With the Australian federal election a week away, for those interested in the democratic shifts that are taking place in the country, the overall result of the election may be less intriguing than the details. Due to an uninspiring campaign, how seats will be won in the House of Representative is arguably the most interesting thing about this election. This will make the most influential actor of the election not any party or party leader, but Australia’s voting system itself.
Australia uses a ranked choice voting system, or preferential voting, as it is called in Australia. For the House of Representatives, voters need to number each candidate on the ballot in terms of their preference. Since its introduction in 1918, this system has provided oxygen to a number of different political forces, but has generally produced majoritarian governments.
But this may be changing. Australia is undergoing a slow democratic revolution. Over the past two decades the public has been steadily moving away from the country’s major political parties. At the 2007 federal election over 85 percent of voters cast their first preference – what is known as a “primary vote” – for either the Labor Party or the parties of the conservative Coalition (then three parties, now four). By the 2022 election, around 68 percent did so.
And that trend is likely to continue, with the potential for this figure to dip down to the low-60s.
The result is a shift from a binary political environment to an increasingly multipolar one, in which the major parties receive a third of the vote each, and the final third is going to everyone else.
What this weakening of the major parties is producing is a far less certain understanding of who might win specific seats. At the last election in 2022, only in 15 of the House of Representatives’ then-151 seats (150 this election) did the winner of that seat secure a majority of first preferences. Although preferences were distributed to produce the overall result, the top preferences didn’t determine who won the seat.
The further weakening of the major parties’ vote will mean that the calculations to produce winners in each seat will become more complex. It also means that results will take longer to decide, and if the election is close, there may not be enough information to declare a winner on election night.
For the parties of the Coalition, the weakening of their primary vote makes many of their seats more vulnerable. Labor can rely on preferences from the Greens to get it across the 50 percent mark in a large number of seats, but until now the Coalition has lacked such a relationship. However, seeking to find a similar relationship has led the Coalition to do a preference deal with the far-right One Nation party.
Parties issue “how-to-vote” cards at each election giving an indication of how they would like voters to rank their ballots. Voters are not obliged to follow these cards, but a significant number do, which makes them highly influential.
In 139 seats the Coalition parties are placing One Nation above Labor, and in 55 of these seats they are recommending that voters put One Nation second. In response, One Nation has issued how-to-vote cards to rank the Coalition parties second in seats where they are under threat.
This is a huge political – and moral – shift away from the era of former Liberal Party Prime Minister John Howard, who insisted on putting One Nation last on the party’s how-to-vote cards, regardless of whether this might help Labor.
However, currently the contest with Labor in individual seats is not what they fear the most. The rise of well-organized independent candidates are eating away at the Coalition. These independent candidates have won eight traditionally safe Liberal Party seats at recent elections, and two more look highly likely to fall this election, plus one traditional National Party seat. A further six seats are serious possibilities.
This will make it incredibly difficult for the Coalition to get anywhere near a majority. Although the Labor Party vote in its traditional working class seats in the western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne is weakening, the vote away from Labor isn’t going to the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party is losing its wealthy, highly educated seats, but are unable to offset these losses with gains elsewhere.
Australians are clearly seeking something more complex from their political system – reflective of a society with array of interests and ideas. They no longer believe that a system dominated by the Labor Party and the parties of the Coalition is beneficial to the country. They believe that these parties need supervision, and they are using the nature of the country’s voting system to build a new political structure that better reflects this belief.