How do the independent seats lean?

With a hung parliament looking very likely at the upcoming federal election, there has been quite a lot of looking back at the last hung parliament in 2010.

Amongst other elements, there has been some parallels drawn between the experience of the crossbenchers in 2010 and how the current crossbench could jump if they find themselves in a position to decide who forms government this year.

Narrowing down further, it is worth drawing a comparison between Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, two former Nationals members representing traditional Nationals seats who supported the Labor government, and those crossbenchers who represent traditional Liberal seats today – the “teals” and some similar members representing regional seats.

Windsor and Oakeshott ended up retiring at the 2013 election. While their electorates overlapped with independent seats at a state level, all of those members were gone by 2013, and independents haven’t been competitive in those areas since then. While we don’t know how these two would have performed at the 2013 election, it is likely that they would have been defeated. Other cross benchers did not suffer the same fate. Left-leaning crossbenchers Adam Bandt and Andrew Wilkie represented traditional Labor seats and while there was a swing against the Greens in 2013, Bandt and Wilkie both strengthened their position that year and still hold their seats. Likewise Bob Katter’s decision to support a Coalition government in 2010 has stood the test of time.

While there is now a larger cohort of teal MPs representing traditional conservative seats who may find themselves deciding who forms government after the election, I don’t think their position is comparable to Oakeshott and Windsor. In this post I’m going to examine some electoral statistics to show how their electorates, and their voter bases, differ from those of the 2010 independents.

So first it’s important to clarify what statistics we are using.

When votes are counted for the House of Representatives, they are first collected into primary vote piles. Then the votes are distributed, with one candidate knocked out in each round.

The final preference count is called the ‘two-candidate-preferred’ count, and in all of the seats I’ll be discussing today that final count is between a Liberal and an independent. But there is also a two-party-preferred count, which takes all the votes and distributes them between Liberal and Labor.

Finally I will also reference the three-candidate-preferred count. This is the second-last round in the preference count, and in all of these seats was Liberal vs Labor vs Independent. You can thus compare it to both the 2CP and 2PP to identify how many voters ranked Labor, independent or Liberal in which order.

I should also note that I will be mostly focused on the six newly-elected “teal” seats from 2022, plus the seats of Warringah, Mayo and Indi. All nine have some commonalities. They were Liberal seats before being won by an independent. The Liberal Party remain the runner-up in the seat. The sitting members are all broadly people who sit to the left of the Liberal Party with socially progressive positions. I will sometimes use redistributed data, in which case I will include Bradfield in place of North Sydney.

I should also note that I am treating Rebekha Sharkie as an independent. While she remains a member of the Centre Alliance, that party has ceased to exist outside of her candidacies. Later on I will also examine Bob Katter, and I will likewise treat him as an independent even though he has run for his own party since 2013.

The first thing to note about these seats is that they have been shifting to the left in recent years. This first chart shows my estimate of the two-party-preferred vote (ie Labor vs Liberal) for these nine seats at every election since 2004. These figures have been adjusted for the current 2025 boundaries, and have been subtracted from the national vote. A ‘0’ would indicate that the seat’s 2PP was exactly the same as the national 2PP. Any lower number indicates the Liberal Party did better in that seat.

These seats used to lean quite far to the right. From 2007 to 2016, these seats voted about 11-12% to the right compared to the country, on average. This was less dramatic in 2004, but that was an election noted at the time for the fact that Labor gained swings in inner city areas while losing ground elsewhere. This is when the term “doctors wives” was coined.

Bradfield and Curtin were almost 20% more right-leaning than the country in 2016.

But in 2022, none of these seats leaned more than 10% to the right. Indeed Mayo gave Labor a 2PP majority in 2022, voting just 0.5% to the right of the country.

It’s worth noting that even if there is a swing to the right in 2025, polls are suggesting that these seats will not swing as much to the right as other seats. The first YouGov MRP this year showed these nine seats swinging to the Coalition by 1% on average on the 2PP, while the rest of the country was swinging 3.4%. The second MRP shows those numbers down to 0.8% and 2.1%.

So seats that were once heartland Coalition seats are rapidly coming closer to the national median.

So if you were an independent MP trying to decide if you were going to support a Labor or Coalition government, you’d want to know who is in your voting base and how they might lean.

To start with, this graph shows a breakdown of those voters who ended up in the 2CP for one of these independent MPs, showing their original primary vote.

None of these independents is close to winning a majority of the vote on their own. The vast majority of preferences they receive come from either Labor or the Greens – both because Labor and the Greens make up the lions share of preferences available, and because they tend to preference these independents at high rates.

Another way to look at that data is to look at how votes from a particular party flowed as preferences across these nine seats. Labor, Greens, One Nation and the UAP ran in all nine seats.

Labor and the Greens made up over 70% of available preferences, and both parties gave independents over 80% of their preferences.

But there is a different statistic that makes the preferences of these voters even clearer.

By comparing the 2CP, 2PP and 3CP, you can calculate exactly which proportion of independent 2CP voters also gave Labor their 2PP.

For this chart, I’ve also included the three Queensland Greens seats, where they were against the LNP in the 2CP. I’ve also included Kennedy in 2022, and Lyne, Kennedy and New England from 2010. The comparison is stark.

For the nine seats I’ve been discussing up to this point, the proportion of independent voters who preferred Labor to Liberal is overwhelming. The proportion ranges from 71% in Indi to 82.7% in Kooyong. This is not quite so high as it is in the Greens seats, where well over 90% of Greens 2CP votes prefer Labor over LNP, but it’s not that far off.

In contrast, Kennedy, Lyne and New England look very difference, with roughly half of voters for those independents preferring Labor to the Coalition. Indeed in Tony Windsor’s seat in 2010, barely 43% of his voters preferred Labor.

For one final graph, this one simply compares the 2CP and 2PP in each seat.

The Labor 2PP in the current independent seats is much higher than for the independents in 2010. It only exceeds 50% in Mayo, but it comes close in Warringah and North Sydney.

None of this is to say that these independents solely rely on progressive voters to get elected. Generally they need a large base of progressive voters to get close to victory, and then need some conservative voters to push them into majority. But in the current batch of independent seats, that base of progressive voters is much bigger and that extra push of conservative voters is much smaller than in Lyne or New England in 2010. The direction of travel makes it quite plausible that more of these seats could see Labor winning a majority of the 2PP in the near future. That was never close to a possibility in New England or Lyne in 2010.

When you see those different figures, it’s clear that the experience of the rural independents in 2010 doesn’t have much to tell us about what is happening now.

I’m not saying these numbers mean independent MPs should definitely support a Labor government. A lot will depend on the exact numbers in the parliament, what deals are offered and the nature of the negotiations. But I don’t think people should assume that independent MPs representing traditionally conservative seats would by default favour a Coalition government. Those seats are changing, the progressive bloc of voters in those seats has grown significantly in recent years, and those voters make up a key part of the independent voter base.

We will be able to update these statistics following the election, but not all of the data will be available quickly enough to be useful in the case of a hung parliament. So I hope this post is useful in assessing how these seats sit in the political context.

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