I’ve been absent for the last week while moving house, but I wanted to come back with a brief post since the Legislative Assembly results have now been finalised.
Despite a significant swing against the government on a two-party-preferred and primary vote basis, the government has ended up with one more seat than they won in 2018.
Labor won 56 seats, the Coalition won 27 (and are expected to win the supplementary election in Narracan), and the Greens won 4. So that is a net increase of one seat for each bloc compared to 2018. Meanwhile there are no independents, down from three in the last Assembly.
For what it’s worth, the VEC’s pre-election seat estimates based on the redistribution was 58 Labor, 26 Coalition, 3 Greens and 1 independent.
If you take the VEC margins to determine the pre-election status of each seat, there were nine seat changes.
Labor lost Caulfield, Hawthorn, Morwell and Nepean to the Coalition, although Caulfield had a sitting Liberal MP and Morwell had a sitting (and retiring) independent MP. Labor also lost Richmond to the Greens.
Labor gained Bass, Bayswater and Glen Waverley from the Liberal Party, although Labor had sitting MPs in Bass and Bayswater.
And independent MP Suzanna Sheed lost her seat of Shepparton to the Nationals.
The Nationals also picked up Mildura, which was held by an independent MP but had been redrawn into a marginal Nationals seat. Labor also picked up Hastings and Ripon, which had been redrawn into marginal Labor seats. These three seats thus don’t turn up on the seat change list.
The change in seat count is a bit more revealing if you separate Liberal and Nationals:
- Labor – 56 (+1)
- Liberal – 19 (-2), assuming they win Narracan
- Nationals – 9 (+3)
- Greens – 4 (+1)
- Independent – 0 (-3)
The Nationals make up a significantly larger share of the Coalition now, thanks to Nationals wins over independents while the Liberals lost seats in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne.
The final two-party-preferred figure is 54.91% for Labor, excluding Narracan. The final figure would likely be a bit less with that conservative seat added to the count. You can’t do a fair comparison of the whole state for swing purposes since no Coalition candidate contested Richmond in 2018. If you exclude Narracan and Richmond, the swing in the remainder of the state is 2.6% against Labor (thanks to Kevin Bonham for that calculation).
I will be back with some more blog posts later this week analysing these figures a bit more closely once I have more time, but it is worth noting that this result is bound to result in an even less proportional result. Labor has won a slightly increased majority, over 60% of seats, off just 37% of the primary vote – their second-worst result since 1979.
As I said previously, this isn’t very representative. I understand the argument about “local members” but ask countries like Sweden, Norway, Spain, etc. they have a proportional system and they are happy with it.
Proportional representation does however mean parties create lists and the leader of the party will be on the top of the ticket meaning he/she will never lose their seat unless the party is wiped out of parliament, however I think allot of countries have “regional proportional representation” where they elect members a few members per region.
I can see that working here in Australia, although we do have a ranked choice voting system unlike those in Europe. A ranked choice voting system would not be needed anymore if the system was more proportional, it would defeat the purpose of it.
Our current system is a “winner take all” system meaning hypothetically a party can win 80% of the TPP vote yet still lose the seat count. It all depends where the votes are. Proportional representation guarantees this would never happen.
People could argue stability, but most countries in Europe don’t seem to have problems with taking weeks to form government.
Pr is of course the fairest system but this will mean there will always be minority govts. Labor for example would need at least implicit support of the greens. The teals and the nats would lose as they have their support concentrated in specific areas. Actually weird as it sounds at a federal level we are getting closer to pr by accident. I would support a pr system like Tasmania but few within the alp would. You can amend the law to have fairer systems. Set higher quotas for seat representation also have a top up system to balance like nz does. I would extend the definition of a formal vote to bring in a savings provision to reduce informal votes based on voter intention similar to sa now
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