Antony Green's Election Blog

Should 'Liberal' and 'Labor' be Quarantined as Political Party Names?

This morning's Sydney Morning Herald and The Age report that the government is considering changing the Electoral Act to quarantine the names 'Liberal' and 'Labor' to prevent minor parties piggybacking on the long established name recognition of the major parties.

The move is a reaction to the success of the Liberal Democrats at the 2013 NSW Senate election, when the party drew the first column on the ballot paper and polled 9.5%, putting at risk the election of third placed Liberal Senator Arthur Sinodinos.

Average Swings at Federal By-elections 1983-2013

Since 1983, the average swing against the government of the day in by-elections that finished as two-party contests has been 5.1 percentage points. The average swing against first term governments was a smaller 1.7 percentage points. The swing has been against the government at six of the eight first term two-party by-elections held since 1983.

2013 Federal Election Offcuts

Recently I was writing a book chapter on the 2013 Federal election results. As always happens, paragraphs you have carefully constructed need to be sacrificed to fit within the specified word limit, and to permit the retention of more substantial parts of the chapter.

Thankfully, blogs are a useful place to publish article off cuts, so here are some spare thoughts on the results of the 2013 Federal election.

Timing and Causes of Federal By-elections 1992-2014

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Bronwyn Bishop, has today issued writs for a by-election to be held in the inner-Brisbane seat of Griffith. Polling day for the by-election will be 8 February and the by-election has been caused by the resignation of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

You can read my background on the Griffith by-election and candidates via this link.

The table below shows the timing of all House of Represenatives by-elections since 1992. Had the Griffith by-election not been called today, it would have created the longest gap between vacancy and by-election in the last two decades. At 78 days, the period of vacancy for Griffith is slightly shorter than the 80 days for Gippsland (2008) and 81 days for Aston (2001).

The Remarkable Path to Victory of Wayne Dropulich

The most astonishing result of the 2013 Australian election was the extra-ordinary election of Wayne Dropulich of the Australian Sports Party in the Western Australia Senate.

With a first preference vote for his party of just 0.23%, it took an astonshing sequence of exclusions and preference flows to allow Mr Dropulich to increase his vote more than fifty fold to reach the quota of 14.3%. He was elected to fill the fifth seat ahead of the Greens who had polled 9.5% of the first preference vote.

At this stage whether Mr Dropulich will take his Senate seat depends on proceedings before the Court of Disputed Returns. The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has petitioned the Court to void the result and order a new election for the WA Senate.

As will be outlined below, Mr Dropulich was initially defeated on the distribution of preferences performed after the initially tally of all first preferences. After the AEC permitted a re-count, Mr Dropulich was elected on the distribution of preferences that followed the completion of the second count.

However, 1,370 ballot papers could not be located for the re-count and these were not included in the second count and distribution of preferences. If the tally of the missing votes from the first count were added to the second count, the result would change again, with a critical one vote difference at a crucial point in the count resulting in Mr Dropulich failing to be elected.

Having been duly declared elected, Mr Dropulich is entitled to be sworn in as a Senator on 1 July if the Court has not decided the matter before then, or if the Court chooses to let the second count excluding the missing votes stand. If the Court orders a fresh election, Mr Dropulich would no longer be entitled to his Senate seat. If the Court does not issue orders for a fresh election until after 1 July, Mr Dropulich would be entitled to hold his seat until a judgment is given.

What was remarkable about Mr Dropulich's victory was how a party that finished 21st out of the 27 parties on the ballot paper managed to get elected. Of the 20 parties that contributed ticket votes to his quota for election, 15 polled more votes than the Australian Sports Party.

The path by which Mr Dropulich passed those 15 parties and gained their preferences was perilous. At three points in the count Mr Dropulich was the second lowest polling candidate remaining, and on each occasion he picked up preferences from the excluded candidate that allowed him remain in the count by avoiding last place.

Comparative Rules on Registering Political Parties

In my last post I illustrated the surge in party regsistrations that took place ahead of the 2013 election. (You can read the post here.)

Today comes news that the Palmer United Party has applied for registration to contest the 2014 Tasmanian election. In a process used only in Tasmania, the names and addresses of the 100 members on whom the party is relying for registration have been published in today's Tasmanian Government Gazette. (You can find the details here.)

So I thought it worth highlighting some of the differences between the Commonwealth, State and Territory registration procedures. The table below is taken from Annex 8 of the Rudd government's 'Electoral Reform Green paper: Strengthening Australia's Democracy'. It was published in September 2009 so there may have been changes to rules in some states.

I've included details under three headings, on the membership requirements, registration review process and requirements for party constitutions.

The Growth in the Number of Registered Political Parties

Despite political parties having been integral to the nation's politics since Federation, it was not until 1984 that party names first appeared on national ballot papers.

From 1901 to 1983, the full names of candidates were listed in alphabetic order with no party affiliation. One of the oddities of this was that candidates seemed to be disproportionately drawn from names that began with letters in the first half of the alphabet. The Democratic Labor Party had a wonderful ability to find candidates whose name started with 'A' or 'B', so ensuring they headed the ballot paper and gained the advantage of the donkey vote.

The suite of changes introduced before the 1984 election included a random draw for position on the ballot paper to eliminate alphabetic bias in candidate nomination; to allow candidates to have their known name rather than full name on the ballot paper; and the inclusion of party names on ballot papers.

(Random column draw had already been introduced for the Senate in 1940 after the famous Labor 'four A's' ticket in NSW at the 1937 Senate election, nominating candidates Amour, Armstrong, Arthur and Ashley to ensure the party received the first column on the ballot paper.)

The Disappearance of Three-Cornered Contests at Federal Elections

A little commented upon feature of recent Federal elections has been the disappearance of three cornered contests, those classic Australian electoral contests between competing Labor, Liberal and National Party candidates.

Despite a long history of three-cornered contests in rural seats, and the adoption of preferential voting to permit such contests, recent Federal elections have seen their number decline to single digits.

Preference Flows at the 2013 Federal Election

The AEC has now finalised the election count, which has allowed it to release the data on preference flows at the 2013 election.

This data looks at the final destination of preferences between Labor and the Coalition candidates for each of the minor parties. The overall data is summarised in the table below.

Minor Party Preference Flow Data - 2013 and 2010 Elections Compared

	2013 Preferences			2001 Preferences
Party	% Vote	% to ALP	% to L/NP	% Vote	% to ALP	% to L/NP
Greens	8.65	83.03	16.97	11.76	78.84	21.16
Palmer United	5.49	46.33	53.67	..	..	..
Others	6.93	46.97	53.03	6.64	41.74	58.26
Total	21.07	61.61	38.39	18.40	65.46	34.54

Overall the percentage Green vote fell compared to 2010, but preferences from Green voters flowed more strongly to Labor. Labor also received a greater proportion of preferences from non-Green minor party and Independent voters in 2013, but as the vote for these parties and candidates almost doubled, this led to an overall decline in the flow of preferences to Labor.

Average Candidates Per Vacancy at Federal Elections 1949-2013

The 2013 Federal election saw a record number of candidates nominate in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

There were 1,188 candidates contesting 150 electorates in the House, an average of 7.9 candidates per contested vacancy. The previous record numbers were 1,106 candidates in 148 seats at the 1998 election, an average of 7.5 candidates per contested vacancy.

The increase in Senate candidates was even more dramatic, a total of 529 candidates contesting 40 Senate seats, an average of 13.2 candidates per vacancy. The previous record was 367 candidates and an average of 9.2 at the 2007 election.

The record for the number of Senate candidates was broken in every state at the 2010  election.

The graph below shows how the averages have increased since 1949.