Right-wing fringe parties and unique voting laws may dash Coalition’s chances in NSW

The teal independent phenomenon claimed four of the state’s House of Representatives seats at the federal election last May, and continues to loom large in assessments of the Coalition’s chances of an against-the-odds win in NSW on March 25.

However, the focus on the Liberal Party’s difficulties in affluent harbourside and northern beaches seats tends to overlook the equal pressures it faces at the other end of the political spectrum.

The cause of right-wing minor parties has been boosted across the board in recent years by the rise of populist politics and online conspiracism. But the problem for the Coalition in NSW specifically has been exacerbated by its responsibility as the party in government for managing the COVID pandemic.

From a right-wing perspective, the government is further encumbered by an image of pragmatic moderation personified by NSW Treasurer and Deputy Liberal Leader Matt Kean, who has become scarcely less of a hate figure on the right than anyone from Labor or the Greens.

The resulting complications at the election include the entry of the anti-vaxxer Informed Medical Options Party and an array of right-wing competitors in the upper house, among whom are high-profile Christian conservative Lyle Shelton and former federal Liberal MP Craig Kelly, who have helpfully drawn Group A and Group B on the expansive ballot paper.

Above all, there is One Nation, to which Mark Latham as state party leader has brought a tactical nous that hasn’t always been the party’s strong suit. One Nation is running candidates in only 17 of the 93 lower house seats, but it has smartly chosen to concentrate its energies in mining areas and the outer suburbs — the latter bringing it into contact with at least four of the election’s key seats.

By contrast, it has opted to sit out the federal byelection for the Melbourne seat of Aston on April 1 in what Pauline Hanson describes as a “strategic decision not to take votes away from the Coalition” — seemingly sending the message that it will play favourites with the Liberal Party of Peter Dutton, but not the Liberal Party of Matt Kean.

Such considerations are normally blunted by preferential voting, but NSW stands as an exception as the one jurisdiction where voters are not compelled to number every box.

The implications of this are laid out in sumptuous detail in an analysis of ballot paper data from the 2019 state election by the ABC’s Antony Green. It shows that even Greens voters, with their distinct sense of Labor as the lesser of the available evils, allowed their preferences to exhaust 40% of the time, which provides all the explanation you need as to why Labor governments knocked optional preferential voting on the head in Queensland and the Northern Territory.

By the same token, optional preferential voting can play to the Liberals’ advantage only in seats where they face pressure from teal independents, preferences having been crucial to their successes federally.

However, exhaustion rates for the Greens are left in the shade by those of minor parties of the right, whose supporters are largely motivated by a desire to thumb their noses at an establishment broadly defined. Nowhere is this truer than for One Nation, which led the pack in 2019 with an exhaustion rate of 70%, the remainder flowing 18% to the Coalition and 10% to Labor.

Given the 64-36 split of One Nation preferences under full preferential voting at the federal election, this amounts to a penalty to the Coalition of at least 2% after preferences where One Nation polls 10%, which it can reasonably expect to do in the seats it has chosen to contest.

This alone could account for a negligible Liberal margin in Penrith and have a decisive impact when combined with an expected Labor swing in Parramatta — losses that could prove fatal in the context of an election where polls suggest the Coalition can hope for little more than a tenuous hold on a minority government.