The event will be held at the Punter’s Club in Fitzroy at 7pm that Tuesday.

With One Nation reaching new polling highs and an ageing Labor government seemingly set for defeat, Victoria’s election looks set to be complex and may take some time to call.

Three days after the election, join myself and two guests to debrief on the campaign, analyse the results and understand what might be coming next.

Those guests are:

• Rachel Withers is a freelance journalist and commentator who has written for Crikey, The Age, The Saturday Paper and The Monthly, where she was awarded Mumbrella’s “2021 Columnist of the Year” for her newsletter, The Politics. She currently co-hosts RRR’s Spin Cycle, and regularly appears on political podcasts including Cut Through, Lamestream, and Serious Danger.
• Dr Emily Foley is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Canberra’s Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Flinders University. Based in Melbourne, Emily’s research focuses on party politics, political organisation, and participation in Australia.

Tickets will cost $20. For those of you who are Tally Room members on Patreon, early access for tickets will open next Monday, September 28. For everyone else, tickets will be available from Monday October 5. But get in quick as spaces are limited.

This redistribution was due last year, but was postponed due to doubt about whether Queensland could gain a thirty-first seat for the 2028 federal election. That is why this redistribution is only commencing now, while redistributions for federal seats in South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT are almost finished.

Along with the opening of submissions, the AEC has also published detailed enrolment figures for every SA1 block in the state, as well as projections of what they expect enrolment to be in August 2028. This is a shorter projection period than what I’ve seen for past redistributions, and I’ve asked the AEC why this is the case.

The main point of this blog post is to analyse those projected enrolment figures.

Australian federal electoral law allows electorates to be drawn with up to 10% variation in current enrolment, but just 3.5% variation as of the projection period. So those projection numbers end up more important and ensure that fast-growing seats are drawn smaller than slow-growing seats.

This map shows how much each seat deviates from the average on the projected figures. You can click on any seat to see the precise deviation on both metrics for that seat.

There is a very distinct ring wrapping around Brisbane where seats 15%+ over the projected quota: Wright, Blair, Longman and Fisher collectively are projected to have about 73% of a seat in surplus enrolment by 2028.

Seats in Brisbane proper, on the other hand, are mostly well under quota. Ryan, Moreton and Bonner are all at less than 90% of the average. Most other urban seats are all under quota by smaller degrees, although Brisbane and Petrie are above average.

The Gold Coast has some seats over quota and some under quota, but they mostly cancel out. Forde and Fadden have over a quota of surplus voters between them while Bowman, McPherson and Moncrieff are close to quota. Fairfax on the Sunshine Coast is slightly over quota.

Looking further field, just one seat outside of the south-east is over the average: Hinkler in central Queensland is projected to be 2.9% above the average. But none of the seats are as far below the average as Ryan, Moreton and Bonner.

This table groups electorates by region, and then ultimately into urban South-East Queensland and the remainder of the state. When one seat is over quota but it’s neighbour is under quota it is easy enough to adjust both seats by moving a suburb. But when a region systemically is under quota, it forces more significant changes.

The twenty seats of urban South-East Queensland are due to contain surplus voters equivalent to 40.9% of an electorate by August 2028, but that masks significant differences within these seats. The nine seats of Brisbane will only have about eight and a half seats worth of voters, while outlying south-east Queensland and the Sunshine Coast will have over 80% of a surplus seat.

Regional Queensland is significantly under quota, in particular the seats of North Queensland.

I suspect we will see shifts along the coast with seats expanding southward, and that will absorb some of the surplus enrolment on the outskirts of south-east Queensland, but Brisbane electorates will need to expand outward to absorb the remaining growth.

You can make suggestions now, and they must be in by Friday 16 October.

The legislation will also go some way to diluting the significance of the non-residential vote in the City of Melbourne. Currently non-residential businesses and property owners each get two votes in City of Melbourne elections (just for that one council), which allows them to outvote the residential population. That clause has not been removed, but it appears that automatic enrolment of non-residential voters will end, which should go some way to reducing the number of non-residential voters.

I am currently working on a historical research project on group voting tickets, likely to put out after next year’s New South Wales state election. The GVT appears to have been an invention of the Australian Electoral Office (soon to become the AEC) in 1983 as a solution to the problem of high informal voting levels for the Australian Senate. The newly-elected Hawke Labor government had a policy of introducing optional preferential voting to solve the informality problem. Indeed the Whitlam government had legislation introducing OPV that died in the Senate in 1975. But with the Coalition and the Democrats strongly opposed to OPV, the GVT (or ‘the list system’ as it was called at the time) was a solution.

It quickly spread to New South Wales and South Australia, and was introduced in Western Australia when proportional representation was introduced in 1987. New South Wales was the first to abolish GVTs following the 1999 election, and then Victoria introduced the practice when proportional representation was introduced in 2006.

The next City of Melbourne election will be held in late 2028.

I cannot rule out the possibility that some other elected bodies uses GVTs – when I was active in the University of Sydney SRC around 2005-6, numerous other student associations used GVTs to simplify enormous ballot papers. The Sydney Uni SRC at the time elected 45-47 members to their SRC on a single ballot paper. The number was reduced to be in the thirties, but I also made sure that the SRC adopted a NSW-style above-the-line system rather than GVTs.

Anyway, congratulations to Victorians for finally making this move, and also making a small first step to reducing the undue influence of non-residential voters in the state’s most prominent council.

9:10 – One of those two remaining booths has now reported, but the number of postal votes has also doubled. One Nation’s primary vote lead is now over 10%.

8:38 – We now have all but two ordinary booths reporting primary votes, and all but four booths reporting preference counts. In the places where both figures have come in, Labor has 55.3% of preferences from the remaining 14 candidates. Still, despite this, One Nation is on 53.2% after preferences.

8:24 – Unfortunately I was miscalculating the preference flow to Labor, it’s more like 60%, not 75%.

Speaking of errors, the WAEC results seem to keep popping up with errors – vote totals change slightly for particular booths, and right now two booths have exactly the same primary vote figures.

8:10 – We now have preference counts from four election day booths and they all show Labor getting 72-79% of preferences over One Nation. But One Nation still wins three out of those four booths.

8:01 – We have preference counts from two booths, and they show the votes of other candidates favouring Labor over One Nation by 74-79%. One Nation is still leading on the raw 2CP count, but it’s relatively close.

7:43 – There is no good news for Labor in the first two regular election-day booths. Labor has polled 26% and 28% in these two booths, well behind One Nation. In the low to mid 30s.

I am calling this by-election as won by One Nation.

7:39 – Poll Bludger’s results website (based on the media feed) is ahead of the WAEC website. It also has results now for Comet Bay and Port Kennedy. It also appears the Western Australian Electoral Commission batch was a mistake and it’s now listed as Mobile Polling.

Overall One Nation has a primary vote lead over Labor of 34.7% to 26.1%.

7:35 – Another roughly 1300 postal votes have been added, and Labor is on 25.6% to One Nation’s 35.5%.

There’s also another booth called ‘Western Australian Electoral Commission’ – presumably prepoll votes at the electoral office – which has One Nation on 22.6% and Labor on 26.3%. I don’t have a 2025 comparison for this booth.

7:23 – The first batch of results has reported and it’s 1300 postal votes. One Nation leads on 36%, with Labor on 25% and the Liberal Party on 19%. If you compare this to the total postal vote in 2025 (which was about twice as big), that’s a swing of 23% against Labor and 28% to One Nation. But it would be unsurprising that One Nation does relatively well on the postal votes.

6:00pm WA time – Polls have just closed in the by-election for the WA state seat of Secret Harbour. I will be covering results tonight, although I don’t plan on doing much in the next hour. WA is two hours behind the east coast, so I am posting this at 8pm Sydney time. While we wait for results, you can check out my by-election guide.

I have 341 candidates on my list of Legislative Assembly candidates. These candidates are running for eleven parties, along with fourteen independents. As a comparison, 740 candidates were nominated in 2022, representing twenty-one parties.

I expect that this field will grow a lot, but there is a question as to how the abolition of group voting tickets might affect motivations to run large numbers of candidates.

Under group voting tickets, a party may only be aiming to win in one region, but has an incentive to run candidates in every region so they can swap those preferences. Now, preferences will only flow according to voters (who may follow how-to-votes). For a small party, there may be an incentive to focus efforts on one or two regions. This could also flow through to the lower house where some minor parties have made a big effort to run a lot of candidates. In 2022, Animal Justice ran candidates in all 88 electorates, while Family First ran in all but one and the Family Party ran in 58 out of 88.

This time around, Labor and the Greens are leading with 74 announced candidates each. Both parties will undoubtedly run a full slate of 88. Victorian Socialists are not far behind with 68 announced candidates – a very large number this far out for small parties.

Often when a minor party runs a huge number of candidates, a lot of those candidates are announced at the last minute, with little details about those candidates at the time of nomination. Yet most or all of those VicSoc candidates have profiles on the party website.

The Liberal Party has announced 56 candidates and the Nationals have announced ten. The two parties have only announced competing candidates in the seat of Ripon, so the Coalition has 65 seats covered – less than the Socialists.

The Animal Justice Party, New Democrats, West Party and Socialist Alliance have all announced 6-12 candidates each.

It is fascinating how few seats have announced One Nation candidates. So far they have announced just eleven candidates. These candidates are mostly in outer suburban seats like Pakenham, Yan Yean, Sunbury and Melton. Only in Murray Plains and Narracan have they announced candidates in deeply rural seats where they will likely be in a head-to-head contest with the Nationals. I wonder if this reflects an analysis of the SA election which showed that they needed a much higher vote to win those rural One Nation-Liberal contests compared to their viability in a Labor-One Nation outer suburban race.

I have been categorising candidates by gender. Labor and Greens are running a clear majority of women. Indeed if the two parties announce men for all of their remaining seats, they would have a bare majority of men. The Victorian Socialists are about even, while the Liberal, Nationals and One Nation parties are all male-dominated.

There are an average of 3.875 candidates per seat. Only one candidate has been announced in the Liberal seat of Mornington and the Nationals seat of Lowan. There are six candidates in Essendon, Melton, Narre Warren South, Pakenham, Sunbury, Frankston and Werribee. These seats all have a Labor and Liberal candidate – two seats are missing a One Nation candidate and Sunbury does not yet have a Greens candidate.

As for the upper house, we don’t really have that big fields in most regions yet. For most minor parties, they only have a chance of winning one seat, so it’s more a question of whether a lead candidate has been announced rather than the total volume of candidates.

The Liberal Party, One Nation and Greens have all announced full tickets. Animal Justice, Victorian Socialists and Family First have all announced lead candidates in four regions. Sustainable Australia has recently announced close to a full slate.

In 2022, the ballot papers were almost all the same size in every region – 22 groups in most regions, and 24 in West Metro.

With the new optional preferential system, voters will be instructed to number at least five boxes above the line. Experience from Senate elections suggest most voters will number five, no more, no less. But Senate experience also shows us that, as the ballot papers have shrunk, those five preferences have been more meaningful and lasted further into the count. Five preferences is more likely to stay in the count in a race of 15 groups than a race of 25 groups.

I suspect in the medium term of the next ten years we will see amalgamations and the closure of some small parties, but the trajectory for this year’s election may already be set.

While this election is still some way off, it should be of interest with the first-term LNP government facing off against a resurgent One Nation in very different circumstances to other jurisdictions.

As has become my standard practice, I will wait until closer to the election to assess the likely result in each seat.

Most of the guide is paywalled for those who donate $10 or more per month to the Tally Room via Patreon., but I have unlocked three guides to give you a taste:

• Caboolture
• Logan
• Townsville

At the same time as I have been publishing this guide, I have unlocked the entirety of my Victoria 2026 guide, about three months out from the election. If you find it useful, please consider signing up as a $10 member via Patreon. This gives you access to my NSW and Queensland guides, and my partially-completed federal election guide.

This means my federal election guide now covers 120 House of Representatives electorates, as well as the 8 Senate guides. The 30 guides for Queensland will need to wait until the federal redistribution in that state is finalised – which I expect will take place about a year from now.

Most of this election guide is exclusive to those who sign up as a Tally Room member via Patreon – more on that below. But there are six guides which are unlocked and free for everyone to read. That now includes my guide to the Tasmanian seat of Franklin. This seat has been dramatically redrawn in the redistribution, losing its western half to Clark and expanding up the east coast of Tasmania. An independent, Peter George, came second here in 2025 and then went on to win a state seat representing the same electorate. But on the new boundaries, I think this seat is now a conventional Labor-Liberal contest again.

It’s worth noting that the Commission has proposed renaming this seat, and specifically suggested the name ‘Tongerlongeter’, and the process of consultation on a new name is ongoing. If the name changes, I will update the guide.

With this new addition to my election guides, I’ve also now changed my price for Tally Room membership from $8 to $10. For the last year or so, I have been promoting the Tally Room as costing $8 + GST ($8.80). Unfortunately I now realise Patreon does not take Australian GST directly from patrons (unlike sales tax in a number of other countries), so I need to increase my prices to take account of this change. I will not be rising prices for existing $8 donors, if you stay as a member. But unfortunately I will need a small price bump to cover GST and general price rises.

I have also now created an option to sign up for an annual membership for $96 a year – that is $8 per month on average, 20% off the new price of $10 per month.

That’s it for now – I am currently working on my Queensland state election guide which should be out later this month, and I’m also looking forwards towards the Victorian state election – keep an eye out for an announcement about a live event, and of course the podcast and an election night livestream.

Group voting tickets allow parties to control how preferences flow when voters cast their votes above the line, which allow for preference deals and have allowed small parties to corral their votes away from the bigger parties and win seats from low primary votes.

This legislation was introduced yesterday and when finally were able to see the legislation today following the second reading in the Legislative Assembly. You can read the legislation here.

There was a general expectation that a post-GVT electoral system would adopt some version of the systems used in other states or for the Senate, but now we have the detail.

It looks like Victoria will largely follow the lead of the Senate by requiring voters to number as many boxes as there are seats to be filled – in this case, five. But, also like the Senate, voters who give a clear ‘1’ but fail to number their top five preferences clearly will still have their votes count as formal. This was an important provision for Senate reform, since it meant that any voter who just voted ‘1’ (as had been formal prior to reform) would cast a formal vote.

Parties will be required to recommend 5 preferences or more on their how-to-vote cards, and we have seen from federal elections that this leads to a very high number of voters following that advice and numbering that minimum number of preferences.

I strongly support this legislation and hope that the Parliament will pass it with no delay.

We have a number of tools to help with this task, such as the pendulum and historical swing trends, but most of these tools don’t work that well in a multi-party environment, such as the one we’re now seeing with One Nation’s surge in support.

For this blog post, I’m going to use some limited data we’ve gained on how One Nation is polling in the state seats of Victoria to model how votes might turn into seats if One Nation’s vote is higher or lower.

To do some more sophisticated modelling of how votes might turn into seats, we would ideally get an estimate of how much of the vote each party has in each seat. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but it would give a rough shape of how votes are distributed. At a national level, two MRP polls have been published this year: one by DemosAU and one by Redbridge/Accent.

At a state level, none have been published in Victoria (or any other state). But we do have one MRP that was leaked to the media.

Redbridge/Accent conducted an MRP for Victorian Trades Hall in June 2026 which was eventually leaked to media outlets including the Australian Financial Review.

This MRP reported a primary vote of 27% for One Nation, with Labor and the Coalition tied on 26%, and the Greens on 13%. It’s basically a three-way tie between the three leading parties.

This MRP reports seat totals based on these votes of 39 Coalition seats, 35 Labor seats, 12 One Nation seats and 2 Greens seats. But there’s been a lot of disagreement about those seat totals.

The MRP asked voters to fill out a full ballot, and thus used preferences as allocated by the voter. It is more traditional in polling, particularly for MRPs, to use historic preference flows instead.

While we have less data on how preferences flow with a strong One Nation vote, there are definitely some strange figures in the Redbridge/Accent MRP preference flows. In particular, the MRP suggests that Coalition voters are favouring Labor over One Nation, while recent elections have suggested the opposite.

It may be that part of the discrepancy comes from Liberal how-to-vote cards. While those may influence voters in a real election, the MRP respondents haven’t had that advice.

It makes a big difference in a scenario where One Nation makes it to the top two in numerous seats. I have produced my own preference flow estimates based on previous elections. With the same primary votes as the Redbridge/Accent MRP, the seat totals end up very different:

The specific preference flows make a huge difference. I originally had Coalition to One Nation preferences a bit higher but tweaked it after feedback from Kevin Bonham, and that dropped the One Nation seat count from 31 to 27. There is also a lot we don’t know about how Coalition and One Nation preferences will flow in Labor-Greens contests and this makes a big difference as to the Greens seat count.

Anyway, while I have questions about the MRP’s preference flows, I do appreciate the provision of primary vote figures for every seat in the state, which then allows us to do some other analysis.

So I have taken those primary vote figures for the 88 seats, and I have then applied a model where I increase the One Nation primary vote of 27% by increments of 1% until they get to a primary vote of 37%, and also decrease their vote to 17%. For each increment of 1%, I transfer one third of a percentage point from Labor, and two thirds of a percentage point from the Coalition.

I also considered a model where there was a 1:1 swap between One Nation and Coalition votes, to model the impact of changes within the right-wing part of the electorate. I suspect the Coalition contributed more of One Nation’s vote as their vote started to climb, but this model only tries to model a One Nation vote starting at 17%, at which point that early climb has finished.

So, what did I find? This next chart shows how many seats each party would win for a given One Nation vote between 17% and 37%, using my preference flow estimates and using Redbridge/Accent’s primary vote estimates as a starting point with One Nation on 27%.

I have assumed that the top two candidates make the 2CP. If two candidates are tied for second place, I have run two different counts for each of the possible 2CPs, with each result worth half a seat. This explains why some results involve a party winning half a seat.

The number of One Nation seats is very low until they get to about 22%, and then the seat count climbs relatively consistently until they get to the low 30s, then it slows down again. In this model, Labor and Coalition seat wins are roughly neck-and-neck as the One Nation vote climbs.

Interestingly, a primary vote of 32% is enough for a very slim One Nation majority. In that scenario, the Coalition is on 24.3% and Labor is on 22.7%. With quite a clear right-wing majority, it’s not surprising that the dominant conservative party would be able to win a majority in a divided contest.

This is just one model, but I think it does give some insights into how One Nation might perform in seats for a given vote.

Another feature of this modelling that I found interesting was how each party’s vote share translates differently into seat shares. Each party has a different preference position – Labor benefits from the Greens in most seats. The Coalition does a bit better than One Nation if they face off. At the recent state election in South Australia, One Nation narrowly outpolled the Liberal Party, but won one less seat. I think it’s reasonable to expect a similar primary vote for the two parties would see the Coalition win more seats.

So I went into my election model and compared how many seats each party wins on the same primary vote. The range of results is wider for One Nation than the other parties, since the model assumes a greater range of change for One Nation.

For most of the comparable range, the major parties win more seats than One Nation on the same vote.

On the current polling, with all three parties in the mid-20s, the three parties would win relatively similar numbers of seats. If any of the three parties was to boost their support into the 30s, they would then have a chance at winning a majority, because there is quite a steep dropoff in support.

Next month I plan to write seat guides for the 18 seats in South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, to add to the 102 that have already been published. Queensland’s 30 seats will need to wait for next years.

10:30 – I have updated my federal pendulum to reflect the new boundaries for South Australian, Tasmanian and ACT federal electorates. This includes links to my guides that I’ve written so far – I am planning to write guides for these newly-completed electorates in August.

I will put together the interactive map later this morning, but that’s it for now.

10:20 – This table compares the old and new margins. There is very little change – Mayo becomes 0.4% stronger for Rebekha Sharkie, while Makin and Spence each change by 0.2% and Barker changes by 0.3%. Compared to the draft redistribution, the biggest change is in Grey/O’Donoghue, where the Liberal Party is now 0.4% stronger than they were on the draft boundaries.

10:15 – This table shows the 2PP and primary vote for each of the new seats. Only Mayo, Spence, O’Donoghue and Kingston should have differed from the draft.

10:13 – The original draft redistribution shifted 3.9% of voters – the new version shifts just 1.8%.

10:00 – The Australian Electoral Commission this morning announced the final decision on the federal redistribution of South Australia’s ten electorates.

They have adopted most of the proposed changes, but in two places they will be leaving suburbs in their original seat. A bunch of suburbs swapped between Mayo and Kingston will remain in their 2025 electorate, and the same is true for Grey and Spence. The commission has also adopted the new name of O’Donoghue to replace the seat of Grey.

This is a relatively small chance so it will be possible for me to create a map and data reflecting these changes – something the AEC has not done itself. When that’s done I will share an interactive map, my estimate of seat margins, and an estimate of the pendulum now that the first wave of redistributions has been completed. The Queensland federal redistribution is only commencing now and will take a way to finish.