Apologies to those who might have been hoping for a philosophical Easter reflection on the prospects of world peace or the like. Maybe next week. Instead I want to say a bit more about the South Australian result in the light of the breakdown of Australia’s two-party system.
Before the election I noted that the Liberal Movement in 1975 won the largest third-party vote ever in South Australia with 18.3%, and that it was also the fourth-largest vote by a party in any state election other than Labor, Liberal or Country/National. Those records have now both fallen: the Liberal Party with 19.4% is now the highest-ever third-placegetter in South Australia, and One Nation with 22.5% is now third on the table of non-major-party votes – behind its own Queensland result of 1998 (22.7%) and the QLP in Queensland back in 1957 (23.4%).
But although One Nation is what people want to talk about, there’s more to the story than that. The major party vote was already in deep trouble before the recent One Nation surge. At last year’s federal election it fell below two-thirds for the first time ever, to 66.4%. Only Tasmania in 2024 had recorded a lower total, with 65.7%.
South Australia has now blown that record out of the water, with a combined major party vote of just 57.1%. The state’s previous low was 70.8% in 2018, which then recovered a little to 76.1% in 2022 before plunging this year by 19 points. And there’s no reason to think there’s anything special about South Australia. The other states were already at record or near-record lows; if One Nation has the same impact there, their major party vote too will fall to the 50s.
By my calculation, in the last decade of last century the combined major party vote across state and federal elections averaged 84.5%. In the first decade of this century that average fell to 80.5%; in the second, to 77.7%. So far in this decade it’s down to 71.3%: since 2014, only two states have recorded a number above 80% (Tasmania 2018 and Western Australia 2021), which was once routine.
Yet the electoral system carries on its way with little regard to the shift in voting sentiment. Labor and Liberal parties still won 83% of the seats in South Australia, 26 points ahead of their vote share. Last year’s federal election was much the same, with the majors taking 137 of the 150 seats. It’s become normal for a party to win government with less than 40% of the vote: in South Australia it was just 37.5%, despite the landslide victory.
Preferences, once incidental to the result, are now critical: only five of the 47 seats (all of them Labor) were decided without them. As I remarked last year, “What used to be a subordinate part of the system has become almost universal.” And with multiple candidates in contention the order of elimination matters more and more, in ways that voters are unable to anticipate.
How long are we expected to tolerate a system where voters have to guess at how best to give effect to their choices, and up to two-thirds of them end up with a government they did not vote for?
Finally a word on the South Australian upper house, the Legislative Council. Unlike the lower house, voting there is democratic: the state elects 11 members each time to serve eight year terms, by proportional representation across the whole state. Counting is not yet complete (preferences have to be distributed, although they almost never make a difference) but there is no doubt as to the result: Labor will win five seats, One Nation three, Liberals two and the Greens one.
The government will therefore face an upper house of ten Labor, six Liberals, three One Nation, two Greens and one right-wing independent (ex-One Nation), forcing it to negotiate for passage of its legislation but giving it multiple options to do so.
The World is Not Enough 