We are now less than two months away from the last possible date for the 2025 Australian federal election, so it seemed to be about time to take down the paywall around my federal election guide. But I am also launching another election guide behind the paywall, my first for 2026.
6:00 – Polls have just closed for the by-election for the New South Wales state seat of Port Macquarie, covering one of the larger regional cities on the mid north coast.
I’m out tonight so probably won’t be live-blogging much, but you can discuss the results here and I might drop in a little bit.
Over the last few years I have had the privilege of making submissions and then appearing before parliamentary inquiries reviewing the conduct of the most recent federal election and the most recent state elections in New South Wales and Victoria.
We have a lot of information about how the count is going for the Legislative Assembly in Western Australia – there’s a few close races, and places where we’re waiting for full distributions of preferences, but the information is reasonably clear.
Unfortunately there’s a lot less useful data for the Legislative Council, and there’s bunch of ways in which the data reporting is falling short of what we’ve got in other states using similar electoral systems.
The federal Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters holds an inquiry into the conduct of each federal election, and they did so in 2023. I had the opportunity to make a submission, and then appear before the committee.
Ben is joined by William Bowe from the Poll Bludger to wrap up the results of yesterday’s Western Australian state election, which was a third consecutive landslide victory for Labor.
For this post I wanted to put together a bunch of my thoughts the day after the WA election. I will be recording a podcast this afternoon and I hope to get it out before the end of the day.
Firstly, let’s zoom out and look at the scale of the result.
Labor won 41 seats out of 59 at the 2017 election, alongside 18 Liberals and Nationals. The 2021 result saw Labor win 53 seats, to just six for the conservative parties.
6:57 – Bunbury is the kind of seat that would fall if the conservative parties were close to taking power, but the swing is falling a long way short. The first booth has a 17.7% swing away from Labor and 8.4% to the Liberals – the ABC thinks that’s a 2PP swing of 12.4%, which is far short of what they’d need to win.
There has been a common story all over Australian politics of the major parties losing ground.
Ben is joined by John Carey to discuss how you design an electoral system for a new democracy – what factors are most important to producing a healthy and sustainable democracy, and how might those requirements change over time?