Both major parties have done significantly better on the electorate vote than the party vote. Both parties are tied on just over 29% of the party vote – right now National is on 29.3% and Labour is on 29.2%. But by my count, National is on 41.4% of the electorate vote and Labour is on 33.7%.

A divergence between the two ballots is normal, but it’s not normally that big. In 2023, National did 5.4% better on the candidate vote – this time it is over 12%. It has not always been the case. In 2011 and 2017, the National vote was about the same on both ballots, while in 2014 they actually did worse in the electorates.

So that’s part of the story – if those people who voted National in the electorate cast the same vote on the party list, they wouldn’t have an overhang. Presumably most of those voters instead cast a vote for ACT or NZF.

National also seems to have overperformed in the right places. This chart shows the difference between the National party and candidate vote. In weaker National areas they performed about the same, but they overperformed in areas that put them over 50%, including most of the close races.

Labor, in contrast, had a mix of high candidate votes in seats where they were weak and in stronger areas.

Finally this graph compares the candidate vote for the two major parties. While there are occasional seats involving other parties, the picture is very clear – National tended to achieve a candidate vote in the 40-60% range, while Labour’s was usually under 40%. With such a big difference in how the two parties performed in the electorates, National was bound to win a lot more electorates. And this seems to have mattered.

1:06 – So we will soon have all the data that we will have for some time – the remaining ‘special votes’ won’t be reported until the final results are declared in a few weeks. It is not uncommon for a seat or two to flip in terms of the list vote on those figures, but that’s not the main game now. Opportunity is on 6.0%, which is probably enough to stay above the threshold.

But there are quite a few close electorate races and they could make a big difference. If National or Te Pati Maori lose any seats, it will reduce the overhang. If either of them gain seats, it will widen the overhang.

There are nine seats on margins of less than 5%. These are:

• Wairarapa – National leading Labour by 139 votes
• Wellington Bays – Labour leading Green by 140 votes
• Mt Roskill – Labour leading National by 252 votes
• Hamilton East – National leading Labour by 456 votes
• Te Tai Tokerau – Te Pati Maori leading Green by 492 votes
• Hutt South – Labour leading National by 889 votes
• Whangārei – National leading Labour by 1061 votes
• Nelson – National leading Labour by 1210 votes

It’s worth noting that the special votes have traditionally led to the National Party losing two seats on the party list. Such a change would boost the left count without cutting the actual number of National seats, but it would not be surprising if a similar trend cost the Nationals some of these close races – there are four National seats on that list. It seems likely such a shift would cost the right bloc a majority and put Opportunity in the box seat.

12:37 – Excluding special votes, which won’t be reported for a few weeks, most of the vote has now been counted.

There are still ten overhang seats: I think they are four for Te Pati Maori and six for National, although National is close to having a seven-seat overhang.

This is a pretty severe skewing of proportionality. Right now National have 29.5% of over-threshold votes but 32.3% of seats, while TPM has 0.6% of over-threshold votes but 3.8% of seats.

On a bloc basis it mostly cancels out. ACT and NZF are also under-represented. The collective right is over-represented by 1% while the left is under-represented by 0.4% – the remaining under-representation hits Opportunity.

For what it’s worth, if there were no overhang we’d be currently looking at a parliament of 35 National, 36 Labour, 16 Greens, 13 ACT, 12 NZF, 7 Opportunity and 1 TPM. That would be 60 right, 53 left and 7 for Opportunity. It’s only a couple of seats difference but it would make a big difference.

10:08 – I thought I’d summarise some of the close electorate races:

• Te Tai Tokerau – Aperahama Edwards (TPM) 30.8% leads Hūhana Lyndon (GRN) 28.9% by 444.
• Hutt South – Ginny Anderson (LAB) 45.1% leads Chris Bishop (NAT) 43.4% by 504.
• Mt Roskill – Carlos Cheung (NAT) 45.2% leads Michael Wood (LAB) 44.3% by 194 votes.
• Hamilton East – Ryan Hamilton (NAT) 45.2% leads Georgie Dansey (LAB) 45.0% by 39 votes.
• Takanini – Rima Nakhle (NAT) 47.9% leads Kharag Singh (LAB) 42.7% by 751 votes.
• Wairarapa – Kieran McAnulty (LAB) 44.0% leads Mike Butterick (NAT) 43.0% by 278 votes.
• Wellington Bays – Julie Anne Genter (GRN) 38.1% leads Craig Renney (LAB) 37.0% by 346 votes.
• Whangārei – Lloyd Budd (NAT) 39.8% leads Gary Payinda (LAB) 38.4% by 459 votes.

9:49 – Labour has dropped back to 35 and NZ First is up to 12, putting the current government back into majority.

9:08 – I should also mention Te Tai Tokerau, where the Te Pati Māori candidate has a narrow 255-vote lead. Interestingly the Green Party is in second, Labour third and sitting independent MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi is in fourth. If Labour or Green take the lead it will not give them any extra seats but will reduce the TPM overhang by one, shrinking the left bloc by one.

9:02 – I think National’s 42nd seat is Hamilton East, where they now lead by 99 votes.

8:59 – National has picked up a 42nd seat, increasing their overhang to 7.

8:58 – Right now National is leading in 41 electorates, although some of those leads are very narrow. Labour leads in 21, Greens in 3, ACT in 1 and Te Pati Māori in 5.

Why is National winning so many electorates on such a small share of the national vote?

Some of the story is undoubtedly voters choosing to vote for a smaller party on the list vote and sticking with Labour or National for their electorate vote – just like how minor parties often do better in the Senate than the House in Australia. Te Pati Māori has been explicitly encouraging voters to just vote for them on the electorate vote. Some people may be doing this tactically but it seems to mostly be sincere.

But there is also the reality that bigger parties get a big winners bonus under a FPTP system and the 71 electorates remain a FPTP system. National also has a more efficient distribution of the vote than Labour, so still pick up a lot of electorates despite a vote trending under 30%.

8:51 – Opportunity remain steady on 5.4%. If they can stay above 5%, I think they’ll will hold the balance of power. But if they fall behind, the right wing government will maintain its majority.

8:49 – The results show the parliament expanding to 130 seats, with the right bloc holding exactly half. National’s list vote is now 0.5% behind Labour so I suspect their fair share of seats has fallen from 36 to 35, with Opportunity increasing to 7, and the National overhang has thus expanded to six seats.

8:46 – In Nelson, National candidate Blair Cameron is just 235 votes ahead of Labour MP Rachel Boyack. Another National seat which is unlikely to hold.

8:43 – In Hutt South, senior National minister Chris Bishop trails his Labour rival Ginny Anderson by 815 votes with 39% counted. It’s very unlikely Bishop will make it in on the list due to the National overhang and right now it’s hard to see him catching up.

8:41 – Cheung’s lead has already shrunk further to 131 votes.

8:39 – As far as I can tell, the narrowest National lead in an electorate right now is Mount Rosehill, where Carlos Cheung leads by 206 votes over his Labour rival with 21% counted. Every seat Labour takes from National reduces the right-wing position by one seat because of the overhang. It’s hard to see National holding this seat.

8:35 – The right-wing lead has narrowed, they now are on 65 seats, the left on 58 and Opportunity on 6. If one more seat flips from right to left it will put Opportunity in the balance of power.

8:33 – On the left, Labour is on 36, Green are on 17 and TPM are on 5. That’s a gain of two each for Labour and Green and a loss of one for TPM.

8:30 – Within the right wing bloc, National is currently on 41 seats, ACT is on 13 and National is on 11, for a total of 65 (down one from my last update).

This would be a loss of 7 seats for National, a gain of two for ACT and three for NZF.

8:24 – Let’s talk overhangs. If a party wins more electorates than it’s share of the national vote justifies in seats, then those extra seats are added to the parliament as a bonus that doesn’t fit with national proportionality.

Right now there would be a lot more potential for electorate leads to change while the number of proportional seats that might change is much smaller, so there’s plenty of room for change. But right now the results sites have Labour and National on pretty much the same list vote but have National winning five more seats – that would be an overhang of 5.

On the other hand, Te Pati Māori is on 0.6% yet are winning five seats – that would be an overhang of 4. So that is two overhangs mostly cancelling each other out.

8:12 – A topic of great interest is whether Opportunity clear the threshold. Without Opportunity, the right has a decent lead on the left. With Opportunity, the right’s lead is quite narrow. Right now, with 24% counted, Opportunity are on 5.4%. If they fall below 5%, they don’t win a single seat.

8:07 – So far results have the right wing bloc winning a majority, but it’s still quite early. With 22% counted, the right wing government is currently on 66 seats, with Labour, Green and Māori on 56, and Opportunity on 7. That’s a narrow right wing majority but also implies a large overhang.

7:00 – It is now 7pm New Zealand time. Polls have just closed in New Zealand.

We should be getting the first results shortly. Advance votes – what we would call ‘pre-poll’ votes in Australia – are counted during the day on election day, and should be reported very shortly. This will result in a large volume of votes being reported very quickly.

Unfortunately I am double-booked, visiting Parramatta’s new Powerhouse museum. I will post a couple of quick updates while I’m out, and then analyse the results in much more depth later this evening.

It is worth noting that in the past there is often a right-wing skew in the early results – in 2023, the TV analysts seemed to be surprised by this, but it shouldn’t be surprising. Despite having the data to do it, it doesn’t seem like booth-matching results happens.

I will be posting updates using New Zealand time, which is two hours ahead of AEDT – 7pm in New Zealand is 5pm in Sydney and Melbourne.

It is typical for the bigger parties to announce their candidates some way out, but it has been notable that the Labor government has not officially announced their upper house candidates. A number of MLCs have announced their retirement, but the party had not announced candidates. The VEC nominations give us some sense of who is running where – and a number of sitting Labor MLCs have switched regions.

I’ve also analysed the number of retiring MPs at this election and compared them to numbers in the past. Numbers are high, but not much higher than in the past.

The number of candidates on my lower house list has now reached 697 – 32 of whom have not yet appeared on the official VEC list. Most of the missing candidates are Libertarians. I assume they will turn up, but we’ll see.

This is a slightly smaller list than 2022, when a record field of 740 candidates nominated for the Assembly. So it seems likely that the 2026 field will be slightly smaller, but I can’t be sure of that. It would still be the second-largest field.

Compared to 2022, the candidates are concentrated amongst a smaller range of parties. Labor, Greens, One Nation and Victorian Socialists are running in all seats, and one of the two Coalition parties is running everywhere (with both running in Ripon). Family First have nominated 70 candidates, so it is plausible that they could end up running a full ticket. Animal Justice has nominated candidates in almost half the seats, with the Libertarians in 20 seats. Everyone else is running small numbers.

For quite a while now, the size of the candidate fields in the upper house seemed diminished. At this point, it seems plausible that the upper house ballot papers really will be smaller. So far, 274 Legislative Council candidates have nominated, compared to 454 in 2022.

Unfortunately the nominations data does not group candidates together, but most candidates are running for parties and it’s pretty clear which independents are running together. Based on this analysis, so far we have an average of 11 groups nominated per region. The average in 2022 was 22.25. I expect there will be some increase, but overall the upper house ballot papers look much smaller without group voting tickets.

Eight parties have nominated tickets in all eight regions: Labor, the Coalition, One Nation, the Greens, Victorian Socialists, Sustainable Australia, Legalise Cannabis and the Democratic Labour Party. In comparison, the same 22 parties nominated in every region in 2022.

Under group voting tickets, there is an incentive to nominate a full slate of candidates as it is quite easy to control your voters’ preferences, and you can then swap those to gain strong flows in your best areas. Under the new system, there is no reason to run a bunch of candidates where you can’t mount a campaign. It makes more sense to concentrate.

Family First have nominated in six regions, the Shooters in the three (rural) regions, Animal Justice, the Libertarians and Socialist Alliance are running in two, and the West Party is focused entirely on one region. It is possible some of these parties may end up nominating in more places, but it looks like a clear shift in strategy.

Now we finally have information about which Labor MLCs are running again, and there’s some interesting shifts.

During the debate about the future of the Legislative Council, I argued that the massive regions of the upper house do not provide meaningful local representation, and pointed to examples of MPs shifting to different regions a long way away from each other. We have a lot more evidence of that now.

Labor won 15 upper house seats in 2022. Four are retiring this year, and the other eleven are running for re-election. These eleven have been spread across the eight regions, so there is no region without an incumbent Labor MLC running. But three of these MLCs have moved to a new region.

Enver Erdogan and Tom McIntosh have swapped regions, with Erdogan moving from North Metro to Eastern Victoria and McIntosh the opposite. Ryan Batchelor has moved from South Metro to North East Metro. There was no incumbent MLC running for re-election in the north-east, whereas Batchelor would have likely needed to run second in his previous region. It suggests that Labor is concerned that he wouldn’t be re-elected in South Metro as the #2 Labor candidate. Unfortunately we don’t yet know the candidate rankings within the Labor ticket, but we’ll know on Monday.

More generally, I looked at the numbers of MPs in both houses who are retiring this year. Every MP except for Darren Cheeseman has announced their intentions. I assume Cheeseman will retire but I won’t assume that until nominations formally close.

This final chart compares the number of MPs retiring at each election since 2002.

So far we have 28 retirements in 2026. This includes 15 Labor MPs, 9 Coalition MPs and four others. I have counted the late Tim Read, who had announced his retirement before his death earlier this year, as well as Adem Somyurek, Will Fowles and David Ettershank of the Legalise Cannabis party. Arguably two of those four retirements are driven by the upper house reforms.

The previous record was 26 in 2022, but the number of Labor retirements was actually higher last time than this time.

That’s it for now. I will be looking for websites for all of the newly-nominated candidates and will keep updating candidate lists as time allows (around analysing the New Zealand election results). The final lists should go up on Monday evening.

The value of the 2PP has been questioned in recent years, as an increasing number of seats were not Labor-Coalition contests, but it still helped explain three quarters of seats in 2025.

Yet since 2025, the surge of support for One Nation has meant that the meaningfulness of the 2PP is in serious doubt. And it may be the case that the increasing number of non-classic seats will force electoral commissions to abandon counting the 2PP everywhere.

The two-party-preferred vote (2PP) evolved in an era of Australian politics when almost every seat was a contest between Labor and the Coalition – but there was a growing number of votes cast for everyone else. Pretty much every seat ended up as a Labor-Coalition race, so the 2PP was synonymous with the final preference count, which would determine who would win.

Up until 1984, a final head-to-head count would only be conducted in seats where no candidate reached a majority of the vote at an earlier stage. In order to achieve a complete two-party-preferred count for the whole country, and to produce margins for safer seats, psephologists like Malcolm Mackerras and Colin Hughes would use preference flows from close races and make estimates of the final margin.

As of 1984, the Australian Electoral Commission was required to conduct a full preference distribution (which would then produce a two-candidate-preferred figure) for every seat, even if the winner achieved a majority of the primary vote.

In the 1980s, the two-candidate-preferred count and the two-party-preferred count were synonymous. A ‘non-classic’ seat is a race where the top two are not Labor vs Coalition. In other words, a non-classic seat is one where the two-candidate-preferred and two-party-preferred figures are not the same.

In 1983 and 1984, every single seat was classic. That was almost true in 1987 too, but things got messy.

In the seat of Newcastle, independent George Keegan came second, with 27.1% of the primary vote compared to 16.5% for the Liberal candidate Alan Taggart.

Despite Keegan clearly coming second, the AEC was required by law to do a Labor-Liberal 2PP count, not a Labor-independent 2CP count.

The law must have changed after this election, because in 1990 there were three non-classic contests in Newcastle, North Sydney and Cunningham. Ted Mack in North Sydney became the first crossbencher to win a seat in the House of Representatives since the 1960s.

The Australian Electoral Commission has regularly conducted a process called ‘scrutiny for information’ (SFI) – this process seems to have been conducted for all but one seat since 1990.

For most of that time, the SFI process wasn’t needed in many seats, since most seats naturally produced a 2CP which was also used as the 2PP.

From 1990 until 2007, there were never more than six seats requiring a extra 2PP count.

Of course this count isn’t an automatic thing – it required the employment of staff for a longer period and would extend the election counting period.

But over recent years, as the number of non-classic seats has increased, there has been a growing list of seats requiring this special treatment, peaking at 35 in 2025.

Up until 2025, you might have been under a misapprehension that this counting process is required by law – but it is not. In 2025, the AEC declined to conduct an SFI count in Bradfield due to the ongoing court case and close 2CP count. Instead, the AEC came up with its own estimate of 2PP figures to fill in the results system, but there was no reason to think they were accurate.

So in 2025, it was necessary to conduct extra SFI counts in 35 out of 150 seats – over 23% of all seats. This was about seven times the average in the 1990-2007 period.

There’s reason to think that the number of non-classic seats may skyrocket at the next federal election.

DemosAU has conducted four MRPs over the course of about a year. In the last three MRPs, about a quarter of seats would still be Labor-Coalition contests.

If the last MRP was to play out, and the AEC was to maintain their previous policy, they would need to do an extra 2PP count in 111 seats.

It seems genuinely unclear as to whether 2PP counts will continue at federal elections. There are practical issues with collecting all of that extra data, and questions about the value of that data.

Indeed we’re seeing some different approaches from this year’s state elections.

At the South Australian state election in March, just 13 out of 47 seats were classic seats. It was reported at the time that ECSA planned to do extra counts only in seats where Labor didn’t make the 2CP, thus creating a statewide Labor vs other 2PP. I haven’t actually seen the results of such a count, and I don’t know if ECSA made progress. EDIT: ECSA has now sent me this data, which means we now have 2PP figures for 20/47 seats. I’ve added the data to my data repository.

Not every state has consistently produced 2PP counts in every seat, unlike the AEC.

When a state mostly has complete 2PP counts, it is usually not too difficult to make estimates for the few missing seats. In the case of Queensland, most elections have a statewide 2PP figure, but there’s a break in the series in 1998 and 2001 when One Nation hit their previous peak. 2PP became a meaningful figure again from 2004 – so the current moment may not be the end forever.

The Victorian Electoral Commission held a briefing for psephologists last week, and they mentioned that they still plan on conducting a 2PP count in every seat.

Meanwhile, New South Wales uses an entirely different method of counting votes by data-entering the full ballot into the computer. This means that every single 2CP pairing can be estimated, and there is no extra effort involved in calculating 2PP for every seat. Still, those two upcoming elections may be the last to produce full 2PP figures for the entire jurisdiction.

So what do you think? Should the AEC maintain the 2PP count, or does the changing party system mean this measure has run its course?

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Ben: Welcome to the Tally Room podcast. I’m Ben Raue. New Zealand’s election this weekend is testing the limits of the proportional voting system the country first introduced thirty years ago, as more voters than ever look beyond the two major parties. In today’s podcast we’re going to look at the New Zealand electoral system, the parties, and what the polls say might happen on Saturday.

My guest today is James Mulrennan. James is the author of The Overhang where he analyses New Zealand’s elections. Hello, James.

James: Kia ora.

Ben: But first you can now buy tickets for the second Tally Room Live podcast recording in Melbourne on Wednesday, December 2nd, with The Guardian’s Benita Kolovos and the University of Melbourne’s Todd Farrell. There’ll be a link to buy tickets in the show notes. The first show is sold out, so get in quick if you want to grab your spot.

New Zealand first used the Mixed Member Proportional electoral system, or MMP, in 1996. This system opened the door for smaller parties to win significant numbers of seats and take on roles in government.

New Zealand has only elected a single party majority government once since 1996. But this year, declining support for the major parties have reached a point where the electoral system is struggling to accurately reflect voter intention.

James, the current conservative government has been in power for three years. In the past, the junior partners in government have usually been the ones punished at the following election. But this time it seems like the National party are the ones who are losing support. Why do you think that is?

James: So I think it’s a combination of things.

Obviously the state of the economy, cost of living is just constantly coming up as an issue in any issues based polling, which even for a first term government who came in with a sizeable majority, have, you know, had to face that down and struggle with it. And as the face of that coalition, I think National are the ones who bear the brunt of that.

But on the other hand, the realities of coalition politics means that they are in part accountable for the agenda of their partner parties, the New Zealand First party and the ACT party. and, you know, given their minority parties, some of those things are less popular. But as the face of it I think National are the ones who have suffered as a result.

There’s also some suggestion that Chris Luxon, their leader, the Prime Minister has not kind of connected with the public in the way that previous first term prime ministers have. He’s sort of constantly neck and neck in the preferred Prime Minister polling with opposition leader Chris Hipkins. and so I think that’s part of the story.

Ben: So why don’t we run through the parties? Most of the parties in New Zealand politics have been around for a while. So if someone’s previously looked at New Zealand elections, most of it won’t be a surprise. we effectively have three parties on the right, three parties broadly on the left, and then a seventh party that sort of sits outside of that. Let’s start with the parties of the government. So National Party, they’re the traditional conservative party, major party of the past. But then we’ve also got ACT and New Zealand First.

James: Yeah, so National will be familiar to anyone from a a Commonwealth jurisdiction. Longstanding centre right party formed in the mid 1900s, out of the the previous Liberal and Reform parties. so very similar to the situation with the Liberal Party in Australia, except the National party is the Nationals and the Liberals all in one. and, you know, for a long time prior to MMP they had the natural party of government status and held office for most of the time.

More recently they’ve been joined by the ACT Party. so they’re more of your kind of libertarian neoliberal right wing party. so very much focused on fiscal discipline, on reducing the size of government, on bureaucratic efficiency, things like this, initially formed as a breakaway from both the Labour and National parties after the market reforms of the 1980s. and so, very much sit to the right of the National party.

And then finally New Zealand First, who traditionally weren’t necessarily seen as right-aligned. They formed coalitions with both the Labour and National parties in the past and originally formed as a a splinter party from National with their leader still to this day, Winston Peters, breaking away with National over disagreements of some of the 1980s and 1990s reforms. They’re sort of more of your interventionist right wing party, a kind of more populist style of leadership. They’ve taken on many forms and many different issues and target audiences over the years.

For your Australian audience, there’s sort of a degree of comparison to Pauline Ho Hansen’s One Nation, formed at a similar time and addressing similar similar issues and audiences. a lot of focus on immigration as we see from conservative parties in the Western world. but also there’s a degree of Bob Katter in there in terms of Winston Peters’ personality and his at times contentious avuncular engagement with the media.

Ben: Yeah, so New Zealand First in particular, I feel like traditionally people would compare them to one nation and the fact that New Zealand First formed governments with Labour, I believe in 2002 and then definitely in 2017, they formed a government where Winston Peters took on that kind of deputy prime ministerial role.

And that didn’t seem to really fit the mould very much, but it does seem like in the last few years, particularly during the last parliamentary term when they were actually out of parliament, they swung quite clearly to the right and were very opposed to the Labour majority government to the point where in 2023 there wasn’t really any doubt about which way they would fall.

James: No, and I think the feeling is in many ways mutual there. given some of the issues that New Zealand First has picked up on, and the audience it’s appealed to since the Covid disruptions, and, you know, issues around vaccine mandates and lockdowns, that really drove if nothing else, a personal wedge between the New Zealand First Party and Chris Hipkins’ Labour Party, where there was just an inability to agree in the past.

And also I think on the substance New Zealand First have really drifted into some conservative social issue positions around gender, around migration, and you know, things that do border on the conspiratorial, that the Labour Party just isn’t willing to couldn’t, with their support base, go into government with and that’s even setting aside the inability of the Greens or Te Pati Māori to get along with New Zealand First.

So it has created, I think on both sides a kind of clear set of two governing block or two blocs looking to govern.

Ben: On the left you’ve got Labour, the Green Party, and Te Pati Māori. one thing I have found fascinating over the last few years of New Zealand politics is traditionally you’ve had parties on both sides forming government with various forms of government. You know, there was more uncertainty, more flexibility about who they would form government with. you know, Te Pati Māori in a kind of previous form, supported the John Key National Party government.

As we talked about New Zealand First going the other way, and there was other parties like United Future in the past that could have been seen as a right wing party but supported a Labour government. But it does feel very much now like putting aside the seventh party, which we’ll talk about in a minute. You effectively have two blocs of three parties each. And that isn’t to minimise the disagreement within them, the internal tension, the desire to maybe include or exclude fellow members of that bloc in government.

But effectively no one in either camp is willing or acceptable to the other camp. and so effectively if either of those camps gets a majority, it rules the other one out.

James: Yeah, and that’s exactly what we saw in 2023, even though New Zealand First support was necessary for ACT and National to form a government, there was never any prospect or discussion that New Zealand First would have worked with the parties at the left.

Ben: So tell us about those parties. Let’s maybe let’s start with Labour and and Greens and then we’ll get Te Pati Māori.

James: Yeah, so Labour are again fairly straightforward. centre left labour party, since the 1980s that sort of meant more of a third way type of vibe as you’d see with New Labour in the UK. and yeah, centre left social democrats. to their left, is the Green Party, which again, broadly similar, although I think there are some interesting differences between the the New Zealand Greens and Greens overseas.

Over the last twenty years, they’ve really occupied that role on the left of picking up social justice issues, economic justice issues, and increasingly indigenous rights issues. they’ve now started campaigning in the Māori seats quite actively. and in many ways filling a a gap that was created by the decline of a previous left wing party, the Alliance that the Greens were originally part of.

And so they’re nearing record highs in the polls at the moment, around sixteen percent, a bit like what we’re seeing on the right where New Zealand First and ACT are taking up space that was previously occupied by National. There’s a degree to which the Greens are taking up space that was occupied by Labour.

Ben: It’s always been interesting for the Greens, and I think the Australian Greens find themselves in a similar position, although it’s less about coalition government in Australia and it’s more about preferential deals before an election, where their position on the left of politics doesn’t give them a lot of options. Like they can they can try to hold a line against Labour, they can demand things, but Labour knows that ultimately they don’t really have any other option and they’re gonna have to work with Labour.

And I think we particularly saw that in 2017 where Labour needed both the Green Party and New Zealand First to form government. But New Zealand First’s position kind of in the middle of the political spectrum gave them the advantage of controlling who formed government and thus getting a better deal. And I think sometimes people have interpreted that as the Greens are bad deal makers.

But I think it also just reflects their position in the political spectrum. if they were a different party, they could negotiate differently. And I think we we will get to that in a minute with the Opportunity party, but that has often held them back in terms of their ability to demand key roles in government. they have had ministers but they’ve been very junior roles outside of cabinet.

James: Yeah, no, that’s absolutely right. they’re playing on a higher degree of difficulty in some ways than the centre minor parties who have that option. It’s just they’re a relatively internally democratic party, as is pretty common for Green Parties around the world, and so their membership has approval over coalition deals. And there is just no reality, no universe in which the party would be able to do a deal with National.

So they have to take the world as they find it, which is how do you influence the Labour Party from the left without that negotiating position and we have seen in one of the minor party debates a real difference of views between the Greens, and in some ways similar but in other ways different Opportunity party, around the philosophy of change or the strategy that they’re they’re bringing to the table.

Ben: Then Te Pati Māori, who have been around for a while but kind of declined in significance and then have come back and in the process changed their name from the Māori Party to Te Pati Māori, which is quite a convenient way to distinguish the earlier and latter eras of the party, but tell us a bit about them.

James: Yeah, so originally Te Pati Māori formed as a breakaway from the Labour Party. Um Labour, with one exception in the 90s, has basically held all of the Māori electorate seats, right back to the 1930s but then there was some particularly controversial legislation around what’s called here the Foreshore and Seabed Act, but effectively the legislative extinguishment of indigenous rights to, or the legal possibility of indigenous rights in the foreshore and seabed. and so that provoked a very strong reaction within kind of Māori politics more generally.

And then as a part of that an MP broke away from Labour and set up what was then the Māori Party. Then off the back of that, given the tension in the mid 2000s with the Labour Party, Te Pati Māori chose to enter a confidence and supply agreement with John Key’s National Party. Situation there was somewhat complicated that they weren’t necessary to form a government with National, but they were sufficient.

So you sort of had this multi party relationship between National ACT, United Future and Te Pati Māori, where National had separate deals with each of those three parties, but they weren’t all in in government together. And so yeah, that staked them out as more ‘centrist’, but it’s just really the axes on which they’re polarised and they’ve distinguished themselves from Labour just don’t necessarily neatly track with kind of left and right categories.

What has driven them into this wider left bloc is one of the unifying themes between National, New Zealand First and ACT in this coalition has been around indigenous rights and the role of the the Treaty of Waitangi. The view that the coalition takes of the role of the treaty and Māori in public life is diametrically opposed to Te Pati Māori’s view and was seen as an attack on the place of the treaty in New Zealand society.

It led to some of the largest protests we’ve ever seen in the country towards the end of 2024 and alongside that Te Pati Māori rising in the polls, to kind of record highs for them. That’s then since fallen away because of some internal ructions that have led to a split in the party. So now Te Pati Maori have lost two of their sitting MPs who are now running as

either a new party or independents, which has kind of taken some of the momentum out from behind that. But just again, with the issues that New Zealand First in particular are taking on there’s just no prospect of a government that includes them and Te Pati Māori being functional. almost by default, Te Pati Māori fall in with Labour and the Greens.

With the Greens I think that’s fine. I think there is still a reasonable degree of bad blood with the Labour Party, given both the split in 2005 and then Te Pati Māori’s support for the National government. but also I think Labour who have to consider their centre flank are kinda concerned about Te Pati Māori, you know, taking out some pretty radical positions that they feel they have to defend to centre voters who may not feel the same way.

So all things considered Labour would prefer no coalition partners, but I definitely think they see a a more stable relationship with the Greens. They’ve proven that during the Ardern government. but whereas with Te Pati Māori they obviously would if they had to, but they are very actively trying to win back the Māori seats for the Labour Party.

Ben: And let’s talk briefly about the Māori seats because that is a big difference with the electoral system that traditionally there were these electorates in New Zealand for people of Māori heritage. and it was previously a way to kind of segregate and reduce their power in some sense because, you know, these voters tended to be left leaning and these electorates produced enormous left wing majorities and it kind of was an inefficient way to distribute votes.

At least until this election, that hasn’t been such a concern with the proportional electoral system balancing out any of those issues now. And now Māori voters are given a choice every five years, or I assume when they enroll for the first time as well, whether they want to be on the Māori roll or the general roll. And then there are electorates drawn that overlap with the general electorates just for voters on that Māori roll. So there are seven of them around the country.

And so any area of New Zealand you’re in will have an local electorate MP, but also a local Māori MP. and they have played a very different dynamic, right, where Te Pati Māori its ability to get elected is pretty much entirely dependent on its ability to win individual electorates, in a way that at least until this year, the party totals in parliament for everyone else are largely dependent on their vote nationally, not about how they do in an individual seat. but that’s very much not true for Te Pati Māori.

James: Yeah, the history there behind the Māori seats a bit of an interesting one. Originally it was to do with the property franchise and the fact that Māori traditional title to land just didn’t mesh with a Western system, so as a compromise to ensure equal representation the Māori seats were created to manage that. the role the seats have played through our history has changed over time.

I think there was a time where it was more or less an act of continuing gerrymandering, where it kept a um separate representation that that did advantage National in the general electorate seats that would otherwise have those voters. But they’re now seen I think as a pretty important part of the constitutional settlement around Crown-Iwi relations and how, the promises of the Treaty of Waitangi are honoured.

They’re not explicitly referenced in the treaty, but they’ve formed part of maintaining the social peace around indigenous issues in New Zealand. The Māori seats are very unpopular on the right. it’s been a core issue for both New Zealand First and ACT and some factions within the National Party that are very opposed to what they see as a, you know, racially discriminatory form of representation. but also one that happens to have favoured the other side.

There have been overhangs created by the Māori seats in the past where Te Pati Māori doesn’t get enough seats on the proportional party vote to cover all of the electorates it wins, but it’s sort of of the order of one to three at most, and no elections ever hung on whether or not Te Pati Māori has those overhang seats. So it’s sort of been acknowledged as something that happens but it’s never really been much of an issue.

But this election Te Pati Māori have explicitly been running a strategy of give us your candidate vote in the Māori seats, but give your party vote to one of the other parties of the left, so that we can you know, enhance our position. and that’s new.

We have seen over the course of this year Te Pati Māori more or less disappear as a force in the party vote polls, well under 1%, under half a percent at times, which, you know, could reflect that strategy coming to pass, but we’ll find out in a week or so.

Ben: So in New Zealand there are 71 electorates, seven of which are Maori seats, 64 are general electorates. There used to be 72, but one of them was abolished in the last redistribution.

So each of those 71 seats elects its member through first past the post, and then there are another 49 seats which add up to a total of 120. So a voter has two votes. They cast their for their local candidate and then they cast another vote for a party at a national level. if you get over 5% nationally or you win an electorate, then you qualify for list seats,

But the list vote is used to work out what the total balance of the whole 120 is. So if a party wins a lot of electorates, effectively those seats are subtracted from how many list seats they get. And that’s what makes it a proportional system, as opposed to countries like Japan or Italy, which use a superficially similar system, but they don’t factor in the electorate results when the list seats are worked out.

Now the overhang, the name of your newsletter and what is seemingly of great relevance to this election, comes into play when a party wins more electorates than its share of the total vote. So if Te Pati Māori wins four electorates but only wins enough party votes for two, that creates two extra seats in the parliament to make up for that extra two seats. So everyone else still wins their share, but you win extra.

And it’s probably worth contrasting that with Germany, which has a very similar system to New Zealand, but until recently when they have tweaked their system further, They would then give everyone else extra seats to balance out that.

So if Te Pati Māori got double the number of seats it was entitled to, I guess that would mean every other party would also double the number of seats and it would create an overall balance. But in Germany that has led to much, much larger parliaments and they’ve now moved on from that. But New Zealand doesn’t even have that. So I think that’s all the basics of the system.

But now let’s talk about Opportunity because we talked about that 5% threshold.

If a party gets 4.999% of the vote and doesn’t get an electorate, they don’t get anything at all, right? Whereas if they get five, they probably get six, seven seats somewhere around there, depending on exactly how the rest of the parliament works. and so for Opportunity, tell me a bit about them and their chances of getting into parliament.

James: Yeah, so Opportunity Party was founded in 2017 by a wealthy entrepreneur by the name of Gareth Morgan, and has morphed over time, it’s fair to say. their slogan this time around is “not left, not right, but forward”, which will be familiar to anyone who followed Andrew Yang’s campaign for president in the United States, that it is very much sort of a progressive centrist style of politics that tries to focus in on just what works and just sensible policy and without too much ideology, is how they’d put it.

So they do have a lot in common on some issues with both National and Labour, and have been very explicit that they would be willing to work with either party.

Probably a somewhat good analogy is the teal candidates in Australia that sort of a lot of previously Liberal-National seats or voters who perhaps are a little dissatisfied with the current shape of the National party, are seeing Opportunity as an alternative.

And then similarly, former Labour voters or former Green voters who are uninspired by the offering that Labour have put on the table are probably beginning to defect over to Opportunity as well. We don’t have a super clear picture of that, and we probably won’t until we see what the spread of where their support’s coming from looks like.

Ben: Indeed, their party colours, at least according to Wikipedia, are teal. So, you know, like the teals in Australia, they’ve gone for that mix of blue and green. And I have seen in some of the debates them specifically targeting the Greens and talking about being an environmental party, but suggesting that the Greens have missed out on opportunities to contribute to government because of their refusal to work with the Nationals.

James: Yeah. and the reason I say they’ve had a few different forms and a few different priorities over there is some of their fundamental policies are fairly radical. a centerpiece of their program is a move to a land tax based tax system, rather than focusing on income tax, combined with a a universal basic income, which, yeah, it would be a a pretty radical change to tax and welfare laws in New Zealand.

But on the other hand, the issues they’ve chosen to prioritise and have declared as their bottom lines in negotiation are, probably much more realistic given they are for a party on near enough five six percent of the vote. around a few environmental issues, a few social issues.

So it has made them a bit difficult to classify and and and pin down.

They’ve got a new leader since the last election, Qiulae Wong, who is contesting the seat of Mount Albert in Auckland as an alternative way to try to get above the the threshold and qualify for seats.

But yeah, over the course of this year they’ve lifted from 1-2% in the polls, which has been traditionally what they’ve got at the last three elections, to first over five percent and now somewhere between six and eight. so whilst it’s fairly likely at this point that they will get in, there’s obviously some uncertainty there The most powerful vote you can cast statistically in New Zealand is the one that tips a party from 4.999 to 5.0.

And there is the possibility that Opportunity are quite close to that margin. and in terms of the likely shape of Parliament, whether they make it in or not really does have a big role in determining who’s likely to govern. With polls as they are at the moment, it would be very unlikely that Labour would be able to form a government without them. Never say never.

We’ve seen some big swings in the past, but absent Opportunity, with National, New Zealand First and ACT picking up probably just enough seats to continue governing alone. So it’s been a real focus of debate and coverage over the campaign.

Ben: And something I’ve always found interesting about that 5% threshold is the tactical voting dilemma it creates for voters. Because in theory a proportional system should reduce that tactical voting question because every vote counts in some way.

And you know, when we have proportional systems here in Australia using preferential voting, of course parties that poll poorly don’t get people elected, but you go from zero to one, you don’t go from zero to six or seven and those votes can still be really valuable even if the number one person they voted for doesn’t elect someone, right?

Like if one or two percent of people vote for a socialist party, those preferences might still help elect a Green over someone else at some point.

Whereas it does create this dilemma for people and clearly, Christopher Luxon has been trying to discourage conservative voters from voting for them by saying that he won’t form government with them and I mean, there’s a lot of skepticism about how serious he is about that promise, but it is clearly intended as a don’t go give them your vote. ideally for them they would have Opportunity pick up as much of the left vote as they could without getting past 5% and soak up those left votes. And effectively then those votes are all dead, right? They don’t count for anything at all.

James: Yeah, the threshold effect is pretty extreme and it’s why you have seen in the past a lot of minor parties going the other route to qualifying for seats, which is to win a single electorate. but there is a credibility gap, I think, that you’ve got to get over as a minor party there’s sort of a dead zone between about 2% where you’re kind of not in it up to a little over five percent where once that realistic prospect that you’re elected is established, then more support will flow your way.

The threshold has been one of the factors behind why New Zealand’s system hasn’t come to resemble proportional systems in other countries. It’s very difficult to enter parliament without pre existing representation. It hasn’t happened since I think the 1960s with the social credit movement even before MMP came in. So if Opportunity do make it in, that will be the first time that’s happened without a breakaway from an existing party.

Ben: Right, because ACT and New Zealand First were – well, New Zealand First started before MMP ACT kind of started in that period where you knew that MMP was coming, but they both were founded by defectors from the major parties. Te Pati Māori was founded by a defector from the major parties. The Green Party wasn’t, but it was a member party of the Alliance and had members of parliament who then split off to get elected separately. Yeah.

James: Yep. Yep. And previous parties that have sort of been and gone, United Future, the Alliance, the Progressive Party and the Mana Party, were all, you know, defectors from previous parties. So, Opportunity coming in as something you know, there are obviously people involved who have been in involved in politics in the past, but it’s not that direct lineage. So it’s a tough ask in the system and you have to credit them that they’ve been able to garner the attention and the support that they have.

Ben: Yeah, and the 5% threshold, a lot of countries that use proportional representation have some kind of threshold, often around that level, is a deliberately designed thing to limit the fragmentation, right? It is designed to avoid a situation where you have a party getting two, three percent and having like six or seven parties in government. It does feel like despite that though, the amount of fragmentation in New Zealand politics has been growing a little bit.

We’ve now got six parties, well, you can argue about Te Pati Māori, but certainly the other five, all with substantial numbers of seats. We’re not talking about parties only electing one or two MPs as we have in the past. And, right now a fully fledged coalition government with three parties all with substantial numbers of seats. Whereas traditionally, even if sometimes you had three parties in government, usually one or two of them were very, very small. And it does feel like the medium sized parties have become bigger and more significant in New Zealand.

James: Yeah, I think initially with the transition to MMP we operated under this two-and-a-bit party system where National and Labour were still very dominant and you’d only really see the medium parties rising to prominence when one of the major parties was collapsing. So if Labour were in opposition, and failing to find a message that worked, you’d see support obviously moving to National but also moving to to the Greens in New Zealand First.

Ben: And ACT were also at their peak when the National party were very weak.

James: Exactly, exactly. So that was the dynamic for a while where it was quite clear that Labour and National were the main games in town and they’re still polling thirty percent. But what we’re seeing now does more resemble what you see in, say, continental Europe of this sort of constellation of aligned parties of different sizes, probably clearer blocs as we discussed at the beginning, than you’ve seen in other systems.

So it’s an interesting question. Given the size of our parliament and some of the seats-to-votes theories about the numbers of parties you’d expect to see in a proportional system like ours, we’ve up until probably 2023 or so, run well below that with Labour and National dominating.

But in some ways this could be just the realities of a proportional system asserting themselves. or it you know, the the kind of stable juncture we were at with the the boom of the 90s and the 2000s which supported the enduring three term National and Labour governments, has sort of given way to a much more disrupted macro environment.

And if neither of the major parties are being seen as dealing appropriately with that, that support is gonna go elsewhere. it’s partly personality. I think it’s probably not controversial to say that both Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins sit in the shadow of two very popular past leaders of their parties.

And so without that kind of resonant figurehead like a John Key or a Jacinda Ardern, the major parties haven’t been able to attract the support and attention that they’ve had in the past. and that’s seen the, you know, rise in visibility of the likes of Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson of the Green Party or Winston Peters and David Seymour of New Zealand First and ACT.

Ben: So we understand the parties, we understand the system. One of the big things we’ve seen in this term is the relative strength of the National Party compared to its minor party coalition partners has been going down. New Zealand First did appear to be on a particularly high point, whereas ACT polled more at the previous election. But in the last few months, New Zealand First vote has declined a little bit and ACT’s vote has gone up.

But it’s still interesting because New Zealand First three times in the past have formed government. All three times their vote then dipped below five percent, right? Sometimes they stayed back in because they had an electorate, sometimes they got knocked out of parliament. But a term in power for New Zealand First has always led to a big decline. Right now, they’re on track for a substantial increase, although not as much as they were getting in, say May.

Putting aside the question of left versus right, if the right wing government is re-elected, that make up of that government would be quite different.

James: Yeah, there’s a really good piece of analysis in a website over here called The Spinoff, the terms they put it in was everyone is in opposition now. And that has been the pattern we’ve seen with New Zealand First is they’re very effective in opposition at opposing at finding, you know, issues where people are frustrated with the governing parties.

And they’ve basically just continued that approach despite the fact that they are in coalition, in cabinet, of taking issue with especially some of ACT’s proposals. but yeah, continuing to motivate that kind of protest energy from within coalition. so I think that’s a part of the continued support they’ve seen.

And then the other part is the weakness of National and Labour in government and in opposition has sort of left enough space available for them to occupy. I guess the other contributing factor is and this is a risk for Opportunity if they are in a position to ACT as kingmaker, is roughly speaking, half to a third of New Zealand First support at past elections wanted them to form a government with either National or Labour.

That faction immediately gets disappointed when they support the other side. As we saw after 2017, there was a lot of voters who were not particularly happy with the decision to go with Labour. Saw the same in the 2000s or especially in 1996 with the decision to go with National. That probably wasn’t the case at the 2023 election where it was very clear through the campaign from the statements Hipkins and Winston Peters had made that a vote for New Zealand First was a vote for a coalition with National. And so there hasn’t been that same sense of betrayal that’s driven some of their voters away.

Ben: So the kind of Green Party approach of picking a side and being reliable and stable, maybe works well for your kind of long term vote stability because you’re not pissing off half your base when you do the thing that everyone expected you to do.

James: Yeah, it’s, not a choice that is open to the Greens to do anything else, but the advantage of being a stable, kinda ideologically distinct.

Ben: I don’t know, they could completely change what they believe in and change who their voters were, parties do it, you know.

James: To an extent the Green Party has, a big part of their rise since the 2000s has been growth as we’ve seen in Australia and the UK as well. Growth in the inner city urban areas more focused around issues of housing, transport, social justice, and a decline in some of the more rural alternative lifestyle type seats where they’d done well previously.

The first seat they won was Coromdanel, which is a rural kind of alternative lifestyle beach towns type seat. Whereas now the first seat that they won more recently was Auckland Central, the center of the biggest city. and then the same in the central seats in Wellington.

So yeah, the parties do change, but I think people know what they’re getting with the Greens, whereas that might not have been true with New Zealand earlier in the 2000s, whereas now it’s a clearer picture of what people are voting for. So I think they’ve been able to hold on to some of those voters. and also just the you know, the issues have been favorable for them. one of their core issues has been around the oil and gas sector, and the decline of the fossil fuel industry in New Zealand.

That has become much more prominent, with both domestic energy prices in New Zealand even before the Strait of Hormuz was closed. and obviously now with disruptions to the global oil supply, that’s a coherent message that resonates with people. The Greens and Opportunity have their own version of it around electrification, but it’s played to their strengths in a lot of ways.

Ben: So that’s been going on the right. It’s not quite so obvious on the left where Labour has had a polling increase throughout the term, but certainly in the last few months we’ve seen the Green Party picking up its support while Labour and Te Pati Māori are falling.

But probably the more interesting polling trend: In theory under a proportional system you put aside the overhangs, you put aside who gets over the threshold. You would expect that if one bloc is in total polling more than the other bloc, they probably form a majority under this kind of everyone’s picked a side system. And in that regard, the right wing parties generally have been polling a little bit better than the parties of the left, but it’s not super clear.

James: Yeah, so I think what was unusual about this term, and I think it partly is to do with the state of the world, is basically no honeymoon period for Luxon’s government. That there was a year or so where they stayed basically where they were at the 2023 election. But since then Labour did see a sustained recovery, which is unusual for a first term opposition government in New Zealand to a point where over 2024-25 they were ahead of National in many polls, even where the left bloc was sort of just behind. But then yeah, the dominant trend in polling over 2026 is support for Labour falling away as support for the Opportunity Party and then more recently the Greens has increased.

Obviously post hoc ergo propter hoc doesn’t mean that it’s the same voters that are moving, but it’s a pretty compelling trend. That Opportunity have been rising while Labour has been falling.

The Greens rising over the course of an election is not unusual. The minor parties tend to do well once they’re on a more of a level footing with the major parties over the course of a campaign. So that increase that they’ve seen is, you know, it doesn’t always happen, but it’s it’s not surprising to see.

And we see the same with ACT over the the past couple of months of increased prominence with some high profile candidates. But yeah, since the beginning of this year, the right bloc has been sustainably 3-5% of the collective left bloc. but the real uncertainty that’s been injected into the outcome has come from the Opportunity Party and from the prospects of National and Te Pati Māori winning additional seats.

Ben: Let’s go to that and let’s talk about that element because, until this election, and honestly, until the last couple of months I don’t think people have been talking about it very much. You you have, but the electorate contests in New Zealand outside of those Māori electorates have largely seemed like a sideshow to those of us watching from the outside.

They obviously matter to the individual candidates who are running because it can matter to the personalities of who actually sits in parliament. And there’s dynamics where who you nominate in an electorate can have an effect on how you poll in that area on both ballots and all of those kind of dynamics. But ultimately, in terms of who gets elected to parliament, they haven’t mattered, right?

And the example I like to use is I think it was 2014. There was actually two elections in a row where it was really close. Jacinda Ardern ran for Auckland Central and lost to Nikki Kaye, who was the National Party candidate. In 2014, that was the last seat to be decided, and whoever lost that seat would then fill the last list seat. And if the lead changed, the party that had gained the lead would then lose a list seat, and the candidate that had fallen behind would have then gained a seat on the list.

So, in terms of the actual makeup of parliament, in this super, super close contest, which would be a really big story in Australia made no difference to who sat in parliament. And I know there’s resourcing things as well. You have a local electorate office and all that kind of stuff as well that you get with being the local MP.

But what’s interesting this year is because the National party’s vote has fallen so far, but under those dynamics of first past the post, you look at a UK election or even a single member election in Australia, the major parties still get these big winners bonus from being the bigger parties.

National are in a position where they will do very badly out of the list vote, but actually do quite well out of the electorate vote, we suspect. It’s hard to say. And that could create a mismatch where they win a few more or maybe even a lot more electorates than their share of the party vote, which has both consequences internally for them, but also probably would lock in a right wing government.

James: No, it’s exactly right. Electorates aren’t supposed to matter to the overall proportionality of of Parliament. In many ways it’s a bug that they do. there was some concern when MMP was first introduced that parties might do this tactically. It was kind of mooted of, well, should we split the party into a an electorate party and a nationwide party to game the system? Very quickly kiboshed as being sort of constitutionally illegitimate.

But iit has been this persistent risk with mixed member systems that eventually the pressures in the system and the incentives the parties face, as I think we saw in in Japan or other places, they’d eventually default to being mixed member majoritarian systems where you’ve got two separate pools of candidates, one proportional and one electorate.

Ben: it’s definitely happened in Italy, which now has a mixed member majoritarian system where the link between the two has been separated. But you effectively could have Labour One and Labour Two, and Labour One only runs in the electorates and Labour Two runs in the list, at which point the linkage is completely broken.

We’ve seen in New Zealand, I think we’ve definitely seen it in Scotland, which has a similar system, but like New Zealand, relatively large proportion of the seats are local electorates compared to the number of list seats. And in Scotland they also calculate the proportionality by region. they don’t have overhangs, but if a party wins more than its share of the electorates, other parties just miss out on list seats to make up for it.

But what has definitely happened in Scotland is there are people who are pro-independence, will vote for the Scottish Greens on the list and they’ll vote for their local Scottish nationalist candidate on the constituency vote and effectively that boosts the overall pro independence share in Parliament compared to what their vote is.

And those people are voting sincerely, and I think you could also argue there are sincere people who are like, I’m gonna vote for the Māori party in my Māori electorate vote and then I’m gonna vote for the Greens or Labour, people do this naturally. They sincerely go: well, I like both these parties and I’m gonna split my vote.

But it does feel like in New Zealand we’re beginning to see particularly some independent groups that are not running their own candidates, encouraging voters to go, you can do this on purpose.

You can say vote for one party on one and one party on the other. The problem being if one side of politics does it, they get a short term advantage, right? But effectively then when the other side does it in response, it just breaks the proportionality entirely.

James: Yeah, and it’s almost happened by accident a couple of times in the past. So National have come very close I think they only had four seats on the list at the 2023 election. And you know, is there gonna be a major party overhang sort of fulfills the role of the contested convention in the United States where it’s fun to talk about but it never really happens.

But partly because of the Māori seats being a separate block of electorates where a lot of Labour’s vote, you know, a tenth of their vote comes from. what that means is in the general seats, along with Labour being quite concentrated in kind of working class areas of the major cities, is that on average National just have more seats that they can win when the parties are neck and neck in the polls.

What that means is put aside tactical voting, people just sort of sincerely splitting their vote as they always have, where, people understand the electorates are an FPP race and so you see ACT voters voting for National candidates, green voters in most seats voting for Labour candidates. even just with

that kind of ordinary behaviour, we probably will see a National overhang at this election. but yeah, now there’s been some talk, it must be said vociferously opposed by National party leadership, that people should engage in tactical voting to kind of boost their side’s chances. and really what’s driving that is the relative position of National versus the other parties of the right where, you know, roughly speaking, ACT on ten, New Zealand First on ten, National on thirty, that kind of ratio is sort of unheard of, at least in situations where National is doing well, where National’s votes collapse, that we saw that kind of gap emerge in 2020.

Ben: If you look at an Australian election or a UK election, because I don’t actually think preferential voting would help very much with this phenomenon, just to be clear, I’m sure we’ll get some comments going, if we had preferential voting it’d fix that. I don’t think it would help very much, to be honest, because you can have a majority block, but thirty percent of the vote is enough if you’re a little bit ahead of the other major party to win most seats, right? To just sweep it in. but thirty percent is not enough to win a large number of list seats.

James: No, and you know, that’s not a mathematical necessity. what’s driving it is the ratio of available list seats versus the number of electorates. Because we have increased the number of electorates since MMP was first introduced, but haven’t increased the size of parliament in response to that, what that’s usually meant is election to election, there’s one or two fewer list seats than there have been previously for complicated reasons I won’t go into we lost an electorate seat which at the last redistribution which has made things slightly easier. where you have plurality voting in the electorate seats and proportional voting nationwide and then layer on top of that the uneven distribution of party support across the country, it’s just a kind of natural outcome of that process.

Ben: And it’ll be interesting after the election because of the simple calculations of the New Zealand electoral system, it will be quite easy to go, well, if we had 20 more list seats, this wouldn’t have happened, or something like you know, to do those calculations afterwards. one element of the overhang means that sometimes there are prominent politicians for a major party who don’t run for an electorate, they only run for the lists.

And they’re really high up on the list, maybe they’re number two, number three on the list. but they are relying on their party at least getting a couple of list seats. But it looks like Nicola Willis in particular, who’s the finance minister, she’s not running for an electorate. So if the party gets any kind of overhang or even gets exactly the right number of seats, she won’t get elected.

Paul Goldsmith, who has traditionally run against the leader of ACT in Epsom, he won’t win that electorate. So he’s relying on the list. And then Chris Bishop, who represents a marginal seat in the Wellington suburbs, is also a very prominent minister. So all three of them are in danger. I mean Bishop could survive if the party does particularly well on the electorates, but three of them are in danger of effectively being squeezed out by the party’s very successful local electorate backbenchers who are more likely to survive if this sort of thing was to happen.

James: Yeah, between the two, three, four, and five on the National Party list, I think you’ve got seventeen ministerial portfolios and the Speaker of the House, all of whom would, Bishop aside, who has at least some prospect of retaining his seat, although the party is not popular in Wellington at the moment.

You know, all of whom are really going to struggle to make it into the House, which long term has to be of concern to the National party that their ability to attract and retain capable people who, there may not be space for them, in a safe electorate seat where constituency parties have a a big role in picking candidates. it’s been a really useful feature of MMP that the major parties place a lot of value on is their ability to put someone near the top of the list if they’re a prospective finance minister or foreign minister or speaker of the House.

And National looks like they’ve all but lost the ability to do that.

And I think that’s part of what’s driving National’s opposition to any suggestion of tactical voting is they want to be the strongest party within their block. They want their relative power compared to New Zealand First, ACT or potentially Opportunity to be as large as it can be. But they also want to retain the top of their list because those are you know, the finance minister is a very important role and you know bishop who’s sort of seen as the obvious successor if Nicola Willis does look out may lose his seat as well. So it really creates a problem for them, which is part of why they’re so opposed to tactical voting.

Ben: Is there any evidence that like say for example Labour or maybe the Greens by kind of staying out of particular electorates are trying to minimise that overhang by winning some of those marginal seats? Like that they’ve responded at all? Because I could imagine from their perspective they’ll be like, normally we don’t really care that much about winning these individual electorates, but in this case a split Labour-Green vote may like lock us out of government.

Is there any evidence that they’re responding in their campaigns?

James: So I haven’t seen anything about that from the parties themselves. the Greens with their own voters traditionally do very well on the candidate vote, even in seats where there was never a prospect the Green candidate would win, people two tick. I think where that becomes more relevant is after this election, if they do miss out partly or entirely due to National having an overhang, you may see a natural response to that.

Are we seeing evidence of ACT and New Zealand First voters moving more towards National than they have previously? And have we seen tactical voting in response? what we do see is in a few key marginal seats, both ACT and the Greens choosing not to stand candidates. more ACT than the Greens. I think there’s probably only two seats where the Greens aren’t standing. and in some of those close races, you know, their voters understand the

two horse race dynamics and tend to support either the National candidate or the Labour candidate, whereas they’re more free in safe National or safe Labour seats to vote their heart.

Ben: It is fascinating how the proportional way of thinking can sometimes coexist for people in their brain with effectively a first past the post way of thinking, right?

James: You and I and others think about this a lot more than other people do, and and a lot of times it’s just they like the local candidate or, they’re prominent in the area or whatever it is. But yeah, if it does happen, I think there will be serious questions about what the right tactical response is from Labour and the Greens. But I think it will also prompt a conversation about, do we feel this is legitimate?

It is a mixed member system. In some ways the adoption of a mixed member system was kind of a compromise in the move away from first past the post. So I think some would say that local MPs matter and it’s a perfectly legitimate outcome. The Labour Party will not be saying that if this is what causes them to lose. but I think we will see a debate about what is to be done about it.

You’d have to say a government that was elected off the back of this kind of support’s probably not going to be particularly enthusiastic about giving up that advantage.

But then, the history of how we got MMP in the first place did come in part from National winning two elections in the 1970s and 1980s with a minority of the vote just because of the way

FPP operated. So it could be that this’ll kick off another round of reconsideration, at least on the left, of what form the electoral system could take.

The other approach would be adding more seats to maintain proportionality. I can’t see that happening here because of what it would mean with Te Pati Māori, who okay, they’ve only got an overhang of two, two seats is not a lot, but that’s double their proportional entitlement.

And so to cancel that out you’d have an unforeseen doubling of the size of Parliament, that kind of uncertainty, not least it would probably begin to exhaust the major parties lists. I can’t see that getting off the ground. I’ve seen some speculation and argument that that’s actually what our legislation says ought to happen. I don’t agree with that, but it’s an opinion I’ve seen people posting from the Labour side.

And if things are close, and I think this is true both of the nationwide vote and the electorate vote, things could be more contentious and we may see recounts, litigation about the validity of ballots, because there’s been some changes to the enrolment laws that are creating problems there.

So if the election is close, I think we could be in for a rocky democratic ride over the next couple of months, as those things work through. fortunately New Zealand has largely been spared that because of the simplicity of the proportional system. The electorate votes matter to people in that electorate, but they don’t matter to the outcome. If that’s now no longer true, yeah, things could get quite tense.

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

James: Thanks, Ben.

Ben: I’ll be covering the New Zealand election this Saturday night with a live blog, kind of on and off through the evening, so please check it out. And you should also check out James’s newsletter, The Overhang, which is providing the best Psephological analysis of the New Zealand election. James, what are you gonna be doing on election night if someone wants to read what you’re saying?

James: So probably the easiest way to follow the live results is via X or Bluesky. that’s @ overhang AONZ. and we’ll know pretty quickly given how fast the votes are counted, what things are shaping up and then we won’t know for two weeks until provisional votes come in what the final results are.

Ben: So a lot of votes are effectively entered into the count right on 6pm when polls close, because those are early votes and they’re effectively counted on the day and then published at six o’clock. So we get a lot of those results straight away and then we get a lot of other ones through the night. But New Zealand, differently to Australia, all the extra votes that can’t be counted on the night will get processed over a two week period.

But here in Australia we get gradual updates and we gradually call those last few seats. But in New Zealand you have radio silence for two weeks and then you get everything in one go. Is that right?

James: Yep. Nervous wait on the specials is how we talk about it here.

Ben: And I’ve said a couple of times to people in New Zealand, like when people are like, we have to cut down on this time because this is bad. In Australia we also have that kind of two week wait, but the commission reports updates gradually as votes come in and almost everything is determined before the very last day of the count. and I suspect the same would be true in a lot of ways of New Zealand.

You know, you might not have the full picture, but the picture would gradually fill in rather than this yeah, radio silence.

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

Victoria will go to the polls in November in a state election that may be the most watched state election in Australia in a long time.

For today’s episode, we’re going to get up to speed on Victorian politics, the changes we’ve seen in the last term, the big policy issues that have dominated state politics, and the changes to the electoral system. This is the first of three pre-election podcasts covering the Victorian state election. My guest today is Benita Kolovos. Benita is Victorian state correspondent for The Guardian Australia. Hello Benita.

Benita: Hi, thanks for having me.

Ben: Thanks for coming on. But first, I’ve just launched the first range of merchandise for the Tally Room. You can now buy a hat that says waiting for the pre polls and a bag that says single transferable tote. These items are only available for a limited time. Pre orders must be in by Monday, November 2, so if you want to order something, please do so now. I don’t want you to miss out. The last Victorian state election was a third victory in a row for Daniel Andrews, who had led the state since 2014.

Meanwhile, John Pesutto had returned to Parliament as the new hope for the Liberal Party and immediately walked into the party leadership. A lot has changed since then. New leaders have taken over both major parties twice, and One Nation’s rise has shaken up the board. Benita, Labor came out of the 2022 election polling over 40%, and now they are polling in the mid-20s. What were the major issues that have led to the party losing all that support?

Benita: I think it started when Daniel Andrews resigned back in September 2023. Jacinta Allan took over from him. She, I guess, didn’t really command the same authority over her party room or also like the respect of of the public, right? Like Daniel Andrews was this, really confident, charismatic leader. Everyone kind of knew what he stood for and whether they agree with him or not.

They liked having that kind of politician with conviction. They didn’t really know as much about Jacinta Allan. And then I think from about the middle of 2024, so she’d been in the role for around six to nine months, we started to hear about these allegations of corruption on government construction sites. The big build. That was the dogged reporting of Nick Mackenzie at the age.

And that reporting continued almost weekly, sometimes even daily, for two years and Jacinta Allen did not want to call a Royal Commission into the issue. And I feel like that kind of took over the entire political discourse. So there was that element. the debt in Victoria is forecast to reach $199 billion in the next four years. We’re seeing things like you know, health services under a lot of pressure.

The pothole, I think, has become the symbol of this election. you drive down any street, whether it’s in regional or metropolitan Melbourne, and you’re seeing these big craters. And I think it’s just an illustration of if the government, can’t do this right, then you know, where’s the money going? And I think it all kind of ties back in to the big build as well. And I think that was the reason ultimately why the party room decided that they needed a leadership change so close to an election.

Ben: Yeah, I find it interesting with Jacinta Allan, towards the end her popularity was very poor.

Benita: it was worse than Scott Morrison or Peter Dutton’s which is quite extraordinary. I think her approval rating was just about to hit -50, which is a a figure we haven’t really seen before in state politics.

Ben: Yeah.

I’m curious though, we have a government here that’s been around a long time. We often see with governments that when they’re aging, problems pile up and there’s less less sympathy, less forgiveness from the voters. How much of that really was about her personally as opposed to her as the symbol as the leader of the party? Because since Ben Carroll has taken over for Allan, you know, he’s not as unpopular as she is, but it doesn’t seem like a lot has particularly changed in terms of the popularity of the government.

Benita: I think part of the issue with Jacinta Allan’s leadership was the fact that she didn’t really differentiate herself much from Daniel Andrews at the start. She’s from the same faction as him, very, very close to him. you know, kind of continued on with the Andrews era. and I do wonder, because obviously Ben Carroll’s come out, and I think it was like one of the first lines at his first press conference saying, I’m not Daniel Andrews, I’m not Jacinta Allan, and he has made some significant shifts. I do wonder if that had been earlier. there was talk about leadership change for, almost 12, you could even say 18 months. If, we think about the whispers around the 2025 election.

I do wonder if that might have shifted the fortunes. He’s obviously from a different faction, a very different type of Labor leader. His campaign bus has been unveiled and it literally says new Premier, new direction on it. So I do wonder if that’s enough. But then as you mentioned, twelve year government, Labor has never won a fourth term in Victoria. they’ve never done it after a leadership change and there’s been two. So I do wonder if it is an unsurmountable task.

Ben: Yeah, I’m looking at the polls here. the last few polls before Allan resigned, there was a 21 for Labor in terms of primary vote, but there’s some 26s, some 27s, there’s a 28 from Newspoll. And then in September and October, it’s all 24 and 25.

The worst of Jacinta Allan’s polls are a bit worse than what we’ve seen under Carroll, but he’s consistently been polling about the same or even a little bit less in terms of the party’s voting intention popularity than Allan was. And I think it does show like, he’s clearly trying to pursue this strategy of saying I’m a new guy. but I don’t really see any evidence of the voting public’s buying it. Like I think that they’re just like either you’re okay with Labor either way or you’re not. and it doesn’t look like much has changed.

Benita: I do think it’s really interesting because when I was speaking to Labor people at the start of the year, all the conversations are around how can we lift our primary to be in the high twenties or to have a three in front of it. That was the goal. and you know, people that were kind of agitating for a change, some of them reckon that Ben Carroll could have done that, but then when you speak to them now, you know, they say it was all about stemming the bleeding.

And they reckon that it would have gotten lower if Jacinta Allan had stayed, but obviously we’ll never know.

Ben: Jess Wilson now the third Liberal leader since the last election. John Pesutto was leader for a while. Interestingly, when I look at the polls the highest point of support for the Coalition actually came right before Pesutto was rolled. Like he was actually in a relatively strong position.

But his issues were all internal about his position within the Liberal Party, not about his ability to win votes in the broader community.

Benita: Yeah, and obviously he lost the defamation action put forward by his colleague, Moira Deeming, another Liberal MP. It put him in a position where he was having to pay significant legal fees and damages to a colleague. There was talk that if he had to try and pay that himself it would bankrupt him. So I just don’t think that it was tenable for him to stay in that position at that time.

And then obviously Brad Battin took over as leader after John Pesutto, a former police officer, you know, really kind of raised crime to be the main issue of the opposition. I think, you know, lost some support in his party room along the way with that strategy.

And then we saw Jess Wilson come in in a I would say a relatively bloodless leadership coup. It was pretty clinical. It was over within, I don’t even think it lasted 48 hours when you compare that to the prolonged issues that were facing John Pesutto. So she’s come in, she’s managed to unite, I would say, the party room. Like you’ve got people from both the, you know, moderate wing and the more conservative wing of the Liberal Party.

She’s brought them all together. She doesn’t have the baggage of the leaders that have come before her. She’s a first-term MP. So so far, it does look like everyone is working together. And, the polls are in their favor right now. So I think they could look at that and feel confident. And it’s enough to kind of bring people that may not necessarily like each other a lot together.

Ben: in terms of the kinds of areas they represent, the kind of image they present, Pesutto was clearly presenting a bit more of a moderate image, someone who theoretically could help the Coalition win back voters in the centre. Battin represented a much more outer suburban electorate and I think reflected that conservative image. And so Wilson in that sense, you know, like Pesutto, she’s in a seat which is quite a strong teal area. but

I think a lot of that is image. Not that she’s a significantly more moderate or less conservative politician, but it does seem like the party very much wanted to go for a leader that reflected that slightly more moderate positioning, aesthetics, style. but the problems that John Pesutto had kind of

Interrupted that trend.

Benita Kolovos (09:15)
Yeah, absolutely. It completely overshadowed it. and I think another good point to raise with Jess Wilson too is she’s a first-term MP. She’s young, she’s 36. it’s a really good kind of foil to a government, you know, a long-serving, tired government that’s had a lot of departures. And she’s talking a lot about being kind of like a fresh start, and it kind of is matched by who she is.

And I think she is also a moderate. She might not necessarily say it. I think the way that she describes herself ideologically is as a classical liberal, so focused on the economy, on providing services and the government kind of staying out of people’s way. So I don’t think we’ll see her get into those kind of culture wars, those fringe issues. and I think, on the whole, that’s the only way that you can win in Victoria. It is a more progressive state. you know, they need 16 seats to form government.

So they need to have broad appeal across the regions, across the outer suburbs, across the inner city. So I do worry if you lean too far one way or the other, that that equation to get that pathway to government becomes more difficult. So I think it does make sense having her in that role.

Ben: You would think that picking a leader like Jess Wilson may not be the best choice for the Coalition, the Liberal Party and including the Nationals more generally, in terms of holding off One Nation who have been consistently polling in the 20s in Victoria for quite a while now. Frankly, like neck and neck with Labor. Labor’s usually ahead of them, but not by very much. but it does seem like the primary vote that the Coalition is polling is quite poor. Like you would think that, in a typical two party race, that would not be enough.

But in the current circumstances, they could potentially be winning enough to scrape across the line and get a majority, even with such a large share of the right wing vote going to One Nation. But that’s going to be a real question for the campaign. And we’re going to talk a bit more about the psephology of, how many votes you need to win a majority and that kind of thing in a future episode and what seats are going to be in play.

But my modelling does show that 28-30% for one of the major parties probably is enough to win a majority, which I think people think is a bit counterintuitive. But to take the latest Newspoll that has been published in the last couple of days, it was polled last week, that had the Coalition on 33 and One Nation on 20, Labor on 24, that is probably a number where I reckon the Coalition could get a majority on those numbers.

They get One Nation preferences when they’re up against Labor and they get Labor preferences when they’re up against One Nation. And they’re far enough ahead of One Nation that there’s not a lot of getting knocked into third place happening there. So that’s gonna be really interesting to see. But how has that impacted on how the parties have talked about politics, have talked about the issues as One Nation has surged this year?

Benita: Look, I do think that you’re right. And at the moment I know it’s still, you know, a couple more weeks to go until the election, until the campaign really kicks off in earnest. I do suspect that what we’ll see with One Nation is, you know, they’ll help get the Liberals over the line in quite a few seats just based on how they’re polling at the moment. Labor is you know exploiting this.

They are going really hard on this idea that it’ll be a Liberal-One Nation coalition and that, One Nation will drag the Liberal Party, despite having a moderate leader, to the right. and they’ve been doing that on all sorts of issues, whether it’s in health, and you know, one of the biggest kind of political wedges I’ve seen recently is on abortion and and making that more accessible.

I thought it was telling that Jess Wilson, the day that Labor announced that they would make all abortion care free, she immediately matched it. So took the heat out of that issue. But I think they’ll continue to do that throughout the campaign.

On the Coalition side, they’re just completely avoiding even talking about it. You’ll go to a press conference, you’ll ask about preference arrangements, ask about if they’re in a minority government, would they work with One Nation, and you just get knocked back with the same response, which is ‘we’re running for a majority government’. So they’re not even playing into those hypotheticals. It’s interesting, right? Because if you went back a couple years, couple elections.

Those sorts of questions would be directed towards Labor and and the Greens and Labor would say the exact same thing. you know, we’re running for a a majority, we’re not gonna be working with the Greens. So now we’re seeing it on this side of politics as well. but yeah, the way that the polling’s playing out, I do get a sense when I speak to Liberal MPs in particular, that they are getting more and more confident that they can get there on their own.

Ben: I think a big part of this story of this election is the Labor-Liberal swing voter. Because you look at the statewide totals, and okay, the Coalition vote’s down, right? They’re on 33%. And late last year, when One Nation wasn’t really in the polls at all, they were polling in the high 30s to 40%. You know, the last Redbridge poll at the end of 2025 had the Coalition on 40. So it looks like they’re down.

But actually, once you combine them with One Nation, that’s 53% of the vote in the most recent Newspoll. It’s usually in the low 50s as a combined vote. When you look at a two-party preferred question, you know, the last few have had them on 52, 53, 56, 55. So there’s clearly a majority of the state voting in a conservative direction. So some voters have switched from Labor to Liberal.

And I suspect what’s going on here is that the coalition is gaining some votes and they’re losing others. And frankly, I think they’re gaining votes in a way that’s very efficient for them. They’re probably gaining urban votes, votes that are in marginal seats, and they’re losing votes in their rural base. and I think the question, and I think it’s a smart strategy for Labor, I don’t think it’s really working right now, but we’ll see, is to communicate to those voters going, okay, you might be comfortable with a Coalition majority.

But you’re not going to get that. You’re going to get the Coalition possibly the Liberal Party dependent on One Nation. And that looks extremely likely back when the three parties were basically tied. You know, you looked at a situation where One Nation would wipe out the National Party and you’d have a basically a three-way tie and you’d have a very strong One Nation in the middle able to dictate terms. Since then I think things have changed. The Coalition’s vote is picking up a little bit. Maybe they get to the majority without needing it.

But it’s obviously very awkward for the Liberal Party. It’s a topic they want to stay away from. So I think it makes perfect sense from their perspective to not want to answer your question on that. because there is no real good answer, you know, because they need to hold on to that conservative base. but they are also trying to hold on to those moderate urban voters who are switching from Labor to Liberal, who maybe aren’t big fans of the idea of One Nation being so influential in politics.

And so their hope is to cross their fingers and hope they get to a majority in their own right. I’d be interested to know from your perspective as someone who watches this stuff closely. We’re always talking about preferences and we will talk about preferences in a minute. But I’m also really interested in what a hung parliament dynamic would look like.

If the Coalition gets within a couple of seats of a majority, they’re probably okay. But if they’re a long way short of a majority and one nation has a large block of votes, how do they work with those people? What sort of agreement do they reach? Can they rely on them to form a government? has there been any conversation about that? Is that something that’s coming up in press conferences? That kind of thing?

Benita: We’re trying, but we’re not getting many answers to these questions. And I think they are important questions. I think that Antony Green made a really good point recently about this too. One Nation MPs don’t have a really good track record of staying One Nation MPs throughout a term of government. So I do wonder if we had that sort of situation would they necessarily stay with their party, would it be easier for a Coalition government in minority to kind of pick off a few of these One Nation turned independent candidates? Would a couple jump ship? I think it would be anything but predictable. I think if we were in that sort of situation, it would be a very wild couple of years. There are independents running as well. I’m not sure how well

independents will do this election, given that kind of protest vote appears to be going to One Nation or like the more right side of politics. but yeah, we could also have a situation where if they are off by one or two and there is an independent in there, that that would be their pathway through.

Ben: You look at New South Wales right now, we have a hung parliament in New South Wales, but the dynamics are very different because the government is just short of a majority and they have a lot of people they can work with. So no one really is in a position of great power. like after that election, I think there were twelve crossbenchers, independents and Greens, in the lower house and the government was two votes short of a majority. So they did come to an agreement, but they came to an agreement with I think three independents who they were closest to and they left everyone else else off, but they always had that o that option. and so, like let’s say for example, One Nation wins, say 15 seats, which if they fall a long way behind the Coalition, they might do a lot worse than that. But that’s quite plausible. If the coalition is two votes short of a majority and there’s fifteen One Nation members, that fragmentation probably would work for Wilson.

But if they’re 12 or 13 votes short of a majority, they’re kind of reliant on a unified One Nation that can be a partner in government. And apart from any ideological concerns about sharing power with the far right, which is always going to be a question, I’m just not sure One Nation is actually capable of being that partner, you know, even if the Coalition was willing to do it.

Benita: They say they have a list, One Nation. They’ve talked about their list of demands, but they haven’t really told anyone what their list of demands looks like. They have said though that you know, changes to abortion laws are not one of them. I guess they don’t want to get wedged by Labor on that either. But yeah, it hasn’t happened.

And I think that’s why there are so many eyes on this election, is because this is the first one really, like we were starting to see this rise of One Nation at the South Australian election, but it really came after that with the Farrer federal by election, right? that this could be a party that could actually have a say in the direction of a state. They’re not just gonna be one person or a couple people in a chamber, going off at whoever’s in government. This would be a very significant thing.

Ben: The big difference between Victoria and South Australia, right, was in South Australia we knew we were gonna get the Labor government re-elected. Malinauskas was very popular, the Liberal Party was a total mess, and there was no doubt about that. So people could vote for One Nation, even elect One Nation members, and it didn’t really have any influence on the government.

And I do think that might be a question for voters if they think Wilson is on the verge of winning a majority or not. Are there conservative voters who go back to Wilson, who stick with the local conservative MP, because they’re on the verge of having a Coalition government and they don’t want to stuff that up? And I suspect that isn’t a big force that voters who are switching to One Nation don’t really care about that. But it could be a factor and that hasn’t really been tested yet.

But yeah, that’s gonna be interesting to see in the campaign. Likewise, Labor’s effort targeting those Labor-Liberal swing voters saying you don’t want one nation anywhere near government, have an effect too and bring Labor back? Because, you know, Labor’s polling very poorly, but I also think they could probably win an election with a really low vote. You know, I did some modelling at one point that suggested they could win a majority on like 28% of the vote.

And that’s because of a few things. One is there’s quite a high Greens vote, which also means it’s plausible that there could be a Labor-Greens majority in Parliament. There’ll be a lot of preferences from the Greens flowing to Labor, but also the Coalition and One Nation, you can’t just add their votes together because quite a large number of those voters aren’t going to preference the other party over Labor.

And so Labor will benefit in close races from voter leakage where the two parties won’t go to each other. Can I ask you about preferences? Because I’ve seen a little bit of talk about it. The Coalition hasn’t announced their policy. I’m extremely confident that they’re going to preference One Nation because I don’t think they have any other option. They are bleeding votes on their right. They need to hold on to that part of their supporter base. And preferencing Labor over One Nation just wouldn’t be feasible. What are you seeing?

Benita: I think we have a little clue in the by-election that we had in Nepean earlier this year, where they preferenced One Nation third, and then they had the Libertarian candidate above them. Labor weren’t running in that seat, so it’s not, like for like comparison, but I think we will see depending on the seat, maybe other candidates, but One Nation will definitely be high up on their ballot.

Another question is what they do with Greens preferences. So at the last election, they preferenced Greens above Labor, and I think that helped the Greens in a seat like Richmond. will they do the same this time? The federal election in 2025 came in the context of the war in the Middle East between, Israel and Hamas and the Liberals were saying that, we have to have the Greens last because of how they responded to that. Will they do the same here or will they put the Greens above Labor? And then, potentially that could impact a whole bunch of inner city seats that may go green over red.

Ben: Hmm. And I think they are going to preference the Greens higher. And I think it mainly is to simplify their message, which is a ‘put Labor last’ message. There’s an Instagram video from Nicole Werner that I watched where she was talking to a character that represents someone who was voting first for they didn’t say One Nation, but it was basically One Nation, and then just donkey voted the rest of their ha of their ballot paper, and this person accidentally has preferenced Labor.

And the pitch was clearly directed at conservative voters to make sure they preference the other conservative parties and they don’t go to Labor. And I think if that means that the Greens benefit in a few inner city seats where they’re not really that interested in those seats, so be it. And I suspect that is where it’s going. It sounds like One Nation is also thinking that they’re pursuing that policy of put Labor last. And so the Greens benefit there, not so much because anyone wants to preference them higher, but preferences are complicated. And you wanna keep things simple and it’s a simple message.

Benita: Advance are also running in twenty seats a campaign around ‘Put Labor Last’. There is a little bit of concern within the Liberal Party about that because it basically is kind of such a thing, it doesn’t necessarily matter who you put number one on your ballot as long as Labor’s last on it. And the seats that they’re targeting are seats like Pakenham where One Nation’s leader Warren Pickering is running. So there’s a bit of concern there that maybe that could inadvertently help One Nation, when the Liberals and the Nationals have been saying the only way to change the government is to put us first.

Ben: It reminds me of how GetUp used to work in these kind of contests where they intervened in elections but they didn’t want to pick a side between Labor and the Greens. And so often I think both sides resented their involvement because they wouldn’t pick. But for someone like Advance, I I think it makes perfect sense because they would have supporters on either side of that fence.

And that’s their agenda. You know, they don’t have the same agenda as the Coalition.

So I’m not surprised by that, but I think that does point to an effort to encourage conservative voters to keep their preferences tight, which will help keep Labor out of power, but you’re right, it’s not particularly helpful for getting a Coalition majority government.

Benita: Yeah, these are seats like Melton and and Yan Yean, Hastings, Bass, all ones that One Nation are targeting.

Ben: Now, Victoria’s Legislative Council has a new voting system. Both of us have talked a lot about this as an issue, getting rid of group voting tickets. It will be interesting to see what this does to nominations because a lot of these small parties that were relying on group voting tickets to win seats in the Legislative Council consistently would run candidates across every region.

And most these parties haven’t announced a lot of candidates yet. And I suspect even if they still run, they might focus their efforts on one or two regions. And that might actually result in much smaller ballot papers, which could also mean that, you know, people are always anxious about votes exhausting. But, you know, voters are going to be asked to number at least five boxes on the ballot paper.

I suspect based on what happened in the Senate, most people will do exactly that. Five, no more, no less. but five goes a lot further on a ballot of fifteen parties than it does on a ballot of twenty-five. So if that ballot is getting smaller, it gets easier to vote, it gets easier to mark your preferences, more of those votes flow. So that’s going to be interesting to watch. what are you seeing about how the parties are campaigning and how the the new voting system might be affecting that?

Benita: I think the key difference is obviously how we vote’s gonna look like the Senate, but the quota to get elected is a lot bigger than if you’re in the Senate. So I think the quota is now 16.7% to get a seat. So I think that will ultimately end up favoring the major parties and One Nation as well.

I’m expecting to see, you know, most of those upper house candidates in the number one spot for One Nation to be successful and possibly even pick up a second spot. It does make it really hard for you know candidates like Georgie Purcell for Animal Justice Party, who’s you know been a pretty vocal and and key member of the upper house chamber this term. I think for her to be successful, I imagine she’d have to overtake the Greens in that seat. So it’s a big task that you’re asking for with with the way that the numbers kind of stack up.

Ben: I think you’re right. I think most of those minor parties, probably all of them, will get wiped out and the upper house will be solely Labor, Coalition, One Nation, Greens. I think you’re right. Someone like Georgie Purcell probably needs to get ahead of the Greens and then get their preferences, and that’s a big ask, and I don’t think that will happen, to be frank.

It will be interesting to see how people like her will poll though, because in the past, people who’ve lucked their way in on group voting tickets really haven’t been very successful at then building up their support in other ways.

She’s been prominent, but does that reflect a real base of support in the community? Is she able to poll more? And like, if there’s less parties on the ballot, that will probably make that a little bit easier for people to find her.

Benita: Particularly like, yeah, the regions too, because she’s in Northern Victoria, which is a a regional seat. And I would suspect a lot of her support she would have it in the regions, absolutely. And I know she works a lot with like the shelters and community groups in her electorate. But I imagine a lot of her support would also be in the city as well, with, you know, young women.

Ben: Yeah. And like the regions – the regions mostly don’t really reflect real communities, right? They’re too big to reflect local communities, but they don’t even, particularly in Melbourne, reflect the broader communities. they’re just arbitrary lines largely.

And that’s, I think that is a good argument about why it’d be worth getting rid of them. But really they’re there. And I mean, interestingly, after the group voting tickets debate was done, I went back and read the Constitutional Commission that the Bracks government set up.

I really wish I’d read this a bit earlier. I didn’t realise it existed until quite recently, where they went through the options of creating an upper house. But it’s very explicit back then that they have picked eight regions specifically to create a barrier to entry. Like it is designed for a barrier to entry, not particularly for local representation.

Like there was always an understanding that there’s not much local representation that you get out of it. It’s designed that way to raise the bar. and so there would be these debates about the upper house and I would be like, it’s not my place to say, but yes, there is a bar and you get rid of the bar by abolishing the regions.

Benita: And I think that’s why so many people were upset with how the government approached the changes to the upper house, right? Like they had had an inquiry, they’d come up with new models to make it more, I guess, fair, and that I think requires a referendum. So that was always going to be a big ask to do. But the fact that they knew about this issue for, you know, multiple terms of government.

And they left it until, was it July? Late July when Ben Carroll became premier.

And it’s just now left us with a system that…it isn’t equitable, is it?

Ben: Well, it is gonna reflect the proportions of how people vote.

I think if we get a majority of the state voting for the conservative forces, they will win a majority in the upper house. And it in a way it’s gonna be a lot simpler because, if a region votes to the left, you’ll get you’ll get three Labor or Greens MLCs and they win that region. And there’ll be eight regions and whoever wins more of the regions wins a majority. And so in that sense it’s simple and fair, equitable

I don’t know, it can play the same on left and right.

It’s designed discrimination against small parties in order to encourage consolidation and avoid the parties fragmenting, which is exactly what that fragmentation is what the old system has done. It’s interesting to compare it to the Senate, because the Senate is mostly now Labor, Coalition, One Nation, Greens. You know, you’ve got Jacqui Lambie in tassie, you’ve got Pocock in the ACT, and then you’ve got a bunch of defectors and that’s about it.

And so, in a sense, what they wanted, what those crossbenchers wanted, was something a bit more like the New South Wales upper house or the WA upper house, where you do get Animal Justice, Legalised Cannabis.

Benita: What’s the quota in those?

Ben: New South Wales, it’s four and a half percent.

Benita: Yeah.

Ben: And in WA, I think it’s like 2.7 So they are like 37 members in one region. So if you got rid of all the regions, Victoria would be about the same as WA. And so I just think, I don’t think it’s necessarily good or bad, but it’s a choice about how much you represent the exact proportions of everyone that they vote for, or how much do you kind of force people to reach a threshold of support before they can get in. because those preferences will flow, you know, and those parties’ preferences may make a difference about deciding if One Nation or the Greens gets the final seat in a region.

It’s not like New Zealand where if a party falls below their barrier, their votes don’t count at all. here, those votes will still have value. and I think in in the future we might see small parties winning.

But to come back to the point about how those upper house regions don’t really reflect real communities, I do find the West Party in Western Melbourne quite interesting because it does seem like they have tried to identify themselves with a regional identity of Western Melbourne.

And I don’t know how much that really reflects how people in Western Melbourne think of themselves. but that’s what they’re targeting. And in a sense, if they were ever successful, it would follow the model of Nick Xenophon, Brian Harradine, Jacqui Lambie, they’re not trying to get people elected across the whole country, although they’ve all been tempted at times to run candidates elsewhere, but they have a lot of success in one place, and that is enough to get elected.

You know, you could imagine someone who has concentrated support in Western Victoria getting elected there, but I don’t think the West Party are at that stage yet. I think it’s more of an interesting idea than something that’s gonna be pulled off in 2026.

Benita: I spent a couple days out in the northwest recently to write some seat profiles. And I think if there wasn’t that One Nation surge, they’d be doing a lot better. Because I feel like that anti-establishment, you know, my area’s voted Labor for the whole time it’s existed. You know, I want to shake things up, but I don’t kind of identify with the Liberal Party.

I think those voters are currently parking themselves with One Nation rather than the West Party. And then the other region where I’m seeing this happen is Southern Metro, the independent candidate that ran in Hawthorn at the last election against John Pesutto, she’s now running on a ticket for the upper house – Melissa Lowe, it’s interesting to see that kind of strategy of maybe we can try this in the upper house instead and how effective that’ll be.

Ben: Well, it’ll be interesting if she’s presenting herself as a kind of tealish candidate because the share of the vote you need to get elected to the upper house is a lot less than what you need to win an individual seat in the lower house. But first of all, you’ve got to do it over eleven seats, so it’s got to be much more distributed.

And secondly, I think those teals have always benefited from some Labor and some Greens voters who might still sincerely support those parties but vote for a teal because they think they can win. And in the upper house that’s not relevant, you know, because the Greens and Labor can win everywhere. it’s very obvious that those teal candidates and there are a couple of seats where the teals have done quite well in Melbourne in recent elections at a state level, but just haven’t been able to get elected. Hawthorn, Kew come to mind.

Benita: Mornington, she got pretty close as well.

Ben: Yeah, Mornington, that’s a good one as well. they’ve done quite well in those electorates. and they’ve clearly gotten a lot of Labor and Greens voters switching to them. But how much of those people who sincerely prefer this independent to Labor or the Greens? And I think there’s probably some of that. And how much is this a strategic choice by those voters? And I’m pretty sure it’s a bit of both. Like I’m sure it’s a bit of both. We we can’t say exactly how much.

Benita: But then I speak to people that say I vote for Labor in the lower house, but then Greens in the upper house to, you know, influence how a bill is. Admittedly it would be a pretty small group of people, but I wonder if there’d be any any of them that might be voting for the liberals in the lower house and maybe a teal in the upper house to keep them small-l liberal.

Ben: It would be interesting. I think as someone who grew up with parents who voted for the Democrats in the Senate and did not vote for the Democrats in the lower house for my childhood. I think there’s a lot of that that goes on.

There was this story about the Liberal candidate for Sunbury, Simmone Cottom, who was recorded talking to a voter and kind of at one point said, Well, you can vote One Nation in the upper house and Liberal in the lower house. I don’t think she’s advocating a One Nation vote.

Like I think the reporting made it sound like something it wasn’t quite that.

Benita: It made it sound like it was a bit organised, right? Like this was some sort of talking point.

Ben: She was trying to talk someone down because she was imagining that this voter was considering voting One Nation for everything.

And she was trying to talk them down from that. Basically, it was a compromise negotiation position, which then became clear the voter like, Well, I’m not going to vote for One Nation. So it is interesting that I reckon this candidate has probably had a lot of conversations with other voters who think that way and has made an assumption about this voter. But she would absolutely prefer they vote Liberal in both houses.

But it’s that recognition that there are a kind of voter who will do that and she wants their lower house vote and I think there will be a decent number of people who vote One Nation in the upper house, vote Coalition in the lower. It would be an interesting strategy if you’re a moderate Liberal who is worried about the Coalition being dependent on One Nation. Take this latest Newspoll, which had the Coalition on 33, One Nation on 20. That might be enough to get a majority in the lower house. You’re not getting close to a majority in the upper house on that. Maybe on average you’re getting two per electorate.

So maybe you get 40% of the chamber, but they would absolutely be dependent on One Nation in the balance of power on those numbers.

I don’t know how much people are thinking this through, but I could imagine a more moderate Liberal voter saying, I’m gonna vote for Jess Wilson to form government, but I want someone a bit more progressive as a counterbalance to One Nation in the upper house.

Benita: Like I said, I think it would be a switched on voter, but I can see that happening. And I think it’s also worth noting, we did see a lot during this term of government, the Liberals and the Greens working together to kind of put pressure on Labor, whether it was setting up parliamentary inquiries or successfully getting motions up. Could they possibly work together in the upper house? I don’t know.

Ben: I think it’s a lot easier for them to work together when they’re not in power.

Benita: Yeah. And when there’s a common enemy, right?

Ben: Yeah, yeah, and like they can come to agreement on issues of process and issues of opposition.

I think it’s much less likely that they’ll be able to do that if it’s a Coalition government.

Because, over many years I’ve seen Liberals and Greens can work together.

But they’re working together in a negative space, right?

Benita: Yeah.

Ben: That they’re working together to stop something, or they’re working together to have an inquiry. And then when they get to the inquiry, they talk about completely different things and have completely separate agendas. But they can agree, they can agree to have a talk, you know?

Benita: To have the inquiry. For sure.

Ben: And I think it’s a lot harder to do that once you’re actually in government. It might happen sometimes. I think it’s more likely to be the case actually that the Coalition does the mirror image of what we see Labor doing federally.

Where Labor goes to the Coalition and goes, Look, if you don’t work with us, we’re gonna go work with the Greens.

Jess Wilson could go to a Labor opposition, and say, if we work together, we can do this without involving One Nation. But if you won’t work with me, then I have no choice but to go to One Nation. And so I think it’s Labor that’s the alternative to One Nation, not the Greens. I think the Greens will find themselves on the outer.

Benita: Yeah, no. I can totally see that being kind of the future of the upper house under a Coalition government, yeah.

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

Benita: Thank you so much for having me.

Ben: Tickets have almost sold out for the first Tally Room Live podcast recording on Tuesday, December 1st in Melbourne. So we’ve added a second show at the same place on Wednesday, December 2nd at 7pm. My guest will be Todd Farrell from the University of Melbourne and yourself, Benita.

Benita: Yay. Looking forward to it.

Ben: So tickets are now on sale for that second show, so please grab them now.

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

This is the final 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 the rise of One Nation, and the first attempts by parties to discourage voters from using their preferences.

Then I’ll look at the rise of the Greens, and how preferences became helpful to Labor again. We look at how resistance to OPV held up reform of the Senate voting system, and how the recent fragmentation of the party system makes it harder to know who would benefit from optional preferential voting.

The story ends with the Queensland government’s impending decision on reintroducing optional preferential voting for Queensland state elections, and I suggest a compromise that could achieve the best of both worlds.

But first, I have just launched the first range of merchandise for The Tally Room. You can now buy a hat that says ‘Waiting for the pre-polls’ and a bag that says ‘Single Transferable Tote’. These items are only available for a limited time. Pre-orders must be in by Monday November 2, so if you want to order something, please do so now. I don’t want you to miss out.

Independent federal MP Pauline Hanson founded the One Nation political party in 1997, after winning a seat in parliament as a disendorsed Liberal candidate at the 1996 election.

The first major electoral test of this new political force was the 1998 Queensland election, held in June of that year.

National Party leader Rob Borbidge had formed a Coalition government with the Liberal Party in 1996, after a by-election loss tipped Labor out of office mid-term. But his time in office was to be short.

Like in 1995, the Liberal and National parties mostly avoided running against each – there were just two seats where the two parties both ran. But this time, the right-wing vote was split with One Nation.

Controversially, the National and Liberal parties decided to preference One Nation ahead of Labor, and it made a difference.

One Nation ended up winning eleven seats. In eight of those seats, the final count was One Nation vs Labor, and in all but two of those seats, Labor was leading on primary votes. Labor preferences mostly flowed against One Nation, but the Coalition’s preferences made a big impact. Labor’s seat count was steady at 44, but there was a lot of churn below the surface – Labor losing seats to One Nation and gaining others from the Coalition.

The reaction to the Coalition’s preferencing decisions led to a change of policy for the federal election in October of the same year – the Coalition put One Nation last on their how-to-vote cards, and the party didn’t win a single seat in the House.

One Nation ended up outpolling both of the Coalition parties separately. One Nation polled 22.7%, with the Liberal Party on 16% and the Nationals on 15%. The National Party still won more seats than either of the other two parties, but with One Nation winning eleven seats, the Coalition had no prospect of governing without One Nation. Between the three parties, they held 43 seats out of 89 – two short of a majority.

Labor’s seat count stayed steady, but in the last parliament they faced off against a united block of 44 Coalition members – now they faced a scattered mess of right-wing members who were unlikely to be able to govern together. Crucially, the newly-elected independent MP Peter Wellington decided to back Labor, giving them 45 seats and government.

Despite the chaos of One Nation’s entry to the contest, exhausted votes remained relatively low, if higher than in 1992 or 1995 – in seats where it ended up as a race between Labor and the Coalition, just over 30% of preferences exhausted.

Following the election n, Labor figures noticed that preferences tended to flow against the party, with parties of the right relying on preferences to construct a united front against Labor. A change to first-past-the-post was out of the question, but there was potential to encourage voters to act in a way that was more like first-past-the-post.

The first chance to test this theory came at the New South Wales state election in the following March.

Exhaustion rates at previous NSW state elections had been relatively low. Looking at preference flows to the major parties, it was usually around 25-30% at the 1988, 1991 and 1995 elections.

It is hard to find much evidence about what campaign tactics were conducted at the 1999 election that shifted how people filled out their how-to-vote cards, but the data is clear. In 1999, the exhaustion rate jumped from 31% to 53.7%.

In other, more recent, elections, we’ve seen tactics that encourage voters to “just vote 1”, with posters, flyers and advertising encouraging that message without centring the campaign on the party spreading the message – ideally the goal is to convince voters who are not voting for you, to weaken your opponents’ preference flows by exhausting.

Of course, you would only follow such a strategy if your party doesn’t expect to do particularly well out of preference flows. In 1999 in New South Wales, the party in that position was Labor.

One Nation did not poll anywhere near as well in New South Wales as they did in Queensland, but still polled a respectable 7.5%. The two Coalition parties suffered a swing of about 10%, with Labor’s primary vote increasing slightly.

The Liberal and National parties had found themselves running against each other in seven seats, sometimes creating space for Labor to win.

In the seat of Clarence, Labor polled just 36.9% compared to a combined vote of 54% for National, Liberal and One Nation, but high rates of exhaustion led to the National Party falling short and Labor holding the seat.

The Legislative Assembly was cut in size by six seats, but Labor still gained five, while the Coalition lost thirteen and One Nation failed to win a single seat. A very slim Labor win in 1995 turned into a landslide re-election.

The far more famous example of Labor pursuing “Just Vote 1” tactics took place in Queensland in 2001.

The first-term Labor government of Peter Beattie had learnt from the experience of 1998, when Liberal, National and One Nation preference flows were crucial to defeating Labor candidates.

Labor used the slogan “Just Vote 1 Labor” for their campaign. The “just” was an important addition to the traditional “Vote 1”.

I haven’t been able to find the campaign ad Labor ran to encourage voter exhaustion, but I did find a description:

“Labor’s Just Vote 1 slogan was already part of Premier Beattie’s mantra at the start of the campaign and it was reinforced by a skilfully constructed ad which involved two voices talking about their voting options in general terms and deciding they could just vote 1 for their candidate. Only in the last seconds does it become clear that it is an ALP ad. While technically only advising Labor supporters on what to do with their preferences, the ad was equally persuasive to conservative and minor party supporters. In the final week of the campaign, the ALP spent 40% of its TV advertising budget airing the Just Vote 1 ad alone.”

The campaign was devastatingly effective. Preference exhaustion in Labor vs Coalition contests jumped from 30.3% to 52.4%, and the Coalition only had a slight advantage on preferences compared to Labor, despite the much larger pool of right-wing minor party votes.

Labor’s primary vote also surged by 10%, while the Coalition parties lost further ground compared to their devastating 1998 results, and One Nation pulled in 8.7%. Labor won 66 out of 89 seats, leaving the right-wing parties as a small rump.

This was the last Queensland state election where the original incarnation of One Nation was a major factor. By 2004, the party polled under 5%, and by the time the Liberal National Party, as it became, began to rebound, One Nation was mostly out of the picture.

Labor had been the beneficiaries of OPV during the One Nation era, but that was about to change.

The number of candidates nominating for parliament continued to grow during the 1990s – it peaked at just over 1100 candidates for the House in 1998 – almost seven and a half candidates per seat.

At the following election, in 2001, the rate of informal voting in the House of Representatives surged to 4.8% – the highest since 1987. The informal rate dropped down to 4% in 2007, but has remained between 5% and 6% since 2010.

Australia tends to have high rates of informal voting compared to other countries and there are two main causes: compulsory voting and compulsory preferential voting.

Some people who don’t want to cast a vote respond to compulsory voting by submitting a blank ballot, or writing an angry message. It is usually obvious that these people have not attempted to fill out their ballot paper.

The other main kind of informal voting involve people who have failed to fulfill the requirements for a formal vote – they have just voted 1, or they have skipped a number, or in some other way failed to mark a preference for every candidate. Most of these votes are formal under an optional preferential voting system, although not all of them. Someone who marked a ‘1’ for multiple candidates would still be informal under OPV. It is usually obvious whom these voters intended to vote for, but the rules of CPV prevent them from being counted.

One of these two types of informal voting also exists in an OPV system like New South Wales, but not both. Looking at the 1999 and 2003 state elections in New South Wales, they produced an informal rate of about 2.5%, compared to around 5% at recent federal elections.

In the early years of the new century, the Australian Electoral Commission regularly conducted surveys on informal votes after the election. They found that roughly half of all informal votes appeared to be deliberate, and the other half appeared to be accidental. It is the latter half that can be caused by CPV rules. In 2025, the AEC conducted another similar survey – it suggested that accidental informal votes have grown to be a larger part of the total.

One solution to this problem is to allow for ‘savings provisions’ that allow certain votes to count, even if they technically don’t follow the rules. In particular, Australian election law in 1984 was changed to allow for some numbering errors on a ballot paper, as long as every box is numbered. This was originally intended as a solution to the problem of Senate informal votes, but the rule also applied to the House of Representatives.

A particular method of voting became known as ‘Langer voting’, named after political activist Albert Langer, who had advocated for people to vote in a way that produced optional preferential voting through a backdoor. The voter could number their boxes 1, 2, 3, 3 – their vote would count up until the point where there would be a skipped or duplicated number, and would then exhaust. Langer campaigned for people to vote this way at the 1987 and 1990 federal elections. In 1992 , legislation was changed to make it an offence to encourage people to vote this way – but the savings provision remained.

At the 1996 election, Albert Langer suggested he would again encourage voters to use the savings provision to avoid marking every preference. Langer published an advertisement which led the AEC to obtain an injunction. Langer defied the injunction and ended up in prison for contempt of court.

Prior to the 1998 election, this issue was resolved by eliminating the savings provision, and also eliminating the offence that was no longer relevant. Because of Langer’s campaigns, the CPV rules have ended up becoming less forgiving of mistakes.

Analysis of informal voting has also shown that rates of informal voting tend to be higher in Labor-voting electorates – in particular amongst voters with lower levels of literacy or from a non-English speaking background. This has been known for a long time – Mick Young pointed out how informal votes for the Senate in 1974 were much higher in Labor-voting areas when he argued that compulsory preference requirements had likely prevented Labor from electing a sixth senator in New South Wales that year.

In the early 2000s, the growth of support for the Greens meant that Labor found itself more reliant on their preferences to win elections. Greens voters have continued to be more likely to preference Labor over time, and grew to be a much larger share of the vote.

We know from New South Wales state elections that preferences don’t flow as strongly under OPV – not as many of those Greens votes would flow to Labor under that system.

This created a dilemma for Labor: CPV ensures strong flows of preferences from the Greens, but it also causes more Labor votes to be informal. Perhaps this explains why neither party was advocating for OPV during the early 2000s – the benefits and costs were spread around between Labor and the Coalition.

Labor did look at savings provisions as a possible solution – in 2013, in the last year of the Gillard federal Labor government, the government drew up plans for legislation that, amongst other things, would have allowed votes to be counted, effectively following OPV counting rules. But, most importantly, it would be illegal to advocate for voters to vote in a way that would be formal under OPV but not CPV – basically parties would need to campaign based on CPV, but votes would be counted as if it is OPV.

There were concerns about how this would play out – would it lead to people advocating for an OPV vote, and then ending up in court, as Albert Langer did in 1996? The bill did not end up going anywhere after Julia Gillard was replaced as prime minister by Kevin Rudd.
Part eleven – Labor and Coalition positions solidify

As One Nation faded away and the Greens became the main minor party in Australia, the Coalition no longer benefited much from preferences. Contests between the Liberal and Nationals parties had become rare – and in Queensland the two parties merged, making a three-cornered contest impossible.

At the 2009 Queensland state election, the Liberal National Party put up posters advocating for voters to ‘Just Vote 1’, but with miniscule identification. A voter could very easily mistake the poster for official instructions from the electoral commission. I photographed one of these posters myself at that election.

Another LNP poster from 2015 didn’t hide its political agenda, but it tied marking preferences in with potential hung parliament chaos if the left were to win. Those watching on video will be able to see both of these posters.

This second poster was divided in two: on the left it says “Certainty – Vote 1 LNP”. On the right it says “Chaos – If you number every square”. This is illustrated with a bunch of jumbled up ballot paper boxes and numbers.

As of the 2010s the traditional positions had flipped entirely – the Coalition was more likely to be supportive of OPV, although this wasn’t a unanimous position. And Labor had become strong supporters of CPV – the complete opposite of the positions of the Whitlam government and the early Hawke government.

In 2013, Coalition shadow minister for electoral matters Bronwyn Bishop expressed support for optional preferential voting, although Nationals leader Warren Truss rejected the push – the Nationals remain the part of the Coalition most likely to be supportive of preferencing.

In 2020, the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, with a Coalition majority, issued a recommendation for optional preferential voting, with Labor and the Greens issuing dissenting reports strongly rejecting the recommendation. The South Australian Liberal government also proposed OPV in 2020.

By the early 2010s, there had been no expansions of OPV around Australia for twenty years. But in February 2016, the governing Country Liberal Party changed election laws in the Northern Territory, switching the territory from CPV to OPV.

The subsequent territory election, held six months later, produced a very low informal rate, but was also a disaster for the CLP. They were reduced to just two out of 25 seats, with Labor winning 18.

The Country Liberal Party had even engaged in some of the same ‘Just Vote 1’ tactics we’d previously seen in Queensland. The governing party put up very plain posters that said “Important Election Information: Just Vote 1. You only need to number one box”. The posters had no obvious CLP branding and could have been mistaken for official advice.

The new Labor government brought the territory back to compulsory preferential voting for the 2020 general election, and it remains the system today.

The ‘Just Vote 1’ campaigning showed that it is possible to reduce the number of people who fill out their ballot paper, but there is also evidence that campaigning can also drive up preferencing rates in particular circumstances.

Arguments against OPV have long suggested the system is “tantamount to first past the post” – seemingly based less on practical experience and more on a theoretical assumption that voters won’t fill in preferences if they aren’t forced to do so.

In the early 2010s, Labor experienced two different elections where the party was at a very low point in states using Optional Preferential Voting: in New South Wales in 2011, and in Queensland in 2012. Both elections saw landslide victories for the conservative opposition. And in both elections, there was a notable drop in the proportion of preferences that flowed to Labor. For Greens voters in particular, the party chose not to bother with a preference deal with a party so obviously on track for defeat, and there was a big increase in vote exhaustion.

In 2015, however, there was a big organised effort to encourage voters on the left to mark their preferences at the Queensland election, after three years of Campbell Newman’s LNP government. The rate of vote exhaustion dropped to the lowest level since the ‘just vote 1’ campaign of 2001, and Labor gained 44.9% of preferences – the highest proportion they’d received during the OPV era.

OPV can look like first past the post, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Voters, political parties and campaigners have agency. Voters have a choice, and they can use it if they wish.

A year after that election, Queensland Labor decided it was done with optional preference voting, and they dispatched it quickly.

With a redistribution expected soon, an LNP bill progressed through the hung Queensland parliament, to add extra seats to the Parliament. The Labor government proposed a surprise amendment to switch counting rules from optional to compulsory preferential voting. These changes gained the support of the crossbench, and were passed within hours.

An opposition MP, Ros Bates, described the change as “the most disingenuous act of corruption and bastardry that I’ve ever witnessed in this Parliament”. The LNP’s leader promised to reverse the change if the party won the next election.

The Attorney-General, Yvette D’Ath, argued that the change was necessary to reduce informal votes. While there have been concerns that using OPV at a state level can increase informal voting in that state for federal elections, there would have been no doubt that the change would have increased the informal rate at the state level. And that is what happened. At the 2017 state election, the informal rate doubled to 4.3%.

With no preferences exhausting, the rate of preference flows to both Labor and the LNP went up. But the flow of preferences to the LNP went up a lot more than Labor. One Nation surged back into Queensland politics, polling 12.8%, and their preferences were a valuable addition for the LNP.

Once again, the political parties held positions that had once aligned with their self-interest, but that self-interest was changing once again.

Group voting tickets were first invented in 1983 as a solution to the dilemma of how to reduce informal voting for Senate elections without using optional preferential voting. But by the 2000s, there was an increasing push to get rid of those tickets.

Group voting tickets made it easier for parties to swap preferences and make deals, without having to hand out millions of how-to-votes to voters. As the vote for small parties increased, they were able to use preference deals to allow a party on a small vote to pile up votes and potentially win.

In 2004, Family First won a Senate seat in Victoria thanks to preferences snowballing until they had enough to overtake Labor. Victorian Labor preferenced Family First ahead of the Greens as part of a reciprocal preference deal, and Family First then defeated the Greens. It was generally agreed that this didn’t reflect how those voters would have marked their preferences if they chose their own preferences.

The Greens had supported reform for a long time – the NSW branch of the party had supported reform of a similar system for the NSW Legislative Council following the 1999 election.

But there was a dilemma. Ballot papers had continued to grow since the early 1980s. It wouldn’t be any easier to number every single candidate box than it had been in 1974. At the 2004 federal election, the field of New South Wales Senate candidates reached 78, exceeding the 1974 candidate count.

The New South Wales solution was to allow voters to vote above the line for individual parties, with the vote flowing to all of the candidate in that party, before flowing to all of the candidates in the party marked with a ‘2’, and so on. But New South Wales didn’t require voters to number more than one box.

To properly implement above-the-line voting for individual parties with compulsory preferential voting, it would be necessary for voters to mark numerous boxes – in New South Wales in 2004, twenty-nine groups nominated.

There really didn’t seem to be a solution to the dilemma, and for a while it was something that helped protect group voting tickets from abolition.

In December 2004, just two months after the election that saw Family First defeat the Greens in Victoria on Labor preferences, Greens senator Bob Brown introduced legislation that would have introduced NSW-style preferencing above the line but with compulsory preferential voting.

The bill wasn’t debated in parliament, but it’s hard to see how it could have worked. While voters had gotten used to voting just ‘1’ above the line, they’d need to number dozens of boxes in most states to cast a formal vote.

The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters considered the issue in its routine inquiry into the 2004 federal election.

Amongst a broader conversation about possible electoral reform, it was also suggested that one possible reform to the Senate would be to make it easier to vote below the line – voters were unlikely to use that option when it required numbering over 50 boxes, as in some of the bigger states. The report references some submissions suggesting that a voter following the party’s ticket implied agreement with the party’s preference order – but considering the difficulty in lodging a vote that didn’t follow the ticket, this couldn’t be assumed.

While the report did raise the possibility of optional preferential voting above the line in the Senate, the general consensus remained strongly against OPV. The committee recommended a reform along the lines of Bob Brown’s bill, introducing compulsory above-the-line preferencing above the line.

As the issue dragged on into subsequent elections, pressure continued to build up, and the need to find a practical solution began to weaken the opposition to OPV.

Another bill from Bob Brown in 2008 had abandoned the concept of numbering every box above the line. Instead the bill proposing above-the-line voting with a minimum number of preferences, equivalent to more than half of the seats up for election: four in the case of a half-Senate election and seven for a double dissolution.

Momentum for reform built up after the 2013 federal election, and Nick Xenophon presented a bill that only required a single preference above the line, or as many preferences as there are seats up for election below the line.

The inquiry following the 2013 federal election seriously considered Senate reform as one of the main issues.

The longstanding resistance to OPV had finally broken down, with widespread support for rules that would allow voters to just number one box, or at least number a small number of boxes.

The Liberal Party, Labor and the Greens all supported optional preferential voting above the line, while the Nationals still insisted on compulsory preferences.

Others advocated types of limited preferential voting, where voters would be required to number more than one box, but not all of them. This was a common opinion as a way to improve below-the-line voting.

The Labor submission proposed to require that ballot paper instructions and how-to-votes tell voters to number a certain number of boxes above the line while counting a single 1 above the line as formal.

The committee eventually recommended OPV above the line and preferencing below the line for as many boxes as there were Senate vacancies.
The report was handed down in May 2014, but the government sat on the issue for some time, finally bringing forward legislation in February 2016.

The legislation largely followed the recommendations, with an innovation first suggested by Labor in their submission to the 2014 inquiry – while voters would be asked to number six boxes above the line, one would be enough for a vote to count.

Labor opposed the legislation, as did many of the crossbench senators who had benefited from the old electoral system to win their seats.

But once the legislation was passed, reform of group voting tickets gradually spread across the remaining states who used the system: in every case the state reform was passed by a Labor state government: South Australia before the 2018 election, Western Australia before the 2025 election and Victoria very recently.

Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that OPV benefited the right. The large Greens vote meant that Labor missed out on preferences from Greens voters, while the right-wing vote was more unified.

But in 2025, the Coalition’s collapse in support showed the beginnings of a change – almost 13% of voters cast a vote for a minor party or independent and then preferenced the Coalition over Labor.

Since 2025, the rise of One Nation has muddied the picture even further. A One Nation vote around 10% would’ve caused problems for the Coalition under OPV, but at current polling levels One Nation would begin to push the Coalition out of the top two in many seats, and the preference dynamic would become very different.

In races between Labor and One Nation, preference flows could favour either side, or largely even out. The Coalition would expect to do better on preferences in a race against One Nation, with voters of the left favouring the Coalition.

And in a traditional Labor-Coalition contest, there would be an increasing number of right-wing preferences at play, erasing Labor’s preference advantage.

But more importantly, a lot of these assumptions would vary from place to place. In urban seats, Labor would likely have a preference advantage over the Coalition, while the opposite would be true in more rural areas.

So while a particular party might have a preference advantage in a particular kind of seat, that can’t be applied to a whole state or the whole country.

With over a century of parties determining their positions on the electoral system based on how it might help them, where do they land now?

At the 2026 South Australian state election, One Nation state leader Cory Bernardi announced a policy of supporting optional preferential voting. Bernardi, like Whitlam before him, made the argument on the grounds of personal freedom, arguing that under OPV “people don’t have to, or are not forced to, vote for a party that is against their values”.

It does seem like preferences generally are unfavourable to One Nation now, so such a policy is consistent with a century of self-interest driving political principles.

The Queensland LNP took power in 2024 with a promise to restore OPV to state elections, after Labor changed the system with no notice in 2016. Queensland premier David Crisafulli continues to insist that the policy has not changed, but the government has not yet moved, almost two years into the term.

As the party that sits between One Nation and Labor, the LNP would likely benefit from preferences from either of those other parties if they drop into third. And those preferences would be diluted if OPV was introduced.

But this would not be the first time that a party’s self-interested policy persists after the self-interest has faded away.

Putting aside the question of self-interest, it seems that there are upsides and downsides to both systems.

Optional preferential voting gives voters more freedom to mark as many boxes as they want, and ultimately the power to not mark preferences if they don’t want to. It is also a protection against needing to number the boxes of candidates who they have no opinions about, which could lead to their vote being informal.

Compulsory preferential voting also has its advantages – sometimes a voter may think they don’t want to bother to mark preferences, but genuinely have a preference and miss out on a say in the decisive pairing. And OPV can lead to misleading campaigns to drive down preference flows.

Preferences matter more now, because a lot more of them flow. In an era where most people voted for the two main parties, preferences were a minor part of the system and only decided a few seats. Based on current polling, preferences have the potential to shift the vast majority of seats.

And preferences matter more because of the single-member electoral system. When we elect 21 or 37 members in a single electorate, as we see in the upper houses of New South Wales and Western Australia, preferences play a minor role. At the last New South Wales election, preferences did not change a single seat in the upper house.

For proportional elections in Tasmania and the ACT, where 5-7 members are elected in each district, preferences do matter but less than they do in a single-member election.

This is partly why it was easier to resolve the OPV-CPV conflict in proportional elections – both because there are more candidates on the ballot, and because preferences play a less crucial role.

Short of moving to a proportional system – which is a story for another time – I suggest that we can take a lesson from the Senate reforms of 2016 to find a way through the OPV-CPV split.

Under the Senate legislation, voters are told to number at least six boxes above the line or twelve below the line – but that is not how the votes are counted. Any single ‘1’ above the line or six boxes below the line is enough for a vote to count.

I don’t see why we couldn’t do something similar for the House of Representatives or other single-member systems around Australia. The ballot paper should instruct voters to number a certain number of boxes. There’s no point telling someone to number ten or fifteen boxes, and there would be a certain elegance in copying the six boxes of the Senate system. This would be backed up by an AEC advertising campaign, instructions from AEC staff in polling booths and written instructions on the ballot paper.

But any single ‘1’ vote would count as formal. OPV rules would apply at counting time.

The Senate experience suggests that if voters are told to number six boxes, they will do so. In most cases, that will be enough to keep high numbers of votes in the count, while giving voters the freedom to opt out of the final contest if they prefer, and avoid excessive informal votes.

One extra complication would come in preventing ‘just vote 1’ campaigns as we’ve seen in New South Wales and Queensland.

In Senate elections, preferences flow in all different directions depending on the exact breakdown of the vote. So no party has an incentive to encourage a single ‘1’ vote, particularly with the House of Representatives ballot still requiring a full numbering. But in the House, parties may calculate an advantage in advocating for a single ‘1’ in particular seats or more generally.

Perhaps we shouldn’t go as far as the Langer law of 1990 which criminalised advocacy of a particular method of formal voting. But I don’t think that is necessary to minimise careless voter exhaustion.

In a number of states, parties are required to register how-to-vote cards in order to hand them out near a polling place. If how-to-votes need to be registered, it would then be possible for the Electoral Commission to require all how-to-votes to be consistent with the requirement to number six boxes. It would not force parties to specifically recommend who those preferences should go to, but it would at least mean they would tell voters to number six boxes.

I think a system like this would work pretty well – informal votes would be much lower, and we wouldn’t see the rates of exhausted votes we see in New South Wales. Yet voters would ultimately still have the right to not vote for someone if they don’t wish to.

I don’t think we’re about to see this change in federal elections, but I think the time is right for Queensland to experiment with this reform. The Queensland LNP has promised to restore OPV, but is anxious about missing out on crucial preferences in close races. The ‘just vote six’ hybrid could be the answer.

That’s it for episode three of ‘just vote 1’, and the end for this series. If you liked this turn into electoral history, please let me know. I would like to do more historical research for the podcast, particularly outside of election time.

Thank you to a number of people who helped with historical research including Chris Monnox, Chris Salisbury, Andrew Bartlett, Todd Farrell and a bunch of people on the Tally Room discord.

The podcast will be back next week with coverage of the Victorian and New Zealand elections. So stay tuned for that.

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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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!

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.