I thought I would knock together a blog post analysing the trends and trying to compare the situation to previous elections.

Right now I have identified 533 candidates for the Legislative Assembly. This is roughly in line with the number of candidates who nominated in 2006-2018 – about 500 nominated in each of those years, peaking at 545 in 2014. But the numbers surged to a huge 740 in 2022, and we’re nowhere near that number yet.

But of course it’s worth noting that we are still almost a month away from nominations closing, and plenty of candidates emerge at the last minute. Indeed it’s not unusual for waves of candidates to appear on the official list of nominations with no prior announcement.

There’s always a few people who post in various places saying “wow, this major party is just not running in my seat” but the bigger parties will always nominate a full slate. The absence of a candidate doesn’t mean they won’t run, but it does suggest something about their capacity and how they prioritise that seat.

I have found a blog post I wrote on October 29 2022 – so a little bit later in the nomination process than we are at today – and it provides some useful comparisons.

I had identified just 422 candidates at the end of October last time, even though the list ended up blowing out to 740.

At that time, Labor and the Greens still had almost ten seats where they hadn’t announced a candidate, while the Coalition had candidates in all but two seats.

Three large minor parties have the most coverage. One Nation has announced a candidate for every seat except Northcote. The Greens are only missing in Thomastown and Warrandyte. The Victorian Socialists now have candidates in all but six seats.

Labor is short eight candidates, while the Coalition is absent in five seats. There is just one seat with both a Liberal and Nationals candidate: Ripon. In 2022, the parties ran against each other in six seats.

I thought I had noticed a large field of credible-appearing independent candidates. The number of candidates (40) is not enormous, compared to the 120 candidates who ran in 2022. But compared to the 32 candidates in the race in early October last time, or the 48 candidates announced by late October, these numbers seem roughly on par.

The gender trends are not surprising – One Nation is overhwelmingly male, while Labor and the Greens have a majority of female candidates. Animal Justice is almost entirely running women.

With five groups running candidates in most seats, there isn’t much variation in the size of the field in each seat. Warrandyte has just three candidates, with four other seats having only four candidates. Sydenham has ten candidates and Melbourne has nine. Albert Park, Benambra, Broadmeadows and Macedon all have eight.

I am also interested in the spread of candidates between parties. Just eleven parties have candidates announced so far. This compares to twenty in 2022.

Now it is possible that a number of small parties will announce a handful of candidates at the last minute – 24 parties are currently registered for Victorian elections. But there are other reasons to think the field might be narrowed in terms of the range of parties.

When looking at Legislative Council tickets, the number of groups with announced candidates varies from seven to nine. There have still not been announcements of the Labor tickets, so you can add at least one to each group. This compares to 2022 when the same 22 parties ran in all eight regions.

Again, there may be groups that emerge with candidates at the last minute, but I suspect we will see shrunken Legislative Council ballot papers, with potentially some parties focusing on one or a handful of regions rather than running statewide.

We have seen these trends at a federal level – more candidates running for a smaller number of parties, and shrinking upper house ballots. Those smaller ballots will reduce the impact of vote exhaustion, with voters asked to number at least five boxes.

This is the first time we’ve ever done this, and I’m not yet clear on how much demand there might be. So these items will only be available for a limited time, and based on orders we will know how many to produce and send out.

Orders must be in by Monday November 2. I hope this will allow for any merch to reach you by the time of the Victorian election at the end of November.

The store can be found at the ‘shop’ link on the top menu of the website, or by clicking here.

We’re keeping it simple – there’s one tote bag and one hat.

The bag has the slogan ‘Single Transferable Tote’ and the Tally Room logo. It is for sale for $30.

The hat has the slogan ‘Waiting for the pre-polls’ and is for sale for $40.

Shipping will be a flat fee of $10.

As always the Tally Room is supported by you, the reader, mostly through Patreon subscriptions. Any profits from the sale of these items would help allow me to spend more time doing the analysis and reporting on this site. Recently I’ve really enjoyed doing the research for my election history podcast series. I have a lot more ideas for those but I probably need a boost to my income to have the time to make more.

If these items sell well, I may be able to have some available for sale at the Melbourne show – but pre-ordering now is the only way to guarantee you’ll get something. If this goes well, I may do a future run of merch for other elections, but only if readers think this is worth supporting now.

So please go have a look and buy something!

Thanks to everyone on the Discord who helped me workshop some ideas for products, and to Dale Harrison who has pulled together the store and worked out production and distribution.

The latest poll was published earlier this week, and showed a slight change in the primary vote, but a very big change in the seat counts. For this blog post, I am going to explore what changed between those two polls, and what it tells us about the mechanics of our electoral system.

First, let’s look at the topline figures. One Nation’s primary vote dropped by four points, from 30% to 26%. Labor and the Coalition both increased their support by just 1%, while the ‘others’ vote increased by two points.

Next up, let’s look at a summary of the most likely winners across all 150 seats (although DemosAU also provides ranges of outcomes).

The first post-election MRP, conducted in October-November 2025, showed Labor steady on just under 100 seats. The last MRP, however, had Labor on just 68 seats – probably enough to scrape together a majority, but only just ahead of One Nation on 60 seats.

Labor’s seat count is now back in the 80s, while One Nation has crashed into third place with just 24 seats. Despite outpolling the Coalition on primary votes, One Nation ends up winning fewer seats.

This grabbed my attention, because I have been saying for a while now that One Nation would need to significantly outpoll the Coalition to win more seats. I have argued that if the two parties are close to neck-and-neck, like they were in South Australia, the Coalition would win more seats. And that is exactly what this poll has shown. For the rest of this post, I want to explore why this is happening.

Let’s start by looking at who makes the top two in the 150 seats. You can’t win a seat under our single-member electoral system unless you make the top two. When the race for second and third is close, it can make a big difference as to who wins. We have seen on the left that the Greens’ chances of victory are much greater when Labor drops to third – and now the mirror image is appearing on the right, with One Nation’s chances of victory dropping away if the Coalition makes the top two.

The top two changed in 28 seats (almost a fifth of the country). Labor-One Nation contests remain the most common type of contest, but have dropped from 97 seats in February-March to just 74 in August-September. There are significantly more Labor-Coalition contests, and also more Coalition-One Nation contests.

By my count, One Nation lost twelve seats because of a change in the top two. In six seats, One Nation won the seat in the May-July poll but now fell into third place – five of those seats went to the Coalition and one went to Labor. There was a further six where One Nation stayed in the top two but their main rival changed from Labor or an independent to the Coalition, and in all of these seats the Coalition won.

Those twelve seats make up just over a third of One Nation’s losses compared to May-July.

One Nation lost a further 22 seats where there was no change in the top two – 15 to Labor and 7 to the Coalition.

The next question is the impact of preference flows on the results. This next chart shows the proportion of all other votes that flowed to each top-two party in each seat. Results are grouped based on who the top two were. In brackets shows how many seats were in that category for each MRP.

The numbers are fairly steady, although One Nation has been doing relatively worse over time, against either the Coalition or Labor. Labor has been losing ground to both the Coalition and the Greens.

The most recent DemosAU poll report explains the logic of their preference flows. In short, it is a combination of past election data and respondent preferences.

I was mildly critical of the first MRP in 2025 for using overly generous preference flows for One Nation, and it does look like flows to One Nation have weakened in subsequent MRPs. Comparing these figures to South Australian election results suggests they are roughly right. Kevin Bonham has suggested that the expected flow of preferences from the Coalition to One Nation is too weak. Based on the experience of South Australia and Farrer, I think it is probably about right, but could be slightly low once you consider that these voters haven’t been offered a how-to-vote that will likely recommend Liberal preferences to One Nation.

As you can see from the above table, One Nation do not win a majority of preferences against either the Coalition or Labor. Labor has a slight lead, and that would vary from seat to seat depending on the make-up of the other minor candidates (in particular the relative balance of Coalition and Greens voters), while the Coalition defeats One Nation comfortably.

This preference deficit can be seen in how One Nation performs in seats where they come first on the primary vote. One Nation came first or equal-first in 52 seats on this week’s DemosAU MRP, yet they only win 24 of them. Labor wins eleven, and the Coalition picks up seventeen. That is half of the total Coalition wins, achieved on preferences against One Nation.

Another point worth making is the closeness of many of these races. The “winner” polled just 50% of the 2CP in nine seats, and Labor won six of those seats. This does seem quite lucky, and it wouldn’t take much for Labor to have won a lot less than the 84 that the MRP projects as the most likely outcome.

DemosAU split seats into “in doubt”, “lean” and “firm” based on the winning candidate’s margin, and this next chart shows how many seats are in each of these categories based on the top two and the winner.

Overall, the “in doubt” races between Labor and One Nation split about evenly. Labor has a lot more safe seats, which reflects the deep split internally within the right which isn’t replicated on the left.

Most Coalition-One Nation seats are marginal in one way or another.

Overall, One Nation’s support has dropped somewhat since the middle of the year, and this poll shows the consequences of such a drop.

A slight swing back to the left has put Labor on more solid ground, but their majority is not very solid. I estimate that a swing of less than 2% would put Labor in minority.

If you were to look for a right-wing majority including the Coalition, One Nation, Bob Katter and Dai Le, Labor would need to lose all the seats on 50% and 51%, and just two seats on 52%. That’s not much of a shift.

Within the right, the Coalition has a big advantage if they make the top two, and One Nation’s seat gains rely on beating the Coalition by enough of a margin to push them out of the top two in most seats. If One Nation and the Coalition are competitive on the 2CP, the Coalition will win in most cases.

These MRPs are very useful, but they should be seen as a reflection of the current state of play, not a prediction of an election result. And comparing multiple MRPs over the year shows very clearly that small shifts in the vote can swing a lot of seats. Under our fragmented electoral system, a lot more seats could be in play at the next election.

In the final episode, Ben will look at the rise of One Nation and tactics to encourage voters exhausting their ballots, and look at who optional preferential voting might benefit or hurt today.

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

This is the second part of a series looking at the history of optional preferential voting in Australia – Just Vote 1. In today’s episode, I’ll be looking at how DLP preferences flowed strongly against Labor in the 1950s and 1960s, and how Labor responded by pushing for optional preferences in the 1970s and 1980s.

By the 1990s, preferences were no longer something that helped the conservatives, and Labor responded by changing their policy to support full preferences. Just as Labor abandoned OPV, the use of optional preferences in New South Wales and Queensland began to have a bigger impact.

But first, I will be holding my first Tally Room live podcast recording in Melbourne later this year. The show will be recorded at the Punter’s Club in Fitzroy on the Tuesday after the state election, December 1st. I’ll be joined by Emily Foley and Rachel Withers and we’ll be unpacking whatever the hell happened on Saturday night. Tickets are $20 and are now on sale – the link for tickets can be found at the Tally Room website.

The 1954 federal election was very much a two-party affair. The Communist Party polled just over 1%, as did some independents, but over 97% of the vote went to Labor or the Coalition.

But a few months later, things started to unravel within Labor, with federal leader HV Evatt denouncing the influence of BA Santamaria’s Movement and Industrial Groups within the ALP in late 1954. The split formalised at the 1955 federal conference in Hobart, with Movement delegates excluded from the party and going off to form a rival party, then called the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist).

The split was very much a state-based affair, and was originally focused entirely in Victoria. The split resulted in a large number of Victorian state MPs, as well as seven Victorian federal MPs, being expelled from the party, and it caused the fall of the Cain Labor state government. The New South Wales Labor government was able to keep internal tensions in check – while the split in Queensland was yet to happen.

At the 1955 federal election, Anti-Communist Labor candidates stood in less than a third of seats – every seat in Victoria, and three seats each in South Australia and Tasmania.

Even at the start, the party that would later become the Democratic Labor Party pursued its most famous strategy – deny preferences to Labor until the party reforms and reunifies with the expelled element.

While it only affected a third of the country, the impact was obvious in those seats. Across 34 seats where the Anti-Communist Labor candidate failed to make the top two, an average of 77% of preferences flowed to the Coalition over Labor.

The breakaway party did show some promise in coming close to winning seats, but failed to win any. Anti-Communist Labor made the top two in five seats, and they gained very strong preference flows. Liberal preferences flowed strongly to them over Labor, and in one seat Labor preferences favoured their former co-partisans over the Liberal Party. They came close in three seats, but missed out.

The ALP (Anti-Communist) showed that they had the potential to do very well out of preference flows – as the nascent Country Party did in 1919 and 1922 – but they just didn’t poll enough primary votes to benefit from those flows. The party did not win a single seat in the House of Representatives throughout its history.

After the 1955 election, the split widened, this time into Queensland.

Labor had ruled Queensland since 1932, but in 1957 the split brought 25 years of Labor rule to an end.

The Premier, Vince Gair, was expelled from the ALP in April 1957 over his support for the Santamaria-aligned Industrial Groups – the same issue that had caused the Victorian split two years earlier. He took a majority of his caucus and almost all of his cabinet with him and formed the Queensland Labor Party. His government limped on briefly before losing confidence and going to an election.

The 1957 Queensland election was conducted using first past the post. Four parties each polled between 20% and 29%, and the results were anything but proportional. The Country Party, who polled fourth-highest, won the most seats. The Liberal Party and the Country Party between them won a majority of seats with 43% of the vote. More than half the vote was cast for either the original ALP or the br eakaway QLP, but they were significantly reduced in strength.

It is fascinating to consider what would have happened if preferences had been used, and they had flowed the way they did at federal elections around that time. I estimate 23 out of 75 seats, almost a third of the state, would have had a different winner.

Labor would have been hit particularly hard, with QLP and Coalition preferences both flowing against Labor. On the other hand, the QLP would have benefited from being the centre party, much like the Country Party did after the First World War. They would have doubled their seat count.

The Coalition parties would have lost some seats, with Labor preferences favouring the QLP over their historic opponents, but they would have also won some seats on preferences from the Labor breakaways. Overall, those preferences would have favoured the Liberal Party more than the Country Party. There still would have been a Liberal-Country coalition government, but with Labor reduced to a rump and the QLP as the main opposition.

This was yet another example of why Labor didn’t like preferences in the 1950s. At a state level, first-past-the-post stunted the success of the breakaway party and saved the Labor rump from a wipe-out.

At a federal level, what was becoming the Democratic Labor Party used preferences as a tool to beat Labor.

In 1958, the Queensland Labor Party contested almost every seat in their state, while the Democratic Labor Party, as they were now called, ran in almost every seat in the other five states. QLP and DLP how-to-vote cards clearly recommended preferences to the Liberal and Country parties over Labor –about three quarters of preferences flowed to the Coalition over Labor when DLP or QLP candidates were knocked out.

And this became the standard for the next decade and a half. The Queensland Labor Party eventually joined the Democratic Labor Party in 1962 – it was a national party but particularly strong in Victoria and Queensland, where the ALP had split. And they kept recommending preferences to the Coalition and away from Labor.

In 1961 and 1969 Labor came close to victory – a weaker DLP preference flow may have flipped those elections, but instead Labor remained out of power for 23 years.

The DLP effect can be seen very clearly in the data.

The Coalition would regularly come from behind on primary votes to win multiple seats at every election in this era. Labor wins from behind remained very rare, with just one such victory in each of 1961 and 1974.

Comparing the major parties’ primary votes to their two-party-preferred vote nationally, preferences clearly favoured the Coalition up until 1972, although the total volume of preferences was much less than has been seen at recent elections.

The DLP’s use of preferences to lock Labor out of power was well known in Australian politics at the time, and it flowed into opposition to the preference system within Labor and amongst their supporters.

A 1973 poll showed that 39% of voters supported first-past-the-post, with another 6% supporting an optional preferential voting system. 51% of Labor supporters favoured first-past-the-post, compared to less than 30% of those who supported the Coalition parties, the DLP or even the left-leaning Australia Party.

At some point during this era, Labor adopted a formal policy at a federal level of supporting first-past-the-post voting. This wasn’t totally new – after all, Queensland Labor had legislated this change in 1942, and New South Wales Labor had tried the same in 1927. But in the 1950s and 1960s, preferences were clearly not a winner for Labor, and political self interest meant they advocated for its abolition.

The ALP’s federal conference dropped support for first-past-the-post voting in 1971, and in 1973 they adopted a policy to advocate for optional preferential voting. It has been hard to find much information about why they made this change – it seems likely that underlying community support for having at least the option to mark preferences made first-past-the-post an increasingly untenable policy, but optional preferences created the potential to achieve some of the same political effects.

While Labor supported a change to the system, the 1974 federal election showed an example of compulsory preferences at their worst, and gave them a pretext to make a change.

The 1974 federal election was just the second double dissolution since the introduction of proportional representation for the Senate in 1949.

With each state electing ten senators on a single ballot, it was very tempting for new contenders to enter the race.

The field was particularly large in New South Wales, where 73 candidates nominated across eighteen groups, and a list of sixteen ungrouped candidates. There were also 40 candidates in Victoria, and 38 in South Australia.

This was a big uptick compared to the last Senate election in 1970. At that election, Victoria had just 25 candidates, and no other state had more than twenty.

This mattered, because voters needed to mark a preference for every candidate on the ballot paper, without mistakes. With a field of 73 candidates in New South Wales, it would be very easy to make a mistake with your numbering and your whole vote is informal.

This surge in candidate numbers did increase the informal vote in five out of six states. There was an informal vote of 12.3% in New South Wales, and in five of six states it was over 10%.

The informal rate had been high in the Senate for a long time. At the first proportional representation election in 1949, New South Wales recorded an informal rate of 12%, with every state except Queensland exceeding 10% – much like in 1974. The rate was again higher in the late 1950s, but 1974 hit a new high.

The 1974 election produced a slim majority for the Whitlam government in the House of Representatives, but the numbers were slightly worse for the Senate.

Labor and the Coalition each won 29 seats, leaving the balance of power in the hands of two crossbenchers, neither of whom were particularly favourable to Labor. And as we know now, conservative state governments in New South Wales and Queensland appointed senators unfavourable to the government to fill Labor seats in the Senate, leaving Labor without a working majority, and ultimately leading to the dismissal of the Whitlam government and the premature 1975 election.

What people probably don’t remember is the close races at that 1974 election. In two states, Labor came very close to winning an extra seat.

In New South Wales, Labor’s sixth candidate Peter Westerway fell about 32,000 votes short of winning, losing to the fifth Liberal candidate Peter Baume. But over 330,000 informal votes were cast.

Meanwhile in Queensland, fifth Labor candidate Mal Colston lost to sixth Coalition candidate Glen Sheil by less than 5,000 votes, compared to almost 66,000 informal votes.

Labor figures at the time blamed the high informal rate for both of these losses, and they were probably right. Evidence over a long period of time pointed to higher levels of informal voting in Labor electorates, with informal voting more common amongst groups that favoured Labor. It is likely that there were enough voters who attempted to vote Labor but failed to vote formally to put Westerway and Colston in front.

And if these results had gone the other way, Labor would have started the new term with a clear majority – and even if those conservative premiers still played havoc with Senate vacancies, the government would have had the numbers to pass its legislation and avoid supply being blocked. It is likely the government would have been able to complete its term and see what fate awaited it after a full term in government.

With this in mind, the Labor government moved on optional preferential voting. Labor had looked to loosen preferencing requirements for at least half a century, and now they tried to act.

The Electoral Laws Amendment Bill of 1974 attempted to make a number of changes to Australian electoral law, many of which would be implemented a decade later: bringing forward the close of voting from 8pm to 6pm, adding party names to the ballot and registering political parties, amongst other reforms. But one of the most prominent and most controversial was a proposal to introduce optional preferential voting for both the House and the Senate.

When the Bill was first introduced, the minister, Fred Daly, claimed that the change would speed up the counting for Senate elections, which had taken a very long time in 1974, but also aimed at “allowing electors the maximum degree of choice in exercising their democratic voting rights.”

“This often means that an elector… is compelled to express a preference for candidates whom he may not know or for whom he has an extreme dislike. Faced with this meaningless, undemocratic requirement, many electors either intentionally or unintentionally disfranchise themselves by failing to correctly mark all necessary squares on the ballot paper.”

The Labor Party was making a pragmatic argument about simplicity and voters making mistakes, but also making a moral argument that voters have the right to not mark preferences for those they dislike or do not know.

The response from the Coalition focused on how optional preferential voting was “tantamount to first-past-the-post”. They insisted that, if voters weren’t required to number every box, many of them would exhaust their votes and preferences would become irrelevant.

Future prime minister John Howard, in his first term in parliament, expressed concern about candidates winning without majority support: “The whole purpose of preferential voting is to be absolutely certain that when all the preferences have been counted, when all the votes have been counted, whoever wins can say that a majority of the people voted for him, either as a first preference or as a second preference.”

The Coalition made no attempt to compromise on the legislation, despite the bill including other provisions that had previously been proposed by the former Coalition government. The legislation was defeated in the Senate without any pretence of amending.

The bill was introduced a second time, with Gough Whitlam speaking in the debate, arguing that “the change involves no derogation from voters’ democratic rights; in fact, it will enhance them.”

The Coalition did amend the bill in the Senate the second time, removing the OPV clauses amongst others. The amended bill was unacceptable to the Labor-controlled House, and the bill died again.

When the Whitlam government was dismissed in November 1975, Malcolm Fraser used a list of 21 bills that had been blocked twice by the Senate as triggers to call another double dissolution. The bill proposing OPV was one of those bills.

Labor may have failed to introduce OPV at a federal level in 1975, but the electoral system achieved its biggest victory later that decade when the Wran Labor government in New South Wales introduced OPV for state elections.

New South Wales had used compulsory preferential voting since 1930. The Wran government had taken power in 1976, and had reformed the Legislative Council in 1978 to be directly elected using proportional representation.

Labor won the subsequent 1978 state election in a landslide, and also won control of the Legislative Council, now with a third of its members directly elected.

In 1979, Wran turned his attention to the Legislative Assembly electoral system, with a bill that proposed to introduce OPV, and to constitutionally entrench the bill. A referendum would be needed to switch the electoral system in the future, but no referendum was needed to make the change in the first place.

Wran argued for OPV as an equity measure that would make it easier to vote, arguing that the existing system “discriminates against the less educated, the migrants, the Aboriginals, the aged and the handicapped”. The bill swept through the parliament despite Opposition cries that OPV was “effectively first past the post”, and was used for the first time at the 1981 state election.

Labor returned to power at the federal level in 1983. While the Whitlam government was fiercely opposed by a conservative majority in the Senate, the balance of power was now held by the Democrats, who were open to reform. Labor had learnt from the experience of 1974, and sought to use the committee system to develop ideas and build support for reform.

The Labor government established the Joint Select Committee on Electoral Reform in 1983. The subsequent inquiry covered many issues. The Labor submission advocated for OPV, but it was clear that there was no parliamentary majority – the Liberals, the Nationals and the Democrats were all fiercely opposed.

While Labor supported OPV for both houses, the urgent issue was the Senate. The informal rate in the Senate remained stubbornly at 9% or above for every election since 1975, and ballot papers continued to grow. If it was still necessary for every preference to be marked, but that requirement was catching out more and more voters, what could be done?

The Australian Electoral Office offered a suggestion – something that was called “the list system” at the time but we now called Group Voting Tickets. Candidates had already been grouped together based on party for many decades – the AEO proposed that each group would lodge a “ticket” with a preference for every candidate on the ballot. A voter would have the choice between numbering every box below the line or just marking a single ‘1’ above the line – something that would have the simplicity of OPV but while avoiding the evil of exhausted votes.

The classic option of voting for every single candidate remained, with some slight tweaks to allow for some votes to count where a small number of mistakes were made – but even those savings provisions were controversial. Anti-OPV politicians were terrified of leaving the door even slightly ajar. There was also a massive asymmetry between the two methods: fill in dozens of boxes correctly, or just mark a single ‘1’. Still, they had a solution.

Preferences would remain compulsory, but in a way that could cope with a ballooning field of Senate candidates. At the 1984 federal election, the Senate informal rate halved, down to just 4.7%. It kept dropping to a low of 2.6% in 1993.

The battle-lines on OPV were clearly drawn in the 1970s and early 1980s: Labor supported freedom of choice, and keeping the voting system simple to minimise informal voting. The Coalition supported ensuring that every box was numbered to avoid exhausted votes and to give winning candidates a majority mandate. Both political positions arose in a context where they were in the self-interest of the parties. Labor had always stood alone, with a single candidate and not many friends on the ballot, while the Coalition sometimes benefited from using preferences to resolve internal tensions, and also benefited from preferences from the DLP.

But by the early 1970s things were beginning to change. 1972 was the last election where the DLP polled a substantial vote share, and the last election where the Coalition had a big lead on preferences.

In 1974 and 1975, the race became far more polarised between Labor and the Coalition. The Coalition still did better out of preferences, but there weren’t many of them available. The DLP’s support had crashed in 1974, while support for the liberal left Australia Party and Liberal Movement – both of whom were precursors to the Democrats, and arguably the Greens and teals – remained steady at just over 3% between them.

Support for minor parties spiked in 1977, with the newly-formed Democrats polling over 9%. Preference flows split about equally between the major parties, and this was about the same in 1980 and 1983.

The 1984 election was the first election to see Labor take the lead in preference flows, and this trend continued.

The story really changed in 1990. Labor had now been in power for seven years, and their prospects for another term did not look good.

The 1990 election was a watershed moment for minor parties and independents. Ted Mack became the first independent to win a seat in the House of Representatives in a generation, and the Democrats reached their high watermark, with 12.6% in the Senate and winning senators in five states.

It was also the debut on the national stage for the Greens – although at this stage there was no single united Australian Greens political party. Instead state-based Green parties contested the election in five states and the ACT, running in sixty seats.

Ballot papers were bigger than they’d ever been before, with 150 more candidates than the previous record in 1984. The average ballot paper had over five candidates.

Labor’s vote crashed to just 39.5% of the primary vote, a swing of 6.5%. This was slightly lower than the vote polled at the devastating landslide defeats of 1966 and 1977. But they didn’t lose. That swing did not flow to the Coalition, who also suffered a 2.4% swing. It went to the independents, the Democrats, the Greens and other parties. And many of those votes came back to Labor as preferences.

Over 10% of all voters cast a vote for a minor party or an independent but preferenced Labor over the Coalition. Just 6.6% of voters gave a preference to the Coalition.

These preference flows saved the Labor government’s skin – the government left with an eight-seat majority and just 49.9% of the two-party-preferred vote.

Credit was given to voters concerned about the environment, and savvy Labor Party operators who made a connection and convinced those voters to give them a preference.

Suddenly, preferences weren’t such a bad thing for Labor. The party changed its policy in 1991 to support compulsory preferential voting. When the ACT was considering a change to its electoral system in the early 1990s, Labor members advocated for single-member electorates with compulsory voting, without success. And in Queensland, the Labor government did not show its former enthusiasm when the state moved to OPV.

The 1989 state election was a watershed moment in Queensland politics. 32 years after the Labor split ended a generation of Labor in power, the time of the National Party came to a close.

Joh Bjelke-Petersen had served as premier for almost two decades, stepping down in 1987. While the Country Party, later renamed the National Party, had governed in coalition with the Liberal Party for most of their 32 years in power, the coalition had split in 1983 and the Nationals had governed alone for six years. Bjelke-Petersen was followed by two short-term premiers, and the party lost in 1989.

Labor won the 1989 election in a landslide, winning 50.3% of the primary vote and winning a 19-seat majority despite rural malapportionment that drew Labor-leaning urban seats with significantly larger populations than seats in the Nationals heartland.

A new Labor government heralded an era of reform, but the process had actually started under the Nationals government. The Fitzgerald inquiry inquired into corruption in the state, and actually commenced while Bjelke-Petersen was still in office in 1987.

In 1989, the Fitzgerald inquiry recommended an Electoral and Administrative Review Commission, amongst other bodies, and that body was legislated in 1989.

Amongst other matters, the EARC performed a review into all elements of the electoral system. This included features of the electoral system that had been skewed to keep the Nationals in power, such as drawing electorates with wildly different populations.

At the 1989 state election, almost 80% of preferences flowed to the Liberal or National over Labor. This partly reflected that the Liberal and National parties ran against each other in almost every seat – more than four fifths of seats had both a Liberal and National candidate. There also wasn’t much of a minor party presence – the Democrats and Greens each ran just seven candidates and no minor party polled over half of a percent.

So the EARC had a wide remit to review the electoral system, and they did exactly that. They seriously considered optional or compulsory preferential voting, receiving a large amount of evidence from the public.

All three major parties supported compulsory preferential voting – even Labor, who may have still seen an advantage in OPV at a state level, while beginning to see the downsides at a federal level. But a wide range of other advocates recommended OPV, for a lot of the reasons we’ve seen before – simplicity, freedom of choice, and making it easier to cast a vote.

In the end the EARC recommended a switch to optional preferential voting, seemingly on the basis of voters having the right to not mark preferences they do not genuinely believe in.

The Commission was “concerned that electors are currently required to record views they may not have”, and that voters may have “either to invent preferences, or arbitrarily assign rankings to candidates about whom they know nothing and care less or accept that their ballot-paper will be excluded”.

The Commission supported compulsory voting but argued that having required voters to cast a ballot, “it is inappropriate for the electoral system to corrall votes on behalf of candidates or parties who electors do not wish to support”.

The Commission also referenced the experience of OPV in New South Wales, which had now been using the system for a decade. They took the example of some voters choosing to “just vote 1” as evidence that under CPV “voters are being required to express views they may not have”.

The premier, Wayne Goss, responded to this recommendation by agreeing to legislate for OPV, but he wasn’t enthusiastic about it. He predicted that Labor would see some disadvantage from losing Green or independent preferences. Meanwhile the state director of the National Party focused on the need for the National and Liberal parties to cooperate more closely to avoid the system slipping into de facto first past the post, which he said would benefit Labor.

Despite some who urged the Liberal and National parties to work together, the two parties entered the 1992 election completely separately – about two thirds of seats had both a Liberal and National candidate, with the parties competing to see who would be the bigger conservative party on the new electoral boundaries.

Labor won 54 seats again, as they had in 1989. A majority of preferences still flowed to the conservatives, with about 20% of preferences exhausting. Voters were still used to marking preferences, and they did so.

At the 1995 election, the National and Liberal parties learnt from their experience and mostly avoided running in the same seats. Meanwhile there was a fight brewing on the left, where the Greens were emerging as a challenge to Labor. Queensland Greens founder Drew Hutton in particular saw preference allocation as a way to punish Labor governments in Brisbane and Canberra for poor performance on the environment.

Such threats were made at a federal level, but the Greens came to find that they didn’t have much bargaining power under a compulsory preferential voting system where most of their voters would preference Labor anyway. But in Queensland, OPV gave the party the option of recommending no preference at all – a much more viable threat.

The Queensland Greens ended up deciding not to recommend preferences to Labor in 1995, but in five seats actually recommended preferences to the Coalition.

The 1995 election ended up being extremely close – Labor won a slim one-seat majority. This majority was later overturned when the result in the seat of Mundingburra was thrown out – the Liberal Party eventually won the seat at a 1996 by-election, and independent Liz Cunningham ended up backing a Coalition government to take office mid-term.

But before that change in government, there was talk about abolishing optional preferential voting – the Coalition was eager for the change, with National leader Rob Borbidge saying that OPV “can effectively be a first-past-the-post system”. Labor was less certain, but showed an openness to ending OPV.

Despite Labor’s frustration with the Greens, that didn’t show up much in the preference flows. The ending of National-Liberal contests did lead to a lot less preferences being available to flow on the right, but still the proportion of preferences flowing to Labor increased significantly.

That move to abolish OPV did not go ahead. The Coalition was back in power in Queensland, but perhaps not for long – an independent named Pauline Hanson was forming a political party called One Nation, who would have a big impact on the next two Queensland elections.

That’s it for episode two of “Just Vote 1”. In next week’s final episode, I’ll look at how the rise of One Nation led to parties encouraging voters to “just vote 1” – initially parties of the left. One Nation’s collapse and the rise of the Greens led to the conservative parties advocating for OPV. The story finishes in the current day, looking at how optional or compulsory preferences play out in today’s fragmented party system. It’s no longer so easy to tell who benefits from votes exhausting. As Queensland considers a switch back to OPV, it’s hard to say whether it would actually be in the interests of the Queensland government to make such a change.

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

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Once again, thanks for listening!

In the next two episodes, Ben will explore Labor’s push for first-past-the-post and optional preferential voting in the middle of the 20th century, and how the self-interest of the parties flipped in the 1990s to the point where it’s the Coalition that is now more likely to support OPV.

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

This is the first of a three part series examining the history of preferential voting in Australia – in particular the debates about optional or compulsory preferential voting.

This is a story about how we vote, and why we vote that way. It’s a story of what political principles matter when designing an electoral system, but also about how those principles are often dictated by political self-interest.

It is a story over a century in the making, about how and why Australia adopted preferential voting, and the subsequent fight over exactly how these rules should work.

In Australia today, we have two main methods of election when a single representative is being chosen. Both methods require the voter to number their preferences, with a ‘1’ for their most preferred candidate. Under both methods, a vote can be passed on to lower preferences if their most preferred candidate is knocked out. But the difference is about whether voters need to number those other preferences or not.

Under ‘compulsory preferential voting’, or CPV, the most common method used for the House of Representatives and single-member elections in most states, the voter must number every box. There might be a few exceptions to deal with mistakes, but generally voters must clearly express a preference between every candidate. If they don’t do so, their vote is considered informal and is not counted.

Under ‘optional preferential voting’, or OPV, most prominently used to elect the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, voters don’t have to number any other boxes. If they don’t clearly indicate their preferred candidate, then the vote can’t be counted, but as long as there is a single clear ‘1’, the vote counts. If all of their preferred candidates are excluded, the vote ‘exhausts’, so not every formal vote will remain in the count until the end.

These two methods have existed for at least a century, and during that time there has been a constant tension over the method of voting. Early in the 20th century, those parties that tended to lose out from the flowing of preferences advocated for a return to ‘first past the post’, but this option was discredited by the 1970s.

Since then, the argument has focused on the exact method of marking preferences:

Do we force every voter to mark preferences for every candidate, which ensures stronger flows of preferences and a winner with a majority of the vote, but at the cost of more informal votes and denying a voter the choice to simply not mark a preference?

Or do we keep informal voting low and give voters the freedom to not mark preferences, even if it means candidates are elected with less than half the vote and preferences don’t flow as strongly?

Where a political party lands on this question often depends less on their political principles and more on what might help them. If your party does better on preferences from other candidates, or needs preferences to coordinate between multiple parties, you’ll likely support whatever method ensures preferences flow as strongly as possible: compulsory preferential, that is. But if your party is relatively united and doesn’t gain much preferences, you’ll likely support the method that minimises the flow of preferences – first past the post or optional preferential voting.

For most of the twentieth century, it was the parties of the right who benefited from preferences, while Labor usually experienced preferences as something that would flow against them and lose them elections.

This dichotomy then flowed into party positions on the electoral system: preferential voting was generally introduced by a conservative government, while Labor governments advocated for first-past-the-post or optional preferential voting. This split lasted as late as the 1980s – the Whitlam government attempted to introduce optional preferential voting for federal elections in the 1970s, and the Hawke government supported OPV in 1983.

But in more recent years, the positions have flipped. Preferences have favoured parties of the left, with Greens preferences being crucial for Labor election victories while the Coalition has been more unified. This led to the Queensland Labor government switching the state to CPV in 2016.

Yet in 2026, as another Queensland government considers switching back to OPV, it is no longer so easy to identify the winners and losers from preferential voting. With an increasingly fragmented party system, with One Nation threatening to win numerous seats, it now looks like preferential voting may favour one party in a particular context, but not in a different context.

For this podcast series, I’m going to explore the history of debates over preferential voting methods in Australia, looking at how arguments over political principles neatly aligned with the partisan self-interest of the day.

In the first years of Australian democracy, elections generally could be described as ‘first past the post’. You voted for as many candidates as there were to be elected, and whoever had the most votes won. There was no preferential voting, and certainly no attempt to make the result proportional. Some electorates were represented by a single member of Parliament, but multi-member electorates were common, particularly in the cities. Still, it was a simple matter of who comes first wins.

The first use of preferential voting for a parliamentary election in Australia came in colonial Queensland. The ‘contingent vote’ was passed in 1892, and first used in 1893.

This system was an optional preferential system in that voters weren’t required to preference every candidate. It worked a bit differently to our modern systems, but this wouldn’t have been noticeable for most voters.

The contingent vote was inspired by the second-ballot electoral systems that were commonplace at the time, and are still used today in countries like France. Voters first cast their votes for a wider range of candidates. If no-one wins a majority, the top two return for a second head-to-head election.

The contingent vote attempted to roll this all up into one election. First preferences were added up. Top two were identified, and then all other candidates’ preferences were allocated to one of those top two. While in our current system it is possible for a candidate in third place to occasionally win, that would have been impossible under the contingent vote.

Right from the very beginning, changes to the voting system were motivated by political self-interest, and anxiety about rising forces. A.A. Morrison, writing in 1960, said about the 1892 reforms:

“the Government found itself faced not only by an official Opposition whose policy differed from its own, but also by a growing Labor Party. It was accordingly fearful that in any election fought under the old system the splitting of votes between the two parties with similar views might present too many seats to Labor. Hence it introduced the contingent vote.”

No other colonies tried preferential voting before Federation, but the topic quickly came up in the first federal parliament.

The Barton government needed to pass an Electoral Act that would establish voting methods for Australia’s federal elections – the first federal election in 1901 had been conducted using the laws of each of the new states. The government’s Electoral Bill proposed preferential voting in single member electorates for the House of Representatives, and proportional representation for the Senate. In broad strokes, it looked a lot like the electoral systems we use today, but there were differences in the detail.

Optional preferential voting was proposed for the House of Representatives, but the bill ended up coming undone in the Senate, with opposition to the proportional system. When the bill returned to the House, there were concerns from Labour MPs about using a numbering system for one ballot while not using numbers for the other ballot. The government retreated, and first past the post was embedded as the electoral system for the House.

In the Senate, a ‘block vote’ system was introduced, where voters would vote for as many candidates as there were seats to fill, and the top-polling candidates would win.

The Protectionists would have likely benefited if preferential voting had been introduced in 1902. As the party sitting ideologically between Labour and the Free Traders, they would have likely benefited from preference flows anywhere that they made the top two. At the 1903 election, there were three seats where the Protectionist came a close second and could have won with preferences.

The 1903 federal election produced something close to a three-way tie, with 26 Protectionists, 24 Free Traders and 22 Labour members. If those three seats had flipped, the Protectionists would have been clearly the biggest party. Instead, the next three years were very unstable, with governments changing a number of times, and the Protectionists fell into third place in 1906.

Prior to that 1906 election, Protectionist leader Alfred Deakin made another attempt to introduce preferential voting – specifically CPV – in a pitch to Labor leader Chris Watson to isolate George Reid’s Free Traders:

“Have you thought of the exhaustive ballot – compulsory voting for every candidate. The lowest dropped out & his votes divided until someone gets a majority. With this our candidate & yours could not do each other anything like so much harm and one or others [sic] of us would win in several Reidite constituencies. Of course it must be compulsory voting for all candidates. It would be a great safety valve for both of us. What do you think?”

Labor was not interested, and a Deakin government bill on the matter lapsed at the 1906 election.

By 1909, the remnants of the Protectionists merged with the former Free Traders to form the fusion Liberal Party. For the next decade, Australian politics was very much a two-party affair.

Preferential voting began to spread through the Australian states over the next few years – and it was always non-Labour governments doing the legislating. Western Australia introduced optional preferential voting in 1907. Victoria introduced compulsory preferential voting in 1911, and WA made it compulsory the same year.

New South Wales actually experimented with a second ballot, which was introduced in 1910 by the Liberal government. At its first use, three seats required a second ballot, and in one seat, Labour voters swung in behind an independent who defeated the Liberal candidate who had come first on the original ballot.

Preferential voting returned to the federal agenda in the early 1910s. Joseph Cook became prime minister in 1913 and instituted a royal commission into the electoral system. Cook promised to implement preferential voting during the 1914 election, but ended up losing. That royal commission eventually recommended preferential voting for the House and proportional representation for the Senate, as in 1902.

There were constant pressures on the non-Labor side of politics as different candidates sought to run, but under first-past-the-post they largely were able to keep splitting candidates off the ballot: independent or minor party candidacies were rare, and it was very rare that a candidate was elected with less than half of the vote. In 1910 and 1913, only ten or eleven seats saw more than two candidates nominate. In 1914 and 1917, there were just three seats at each election which had three or more candidates.

At the 1917 election, it was very much a two-horse race – the Nationalists were a new party created by a merger of the Liberal Party and supporters of Billy Hughes who had split from Labor over the issue of conscription. Over 98% of votes were cast for either the Nationalists or Labor.

But in the following term, cracks began to form in the united anti-Labor front. Farmers groups in particular looked to run their own candidates independent of the Nationalists.

With farmers groups such as the Victorian Farmers’ Union looking to run candidates, we saw the familiar dance seen in first-past-the-post systems on many occasions: two distinct groups who both want to defeat their common enemy, but want something in return for withdrawing.

In early 1918, the national farmer’s organisation formally asked Billy Hughes to support preferential voting, but the prime minister left for Europe without a reply.

A by-election for the Victorian seat of Flinders was due to be held in May 1918, after Sir William Irvine was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria.

In addition to the Nationalist and Labor candidates, the Victorian Farmers Union nominated a candidate, John Hall. The acting prime minister William Watt tried to convince Hall not to stand by promising that he would introduce a bill on preferential voting, but the farmers insisted on a promise from the party overall.

The night before election day, Hall officially withdrew, thanks to the Nationalist government promising to introduce preferential voting.

The Nationalist candidate, future prime minister Stanley Bruce, ended up winning very comfortably, with 64% to 34% for Labor and 2% for the withdrawn farmers candidate, but the Farmers had achieved an important concession.

Western Australian founding father John Forrest died in early September, triggering a by-election for his seat of Swan. Preferential voting legislation was introduced in early October, but it was too late for that by-election.

The Western Australian Farmers and Settlers Association, who were affiliated with the Victorian Farmers Union, decided to stand a candidate alongside an independent and candidates for the Labor and Nationalist parties.

The vote ended up being split roughly three ways – Labor’s Edwin Corboy won with 34%, the farmers candidate polled 31.4%, while the Nationalist came third with 29.6%. It is highly likely that a preferential ballot would have seen Nationalist preferences elect the farmers candidate.

Just four days after the Swan by-election, and with a bill for preferential voting already introduced into parliament, Nationalist MP Chester Manifold died, triggering a by-election for his Victorian seat of Corangamite. There was now greater urgency to change the electoral system and allow the farmers candidates to run without splitting the vote.

The Electoral Bill of 1918 was a big one, that overhauled a large amount of Australia’s electoral system. But the introduction of preferential voting for the House of Representatives was one of the biggest items.

It proposed a system of compulsory preferential voting. The possibility of using OPV instead was not a major topic of the debate, although it did come up briefly.

In response to a question, the minister Paddy Glynn, clarified that “all preferences must be marked”. Labor MPs William Mahony and James Fenton objected, with Mahony calling it “scandalous”. Glynn defended the decision to use CPV by referring to its usage in Victoria and Western Australia.

Labor’s opposition to the reform focused on a number of other issues. They objected to making changes while soldiers were still overseas, with the First World War a few weeks away from an armistice. They also strongly objected to introducing a preferential system for the House while continuing to use the block vote for the Senate, whereby voters would tick or cross as many boxes as there are seats.

Eventually the government conceded the problems with not using preferential voting in the Senate, and in 1919 passed legislation switching the Senate to the preferential block vote – voters would number every box on both ballots, but the Senate results were not proportional – usually one side would win every seat in a state. Proportional representation would not arrive for another thirty years.

Some MPs supporting preferential voting made grand claims about how it would eliminate the need for party preselections, since multiple candidates could nominate, but they didn’t seem to consider that this would lead to much longer ballots and thus a more complex voting experience under CPV. In practice party preselections continued, although there were occasions of parties, in particular the Country Party and the pre-Second World War conservative parties in the cities, nominating multiple candidates for the same seat.

Labor members also raised concerns about making the voting system more complex, and potentially leading to more informal votes. John West, Labor member for East Sydney, said:

“Our electoral system should be so simple that people can readily understand what they have to do when they go into a polling booth every three years to record a vote.”

Some Labor members argued the move was pointless – since most seats only had two candidates, it would not change anything. This was missing the point, possibly intentionally – the two parties of the 1910s were already fracturing, despite efforts to minimise the field of candidates. Preferential voting would fuel that fragmentation, but it would also help manage it.

And of course, numerous Labor politicians made the charge of self-interest on the part of the government – with farmers candidates chipping away at the Nationalist vote, the government saw how the political system was changing.

But it’s likely the Nationalists understated the growth of what became the Country Party – rather than just polling a small share of the vote and those votes flowing back to the Nationalists, the farmers candidates often pushed the Nationalists into third place, and Nationalist preferences then flowed to them.

The farmers groups won eleven seats at the 1919 federal election, and the newly formed Country Party won fourteen seats in 1922, negotiating a coalition with the Nationalists which saw Billy Hughes replaced as prime minister.

In the early years of preferential voting, the parties did experiment with running multiple candidates. In 1919, the Nationalist Party ran a second candidate in four seats – three of them in Tasmania, where Hare-Clark had already established the principle of a party running multiple candidates and letting the voters sort it out.

In the first three decades of preferential voting, the two parties of the right regularly nominated multiple candidates: the Country Party nominated multiple candidates 27 times between 1922 and 1949, while the Nationalist and United Australia parties nominated multiple candidates 36 times. As the centre-right fragmented in the 1940s, preferential voting made it possible for different elements of the centre-right to run their own candidates and use preferential voting to avoid a Labor victory.

There were also regular cases of the two right-wing parties running candidates against each other, although the heights of 1919 and 1922 were rarely repeated. After the Nationalists and the Country Party formed their first coalition in 1922, the parties agreed to an electoral pact to not run candidates against each other’s sitting MPs.

While these cases did pop up, many seats remained straight contests between the major parties for a long time, and ballot papers were usually quite small. Two-candidate races were still very common.

While fragmentation was most common on the right, preferential voting was also helpful for Labor in managing the splits within the party in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1940, Labor won four seats despite trailing on the primary vote – sometimes they benefited from preferences from Jack Lang’s breakaway Labor party, but Labor also sometimes benefited from conservative preferences to defeat their former party colleagues.

In 1943, Labor defeated independent Labor MP Maurice Blackburn on United Australia preferences, and defeated Jack Lang in Reid on preferences from the UAP and another breakaway Labor Party.

In the first half of the 20th century, it was usually the parties of the right who managed to come back and win thanks to preferences, but it wasn’t exclusively so, with Labor actually doing better on preferences in 1940.

While Labor did occasionally benefit from preferences, the party was still generally anti-preference.

New South Wales moved away from the second-ballot system at the 1920 state election. The government of William Holman – who like Billy Hughes an ex-Labor politician who had allied with the conservatives – legislated to use proportional representation for the Legislative Assembly. This system was used for three elections, but after the 1925 election the Labor government of Jack Lang moved to abolish the system.

The Lang government’s original intention was to revert to first-past-the-post, a system that hadn’t been used in a quarter-century, but the conservative Legislative Council amended his legislation and forced Lang to accept optional preferential voting.

The OPV system was used for one election in 1927 – the newly elected conservative government then moved to compulsory preferential voting, and that system was used in New South Wales for the next fifty years.

Further north in Queensland, the Labor government was shocked by the Cairns by-election of 1942, when conservative preferences elected an independent Labor candidate over the official party candidate. They also moved to restore first past the post, but had no upper house to get in the way.

In the 1940s, however, Labor’s reluctance to support preferential voting was not universal. Labor legislated for proportional representation in the Senate in 1948, and they required voters to number every box. Indeed a Liberal MP, Archie Cameron, proposed that voters should only need to number as many boxes as there are seats to fill, and this was rejected out of hand by the Attorney-General, HV Evatt, who expressed concern about votes exhausting when they could influence the result.

There was an uptick in informal voting for the Senate at the 1949 federal election under the new system. There was no change in the demands on the voter – they needed to number every box under the old and new system – but the informal rate climbed from 8% to 10.8%. Voters in South Australia needed to number up to 24 boxes, and 11.6% of voters cast an informal vote in that state.

Despite Evatt’s opposition prior to the election, Labor leader Ben Chifley proposed in 1950 that voters should only need to fill in some boxes, not all of them, for a formal vote to be counted.

Australian politics in the early 1950s found itself back in a similar position to the 1910s – Labor and the Coalition had emerged as two strong major blocs, with few votes cast for anyone else. The Labor breakaways of the 1930s and 1940s had faded away, and the Liberal Party had consolidated the urban conservatives.

In 1951, Labor and the Country Party each came from behind to win a single seat, but politics was mostly a two-horse race – there was only eight seats where preferences needed to be distributed. The Liberal and Country parties did not run against each other in any seats. There were only five seats where the ballot paper reached as far as a fourth candidate, with almost two thirds of seats being two-horse races.

Despite the emergence of the Country Party as a major force, politics seemed to have reverted to something as close as possible to a two-party system, and thus preferences played a much less significant role in deciding elections.

But it wouldn’t last, as the Labor Party was about to split.

That’s it for episode one of “Just Vote 1”.

I’ll be back next week to explore the Labor Party split of the 1950s, how DLP preferences fueled the long era of Coalition government, and the Labor Party’s reaction against preferential voting, which led to the Whitlam government’s attempt to introduce OPV in 1974. But already in 1974 there was the beginnings of a shift, as preferences stopped flowing as strongly to the Coalition, and growth of progressive candidates on the left meant that preferences started to be quite handy to the Labor Party.

I will be holding my first Tally Room live podcast recording in Melbourne later this year. The show will be recorded at the Punter’s Club in Fitzroy on the Tuesday after the state election, December 1st. I’ll be joined by Emily Foley and Rachel Withers and we’ll be unpacking whatever the hell happened on Saturday night. Tickets are $20 and are now on sale – the link for tickets can be found at the Tally Room website, but go grab them because tickets are limited.

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 @thetallyroom.

This podcast is made possible thanks to the generous support of our donors on Patreon. I’d love to do more podcasts about election history, and donating to Patreon can help make that happen. Sign up at patreon.com/tallyroom.

Ad-free versions of this podcast are now available for Patreon subscribers. And if you sign up for $10  or more per month you can join our Discord, where we’re having great conversations about elections.

If you’re a Tally Room member, you can also new access election guides for the New South Wales state election, the next federal election and the Queensland state election.

Information about this podcast is available at tallyroom.com.au, and you can email questions or feedback to podcast@tallyroom.com.au. Thanks to Chris Dubrow for writing the music you hear in this episode.

Once again, thanks for listening!

Tickets are now on sale for the public. Spots are limited, so if you’d like to come along please grab your ticket now at this link. This link wasn’t working earlier but is now.

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.

I hope I’ll see you there!

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.