Good morning, I have been writing this blog post after getting home to wrap my own head around the scale of the count. I expect I will have some issues with the website’s accessibility today, so some of this may also be posted over on Tally Room in Exile, my backup blog.
Firstly, it appears that there has been a significant increase in the number of contests involving minor parties and independents, but it will be some time before we can say how many seats are now non-classic.
Right now, 116 seats appear to be classic contests, 15 are Coalition vs Independent (including Katter and Sharkie), 10 are Labor vs Greens, 8 are Labor vs Independent, and one is Coalition vs Greens (Ryan).
But there are 19 seats where it is not clear at this point which parties should be in the 2CP, and it will require further counting to make that clear. I’m sure some of these seats will require a 3CP. That isn’t to say all these seats are in play – in some cases there is a clear winner and two parties competing to come second.
In theory as many as 43 seats could be non-classic, but at the moment 34 are leaning that way. As a reminder, the 27 non-classic seats in 2022 was an enormous jump. It’s hard to see the number not being higher this time.
I’m going to introduce a term I haven’t used much in the past: “Maverick”. The AEC uses this term to apply to seats where their initial chosen 2CP turns out to be wrong. This year, an enormous 22 seats were declared Maverick, although the Maverick status of Macnamara was later overturned. I think there’s three others where they could arguably do the same, and resume counting the initial 2PP count.
The Maverick status also covers two seats in WA where they picked the wrong party out of Liberal and Nationals. Ten of these 21 seats continue to be unclear as to what 2CP pairing will apply. There is thus a further 9 seats where it is unclear which parties make the 2CP, but since the likeliest pairing is the current pairing, they will continue counting until they decide otherwise.
The main reason for all of this complexity is the closeness of the second-placed and third-placed candidates. There are 30 seats where that gap is less than 5%.
I previously analysed these gaps at the 3CP level, which is not quite the same thing but is usually similar, and I have found the gaps have kept getting smaller. Well it looks like this trend is continuing in 2025. It is getting harder and harder to know which two candidates are the top two.
As for the seat outcomes, my current estimates are:
- Labor winning 86, leading in another 7
- Coalition winning 36, leading in another 4
- Independent (including KAP and CA) winning 10 and leading in 5
- Greens leading in 2
I won’t go into what those seats are now. Right now it looks like five of the six urban teals, plus Sharkie, Katter, Dai Le, Wilkie and Haines have all been re-elected. Zoe Daniel is leading in Goldstein, as are independents in Bean, Calare, Bradfield and Cowper, with the Calare candidate being ex-Nationals MP Andrew Gee. The total vote for independents (not including CA or KAP) has surged again to 7.8%.
The historic scale of Labor’s victory and the Coalition’s defeat forced me to collate some data on previous results, and this chart shows, as a proportion of the House, how many seats the government, opposition and crossbench have held after each election.
The exact record will depend on the final results, but it seems likely that this election result will produce more seats than the 90 seats won by Tony Abbott in 2013. There’s a chance Labor could surpass John Howard’s result in 1996, although I don’t think they’ll quite get there. As for Labor results, this is their best result in seat terms since 1943, and I don’t think any other result before that was any better.
For the Coalition, this looks like the worst result for any major party since 1943, even producing a lower seat proportion than Whitlam’s Labor in 1975. Of course the ballooning size of the crossbench means the defeat of the Coalition is a bit more impressive than Labor’s victory – an exaggerated version of the mismatch we saw in 2022.
For this whole campaign we have been looking at the declining major party votes, and what is amazing is that Labor has achieved this enormous victory while barely raising their primary vote.
The combined major party vote has continued to drop, currently sitting at 66.4%, just below two thirds of the total vote. The Coalition has also broken their own record for their lowest vote share since 1943. And the combined vote for the minor parties and independents has now passed the Coalition, and is over one third.
The final point I want to touch on is the Greens’ performance. At the moment it looks like they will scrape by in Melbourne and potentially win other seats like Wills and Ryan. Their result wasn’t particularly impressive, but I want to emphasise how much they are victims of the electoral system. Nationally the Greens vote is steady, just over 12%, and part of the story is that the Greens suffered primary vote swings in many of their best seats while gaining votes elsewhere. The map at the end of this post makes this very clear in cities like Melbourne and Brisbane, although you don’t see it in the same way in Sydney.
But in a number of their seats, their defeat did not primarily come due to a dropping primary vote, but a rearrangement of their opponents. In Brisbane and Griffith, the rising Labor vote pushed the LNP into third, and thus LNP preferences will elect Labor.
It’s a perverse part of our system that the most conservative voters decide who wins in some of the most progressive seats. Elizabeth Watson-Brown likely will survive while Max Chandler-Mather will be defeated because she represents a more conservative seat where the LNP is the main opponent.
And this is a challenge for the Greens because so many of their best seats are now Labor vs Greens contests where Labor will easily win the 2CP on Liberal preferences.
And finally, this map shows the swings for Labor, Coalition, Greens and One Nation on the primary vote, and a 2PP swing for the 124 seats with 2PP counts at the moment.
Amongst those 124 seats, the biggest 2PP swings were again in Inner Metropolitan seats, averaging 5.08%. Outer Metropolitan averaged 4.07%, Provincial 2.55% and Rural 2.12%. The urban-rural divide is growing even now.
Australia’s lower house is not a proportional representation system. Time and again, in many countries around the world, it has been shown that single member electorates create a two party system. Our preferential system is miles better than FPTP and allows minor parties to enter the field without acting as a spoiler. But as long as we have single member electorates, the house will continue to be dominated by two blocs.
If anything, an argument could be made that the 2022 Greens results in Brisbane was a perverse outcome. These members were not Condorcet winners – they relied on Labor falling to third place to pick up their preferences. All three would have lost to Labor on a 2PP count, but this count was never conducted.
With that said, Arrow’s impossibility theorem guarantees that there will be perverse outcomes in any electoral system. Personally, I think it is valid for a party like the Greens to strategise around the paths to victory that are opened to them by the quirks of the electoral system. They just have to recognise that these paths are inherently unstable, and vulnerable to changes in fortune of the parties around them, as we saw this week.
All electoral systems have tradeoffs. Single member electorates create a closer link between politicians and their individual constituencies, at a cost of proportionality. MMP systems like NZ balance some of this out a bit. But I think our senate does a good job of this also, at least not a bad enough job that it warrants a referendum to change. And personally, I think there is benefit to having single member electorates in the house, which decides the executive, while maintaining proportionality in the senate, which is required for legislation.
Looking at the overall vote the Nationals get about 4% but get many seats. If limited to a state that they actually run in like NSW there total vote is under 8% but they get 6 out of 46 seats (13%)
In NSW the greens get under 11% of the vote but 0 seats (with a chance in only 1)
To the people calling Franklin, the ABC’s computer now has George behind just 0.1%. Certainly not as
Whoops accidentally sent! Meant to say: Certainly not as clear-cut as yesterday!
will be interesting to see where the non-Greens crossbench ends up
Currently 10 called by ABC with 7 close seats where one of the contenders is an IND. Though IND could end up with none of those
Would certainly go against my prediction of a larger cross-bench after this election and goes against a total primary drop for ALP+Coalition
I think Chris is quite right. There’s no rule that says that a fully proportional system is the only legitmate method of forming a parliament just because it most closely reflects first preferences. Our system maximises the chances of one party forming government which is good for stability and allows bad governance to be punished, but ensures that legislation passing is more dependent on dealing with minority groups through making it hard to form an upper house majority.
Regarding the Condorcet advocacy upthread, there’s a big issue with implementing such a system in practice and perhaps particularly in the context that exists in Australia. While in the realm of pure theory all voters are considered to have perfect information, the reality we observe is that many minor parties and independents are completely unknown to the vast majority of voters. Under IRV as practiced, this is totally harmless – these candidates will receive few votes and never have a chance of being elected – but because they are unknown it is quite reasonable that voters on both sides of the political spectrum would rank them ahead of candidates they truly detest. Adding a Condorcet criterion on top of IRV would therefore have the potential to elect frivolous candidates who lack any real level of positive support – it would even, I suspect, create a perverse incentive to stand for election and make no effort to campaign in the hopes of being ranked in the middle by the vast majority of voters and thereby become an accidental Condorcet winner.
If we assume 80% of Liberal preferences go to an independent centrist over Labor, and 80% of Labor preferences do so over the Liberals, and support for the major parties is evenly split, then the independent would need around 20% of the 3CP to win. That number increases if the major party vote is not evenly split.
It’s possible that the major parties would recommend putting the other major party over the independent – this is a new form of strategic voting that would be introduced under such a system.
The strategic voting we have now is that voters can switch out their most preferred candidate (LNP) to another (Labor) to prevent a less preferred candidate (Greens) from being elected.
The strategic voting that is introduced by “Condorcet-winner-otherwise-IRV” is that voters are incentivised to switch their down-ballot preferences to ensure that their preferred candidate wins. And that’s… kind of weird?
So, to the point, that others have echoed – it is an unfortunate reality that no voting system is immune to strategic voting.
Ben – OK, so you think only proportional representation is non ridiculous?
That’s a valid position though one I disagree with. Every independent elected to the Parliament or who comes close is demonstrating how much Australians value the ability to vote for local members who represent their area, not just stick their votes in a collective hopper and get back a proportional mix averaged over larger regions or the entire state or entire country.
The Australia Institute’s own polling just before the election revealed a big negative approval for the statement that a hung parliament would be good for Australia – that was cheekily left out of the accompanying press release that tried to paint the opposite picture. I put to you that to avoid minority government, proportional representation would change voting behaviour to crush independents and most minors and create an actual duopoly instead of the one imagined by angry Greens at the moment.
All of this lovely philosophical debate aside, calling the Greens victims in this wrapup looked like a specific and unreasonable comment on this election not a generalised comment about the entire Australian system and I reacted that way, so apologies again for misunderstanding you.
O think Angus Taylor will end up being leader. Given hes the last remaining liberal mp with a seat which is based in a capital city. Exc tim wilson and maybe hamer
Aaron Violi (Casey) and Jason Wood (La Trobe) are based on the outskirts of Melbourne, Cook, Mitchell, Berowra, Lindsay, Bowman, Canning are also in capital cities (outskirts). Parts of Flinders and Bullwinkel are in capital cities too if the Libs win them.
True that. But i dont think any of those people would get the numbers. I should have clarified that. Also canning is partially in perth but mistly not. Taylor for interim or temporary leader for a while is my guess. Hastie to take over in a year or 2.
@Death Vader, while Hume on paper is a capital city seat, majority of the seat is Semi-rural full of commuter towns with regional vibe only with some new housing estates for Sydney’s outskirts so probably wouldn’t think it is a urban seat and is more akin to McEwen in VIC or Bullwinkle in WA albeit with Liberal Party demographics
* Bullwinkel
People should think beyond the limitations of single member electorates. They are a poor way to represent people. There are PR systems which allow for local representation, and allow for independents, but avoid the problem now where such a low proportion of voters get the person they actually preferred to represent them.
I also find it strange that people are condescendingly explaining “well we don’t have a proportional system” as if that isn’t my point and that I haven’t been advocating that for a long time.
@Darth Vader there are still Liberal MPs in the capitals.
Liberal seats entirely within a capital city:
* Brisbane: Bowman, Longman (still in doubt but Liberal ahead)
* Melbourne: Goldstein
* Sydney: Cook, Lindsay, Mitchell
Not many, but still some. Angus Taylor is just the most high-profile, and to be fair he may have his office in Camden but Hume is more of a regional and rural seat on the outskirts of Sydney and in the Southern Highlands and around Goulburn than a true metropolitan seat.
According to Sportsbet however Sussan Ley is the clear favourite to become leader.
On the electoral system, I really think what we need is to make every house seat elect, say, 3 members by some form of PR. Not only would this reduce a lot of the preferencing issues that effect the Greens but also other parties, making election less dependent on tactical voting, it would mean more voters would vote for a winning candidate. As Ben’s talked about before, having an odd number also means it’s less likely for most seats to be deadlocked even, like the senate tends to be (the senate would also need to be expanded, ideally to an odd number per state per election).
I’ve thought a lot about multi-member electorates and think they are the best solution for small populations like Tas and ACT (NT should really have them as well to avoid stupidly small electorates). They should also exist for basically every council. That said, I still think there is value in having a local member and to keep the geographies of electorates a reasonable size you would probably need to triple the number of house MPs. Triple the number of pollies would be quite the hard sell to a skeptical public! So for larger electorates I still lean towards keeping single member electorates with IRV in my favour. If we didn’t have the senate as a more proportional chamber of parliament, then for sure I would support multi-memeber electorates or MMP.
I’ve seen some Liberal folks talking about the condorcet method in real life as well as on here. The cynical part of me sees this as the born to rule mentality creeping in that they don’t get the final say in many 3 corner contests 🙂
Why did the Sydney-based teals score swings whilst the Melbourne-based teals faltered?
After looking at the results, I will make some wild guesses.
1. Monique Ryan and Zoe Daniel were more left-leaning. The Sydney teals are economically right-leaning. Sophie Scamps and Allegra Spender especially were seen as more pro-business and keen on tax reform. They were perhaps more in tune with the more moderate Liberal voters of the past.
2. Sydney teals had more favourable redistributions that expanded to include teal territory or inner-city safe Labor territory (Sydney and Kingsford-Smith).
3. Liberals preselected politically savvy candidates for Kooyong and Goldstein and mounted strong campaigns. The Liberal candidates in Sydney teal seats seemed well-credentialed but it was a case of ‘wrong place, wrong time’. I didn’t sense much Liberal ground game in Sydney’s teal electorates.
4. Liberals’ Victorian strategy and state Labor’s unpopularity. The Liberals poured resources banking on state Labor’s unpopularity to win various seats in outer suburban Melbourne. Also, because the ratio of Liberal seats to total seats in Victoria was pretty low, there were lots up for grabs. The heavy campaigning probably spilt over into Kooyong and Goldstein. At present count, the statewide 2PP swing is pretty much zero in Victoria.
@Votante Perhaps it is the case that, for whatever reason, Sydney is simply more receptive to the teal pitch than Melbourne? Recall that there were much touted attempts by teals and tealoids to win seats in the Victorian state election which failed, whereas in the NSW state election several independents won seats with teal-ish platforms in areas overlapped by federal teal-held seats. There are other potential explanations for this as well but it does seem worth noting that this is not the first sign of a difference in teal fortunes either side of the Murray.
I’d also add that I’m not very convinced by the narrative that ties it to Victorian Labor’s unpopularity. Yes, the Liberals bet very heavily on this swinging the election but we didn’t see an impact from this in seats actually held by Labor (except arguably Bendigo, but Bendigo in a sense argues against the thesis that there was something exceptionally strong about the Victorian Liberals’ campaign in particular). Why would a reaction against State Labor, even one spurred by the Liberal campaign, manifest solely or even chiefly as a swing against independents without any connections to State Labor? I don’t buy that narrative myself.
The libs will need to regroup. Keith Wolahan is probably one of the stand out results while he will likely lose he suffered a 1.1% swing against him from the p redistribution and has only been narrowly defeated (assuming). Despite being a first term member and having his seat move further into labor territory. Though this is on e of the seats I stated would trend labor over time if another redistribution occurs before the expansion of parliament. State liberals will be lucky to have him. The problem wasnt with the cnadidates(some exceptions) it was with the liberal brand and the policies they were offering. Jacinta Allen should be worried next year not just for the survival of her govt but her own seat too in Bendigo. I wouldn’t be surprised given their success if the nats go after Ballarat as well.
@Dryhad, from what I gather, the Liberals poured resources into boosting their appeal in greater Melbourne, at least relative to Labor. This might’ve made it easier for an undecided voter to switch back to the Liberals.
The Liberals also had a really good postal vote campaign according to Antony Green. This helped in Kooyong and Goldstein.
I noticed that the primary votes in both seats dropped for Labor and to a greater extent, the Greens, whilst the votes for teals went up and even more for the Liberals.
@Votante I think it’s likely more your third point, that the Liberals were simply targeting the Melbourne teals much harder, because they were much more marginal to begin with, and because they Libs thought Victoria would be better for them generally. Whereas no one really thought Spender or Steggall would lose at any point.
Your first point on the relative alignment of the different teals feels like the kind of detail that gets oft talked about in forums like these, but I feel like only a sliver of voters would be differentiating between the teals in that way in practice.