Over five weeks after the state election was held, the WA Electoral Commission has finally concluded the counting procedure for the WA Legislative Council, with the button pushed yesterday afternoon. This resulted in the full distribution of preferences, electing the 37 members for the chamber.
We now know the final primary votes for each party statewide and in each electorate, and how the final rounds of the distribution of preferences played out. For this blog post I’m going to run through some of the key stats and show how close the final rounds of the count were.
The informal rate was 2.92%, up from 1.95% at the last election.
2.5% of votes were cast below the line in 2021 – this year it was 2.4%. This is very similar to the rates seen at recent NSW Legislative Council elections, with 2.3% voting below the line in 2023.
The 37 seats split between parties as follows:
- 16 – Labor
- 10 – Liberal
- 4 – Greens
- 2 – Nationals
- 2 – One Nation
- 1 – Legalise Cannabis
- 1 – Animal Justice
- 1 – Australian Christians
That’s a 22-15 split between left and right. Labor can pass legislation with the support of three other MLCs. The most obvious combinations are ALP+LIB or ALP+GRN. Without the support of the Greens, Labor would need the support of at least one right-wing minor party.
Throughout this count we have lacked crucial information on the primary vote for each group, but we now have the final figures.
If you look at the primary votes for each group, as a proportion of quotas and ignore the role of preferences, 36 of the final winners were in the top 37. 34 seats were decided on full quotas, with five other parties with remainders of 0.4 quotas or more:
- Labor – 0.5396
- Moermond group – 0.5085
- Animal Justice – 0.4598
- One Nation – 0.4499
- Sustainable Australia – 0.4091
Moermond ended up missing out, with both AJP and ON overtaking her for the final two seats. It’s worth noting that Sophie Moermond led the first independent ticket with prominent fellow independent MLCs in the next two spots, and about half of the gap between her ticket and those that ended up overtaking her is explained by quite high below the line votes for those MLCs, particularly Louise Kingston.
The result was very proportional, unsurprisingly, and after five weeks of vote counting preferences only changed one seat.
This chart shows the final rounds of the preference count.
While Labor was leading on the primary vote, they had actually fallen behind and Moermond was leading until the Liberal candidate was knocked out. Liberal preferences pushed One Nation into the lead and almost pushed Labor ahead of Moermond.
The exclusion of Stop Pedophiles pushed Labor and Animal Justice narrowly ahead of Moermond.
Shooters, Fishers and Farmers pushed One Nation quite far ahead of the pack, and otherwise left the other three contenders almost tied.
Finally Sustainable Australia preferences split between all four candidates, but favoured Animal Justice and Labor. At the end of the count, this left Labor on 0.7 quotas, Animal Justice on 0.66 quotas and Moermond stranded on 0.63 quotas.
The final margin of victory between the Animal Justice Party’s Amanda Dorn and Sophia Moermond was 1391 votes. That is 0.09% of all formal votes, or 0.0340 quotas. Really quite a slim victory.
Finally I have updated the seat map I posted a few weeks ago with the final results for the six most popular parties. The final results do include a breakdown of results by seat and by vote category (ordinary, pre-poll, absent, postal etc). Unfortunately it doesn’t include a breakdown by polling place but hopefully that will come.
Moermond losing is not surprising, honestly higher than I anticipated.
Moermond probably would have done slightly better if she’d registered a party name, even just called “Moermond Group” to make a more normal looking ATL box.
And slightly better is all she needed. I’m always amazed that siting parliamentarians can’t get organised or informed to tick off these boxes that can be crucial in elections.
Nevertheless I thinks it’s a good outing of a great electoral system. There are things the WAEC can do to smooth out the reporting, number 1 priority would be to tell us the BTL primary votes at a much earlier date. That could have shrunk uncertainty in projections by quite a lot weeks ago.
Priority 2 for me would be to breaking down the upper house votes by booth, as Ben Raue mentioned.
Rather ridiculous article on the ABC here:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-17/wa-new-legislative-council-include-less-regional-members/105151614
“Less than a dozen of the 37 elected members call regional WA home.”
“as few as three country Labor MPs”
So… less than 32.4% of all MLCs, and as few as 18.7% of the Labor ones, represent *check notes* less than a quarter of the state’s population, most of whom don’t vote for Labor. Seems like a pretty good deal for regional WA to me.
Based on my pre-election classifications actually it’s 12 out of 37 from non-metro electorates. Which is 3 more than their proportion.
Australian Christians won a seat if i am not mistaken this the first time. Fred Nile CDP used to win seats in the NSW upper house.
That’s correct Nimalan. Given they ran in almost every lower hosue seat and only just finished with less votes than LCWA in the upper, I think it would be interesting to include them in the above map.
All in all a good result for Labor. The Greens will help them get most stuff through, and if it’s development or industrial related there’s probably a way to make headway with the myriad others in the LC.
@ North by West
I will be interested to know if Net Zero legislation will be bassed at a state level in WA this term.
Exactly as I predicted