Yeah, and I’ve got an article about the dynamics of preference counts and how they change as the major party vote goes down and as more options become available. And we’ll be finishing the edits this week. And one of the things that’s been really interesting is that since we did the draft, we’ve had the South Australian election, now we’ve had the Nepean election.

And now as I go back and I read over my previous work, I’m like, well, there’s so much extra information we now have and so much extra data that we’ll have to decide where to draw the line there.

Mark: A couple of colleagues who are writing in the journal about One Nation, Emily Foley and Josh Sunman. I think you’ve had Josh on before and Emily’s, I think, going to be on the Farrer livestream this weekend. They’re writing about One Nation and how they perform working class values. Very much around how they’re challenging the traditional Labor vote as well as the vote from the right.

Ben: Yeah, so you mentioned the live stream this Saturday night. Join me on YouTube for the Tally Room live stream for the Farrer by election. I’ll be joined by William Bowe from the Poll Bludger, Phoebe Heyman, your co editor, Kevin Bonham, Tasmania’s leading psephologist and Emily Foley through the night as we follow the results and discuss what they mean. And then on Monday evening, if you’re in Canberra, I’ll be part of a live recording of the Democracy Sausage podcast hosted by Mark Kenny and Maria Teflaga and friend of the podcast, Jill Sheppard will also be joining in. So tickets are free for that, but spots are limited. So if you want to come along, please register now.

And that’s going to be really interesting timing. We didn’t talk about the budget actually, but the Farrer by-election will be taking place just days before the federal budget. And that will also be very interesting because that event will be on the night before the federal budget. And, you know, we may well not even know the result by then for the Farrer by-election.

You can find this podcast on your podcast app of choice. If you like the show, please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes. You can follow me on bluesky at www.benraue.com You can now also follow The Tally Room on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube at The Tally Room.

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Thanks to Chris Dubrow for writing the music you hear in this episode. Once again, thanks for listening.

The Liberals did very well on the pre-poll and postal votes, winning 64.1% and 72.4% on the 2CP. These margins are much greater than the election-day vote. It means that Marsh’s 2CP margin has blown out to 13.5%.

As to the question of whether Tracee Hutchison makes the 2CP count: One Nation is in a clear second place on primary votes, with 24.7% compared to 21.3% for Hutchison. 15.5% of the vote was cast for other candidates, and about 3/5s of that vote sits with the Greens. I reckon there’s a good chance there’ll need to be a Liberal-One Nation count. A 3CP count would be handy, but I doubt we’ll get one.

9:50 – The primary vote figures in Nepean are looking close to done – we’ve got every election day booth, over 5500 postal votes and over 23,000 pre-poll votes. Marsh (LIB) is on 38.5%, Hercus (ON) on 24.7% and Hutchison (IND) on 21.3%. I think this probably still ends up as a LIB-IND count but I’m not completely sure now.

For the 2CP count, we’re still waiting for Rosebud, and we have less than 3,000 pre-poll votes. Marsh’s lead has blown out to a 13.4% margin. Marsh is winning the non-election day vote very comfortably.

9:32 – The Tasmanian vote count has finished for the night, with extra pre-poll votes and some mobile votes added since I last checked.

The final standing in Huon is:

• Harriss (IND) – 30.6%
• Glade-Wright (IND) – 27.8%
• McKibben (ALP) – 16.5%
• Gibson (GRN) – 15.1%
• Rowan (IND) – 5.4%
• Petersen (IND) – 4.6%

And the standings in Rosevears are:

• Palmer (LIB) – 42.7%
• Mckinnon (ALP) – 24.7%
• McLennan (GRN) – 16.6%
• Monson (IND) – 16.0%

The TEC has helpfully shared an update about what to expect next. In short, counting will resume on Monday but postal votes will need to wait until Thursday.

In preparation for the next stage of the count, work on Sunday will focus on checking and verifying ballot papers, including the transfer of out-of-division votes to the correct division and assessing the eligibility of provisional votes.

Counting on Monday will begin with approximately 860 telephone votes, followed by provisional and out-of-division votes. Rechecks of first preferences will then commence and continue on Tuesday.

Results will be updated progressively on the TEC website.

Counting of postal votes will begin on Thursday, in accordance with procedural changes legislated in 2024, which require the Commission to confirm a person has not voted by any other method before their postal vote can be counted.

This process requires roll mark-off data from all polling places to be finalised and available before postal packs can be checked against the roll and ballot papers are extracted for counting.

9:03 – The Rosebud booth in Nepean is stubbornly refusing to report any figures, but we now have a much bigger sample of pre-poll votes. And the 2CP has mostly caught up, just with fewer pre-poll votes and no postal votes. The Liberal margin is now 9.0%.

8:34 – Kevin Bonham, who knows more about Tasmania than myself, points out that Susan Monson’s preferences are unlikely to favour either leading candidate. He also shares reports that Greens preferences are more pro-Palmer than would be typically expected. These factors make me think Jo Palmer will be re-elected in Rosevears.

8:33 – I should note that, comparing primary to 2CP counts where both have reported (excluding the tiny pre-poll booth), Marsh is attracting 54.6% of preferences and Hutchison 45.4%. Just over half of all preferences to distribute are from One Nation, while the Greens make up about a quarter. Undoubtedly some One Nation voters are preferencing the independent, but I suspect the logic of One Nation voters favouring the Liberals when we go from 3CP to 2CP will hold up.

8:30 – We now have a batch of postal votes for the Nepean primary vote count, and all but one election day booth. The Liberal primary vote has climbed up to 41.2%, with One Nation on 21.4% and Hutchison falling to third on 20.9%. I would still expect Hutchison to make the 2CP on those figures. The 2CP count is quite well advanced but only includes a tiny pre-poll count and no postal votes, and Marsh is leading by a 4.8% margin.

8:19 – The final election day booths have reported from Huon and Rosevears. I suspect we are close to the final figures for the night, with election day and pre-poll votes reported.

The current standing in Huon is:

• Harriss (IND) – 30.5%
• Glade-Wright (IND) – 27.2%
• McKibben (ALP) – 16.7%
• Gibson (GRN) – 15.5%
• Rowan (IND) – 5.6%
• Petersen (IND) – 4.5%

And the standings in Rosevears are:

• Palmer (LIB) – 42.8%
• Mckinnon (ALP) – 24.9%
• McLennan (GRN) – 16.8%
• Monson (IND) – 15.4%

My best guess is that Glade-Wright is the favourite to defeat Harriss, and Palmer is the favourite to be re-elected.

8:15 – We now have 11 election day booths reporting primary votes, with just two more to come. Marsh (LIB) is on 36.6%, Hutchison is on 23.8%, and Hercus (ON) is on 21.2%.

Nine of those booths have reported 2CP figures, and Marsh leads Hutchison with 55.4%. This is the first time tonight where Marsh is trailing behind the Liberal 2PP from 2022, down 0.4%.

8:07 – This Nepean race seems like a new flavour of complex 3CP count that I haven’t seen before (although I’m sure there’s an example somewhere).

It looks pretty clear that the Liberal Party will win whether they face One Nation or Hutchison in the final count. I think the chances of One Nation making that final count are slim, but it’s still interesting as a small swing could have produced a Liberal-One Nation contest. Yet the Liberals look like they will win comfortably in either scenario.

We’ve had races before where there is a close race for second but the leader is so far out that it doesn’t matter, and we’ve had races where second and third have similar chances of success because they preference each other strongly, but I don’t know if I’ve seen one where the leader is so low, but is very highly likely to win because they get preferences from either direction.

If this is a Liberal-One Nation contest, the make-up of the Liberal majority would be quite different to if it was a Liberal-Independent contest. But because the Liberals are in the centre relative to their two main rivals, they can win with a relatively small primary vote lead. Yet it would also leave them not that far away from falling from first into third, and thus losing.

This could be something to watch for next week in Farrer, where the Liberals are again facing strong challenges from an independent and One Nation.

If this really is a new phenomenon, I’d like to nickname it ‘Three Stooges Syndrome’, after the scene in the Simpsons (season 11, episode 12) where Mr Burns is diagnosed with every illness, but told he is fine because they are all in perfect balance.

7:59 – Four booths have reported preferences in Nepean and the Liberal margin is 6.9%. My model expects this to grow to 8.8%.

7:57 – A very small batch of pre-poll votes have reported in Nepean but the VEC does not break out these votes based on the booth so we don’t know what to compare it to. It’s just 26 votes, but it’s all in one row.

7:55 – Things are slowing down in Tasmania – we are waiting for one more election day booth from each seat.

I doubt we’ll be able to call either seat tonight. Dean Harriss has a narrow lead over Clare Glade-Wright but I suspect she can chase him down. Jo Palmer’s lead is wider over Labor but there are quite a few preferences to be distributed.

7:47 – Two booths have reported 2CP counts in Nepean. It looks like the VEC has picked the right pairing, and Marsh leads Hutchison 59.2-40.8. That’s a 1.7% swing compared to the Liberal-Labor count in 2022.

7:46 – Six booths have reported in Nepean, and the vote for the leading candidates now is:

• Marsh (LIB) – 33.0%
• Hutchison (IND) – 25.0%
• Hercus (ON) – 21.8%

7:43 – Pre-poll and another booth have reported in Huon, and Harriss now leads Glade-Wright 31.4% to 26.9%. Jo Palmer’s vote in Rosevears is now down to 40.9%.

7:38 – We’ve just had the local pre-poll report in Rosevears, and Palmer now leads Labor 41.3% to 25.1%. It looks a bit more achievable for Labor to catch up, but Palmer looks like the favourite. Still waiting for two more election-day booths.

7:34 – With five booths reporting, Marsh (LIB) is on 32.9% in Nepean. Hutchison (IND) is on 25.1%, and Hercus (ON) is on 22.1%. It’s probably worth noting that if Hutchison and Hercus are close on primary votes, Hutchison would likely pull ahead with almost 13% sitting with the Greens, compared to 1.9% with other right-wing parties (Sustainable Australia’s 1.6% is probably a wash).

7:25 – Twelve out of sixteen election day booths have reported in Rosevears, and Labor has pulled out in front of Susan Monson. So have the Greens in fact. Labor is on 23%, with the Greens on 17.8% and Monson on 16.9%. Palmer is on 42.4%, up 1.8%.

7:22 – The first three booths have reported in Nepean, and in raw figures the Liberals lead on 31.6%, followed by independent Tracee Hutchison on 23.9% and One Nation on 22.6%, with the Greens on 14.1%. That is a 13.4% swing against the Liberals, but we don’t have matched swings for Hutchison or One Nation, neither of whom ran in 2022.

On those numbers, I suspect the Liberals would defeat either rival. It is very helpful to the party that their loss of support has split in two directions – if it was all one way or the other they’d be losing.

7:07 – Six booths have reported in Rosevears. Jo Palmer has a swing of 1.1% against her, while Monson leads Labor 22.7-21.2.

7:05 – I want to emphasise generally that we don’t have any 2CP figures in Tasmania, and won’t have any – they just do primary counts then a full distribution once all votes are counted. On a primary vote basis, there are issues with calculating primary vote swings because the candidate field has changed. In Huon in 2022, Dean Harriss polled 23.7% and the Liberal Party polled 22.7%. This time there is no Liberal candidate, so you’d expect Harriss to pick up a lot of that Liberal vote (as well as the fact that he’s an incumbent). So a swing of about 4% isn’t very impressive. Meanwhile on the left, the Labor+Greens vote is down from about 46% to 30%, but that is a lot of preferences for Glade-Wright to benefit from.

In Rosevears, independent candidate Janie Finlay did well in 2020, polling 30% of the primary vote and narrowly losing. She isn’t running this time, as she is now a Labor lower house MP. It is probably not fair to expect Labor to pick up all of her vote, and right now it looks like it’s scattered amongst the three non-Liberal candidates.

7:02 – With seven booths reporting in Huon, Dean Harriss leads Clare Glade-Wright 34.1% to 25.6%. There is another 29.9% with Labor and the Greens, and 10.4% with two other independents. Glade-Wright will likely do better on preferences but it’s worth noting that Harriss is polling 4.3% better than his 2022 vote. Although in 2022, there was 22.7% sitting with the Liberal candidate, so that’s probably not a great sign for Harriss.

6:57 – Susan Monson is now narrowly ahead of Labor, 22.4% to 22.2%, and my model projects that this gap will widen slightly.

6:57 – We now have four booths in Rosevears, and the Liberal vote is now down 0.5%. I have also modified my analysis to credit Janie Finlay’s 2020 independent vote to Labor, since there is no equivalent this time and she’s now a Labor MHA. Upon this calculation, there is a 22.4% swing to Susan Monson, a 7.6% swing to the Greens, and a 17.6% swing away from Labor. So Finlay’s vote has scattered amongst three candidates, not all gone to Labor.

6:52 – We now have three booths in Rosevears and the primary vote swing to Palmer (LIB) is now 1.5%.

6:51 – The fifth booth, Glen Huon, is still relatively small, but they are getting bigger, and this is a good one for Harriss, with a 9% swing. This means he is now up 1.7% overall, and just narrowly behind Glade-Wright. This race looks very competitive but Glade-Wright is clearly Harriss’ main rival.

6:47 – Four booths in now in Huon, and Harriss is down 1.1%, with Glade-Wright leading 33.6-22.0.

6:45 – Two small booths in Rosevears have reported. Liberal MLC Jo Palmer is up 2% to 43%. The other vote is split roughly three ways – Labor on 22.6%, independent Susan Monson on 18.2%, and the Greens on 16.3%. Everyone has a swing towards them, because there was a big vote for independents in 2020 who aren’t running now. To be honest it looks like a roughly status quo result so far.

6:42 – Three small booths have reported in Huon. Independent Clare Glade-Wright is leading with 36.5%, with incumbent conservative independent Dean Harris on 24.2%, Greens on 16.5% and Labor on 14.6%. This is a slight 0.9% swing to Harriss compared to last time. Labor and the Greens are both down – Labor down 7.8%, and Greens down 10.1%. Glade-Wright is currently looking very viable and is Harriss’ main challenger. But they are just three small booths.

6:00 – Polls have just closed for some elections being held today in Victoria and Tasmania, and I’ll be tracking the results tonight on this live blog.

In the Victorian state seat of Nepean, a by-election will choose a new member of parliament to serve until the November state election, following the resignation of Liberal MP Sam Groth. This seat was held by Groth by a 6.2% margin. Labor is not contesting the seat but the Liberal Party faces a challenge from One Nation, independent Tracee Hutchison, or both.

In Tasmania, voters are electing two members of the Legislative Council, in the seats of Huon (which covers rural areas to the south-west of Hobart) and Rosevears (which covers rural and suburban areas to the north-west of Launceston). Tasmania’s MLCs serve six-year terms, with 2-3 seats up for election each year over a six-year cycle.

In both seats, conservative MLCs are defending seats they last won by narrow margins.

Labor won Huon at the last regular election in 2020, but that MP resigned within two years, and the 2022 by-election was won by conservative independent Dean Harriss, winning by a 2.5% margin over Labor. Labor and the Greens are challenging Harriss this time, alongside three other candidates.

Liberal MLC Jo Palmer narrowly won Rosevears by a 0.6% margin over independent Janie Finlay, who later became a Labor lower house MP. Three of the four candidates in Rosevears are Labor, Liberal and the Greens. Independents have traditionally played a big role in Tasmanian Legislative Council elections, but Rosevears is as close as they get to a straight Labor-Liberal contest.

I will be doing my usual liveblogs for Nepean and the Tasmanian Legislative Council on May 2, and for Stafford on May 16.

I will also be doing a livestream for the Farrer by-election on May 9. This will be my second livestream following the South Australian election livestream in March. I will have a number of guests and we will be livestreaming from 6:30pm. You can watch the livestream on YouTube at this link.

I will also be doing a live event shortly after the Farrer by-election. On Monday, May 11, I’ll be a guest for a live recording of the Democracy Sausage podcast at the Australian National University in Canberra. The event is free but you need to book a ticket. I hope I’ll see you there!

9:38 – Labor’s lead in Liverpool South has fallen back a bit, now leading 37-22, with almost 5000 postal votes counted. Every election day booth has reported but no pre-poll votes.

7:45 – With 44 booths reporting in Newcastle, Gavin Morris is on 49.1%, and I now project he will fall just short of a primary vote majority. The swing against Labor is now 14.7%.

Meanwhile in Liverpool South, my best estimate of a swing against the Liberal Party (based on mayoral booths) is 18.3%, with Labor’s vote up 16%. The Labor primary vote is just over 40%.

7:31 – Worth noting the Greens are outpolling Labor in Newcastle.

7:22 – Labor candidate Zeli Munjiza is leading in Liverpool South, with 39.31%. The Liberals are way behind on 22.5%. This is looking pretty good for Labor. That is with nine booths reporting.

7:19 – By my count, 25 of the election day booths have reported in Newcastle, out of 48 booths. Gavin Morris is on 50.6%, which is a swing of 18.5% compared to Ross Kerridge in 2024.

The Labor vote is down 14.3%, the Liberals are down 5.5%, and the Greens are up 1.5%.

7:03 – Meanwhile we have one booth in for Liverpool South and it is Hoxton Park Anglican. Labor has the lead, whereas the Liberal Party easily won the primary vote for mayor there in 2024. I don’t have council booth figures so I’m comparing to the mayoral results.

7:00 – Thirteen booths have reported in Newcastle, and Gavin Morris is just over 50% of the primary vote. A very good start for him.

6:17 – I will be comparing the new election results for Newcastle with those from 2024. I was hoping to do the same for Liverpool but I have discovered that the booth-level ward results are missing from my dataset. Presumably this was to do with the election being run by a private provider. I thought I had solved that problem but apparently not.

6:00 – Polls have just closed for three council by-elections in New South Wales. I wouldn’t normally cover council by-elections, but two of them are quite large.

In the City of Newcastle, there is a by-election for the Lord Mayor. Ross Kerridge resigned recently due to the tolls of his cancer treatment. I have written a guide for this by-election here. Ross Kerridge was elected at the head of an independent team called Our Newcastle in September 2024, defeating the Labor incumbent by a 1.7% margin.

Kerridge has endorsed independent Gavin Morris. His main opposition is Labor councillor Declan Clausen. The Greens and Liberal candidates are also sitting councillors. The twelve councillors split 5 Labor, 3 Greens, 2 Liberals and 2 independents elected on Kerridge’s ticket. If Labor gains the mayoralty, they will be just one vote short of a majority.

In the South Ward of Liverpool council, there is a by-election to replace Betty Green, who was won of four Labor councillors elected to the council in 2024. The council is split down the middle at the moment. In 2024, Liberal councillor Ned Mannoun returned to the directly-elected mayoralty, along with four other Liberals, four Labor and two independents. Betty Green was elected deputy mayor in September 2025 with the support of the Liberal councillors, putting her out of step with her own party. She resigned from council some time later.

Part of the interesting story here is that Liverpool chose not to use countbacks following the 2024 election. If countbacks were used, this seat would have been filled by countback shortly before the deadline for the last use of countbacks for this council term. Instead the by-election has apparently cost $900,000, and has been quite bitter between the major parties.

At the 2024 election, the Liberal Party polled 40.2% in the ward, and the ALP polled 30.2%. The right-wing Our Local Community also polled 9.4%. So it’s likely that a status quo result would see the Liberal Party gain a sixth seat of eleven, giving them a majority on the council.

There will also be a by-election for the A Ward of Uralla Council. I have no plans to cover this contest.

The recent South Australian election was off the charts for disproportionality, with a government winning an enormous majority with less than 40% of the vote. Two right wing parties split the vote between them fairly evenly, and won very few seats from that vote.

From today’s post, I am going to look at how that disproportionality compares historically, and look at what the result could have looked like under some kind of proportional representation (PR) system.

The most widely-accepted method of calculating disproportionality is the Gallagher index of least squares. This method compares each party’s share of the vote and share of the seats and adds up the differences. A score of 0 would indicate precise proportionality between seats and votes. Say, every party received exactly 100 votes per seat. I have previously analysed the Gallagher index for a number of Australian jurisdictions and you can find those posts here.

South Australian elections have been steadily increasing in disproportionality in recent decades with occasional spikes. The previous high of 20.65 took place in 1993. The Liberal Party polled just over 50% with Labor just over 30%, but won 37 seats to 10, with 9% of the vote going to the Democrats for no seats.

But the 2026 result is off the charts, with a score of 28.4. By comparison, the 2025 federal election produced a score of 23.1 if the Coalition is treated as separate parties, or 22.1 if the Coalition is treated as a single party.

To give a sense of what could be possible under a proportional system, I have split up the 47 existing electorates into three maps based on different magnitudes (the number of members per electorate) – three, five or seven. Unfortunately 47 is a prime number so it’s not possible to make every seat the same magnitude, but I made them as close as possible. I refer to those maps as M3, M5 and M7, while the actual electorate map is M1. I have then taken the actual 2026 results, and the 2022 results matched to the current boundaries, merged them into the multi-member electorates and estimated who would have likely won each seat.

Now I should note that this is just a simulation. A different electoral system would undoubtedly lead to changes in the party system and how people vote. But still, it is interesting to see how a given vote spread produces different results under different systems.

I would also ask you to not put too much importance on the specific electoral boundaries or the names. I have tried to draw them in a sensible way, but if real electorates were drawn they would be drawn afresh, not just merging existing electorates, and there would be opportunity for those with local input to feed in.

Having said all that, this map shows the three maps I drew. Adjacent seats in the same colour are merged into the same multi-member electorate. You can click on any seat to see the result for that merged electorate at the 2022 and 2026 elections.

I conducted a similar exercise using the results of the 2019 and 2022 federal elections.

One thing that jumped out was that fragmentation goes up as the average magnitude increases. Under an M3 model, the result is reasonably proportional, but does give a small winners bonus to larger parties, compared to a purely proportional result.

This chart shows the results of the three models in 2022 and 2026, compared to the actual result and a purely proportional result.

The scale of Labor’s victory beyond their vote share in 2026 really stands out. Their proportional share of seats would have been 18 seats, but they actually won 34 seats – almost double. The disproportion was much less in 2022, when they won eight more seats than their proportional share.

The M3 model in 2026 still leaves Labor with a slim parliamentary majority, but in every other proportional scenario the Labor government usually ends up slightly short of a majority. Yet there is always a progressive majority.

Meanwhile, on the right, One Nation would have won more seats than the Liberal Party under any 2026 model. Once there is even some basic proportionality, the higher One Nation vote means they win more seats. One Nation piled up a lot more votes than the Liberal Party in seats they didn’t win, but once there are 3-member electorates, there’s usually at least one right-wing seat in each electorate.

The performance of One Nation is particularly notable. You see a lot of anger at the electoral system from One Nation supporters, but pretty much none of it seems to be directed towards improving proportionality. Instead it is usually focused on preferences. A wide variety of parties would benefit from a more proportional system. At these recent elections, it would have benefited all parties other than Labor. The Liberal Party has a lot less room to fall if results are proportional, and the Greens and One Nation can win their fair share.

Sullivan was elected twice as a Labor MP in 2020 and 2024, but was expelled from the party in May 2025 over domestic violence allegations, and passed away last week.

The by-election will likely be held around the middle of 2026. Stafford is a relatively conventional Labor seat in the northern suburbs of Brisbane. I don’t think it’s a particularly good area for One Nation, but I’m sure they will make their presence known.

Read my guide to Stafford here.

The typical process of counting ballot papers at the election doesn’t usually distinguish different types of informal votes. A vote could be informal because the voter has left their ballot blank, because they’ve only numbered one box, or because they have made a mistake in their numbering. Federal informal voting rules are quite strict, and there could be numerous reasons why a vote could be informal.

If you want to know more about why voters are casting informal ballots is by conducting a survey where you revisit those ballot papers and categorise them, recording the cause of the informality.

The last survey of informal ballot papers took place in 2016, but the AEC had promised to produce another report after the 2025 election. You can read it here.

The AEC has not reviewed informal ballot papers in all seats, but instead has selected 25 seats to review. They’ve reviewed the ten seats with the highest informal rate, another eleven seats which had at least one booth with 50 or more votes and an informal rate of over 25%, and four more seats as a comparison. These seats have a bias towards New South Wales, since informal voting tended to be higher in that state.

Past informality reviews have split the different voting categories between those that are apparently deliberate and those that are apparently accidental. Blank ballots, for example, are presumed to be deliberate while those where a voter has numbered some boxes but hasn’t successfully filled out the ballot are presumed to be accidentally informal.

For this report, the AEC has categorised completely blank ballots, and sorted those with some numbers into those with a single ‘1’ only, those with numbers 1-6 (which is what would happen if you took Senate advice and applied it to the House) and those with other incorrect numbering. A small number of ballots involved a voter identifying themselves (0.2%) and 8.4% don’t fit into any of those categories.

A clear majority of informal votes involved someone filling in the numbers, specifically:

• First preference only – 16.9%
• Numbered 1-6 only – 12.3%
• Incorrect numbering/method – 37.0%

Unfortunately the data doesn’t make it entirely clear if all of these votes have a clear ‘1’, but the first two categories at least would count as formal under optional preferential voting (OPV), and I suspect most of the incorrect numbering would also count as formal.

The report breaks down the type of informal votes based on the number of candidates on the ballot.

As the ballot gets bigger, numbering issues become a more significant issue, with 1-6 numbering issues making up 12-19% of informal votes once the ballot is longer enough for 6 preferences to not produce a formal ballot. This is consistent with data we had on ballot paper size being correlated with informal voting.

The AEC survey identified a significantly higher rate of 1-only votes in New South Wales, the only state currently using an OPV system for single-member electorates in state elections.

The AEC survey also looked at specific polling places with extremely high informal rates. There was one booth, Missabotti in the NSW seat of Cowper, where 45% of votes were informal. The AEC has identified that 64% of those informal votes were voters who numbered 1-6. Eleven candidates ran in Cowper, so a voter filling out six preferences didn’t come close to a formal vote. It does look like incorrect ballot paper instructions (potentially combined with incorrect word-of-mouth) did have an effect there.

The big question for me is how much informal voting is driven by the requirement for voters to number every box. There will always be people who intentionally vote informal simply out of protest at being required to cast a vote, and those voters are easy to identify through blank ballots or scribbled messages. But then there are those who cast a vote with a clear intention, but aren’t counted because of our strict formality rules.

It’s a bit hard to compare like-with-like between 2016 and 2025, both because the categories have changed slightly and because the 2025 survey doesn’t cover every seat. In 2016, incomplete and non-sequential numbering made up 40% of informal votes, and blank votes made up 25%. I think it’s also possible that the “incorrect numbering/method” category in 2025 would cover ticks and crosses, which brings the equivalent number in 2016 up to 48%. But in 2025, that number is up to about 66%. So it does seem like numbering issues are playing a bigger role than they used to be.

The AEC report seems to have an unspoken assumption that anyone who just numbers one box, or numbers a handful and then stops, has intended to vote formally and has misunderstood the rules. But I think it’s entirely possible there are voters who refuse to mark certain preferences, and know that their vote will be informal. On the right, One Nation has been sending signals of such a position, and I think we could see some voters on the left who refuse to preference either major party. Right now it is the position of the electoral system that it’s too bad, those voters have to number every box. I’m not so sure.