There’s been a lot of arguments coming out suggesting that Pauline Hanson and the rest of her team are only contenders for seats thanks to the Senate voting reforms, and the double dissolution.
Clearly a double dissolution made it easier for all small parties, including One Nation, and you can argue that a double dissolution was made possible thanks to Senate voting reform (although it wasn’t necessary to do both).
There are a number of points to challenge in this argument and I’m planning to cover them in an op-ed I’m working on, but I just wanted to lay out the facts about why I believe Pauline Hanson would have been elected regardless of the voting system, and would have won under a half-Senate election.
There’s a theory that preferences have hurt Pauline Hanson – parties organised to ensure preferences didn’t flow to her, locking her out of Parliament. This was definitely true in 1998 and 2001, in both houses. The major parties, the Democrats and Greens all preferenced against her, and it helped prevent her from winning in Blair in 1998, and meant that One Nation only won a single senate seat in those two elections instead of winning a bunch.
However that is no longer the case. For whatever reason there are now a bunch of parties which poll a significant proportion of the vote who have shown a willingness to preference One Nation very highly.
In 2013, One Nation was a party that received a lot of preferences far above other rivals for seats, including the Greens, the major parties and even a bunch of other larger minor parties.
Let’s play a little hypothetical here. Let’s take the primary votes for the Senate in Queensland as they currently stand, but imagine that it’s a half-Senate election, so the quota is higher. The leading tickets are:
- 2.36 quotas – Liberal National Party
- 1.90 – Labor
- 0.64 – One Nation
- 0.53 – Greens
- 0.18 – Liberal Democrats
- 0.14 – Family First
I did try to do a full preference distribution using Antony Green’s 2013 calculator, but that’s not possible due to the presence of parties belonging to Glenn Lazarus, Nick Xenophon, Derryn Hinch and Jacqui Lambie that don’t have a 2013 parallel.
So instead let me quickly run through all the parties that give their preference to One Nation before any of the other parties contending for seats.
- Online Direct Democracy (previously Senator Online)
- Katter’s Australian Party
- Democratic Labour Party
- Shooters, Fishers and Farmers
These three add up to 0.28 quotas, bringing One Nation up to 0.92 quotas.
While this is going on, Family First has also gained votes from Sustainable Australia, Animal Justice and Australian Christians who flow next to One Nation after Family First, and then presumably knock out the LDP who flow to Family First.
This puts One Nation on 0.92 quotas, and Family First on 0.45 quotas – all of which are votes that flow to One Nation next if Family First is knocked out.
There’s a lot of preferences we can’t predict – who knows where Lazarus, Xenophon, Lambie preferences go. But at this point One Nation is close to a quota, and Family First is still behind the Greens primary vote. So let’s assume Family First is knocked out.
At this point, all of these parties’ preferences flow to One Nation, electing their candidate:
- Animal Justice Party
- Sustainable Australia
- Australian Christians
- Liberal Democrats
- Family First
Easily electing One Nation.
Thus you can see how One Nation, polling the kind of vote they did on Saturday, would have likely won a Senate seat in Queensland regardless of system or number of senators elected.
Are you giving the preferencing from 2013 or the HTVs this time?
We won’t have to speculate as to whether Hanson would have won under a half-Senate election: the AEC will do a half-Senate throw in order to to provide the Senate advice on how the short and long terms should be allocated (which the Senate will be free to ignore if it chooses).
@Andrew, I’m using 2013 group voting tickets. How to votes aren’t like group voting tickets, they aren’t comprehensive and parties act differently when the preferences are easier for voters to follow.
@kme – that will tell us if she’d have won under a half-Senate under the new voting system, but not under GVTs. I suspect she would’ve won under the new system too if Turnbull hadn’t called a DD.
Agree that is true in Queensland (and indeed the AEC does have to do a half-senate throw) — either way I suspect it means Pauline gets a 6-yr term (unless we have another DD),
However One Nation is also a decent chance in NSW and WA with 0.52/0.48 quotas and an outside chance in SA and TAS with 0.37/0.32 quotas.
Under a half-senate election these potential 4 states wouldn’t have been close
Under the new Senate voting system in a half-Senate election, no we wouldn’t see ON have a chance in those other states. But I’m not so sure if they would have under GVTs – candidates clearly got elected in that range and ON has gotten quite good preference flows.
I think in the future parties will change their behaviour to deal with One Nation.
There is some talk that One Nation might receive the 3 year senate terms this time around, we will see.
It is maybe strategic to preference at least one least bad right or centre party at the very end in your HTVs. Labor did preference the Nats at 6 in WA. I question the wisdom of preferencing micro parties in your HTVs without ending your 6 with someone who can hypothetically accumulate the quota if Labor and Greens are both knocked out (Lazarus perhaps in QLD as an alternative to more right parties)
I imagine that there would have been pressure to change the GVTs to put Hanson last if they brought about this result too.
Also I think we are done with DD elections until everyone forgets what a disaster this turned out to be for The Gov.
If Hanson get a 6-year term, that does not get cut short by retirement or a DD, she will be eligible for an old style defined benefits scheme parliamentary pension because she was first elected in 1996.
If she manages to get 4 colleagues in the Senate, thus gaining party status and thus presumably the leadership, she would be in line for a larger pension because of the leader`s salary.
Tom, I think it is two continuous terms for the old pension.
Interesting analysis, I tried to do something similar for NSW (though actually looking at a full senate election but with GVTs), but there were too many parties who were new, it’s clear that under the old system there would be a preference harvest on but without the actual deals it’s so hard to predict who would benefit since it is so dependent on deals which go against what you would assume preferences to be based on shared policies or principles. I also agree that HTVs aren’t a good predictor of GVTs, parties act differently when they are making fewer choices and those choices are transparent to the voter.
I think your QLD analysis fairly clear cut though because ON start from a high proportion of a quota.
Looks like Hanson has a very strong chance of a 6 year term under the count back method too (or a certain chance under the other method).
I believe it is 7 years for the pension, no consecutivity required.
Andrew – I took the attitude, and advised my parents to follow suit, that you should number down until you have covered both major parties, at a minimum, putting any party you prefer over at least one major party above them along the way. In my case, from 38 tickets in QLD, I voted for 28 of them, with 28 going to Family First as the party I’d rather my vote support over any of the parties that didn’t get numbered (including ONP, CEC, RUA, ALA, Christians, CDP, the “direct democracy” parties, Health, and Progressives – that last one because of what I learned when looking into how they’ve been operating).
I kind of wish that the various parties would follow a similar attitude with their HTV cards. I don’t mind them saying “at least to 6”, but they really should number all preferences on the HTV, at least until the point where the parties are entirely unworthy of presence in parliament.
Ben – I decided to make a really rough guess at where things would land with the current senate voting system but a half-senate election. Where a HTV exists, I’m following it. Where no HTV exists, but an obvious preference can be guessed (for instance, Drug Law Reform will probably flow to Greens), I’ve allocated half exhausted, half to the appropriate party.
A few cases have split in other ways (Hinch, I’m estimating 33% Labor, 33% Family First, and 33% Xenophon, based on the idea that his support base would split with a third being anti-establishment (to Xenophon), a third being “all about family and children” (to FFP), and a third being those who didn’t want to put majors first (to Labor)). To avoid serious frustration over hand-manipulating the movement of votes, I’m not going to deal with leakage.
When it’s down to 10 candidates remaining, we have (from lowest to highest): Lazarus, Xenophon, Katter, LDP, FFP, AJP, LNP, Greens, ONP, Labor.
Lazarus flows to Katter, while the portion of Lambie votes I allocated as flowing to Lazarus are going to be treated as exhausted, for simplicity. Katter moves up to being directly below Greens.
Xenophon didn’t allocate preferences, but I’ll assume a quarter each to Labor, Liberal, FFP, and Greens. Portion of Lambie votes will again exhaust, as will Hinch votes.
LDP’s QLD HTV doesn’t allocate to any party remaining, but they often put Family First in their preferences, so I’ll assume 50% to Family First, with the remaining exhausting. This kicks Family First above AJP and Katter.
AJP are next, and have preferences from 5 different parties. AJP themselves flow to Greens, as do REP, Cyclists, and I’ll assume a quarter of Sex (their HTV exhausts, but I’d expect quite a few Sex voters to put Greens in anyway), plus half of Sustainable (HTV open at this point). The remainder exhaust. Greens are now ahead of ONP.
Katter votes flow to Family First (5th preference – ONP are 6th), assumed CountryMinded exhausts, DLP and Lazarus flows to Family First.
Current status: LNP (after 2 quotas electing first two senators), Family First, One Nation, Greens, and Labor (this is low-to-high, remember).
LNP got a few preferences along the way, but I’ll assume they exhaust. Their remaining quota flows to Family First, which puts One Nation in the last remaining place. One Nation doesn’t get a seat (margin is about 12,000 between ONP and Greens, nearly 30,000 between ONP and FFP).
With three seats undecided and four parties remaining, the only remaining question is who has the fewest votes – preferences won’t make a difference from here. ONP gets knocked out, and Labor, Greens, and Family First pick up the remaining seats.
LNP 2, Labor 2, Greens 1, Family First 1.
So if the double dissolution didn’t happen, I contend that Hanson would *not* have gotten a seat… at least, based on the current count. And while I’m sure there would be leakage, and less exhaustion, I suspect that it wouldn’t help ONP enough to get above Greens or FFP.
‘Thus you can see how One Nation, polling the kind of vote they did on Saturday, would have likely won a Senate seat in Queensland regardless of system or number of senators elected’
The only problem with your theory is that One Nation did poll the kind of vote they did on Saturday (in fact higher) in 2001 Queensland Senate election. And they didn’t win.
Steve, in both this article and my Guardian article I have acknowledged that there was once a time when One Nation did badly from preferences. But the whole point of this article is that I’m demonstrating that this is no longer the case.
Glen,
I’m in agreement about ‘our’ votes. I voted below the line and probably just went far enough that my tiny bit of a vote after quota goes as far as possible.
I’m writing though about HTVs which probably aren’t going past six anytime soon.
That Labor put Nats number six in WA (after Greens etc) does not look so silly when the last spot might be One Nation Versus Nats
We will see how party HTVs develop to make a difference under the new system.
I think Ben’s core point is both correct and important – One Nation no longer does badly from preferences, as there were/are now plenty of parties prepared to preference One Nation above the larger parties.
In Qld, even though parties usually only showed 6 parties to preference on their how to votes out of 38 options (including their own party at number 1 of course), Hanson was shown in the top 6 of Katter’s Party, Family First and Aust Liberty Alliance. That’s a pretty good sign they would have been happy to preference her above the larger parties under the old system, as would others who ran but didn’t have any how to vote cards at booths (not that I’ve seen anyway) such as Rise Up, Fred Nile’s mob, Aust Christians just for starters.
We’ll all see soon enough how the Senate preferences of voters actually played out at this election, but I think it is fair to say that One Nation candidates would likely have got a better preference flow under the old system, as many hard right parties – not to mention non-right parties prepared to preference for the sake of deals of which there was more than one – did put One Nation above all or most of the established parties. These preferences would have flowed almost 100%, rather than the much lower fractured flow which will happen under the improved Senate voting system.
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