Every time there is an election I see the following points made about preferences, I don’t think they are helpful and I’ll explain why.

The resignation of Richard DiNatale from the Senate and need for the preselection of a replacement prompted me to go back and reconsider the 2018 Victorian state election results as it seemed that some unsuccessful candidates there might be candidates for the Senate seat.
As it turned out I got sidetracked and didn’t finish the post until the preselection was over and won by Lidia Thorpe.

The basic story of the election was the the Greens lost a lot of seats, and some have used that so suggest a big loss of electoral support for the Greens, however a look at the percentages does not support this idea, so a more nuanced view is required.

This is not an attempt to paint it as some sort of good result, there was a decline in vote and the Greens failed to turn their gains in 2014 into an increase in vote. However there is some important context. A strategy of trying to win lower house seats has generally been successful and may have come at the cost of upper house seats, and furthermore Group Voting Tickets and preference deals put the Greens at a disadvantage in the upper house.

In the leadup to the 2019 Federal Election there was quite a bit of talk of strategic voting. At the time I wanted to write about it but was a bit busy, now that I do have time it’s no longer of much interest but at least I’ll have it here ready for when it does come around again.
Since it was mostly discussed in terms of supporting conservative independents to defeat Liberals then I will use this situation to give concrete examples, however the same principles can apply in any appropriate circumstances regardless of the parties involved.

It looks like the Coalition government is going to have a narrow majority and I have already seen calls for a double dissolution (DD) election. I remember that this sort of thing started up after the Coalition won in 2013, and I never quite saw why people wanted it. It seemed to just be code for “new election now” but also with some sort of magical expectation that it would give them the result they want ie. not a coalition government. In reality, there is no reason why a new election soon after the last one should give a substantially different result.
In fact, now that we’ve had a DD election in recent memory I thought this sort of thing would stop, but it hasn’t.
There is no reason to expect a DD, this would have to be called by the Liberals because they think there is an advantage in it, and they would need a trigger so it’s not happening until well into the term anyway. I think a lot of times people are thinking more along the lines of the Whitlam dismissal but there were very particular circumstances there.

It also seems to be prompted by the small majority in the house, however, Labor a long way from the numbers to form Government, if the Liberals did lose any members to court challenges (e.g. in Chisolm) or defections or by-elections, then they would still have the support at least half of the cross bench. Even if they did lose that support, there is no reason to expect a DD election.

Anyway, despite all this, I thought I would have a look at another reason why a DD is not an attractive proposition – what would the senate look like?

I’m seeing a lot of claims that Labor lost because Clive Palmer spent lots of money to get votes from Labor which he then handed to the LNP as preferences. I do not think this is a good summary of what actually happened.