Field set in Australia

Nominations closed last Friday for the Australian federal election being held in three weeks time, on 3 May. Here’s the electoral commission’s press release, and if you’re keen you can download the whole list of candidates. Ben Raue at the Tally Room has a particularly good summary of who’s running, with some nice comparative charts and tables.

The days when few electorates had more than four or five candidates are long gone. There are 1,126 candidates for the 150 seats in the House of Representatives, an average of about seven and a half; 16 seats have ten or more candidates. Many voters will be confused and many votes will be informal because of ballot papers cluttered up by candidates with no chance. But the total is actually down slightly on 2022 – as Raue says, “the size of ballot papers [has been] mostly stable dating back to 1998.”

The Senate is rather a different story. There the number of candidates increased relentlessly prior to 2016, when the weirdly undemocratic system of group voting tickets was abolished. Since then there has been a steady decline, to 458 in 2019, 421 in 2022 and this year to just 330. The biggest ballot paper will be in Victoria, with 21 columns; compare 2013, when every state had more than that, New South Wales topping the list with 45.

So it seems (as I predicted back in 2019) that the message has gotten through that there is no longer a lottery for Senate places and microparties are wasting their time and money. No sign of an apology, of course, from the assorted hacks who assured us at the time that more candidates just meant increased participation and that reform would have no effect.

Another useful reform of recent years has been the creation of a longer gap between close of nominations and the opening of pre-poll voting. (For background, see my two-part series on the subject from 2020.) First introduced in 2022, it avoids the previous unseemly rush and ensures that voters have a bit more common experience when they vote. The gap will actually be a day longer this year since next Monday is a public holiday, so those who vote early will at most be missing 11 days of the campaign.

The downside of that is that an ever-larger volume of pre-poll votes is being taken at a limited number of times and locations, leading to congestion and logistical problems with counting. Most of those who pre-poll are probably not strictly eligible under the legislation; the AEC does mention the restrictions, under the heading of “early voting eligibility” on its website, but appears to make no other attempt to enforce them. Absent some major shift in the political winds, large-scale pre-poll voting is here to stay.

We might have another look at that next week, once voting is actually under way. Meanwhile, just a quick look at the betting market. The good news for the government in the opinion polls has continued, and its odds of victory are fairly stable at around 10-3 on, with the opposition at around 5-2 against. The tone of pundit commentary seems to have shifted in the last week or two as well, with more people coming around to the idea that Labor could increase its majority.

With that background, Sportsbet’s markets on individual seats are rather interesting. As of today, seven seats are favored to change hands: four from Labor to Coalition (Aston, Bennelong, Gilmore and Lyons), two from the crossbench to the Coalition (Kooyong and Ryan) and one from the crossbench to Labor (Brisbane). In addition, the Coalition-held seat of Cowper is shown as dead level between Coalition and independent.

So if every seat were to go with its current favorite, that would result in Labor 75 (down three), Coalition 62.5 (up 5.5) and crossbench 12.5 (down 2.5).* With exactly half the seats, Labor would only need to convince a crossbench MP to become speaker – most likely Tasmanian veteran Andrew Wilkie – to retain a majority on the floor.

But it’s worth noting two things about these markets. Firstly, they have a history of being something of a lagging indicator; shifts in overall sentiment, such as we’ve seen lately towards Labor, seem to take a while to flow through to the betting on individual seats. Secondly, last time they badly underestimated the strength of the crossbench: on election eve candidates from outside the major parties were favored in only seven seats, but they actually won 16, most of them at the expense of the Coalition.

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* For the starting numbers I count all seats as belonging to the party that won them in 2022, except that I count Aston (won in a 2023 by-election) as Labor-held.

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UPDATE, Thursday: Three days later, there’s not much shift in the individual markets (although Cowper now has the independent narrowly as outright favorite), but the overall odds on a Labor victory have come in to 9-2 on, with the Coalition at almost 10-3 against.