Preferences and proportionality

This time last week we looked at the two-party-preferred vote from last month’s Australian election. Now further statistics have been published showing the actual distribution of preferences in each seat and the flow of preferences between the major parties, so we can say more about the exact role that they played.

The most interesting table is this one, “Two party preferred preference flow,” which details how preferences from each of the minor parties split between Labor and Coalition. Unfortunately it doesn’t give a comparison with the corresponding figures from last time, but it’s easy to work that out yourself from this 2022 table.

From that we learn the flip side of the much talked-about rise in the third party vote. Although more people are voting for minor parties, those parties are more closely aligned with the majors than they used to be. On the far right, nine different parties collected in aggregate 11.7% of the vote, just over a third of the minor total, and 71.0% of it flowed in preferences to the Coalition. In 2022, when they had 12.1%, that figure was only 64.0%, and in 2019 it was 66.5% out of 8.9%.

The same thing has happened on the other side. The Greens, who have the territory to the left of Labor mostly sewn up, won 12.2% of the vote, and a remarkable 88.2% of it went as preferences to Labor. In 2022 that was already a record figure at 85.7%, up from 82.2% in 2019; in the party’s early days it hovered around 70%. Smaller left-wing parties also increased their lean to Labor, with Legalise Cannabis up from 57.3% to 61.0% and Animal Justice from 63.7% to 66.0%.

Somewhere in between those two poles are the independents, who received 7.3% of the vote, the bulk of it (almost three-quarters, according to Ben Raue’s calculation) with Teal or Teal-adjacent candidates. Of that total, 67.2% preferenced Labor, up 3.4% on the 2022 figure, which in turn was a substantial gain on 2019’s 59.4%.

Preferences as a whole have favored Labor since the 1980s; this year’s global figure of 61.2% is similar to what it’s been for a couple of decades (last time it was 61.5%). But it’s not that long since independents’ preferences tended to favor the Coalition; back in 2007, for example, they did so to the tune of 54.6%. That shift is a major symptom of what’s gone wrong recently for the Coalition.

It also ties into the perennial debate over the unfairness of our voting system. I think it’s outrageous that a party can win a large majority with just 34.6% of the vote, and that the two largest minor parties (Greens and One Nation), with a combined 18.6% of the vote, win only a single seat between them. (The issues were well canvassed last month in a Crikey debate between Robert Lechte and William Bowe.)

But the polarisation of the third-party vote into two camps – the far-right parties as auxiliaries to the Coalition, and the Greens and (to a lesser extent) the Teals as auxiliaries to Labor – somewhat weakens the force of that critique. If the third parties are mostly attracting voters who are committed to a particular side in the Labor/Coalition battle, then the fact that their electoral impact is limited to their preferences, rather than winning seats themselves, makes less of a difference.

So if Greens voters, for example, overwhelmingly prefer Labor to the Coalition (as the figures say they do), it’s harder to argue that replacing a bunch of Labor MPs with Greens would change things very much. Their ability to influence a Labor government would be limited by the fact that their voters do not consider support for the Coalition to be a live option.

It would be different if there was a large centrist party, whose votes were drawn from both Labor- and Coalition-leaning voters: perhaps the most serious distortion induced by the system is that it has prevented such a party from emerging. Instead we have the Teals, who have refused to form a party because they believe (rightly or not) that it would harm their chances in single-member seats, and who naturally drift closer to Labor because they depend on its preferences.

With the new Liberal leadership pledged to try to recover some of the middle ground that the Teals are now occupying, that’s an issue that’s unlikely to go away. And whatever choices Teal voters make will be framed by our creaky and ill-fitting electoral system.