Who preferences who, and who cares?

Every federal election there are a handful of stories which we see time and again, the only thing separating them being the parties and candidates involved. Corflute shenanigans are an example of this: stories about corflutes being vandalised, stolen or posted unlawfully are as numerous as the signs.

I did a quick search on the National Library’s Trove database and found this amusing clipping from The Courier-Mail about the 1935 Queensland state election:

Two election signs erected at West End in support of Mr F. T. Cross, C.P.N. [Country and Progressive National Party] candidate for Kurilpa, were mutilated by vandals on Thursday night. Both were slashed to ribbons, and in each case a section bearing the words “For Clean Politics” were cut away and removed.

[…]

Later in the day, Mr. Cross’s campaign committee erected a supplementary sign below the damaged one bearing the inscription, “Do you call this decency in politics?”

The Courier-Mail (11 May 1935) ‘Election Signs Mutilated: Vandalism at West End’. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article36771423

“Corflute” was registered as a trademark in 1970, so Mr Cross’s cross sign vandal would have been contending with something easier to shred. The vandal got the last laugh: Incumbent Mr P. K. Copley of the Labor Party won on primary votes.

Dual citizenship stories also crop up every now and then as candidates (or perhaps their opponents) rummage through family trees and discover they’re ineligible to sit in federal parliament under section 44 of the Constitution. As it happens I was in the second year of my journalism degree when a whole spate of these stories came out in 2017, and I feel blessed to have been able to live through that extremely funny period of Australian politics – and the high court will so hold.

Corflute stories will exist for as long as corrugated plastic, cable ties, scissors and sharpies are permitted to co-exist; as will section 44 stories until the constitution is amended to remove it – in other words, until the heat death of the universe.

But there’s one kind of story which should go, or at least needs a bit of paring back, and that’s the how-to-vote card stories.

In federal elections, we elect members to the House of Representatives using preferential voting – in the US they called this ranked-choice voting, it’s also called instant-runoff voting in other countries. In the system we use for the House of Representatives, you must number every single box in order of preference, otherwise your vote is informal and doesn’t count. When I vote, I usually get down to my fourth candidate before my bemused indifference compels me to number the boxes randomly.

In case you’re not familiar with the jargon, the primary vote is what election-heads and pollsters refer to as the party you ranked number one on your ballot paper. The two-party preferred vote refers to which of the two major parties (Liberal/National or Labor) you ranked higher on your ballot paper. In some seats they call it a two-candidate preferred vote because one of the two leading candidates is not from a major party (usually these are seats where the Greens are competing against Labor, or an independent is competing against either Liberal/National or Labor).

Because of this, candidates and parties issue how-to-vote cards outside polling stations and online. These leaflets include a snapshot of the party or candidate’s priorities, a happy snap of the candidate, and a mock-up of the ballot paper with some suggestions on how people should vote. This is what the media and election-heads mean when they talk about parties “directing their preferences”.

The ABC’s (outgoing) Chief Election Analyst Antony Green has published an outstanding article on his blog explaining why how-to-vote cards exist in Australia and not so much elsewhere. In short, it’s because voting is compulsory, and because our voting system is unusually complicated, particularly the compulsory preferencing.

The problem is the media puts just a bit too much emphasis on these how-to-vote cards and the preference deals associated with them.

Take this story from ABC’s 7.30 program about the contest between incumbent Climate 200 backed independent Monique Ryan and Liberal candidate Amelia Hamer for the seat of Kooyong. One of the issues they investigated and questioned Hamer on was the fact that Libertarian Party candidate Richard Peppard was ranked number two on her how-to-vote-card for the House of Representatives and number three for the Senate. Incidentally the matter of corflutes also came up in this story, but I’ll defend that inclusion because I consider that kind of sideshow to be a well-deserved little treat for the well-worn voter.

On the other end of the political spectrum, The Australian has been doing quite a bit of reporting this week over the Labor Party putting The Greens in the number two spot on their how-to-vote cards. Indeed, the story of the left-wing major party recommending preferences towards the largest left-wing minor party made the front page of the national broadsheet two days in a row this week. As if Greens voters need to be told to preference Labor above Liberal.

The Greens returned that favour by putting Anthony Albanese in the number three spot on their how to vote card in Grayndler, and by putting Labor in number six.

My first objection to these stories is that preferences are up to the voter. Preference swapping and preference deals were a legitimate matter for scrutiny and debate prior to the electoral reforms of 2016. Before those reforms, you either had to number dozens upon dozens of boxes below the line if you wanted to control where your Senate preferences went, or you could mark a single box above the line and that party would essentially fill out the ballot paper for you. This flawed system got Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party Senator Ricky Muir a spot on the crossbench with only 0.51% of the primary vote, and the Daylight Savings Party a spot in the WA Legislative Council with only 0.2% of the primary vote in a region of the state (Mining and Pastoral, which is pretty much everywhere north of Kalbarri) which voted 66% against daylight savings in 2009.

But when it comes to federal elections and almost every state election, those days are over. Your preferences are between you and your ballot paper, leaving preference whisperer Glenn Druery none the wiser.

Second, the fixation on small minor parties is misplaced. The Libertarian Party (then called the Liberal Democratic Party) got 1.1% of the primary vote in Kooyong in 2022. While it’s true that Ryan got in on preferences – she got 40.3% of the primary vote to Liberal Josh Frydenberg’s 42.7%; after preferences she got 52.9% of the two-candidate preferred vote, a margin of 6,035 votes. Looking at the two-candidate preferred preference flows, 316 LDP votes went to Monique Ryan and 764 went to Liberal. Compare that to The Greens (5,656 to Ryan, 1,435 to Liberal) and the ALP (5,656 to Ryan, 1,435 to Liberal).

The upshot of the figures number is that for a party as small as the Libertarians (which pulled 1.7% of the national House of Representatives primary vote in 2022), stories about preference flows rarely amount to anything more than a gotcha based on the vibe of the party in the eyes of the reporter. I would be very surprised if any seats in the House of Representatives turned on the preferences of Libertarian voters, and even more surprised if they won a seat. The Senate is another story, and that sixth Victorian seat will end up being a lottery as it tends to be, but again, preferences are up to voters.

Sidenote: My grandfather apparently found it most amusing if a candidate got so few votes that they lost their deposit. Rest in peace, Gordon.

The same can’t be said for The Greens, which has grown into Australia’s leading minor party. In the last election, 85.7% of Greens preferences went to Labor, making their primary votes the single largest source of preferences for Labor both as a percentage and in raw votes. Again, I doubt Greens voters require guidance from the party when deciding whether to preference Labor ahead of Liberal. There is only one other political party which has a more one-sided preference flow, and that’s Liberal Party voters preferencing – get this – the Liberal/National Coalition.

These stories are a fun little gotcha for politics enthusiasts and party insiders. But they don’t help to inform voters. Every election is an opportunity for voters to decide what they want their country to look like in three years time. Heck, with the right policies and vision, voters could be deciding on what kind of Australia we’ll be in 10 or 20 years. A segment on 7.30 is valuable real estate for voters, as is a newspaper front page, and that space could be used to press candidates and leaders on what they want to do if they get to the treasury benches or hold the balance of power, and what vision they have for the future of this great nation.

Instead, that space is taken up by the party hacks trying to get one over an opponent.

This article was written in a personal capacity, and the views expressed here should not be taken as the views of any other organisation or individual.