A lot of people would love to know how the electoral map would change if the parliament was expanded.
We’ve already been able to get some idea of what might happen by looking back at the historical experience from the 1948-49 and 1983-84 expansions. But the political system has changed since 1984, as has the map.
Ben was joined this week by Osmond Chiu, Per Capita research fellow and contributor editor for the Labor Left magazine Challenge, to discuss the factions of the Australian Labor Party.
Read Osmond’s 2020 piece in Jacobin on the history of Labor’s factions.
There has been a clear trend in recent federal polling – One Nation has been gaining ground, seemingly at the expense of the Coalition. We’ve now reached a point where One Nation are regularly polling in the mid-teens. If they were to achieve such an election result, it would be the highest vote share polled by a minor party in a federal election under the modern party system, in excess of the best results for the Greens or the Democrats.
The Electoral Matters Committee of the Victorian Parliament yesterday brought down the final report for their inquiry into Victoria’s upper house electoral system.
Ben was joined by Sarah Cameron from Griffith University, to discuss the results of the 2025 Australian Election Study, including Peter Dutton’s unpopularity, foreign policy, voter dealignment, and how the vote splits by gender, generation and whether people own their own home.
6:00 – Polls have just closed for the by-election for the state seat of Hinchinbrook in the north of Queensland.
I will be doing a few updates through the night and may decide to do a video for Instagram and Tiktok later tonight, but I don’t expect it to be the most intense election night.
If you’re looking for something to read while you wait for results to come in, you can check out my guide.
Ben was joined by Michael Evangelidis from GovConnex to discuss the factions of the Liberal Party of Australia – how fluid they are, how they work from the branch level to federal and state party rooms, and how the factions have changed in recent years.
Ben was joined by Frank Bongiorno and Chris Monnox to discuss the history of Australia’s federal parliament being expanded, in 1949 and 1984. We discuss the motivations for these changes, the positions taken by the parties and why it happened when it did. We also discuss efforts to break the ‘nexus’ which links the size of the House to the size of the Senate.
There has been a great deal of focus this week on the events of the Dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government, fifty years ago last Tuesday.
I have been particularly drawn to examining how the role of the Senate has changed since 1975, but also throughout the history of the federation. Changes in electoral systems, the size of the Parliament and a fragmenting party system has produced a Senate quite different to the one that blocked supply in 1975.
Today’s post is the latest chapter in my series analysing the history of previous parliamentary expansions at a federal level. In my last post, I analysed how the pendulum changed during the 1948 redistribution. For this post, I am going to look at how MPs responded to this new map, which seats were left without a sitting MP at the subsequent election, and how the swing varied depending on whether an MP ran for the seat.