When people defend group voting tickets, they often talk about the benefits of electing small parties and having a more diverse parliament. I have addressed this by arguing for an abolition of regions and thus making it easier for small parties to win without preference manipulation. While it is true that group voting tickets have in recent times elected a more diverse upper house, it hasn’t been a sustainable process.
When parties win seats in the NSW Legislative Council or the SA Legislative Council, they tend to stick around. Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party won a seat at every election from 1981 until 2015, giving him a small but sustained impact on NSW politics. The Shooters Party won their first seat in 1995 and has won a seat under a variety of names at every election since 2003. The Greens have won a seat at every election since 1995, and the Animal Justice Party has won seats at the last two elections. Meanwhile the various Nick Xenophon-backed entities and Family First have had sustained success in South Australia’s upper house.
In contrast, members elected in Victoria don’t tend to get re-elected. They tend to get elected under preference tickets which are dependent on luck and favourable preference agreements just as much as they are dependent on attracting primary votes.
This has made me wonder, what impact do incumbent minor party MLCs have on their party’s support? Do they build something which carries into the next election?
For this post, I don’t want to look at whether incumbent MLCs will be re-elected – I’ll wait for the results to be finalised, and there are a lot of seats still in play. As we’ve discussed, there is only a limited relationship between your primary vote support and your chance of election, so it’s not the best measure of actual support.
So instead I’m looking at primary vote data. There are seven minor parties who elected a member in 2018 (not counting the Greens, who are a minor party but have a different role in the system). These seven parties all have incumbent MLCs running for re-election, and are running in every region in 2022, as they did in 2018.
I’m not including the Angry Victorians Party, who have one incumbent MLC elected for Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party, or the two former major party MLCs who are running for the Democratic Labour Party. In the case of DHJ, I’m only considering the two regions where their MLCs have stayed with the party and run for re-election as having incumbents, not the third region where their MLC resigned shortly after the election. The purpose of this analysis is the impact on a party’s support of an incumbent MLC doing work in office and running for re-election, not specifically getting someone elected in the first place.
First up, let’s just look at the primary vote for each party. I’ve averaged the primary vote across the 6-7 regions where each party does not have an incumbent, and plotted that against the primary vote for the region where they do have an incumbent (or in the case of DHJ and LDP, the average of the two incumbent regions).
For most parties, the primary vote is higher where incumbents are running, but not by much - there is very little difference for DHJ, Lib Dems, AJP or Sustainable Australia. For Transport Matters, there were four other regions where the party polled more or the same as Rod Barton did in North-Eastern Metropolitan (data as of Wednesday night)!
The gap is a bit wider for the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers, which makes sense considering their rural support base.
There is a huge gap for Reason, with Patten polling close to 4% while the party averaged under 1% in the other seven regions. There's a lot of evidence to suggest Patten has built up personal vote as a local MP for the northern suburbs.
While this is interesting, there's a danger of confusing the building of a personal vote for a party generally being more popular in a region which could have contributed to their original success - I suspect that is an issue for the Shooters. So next up, I decided to compare the average swing rather than the average percentage.
There is almost no difference for AJP, Sustainable Australia and Transport Matters - all parties who have been particularly successful at winning a seat off a particularly small vote. Indeed Barton and AJP MLC Andy Meddick have both suffered greater swings than the party's average swing in other regions.
Swings against DHJ were bad everywhere, but were amongst the worst in the two incumbent regions. Their worst swing by far was in West Metro, where their elected MLC left the party shortly after the 2018 election and ran for another party. But it's worth pointing out that swings were worse in the four regions with the highest 2018 primary vote, while the 2022 primary vote is more even across the state. So a higher DHJ vote in 2018 (which would have helped them win those seats) has fallen back to be closer to the rest of the state, which manifests as a larger swing.
There's a similar story for the Shooters. They poll much more strongly in the three non-urban regions, and thus the swing against them was larger there. They averaged 5.8% across those regions in 2018, compared to 1.3% in the city. Those numbers in 2022 were 3.9% and and 0.8%, so while the swings were much worse in rural Victoria it was off a much higher vote. But it's worth noting that the sole SFF incumbent in Eastern Victoria has polled worse than his colleagues in the two other non-urban regions.
The result is slightly better for the Lib Dems, but is most impressive for Reason. It's worth noting Patten was already an incumbent in 2018, so the swing calculation may understate her personal vote.
This is a relatively small sample size - I could expand to look at the incumbent small party MLCs who ran in 2018, but there aren't as many - two Shooters, one Reason, one Vote 1 Local Jobs, and a DLP member who had switched parties (so should probably be ignored), but before that there just aren't that many cases.
So far I am seeing very little evidence that most of these MLCs have had any success with their four years in office in building up a local base of support - the only exception is Fiona Patten, who has clearly been effective in this regard. Patten has built her primary vote from 2.8% in 2014, to 3.5% in 2018, to 3.9% in 2022. Of course, with Victoria's voting system, she may not be rewarded for that work with a third term, but it is notable as an exception to a clear rule.
It is a key part of democracy that politicians go back to face the voters the next time, and are concerned about what voters might think. This can be cynically framed as "only being concerned about being re-elected", but I think democracy would be far worse if elected officials had no hope of re-election, and thus governed without regard to the views of the public. Group voting tickets do elect a diverse range of politicians, but if those people are smart they know their chances of re-election are slim, and are disconnected from the views of the electorate. Democracy would be much better served by small parties that are sustainable and can maintain their foothold in parliament over longer timeframes.
What can drive up a minor party’s primary votes in any upper house race are:
– Personal vote where voters vote because of the leader rather than the party. Quite often, the leader’s name is in the party’s name. E.g. Reason Party, PHON in the Senate.
– Having a targeted geographical base E.g. SFF in the regions, Reason Party in Northern Metro. There’s no way Reason would do well in say Eastern or Western Victoria.
– Having a relatively large national/interstate presence. This one is probably a correlation rather than causation. Vote 1 Local Jobs and Transport Matters were small Victorian-based parties to begin with and got elected largely on preferencing.
Thank you for this thoughtful and perceptive piece. When Group voting tickets were introduced to the Senate in 1984, the feeling was that most people followed their party’s recommendation anyway so it wouldn’t make much difference. This more or less worked until 2004 when Labor preferences elected Senator Fielding of Family First, ahead of the Greens in Victoria. Most Labor voters wouldn’t have wanted that and had no idea what their preferences were going to do.
Perhaps it’s time to put together a history of GVTs nationally, because there are complexities in the system. The lower quotas in NSW and SA (even when GVTs were in place) would make the ‘preference whispering’ of Mr Druery less effective, presumably, because parties with a level of support like the Greens, would get up ahead of the tiny parties more easily.
We’ll have to see what the final result in Victoria is, but there is still a need to advocate against GVTs, so I’ll have to again dust off the letters from the past and re-jig them. But the arguments you make, Ben, are a real help.
As at 10 Dec 22 at 4:30 pm The Greens retained Prahran and Melbourne and gained Brunswick (Ex ALP as unfortunately incumbent Jane Jarrett sadly died of breast cancer in July 2022 and Richmond ex ALP with high profile MLA Richard Wynne defeated but the Greens did not win Northcote.
The National have 8 seats so far and the Liberals 17 seats so far. I wonder if the once great Liberal party may become a rump to the Nationals in the future, like in Queensland.
Former Port Phillip Councillor Katherine Copsey, Greens, won in Southern Metropolitan Region with slightly less that a full primary quota so I wonder if she will be more useful than she was as one of my Lake Ward councillors. She nor her staff never returned any phone calls, all be it only a few I made in the years she was a councillors.
I regularly watched Port Phillip City Council meetings on line and she did not say or do much, except for “sprooking” the Greens generic platform. PPCC only had 2 Greens councillors out of 9 councillors so they were mostly ineffective with other councillors (2 Liberal. 2 Labor, 2 RoPP (Residents of Port Phillip) and 1 independent who is the new Mayor) often out voting the Greens councillors sometimes wacky proposals and issues on matters way outside of Victoria.
Narracan District counting did not proceed as a candidate died between the close of nominations and election day. Another election will be scheduled at a later date according to the VEC website.
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