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.
Ben is joined by Ben Moffitt from Monash University to discuss the role of right-wing minor parties in federal politics, why it is so hard for them to work together, and chances in the Senate. We also discuss the seat of Hunter in New South Wales.
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.