This Person And Why They Are Wrong: Episode 1, Wasted Vote Guy

 

The gloriously cooked tweet above reminded me of a series I'd been intending to start where now and then I would cover someone known in the online psephosphere who has a particular gimmick that I haven't previously addressed in detail.  The rules for inclusion in this series are:

1.  the person in question needs to be a published author on elections and not just a rando twitter pest  (though this first one is really scraping the barrel on the first bit) 

2.  they need to have some defining pet argument or recurring MO that makes covering what they do in one article worthwhile and effective.

3. they need to be someone who I've not already written multiple articles debunking, so no Dennis Shanahans will feature in this series.  

I should note here that the subject of this article has written Substack articles unsuccessfully criticising my comments about his nonsense on multiple occasions.  (This did come after I blocked him on Twitter in May 2022 for bogus triumphalism and misrepresenting my arguments - he not long after deleted his side of that exchange.) He may be small fry, but from time to time I do come across someone who has taken his eccentric claims seriously.  Often these are well-meaning people who do share genuine concerns about the under-representation of the Greens in the House of Reps and just don't realise that this particular version of those concerns is silly.

Our subject here has been known under various usernames including djrobstep, wheelreinvent and similar, but in offline discussions he often just gets called "that wasted vote guy" or words to that effect.  The extremely blunt style with which he's pursued his argument on twitter over the years (though not so much in the last six months or so) is instantly recognisable, even when somebody else is describing it.  It has emerged in recent years that wasted vote guy is Robert Lechte.  He was published in Jacobin on his pet subject and then the editors of Crikey chose to put him in a cage match (shamelessly dubbed "Friday Fight") with William Bowe.  He doesn't usually use his full name and I'm not going to either; I'm going to keep calling him wasted vote guy (WVG for short) for the rest of this episode. 

WVG is a fanatical proportional representation supporter, but one who serious adherents tend to think gives it a bad name.  Aside from his argument being an unsound misapplication of theoretical concepts (proof that taking electoral theory articles on Wikipedia seriously will certainly rot the brain), there's another core problem with his output.   While he will sometimes say that preferential voting is much better than first past the post, he often attacks preferential voting with language that seeks to scandalise.  It's as if he wants to have his cake and eat it too by on the one hand claiming that our system is really terrible and corrupt and on the other hand trying to not appear stupid enough to miss the massive daylight between it and first past the post.   

The primary claim WVG makes is that most of the votes cast in House of Reps elections and other single-seat elections are "wasted".  Where this departs from a common argument made by PR advocates about the number of votes that end up with the loser, is that he also includes votes that end up with the winner over and above the loser's 2PP tally, which he refers to as excess.

Different conceptions of "wastage"

PR advocates who refer to unrepresented votes for the loser as "wasted" are using a term that also has a specific meaning in criticising first past the post and PR systems with threshholds.  That meaning is important and different and in my view the term should be largely reserved for that context.  

In first past the post, any vote for a candidate who does not finish in the top two in the seat not only has no effect on who wins the seat but also has no effect on the margin.  In terms of how much the winner won by, this vote may as well not have existed and the voter may as well not have bothered voting.  This creates a strategic dilemma for the voter thinking of voting for a candidate who appears unlikely to finish in the top two.  Should they vote with their heart and risk wasting their vote on the third placed finisher and thereby perhaps helping the nastier of the leading two candidates to win?  Or should they sell out and vote strategically for the more palatable of the expected top two, perhaps at the risk that if their ideal candidate does better than expected they might help the mediocre candidate beat the good candidate, or even cause the bad candidate to beat both?   It's in fact impossible for even expert level voters armed with polling-based models to be able to predict vote shares accurately enough to be sure of making the best strategic choice. The fact that this strategic dilemma applies to quite a lot of voters but nowhere near all means that first past the post discriminates between voters and means that it is a violation of what should be considered basic rights to equal treatment.  There may be excuses for some countries that have it to keep it, but there is no excuse for any country that has ditched it to go back.

In contrast, when some PR advocates try to call the votes that end up with the loser (or exhausted in a system where that's possible) "wasted", all they mean is that those votes did not finish up with anyone who won a seat.  This differs from FPTP in that there is not a "wasted vote problem" that subjects a voter to said tactical dilemma; it's just the case that elections have winners and losers, and single-seat systems have a lot of votes that are for, or in Australia's case finish with, losing candidates.

A better term to avoid confusion is "unrepresented" - in a PR system a much higher proportion of votes do end up directly with someone who wins than in any single seat system.  In 2025, on average the 2CP winner of each Reps seat finished up with 59.5% of the preferences in that seat and the other 40.5% finished up with the loser.  This figure doesn't change a great deal between elections.  In contrast in a Senate count it's normal for about 84% of vote values to finish up with a winner.  (In fact the proportion of voters whose votes at least partially contribute to electing someone is higher than 84%, and the proportion of voters whose votes entirely do so is lower, but never mind that for now.)  PR systems that use a very low quota can have even lower "unrepresented" vote levels than the c. 16% in Senate, though many such systems use threshholds that tend to result in about 10% of voters voting for parties that don't win a seat (these votes are then "wasted" just like votes for uncompetitive candidates in FPTP).

I actually don't think this unrepresented vote argument is a valid argument against our Reps system anyway. In a party system it's effectively a junk statistic.  It's true that about 40% of votes habitually don't end up with a seat winner, but in the case of votes for losing major party candidates there will (except in WA 2021 style wipeouts) be plenty of members of the party elected elsewhere, and the party may even win.  Every preference that reaches a major party that loses the seat contest in at least the competitive seats is a vote where the voter played a role in making the winning party work for that seat, which may in turn have helped the party that lost that seat to win elsewhere.  For some voters, not electing a specific major party candidate in their seat will seriously affect their view of the success of their voting experience, but the vast majority will care far more about the overall result.   The more effective argument for PR - which is not to say there are no counter-arguments - is overall disproportionality in single-member districts.   The leading party (in a close election both leading parties) gets a lot more seats than its vote share while minor parties with dispersed but reasonable support win few if any.  

Your Vote For The Winner Was Wasted??

Where wasted vote guy departs from the usual pro-PR complaint about votes that don't end up with the winner is that his conception of "wasted votes" includes many votes for the winner as well!  Specifically he regards the number of votes the 2PP winner gets above what they would have needed to beat the loser by one vote as "wasted", so if one side wins a seat 60-40, then he calls the 40% for the loser and also 20% from the winner's 60% "wasted", for a total of 60% supposedly wasted.  In optional preferential voting he includes all the exhausted votes as "waste" as well.

Now the first problem here is that this is simply absurd.  Someone who voted for the seat winner in our system is not going to think that their vote was wasted just because they could have voted for the other side and the result would have been the same.  They could (mileage varies) feel their vote for the winner was pointless if they live in an extremely safe seat where the result was never at any stage in doubt, but that's a smaller subset of the supposed wasted excess.  Victory for someone who really cares about their seat result is a collective experience and a win is a win is a win, especially if it's anywhere near a close one.  

There are some systems where a voter for the winner might have a genuine regret - if corrupt boundary drawers had deliberately put that voter in a seat their side was going to win anyway to stop them having more impact somewhere else.  The concept of wastage is useful in assessing deliberate gerrymandering of that sort (see below) but this does not happen in our system.  When one of the majors from time to time does slightly better than the other in terms of the point on the 2PP pendulum at which the two would break even on 2PP, this is because its vote is more efficiently distributed - through strategic, policy and campaign choices as well as personal vote effects, it just happens to be outdoing its opponent in bang for buck.  It is not because of any form of rigging.

In trying to avoid the absurdity of identifying individual "wasted votes" for winners, WVG has previously claimed that winning votes are "fungible", so that you know there are a certain number of wasted winning votes but nobody in particular's winning votes were identifiably wasted.  However WVG has also recently, perhaps out of rustiness as he's not been very active lately, claimed that "[..] 60% of voters receive literally zero representation (conceptually their votes are thrown in the bin due to being losing/excess winning single member votes)".  Well sure, if your concepualisation is daft and serves no purpose other than to prop up your own hostility to our system.  

A far more sensible way to look at it - and much more in keeping with WVG's "water" analogy - would be the way surpluses are distributed in the Senate.  When a candidate polls over a quota on primaries in the Senate every vote for the winner contributes an equal part of its value to electing that candidate, and the remainder of every vote is surplus to that candidate's requirements and flows on.  Likewise in the Reps, every voter whose vote contributes to the winner's election has equally helped the winner to win, and no winning voter is unrepresented.  As with a surplus over quota, it only makes sense here to talk about a surplus of total value over what is required.  It does not make any sense at all to say that there were any individual votes for the winner that did not contribute to the overall result.

A further issue I have raised with WVG's "wasted" mathematics is that if one assumes that all voters who voted formally were always going to do so, the excess in a compulsory preferencing election needs to be halved, because in that case if the voter didn't preference the winner they would preference their opponent, a net change of -2 to the margin.  

Herpetpsephology Fail!

As if dragging in the language of "wasted votes" from anti-FPTP theory is not bad enough, WVG also tries to pretend that the maintenance of our current single member system is a form of "gerrymandering".  The electoral map amphibian that is the gerrymander is widely misidentified in Australia (often being used to refer to malapportionment, for instance) so he is hardly unusual in this.  Gerrymandering is actually the manipulation of electoral boundaries to deliberately achieve certain results.  It is classically used as a pejorative for cases where, given a population relatively evenly split between two parties, the mapmaker might create five seats that fairly narrowly but comfortably enough favour one party and two that massively favour the others.  (It should be noted here that in some cases this kind of process can be used as a force for good - if an area too heavily favours one party it is sometimes good to draw a district that favours the minority so that they get some representation rather than none.)

Wasted vote guy has run a completely tinfoil (and IMO not completely intellectually honest) argument in which parties that vote to maintain the current Reps system are supposedly "engaged in the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage".  In fact they're not manipulating the boundaries, they're simply preserving a system that has that many boundaries, and that same number of boundaries could be put anywhere within practicable reason and WVG would still complain and allege it was all a wasted vote plot.  

A further point here is that WVG in 2023 complained about the Nationals and teals doing so well in seat terms relative to their vote, but failed to mention that this is not only down to concentration of support but is also down to both these forces not running everywhere and, in the Nationals' case, being shielded from a potentially effective competitor (the Liberals) by the latter's voluntary withdrawal from nearly all the seats they contest.  

PR Obsessives For First Past The Post!

Another characteristic of WVG is the way he quite often flirts with anti-preferencer talking points.  The tweet depicted on this thread is an example (suggesting Albanese didn't really win, making a big fuss about Labor's modest primary vote and attempting to stir up contempt for the Prime Minister) but the Jacobin article contained others.  Despite him being outraged by me pointing out that he was pushing FPTP tropes, he did in fact in his Jacobin article claim that the Coalition would have won in 2022 under first past the post (they only led on primaries in 73 seats, which might or might not have been enough to cobble a minority government together, and would most likely not have even won all of those with strategic voting at play).  

He also said that "when used in combination with single-member electorates, it nevertheless creates a mechanism that reinforces the two-party duopoly on power by funneling minor-party votes back to major ones." (This is not true, it is the single-member electorates by themselves that are the issue, preferences tend to counteract it).  

Finally the "so-called illegitimacy" comment deserves a response, because I've unfortunately seen a fair few left-wing posters retweet claims that Maduro was a legitimate President into my feed - no it does not follow that just because he was abducted by Trump he was therefore a good guy.  The Venezuelan Presidential election "won" by Maduro was a massive, blatant and comically inept case of vote figure fraud, as confirmed by rounding fraud evidence, collected vote total returns, polling, exit polling and the lack of satisfactory official figures.  Nobody who knows anything about elections would use "so-called" in this context.  

That's the end of episode 1 (beyond any updates I may add based on the inevitable reaction).  There are at least another two I have thought of that may appear in this series in the future!

Helen Burnet Quits The Greens!

Witnesses to political history

Tasmanian politics has seldom seemed sober for long since the day in 2023 when two Liberal backbenchers announced they were quitting the government over the Macquarie Point stadium and other things.  2025 was especially deranged but things did seem to have largely settled down once it became obvious that the Rockliff Government would continue in office as nobody could be bothered removing it.  Would 2026 be a sane and normal year in Tasmanian politics?  Nope, we were only on day two before the familiar cries of "go home #politas you're drunk" again rang out among politics tragics as the scene reeled from another shock announcement.  In this case, it's that Clark MHA Helen Burnet, a continuously elected Green at council or state level for a state record of over 20 years had fronted the media in the North Hobart wombat sculpture park to declare that she had quit the party.  There are now six independents in the parliament, the most since the 1909 adoption of statewide Hare-Clark.  

At local council level, it's a common career path for candidates to be elected as Greens then become independents (usually as the end of their first term approaches) but Burnet is the first of 18 state-level Tasmanian Greens MPs to leave the party while in state parliament.  Around the country such defections have not been all that rare and I count six others at state level and two in the Senate (one of these, Dorinda Cox, to Labor).  About half of those defections were triggered by personal controversies.  This also makes this the fourth term of state parliament in a row to witness a defection of some kind.  

What is this one now all about?  Don't ask me, I was as much caught by surprise here as the party says they were!  On New Year's Eve Burnet's Facebook page featured party graphics of "Greens Wins" with no hint of anything amiss, following a video statement two days earlier.  In her statements so far Burnet has said she believes she could do more as an independent for her constituents, for issues "important for the environment and for social justice and equity".  Constituent issues cited included cost of living, public transport, the stadium, a clean and secure water system and waste issues, many of these things the party talks about a fair bit.  A Greens defector saying they believe they can do better for the environment especially sounds like some sort of criticism of the party's direction or effectiveness.  

Burnet has also said she has a "clear intention of being more effective, accountable and heard" and that "I've found it frustrating when I can't get those issues out ... which need to be aired, for us to get some good traction for people in Clark, for the environment, for water quality".   

The above is what I've found so far of what has been said from a press conference I have not yet seen in full, but there remains a high degree of mystery about all this and I suspect we will find out more in months to come.

Speculation on social media has also linked Burnet's departure to everything from forestry policy (the Bob Brown Foundation praising Burnet following her announcement being not lost on those claiming this), to the recent arrival of Hobart Councillor (and ex-Labor-candidate) Zelinda Sherlock in the party, to (directly or indirectly) a potential 2028 race to replace Andrew Wilkie in the federal seat.  Some at least of these are bound to be red herrings.  To add to the mix it is probably worth mentioning that there were differences between Burnet when on Council and the then state Greens over the UTAS move in the leadup to the 2024 election.  Although that recently resurfaced with a bill to enable sale of some of the university's land, I'm not aware of this being a likely factor.

How bad is this?

This is a serious setback for the Tasmanian Greens.  It is not the first time there have been internal tensions over their approach; during the 2010-4 Labor/Greens government, Kim Booth was frequently the purist outside the tent and at times differed sharply from his colleagues.  The difference is Booth never quit the party.  

The Greens polled quite well at the 2025 election, all things considered.  But the bigger winners on the crossbench in swing terms were left indies Peter George, Kristie Johnston and Craig Garland, and George especially has been depriving the party of a lot of oxygen, though it has still been polling well.  It's been impressive that Greens have finally won two seats in Clark in 2024 and 2025 but a lot of that is down to Burnet's personal appeal, her having generally been a star vote-getter for them at various levels for a long, long time.  

The Greens' second seat in Clark is quite marginal; a swing just over 1.8% from them to the Liberals would have seen the Liberals win the seat, although this is partly because the Liberals had three candidates with very similar votes.  Even if Burnet doesn't recontest, having a lower profile number 2 candidate will hurt the Greens on leakage and simply on having a lower overall vote share, and the risk of dropping the seat to Liberals, Labor or independents rises.  The Greens could look at running Sherlock (who succeeded Burnet as Deputy Mayor, albeit elected round the table) as the second Green, though I think her profile is not yet as high as Burnet's was.  Janet Shelley also has a history of polling pretty well for them.   If Burnet does recontest, that makes it very hard for the Greens to hold two, even if perhaps Johnston is no longer there.  I'd expect a substantial part of Burnet's current support base would vote for her as an independent, but she would also need to attract a new audience.  

The defection is big ammunition for critics seeking to claim things are not well within the party following its decision to vote against Labor's post-election no confidence motion in the government.  Labor will always criticise the Greens more for propping up the government than they will criticise the government itself for existing or themselves for making such a transparently nonserious attempt to succeed it after last year's election.  Unsurprisingly they were out yesterday collecting in the media. 

Not much changes in the makeup of the parliament - the government and Greens still have a combined majority on anything where that actually matters.   

Update: The Greens have now responded (perhaps a little slowly?) claiming that Burnet struggled with working in a team and was frustrated with lack of media exposure, and suggesting that previous expressions of concern regarding this were addressed.  It's worth noting re Rosalie Woodruff's comment that "Helen did work as a sole operator as a Greens councillor for nearly two decades" that for all but half a year of Burnet's time on Hobart City Council she was serving alongside at least one other Greens councillor.  However Greens councillors on HCC work as individuals and generally do not caucus or reliably as opposed to usually vote with each other.  I have often found this a bit curious and perhaps this raises the question whether the Greens should be thinking through their expectations of their local councillors, and whether a model where people who are party members are endorsed and then once elected go off and do their own thing is ideal.  

Update Jan 4: I believe a tweet from Philip Cocker is also noteworthy here:

"I worked with Helen on council for 13 years and inside the Greens. Helen is the ultimate team player and showed great loyalty to the Greens."

Update Jan 6:  Burnet has published an op ed in the Mercury (unsure if directly online) that is rather enigmatic.  In particular this bit:

Is this, as it seems to be, a shot at the Greens leadership, suggesting that they specifically have ignored expert evidence in pursuit of adversarial behaviour?  If so on what issues?  

2025 Site Review

At the end of each year I post a review of the activities on this site in that year and 2025 was a big one.  For the first time since I started this site in 2012 there were Tasmanian and federal elections in the same year.  Not only that but they were back to back with one being caused before the dust from the other had fully settled.  

The following graph tells the story of the year in terms of user numbers per week.  This spiked at over 20,000 during the federal election and there was another big lift for the Tasmanian state election.  There were also smaller lifts from the Victorian by-elections that seem like about five years ago and the WA state election.  From about September on though there wasn't much going on.

Site activity as measured in total events was up 98% on 2024, which was itself probably the second-busiest year in the site's history, making 2025 easily the biggest year to date, overtaking 2022.  (Comparing 2022 and 2025 exactly is difficult because of Google's disgraceful handling of the transition from Universal Analytics to Analytics 4).  

In 2025 I released 101 articles, up 22 on 2024 and second only to 2018 so far in the history of this site.  This included 31 posts about the federal election and 28 about the Tasmanian election, leadup and aftermath.  There were five about Tasmanian polling outside of election leadups, four about the WA election and five about the Tasmanian Legislative Council elections.

Ah if only there was time ...

I have been severely spare-time-deprived this year as a result of the back to back federal and state elections and then an upswing of unrelated paid work in the second half of the year.  This has resulted in more pieces I would like to write - especially about the 2025 Reps results - having not been started let alone completed.  Here are some titles of pieces that I started but either didn't finish or didn't release.

Division Hell: Australia's Latest Dumb Culture War Attempt 
The Tasmanian Legislative Council Should Change Its Standing Orders On Divisions
People Must Stop Asking Grok For Information About Elections
Statement Re Relations With The ABC*
Myths About Above And Below The Line Voting In Federal Elections

(* this pertained to an item where I was disrespectfully and misleadingly described on national news, which nearly resulted in me boycotting almost everyone at the ABC).  

Top ten

According to the hybrid formula I use to compare GA-4 stats to old Universal Analytics stats, these were the most popular articles in 2025:  

1. 2025 Late Postcount And Expected Recount: Bradfield

A surprise winner perhaps, but with all the attention having gone away from other seats, this piece following the Bradfield recount action came out on top on the conversion formula I use to compare pre-2023 to post-2023 articles, and sixth (only just short of fifth) on that formula in site history.  Teal independent Nicolette Boele won the initial 2PP count by 40, trailed by 8 after the distribution of preferences, and won by 26 after the recount.  

2. 2025 House Of Reps Postcount: Coalition vs Teals (Goldstein, Bradfield, Kooyong etc)

This piece followed counting action in Kooyong, Goldstein and Bradfield until such time as the latter two seats got a partial recount and a full recount respectively.  Monique Ryan retained Kooyong despite a scare on postals, Zoe Daniel very narrowly lost Goldstein after a particularly lumpy postcount, and for Bradfield see above.  I am most pleased about the coverage of Bradfield in this piece because unlike I think every other significant source covering this count, I never actually called the seat for the Liberals, though at some points I gave Boele very little chance and said that it looked over.  

3. 2025 House Of Reps Postcount Summary, Links Hub And Classic 2PP Seats Page

The hub and classic postcounts page had the most individual views for the year but did not score as highly as the 2022 version, most likely because only a few classic seats (Bendigo because it needed realignment and Longman and Bullwinkel because they were actually close) remained in any level of suspense for long.

4. 2025 House of Reps Postcount: Melbourne

The dramatic demise of Greens Leader Adam Bandt, masked on election night by a strange AEC decision to count the 2CP as Greens vs ... Liberal?  This article had more individual readers than any other but fewer return visits than the other leaders as it was all over and called in a few days.

5. 2025 Tasmanian Postcount: Bass

An unprecedented and strange Hare-Clark postcount saw nobody end up with anything much in the race for the final seat in Bass between the Liberals, Greens, Labor, Shooters Fishers and Farmers and two independents.  The race was complicated by within-ticket splits that nearly saw Labor snatch a freak third seat, leakage and the impact of the Macquarie Point stadium proposal on preference flows.  Independent George Razay started the postcount as an underdog just hanging in there but got motoring near the end and won from notionally fourth place on raw quotas.  Somebody had to.  

6. 2025 Tasmanian Election Guide: Main Page

The usual main page for a Tasmanian state election, outscoring the 2024 equivalent by 7%.  The only page in this list that isn't a postcount page.

7. 2025 Senate Postcounts: National Thread

Thread that followed the Senate postcounts with Labor vs One Nation races of interest in four mainland states (finishing in a 2-2 scoreline).  I was incredibly busy with Reps postcounts this election and wasn't able to give some of the Senate ones the attention they deserved, so this article's attempts to forecast the results were below my normal standard.  Especially I didn't think One Nation could win in NSW.

8. 2025 Tasmania Senate Postcount

Unexpected drama in the Tasmanian Senate postcount as the Liberals polled so badly and Labor so well that Richard Colbeck and Jacqui Lambie were at risk of losing to a completely off the radar third ALP candidate.  In the end normality prevailed and the incumbents were re-elected.

9. 2025 Late Postcount: Calwell

The vacant Victorian federal seat of Calwell saw a postcount so unusual that even a 3CP count wouldn't be enough to solve it, the first recent time the AEC has needed to conduct a full preference throw to decide the final two and the winner.  Ultimately Labor's Bassem Abdo succeeded off a low primary vote without much trouble.

10. Tasmania Remains Ungovernable: 2025 Election Tallyboard And Summary

Main postcount page for the 2025 Tasmanian election count, which finished in a pretty-much-no-change hung parliament.  The title caused some misunderstandings but was actually a riff on "become ungovernable" with a suggestion that Tasmanian voters had deliberately re-endorsed chaos and positively refused to be told what to do. 

Often the pieces I am proudest of or consider most important aren't particularly high-scorers (the postcount pieces and guide pieces generally tend to get the most visitors).  For this year I was particularly proud of my efforts in exclusively covering the Tasmanian Nationals' preselection of a candidate with a notorious past.  

Other stats

The ten biggest days of the year (measured by "session starts") were May 6, 7, 5, 4 (federal election), July 20 (Tasmania), May 8, May 9, June 4 (Tasmania triggered), May 23 (federal/LegCo overlap; oddly the most visited page that day was Bradfield though it had no updates that day) and July 19. 

The most visited pages from pre-2025 were the Tasmanian stadium polling page, the ancient bio page, the Ginninderra Effect page,  the 2024 Tasmanian election voting advice page and 2PP Federal Polling Aggregate Relaunched.

The most clicked tags were apparently Longman, voice referendum, Tasmania 2024, pseph, 2025 federal, debunkings, Tasmania, Cassy O'Connor, LegCo 2025 and Not-A-Poll.  Hmm, I got nothing, that's a weird list there.  As noted previously the "pseph" tag is being very slowly decommissioned.

By "engaged sessions" the most visiting countries were Australia, USA (+1), UK (-1), NZ, Singapore (+5), China (re-entry last seen 2015), Canada (-2), Ireland (re-entry), France (-2) and Thailand (new).  I'm a little suspicious of whether the Singapore and China entries here are fully genuine as these countries have a lot of bot traffic to my site.

168 "Google countries" visited in 2025 (smashing the previous record of 155) and at least 194 have now visited in total, though it may be a few more than that as I have some records of countries appearing on the old Analytics that later dropped off (an example is Botswana which was missing from last year's 186 but has visited before). Genuinely new this year were Belize, Greenland, Guam, Libya, Niger, St Kitts and Nevis and St Martin.  Niger was previously the most populous country never to have appeared.  That list is now headed by North Korea, Burundi and Togo.  

The ten most visiting cities were Melbourne, Sydney, Hobart, Brisbane, Adelaide (+1), Perth (+1), Canberra (-2), Launceston (re-entry), London (re-entry) and Central Coast (-2)

The top hit sources were Twitter, Google, Bluesky (+7), Facebook, Reddit, Pollbludger (-3), The Guardian (re-entry), Bing (-2), The Conversation (-1) and Pulse Tasmania (new).  Taking out search engines the next two were Threads and Tally Room.

Orders of the year

2026 looks like a quieter year than for a while in some ways but will feature two state elections.  In March, the Malinauskas Government in South Australia is universally expected to secure a second term easily, the issue being whether the Liberal opposition can be even remotely competitive.  The Victorian election in November is a much less certain prospect for the by then twelve-year old Allan Labor Government.  My dearest hope for this election is that it will be conducted democratically by putting upper house Group Ticket Voting in the bin before it is held.  If that doesn't happen I'll be encouraging Victorian readers to put all guilty parties in the bin instead.   Reform really should have happened during 2025, and 2026 is Victoria's last chance to avert another joke election.  Movement on this issue needs to happen fast when Parliament resumes.

Tasmania will have elections for two Legislative Council seats in May.  The Liberals' Jo Palmer won Rosevears by a whisker in 2020 but her opponent Janie Finlay has since been elected to state parliament in Bass (three times!) and it will be interesting to see if there is any serious challenger.  In Huon, independent Dean Harriss ran down Labor on preferences in the 2022 by-election. I think that he has had a good term and we'll see if anyone thinks they can beat him.

Also in Tasmania, local government elections come around in October 2026 and I'll again be covering Hobart in detail with some level of coverage of other councils and general themes depending on available time.  And the counts as well, to the extent that I'm allowed to!  (Apparently my sampling outrunning the very slow official figures ruffled a few feathers in 2022).  

In the known unknowns department there's always the potential for federal or interesting state by-elections, though the vultures circling the seat of Isaacs haven't had a lot to say in recent months.  I'm hoping during this year to get on with a lot more of the fine detail from the 2025 Reps election as mentioned above.  There may also be action on expanding the federal parliament and perhaps other reforms. The federal polling story should heat up and 2026 should give us a good handle on where the recent trends on the right are going - a One Nation bubble, a genuine realignment or something that's in between.

Finally as well as hoping that Victoria gets rid of Group Ticket Voting this year, I also hope this year sees a dramatic decline in the anti-preferential-voting rubbish that has abounded on social media since the election, much of it from people who pretend to be patriots.  The support for first past the post by these people should be a national embarrassment. It shows a failure to understand what actually happened at this year's election, a disrespect for over a century of history of providing fairness to voters in a way that embodies the Australian value of a fair go, and a lack of appreciation that first past the post would actually be a futile and stupid vandalism of our system.   

Together with the FPTP nonsense, I've seen far too many of these fake patriots engage in a form of election denial by claiming that the result happened because voters don't understand preferential voting.  In fact it's clear enough from 2PP preference flows that voters for left parties strongly favour Labor and voters for right parties favour the Coalition, suggesting that in broad terms most voters whose preferences matter know exactly what they're doing.  And no, they're mostly not following how to vote cards.  So yes, some people didn't like the result and wanted to sook about it, but wrongly blaming the electoral system is off limits.  2026 is high time for this nonsense to end. 

Thankyou!

A huge thankyou to readers for the interest level this amazing year, to sources who provide me with scrutineering numbers and gossip about dubious candidates, and especially to the many readers who have donated generously to support my work here.  I always hope to find the time to thank everyone personally; but it's only intermittently possible at the moment, and these days with PayID enabled on this site I get some donations where I don't have any contact details for the donor anyway.  

Happy New Year to all readers!

Australia's Worst Oppositions: Phase 2 Not-A-Poll Results

 Secular seasons greetings and goodwill to all readers.  As noted almost every year it's an almost annual tradition on this site to release something every Christmas Day.  Click the Xmas tag for previous random examples.  Why do I do this?  Partly it's a present for those who like Christmas, which in an often lethargic and non-religious fashion includes your host, but it's also a present for those who don't want to deal with this particular Christmas or even generally cannot stand Christmas and just wish it was a normal day when normal things happened.  And what could be more normal than the results of a Not-A-Poll in this website's sidebar?  Therefore, the campaign against compulsory Christmasing brings you again ... whatever this is.  

This one is a very token present to you all and I can report that there is something far more thoroughly wonky and distinctive re the 2025 federal election and other recent elections in the pipeline, but it's not ready yet.  In truth, I've spent the whole year trying to recover my spare time and the volume of 2025 election detail I'd like to be posting on here from that moment when just as I was getting other things back on track after the federal election came the initially bold and exciting news that Dean Winter had placed a no-confidence motion against the Rockliff Liberal Government on the notice-paper.  

Running against an 11-year old state government that had been knocked into minority by its pursuit of an unpopular stadium then spent much of its short 2024-5 term mired in scandal over a droppingly inept ferry birthing fiasco, Tasmanian Labor somehow contrived to lose primary support and not gain any seats, oh and the stadium ended up passing parliament!  However they were far from unusual round the country in being an Opposition who endured a lousy 2025, and reflection on the sad state of Oppositions round the country caused me to write this.  I also ran two Not-A-Polls, one to vote on who actually was the country's worst Opposition (a plurality win for the Victorian Liberals, then still led by Brad Battin) and the current round which very conveniently expired about 9:30 am today.  Amazingly, two voters actually voted today, one at about 2am presumably while stuck in a chimney somewhere and the other about 7, presumably looking too early for the Christmas article. 

I am impressed by the original Worst Oppositions article's kill rate!  Of course I didn't really do it but since I declared Australia to be living in a golden age of terrible Oppositions, a whole four of them have realised it is true and disposed of their leaders!  This has led to an amazing situation in which Selena Uibo, NT Opposition leader since her party were turfed and rendered leaderless last August, is Australia's most senior Opposition Leader!  Steven Miles is the only other survivor of 2024 vintage and the other seven, amazingly, were all installed this year.  This included one forced change after Peter Dutton lost his seat in May, and two others that followed election defeats.  Of the more recent four, those in Victoria and the ACT can be seen as significantly inflicted by internal decisions that backfired against the incumbent leader.  The other two, NSW and SA, mainly reflect that the party was polling awfully at a time when that really should not be the case.  In SA, the factional inability of the party to present itself as politically mainstream is a very big part of the problem.  

Remarkably, three of the state Liberal Oppositions are now led by first-term female MPs, two of whom were born in the 1990s.  History will tell whether these were inspired choices or the party's last desperate attempt to save itself from terminal brand damage.  Perhaps both.  SA will be the first test for this concept, but one where expectations are so low that anything but the Liberal Party being turned into rubble will be seen as okay.  

Anyway, the Not-A-Poll results:

The most popular prediction overall was that precisely one of the current nine oppositions would win; 53.8% had this. 25.4% had more than one (usually two) saluting with 20.8% predicting that the lot would lose.  

Because one is such an easy pick I made it harder for those picking one by asking them which one.  Here Queensland was by far the most popular choice making 1 (Qld) the plurality winner of the options chosen.  My view on this is that there is a difference between how terrible an Opposition is and its chances of winning. Qld Labor has a strong claim to be the least bad state Opposition around, but it's up against a government that is in its first term and that is likely to have federal drag on its side when it goes to the polls in late 2028.  It's true that the last two conservative governments in Queensland were one-termers, but this was extremely self-inflicted in Campbell Newman's case (with a large assist from Tony Abbott as well), while the Borbidge government never won an election in its own right anyway, and so far I think the LNP are doing "don't be Campbell Newman" reasonably well.  They even may be resisting the One Nation polling surge that is happening in most other places.  

Conversely while the Victorian Liberals' squalid reputation is particularly well deserved, they have by far the strongest historical hand - up against a government that will be 12 years old at next year's election, that is federally dragged and that has a Premier polling appallingly - I discussed this further here.  The WA Liberals are not polling well but also have time on their side in that they will be up against a 12 year old government that could well also be federally dragged, and that's still over three years away.  But do the normal rules apply or are there parts of the country under Labor hegemony where the Coalition brand is now too dead to take advantage of them?  My aim is to revisit this article when all of these oppositions have been to an election (I think that's,er, March 2029) and check how many succeeded and why.

Secular season's greetings and Happy New Year to all readers!  As usual my next scheduled event is my annual site review that typically appears on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day and there are, as noted, other goodies being worked on.  

2025 Polling Year In Review

2PP Average For Year 53.9 to ALP (+3.0)

At the end of each year I release a review of the year in federal polling.  See the 2024 article here (ah, those days when the Coalition still seemed competitive!) and/or click on the "annual poll review" tab for all articles back to 2014.  As usual if any late polls arrive I will edit this article to update the relevant statistics.  

2025 was overall not a good year for the Australian polling industry.  The year started well with good results for the two main pollsters in the field for the WA state election but this was followed by a rather serious federal election miss, where pollsters had the right winner but were almost as far off on the 2PP and primary votes as when they were wrong in 2019.  As they had the right winner anyway there was little media interest in the error; there has also been precious little visible introspection from the industry since and none of the attempts at review processes we saw following 2019.  The Tasmanian state election was then a mixed bag with a good result for local firm EMRS but a big shocker for YouGov.  On the plus side, we are seeing more diversity in Australian polling, but still the average transparency level is ordinary.

This year welcomed one new entrant, Spectre, and also saw a low-key and unsuccessful return from Ipsos and a great step up in activity from DemosAU.  

The state of play

As I write, 2PP polling since the election has shown on average a very slow decline, including months where it was arguably static, since a post-election peak which I have at 57.2 in mid-July.  I currently estimate Labor's 2PP at 54.8% (recently dipping marginally below their election result finally for the first time after seven months) though it would be still at 55.4% but for my decision to treat Morgan's recent split sample as two readings.  I made this decision because the second portion of the sample still had a sample size well over 1000 and aggregates function better using fresh data collected over relatively short windows than they do with data pooled over a month.  

Morgan attributed the poor numbers for Labor in the second part of their sample to the travel rorts saga which was the first scandal of such a sort for this government.  It is very common for Morgan to attribute any movement in their polls to anything whatsoever that is in the current news cycle; that said my perception is also that Morgan respondents for whatever reason actually do respond more to news cycle events than respondents to other polls.  With all this being overshadowed by the Bondi terror attack days later we will never know whether the travel rorts matter was really a serious dampener of Labor support.  And given the time of year at which it broke (when polls tend to be scarce on the ground around Christmas) we would probably not have known anyway.  The previous poll to Morgan, a Redbridge/Accent poll that came out of field on Dec 12 with a 56-44 2PP for Labor, had not been visibly affected.  The other polls out in December were an Essential that by last-election preferences was a term worst for Labor (I converted it at 54.3 though Essential's "2PP+" comes out at only 52.1) and a Resolve that was quite strong for Labor (55-45 but I converted it at 56.1).  Newspoll was last out in late November and has never in 40 years appeared as late in December as now (but I'll keep an eye out on Sunday night just in case).  

However the 2PP picture has been a relative sideshow in recent polling to the rise and rise of One Nation, lately running at about 17% primary and with no sign yet that their rise is stopping.  Depending on swing models this suggests they would win from a few to several seats in an election "held now"; a DemosAU MRP had them on for as many as twelve though a difficulty here is in gauging Coalition to One Nation preference flows.  In Hunter, Coalition preferences flowed 83% to One Nation but that was with Stuart Bonds as One Nation candidate, and Bonds is a local figure whose appeal is broader than the party (as can be seen from the Reps/Senate primary vote differences).  In the DemosAU figures Calare would be retained by an independents, and at least Riverina and Lyne also look to me like Coalition wins on Labor preferences; other seats such as Groom and Hinkler might fall to indies before One Nation won them (there is a strong effect of indies on the One Nation vote in such seats).  So I think for the moment something like seven seats is more plausible.  But if they keep going upwards, that can increase rapidly.  

We still don't know whether this is heading for a realignment on the conservative side (in which the Liberals are supplanted by a new main force on the right), a fracturing of the conservative forces into multiple parties or if this One Nation surge is mostly a protest bubble that can deflate if the Coalition starts looking more competitive and probably changes leader.  

How many polls?

This year I counted about 107 federal voting intention polls, some of which doubled as MRP models.  Despite this being an election year, this is down 25 on 2024, which partly reflects some polls becoming less frequent after the election (in some cases retreating to lick their wounds, in others a deliberate decision).  My count includes 27 Morgans (18 before the election and nine after, one of which was split into two subsamples), 15 Newspolls (9 before 6 after), 13 Essentials (9 and 4), 12 Redbridges or Redbridge/Accents (5 and 6), 12 YouGovs (11 and 1), 12 Resolves (5 and 7), seven Freshwaters (6 and 1), six DemosAUs (4 and 2), three Spectres (1 and 2) and a lone Ipsos just before the election.  

2PP Voting Intention

All of the polls in my records released a 2PP voting intention figure of some sort this year.  Prior to the election Labor scored 40 2PP wins, six ties and 21 losses.  They lost every released 2PP in January, lost nine of thirteen in February but had only three losses from 16 polls in March and won all 29 in April and May.  Since the election Labor has won all 38 2PPs.

However a lot of the story of Labor's losses early in the year came from preferencing methods and assumptions that did not end up matching what happened at the election.  Using the released primaries and 2022 election preferences, Labor lost only nine 2PPs if rounded to the nearest whole number, or fifteen if rounded to one decimal place.

I have said plenty before about the pattern before the election in which Labor's 2PP support, which had been declining gradually through 2024, turned the corner early in 2025, at almost exactly the same time that Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term as US President.  There was a steep climb in support for Labor from early March which national pollsters stopped finding evidence of in the final weeks.  Had their finding been that it was continuing through this time, the final polls would have been far more accurate.  

Prior to the election Labor's worst released 2PP was a 45 by respondent preferences from Resolve in February and their best was a 55.5 from Morgan in the third week of April (the only poll to even marginally exceed the actual result).  By my last-election conversions the February Resolve was still the worst, but at a less outlying 47.3.  

Since the election Labor's best released 2PPs were 59s from DemosAU in early July and Resolve in August.  The lowest was a 52.1 (after conversion) from Essential in early December, but it's not possible for me to take Essential's mostly respondent preferences (or for that matter their perennially very low Ind/other primaries) seriously.  By my last-election preferences the DemosAU at 58.9 was Labor's highest while the lowest was a 52.9 from the last week subsample of the December Morgan.  Excluding that, the next lowest were 53.9s from Redbridge/Accent in late Sept-early Oct and in the current Resolve.

As an average 2PP aggregated figure for the year (by last-election preferences) I have Labor on 53.9 for those times my aggregates were active but this is divided into 50.7 before the election and 56.3 since it.  The 53.9, up three points on 2024, is not as high as the 54.9 that Labor averaged for 2022 or the 54.8 for 2023.

Leaderships

This year Anthony Albanese averaged a net -7.5 personal satisfaction rating in Newspoll, but this was divided into -11.7 pre-election and -1.3 after it, with a low of net -21 in February and a high of +3 in August.  Both Coalition leaders fared badly with Peter Dutton averageing net -18.1 and Sussan Ley -19.1; Albanese led Dutton as Better PM by an average 10.6 points (increasing as the election approached) and Ley by 22.7.  It is not unusual for new Opposition Leaders to struggle on such scores, especially when their party is losing the 2PP; indeed historically Ley could easily be behind by more and my sense is that the house advantage to incumbents on Preferred Leader scores has reduced.

Dutton actually beat Albanese as preferred PM in two Resolves early in the year and tied him in one Freshwater.  Dutton was also ahead on net approval in all polls by anyone in January or February, but only in 3 out of 32 readings thereafter.  Ley had a better rating than Albanese for "performance in recent weeks" in all Resolves through to October and also the late December Resolve, but no-one else except the lone Freshwater.  Resolve's early December net rating for her of +3 was a massive house-effect-fuelled outlier compared to Redbridge (-20), Essential (-19) and Newspoll (-29).  While her net rating was down to -4 in the late December Resolve, it was still very different to others.  

The path ahead

2026 will be a big year in terms of where Australian politics and polling is going.  If the One Nation surge stabilises or recedes then we may get back to something more normal.  If the Coalition then doesn't get supplanted or collapsed then Labor's already very long re-election honeymoon is likely to end sometime, perhaps sooner rather than later.  On the other hand the upheavals on the right could overshadow the normal ups and downs of an incumbent government.  

There is much speculation about the impact of the Bondi attack but a lot of it is coming from the same sources that believed antisemitism would be a very salient issue at the election (outside a few of the non-classic contests in Melbourne - and not even all of those either - it basically didn't register).  Obviously the reality is far more significant than the speculation but will voters blame the government and shift their voting intentions or will they take the view that these things are not so easily avoided and that the government is trying to respond constructively?  My own view is that whatever one thinks of the government's response so far, anything is better than US-style "thoughts and prayers".  

Update 22 Dec: this article has been updated for the December Resolve, which found a 1% 2PP hit to the government post-Bondi (and post most of "travel rorts") though on my last-election preferences estimates this goes up to 2.4%.  Albanese took a net ratings hit of 15 points on "performance in recent weeks" and 14 on "net likeability" but his ratings were still far from awful, and Ley was down 7 on each for no obvious reason.  This brought my aggregate down from 55.1 to 54.8; text above has been edited.

EMRS: Liberals Slip But Labor Again Doesn't Pick Up The Scraps

EMRS Lib 34 ALP 25 Green 17 IND 19 others 5

Seat estimate off this poll if election "held now" Lib 13 (-1) ALP 10 Green 6 (+1) IND 5 SFF 1

Highest Green primary since November 2017

Another EMRS poll is out though at this stage the online documentation seems a little sparser than the usual.  I've seen a tweet and various secondary reporting, but not yet the usual poll report [EDIT 25/11: it is up now]. The poll is also missing the usual preferred Premier figure as a result of a "coding error".  My understanding is the error was the inclusion of Greens leader Rosalie Woodruff in at least the online component of the poll.  (EMRS used to do three-way preferred Premier up til 2014 but it tended to be misleading because of splitting of left respondents between the Labor and Green leaders, making it hard to compare to similar polls interstate).  

After pretty good numbers in the previous EMRS and the recent DemosAU this one would come as a bit of a downer for the government.  But in a movie we've seen quite a few times before, when the government takes a hit in the polls it's mostly not the Labor Opposition that mops up the slops, instead it is somebody else.  In this case it's the Greens, and I was surprised to find that the last time EMRS had the Greens on 17 or above was in November 2017.   In those days EMRS tended to overestimate the Greens at election time, something that became less apparent following significant methods changes in 2017.  The poll also has a high, though probably inflated, independent vote (we saw at the state election that 19% independent in generic polling is worth about 15 at the ballot box).  

With the splintered state of Tasmania's non-government forces at the moment we're increasingly seeing a broad green left (Greens plus greenish independents, who are most of the "independent" vote) outpolling the official Labor opposition.  

This poll also includes net likeability scores, in which Premier Rockliff has taken a tumble back to net -1 from net +18 three months ago.  Josh Willie has also dropped, from net +4 to net -4.  I don't at this stage have more detailed breakdowns.  

As a seat projection, in an election "held now" if this poll was accurate, the Greens would gain a seat from the Liberals in Braddon.  I wouldn't expect any change elsewhere as the Liberals were not far from winning in most of the remaining seats.  In Bass, the swing from the Liberals to the Greens would significantly change the exclusion order, pushing the second Green above George Razay at the point where they were excluded, but I suspect that Razay would overhaul them on preferences from fellow Independents and SF+F then go on to win anyway.  (If one allows for the Independent vote being overstated then Labor has slightly more votes than at the state election, but the Greens have significantly more, which also helps Razay if he is over them.)

What has happened here?  The changes from the last poll aren't massive, only just outside the in-theory "margin of error" and maybe the high Green vote is a blip.  But this poll does tie in with something seen in the state election campaign, that when the Macquarie Point stadium proposal dominates the news cycle, the government's polling tanked.  Whenever the government was talking about anything else, yes even TasInsure, things got better.  There might also be some sense of anticlimax that the Budget isn't any different on the debt front than its maligned predecessor, and the government did also encounter what should have been a scandal last week, but I am doubtful these were major factors.  

There's also still the possibility that EMRS's new half-online half-phone methods could have some impact on their results.  The EMRS online panel is opt-in and probably has a lot of politically engaged voters.  However the dual method was also used in their internal Liberal polling for the state election, which was accurate.  So I'm going with stadium fatigue as my primary hypothesis for this one!

Brad Battin's Booting Is A Poll History Outlier

(Note for Tasmanian audiences: I will have the usual article about the latest EMRS poll up sometime tonight or tomorrow)

The last fortnight has seen the leaders of three of Australia's current crop of feeble oppositions displaced while a fourth, Sussan Ley, is precarious (especially after another shocker Newspoll).  First to go was ACT Liberal leader Leanne Castley, who after an irregular (by Liberal Party standards) attempt to kick backbenchers Elizabeth Lee and Peter Cain out of the party room for crossing the floor over parliamentary sitting hours, resigned suddenly on November 10.  Victorian leader Brad Battin didn't recontest after a spill motion was passed 19-13 on Nov 18, and NSW Liberal leader Mark Speakman quit on Nov 21 facing the same fate.  In the ACT the leadership has passed to an old hand in third-term MLA Mark Parton, but both Victoria and NSW have gone for first-term female MPs, Jess Wilson and Kellie Sloane.  

The removal of Speakman requires no explanation following the NSW Liberals' run of poor polling and a terrible result in the Kiama by-election.  But the case of Battin is very unusual.  Since assuming the leadership in the final days of 2024, Brad Battin had led Jacinta Allan as better Premier in every single poll that asked such a question - eight in all by four different pollsters, with an average margin of 8.75%.  There have been occasional cases of Opposition Leaders being rolled who had sometimes led as better Premier (including Battin's predecessor John Pesutto who had led by a pyrrhic single point in his final Resolve sample) but an Opposition Leader who was leading solidly being removed is unprecedented, at least in the Newspoll era.

Normally, two things are more or less the death rattle for incumbent Premiers - personal netsats in negative double digits and trailing as better Premier when not facing a previous Premier as Opposition Leader.   And Jacinta Allan's personal ratings are not just run of the mill bad; in four polls taken while opposite Battin she averaged net -31.8.  Sure, Labor could replace her with Ben Carroll, but that would make them a three-leader government, and those have a poor past record with four losses from five attempts at state and territory level in the last fifty years, three of those heavy.  So there's an argument that Battin has been removed while he still had a very good chance of winning.

That is not to say that the Liberals were polling in an election-winning position at the time.  Prior to Battin's removal, the Victorian Coalition in the last six months had led 51-49 in two DemosAU polls and one Freshwater, and trailed 52-48 in two Redbridges and 51.5-48.5 in an earlier Redbridge, trailed 53-47 in the June Newspoll and trailed by my estimates 53-47 then 52.7-47.3 in two Resolves (Resolve doesn't reliably publish 2PP estimates).  All these 2PPs are rubbery because nobody really knows what the field will be and most importantly whether One Nation (currently polling through the roof federally) will run a serious statewide lower house campaign in the state election.  But even at the better end of the spectrum, 51-49 for the Coalition is probably not enough - though it's closer to enough than I realised before modelling it in detail.  

The reason for this lies in Victoria's tilted pendulum.  The 2022 election saw a shovelling of Labor seats from both the 2PP-marginal and 2PP-safe categories into the moderately safe range, meaning that by uniform swing the Coalition needs to poll into the 52s to take government (assuming that such Greens as win will not assist them).  Indeed a uniform swing of 6% would only yield eight seats, leaving Labor in majority government with about 48 seats (assuming the recaptures of Ringwood and South Barwon) to 37 for the Coalition and 3 for the Greens.  

Things are different on a probabilistic assessment because Labor holds a massive 18 seats on margins between 6% and 9% and on a swing around 6% the Coalition would, through variable swing, be bound to jag at least a few of those.  My usual model estimates 12-13 gains rather than the uniform swing gain of 8 seats, but that's only enough to put Labor into minority. For 16 gains and outright victory the Coalition probably needs more like 52-48 - though even if one or two seats short of that there always might be some independent or ALP discard who might help the Coalition into government. And one of these days Victoria, which alone of the states and territories has an even number of lower house seats, might get a deadlocked parliament (that would be interesting!)

Even so, the fact that the existing 51-49 readings came from Freshwater (the reputation of which took a serious knock at the 2025 federal election) and DemosAU (which is a relatively new pollster) probably meant that even these readings were treated with some scepticism.

Does it matter if an opposition is merely competitive and not actually winning against an unpopular Premier?  History suggests not really - unpopular Premiers find ways to get removed or lose, even if the 2PP polling is OK some time out.  Governments that appear to be polling OK also often nosedive in the final year if they are "federally dragged", meaning that the same party is in power federally (which is in general a large disadvantage at elections).  It can also be argued that the state Coalition parties have taken brand damage from the 2025 federal election, and that once the Albanese Government's federal honeymoon tapers off we could see a return to politics as normal - on which basis the Allan Government is very beatable.

Overall by historic standards there's a strong polling case that Battin still had a good chance of winning.  Why then was he removed?

The leadership change can be sourced to some obvious factors.  While Battin's personal polling was generally good (a minor exception being a net -5 satisfaction in the June Newspoll, though that was far from terrible) the Victorian Liberals had remained a mess on his watch.  A very poorly internally received reshuffle was a factor here.  There was also a perception that Battin's leadership style was too limited with too much of a focus on crime.  Law and order campaigning doesn't tend to win Australian elections by itself - even when crime is being talked about an unusual amount it tends to be only very salient for a few to several percent of voters.  It's also too easy for state governments to take action on compared to the economy and cost of living.  There was some perception hence that Battin wasn't up to winning an election.  Historically it was way short of a clearcut case.  The risk is that if the partyroom waited for clearer evidence to emerge, it could be too late for a new leader (especially a young new leader) to get a sufficient run in to the next election.

The leadership change might also be seen as running up the white flag on an outer suburbs dominated strategy.  In the leadup to the federal election we were bombarded with arguments that federal Labor was on the way out in the outer suburbs and if the Coalition focused there it could get large swings and win many seats.  In fact federal Labor wasn't on the way out anywhere, but despite the Coalition under Peter Dutton relentlessly focusing on such seats (egged on by internal polls that were wrong), they didn't get anywhere near winning most of them and would not have done so even had there not been a national swing against them.  Uniformly removing Labor's 2PP swing from the federal election would have gained the Coalition only Bullwinkel, Solomon and Bendigo and the Coalition would have still lost Dickson, Petrie, Leichhardt, Sturt, Bass and Braddon.

A few years back the theory was that Australia was realigning with higher educated inner suburbs moving to Labor and lower educated working class areas moving to the Coalition but with the current splintering of vote share on the right and following Labor's stellar performance in northern Tasmania in the federal election all that Piketty 101 stuff is feeling very 2022.  The Coalition won't win elections just in the outer suburbs, but leaders who are seen as too inner city might still play badly there, and this is a risk factor with Wilson.  Overall of the eighteen seats in the critical 6-9% range eight are outer suburban with four in the west (where Labor did badly in swing terms last time) and four in the east (where Labor held up well) but there was a lot of COVID issue overlay in the 2022 state and federal spatial vote patterns.  

The latest Newspoll

The first Newspoll of Jess Wilson's career was very quick out of the blocks and this makes it somewhat difficult to compare it with past first Newspolls for state Opposition Leaders.  Pre-2015 state Newspolls outside of campaign periods were aggregates taken from two or three months of polling (similar to Resolve now).  The most notable things in the new Newspoll are firstly Jacinta Allan's terrible -42 net satisfaction and secondly Wilson's 47-33 lead as Better Premier.  Allan's rating is nearly the worst for a Premier in Newspoll history (only John Cain and Anna Bligh at net -43 have been below it).  The only new Opposition Leaders who had not previously led their parties to jump to comparable leads in their first poll were Dean Brown in SA (19% lead) and Campbell Newman in Queensland (12%), and those were polls taken over longer periods.  Both went on to win elections.  

Frequently new Opposition Leaders are slow to get on the board as Better Premier because they are still building their profile.  On this basis a 14% lead after only a few days looks stellar, but because we don't often see such a quick poll after a change, we need to see more over coming weeks and months to be sure this isn't just some instant sugar hit for changing leader against a disliked government.  The other thing that was surprising here was Wilson's personal ratings at 33% satisfied 31% dissatisfied - the latter seems like a high figure for a new Opposition Leader who is also a first termer.  

History suggests it doesn't really matter if state Oppositions are a mess through their term so long as they can get their act together by election day.  The classic case was the WA Liberals in the 2005-8 term where after churning through four leadership changes in a term they had no-one left but to go back to Colin Barnett who had lost the previous election.  Barnett was however able to win (very narrowly).  

Heading into election year 2026 both sides in Victoria have reason to be nervous.  Labor has a Premier way underwater by historic standards and the government will be twelve years old and federally dragged.  The Coalition however faces federal brand damage, the splintering of the right-wing vote and the possibility that federal drag is not going to be such a big thing - as well as its own form for chaos. 

DemosAU: Liberals Increase Lead Ahead Of Budget

DemosAU: Lib 41 Labor 24 Green 15 IND 14 SFF 2 others 4
Liberals would be re-elected in minority, probably gaining one seat

A surprise DemosAU Tasmanian state poll has appeared.  The government will be grinning with a 17 point primary vote lead.  If there is a hostile reception to the coming interim Budget then the grin might not last too long.  That said, there have been some advance signs that the medicine won't be too harsh.  

This poll was self-initiated (not commissioned by anyone) and taken from Oct 16-27 with a sample size of 1021.  DemosAU scrubbed up pretty well in the state election, though not as well as EMRS.  They did significantly underestimate the Liberal primary and, like all pollsters, overestimate Independents, but their overall read of Labor's poor prospects in particular was on the money and their individual candidate breakdowns were very handy (for more detail on that see here). 

The Independent reading in this poll is noticeably lower than the c.19% readings seen before the election.  It's possible the use of both 2025 state and federal election voting as weightings will have toned down any impact of an overengaged sample on the previously over-polled independent vote, but I don't think that's the main reason why independent votes get overestimated in Tasmania anyway.  Rather I think some voters are looking for an independent but at state level never find the right one.  If that's so, this poll might be taken as pointing to some softening in independent support.  The August EMRS had found no such softening; the November EMRS will be interesting in this regard.

False Declaration: Minor Right Nonsense About Senate Reform

Huge if true, but ...

Recently my attention was drawn to an article on the Canberra Declaration website by one Dave Pellowe.  Pellowe is better known for being on the receiving end of a later dropped 2024 Queensland anti-discrimination complaint over comments he made about Indigenous religious beliefs while explaining why he would not include a Welcome to Country in a Christian religious event.  (I'm vaguely curious about what exactly he said, as my home state has a long history of potentially interesting complaints like this being made then almost always dropped - but not curious enough yet to find it.)  The Canberra/Daily Declaration site was better known to me through the involvement of one Julie Sladden, an anti-COVID-vaccine retired doctor and right-wing culture warrior who was bizarrely endorsed by the Tasmanian Liberals for not one but two state elections.  

I'm not sure I'd come across Pellowe talking nonsense about Senate voting before but this is not the first time he's done it.  His Twitter bio reads "Solomon prayed: Give me an understanding heart so that I can (steward democracy) well & know the difference between right and wrong. 1 Kings 3:9".  I hope that he will see this article and realise that having an "understanding heart" to "steward democracy" requires understanding the facts and consulting reliable sources rather than just former UAP and One Nation figure Lex Stewart.  Stewart and Pellowe have been making very similar complaints about Senate reform and the 2016 election, and they're both wrong.