Why we don’t have solid results from Victoria’s councils

The process of vote-counting for the Victorian council elections started last Saturday, and while a lot of votes have been counted, absolutely none of them have been officially published for the public on the VEC's website. The process commenced last Saturday, and in the early...

Victorian committee launches inquiry into upper house structure

The Electoral Matters Committee of the Victorian parliament has launched an inquiry into the structure of the Legislative Council. The inquiry is not seeking submissions on group voting tickets, but the inquiry is related to the push to abolish GVTs because such a change would...

Podcast #135: LNP takes power in Queensland

Ben is joined by Alexis Pink from ZZZ to discuss the LNP coming to power in Queensland. We discuss the divide between north and south, the performances of the minor parties and how this new LNP government might differ from the last LNP government. This...

Queensland 2024 – the next morning

Last night's election result was nothing like the wipe-out expected when the LNP was on 55-56% of the two-party-preferred vote back in September, but it's still reasonably clear. Overall the scale of the defeat looks similar to Labor's victory in 52 seats in 2020....

Queensland election night live

11:10 - That list of seats has changed a bit since I started on this bit of analysis 40 minutes ago, and the last seat is South Brisbane. The gap between the ALP and LNP has shrunk as the pre-poll votes have reported. Greens MP Amy...

Victorian councils – box opening day

Voting closed last night for the Victorian local government elections. Ballot boxes will be opened today and votes will start to be counted. I believe the deadline for declaring results is November 15, and we may not get any official figures before the declaration. I...

ACT 2024 – how preferences decided the final seats

I have been watching the last week of counting in the ACT election, which eventually made it clear that the Greens' Laura Nuttall would retain the final seat in Brindabella, despite her own party conceding defeat on election night, and that Liberal MP Ed...

Podcast #134: ACT election wrap-up

Ben is joined by ACT historian Chris Monnox and Tasmanian psephologist Kevin Bonham to dig into the results of last weekend's ACT election, looking at the narrative, the likely shape of the new government and the close races not yet called. This podcast is supported...

Victorian council election guides finalised

I'm pleased to report that, in the final week of voting for the Victorian council elections, I've now finished my guide to the 33 most populous Victorian councils, as originally planned. I had originally written guides for the 16 most populous but ran out of...

ACT and NSW by-elections live

11:43 - Finally, I wanted to wrap up the narratives of the ACT election. Labor has been in power for 23 years, so it is not at all surprising to see the government losing support. But the loss of support is relatively modest. At the time...