Category: Electoral reform

Resolve Strategic: Labor 27, Coalition 27, One Nation 22 in Victoria

Polling continues to point to a three-way contest in Victoria, as the government finally prepares to abolish group voting tickets for the upper house.

Resolve Strategic is publishing monthly Victorian state poll results for The Age ahead of the election in November, padding out the sample in its regular national polling and inquiring about state as well as federal voting intention. The latest result finds Labor and the Coalition remaining tied on the primary vote, with both up a point by 27%, while One Nation are down two to 22% and the Greens are steady on 12%. Jess Wilson’s lead over Jacinta Allan on preferred premier shifts from 39-20 to 43-24. The poll was conducted last Tuesday to Saturday from a sample of 1000.

There is also a report in the Herald Sun on a 6500 sample poll conducted for Trades Hall by RedBridge Group which has One Nation on 27%, Labor and the Coalition each on 26% and the Greens on 12%. The polling “includes low, median and high scenarios for seats likely to be obtained by each party, and Labor is understood to be able to scrape across the line with its number of seats in the mid-40s on a ‘high’ sensitivity scenario – but could fall into the 20s under the ‘low’ scenario”.

There was a major development over the weekend with reports the government will shortly legislate to abolish group voting tickets for the Legislative Council, which it has taken a confoundingly long time to get around to despite the urgings of a parliamentary committee inquiry in December. The reports are scarce on details, beyond that fact that the reforms follow other jurisdictions in allowing above-the-line voters to number multiple preferences, rather than voting for a single party and accepting its full nominated preference order. The existing system helped two parties win seats from less than 1% of the vote in 2018, and has recently encouraged a rash of registration applications by parties plainly devised with the intention of harvesting preferences. Antony Green noted a fortnight ago that the Victorian Electoral Commission has advised a bill would need to be passed at the next sitting of parliament later this month to take effect in time for the election.

UPDATE: Further results from the poll show 70% support for a royal commission into corruption in the building industry, which Jacinta Allan is resisting, with 6% opposed.

Freshwater Strategy: Labor 23, Coalition 27, One Nation 25 in Victoria

A new Victorian state poll finds Labor running third and 62% backing Jacinta Allan being replaced before the November election.

The Herald Sun has a Freshwater Strategy poll of state voting intention in Victoria that has Labor sinking four points from the last such poll in March to 23%, the Coalition down three to 27%, and One Nation up five to 25%. The report does not provide a result for the Greens, but the Coalition is credited with a 53-47 two-party preferred.

Jess Wilson’s lead over Jacinta Allan as preferred premier has blown out from 47-31 to 49-25, an unusually wide lead for an Opposition Leader over an incumbent. Allan’s net approval rating is down from minus 32 to minus 37, while Wilson’s is down from plus 18 to plus 15. Sixty-two per cent favoured dumping Allan before the November election, including 39% among Labor voters. The poll was conducted between Friday and today from a sample of 1034 – there are a few missing threads, so hopefully we will be hearing more from the print edition or directly from the pollster. I believe we will also see a Resolve Strategic bi-monthly state poll result from Nine Newspapers next week.

Other Victorian electoral news:

• A bill to re-establish a campaign finance regime was passed last week, after the relevant parts of the Electoral Act were struck down wholesale by the High Court in April. The bill restores various aspects of the old system, though not the one that prompted the court ruling, namely the exemption of the major parties’ investment funds from a $4950 cap on political donations over a four-year electoral cycle. It increases the cap to $7500, and also increases annual “administrative expenditure” funding (as distinct from the public election funding based on how many votes a party or candidate receives) from a maximum $1.775 million to $2.765 million. The donation cap is doubled for new candidates and parties and set at a transitional $10,000 for the current cycle. The Greens argued the donation cap down from $10,000 in agreeing to a deal with Labor that froze out the Coalition, who wanted it much higher. The Liberals are particularly aggrieved because the High Court ruling has cut them off from a major source of their funding.

• Merri-bek councillor Katerine Theodosis is Labor’s candidate to succeed the retiring Danny Pearson in Essendon. The Australian’s Victoria Ink column reported in late April that Theodosis was assured of the backing of the national executive after winning the support of the Right faction Australian Workers Union, and that the resulting fait accompli was inflaming resentment among local members already aggrieved by the circumstances in which Jo Briskey succeeded Bill Shorten in the federal seat of Maribyrnong. Pearson appeared to associate himself with Daniel White, a former staffer to Bill Shorten and rival aspirant for the AWU’s support.

• Labor’s new candidate for South Barwon is Rebecca Thistleton, a former Australian Financial Review journalist and state government media adviser who ran unsuccessfully in Melbourne in 2022. The seat’s incumbent is Darren Cheeseman, who was required to resign from the Labor party room in April 2024. Elsewhere, the difficult task of defending a 0.4% margin in Pakenham upon the retirement of Emma Vulin falls to Alessandra Soliven, a 23-year-old Philippines-born former electorate officer and Australian Services Union organiser; and a 0.3% margin in neighbouring Bass will be defended by Chris Buckingham, a gender equity training facilitator with Gippsland Women’s Health, following the retirement of Jordan Crugnale.

• Labor’s candidate for Brunswick is Gabriel Steger, an adviser to federal Cooper MP Ged Kearney, whom the Brunswick Voice reports was preselected unopposed. The seat will be vacated with the retirement of two-term Greens member Tim Read, and as with other Greens-held seats, it will be easier for Labor to win if the Liberals revert to putting the Greens last on their how-to-vote cards, a practice they departed from in 2022.

• The Liberal candidate for Ashwood is former Monash councillor Theo Zographos, who was cast aside in favour of the late Katie Allen as the party’s candidate for the federal seat of Chisholm after Allan’s former seat of Higgins was abolished. Other Liberal candidates for Labor-held seats include Paul Byrnes, a public service legal officer and former staffer to Matthew Bach and Mary Wooldridge, in Eltham; Clare Fitzmaurice, policy adviser to federal MP Anne Webster, in Monbulk; Bass Coast mayor Rochelle Halstead in Bass; David Kitchen, finance manager for a food processing company, in Bayswater; Steve Martin, an engineering manager who ran for the federal seat of Indi in 2019, in Benambra; and Max Williams, owner of a boutique communications consultancy, in Rowville.

• There have been recent retirement announcements from Tim Bull of the Nationals after 16 years as member for Gippsland East, and Gary Maas of Labor after eight years in Narre Warren South.

• The Australian’s Victoria Ink column reports Merri-bek councillor and former mayor Oscar Yildiz, who polled 23.5% as an independent in Pascoe Vale in 2018, is “preparing to launch an independent bid for Essendon”.

• One Nation is yet to announce any candidates, but has declared itself intent on contesting every seat.

Queensland: Resolve poll, Hinchinbrook by-election, electoral reforms

Positive signs for Steven Miles in a poll, negative ones at a by-election, and new laws relaxing restrictions on political donations and tightening ones on prisoners voting.

The Brisbane Times reports state voting intention results from Resolve Strategic for Queensland, which are seemingly being published bi-monthly now, combining the Queensland samples from two of the pollster’s monthly national surveys. This series has lately been reporting what might be thought a surprisingly encouraging result for Labor, given the Hinchinbrook by-election result (on which more below): the Liberal National Party is on 33% (steady), Labor 30% (down two), the Greens 11% (up one) and One Nation 9% (steady). David Crisafulli’s “net likeability” is down a point to plus 16, while Steven Miles’ maintains an improving trend in increasing seven points to plus 5. Crisafulli lead as preferred premier narrows sharply from 39-22 to 35-34. The report says the sample was 869, but a note under the accompanying graphic says 803.

The count for the Hinchinbrook by-election has been concluded, with Wayde Chiesa of the Liberal National Party prevailing over Mark Molachino of Katter’s Australian Party by a margin of 3.7%, a swing to the LNP of 16.9% compared with the October 2024 election result. The LNP primary vote was up 13.0% to 41.2%, with the KAP down 16.3% to 30.1% and Labor down 5.7% to 8.4%.

In further Queensland news, Attorney-General Deb Frecklington announced yesterday that the government would introduce electoral law legislation, which would not at this stage encompass the promised return to optional preferential voting. It proposes:

• Winding back the ban on property developer donations introduced by Labor in 2018 so it applies only to local government elections. Such had been the recommendation of the Crime and Corruption Commission in 2017, but the previous government extended the ban to state elections.

• Quadrupling donation caps presently amounting to around $4800 to a party and $7200 to a candidate by having them apply over a financial year rather than a four-year period.

• Extending the disqualification on prisoners voting from those serving terms of three years or more to one year or more. This is interesting in that an attempt by the Howard government to extend the existing three-year disqualification at federal level to all prisoners regardless of their sentence was overturned by the High Court in the case of Roach v Electoral Commissioner (2007).

• Removing the requirement for the Electoral Commission of Queensland to oversee preselection ballots, which in the estimation of the Courier-Mail “applies uniquely to the LNP as Labor directly appoints candidates through its union-based factions”.

Too much money business

A deep dive into campaign finance reform legislation, federally and in South Australia.

The federal government’s proposed changes to campaign finance laws, to take effect in 2026, passed through the House of Representatives on Wednesday with the support of the Coalition and the opposition of the cross-bench. It will shortly come before the Senate, where the Coalition plans to move amendments to increase proposed spending caps and disclosure thresholds. Katina Curtis of The West Australian reports Labor maintains suspicions that the Coalition “might string talks along but backflip at the last minute for pure politics”, and is duly “keeping its options open” for a late deal with the cross-bench. In the absence of such a deal, Curtis further notes that amendments to the regime will assuredly feature in post-election horse trading in the event of a hung parliament.

That the 227-page bill looks set to proceed swiftly to enactment without a parliamentary inquiry has drawn criticism from constitutional law expert Anne Twomey and former NSW Supreme Court judge Anthony Whealy, the former concluding that the High Court will likely “end up doing the job instead”. At issue is the doctrine of implied constitutional freedom of political communication, by which the court disallowed the Hawke-Keating government’s attempt to ban political advertising in the electronic media, and more recently caps on third party spending in New South Wales. Twomey perceives two potential difficulties: that the spending caps are “so high that it undoes their aim”, and would make it difficult to establish that the laws serve a legitimate purpose justifying limitations on political communication; and that the bill’s provisions, as noted below, tend to favour parties over independents and incumbents over challengers.

The main provisions of the bill are as follows:

• What Graeme Orr of the University of Queensland describes as “the headline the government wants us to focus on” is that federal electoral donations will be capped at $20,000 per donor per year, increasing to $40,000 in election years, with individual donors allowed to donate no more than $640,000 in total. However, this is calculated at the level of the state or territory branch, such that an enterprising donor could contribute $720,000 to a party over a three-year term, plus extra for by-election campaigns. Joo-Cheong Tham of the University of Melbourne law schools notes loopholes include exemptions for union affiliation fees to Labor (uncapped, unlike similar laws in New South Wales) – and, “most significantly”, a failure to apply to donations made by candidates to their parties, which would seemingly amount to ongoing carte blanche for Clive Palmer.

• Caps on spending set at $90 million for general party spending and $800,000 for individual electorate campaigns. As proof against a legal challenge, this would barely clip Clive Palmer’s wings: his party spent $83 million on its 2019 campaign onslaught, and $70 million in 2022. The latter is an issue for the teals, whose campaign spends in some cases exceeded $2 million, which explains the Coalition’s enthusiasm for the package. Katina Curtis of The West Australian notes that spending caps are fair enough to the extent that “limiting donations without limiting spending heavily advantages people who have their own wealth and don’t have to pass the hat around”. However, the two distinct caps mean that parties trying to see off independents will be able to match their local campaign spend, and trump it by targeting the electorate with further spending that doesn’t mention their candidate, or mentions them alongside Senate candidates. Caps can also encourage third-party spending, which has reached its apotheosis with the “super PACs” that dominate election campaigning in the United States.

• The threshold for public disclosure of donations, which the Howard government hiked from $1500 to an indexed $10,000, will be cut from $16,900 to $1000. The Libeals are continuing to grumble about this, arguing that small businesses will feel too intimidated to donate to them. The bill will also dispense with the notoriously lax requirement that disclosures be made only twice yearly, henceforth to be monthly, then weekly during the campaign period, then daily in the week before and after election day.

• The public funding that currently allocates $3.35 per vote to candidates who exceed 4% will have the rate increased to $5. There will further be administrative funding amounting to $30,000 per lower house member and $15,000 per Senator, advantaging incumbents over challengers.

Meanwhile, the South Australian government last week introduced legislation to ban nearly all political donations and fill the gap with public funding, a move that has attracted the interest of The Economist. It may also yet attract the interest of the High Court, with Peter Malinauskas conceding the “challenging” task of drafting the legislation around the objections that might arise.

RedBridge Group: 50-50 in Victoria

More evidence of declining support for state Labor in Victoria; a parliamentary inquiry recommends abolishing group voting tickets for the upper house, among many other things; and teal candidates threaten a legal challenge against campaign finance laws.

The Herald Sun reports a RedBridge Group poll of Victorian state voting intention has Labor and the Coalition tied on two-party preferred, after the last such poll in June had Labor ahead 55-45. The primary votes are Labor 31% (down four), Coalition 40% (up two) and Greens 12% (down two). The poll was conducted July 23 to August 1 from a sample of 1514. (UPDATE: Full report here).

Two further items of Victorian state electoral news:

• The parliament’s Electoral Matters Committee has produced a report into the 2022 election that makes particularly interesting reading after an election conducted amid an unusually febrile atmosphere. It offers a remarkably thorough program of recommendations, including abolishing group voting tickets for the Legislative Council, as has been done everywhere else; addressing the increasing in inappropriate behaviour at voting centres; introducing truth-in-advertising laws; and tightening the election timeline so that nominations close earlier, early voting begins later, and the electoral roll is closed on the day the writs are issued (which the High Court disallowed when the Howard government tried it, but that was without Victoria’s scheme of election day enrolment). The report also recommends further inquiries into transferring certain responsibilities of the VEC, such as enforcing electoral law, to other bodies; reforming the Legislative Council system to counter-balance the likely impact of abolishing group voting tickets on small party representation; and modernising the Electoral Act through a “holistic review”.

• Josh Gordon of The Age reports unsuccessful teal candidate from the November 2022 election are threatening a High Court challenge against the government’s campaign finance laws, arguing they advantaged established parties and violated the implied constitutional right to political communication. Sophie Torney, Melissa Lowe, Nomi Kaltmann and Kate Lardner, who were unsuccessful in their respective bids for Kew, Hawthorn, Caulfield and Mornington, have alerted the government to concerns over a “nominated entity exception” to donations caps, allowing Labor to receive $3.1 million from its Labor Services and Holdings entity and the Liberals to receive $2.5 million from its Cormack Foundation. Donations from entities set up after 2018 were capped at $4320 over the course of a four-year parliamentary term.

Weekend miscellany: NSW by-elections, Fatima Payman polling, electoral reform, preselections (open thread)

A second NSW state by-election looms in a traditionally safe Liberal seat; a mixed bag of polling concerning Fatima Payman; and the government gears up for long-delayed electoral law reforms.

Newspoll should be along from The Australian this evening if it follows its usual three-weekly pattern, and we’re also about due for a Freshwater Strategy poll overnight from the Financial Review. For the time being, there’s the following electorally relevant news from the past week:

• Former New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet announced his resignation from parliament on Friday to take up a position as US head of corporate and external relations for BHP. This will necessitate a by-election for his safe northern Sydney seat of Epping, presumably to be held concurrently with that for former Treasurer Matt Kean’s nearby seat of Hornsby.

• Nine Newspapers reports further numbers from last week’s Resolve Strategic poll showing 41% believe Fatima Payman should relinquish her seat to a new Labor Senator, compared with 29% who support her course of remaining as an independent. However, 54% believe Labor should allow caucus members more freedom to vote in parliament as they wish, with only 16% holding the contrary view.

• It has been widely reported that the government will introduce a package of electoral reform legislation next month, although Michelle Grattan of The Conversation reports it will not include the blockbuster proposal to increase the number of territory Senators, which has failed to find support, and is unlikely to be in place in time for the next election. What will be featured are truth-in-advertising laws on the South Australian model; a reduction of the threshold for public disclosure of donations from the current $16,900 to $1000, together with much stricter time frames for disclosure, reducing to daily at the business end of the campaign period; and a system of spending caps limiting the amount that can be spent on campaigning in any given electorate to $1 million. The latter is most obviously targeted at Clive Palmer, but teal independents have complained of their potential to hinder crowd-funded campaigns against major party incumbents, with Monique Ryan and Allegra Spender’s respective campaign spends in Kooyong and Wentworth at the 2022 election each having exceed $2 million.

Federal preselection news:

• Warren Entsch has confirmed he will not recontest the far north Queensland seat of Leichhardt, which he has held as a Liberal for all but one term since 1996. The Australian reports Labor’s candidate is Matt Smith, former professional basketballer turned Together Union organiser, who was preselected unopposed last week.

• Deloitte director Madonna Jarrett will again be Labor’s candidate for the seat of Brisbane, which Stephen Bates won for the Greens from the Liberal National Party in 2022.

• Jack Dietsch of The West Australian reports that Liberal preselection contests loom for the Labor-held Perth seats of Swan and Hasluck, both of which were won by Labor in 2022, with respective margins of 9.6% AND 10.7% under the proposed new boundaries. The candidates in Swan are Nick Marvin, former chief executive of the Perth Wildcats basketball and Western Force rugby league clubs; Matthew Evans, an army veteran who now works for Mineral Resources; and Mic Fels, a grains farmer. The candidates in Hasluck are Philip Couper, a contracts and procurement consultant and former adviser to state One Nation MLC Colin Ticknell; David Goode, a Gosnells councillor; and Ashutosh Kumar, a credit assessor at Westpac. Pearce, which was gained in 2022 and has a margin of 9.1% on the proposed new boundaries, and Cowan, which Anne Aly has held for Labor since 2016 with a new margin of 9.7%, have each attracted one candidate: respectively, Jan Norberger, who held the state seat of Joondalup from 2013 to 2017, and Felicia Adeniyi, manager at St Luke’s GP Medical.

• Jack Dietsch of The West Australian reports Labor has preselected the top three candidates for its Western Australian Senate ticket: Ellie Whiteaker, the party’s state secretary, who is aligned to the Left faction Australian Manufacturing Workers Union; Varun Ghosh, a Right-aligned former barrister who filled the vacancy created by Pat Dodson’s retirement in February; and Deep Singh, a staffer to Cowan MP Anne Aly aligned with the Left faction United Workers Union. The party’s two members elected in 2019 to terms that will expire in the middle of next year were the aforementioned Pat Dodson and Left-aligned Louise Pratt, who announced in February that she would not seek re-election.

Weekend miscellany: Senate preselections, electoral reform latest and more (open thread)

Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes dumped to an unwinnable position on the Coalition’s New South Wales ticket, and a return of talk about extra territory Senators.

The big electoral news for the week was the publication on Friday of proposed new federal boundaries for Victoria and Western Australia, which you can read all about on the dedicated post. Other than that:

• New South Wales Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes was dumped to fourth position on the Coalition ticket after running third in a Liberal preselection vote last weekend, the third position on the ticket being reserved to the Nationals. The top places will go to moderate incumbent Andrew Bragg and conservative challenger Jess Collins, who earlier ran unsuccessfully for preselection in North Sydney and for Marise Payne’s Senate vacancy. Hughes is part of the struggling centre right faction, but had endorsement from Peter Dutton, Jacinta Price and Michaelia Cash, while Collins was endorsed by Angus Taylor and Joe Hockey. Linda Silmalis of the Daily Telegraph reports that “while the right were claiming a major win, the left claimed it was the result of a larger and less factional state council”. A distribution sheet showed Bragg scored 196 votes in the first round of voting to 146 for Collins, 145 for Hughes and 51 for also-ran Lincoln Parker, which became a 191 to 167 vote win for Collins over Hughes after distribution of Parker’s votes and Bragg’s 16-vote surplus.

• The second position on Labor’s Queensland Senate ticket appears set to go to Corrine Mulholland, in-house lobbyist at Star casinos and the party’s candidate for Petrie in 2022. This follows the withdrawal of her two mooted rivals, former state minister Kate Jones and former Townsville mayor Jenny Hill. Jones had been backed by Left faction heavyweight Gary Bullock in a scheme that would have overturned a convention that the top two positions be shared between the Left, whose incumbent Nita Green will lead the ticket, and the Right, which is backing Mulholland.

• The West Australian reports preselection runner-up Howard Ong, IT consultant and former Australian Christian Lobby activist, has been confirmed as the new Liberal candidate for Tangney following the withdrawal of the initial winner, Mark Wales.

• Special Minister of State Don Farrell told Senate estimates on Thursday that the government had been seeking a cross-party deal on electoral reform that included doubling the number of Senators for the two territories, and that legislation could be expected “soon”. The government also hopes to introduce truth-in-advertising laws and real-time disclosure of campaign donations of greater than $10,000.

• I belatedly observe that Nine Newspapers’ report on Resolve Strategic’s quarterly state breakdowns includes data for Western Australia and South Australia for four sets of quarterly aggregations over the last year, where normally the pollster’s breakdowns are only for the three larger states.

Monday miscellany: Coalition Senate preselections, campaign finance reforms (open thread)

An emerging conservative ascendancy in the South Australian Liberal Party finds expression in a Senate preselection boilover.

We’re entering the final week of the Tasmanian election campaign, with a hotly contested by-election for the South Australian state seat of Dunstan to be held the same day. On the federal polling front though, it’s likely to be a quiet week. There is the following federally relevant electoral news to relate:

• Arch-conservative South Australian Liberal Senator Alex Antic, who was elected in 2019 from third position on the party ticket, will be the lead candidate after a preselection vote on Saturday that will reduce fellow incumbents Anne Ruston from first to second and David Fawcett from second to third. Paul Starick of The Advertiser reports Antic won the ballot for top position ahead of Ruston by 108 votes to 98. This was despite Ruston’s greater seniority within the parliamentary party as Shadow Health Minister, and Peter Dutton reportedly “using his personal authority” to protect her. A conservative challenger, Leah Blyth, lost to Ruston by 118 votes to 82 in a vote for second position and to Fawcett by 106 to 103 in the vote for third.

• New South Wales Nationals Senator Perin Davey, who made headlines last month after a tired and emotional performance at Senate estimates, narrowly survived a preselection challenge at a party ballot held on March 8. Andrew Clennell of Sky News reports Davey scored 42 votes against 37 for Juliana McArthur, the party’s federal secretary.

• Liberal sources cited by Paul Starick of The Advertiser say Nicolle Flint has been declaring interest in returning to the Adelaide seat of Boothby, which Labor won when she vacated it in 2022. Flint “appears to have effectively ruled out” a run for the state seat of MacKillop, which it was long thought she was planning in pursuit of leadership ambitions.

• It was reported last week that Labor is developing legislation to place caps on political donations, to be balanced by greater public funding. This would be most consequential with respect to Clive Palmer, whose company Mineralogy gave $117 million to his United Australia Party before the last election, and businessman Mike Cannon-Brookes, who donated $1.2 million to Climate 200. The cap is “likely to be in the tens of thousands of dollars”, with the government concerned it be able to survive the kind of High Court challenge that Palmer says he is “absolutely considering”. It is also proposed that a cap be imposed on the amount that can be spent on campaigning in any given electorate, which teals and the Greens complain would disproportionately affect those who target small numbers of the seats. Any changes would not take effect until after the next election.

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