Attacks on Australia’s preferential voting system are ludicrous. We can be proud of it | Kevin Bonham (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

The precipitous drop in support for the LNP mostly went to help Labor (side note: for weird historical reasons, our party spells its name the American way, despite in every other context in Australia, labour having a u), which helped them finish ahead of the Greens on 3-candidate-preferred, which meant the Greens got eliminated and their votes went to support a Labor victory. In essence, a drop in support for the right-wing candidates resulted in a centrist candidate winning where previously a left-wing candidate had won. That's an aberrant result that doesn't really match anyone's intuition of how elections should work. And it's one reason a proportional system would be better.

This isn't what happened though. Bandt had a 5.2% swing away from him on first preferences which seems to have gone largely to Labor, who had a 5.7% swing towards them. The Liberals actually had a miniscule swing of 0.2% towards them. That swing away from the Greens and towards Labor pushed them ahead of the Libs into the 2 candidate preferred count, where they won on Liberal preferences.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I was actually talking about the nation-wide results there, rather than seat-by-seat. Hence the case for a proportional system.

But I'll admit, when looking at actual individual seat results, not being from Victoria, I was mostly looking at my own seat of Ryan (where the effect I described occurred, but not quite enough to flip from Greens to Labor) and neighbouring Brisbane (where it happened exactly as I described).

Melbourne is a difficult case because just looking at the swing doesn't tell the full story. The division was also redrawn such that the strongest Greens booths moved to another division, and it received new booths that were much more Labor-friendly. Even if no individual voters had swung at all, you'd have seen a big swing towards Labor in 3CP, though not quite enough for the seat to flip.

The best case you could have made would actually have been Griffith, where the LNP lost a large amount of 1st preference support, and the Greens lost a moderate amount, while Labor benefited from both with a huge boost.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

That's fair, I was talking specifically about Melbourne. However, the redistribution doesn't account for the swing against Bandt. The ABC's analysis put his first preference vote nominally on ~45% after redistribution, but he only got 39.5% (and I believe their swing figures are adjusted for redistributions, which is why they show Bennelong as a Labor gain from the Liberals even though Labor previously held the seat).

You're completely right about Brisbane though (and the same thing nearly happened in Ryan). The swing against the Greens alone wouldn't have dropped them out of the 2CP, the massive surge for Labor at the expense of the LNP was what did it.

this post was submitted on 17 May 2025

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