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.
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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.
I reckon we ought to increase the number lower house seats to 225 seats by combining electorates in groups of 2, and sending 3 candidates from each.
That ought to fix the representation issues we currently have in the lower house, without entirely removing the local nature of lower house electorates.
Say what you will about any party, but when you see a party routinely get 10-13% of the vote, but only manage to get 0.66 to 1.33% of the seats, it’s kinda hard to argue we couldn’t improve the system any further.
Even taking preferences into account, I think our current system favours larger parties too much because of single-member electorates.
Though, I am very grateful for the system we already have. Thank Christ we are not the US or UK (or Canada).
3 is such an awkward number though. It would basically lock in 1 Labor 1 LNP all over the country, with the third being the only variable one. I’m not a huge fan of STV with 3. 5 is really where I’d like to see it start. Merging 3s to return 5 would work, and because of how STV works, you could still adapt for regions where that’s not viable, like the NT and rural WA.
Unless Australians are comfortable with sending a much larger number of lower house members, that would make the electorates get much bigger than they currently are, and I would guess removing local representatives would not be a popular move.
I’m not entirely convinced that 1 liberal and 1 Labor would be locked in everywhere. I think the change in electoral system would produce governments much more representative of how people vote. It would change us to a system where forming a coalition is practically expected.
5 does seem like a reasonable working number of members to send as a combined “delegation” from an electorate, but that’d be the maximum desirable, in my view.
With 225 members and sending 5 from each electorate, that would reduce the number to only 45 electorates in the whole country.
Something, I’m totally fine with, I think federal electorates ought to be much larger than state or local electorates, but it would probably be a hard sell to many people.
Really appreciate you sharing your thoughts on this :)
Unless Australians are comfortable with sending a much larger number of lower house members, that would make the electorates get much bigger than they currently are
Your idea would result in a 225 seat house. Mine would be 250. Not a significant difference IMO.
I actually most of all would like to see a move to MMP, the system used (with some minor differences) in NZ and Germany. Where you elect 1 per division locally, and also vote for a party, with the party vote being roughly 50% of the total seats in Parliament, and used to make the total Parliament proportional to the will of the people. The biggest differences I would like compared to the Kiwi & German system is to let you give a second preference for the party vote, used only if your first choice doesn’t reach the 5% minimum threshold to get any seats, and to choose MPs in the proportional system based on nearest loser, rather than by a party-provided list, so if a party deserves 1 extra seat based on its party vote, the candidate from that party that gets the seat is the one that got 49% of the seat vote, rather than being the person who was pre-selected by the party to get the highest priority.
Kinda disappointed in the election results. Was hoping for a Labor minority where they’d have to work for support.
The optimist in me says that they have no excuses now: They have to perform.
Agreed. Labor has been given the stage now, they better put on a performance.
This is slightly wrong. Just about everything the Government does has to pass both houses, so in a way minority government is the norm for Australia because its quite rare that a sitting government gets an outright majority in both houses.
In this cases it looks like its going to be the same, majority in lower house, minority in upper house.
The thing that undermines the bargaining power of a crossbench is when the two majors team up to pass legislation, which happens often enough. Afterall we don’t want an opposition that simply opposes everything because they’re the opposition.
So the crossbench, i think in this case the key players will be the Greens, have to have a strategy but be able to change their tactics as the Parliament progresses. Their failure to not get a deal from Labor last year on housing, and subsequent inability to find a path to back down for so long, and also the lib-lab team up on electoral and funding reform early this year, showws me they haven’t mastered parliamentary tactics yet.
Viewing it from the Party of Governments perspective, i think, is easier. Its not a cross-bench they’re dealing with, its two or more paths to passing legislation thpugh both houses.
Since Labor is in power, they have the option to attempt legislation with Liberal support, or Greens support. This is where the Greens need to step up, Labor will go with the Liberals if they’re the easier party to deal with on legislation, Greens should aim to be the Partner of choice for the Government this term, this can keep legislation primarily on the progressive side of the ledger.
How do you suggest The Greens step up?
Well, i kind of said in my comment before, they made a tactical mistake last year by failingvto give themselves a way to back down from their housing policy blockage.
Their strategy, ‘to push for ever greater housing reform’ was popular, and they managed to deliver a win for themselves the first time round by securing, was it extra HAFF funding? But the second time round they didn’t have a plan b when Labor didn’t play along, that was a mistake.
So my point was they need to be more alive to the Parliamentary games they need to play.
Its a sign of their importance and success that this is now needs to be a consideration.
Next time housing comes up, they need to setvup their debate with possible off ramps, where they can still claim some success and not lead to a months long stand off, or worse cede the legislative ground to a Liberal preferred option, which tends to be bad for the Greens stated policy directions.
???
But the Greens did pass Labor’s housing policy. After forcing Labor to improve it, and refusing to back down after Labor tried to play games by agreeing to improve it but then reintroducing the unimproved version in Parliament.
The Greens’ only failure is one of PR. That Labor supporters have been so successful in their lies that even people on left-leaning Lemmy believe them. I’m not sure what actions the Greens need to take to counter this very effective PR, because it almost feels like people want to believe it.
The Greens’ only failure is one of PR. That Labor supporters have been so successful in their lies that even people on left-leaning Lemmy believe them.
I don’t think theres need for a conspiracy here Zag, if i’ve forgotten a concession the Greens managed to get in the Bill that went through around November time, thats just my poor memory. My bad.
As such i’d still call it a pyrrhic victory due to the amount of time wasted on a key issue the electorate wants action on.
There’s no conspiracy. It’s just…politicians playing politics. It’s spin, the same thing politicians do all the time, to varying levels of success. In this case, to enormous success, because people are constantly accusing the Greens of being obstructionist despite the complete reverse being true. The Greens have always been open to negotiations, and on both the HAFF and HtB Labor played the obstructionist by refusing to negotiate, relenting after months on the former, and threatening the nuclear option if the Greens didn’t capitulate in the latter.
The concessions I was referring to were in the Housing Australia Future Fund bill, passed with amendments negotiated by the Greens in September 2023. It sounds like you’re talking about the Help to Buy bill, which was introduced in 2023 but after passing the House of Reps in February 2024, Labor waited until September to even begin debating in the Senate, and eventually passed with Greens support in November 2024.
It doesn’t help that despite both of these bills being ostensibly based around affordable housing, Labor has explicitly gone on the record saying they do not want house prices to fall. The Greens do want that. So of course they push Labor to do better. Frankly, I would have preferred them not to pass HtB because it’s inflationary tinkering-around-the-edges rubbish. But they passed it anyway because it might help some small number of people (even if it does create more problems for everyone else), and they don’t want to be obstructionist. Unlike Labor.
i’d still call it a pyrrhic victory due to the amount of time wasted on a key issue the electorate wants action on.
Much more time was wasted by Labor for the timing of the bill in the Senate than by the time from when it began debate to finally being passed. And even that time could have been more than made up for by enacting its 40,000 places over 3 years instead of 4, as the Greens suggested. Or it could have been reduced by Labor doing their job properly and negotiating to improve policy so that it gets popular support.
Labor did none of this. Because they’d rather play politics and be seen to get a “win” in the press than to actually do the right thing. And it worked for them. The media eats up their nonsense. The public eats up their nonsense. And the country suffers for it.
Welp, i think you’ve convinced me on that.
Normally I’d agree, but since Shorten’s loss Labor has been too petrified to do anything ambitious (read: too controversial/progressive) for risk of losing the center. Especially with the Voice flopping at the start of the last term.
Now they’ve got a chance to make some substantial long term changes instead of merely doing little bits of harm minimisation at the margins.
I’m not sure I agree with the authors take on the unfairness to the greens here. The greener electorates manage to elect green MPs. In the seats where they are close, the preferential voting system works as intended. The conservatives can say hey I want the libs in but if they don’t make it I would rather labour over the greens.
How else should it be done? As far as I can see switching to a first past the post system would be significantly worse.
I can’t be sure but I think the author means it’s unfair in the sense that you have a high ‘anti-establishment’ vote but those voters don’t end up with any representation. I don’t think they’re advocating for first past the post.
Perhaps the introduction of some sort of proportional representative system would make things a little more democratic.
I think what they mean is more that when the Coalition does better, the Greens have a better chance of winning than when they do poorly. In theory, the Greens could lose a seat not because Labor did better, but because the Coalition did worse.
Imagine at the 2022 election, the Greens win a seat on an election that goes like this:
- Liberal: 10,000
- Greens: 9,000
- Labor: 8,000
The preference flows from Labor go mostly to the Greens and the final 2PP is something like this:
- Greens: 15,000 (+6,000)
- Liberal: 12,000 (+2,000)
Then, at the 2025 election, the Liberal vote collapses. In order to keep the Greens and Labor counts the same, assume the Liberals all just moved out of the district.
- Greens: 9,000
- Labor: 8,000
- Liberal: 7,000
In this case, after preference flows, the result looks like this:
- Labor: 13,000 (+5000)
- Greens: 11,000 (+2000)
The only change in the primary vote is that Liberal lost 3,000 supporters, but as a result, Labor wins. That’s how preferences work, but it is at least kind of weird that the right-wing vote collapsing moves the whole district further to the right instead of the left as you might expect. In a single-seat election like this, the ultimate deciding factor is “Who came third?”
Viewed another way, if your preferred candidate ultimately lands in second, then your vote was effectively not used at all. Your preferences were never taken into consideration because your candidate never got knocked out. Coming in third at least means your vote can still have an impact on the result.
The proportional representation system is more intuitive in cases like this. A right-wing collapse simply means that more of the left-wing candidates are elected, at the expense of the right wing. Instead of a right-wing collapse moving the district right, it moves to the left.
Thank you. Such a great comment. Really appreciate that you took the time.
People in the minority of their electorate will always feel a bit salty about the outcome, but that’s unsolvable. Having the senate mitigates this already in my opinion, where the greens have roughly proportional representation. There is perhaps an argument to make the senate pool federal rather than state and territory based (looking at you Tasmania).
Moving the lower house to a federal type pool would remove any chance of area localised representation. Not that our current system is great at that with most MPs only caring about the party line, but at last some electorates have members that care about local issues.
Moving the lower house to a federal type pool would remove any chance of area localised representation
Not if it was a federal pool using the MMP system that they have in Germany and NZ. You get a local member and there’s a pool of proportional party members on top of that.
For the lower house I was thinking of something more like multi-member proportional voting with some sane thresholds that candidates have to meet to get elected. So for example in seats like Wills the community is represented by the two candidates that the community overwhelmingly favoured and who basically got the same amount of votes.
I think there needs to be a winner, otherwise nothing gets done, and the government system is already very inefficient in this regard. On the far end of this scale, every person votes on every bit of legislation, but in the end it will usually wash out the same only with the added overhead.
It’s fun to theory craft. But the stark reality here is it’s probably impossible to pass a referendum that changes any of this.
A referendum would be required?
That’s completely the wrong takeaway for The Greens and sounds like the left-wing version of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price cope on ABC’s coverage last night, trying to blame everyone and everything except herself and her party. As a party they need to reassess what their goals are and whether their actions and their communication over the last term were effective in making progress towards those goals. Being super obstructionist on housing during a housing crisis, aggressively loud on Gaza during a period of rising antisemitism and hate in communities around Australia, publicly linking themselves to (and backing) unions with alleged links to criminal organisations are all things that may play well with their left-wing base but are not necessarily going to help them expand further.
A regular Greens voter like myself down in SA may appreciate and understand the nuances around some of these positions, but I seriously question whether the people who voted Green for the first time in Queensland at the last election were happy with the outcome. Don’t forget that action on climate change (and better relief for the disasters it causes) were massive issues at the last election, particularly in that region, and they were issues that the major parties were seen to be failing on. Those are mainstream issues that these Greens MPs were elected on, yet when they got into parliament they did not behave like a mainstream party and continued to play to their hardcore base. That is ultimately going to hurt them in a country where fringe politics is nowhere near as powerful due to compulsory voting.
It’s very important to remember that The Greens didn’t actually perform particularly poorly overall, this isn’t a total rejection from their existing supporters of their strategy and positioning within the system. It was only a failure to take their left-wing agenda any further. They need to decide whether they are willing to sacrifice some of that to manually peel off left-leaning Labor voters once again (rather than just automatically picking them up through disillusionment as they have been previously, that isn’t going to work after such a decisive result) or whether they are content to be a fringe party that plays an important role in the Senate but is mostly absent in the lower house.
I’m 58, so it’s been that way every elction I’ve voted in, getting worse seems to be de rigueue.
Like Donald Hoarne I have very low expectations of voters, alas those expectations are mostly always met.
