Attacks on Australia's preferential voting system are ludicrous. We can be proud of it

The Guardian

17-05-2025

The Coalition's lopsided defeat in the 2025 federal election has been followed by a new round of attacks on preferential voting. No longer do anti-preferencing campaigners have the excuse that Labor 'lost' the primary vote, with Labor currently 2.6% ahead. Nor can they say preferences won Labor the election, with Labor leading the primary vote in 86 of 150 seats.
The latest complaint is just the scale of Coalition casualties. The Coalition will win at most 44 seats (29.3%) off a primary vote of about 32%. This will be the first time since 1987 that the Coalition parties' seat share has been substantially below their primary vote.
An article in The Australian on Tuesday bemoaned the defeats of past Coalition frontbenchers (including Peter Dutton and Josh Frydenberg) and supposed future frontbenchers (Amelia Hamer and Ro Knox) who had topped the primary vote in their seats but lost after preferences. David Tanner said 15 seats at the 2025 election (including 13 Coalition defeats) 'would have had a different winner had a first-past-the-post voting system been in place'. The Australian Financial Review mounted a similar argument on Wednesday.
This, however, assumes voters would have voted the same way and parties made the same campaign decisions if Australia had first-past-the-post. I cannot overstate how unsound this underlying assumption is. In seats where the Greens are uncompetitive, many Greens supporters would vote Labor to ensure their votes helped beat the Coalition. Preferential voting is one of the reasons why the Greens maintain much higher vote shares in Australia than the US, UK and Canada.
Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email
Furthermore, parties would make tactical choices about where to run to avoid losing seats through vote-splitting. An example of this came in the 2024 French elections. The far-right National Rally polled the highest primary vote in the first round of a runoff system. In many seats the leftwing NFP and centrist Ensemble alliances both qualified for the runoff round, but one or the other withdrew to avoid splitting the anti-National Rally vote. In the second round, the National Rally topped the popular vote by 11.2% but won fewer seats than either NFP or Ensemble. Such withdrawal pacts have far greater impacts on results than Australian how to vote cards (which hardly any minor party voters follow anyway), so the idea that scrapping preferences would stop 'backroom deals' between parties is naive.
Removing preferences would probably have changed very few seat outcomes at recent elections, at a massive and grossly unfair cost to the ability of those not supporting major parties to effectively say what they are really thinking at the ballot box. There are also some Coalition wins (at this election, Longman) that could be lost under first-past-the-post, because minor right party voters would be less willing to vote strategically than minor left party voters.
In recent years I have seen some supporters of minor right parties opposing preferences too, claiming that preferences are a 'uniparty' plot against the little guys. Preferences were actually introduced by the conservative parties in 1918 to stop Labor from scoring undeserved wins in three-cornered contests. In the past 35 years of federal, state and territory elections, preferences have been almost nine times more likely to help non-major-party candidates beat the majors than the other way around.
Sign up to Breaking News Australia
Get the most important news as it breaks
after newsletter promotion
In the 2025 election at least five independents and one Greens candidate have beaten major parties from behind, while Adam Bandt is the only non-major-party candidate to lose after leading on primary votes. It is baffling that anyone who opposes major party domination would want a system that renders voting for minor parties pointless. If voters for minor right parties want to see their parties win more seats they should support proportional representation.
Anti-preferencers, as I call them, also claim the UK system is the global norm. Actually just a few dozen countries use it alone to elect their lower houses. Most protect minority voting rights in some way – proportional representation, runoff voting, mixed systems or preferences. We should be proud of the way all voters get a say at all stages of our counts and not seek to import failed and primitive methods from countries that have not overcome their roadblocks to electoral reform.
Kevin Bonham is an independent electoral and polling analyst and an electoral studies and scientific research consultant