Bradfield – Australia 2025

That is true Mick Quinlivan, but as our host here at the Tallyroom has said, there is no need to do that in a preferential system.

Just rank the candidates in the order that you would like to see them elected. Full stop. Easy pezy. Only the candidates that are advantaged by you not doing so, will tell you that you should do any different.

There is still value in tactical voting in Australia in certain circumstances because the more primary votes a candidate receives the more likely they are to make the final count. In the case of teal seats, I’d say it is accepted that they draw votes from a broader coalition of voters (including disillusioned or ‘soft’ LNP voters), while Labor/GRN voters are a more established bloc who are more likely to preference the LNP at or near the bottom of their tickets. Therefore a voter could theorise that the best way to unseat the LNP candidate is to ensure the independent makes the final 2 and likely receives a stronger preference flow than an ALP or GRN candidate might if the independent’s preferences are distributed.

Each teal has maybe 30 to 40 % votes from.other groups such as alp and greens.
The roughly 10% they take off the liberals allows them to win

It might be presumptuous or premature of me to assume that Boele is economically conservative given her consultancy and business background. She’s like Allegra Spender.

I expect Boele is more like Bob Katter as Katter declares that he will always provide Confidence and Supply to the Coalition unless if Labor is narrowly short of a majority and Coalition is way behind like it was planned to do during the 2022 election (although Labor ended up winning a narrow majority)

What rhe independents do is not possible to guess
I would not like to have to rely on Bob Katter to form a govt

@Maxim (and anyone else with like thoughts).

We have been over this issue 1000 times on this site. Whilst your facts are correct the conclusions you draw are highly questionable. I’m sure our host Ben will grace us with renewing his post or comment on the topic from 2022, sometime before the coming federal election. My thoughts are below.

It is stating the obvious to state that “the more primary votes a candidate receives the more likely they are to make the final count”. This is nothing more than basic mathematics. It can also be used in the alternative argument to say that “one should vote for their preferred candidate, as if everyone else does the same and your preferred candidate gets a lot of votes, they may make the final two, and may win on preferences”.

We don’t need to “accept” anything about the flow of preferences – we are best to look at data available. Yes, the teal or other IND will get more preferences from other parties than Labor – however it is about a 5% difference (75% to 70%) so the margins are small and the possibility of it making the difference of who is elected, very small.

You refer to “certain circumstances” but of course we do not know whether these circumstances will fully exist prior to the election. They did not in Bradfield in 2022 – the Teal IND lost anyway. So any Labor (or Green) voters who did decide to vote tactically achieved nothing but made it look like their preferred party has less support in the area than they actually do – not helpful to advance your goals.

How as K.Bonham has often said, not everyone that switched primary vote from Labor and Green to a Teal IND in 2022, did so with a tactical intention – perhaps they simply preferred the Teal candidate to any other candidate. However, when breaking down the Teal primary vote as Mick Quinivan has attempted to do, it is wise to look on a seat by seat basis and not rely on averages (and certainly not rely on a very this analysis- I think it was the AES report) that concluded that most Teal support came from Labor and Green. In North Sydney and Bradfield, the defection of Labor voters was much smaller – only approx 7% of the total voters moved to the IND (based on c/w Senate vote). In most other seats it was 15% or higher.

Voting tactically in the Australian system risks missing the opportunity of your most preferred candidate winning the seat, whilst you bank on your 2nd most preferred candidate maybe getting up. The likelihood of that bet paying off is minute, and you have no guarantee it will be worthwhile when your 2nd most preferred candidate gets to parliament, as Mick states above.

That’s a long way of saying the data mostly supports what I said, which wasn’t that voters should vote tactically but that there are still (perceived or real) reasons to do so.

If the flow of preferences wasn’t such a strong issue why would most current teal seats be notionally LNP-held in a contest with Labor? The fact is in 2022 there was a strong resentment of Scomo’s Liberals and people were motivated to oust them in seats that were perceived as unobtainable by ALP/GRN, and that’s the key point – while you state that it’s unproductive to risk your own party’s ambitions in the seat you are voting in the case in 2022 was that many voters were more motivated to get rid of a Liberal incumbent.

That’s not to say there wasn’t genuine support for teal candidates on their own merits and the attraction of having an unaligned MP representing the seat.

You make a fair point on ‘certain circumstances’, but in some cases in 2022 it was quite clear tbh, what with a 1v1 debates between Liberal and Teal candidates, the dead campaigns of alp/grn in those seats, the vast sums and volunteer efforts that were very visible etc. In my home electorate of Wannon for example I know with almost certainty which two candidates will make the final count

I think you will find they were 1v1 debates because the Labor candidate wasn’t asked….

The reason why most current teal seats be notionally LNP-held in a contest with Labor is because they were very safe Liberal seats to begin with – but not all were. There are oddities – Warringah is pretty 50/50 but no one knows it because Steggall’s primary is so high and the Liberal vote has fallen so far – she didn’t need tactical voting to get her home.

I agree, many voters were more motivated to get rid of a Liberal incumbent. But there was no guarantee it would work, and look at the make up of Parliament – it hasn’t made a difference to who formed government.

If you prefer an IND MP to a major party one – that’s fine, vote for the IND – that’s cool. But there’s no need (even if people tell you there is or you perceive there might be) to vote for anyone else than you preferred candidate and party. If the IND gets sufficient primary votes other than yours, your preference will get them home (or at least to where they otherwise would have got to). If they don’t, then your candidate might win, if not this time, then the next.

The teal vote in their seats was about 2% higher then Labor 2ppp

It does make for an interesting point because ultimately many of these seats would have been future/current ALP targets, now there is significant potential for these seats to be irreparably sandbagged by independents who sit to the right of Labor even in future cycles where Labor may well have won them (and indeed perhaps needed to win them) in order to form majority government. Short term Liberal problem but longer term if these seats stay in independent hands for a while it’s probably Labor’s loss ultimately

In the formerly safe metropolitan Liberal seats that are now held or threatened by the Teals, there are a lot of former Liberal voters who are happy to vote for the Greens or definitely a Teal but not vote Labor (like Jodie in Dons Party). The vast majority of the Teal vote are former Labor and Greens voters – some might be tactical but others are ‘soft’ – parked until a better candidate comes along. The 2pp shows that most of the Teal seats would have been won quite comfortably by the Libs. The Teals had a few things going for them in 2022 that are not an issue in 2025. Scott Morrison after Covid and the fires and his own unique smarminess inspired a
special loathing amongst the voting public especially in the well informed North Shore and affluent areas. Incumbency acts as a lightning rod and on issues like women and integrity he was one damn big lightning collector. The Libs in NSW had some endorsement issues and the Teal candidates were ‘made in a lab’ for those seats. 3 years on – Albo has the incumbency and the economy is not good. Post Gaza the public mood has become brittle and Peter Dutton has probably read the public mood better. He is a known quantity – and disliked by many – but is starting to seem like the so called ‘unelectable’ John Howard of 1994 and 1995 – and we all know how that
ended. I think – except possibly for Monique Ryan and Kate Chaney – the Teals are safe and there is no gaurantee what worked in 2022 will work again in 2025 in seats they don’t hold.
PS: I wonder if Labor would have won in 2019 if there had been a different leader to Bill Shorten – another politician who inspired a loathing.

This will be a close one. I would have expected a Coalition loss if Mundine was selected in lieu of Kapterian. At this juncture, I would expect a rather narrow victory by Kapterian.