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 
I would suggest that assuming voters are not as deliberate with their preferences as they are with their primary vote is no longer true. The days of preference bloc voting have arrived. The final seats results simply indicate that progressive voters have remained more resolute than those on the conservative right – for now.
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Partly I agree with Andrew. A lot of the change in voting has come about because people have come to some popular understanding of preferential voting. But on the other hand, I can’t disagree with Charles that it’s hard to say that the relationship between expressed voter preferences and parliamentary representation is clear and obviously reasonable. (Charles doesn’t argue that, but I think it’s a fair weakened form of his argument that more people can accept.)
But to me, I see that one of the parties is collapsing, and a party collapse takes time, but that doesn’t mean that we should change our voting system in a way that will preserve the party system in that state of collapse. The Liberals have to have a clue if they want to regain competitiveness. Being a party doesn’t give you rights to membership in parliament; you must be representative to get there.
And I’m deeply sceptical of party list voting for the same reason as I’m sceptical of FPTP voting – the only question you can ask and the only question you can answer is “who do you like the most”. The Australian system is different from the French system and the NZ system and the American system because it only lets you participate if you can accept that there’s different levels of crap. Everyone who complains of the uniparty or the neoliberal consensus parties or whatever it is that they hate, is still able to say “well as much as the Labor party is just an impure version of the Liberals, I’d still rather Labor then Liberal” or “they’re all warping our children but at least the Liberals will let us be part of the conversation”, and actually putting that down onto the ballot paper means that the thoughts are more salient for the rest of the three years and compromise is part of your life.
And my final thought is that whatever is happening here is also happening in the US and Europe — it’s affecting us more like the European way. New Zealand and Canada so far seem immune, one is MMP the other is FPTP. One has limited checks and balances, the other has basically none. Maybe they’re not immune and they just aren’t infected yet, just as it wasn’t long ago that some people were arguing that Australia was immune. So maybe the voting systems don’t matter and the electoral systems don’t matter.
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Thanks Casoar – I think part of the problem is that capricious results discredit the system; people see parties win big majorities with less than 40% of the vote & they think there’s something wrong. I suspect our democracy would have been healthier in the long run (although there might have been some trauma at the time) if One Nation had won a dozen seats in the House of Reps in 1998, giving it a chance to comprehensively discredit itself.
But that’s a very good account of the virtue of a preferential system, although I’m still not convinced either (a) that we need compulsory preferences (but I have no problem with ballot paper directions telling you to number every square) or (b) that we couldn’t do better with a proportional system.
As to whether voting systems confer immunity to the far-right virus, no, not if what you want is for people not to vote for them. But a good voting system can make it harder for extremists to take power, and especially undiluted power. The sort of takeover that Trump achieved, or even that Farage has some chance of achieving, would be much more difficult with a European-style PR system.
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Thanks Andrew – Yes, voters may well be giving more thought to their preferences than they used to, as we become more of a multi-party system. But I would still say that a lot of preferences are basically random noise. And I very much object to what would otherwise be valid votes being thrown away because of mistakes in preference numbering, even when those preferences would never have been counted.
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WRT Lebanon – how do they protect the people of northern Israel from these militias and proxies without a buffer zone?
Who’d enforce a DMZ?
And yes, PR should mot be used in lower houses in parliamentary systems – at least not without a high threshold. Bibi wouldn’t be reliant on such crazies and the Free Palestine cult in Berkeley and unimelb would have not got such undeserved legitimacy
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PK – I would say that’s something of an urban myth, or rather two of them: I don’t think Israel’s political instability has anything much to do with PR, and I don’t think Netanyahu needs any encouragement to pursue crazy policies. He’s a fully paid-up crazy himself.
As to Lebanon, you’re getting things the wrong way around. Hezbollah was a creature of the post-1982 Israeli occupation. Given Israel’s record, it would make at least as much sense for Lebanon to occupy a buffer zone in northern Israel, but of course no-one would dream of suggesting that.
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Before 1967, the Golan was used by Syria to rain down shell fire on Israeli towns. Neither Lebanon nor Syria are democracies. Two thirds of the UN members are not as well. Mehreen Faruqui is a child of West Pakistan and has no right to lecture anyone on apartheid regimes and oppressing a different ethnic group.
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I can’t see how that makes any difference to my point, which was that by your logic it would make sense, given Israel’s behavior & record, for Lebanon & Syria to occupy buffer zones of Israeli territory to safeguard against attack. Since we can immediately see that that suggestion is preposterous, we ought to be able to say the same about what Israel is doing.
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Sorry. I just get frustrated at the Free Palestine cult and the “peace movement” for not caring who will benefit from a ceasefire, for unless the militias are disarmed and defunded, it is a pause not an end.
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