Australia has used preferential voting for over one hundred years, and in that time the party system has changed quite a bit. Since the 1950s, there has been an increasing trend of minor parties picking up votes, but until recently these votes were not enough to actually win many seats. So their main contribution, in the House of Representatives at least, was in having their votes flow as preferences to one of the major parties.
Even in the current system, about 5/6ths of all seats end up as Labor vs Coalition contests. So for today’s post I wanted to explore how the flows of preferences have changed over time, in general and then for particular minor parties, and how they flowed in 2022.
This first chart starts in 1958 – prior elections had uncontested seats which reduces the value of the data. It shows what share of the vote for non-Labor and non-Coalition votes ended up flowing to Labor or the Coalition as two-party-preferred votes.
It’s worth noting that this chart was calculated at the national level, so it doesn’t capture preferences that may have flowed from one Coalition candidate to another.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the main source of preferences was the Democratic Labor Party, which despite their name favoured the Coalition with preferences.
They faded from the political landscape in the early 1970s, and the next dominant minor party was the Australian Democrats. There were also other contenders like the Nuclear Disarmament Party in 1984. Labor gained a majority of preferences for the first time in 1980.
Preference rates for Labor have continued to climb, but more slowly, with a dip in 1996 and 1998. Labor gained almost 65% of preferences at the peak in 2010, and the figure in 2022 was 61.54%.
Some of the same dynamics can also be seen in this next chart. It shows the number of seats where the successful candidate was not leading on the primary vote, and the colour represents the party of the winning candidate.
Prior to 1990, come-from-behind wins were overwhelmingly won by Coalition candidates. Labor had just one come from behind per decade in the 1960s and 1970s, and three wins at the 1980 election.
This was a combination of two factors: DLP preferences favouring the Coalition, and the Liberal and Country parties running candidates against each other and defeating Labor on the other Coalition party’s preferences.
The 1990s in hindsight look like a transitional period. The Coalition still won from behind on occasion, but Labor started having these wins regularly.
But for the last two decades, the Coalition hasn’t had a single come-from-behind win.
There has also been an increasing number of come-from-behind wins in recent years, although the total number of cases hasn’t gone far above the previous peaks in 1972 and 1984. There were 16 come from behind wins in 2016 and 2022.
The final twist was in 2022, when there were nine come-from-behind wins by independents and minor parties. Most of these were still at the expense of the Coalition, but Labor did lose from ahead in Fowler.
All of this analysis just treats the minor party and independent vote as one big block but of course they are not. You can see the overall trend shifting as the DLP was replaced by the Democrats, then the initial rise of One Nation and finally the rise of the Greens.
This next chart shows the specific preference flows to Labor on the 2PP for primary votes for the Greens, Democrats, One Nation and Palmer United/United Australia since 1984.
It’s worth noting this does include some elections where these parties lost their status as significant minor parties. One Nation only ran in 15-35 seats at elections from 2007 to 2016, and have only come close to running in every seat at the 2022 and 2025 federal elections. The Democrats still ran in a majority of seats in 2007, but polled just 0.7%. The Greens only ran in 36 seats. They ran in almost every seat in 2001 and have run in every seat since 2004.
The Democrats may have been founded by an ex-Liberal MP but by the mid-1980s they were giving a majority of their preferences to Labor, and it slightly increased over time. Their peak flow of preferences to Labor was in 2001, the last election before they collapsed.
The Greens have seen a steady increase in their share of preferences flowing to Labor, from 66% in 1990 to 86% in 2022.
One Nation unsurprisingly has always had preferences that favour the Coalition, but never by as much as the Greens favour Labor. The initial incarnation of One Nation gave just 54% of preferences to the Coalition, and it stayed around that level until 2016, when they ran in just 15 seats and gave just 50.5% of preferences to the Coalition.
One Nation massively outperformed expectations in 2016, winning four Senate seats. After three years back in parliament and a rebuilding of the party, their preference flows changed dramatically in 2019, with almost two thirds going to the Coalition. The result was similar in 2022.
Finally there are less elections to use to analyse Clive Palmer’s various parties, but there was a dramatic shift between the 2013 Palmer United Party, with 54% of preferences flowing to the Coalition, compared to the 2019-22 United Australia Party, with 62-65% of preferences flowing to the Coalition. This reflects his shift from positioning his party as a centrist alternative to being a party clearly on the minor right.
Preference flows from independents are fascinating, because they have moved around. Traditionally they favoured the Coalition, although there was a period in the early 1990s when Labor won a majority of independent preferences. I suspect that this reflects the numbers of green independents running at the time, and those forces were gradually absorbed into the Greens, but I have not fully investigated that question.
The big shift in the independent preference flows took place at the 2013 election. MPs like Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott retired. This may reflect a change in who was running, or that Coalition-leaning voters who had given their primary vote to independents fled while Labor-leaning voters stayed. Labor now gained almost 64% of independent preferences, a very different picture to the pre-2013 situation.
Understanding preference flows is crucial to conducting opinion polls. A given primary vote will produce quite different outcomes if preference flows change, as they can do from time to time. Typically pollsters will use the ‘last election’ estimates when calculating preference flows, but this can be difficult when the range of options in a poll don’t match the previous election results. Some other pollsters instead just ask the voter and use those preference flows.
It’s worth noting that there was an uptick in One Nation’s preference flows to the Liberal National Party at the 2024 Queensland election, compared both to the 2022 federal election and the 2020 state election. This, combined with the data from their own polls, led Newspoll to tweak their preference flow model to give more One Nation preferences to the Coalition. Peter Brent summarised the situation for Inside Story in February.
Preference flows will be fascinating to watch at this year’s election. Can the Greens preference flows to Labor go any higher, or are they at a ceiling. Does the surge in teal-ish independents lead to even stronger preference flows to Labor? Do the big minor parties of the right continue to polarise further and give the Coalition stronger preference flows? If we see right-wing parties start to give preferences to the Coalition at the rate that the Greens flow to Labor, and see teal voters become more Labor-friendly, it could indicate a growing polarisation in Australian politics. Not just a two-party system, but two blocs, with preferences staying within each bloc. Even if the parties don’t want to be grouped together, the voters appear to be doing this for them.
It’s weird that Labor bag the Greens so hard when Greens voters increasingly preference Labor ahead of Coalition. Do they just want the $3/vote, or is there something else at play in their antipathy?
Ben, I take it you haven’t looked at Senate numbers?
Josh, the ALP’s bagging of the Greens is even weirder when one considers a significant number of ALP seats are won *because* of Greens preferences. If the Greens stopped preferencing the ALP, they’d lose a lot of seats. What’s the saying about not biting the hand that feeds you?
The rise in Minor Party preferences for the ALP exactly matches the fall for the Coalition – 32.65%.
You never read anyone on the blogs bagging Labor for being beholden to minority interests, but that graph shows a different story.
Unfortunately we are heading down the southern European political system where an inability to form a majority will lead to a lack of consensus or reform and increasing debt which can never be repaid. In this country that probably means more regular centre left governments as they will traditionally benefit from greater preference flows despite the main centre right coalition winning significantly more primary votes. Until such time the centre right can provide a compelling and holistic economic reform story (along the lines of suggestions by Allegra Spender and Chris Richardson) we will head down the path of an increasing structural deficit as the economic pie is redistributed rather than grown and expenditure growth exceeds GDP. The coalition do not deserve to win this election based on their economic platform, notwithstanding an incredibly weak government economically and an intellectually inferior PM to any other in Australia’s recent history. There is no need at this stage to change tune for the majority when the unemployment rate is 4%. And the Treasurer can sleep well at night in the knowledge that those that have worked hard and sacrificed to build wealth (how dare they) will need to eventually pay the price at some point – the exact people he holds disdain for. My tip is that the credit ratings agencies will downgrade Australia’s sovereign credit rating over the next 3 years. The economic platforms of both parties will necessitate this.
I imagine as the Labor primary falls, the Greens>Labor flow will increase
Senate preferences are a different thing I might talk about at some point.
Interesting about the independence flows (assuming mainly Teals) because to my eyes they are natural Liberal voters, but now can no longer bear to vote Liberals. While I classify myself as a progressive, I would vote 1 for a Teal like candidate, mainly because at this stage they appear to be the only real mature politicians in the room.
But it goes to your earlier articles about the declining 1st preference votes of the two major parties and the rise of a “third way”. The question for me is will we ever see a tipping point where the numbers fall in favour of minor parties and independence through 1st preference and then other preferencing flows! That would be interesting, although I can’t see it happening in the short to medium term.
It’s important not to underestimate the extent to which teal independents benefit from strategic Labor voters aiming to unseat their incumbent Liberal MPs who they’ve grown to hate because some facebook group told them to. Use Goldstein from 2022 as an example. Labor experienced a big 17% swing against them, dropping to around 11% of the primary vote. In contrast, the Liberal primary vote fell by approximately 12%, landing near 40%. Zoe then won Goldstein on the 8th round of preferences being allocated from Labor. It’s a strategic ALP stinger
It is obvious that a large number of Labor (and Greens) voters switched to vote for the teals. However we can’t say how much of this was “tactical” (ie they still prefer their original party but voted for the independent because they can win) or they genuinely prefer the independent. It’s definitely not 100% tactical.
@ Ben Raue
Where there any exceptions post 1980 where the Coalition candiate won from behind where there was only a single Coalition candidate. In Blair in 1998 the Libs on from behind but there was two Coalition candidates and ALP preferenced Libs over ONP. Interested to know if a minor party or independent helped the Coalition win from behind in a classic contest against Labor.
I don’t have a full list of all the cases available. I do know the two cases in 2001 were Cowper and Paterson. They both had a Lib running against a Nat. So it’s quite possible a lot of the 1990s cases are similar.
Thanks Ben
Yes the 2001 examples were two Coalition candiates. I know the 1996 example was Sam Benson in Batman who won as a Pro-Vietnam war candidate from behind with preferences from DLP and Libs. If anyone knows the 1961 and 1974 examples when Labor won from Behind that would be much appreciated as it predates the Democrats, Greens and NDP.
*1966 example
That high number of come from behind Coalition wins in the 1980s. Are they all where there were two coalition candidates?
@Ben Raue April at 10:02 am:
Agree, if the ALP had that strategy, there’s still no way to pass it on to the vast majority of Labor voters who only switch on at Election day.
For those that are switched on, perhaps Green Left Weekly doing a softball interview with the Riverina Community Independent candidate might give viewers in that division a nudge in the desired direction?
https://www.greenleft.org.au/video/jenny-rolfe-challenges-major-parties-riverina
[vid goes for 40 minutes of motherhood statements, at 35:30 she appears not to understand what antisemitism is/means.]
Since Labor are no hope here, they might fancy their chances of getting a clueless Independent into Parliament for 3 years?
The then NCP won Cook at the 1974 State Election with 2 candidates, but the one that won wasn’t the one that was expected to win by the NCP and folowing a redistribution it went back to Labor for the next 35 years.
[NCP is National Country Party, as the National Party was known at the time.]
Skull has a point. I don’t think that it’s possible this year or in 2022 (& earlier in some seats) to consider preference flows without tactical voting mainly on the left. Some Green votes are just tactical Labor protest voters making a point so the rise in preferences from Green to Labor is explicable in many electorates. We all know that Labor voters have higher IQs than LNP voters and have the confidence to game the system. In perhaps 27 electorates this year many Labor voters will vote tactically for independents, KAP & Andrew Gee & that group will win perhaps 18 seats. My enemy’s enemy & also some respect for the quality of the independents.
As to the thinking on the conservative & right, on preferencing, I am watching Whitlam with curiosity where there are 10 candidates – 8 of the conservative or alt-right allegedly all cross preferencing each other in some sequence or other, & just Labor & the Greens. The Liberals are clearly trialing a strategy.
The defenestrated former alt-Right Liberal candidate, having had the benefit of a $ 200,000 mail out by the Liberals before defenestration, is still running in Liberal blue with his signs & material & the real Liberal candidate has not yet managed a mail out or come down from the mountains to the Labor heartland. Mr Defenestration has signs illegally all over the Shellharbour region on council property but labor appears unfazed. Why? perhaps because he is creating great confusion with the Liberal vote which at Shellharbour & Dapto is only ever an anti labor vote. My guess is that conservative/right preferences will spray everywhere & the informal vote will go through the roof? Beneficiary: Labor & the Greens?
Two things about some of the comments.
Firstly – a lot (maybe as much as 70%) of the Labor voter base (as opposed to the membership/activist/MP base) has antipathy if not downright antagonism towards the Greens. Saying you will get into a coalition or do a deal with the Greens might (not saying it will) cause outright revolt and a mass loss of support in the outer suburbs. The opposite I don’t think would – the so called nuclear option of putting the greens below the Libs would flag to the above group that you were on their side, and for every voter you lose to the Greens in a fit of pique another will come back as you signal he Greens aren’t your friends and it is not OK to vote for them. This is all becoming less prevalent as the realignment happens but we aren’t there yet.
Secondly I doubt there was a lot of tactical voting going on for the Teals. In order for tactical voting to make sense you need a specific set of circumstances that you “know” are going to happen. What is much more likely is that a lot of the Labor/Green vote in these electorates is soft and really an anti Liberal vote, and when something more in their interests came along they jumped to vote for them. Similar to the Liberal vote for Dai Le, it was always more of an anti Labor than pro Liberal vote.
Strongly disagree about labor voters vs greens voters, except maybe in more rural working class places like the hunter, gladstone etc. Many outer suburbs labor voters probably vote labor because the greens are seen as unrealistic there, not because they are despised, and others prefer labor for a number of reasons, but would absolutely prefer greens over libs, and put them second, even if the htv said otherwise. At the last QLD election, the outer suburbs swung hard to the greens, suggesting that there is a cohort of outer suburban voters who at the very least don’t mind them.
Agree about the teal thing though.
CoC, who do you think I am talking about? The outer suburbs I am thinking of are working class – they are full of men and women who jump in their ute/4WD with their hi vis on to factory/warehouse/construction etc jobs, not full of office workers jumping on the train/bus/tram. On simple social class terms this traditional Labor working class base, which is both shrinking in numerical terms and slowly shifting to the LNP/minor right parties, is obviously at odds with the more upper class Greens, hence why Labor make such a big deal of ‘not doing deals with the Greens’, because they don’t want to lose that cohort of their voters, even if the average ALP member these days is closer to the Greens than the old working class.
Yeah I think the sort of bogan types aren’t as anti green as they used to be, I think their economic policies are getting through over the cultural perception.
Thank you for making my point for me Coc – I really do enjoy it when people do that.
What on earth are you talking about?
Your comment showed the exact disdain for the working class that all Green voters and politicians show – you might as well have said ‘those deplorables’. Even if the Greens economic policies were a positive -and I dispute that, every true economic policy that the Greens have is detrimental to non professional workers – that is massively outweighed by the disdain shown for the way people live.
And don’t tell me they call themselves bogans – we do, but that wasn’t the way you were using it.
You won’t accept this but I genuinely was using it as a neutral descriptor, “bogan” is a generally used word to describe that demograph and I acknowledge that it can be used with negative connotations but that was not my intent. I 100% despise the sort of Clinton-esque politicians and commentators who use terms like “deplorables”, “trailer trash” etc, but I would argue “bogan” is not in and of itself in this category, although it can be used that way. I’d argue that their policies like free dental, 50c fares, lifting centrelink payments, capping rent increases and tonnes more policies do help outer suburban voters.
One last thing – you suggest there was a big increase in outer suburban votes for the Greens at the last QLD election. Is that true? I thought they stayed pretty even, with a small loss in inner urban areas offset by a small rise in some suburban areas. Have I missed a big Greens vote?
Ben did a piece on it after the election, their vote dropped in the inner city and went up in the outer suburbs, particularly more ethnic ones, but I think it happened to some extent everywhere. I can’t remember the percentage swing, and I may have overstated it before.
50c fares – no they are for professional office workers. Free Dental – that is not the policy, it is Dental on Medicare, not the same. Lifting centrelink payments, you may have missed I was referring to the working class not the welfare class, capping rent increases is the one I will give you, but it is a bad policy that will achieve the opposite of what is intended – and many of these areas and people are high mortgage areas anyway, so mortgage issues not rent issues are a bigger issue. Almost all of the policies mentioned are designed for those in the top say 10-30% of the income distribution, for people living in the inner city getting the tram to their office jobs in the city, and people know that.
Agree “bogan” is not appropriate (“tradie vote” is more commonly referred), but to suggest “bogan” is offensive and then say “welfare class” – that’s shocking.
Look I use it colloquially in that context, I’ll admit maybe it wasn’t the best choice of word.
50c fares help outer suburban residents the most, cos they often have the longest commutes. Speaking about QLD where we have the 50c fairs, a commute for people from Milton was already cheap, it’s the people going from Ipswich or Redcliffe who had super expensive commutes. Yes “free dental” and “dental in medicare” are different names, but they mean the same thing in practice, you don’t need to pay out of pocket to go to the dentist. Centrelink payments go to plenty of people who have jobs (e.g. payments to parents etc), and at least portions of the old working class are now structurally unemployed, and many more are unemployed at various times going between jobs. We could debate rent caps, and the greens do also want to regulate banks to bring mortgages down, but I’ll accept that their main housing area is rent. And another example, fully funding public schools will benefit the people who can’t afford to send their kids to private schools, or the working class.
Also about the “welfare class”, I’d encourage you to read this: https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/who-is-your-enemy-my-brother. It’s in response to a line from that song that came out a while ago, Rich Men North of Richmond, but I think it applies generally.
I wonder if in many places these days, aside from the tradies, many of the people working in service industry roles are recent (or not so recent) migrants. Part of this relates to needing to work while studying, so includes cleaning, stacking supermarket shelves, retail and hospitality. Then many find that their expensive local university degrees don’t lead to professional employment, and they end up stuck in these roles. As such, I am not sure that many of these people have a deep connection to either of our two main parties.
I am not suggesting that this is across the board, but it is true for outer Sydney and Melbourne, and Canberra as well.
That’s true in the Brisbane suburbs as well, I can confirm.
I had to rush off to the footy last night so I couldn’t continue this very interesting discussion.
On the welfare class comment – it is simply true that there are large numbers of men, more so than women, who see anyone on the dole as ‘me paying my taxes for him to bum around and do nothing’. In fact they see going on the dole as a personal failure. You and I might look at it differently, but it is the key reason why the dole hasn’t been increased despite the strong push for it from some quarters.
There is a second point too – a lot of targeted welfare requires knowing the rules and that is often not something that people with busy and/or chaotic lives can do but it is still often available for people much better off. As an example, I didn’t get Aus Study or rent assistance or any additional welfare when I went to Uni – we could have dodgied up my circumstances to get it but we didn’t. However a lot of people materially better off than us had no problems adjusting their ‘circumstances’ to get all of the government handouts they could.
Remember here as well – I am not necessarily putting putting out my personal views, just my experience of the communities where I grew up which were very working class, and why Labor come across as so anti Greens
That’s fair enough, and I understand that a lot of these people do in fact see welfare recipients like that. Personally, that’s part of why I’m in favour of a ubi, to destigmatise welfare by giving it to everyone. And I do agree that some benefits, particularly those targeted at youth and students, tend to go mostly towards upper middle class uni students, but there are also some that don’t. The pension is an example, my grandad’s living (not very comfortably – he’s got a 40 year old car that barely runs because they can’t afford a new one) on welfare, he worked as a miner out west. So at least some of the benefits do go to people who genuinely need them, even if some don’t.
Again CoC I think you have fallen into the same trap with a UBI, while I can see some benefits you are back with the image of ‘dole bludgers’, this time with some real justification (although I am somewhat of a fan of a UBI there is an obvious issue around paying people not to work).
BTW, we haven’t talked about the real economic policies of the Greens like no fossil fuels, open borders (in practical terms they do), limits on private transport etc, all of of which would disproportionately negatively affect those outer suburban workers who the ALP can’t afford to alienate.