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.
Nominations were declared at midday yesterday across Australia, but it took all afternoon to slowly get a sense of the candidate figures. I hope everyone found my live blog helpful, as I attempted to summarise as many seats as we could find data for. I ended up collating about 60 seats just before the AEC published their full dataset.
10:00 – Hello and welcome. I’m going to be using this live blog to cover the declaration of nominations today.
Ben is joined by Stewart Jackson and Phoebe Hayman to discuss the role of the Greens in the federal election: the seats they are defending and are challenging for, the rivalry between Labor and the Greens and how the electoral system shapes their relationship. The seat of the week is Wills, in the inner north of Melbourne.
From one election to the next, the swings back and forth of Australian politics can look cyclical – that things start and end in the same place. But when you widen the time frame, things look different. Over time, some place move from being safe seats to marginal seats, or even from being safe seats for one major party to the other major party.
Australian politics today is very different to what it was even ten years ago, but the shift in the partisan make-up of the country has been a story decades in the making. For today’s post I’m going to recount and update statistics about how Australia has shifted from a strong two-party system into the fragmented multi-party system we have today.
With a hung parliament looking very likely at the upcoming federal election, there has been quite a lot of looking back at the last hung parliament in 2010.
Amongst other elements, there has been some parallels drawn between the experience of the crossbenchers in 2010 and how the current crossbench could jump if they find themselves in a position to decide who forms government this year.
Ben is joined by journalist Rachel Withers, writer of the Crikey column ‘Well Hung’, to discuss the prospects for independent candidates, including teal and Muslim independents, at the 2025 federal election.
I’ll be speaking at an event next week in Sydney as a preview for the federal election.
The event is hosted by my employer GovConnex along with FTI Consulting.
We’ll be previewing the election and discussing prospects for a possible hung parliament. There will be an opportunity to ask questions followed by drinks.
Tickets are free but there is limited capacity and I expect the venue to fill up.
We’re less than two weeks away from nominations closing for the federal election – nominations will close on Thursday 10 April, and will be announced the next day.
Yesterday I made a bunch of updates to my list of House of Representatives candidates, and have now finished updating each of my election guides with the new lists.