Victoria’s contest of preferences 

Victoria’s November election is set to be one of the most interesting state elections in decades. Redbridge and other polls in the garden state currently have Labor, the Coalition and One Nation evenly split on primary votes at around 26% each, indicating a genuine three-way contest.

There’s been much talk domestically and abroad that One Nation could lead the country and that Pauline Hanson could even become Prime Minister. However – despite what popular polls suggest, or sporadic state seat wins indicate – the notion is entirely specious. David Farley just won One Nation’s first federal lower house seat in 30 years in the Farrer by-election, but one run is far from the 76 seats required to take office.

What these polls suggest is a genuinely open field for new alliances or informal coalitions on or before election day. Rather than a straight Labor or Liberal win, forming government in Victoria may require an agreement to form a minority government with any number of independents and One Nation MPs. This may be unusual in Australia, but it’s the norm in many European countries where no single party ever gets enough seats to form government in its own right. I’ll let you judge whether that’s a better or worse outcome, but it’s a real possibility. 

What is certain in Victoria is that Labor is in serious trouble, the Liberals are not in a winning position, and One Nation is surging yet still a long way from anything close to forming government.

The contest will be on preferences. Deals will be done based on who supports who for a second preference vote. Ultimately, it’s the punters who choose where their vote goes and flows, even if party suggested ‘How-to-Vote’ card preferences make a big difference.

Preference flows are imperfect; not everyone follows the ‘How-to-Vote’ cards. Election Analyst Emeritus Antony Green’s analysis of One Nation preferences since its inception reveals more recent voter preferences flowing to the Liberals at about a 75% rate where they recommend a second preference. This will make a huge difference in fiercely contested, close-call seats. It will have a much bigger impact on Labor seats, which makes sense given the Liberals and One Nation are fighting for mostly the same conservative voters. Even where One Nation didn’t support a second preference to the Liberals, the latter remained the beneficiary of 65% of the preference flows – and that’s significant.

While there have been three-way contests on a seat-by-seat and state-by-state basis between the Labor, Liberal and the National Party (and others, in some seats), it’s much rarer at the federal level. 

Federally, the only sustained three-way party competition occurred during the Federation period from 1901 to 1909, when the Australian Labour Party (before it adopted the spelling Labor) contested elections against the Protectionist Party and the Free Trade Party (renamed the Anti-Socialist Party in 1906). The 1909 merger of the Anti-Socialists and most Protectionists into the Commonwealth Liberal Party – the “Fusion”- largely ended this three-party alignment and laid the foundations for the Labor-versus-non-Labor two-bloc system that has broadly defined federal politics ever since.

Queensland, however, has had a couple of three-way contests. The first was between 1980 and the 2000s when the National Party ruled under a skewed gerrymander voting system. This created genuine three-way contests between the major parties but ended in 2008 with the conservative merger that created the Liberal National Party (LNP) of today.

Queensland’s 1998 state election is even more relevant in today’s context. A fledgling One Nation Party won 11 state seats, Labor won 44 – one seat short of a majority – and the Coalition won 32. One Nation finished second in a further 23 seats. This was achieved on the back of a 23% primary vote – similar to today’s polling.

Labor only reached its outright majority of 45 a few months later, after winning a by-election in Mulgrave in December 1998, triggered when the sitting One Nation member resigned just four months into his term.

While One Nation’s fortunes have varied since then, it has survived – and lately thrived – despite Pauline Hanson’s absence in Federal Parliament until she was elected to the Upper House in 2016 as a Queensland Senator.

The real test for One Nation in Victoria is converting populism into polling support; polling support into votes; and votes into seats. This is no easy task. However, it has two advantages – a conservative-aligned preference flow and its current momentum – so perhaps a clever, well-funded campaign could see a repeat of the 1998 Queensland result.

The final composition of the Victorian Government, both lower and upper houses, is anyone’s guess right now, but I venture a view that a lot of seats will change hands. The contest to form government has the potential to be very different from the status quo and could become a launch pad for a federal assault by One Nation. This would play directly into its leader’s ambition of becoming Prime Minister – however remote the possibility.

Victorian voters are between a rock and hard place: They want to vent their anger at Labor after its three terms in government, but the alternative is a still-limp Liberal Party too focused on internal matters and unable to provide a vision of a better Victoria.

Victoria is the canary in the coal mine. For the Labor and Liberal parties, it’s a challenge to see if there’s space for three major parties alongside the Greens and independents. This battle will be the staging ground for voters who are no longer afraid of who is running their state. It will be less of a contest of ideas and more a contest of preferences between the conservative voter base against Labor and the Greens fighting for the rest.