Will Labor preferences deliver a teal or two? Time to crunch some numbers

The 2022 federal election is effectively under way, with more than 50,000 completed postal votes already signed, sealed and delivered since the Australian Electoral Commission started sending out ballot papers last week.

Among other things, this has meant crunch time for the parties’ preference deals — and, as always, a lot of accompanying sound and fury that doesn’t always signify much.

In truth, the subject has become a lot less interesting since the Turnbull government abolished group voting tickets for the Senate in 2016, before which 95% of voters signed on their party’s full preference order by voting above the line.

When liberated from the need to grind through dozens of individual candidates to lodge an independently determined formal vote — never an issue in the lower house, and now also unnecessary in the Senate — most voters have proved capable of making up their own minds.

This runs contrary to yesterday’s claim by Greg Sheridan in The Australian that teal independents threaten to achieve democratically illegitimate wins off preferences from Labor and the Greens, who “print how-to-vote cards that most of their voters follow automatically”.

In fact, Senate ballot paper data from the 2019 election show that fewer than one in five Labor voters numbered the six boxes in the order recommended by the how-to-vote card.

While adherence rates are higher in the lower house — about 40% for Labor, according to ballot paper studies conducted in decades past — it seems intuitively likely that the affluent and educated voters who dominate the seats targeted by the teal independents will be least disposed to seek guidance from how-to-vote cards.

It’s true that these contests seem finely balanced enough that Labor’s preference directions could potentially swing a result, and Sheridan will surely not be the last conservative inspired to advocate for optional preferential voting. However, Greens how-to-vote cards are rather less likely to prove decisive, as demonstrated by the fact that Labor’s share of its preferences hardly budges from its usual 80% when the Greens try to punish it by telling voters to decide for themselves.

This points to the related fact that how-to-vote cards usually tell voters to do what they would have done anyway, at least so far as consequential decisions are concerned.

The latter qualification is significant, because quite a few column inches are spent each election on preference recommendations that are entirely academic.

This applies to Labor’s sneaky decision to put Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party ahead of the Greens in the central Queensland seats where it got savaged by the Adani backlash in 2019, in contrast to its general approach elsewhere of putting the party last but for One Nation.

Labor presumably hopes this will pass unnoticed in Western Australia, where Premier Mark McGowan has described an apparent deal between the Liberals and Palmer as “pretty low and pretty disgraceful”.

But whereas the UAP’s high placement on Liberal tickets everywhere except (wait for it) Western Australia could be of real value in its quest for Senate seats, Labor’s lower house preferences will be distributed only if its candidates fail to make the final count.

The party’s position in central Queensland is not weak enough for this to be likely — and even if it happens, results there will assuredly not hinge on who Labor has highest out of the UAP and the Greens.

Similarly, the “left-leaning” Liberal members One Nation is directing against to portray itself as above the partisan fray are conveniently in seats where the party is weakly supported and lacks the volunteers needed to distribute how-to-vote cards.

Certainly none are in Queensland, where the Liberal National Party has helpfully boosted Pauline Hanson’s Senate reelection bid by putting her second.

That this decision has passed all but unnoticed shows how far the Overton window has shifted since two decades ago, when Queensland’s Liberals and Nationals tore each other apart over whether to put her last.

William Bowe is conducting paid consultancy during the federal election campaign for Climate 200, which is helping fund independent candidates who support policies to promote renewable energy and mitigate climate change.