Let’s talk about preferences again

As we noted yesterday, voting is already under way in Australia, and that means that people are now being exposed to the different parties’ how-to-vote cards. Cue a bunch of stories about the significance of preferences: the Greens preferencing Teals and other independents ahead of Labor, apparently in retaliation for Labor’s refusal to preference the Greens in a key seat, and the Coalition preferencing One Nation and other far-right parties ahead of Greens, Teals and Labor.

So let’s remind ourselves of what preferences do. They have both a real function – if your candidate is eliminated (and only then*), the preferences of your voters might determine who wins – and a symbolic function, in that they can be seen as signalling your closeness to some parties rather than others. The first only works if voters actually get your how-to-vote card, and even then many of them might ignore it, but the second can be amplified by the media and take on a life of its own.

Major party preferences don’t often get distributed, so historically they gave little thought to their real function. That’s why the Liberal and National parties were so unprepared for the disaster of the Queensland state election of 1998, when their preferences elected a swag of One Nation MPs and brought the issue on to centre stage.

But the debate still happened mostly at the symbolic level. Supposedly hard-headed machine people would argue about whether or not swapping preferences with One Nation was beneficial, but most of the time what they were really arguing about was whether they thought of the far right as an ally or an enemy. Hence my oft-repeated rule that “debates about preferences that are couched in terms of tactics are in fact usually about ideology.”

Similarly with Labor and the Greens. Labor running an open ticket in Macnamara, a classic three-way contest, risks delivering the seat to the Liberals. It’s not that its strategists actually want that outcome, but rather, judging that the risk of it is fairly low, they think it’s more important to deliver a signal that they are ideologically distant from the Greens (either out of their own beliefs or because they think that’s what swinging voters want; probably both).

Greens preferences are a bit different, because in most seats they really will be counted and will sometimes make a difference. But their real impact is less than you would think, because Greens voters tend to make up their own mind regardless of what the how-to-vote card says. And given the Coalition’s drift to the hard right, Labor knows that the Greens will put it ahead of the Coalition anywhere that it could possibly matter.

The Greens do, however, have an interest in Labor falling short of an absolute majority, so in seats where there are Teal candidates or other independents that they might be able to work with, it makes sense for them to preference them ahead of Labor. In that case, real and symbolic objectives are in harmony. But there are only a handful of such seats: most of the Teal or Teal-ish candidates with any chance are competing against the Coalition rather than Labor.

The far right’s preferences are perhaps the most interesting. Its how-to-vote coverage is patchy, so even when its voters are well-disciplined (and many aren’t) they may be left without guidance. If the preferences are favorable to the Coalition, however, then some help in distributing the how-to-vote cards might be forthcoming: that might be one reason for One Nation’s recent switch.

Clive Palmer’s personal Trumpist vehicle, “Trumpet of Patriots”, claims to be making no such compromises; it says it’s preferencing against sitting members regardless of party. Whether his voters (who on all accounts are thin on the ground anyway) will take any notice remains to be seen. But even without changing their preference recommendations, minor parties can have an impact based on where they choose to put their resources.

And symbolism matters too. Even after the threat of electing actual One Nation MPs had dissipated, the Coalition still lost out when it directed its preferences that way because the swinging voters that it wanted to attract hated the idea. But although dealing with the far right was electoral poison, it was what the more ideologically driven party members wanted (not to mention their backers in News Corp).

When we looked at this three years ago, I said “the battle is on for the soul of the Liberal Party.” That battle has now been fought and won. Dalliance with the far right has ceased to be controversial; it is now accepted policy. Tim Wilson, for example, who is now trying to win back Goldstein from the Teals, once said he “had a longstanding view that we should put One Nation and their despicable acolytes last,” but he too has fallen into line, with his how-to-vote card preferencing One Nation ahead of both Teals and Greens.

Those preferences, like most others, will never be counted, but they nonetheless speak volumes as to what this election is about.

(For more on preferences, Ben Raue’s historical survey last week is very good.)

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* In the House of Representatives, that is. In the Senate the preferences of successful candidates can also be distributed, but we’ll worry about that some other time.