#middling preference

This Saturday, 3 May 2025, is federal election day in Australia. If you are unsure who all these parties are on your ballot, I’m here for you. I’ve reviewed all parties registered with the Australian Electoral Commission except for the most widely known ones: Labor, Greens, and the Liberal/National coalition parties. I have also reviewed the teal independents, a couple of unregistered parties who are endorsing independent candidacies, and two independent Senate candidates in Western Australia.

What you will find below: an index to all my reviews, a classification of parties by broad categories of recommendation, recommendations of other sites reviewing the parties, and some voting tips and advice. It should be obvious but these are my personal views and should not be construed as reflecting those of my employer or anyone else. I write from a left-wing perspective sympathetic to democratic socialism and green politics, mixed economies and urbanism. If you have even halfway similar political perspectives to me, I hope this might be useful. Please feel free to share with anybody whom you think will also be interested.

Index to all my reviews for 2025

Read the list below as: party name (ideology / where running). For the locations, a plain state abbreviation means the party is running a Senate ticket in this state; check with the AEC here to see if they also have a candidate in your electorate of the House of Representatives. A state abbreviation with an asterisk (*) indicates that in this state, the party is running only for an electorate or electorates in the House of Representatives; again, check the AEC here to see if it is yours. In some instances, though, I have listed the specific seat.

Animal Justice Party (animal rights / all states + ACT)

Australia First, who are unregistered (neo-Nazi scum / Division of Lindsay)

Australian Christians (Christian fundamentalism / NSW, WA)

Australian Citizens Party (conspiracy theorists / all states + NT)

Australian Democrats (centre-left / NSW*, QLD, VIC, WA)

Australia’s Voice (centre-left / NSW, QLD, SA, VIC, WA)

Centre Alliance (centrism / Division of Mayo)

Dai Le and Frank Carbone W.S.C. (centre-right / Division of Fowler)

David Pocock (green social liberalism / ACT)

Family First (Christian fundamentalism / ACT*, NSW, QLD, SA, VIC)

FUSION | Planet Rescue | Whistleblower Protection | Innovation (centre-left-ish hodgepodge / NSW, QLD, SA, VIC, WA)

Gerard Rennick People First (far-right cult of personality / NSW, QLD, SA, VIC, WA)

Good Party, who are unregistered (centre-left / Divisions of Kingsford-Smith and Page)

Great Australian Party (sovereign citizens / QLD, WA)

Health Environment Accountability Rights Transparency (HEART) (antivax far-right woo / ACT, NSW, QLD, VIC)

Indigenous–Aboriginal Party of Australia (Indigenous rights / NSW, NT*, QLD, VIC, WA*)

Jacqui Lambie Network (centre-right cult of personality / NSW, QLD, SA, TAS)

Katter’s Australian Party (right-wing cult of personality / QLD)

Legalise Cannabis Australia (single issue / all states + NT)

Libertarian Party (far-right libertarianism / all states and territories)

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (xenophobic far-right populism / all states + NT)

Shooters, Fishers, and Farmers (anti-environmentalist gun nuts / NSW*, TAS, VIC)

Socialist Alliance (socialism / NSW, QLD, VIC*, WA)

Socialist Equality Party, who are unregistered (antisocial socialism for cantankerous people / NSW as Group B, VIC as Group G, and indies in seats of Calwell, Newcastle, Oxley)

Sustainable Australia–Universal Basic Income (anti-immigration NIMBYs / all states and territories)

Teal independents (centrism / assortment of lower-house seats in all states and territories)

Trumpet of Patriots (lunar right / all states)

Ungrouped independent candidates for the Senate in WA (right-wing or plain odd personalities who should receive a low preference)

Victorian Socialists (socialism / VIC)

Classification of all parties by broad category of recommendation

At the end of each review is a recommendation of how positively or negatively you should preference each party. Let’s see how all the parties have shaken out. Within each category, I am presenting parties alphabetically rather than suggesting an order for your preferences. I have written a separate entry on how I decide the ranking of unpalatable parties.

Good preference: David Pocock, Indigenous–Aboriginal Party of Australia, Socialist Alliance, Victorian Socialists

The parties above have a positive overall platform that has few or no significant flaws for the left-wing voter.

Decent to good preference: Australian Democrats; Australia’s Voice

The parties above have a positive overall platform, but I have minor reservations.

Decent preference: Animal Justice Party, Good Party, teal independents

The parties (or independents) above have a generally positive overall platform, but I have reservations.

Middling preference: Centre Alliance, Legalise Cannabis

The parties above have a balance of positive and negative qualities, or a decent platform undermined by a notably terrible policy or characteristic.

Note on Legalise Cannabis: middling is a generalisation as candidate quality varies. In Victoria, for instance, give Fiona Patten (lead Senate candidate) a decent to good preference; in Queensland, give Belinda Jones (lead Senate candidate) a weak preference.

Weak to middling preference: Dai Le & Frank Carbone W.S.C., Fusion Party, Jacqui Lambie Network, Socialist Equality Party, Sustainable Australia

The parties above are problematic, but better than what comes below.

Weak or no preference: Australia First, Australian Christians, Australian Citizens Party, Family First, Gerard Rennick People First, Great Australian Party, HEART, Katter’s Australian Party, Libertarian Party, One Nation, Shooters, Trumpet of Patriots

The parties above have more negatives than positives (usually many more!). In the House of Representatives, where you must give full preferences, put these parties as low as possible. In the Senate, I recommend you do likewise to maximise the potential power of your vote; but I recognise that some of you prefer not to express preferences between varying gradations of undesirability or prefer not to rank the most odious parties.

Other good reviewers

For further opinions, b_auspol has reviewed parties and independents contesting NSW, Kevin Bonham has summarised those contesting Tasmania, Notionoriety has concise left-wing overviews for QLD, NSW, and VIC, Anthony Zougras has overviews of all registered parties (more concise than me, less than Notionoriety), and Something for Cate is very comprehensive, with a Victorian emphasis, continuing the tradition of much-missed Cate Speaks.

Voting tips and advice

When you go to vote, you will receive two ballots. The smaller green one is for the House of Representatives, the lower house; whichever party/ies command a majority on the floor of the House forms government. You must number EVERY SQUARE on the small green ballot for the House. Many seats have independent candidates; make sure you look into them as they vary substantially in their platforms and competence.

The larger white ballot is for the Senate, the upper house. This is the house of review. We are voting for roughly half the Senate, as state senators serve six-year terms. This means each state elects six senators, requiring 14.3% of the vote to be elected; each territory elects just two (who serve terms aligned with the House), requiring 33.3% of the vote to be elected. On the Senate ballot you can vote above the line for PARTIES or below the line for INDIVIDUALS. Above the line you must give at least six preferences; below the line you must give at least twelve; beyond this point, you can do what you like. You can stop preferencing entirely or you give as many more preferences as you want. I strongly recommend you preference as far as possible because this increases the potential power of your vote.

If you want something more visual (and humorous), Patrick Alexander has two handy cartoon explainers: you can’t waste your vote for the House of Representatives and what’s the go with voting for the Senate?

If you want to vote below the line in the Senate, you can make your own custom how-to-vote card using Cluey Voter. It is the only site of which I am aware that allows you to construct a below-the-line vote (Donkey Votie and Build a Ballot can only make above-the-line cards). Print it off and take it into the booth with you! And do you need to find your nearest democracy sausage or cake stall? This website has you covered.

Running where: five states for the Senate (not TAS), plus a smattering of House seats across four states (not TAS or WA)

Prior reviews: federal 2022 (which links to my past reviews of most constituent parties), VIC 2022

For newly allied party Australian Progressives, see: federal 2016, federal 2019, federal 2022

What I said before: “It’s not as left-wing as some, it emphasises pragmatic reaction rather than ideological ambition, and some of the policies are clearly a little underdone in trying to reconcile five platforms, but most of their positions contain worthwhile goals.”

What I think this year: This is the longest review I’ve ever written, so if nobody sticks with me to the end then I understand. It’s also a much more negative review than in previous editions. This might surprise some readers, including a couple that I know have volunteered for Fusion before. But the more I worked my way through Fusion's materials, the more I came to dislike this party. The heavy use of images that are quite clearly from generative Artificial Intelligence made matters worse: superficial soulless visuals for a superficial soulless party.

Fusion coalesced in 2022 after Australia’s lax party registration laws were tightened. Its original name was FUSION: Science, Pirate, Secular, Climate Emergency, which embodied the names or main focus of the broadly centrist and left-wing parties that had joined forces. These parties retain an independent existence with individual websites, though these also direct the reader to the main Fusion site. The name has been updated to articulate some core principles of this union, or fusion if you will. As I have said before, putting party positions or slogans in the registered name looks ridiculous.

Earlier this year, Fusion formed an alliance with two extra parties. One, the Australian Progressives, is not too objectionable, although I hadn’t realised they still existed. They have gone from being broadly centre-left in their presentation to pitching themselves as not “‘left’ or ‘right’—we’re about moving forward, ie. PROGRESS”. They describe themselves as motivated by “evidence, not ideology”, which makes them a good fit with Fusion (I’ll discuss that claim more below), and state that they sit in the “sensible centre”, a phrase almost invariably used by people who are neither sensible nor in the centre (usually well to the right).

The other partnership that Fusion established is incredibly, unbelievably stupid. They have welcomed into their camp Democracy First, a decidedly right-wing anti-migrant vehicle of serial candidate Vern Hughes. Yes, the Vern Hughes. This is shockingly bad and raises serious questions about the judgement of Fusion's leadership. Hughes has belonged to more parties than you’ve had hot dinners in the last week: by my count, he has stood as a candidate for at least eight groupings, promoted numerous extra parties that never attained registration, and his most recent outing was in 2022 for the lunar-right Australian Federation Party (now the Trumpet of Patriots). Democracy First is openly Trumpian—they have a 12-point platform (more a rant) to “drain the swamp in Canberra”—and it is an unwelcome inclusion in the Fusion fold.

Democracy First worked through a bunch of monikers before settling on the current name, including Sensible Centre (that phrase again!). Their Twitter handle is still @sensiblecentre_ and I had to make a thread in September 2021 warning people to pre-emptively block them because they were searching keywords and aggressively trolling people and peddling anti-vax “plandemic” nonsense. Whether it was Hughes or not (and I won’t be surprised if it was him), it was and is discrediting to the group. Hughes is a self-interested crank whose ideology and principles are flexible, but flexibly right-wing. If he is presenting himself to Fusion as having had some revelation to disown far-right positions, more fool them; the bloke has long since proven himself disreputable.

What all this means is that if you have a Fusion candidate in your House division or Fusion is running a Senate ticket in your state, the people involved could believe in anything from techbro futurism, urgent climate action, or “sensible centre” right-wing aggression. This significant variation in approach and priorities means that you should look up the people standing for Fusion on your ballot because you might find yourself more or less favourably disposed towards them than the party as a whole.

I’m now going to turn to the policies and principles that the party has posted on the main Fusion website. Before I launch into my criticisms, let me note key things that I like: the emphasis on whistleblower protections, the promotion of university teaching and research, the strong emphasis on combatting climate change and restoring damaged environments, and many of the digital privacy policies inherited from the Pirate Party. I do, though, wonder if the Pirate movement’s time has passed: I agree that copyright and intellectual property laws need reform, but perhaps in different ways now that we need to protect authors and artists from AI companies who unethically use and even steal material to train their lake-draining hallucination machines (which, as I noted above, this party seems quite happy to use for illustrations rather than photos and art by real people).

Fusion articulate both a set of values and separate principles. They spent a shocking amount of words, including some diagrams, to say not much at all. Both pages are laden with buzzwords that can basically mean whatever you want them to mean, although some of the discussion of values is useful, e.g. that their approach to personal liberty is one of “maximum net freedom”, where one individual’s freedom to act can be restricted justifiably if it limits the freedom of others. The principles page is tedious jargon that reads like the sort of emails many of us would have received from senior managers who use fancy language to express banalities.

Two major conceits animate Fusion. First, they have a frankly naïve fantasy that they can bring together divergent political interests (e.g. greener-than-Green environmentalists and Democracy First right-wingers) to achieve something despite their disagreements. Second, they believe they can do this because they are uniquely focused on evidence, not ideology. These are the sort of people who think “ideological” and “evidence-based” politics are polar opposites.

In reality, all political actors are ideological, and to deny this is either ignorant or dishonest. It is akin to people who claim they do not speak with an accent, only people from other places have accents. Leo Puglisi interviewed Miles Whiticker (NSW lead Senate candidate) and raised this topic. Whiticker defended the party as not taking a “zealous theory-driven position” that is pursued whatever the evidence might be. He defines being centrist as having the attitude that “if the theory clashes with the evidence, we are more likely to support the evidence than the theory”, which is absolutely not what centrism is and basically everyone at every position on the political spectrum believes they follow the evidence.

(also, yes, I keep using interviews from 6 News because Leo is doing the lord’s work for political nerds everywhere, conducting detailed interviews with politicians beyond the major parties)

Let’s turn now to a specific policy: Fusion’s housing policy is a mess. It is a total mess. You are not prepared for how much of a mess this is. Most of Fusion’s policy pages are brief, with bullet points and short paragraphs. The housing policy reads as someone’s passion project and it runs to 10,700 words. The average person is not reading nearly 11,000 words from a party they’ve never heard of, even if they’re good words. And these are not good words. The main proposals revolve around tinkering with taxes. There are a bunch of proposals for much greater government intervention in the rental sector through apps and transparency websites that veer into micromanagement, running counter to Fusion’s own “our party” page that suggests if you support mandated regulatory approaches you’d prefer the Greens. Fusion’s rental proposals would be much more invasive and meddlesome than anything the Greens propose to reform the sector.

The policy jumps all over the show. For instance, it favourably cites NIMBY economist and former Sustainable Australia candidate Cameron Murray. For the purposes of this review, I asked a well-read YIMBY friend for his reaction if told a party was citing Murray favourably and he replied that it’s “almost certainly bad”. At the same time, however, the housing policy favourably refers to Auckland’s zoning reforms, which Murray has downplayed (to such an extent Stuart Donovan and Matthew Maltman absolutely savaged him in a piece reviewing the effects of Auckland’s zoning reforms last December). It’s a muddled assortment of ideas.

But the funniest part is the favourable inclusion of Saudi Arabia’s linear-city megaproject The Line, part of its larger Neom development. You’ve got to be huffing farts to think The Line is a good idea, but the best bit is the bumbling invocation of David Ricardo’s idea of comparative advantage. This concept, central to classical economics, states that countries should focus economic activity on specialisation in industries where they have the greatest efficiencies and lowest opportunity costs. Apparently, the comparative advantage of The Line is that it “will have the economic advantages of being in the desert, and having an uncharacteristic layout”. Is that the best you can do? The comparative advantage of being in the desert.

Another questionable policy is that Fusion wants to declare that ageing is a disease. They pitch this as promoting quality-of-life measures, not as a life-extension policy: if ageing is declared a disease, rather than a natural part of existence, they think this is the magic trick that will enable doctors to prescribe medications that have secondary anti-ageing effects to people who do not have the condition or problem the medication is primarily meant to treat. This has a host of questionable implications and potential for misuse. It’s all a bit silly: there are much better ways to promote quality-of-life measures and healthy ageing than to say the process itself is a disease. The strong whiff of techbro futurism that permeates the party makes me think this is really a policy for anti-ageing fans who think Bryan Johnson is something other than a muddle-headed weirdo.

I could pick on other aspects of their policies and principles but this is quite long enough and I don’t want to repeat the length of their housing policy. Although Fusion contains multitudes, much of it feels driven by the old Future/Science Party, which was very blinkered—the classic science bros who badly need at least a basic education in the humanities. If this is a party made for and by STEM bros, then you can consider me a HASS fellow.

Are there worse parties on the ballot? Yes, many. But they are straightforwardly terrible. Fusion had potential, and I was a fan of some of the parties that came together to form it. I’ve spent so much time on this review because Fusion sit much closer to the positions that I support than, say, Family First, and I think it’s worth articulating why—in 2025 at least—they do not represent a good option, especially not for left-wing voters.

(also, sorry Fusion bros, please don’t @ me: I’ve argued with some of you in DMs before about my reviews and it was very boring)

Recommendation: Give FUSION | Planet Rescue | Whistleblower Protection | Innovation a weak to middling preference. Some individuals might warrant a slightly better preference; any that are aligned with Democracy First should be ranked lowly indeed.

Website: https://www.fusionparty.org.au/

Running where: Senate in every state and the ACT, plus a smattering of House divisions in the ACT and five states (none in WA)

Prior reviews: federal 2013, VIC 2014, federal 2016, VIC 2018, NSW 2019, federal 2019, federal 2022, VIC 2022, NSW 2023, WA 2025

What I said before: “I’ll make this simple because nothing has changed. The Animal Justice Party promotes policies that support veganism and which oppose harm to all animals, including invasive species that wreak havoc on Australia’s ecosystem.” (WA 2025)

What I think this year: AJP’s placement in the alphabet means that I usually get to start my series of reviews in a very straightforward manner. They’re a stable part of the micro-party landscape with representation in the upper houses of the NSW and Victorian state parliaments, and at the time of writing they are in contention for the yet-to-be-declared 37th and final seat in WA’s upper house. (This entry will be edited once the WAEC announces the results sometime this week)

Indeed, the question this time around is whether I can highlight something about AJP that I have not noted before. My friend at b_auspol guided my attention to their housing policy, which has a classic left-wing slant in promoting more public housing and which speaks to a common YIMBY demand to “make zoning laws more flexible to allow for higher-density housing developments, and infill (the replacement of houses with higher density dwellings), near public transport and essential services”. As someone who is a big fan of dense, walkable cities that prioritise a choice of active and public transport modes, this goes down well for me.

This election, “The Animal Justice Party stands for Animals, People and the Planet” and they offer a 10-pillar platform that embodies their main priorities. Some pillars will be familiar to long-term micro-party enthusiasts. AJP retains their policy for “Veticare” to provide support for vet bills akin to Medicare, and their policies on animal cruelty are what you would expect (with my usual caveat that their promotion of only “non-lethal” forms of pest control is naïve, but other aspects are more reasonable). How much you like their proposals to “fix the food system” will depend on how much you support vegan/vegetarian diets and whether you think governments should promote a major reduction in meat consumption. It is, though, a bit more moderately phrased a dietary policy than in previous years, with the emphasis on increasing the daily intake of fruit and vegetables for the average Australian.

Other policies are conventional left-wing stuff, such as increasing taxation on big business, promoting a transition to clean energy, and more funding to prevent domestic violence and support victims. Honestly, some of the policies to reduce tax on ordinary people while making sure big business pays their way and can’t exploit loopholes could be bolder! And although the AJP’s policy about supporting victims of domestic violence to keep their pets might seem an extremely niche concern, the b_auspol review makes an important point: “one of the biggest predictors of danger to humans is if the abusive person threatens, injures or kills the family pets, and a lot of shelters don’t allow people to bring pets with them”. I have personal experience here to know how important this is, in what I saw when multiple friends' parents split acrimoniously while we were at school.

As an aside, I am mildly surprised AJP is not running any candidates for divisions of the House of Representatives in WA. I had an AJP candidate in my lower-house seat at last month’s state election, and they stood in ten other state seats.

Recommendation: Give the Animal Justice Party a middling to decent preference. Calibrate this recommendation in accordance with your views on eating meat and consuming other animal products. I am leaning decent this year; beyond my reservations about some aspects of their special interests, they are not a bad left-wing option.

I’ve already published one edition of the Blatantly Partisan Party Reviews for 2025, the WA state election; now, we turn to an even bigger electoral event, the Australian federal poll. A decade ago, with lax registration laws and the possibility of scoring a Senator off a minuscule vote thanks to the undemocratic distortions of Group Ticket Voting, a dizzying number of parties cluttered the ballot nationwide with misleading names and fringe platforms. Senate voting has now been reformed so that preferences only go where voters themselves direct them, and tighter enrolment laws have removed many chancers from the party register of the Australian Electoral Commission.

This year, I will be reviewing almost all parties contesting the election nationwide. I do not review Labor, the Liberal/National Coalition parties, or the Greens, because if you’re reading this blog you almost certainly know what you think about those parties. I have not yet decided if I will include One Nation in this edition. Otherwise, I am seeking to cover all registered parties who are fielding candidates, whether nationally or in just one state, and I will do my best to identify individuals standing nominally as independents but who represent an unregistered party. I will also cover independents contesting the Senate in Western Australia, where I live and vote; if I have time, I will cover any that catch my eye elsewhere (particularly Victoria, as I still think of Melbourne as “home”).

Time for my usual disclaimers: I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of a political party. I review from the perspective of a small-g green democratic socialist. I am trained and work as a political historian of Australia and New Zealand. This background guides my reviews, which originated as—and remain—notes to inform my own vote. I do not aim for any false neutrality or objectivity, and I share these remarks in the hope they are useful to others trying to navigate Australia’s plethora of micro-parties. It should be obvious but these are my personal opinions, which should not be construed as representing the views of my employer nor of any other organisation with which I am affiliated.

I am, of course, not alone in reviewing parties. Leading psephologist Kevin Bonham has already released his rundown of Tasmanian Senate candidates. The b_auspol blog will review the parties and independents that are contesting the Senate in NSW and, if the past is any guide, those reviews are certain to be smarter and more clear-eyed than mine. And Something for Cate is a blog continuing the thoughtful election-reviewing traditions of deeply-missed Catherine of Cate Speaks; it has been three years since we lost Cate and election season still feels empty without her, but I am so glad her legacy endures.

If you are unsure how to cast a ballot, Patrick Alexander has two handy explainers: you can’t waste your vote for the House of Representatives and what’s the go with voting for the Senate?

I will start posting reviews tomorrow. Early voting begins on Tuesday 22 April and I want to post as many reviews as possible by then. Each review concludes with a recommendation. Before I explain this, I should clarify that in the House of Representatives (small green ballot), you must number every square; in the Senate (large white ballot), you must number 1–6 above the line or 1–12 below the line, and then distribute further preferences if you want. I recommend giving full preferences in the Senate because failing to number all boxes weakens the power of your vote. The more preferences you give, the more powerful your vote is; it will stay in the count longer.

Here is my recommendation system for this year:

Good preference: a party with a positive overall platform that has few or no significant flaws for the left-wing voter.

Decent preference: a party with a generally positive overall platform but I have some reservations; or, a single-issue party with a good objective but by definition too limited in their scope to encompass the fullness of parliamentary business.

Middling preference: a party with a balance of positive and negative qualities, or a party with a decent platform undermined by a notably terrible policy or characteristic.

Weak or no preference: a party with more negatives than positives. In the House of Representatives, put these parties as low as possible. In the Senate, I recommend you do likewise to maximise the potential power of your vote; but I recognise that some of you prefer not to express preferences between varying gradations of undesirability or prefer not to rank the most odious parties.

This schema is flexible; I may, for instance, suggest a “middling to decent preference”.

A new state election, a new edition of this blog’s reviews! Hello everyone, it’s time to discover what weird micro-parties are cluttering the ballots in Australia’s western third. Let’s have some fun.

It’s my first state election since moving to WA, and I have come here at the right time: Labor won such a massive landslide in 2021 that it could take control of the Legislative Council (the upper house of parliament) and they introduced a much more democratic method of election. This year is the first election under the new system, where the state at large will elect the upper house, replacing a gerrymander that favoured WA’s most lightly populated regions. I’ll say more about this below.

Election day is Saturday, 8 March 2025. Early voting commences today, Monday 24 February. As usual I will not review the Liberals, the ALP, or the Greens, because I assume that if you are reading this blog you probably already have some idea about where those parties stand and how you feel about them. I will review every other party contesting the election, plus all the independents contesting the Legislative Council. For the first time ever, I will review the Nationals because of the distinctive nature of WA state politics (I normally do not review any members of the federal Coalition), and although I had previously sworn off reviewing One Nation after getting bored of writing the same thing about a party everybody knows just as well as they know the majors, this time I have something to say about them.

You will receive two ballots at the polling place. The smaller one is for your local seat in the Legislative Assembly, the lower house of parliament, where government is formed. The Legislative Assembly has 59 seats that each elect an individual member via full preferential instant runoff voting. This means that on the ballot for your local seat, you must number 1 for your first preference, and then number all the remaining squares in the order of your preference.

No matter what happens, your vote will shape the two-candidate-preferred outcome: it will either sit with the elected candidate, or with the last remaining unsuccessful candidate. This means you should think carefully about the order of all candidates: the final contest for the seat might come down to your two least favourite candidates, so who do you hate less? For instance, you might have a raging disdain for the Liberal Party—but there’s a good chance you despise far-right racist or religious fundamentalist parties even more.

As for the Legislative Council (the upper house, a house of review), it used to have 36 members: six elected from six regions. These were designed to favour rural WA so strongly that in 2021, 25% of the state elected half the members. In the three regions covering metropolitan Perth, a candidate needed about 52,000 votes to win a seat; by comparison, in the most sparsely populated region, Mining and Pastoral, a candidate needed just 7,010! Most Australasian parliaments have in the past had a “country quota” to give regional areas more seats than they are entitled on a population basis. WA clung to such a system for the longest. It effectively meant Labor could never win a majority in the upper house—until McGowan’s landslide in 2021. Labor was therefore able to enact democratic reforms that embody the principle of “one person, one vote, one value”.

So, at this election, WA will elect 37 members to the Legislative Council on a statewide basis. Your vote is worth just as much as any other voter anywhere in the state, and the only people mad about this are furious idiots in towns nobody else wants to live in who think they deserve more of a say than anybody else. Here’s a tip for regional areas upset about not getting enough representation in Perth: be somewhere that more people want to live! But apparently “attract more residents by having more of the things people like and less of the things they don’t” is too much to ask for these entitled whingers.

Anyway, to win a seat on the Legislative Council, a candidate will need 2.63% of the vote. It’s going to be fascinating to see who gets in, as this is the lowest quota anywhere in Australasia. Labor and Liberal should each win somewhere between 10–15 seats, the Greens can hope for 3–4, the Nationals 1–2, and then we will see which of the minors get in. Preferences won’t play a tremendously large role but they will matter. Most seats will be won on a quota, but the last few will come down to preferences—either for a minor party seeking their one and only seat (say from a primary vote of 2.1%) or for the last candidate of a bigger party (e.g. Greens primary vote might be good for 3.7 quotas and they get the remainder of the fourth quota via preferences).

There are two ways to vote for the Legislative Council:

Above the line: you vote for a party or group of independents and accept their candidates in the order they are listed below the line. You must number 1 for your first preference, and then distribute as many preferences as you want. To get a square above the line, a party or group of independents must nominate at least 5 candidates. All parties/groups this election nominated at least 5 people; the one group of independents (column M) does not have their box labelled—only registered parties get that.

Pros: it’s much quicker; it is sufficient for the average voter to express their view

Cons: you cannot reorder candidates within a group; you cannot give preferences to ungrouped independents (there are five people standing solo, listed in the rightmost column)

Below the line: you vote for individual candidates in any order of your choosing. You must give a minimum of 20 preferences, and then you can keep preferencing as far as you want.

Pros: you can change the order of a group’s candidates; you can mix preferences between individuals from multiple parties; you can vote for ungrouped independents

Cons: it is way more time consuming; none of the ungrouped independents have a chance of victory and nor do down-ballot candidates for many groups (below about 3rd for most), so is it worth your time?

Whichever way you vote, I recommend distributing as many preferences as you feel you can—it makes your vote more powerful.

Every review will end with my recommendation of how favourably to preference a party. This is the recommendation system I will be using:

Good preference: a party with a positive overall platform that has few or no significant flaws for the left-wing voter.

Decent preference: a party with a generally positive overall platform but some reservations; or, a single-issue party with a good objective but by definition too limited in their scope to encompass the fullness of parliamentary business.

Middling preference: a party with a balance of positive and negative qualities, or a party with a decent platform undermined by a notably terrible policy or characteristic.

Weak or no preference: a party with more negatives than positives. Either give this party a poor preference or (in the upper house only) you might prefer to let your vote exhaust before reaching it.

Running where: Division of Mayo (SA). That’s all. Former Centre Alliance Senator Rex Patrick is standing for the Jacqui Lambie Network.

Prior reviews (including as the Nick Xenophon Group/Team): federal 2013, federal 2016, federal 2019, federal 2022

What I said before: “I don’t live in the Division of Mayo, and if you do, there’s a good chance you have a much better idea of what Sharkie stands for and how good a local representative she is than I do. I now mentally group her with high-profile indie incumbents (e.g. Helen Haines in Indi) rather than with a party. Looking from a distance, she seems reliably centrist.” (federal 2022)

What I think this year: I’ve been tossing up whether to even review Centre Alliance. It is literally now just a re-election vehicle for Rebekah Sharkie in Mayo. At least in 2022, there was nominally one Senator left representing Centre Alliance, Stirling Griff, though for re-election he ran second on a very doomed independent ticket with Nick Xenophon that managed to win only 2.99% of the vote (see my 2022 review linked above for more details). Leo Puglisi at 6 News interviewed Sharkie last week and asked her why the party is still registered (from 14:15 in the video): her answer boiled down to the fact that disestablishing the party structure required more paperwork and wrangling with the bank than simply keeping it and using it as her banner. For all intents and purposes, Sharkie is an independent. The Centre Alliance website is goneburger, her web presence is based around her as an independent with the slogan “Make Mayo Matter”, and her website does not mention the party name—even in presenting her electoral background.

But I am a completist. Other than the major parties, who are not worth the bother reviewing for my average reader, I have tried to review every party nationwide, even going the extra mile to review unregistered parties that are endorsing nominally independent candidates. So, how could I leave out Centre Alliance when they are registered with the AEC? I could not. If neither major party wins a majority, her vote could prove significant for forming government, so I think it's worth knowing something about her even if you don’t live in the Division of Mayo.

Sharkie is a fairly classic centrist who once supported the Australian Democrats and who was briefly a member of—and an employee for—the SA Liberal Party. If it weren’t for the factionalism within the SA Liberals, or the party’s repeated problems with misogyny that have driven away a large chunk of at least two generations of professional middle-class women with centrist or moderate politics, she might well still be in the Libs. But instead Sharkie joined Nick Xenophon’s party, won Mayo in 2016, and has defended her seat ever since.

What does Sharkie offer this time around? Well, her website is very short on policy details. But as an MP, she is strong on community engagement—you don’t hold a seat this long as an independent without spending a lot of time pounding the pavement or advocating for local interests. As is fitting for someone originally elected for a party formed by anti-pokies campaigner Nick Xenophon, Sharkie has pushed for gambling reform, working alongside the more left-wing independent MP for Clark, Andrew Wilkie, to seek implementation of recommendations from the “You win some, you lose more” parliamentary report issued in June 2023 after an inquiry into the effects of gambling.

Sharkie has also taken a strong interest in aged care policy, regional housing issues, and greater funding for regional healthcare services. She’s promoted the “Keep Cash” campaign, which I think is about as silly as a “Keep Cheques” campaign would be; sorry, folks, cash is much less popular than it used to be and if a business does not think it is economical or worthwhile to keep accepting payments in cash, that’s their call. I’m not sure people (strangely, including some business owners) realise there are costs associated with cash just like there are with providing for electronic payments. Cheques faded away, and if cash does too then I won’t lament its demise an awful lot.

What will Sharkie do if no party has a majority after this election? She has indicated she is not committed to supporting either major party and would see what she can win for Mayo in return for her support, but that she would likely talk first with the Liberal Party. That is perhaps unsurprising given her background, and she justifies it because the state seats that sit under Mayo are held by non-labour members. That claim is not entirely accurate: most are traditionally Liberal seats (with Kavel in the hands of an ex-Liberal independent), but Leon Bignell, MP for Mawson (entirely within Mayo) has held the seat for Labor since 2006. He is only an independent right now because he is the Speaker of the SA Legislative Assembly; since 2021, the occupant of this role been barred from belonging to a political party outside of election periods. I would suggest that Sharkie first follow the outcome of the notional two-party-preferred count that the AEC calculates between Labor and Liberal, which in 2022 went to Labor in her seat but at her previous victories favoured the Liberals.

(One final aside for the election campaign nerds: Sharkie still uses some of the orange branding that Centre Alliance used to deploy more widely.)

Recommendation: If you are a Mayo voter, I recommend placing Sharkie below the Labor and Greens candidates but above the Liberal candidate and definitely above the candidates for Family First, One Nation, and Trumpet of Patriots. Let’s call that a “middling preference” for the sake of my recommendation schema with which I tag every entry.

Running where: Division of Fowler (NSW), sort of. See below.

Prior reviews: none, this is a new party

I reviewed the Centre Alliance despite the fact it is now a shell of a party that de facto independent Rebekah Sharkie retains because disestablishing it would be more effort than keeping it. So, why not review a registered party that is not fielding any candidates this election even though one of the two people in its registered name is seeking re-election! Yes, this is odd, but indulge me: let’s discuss what’s going on in Fowler and then talk about Dai Le and Frank Carbone W.S.C., or as their ballot abbreviation says, Frank Carbone Western Sydney Community. No, you’re not having a stroke, the abbreviation they provided for the AEC party register is longer than the official name. But we’ll get to the party in a moment.

In 2022, for some mind-numbingly stupid reason, Labor parachuted in former NSW state premier Kristina Keneally to contest the Division of Fowler in Western Sydney. Fowler was one of the safest Labor seats in the country, one which the party had held since its creation in 1984: Labor almost always got over 60% of the two-candidate-preferred vote, often over 70%, with their only sub-60% result being 58.76% in 2010. This electorate had literally never been in play. The incumbent, Chris Hayes, decided to retire in 2021 and endorsed as his successor a popular local migration lawyer, Tu Le, the daughter of Vietnamese refugees. Instead, the party halted the local preselection process and Keneally imposed as candidate.

Now, what you need to know about Fowler is that it encompasses some of Sydney’s most culturally diverse working-class suburbs. At the 2021 census, fewer than 40% of the population were born in Australia, with Vietnamese forming the largest migrant community and Chinese also having a sizeable presence. And what you need to know about Keneally is that although she might dubiously be considered Labor royalty—she was state premier for a little over a year but led the party to a devastating landslide loss in 2011—she is an American who lives on a literal island, Scotland Island, beyond Sydney’s posh Northern Beaches.

So, another Vietnamese woman, Dai Le, who came with her family as refugees to Australia when she was a child after the fall of Saigon, ran a successful independent campaign against Keneally. Labor won the notional two-party-preferred vote over Liberal (55.72%), but lost the two-candidate-preferred vote, the measure that actually matters: Le won 51.63%. Le had been a journalist and a Liberal Party member who had contested the state seat of Cabramatta for the party, but in 2016 she stood against the endorsed Liberal candidate for mayor of Fairfeld and was suspended from the party.

This led her to team up with ex-Labor councillor and Western Sydney political personality Frank Carbone. He is mayor of Fairfield, and has been since 2012. He is enormously popular with his community, winning a stonking 81.39% in a two-person contest at the mayoral election last year. Fairfield’s a funny old council, often going its own way to try to save money—it is one of the very few that contracts a private company to run its elections rather than the NSW Electoral Commission, which is a pain in the arse for election nerds because the NSWEC does a much better job. Anyway, Carbone and Le have an alliance on council that covers 9 out of 12 of the councillors plus Carbone as mayor (and Le is still a councillor as well as an MP).

So, Carbone and Le registered this political party in the belief they have a voting base to win federal seats in Western Sydney. And yet… they are not running any candidates and Dai Le’s officially contesting Fowler as an independent! I suppose it would have looked pretty odd on the ballot if it said:

LE, Dai Frank Carbone Western Sydney Community

Leo Puglisi asked Le about this in an interview on 6 News before the election was called (from 19:57). She explains that she formed the party for “the future” and “I want to make sure that I have laid the foundation. I need to get re-elected … to continue to build that foundation … no point rushing running candidates”. She wants to consolidate her hold on Fowler before seeking to grow and says that she prefers the label of independent this time around. Hence, this campaign is an independent one rather than part of a broader tilt for Western Sydney Community. It’s a bit odd that she describes the party registration repeatedly as “planting a seed” (among other cliches that she repeats) when she hasn’t gone on to use the branding at all such that this seed might grow and gain recognition.

Labor has seen sense and their candidate this year is the woman they should have endorsed in 2022, Tu Le, but is it too little too late and does Dai Le have the local profile to secure re-election? She has the advantage of incumbency but this is a very classically Labor seat and Tu Le will fancy her chances of winning it back. Dai Le’s voting record is closer to the Liberals than to Labor, and is very similar to that of Rebekah Sharkie of the Centre Alliance (see figure 1 here). Unlike many other city-based crossbenchers, she is not part of the “teal” movement and does not receive Climate 200 financial backing.

So, what are Fowler voters getting this time around? Dai Le is pitching directly to working-class constituents in the hope they don’t swing back to Labor, underscoring cost-of-living challenges, particularly with energy, groceries, and insurance. Her take on the current government is that a lot of policies lack substance. She believes her local constituents don’t trust the major parties and seems optimistic that she has established her reputation locally as someone who asks the hard questions in parliament. We will see in a few weeks if that belief is well-placed.

Last, is Dai Le likely to support the Liberals if no party has a majority after the election? She says that nobody should assume who she would support, noting in the aforementioned interview with Puglisi that the Liberals “threw me out … why would I be loyal to a party that didn’t want me in the first place?” It seems that although she is ambivalent about the Labor government, the Liberals also aren’t her favourite people these days. She emphasises a preference to assess each bill individually in terms of how she sees it as delivering for Fowler rather than picking sides. Given how many independents are likely to be returned, the major parties likely will have a range of paths to build confidence and supply or to pass legislation, so she might not even be forced to choose.

Recommendation: If you are a Fowler voter, I recommend you put Dai Le below the Greens and Labor candidates but above the Liberal candidate, and definitely above those who are standing for the Libertarians, Family First, and One Nation. For my recommendation categories, let's call this a "weak to middlimg preference" (even if it would be 3rd of 7! I'm more lukewarm on Dai Le than on Rebekah Sharkie)

Running where: for the Senate, all six states and the NT; for the House, a smattering of divisions across NSW, QLD, VIC, and WA

Prior reviews: federal 2013, federal 2016, federal 2019, federal 2022, VIC 2022, NSW 2023, WA 2025

What I said before: “This is a single-issue party and their policy platform does not come close to providing a framework for addressing the bulk of parliamentary business. They’ve won representation in WA and Victoria, and in WA one of their two MLCs was suspended from parliament after spouting anti-vax nonsense.” (NSW 2023)

What I think this year: The quote above alludes to Sophia Moermond, who ended up quitting Legalise Cannabis WA and sitting as an independent because of her antivax, transphobic, anti-wind farm views. I reviewed her loathsome independent ticket for the 2025 WA state election here, and thankfully she just missed out on the last seat in the WA Legislative Council. I plan to post some thoughts about the Legislative Council outcome—announced last week—once I have completed my party reviews. The relevance here is that the calibre of candidates for single-issue micro-parties in general is very uneven, and that Legalise Cannabis in particular can be a real grab-bag with some decent candidates and a lot of questionable ones.

The party’s focus remains squarely on the legalisation of cannabis, not just for medicinal use but also for retail sale, subject to similar regulation as alcohol and tobacco. Indeed, they want it to be regulated more generously, “not subject to the ever-increasing levels of tax paid by consumers on [alcohol and tobacco]”, in the belief doing so would send consumers back to “the illicit market”. Why it’s fine to increase taxes on beer and ciggies but not on blunts is beyond me, especially as Legalise Cannabis in other policies emphasise the potential for taxation on weed sales to contribute to government finances.

As in previous years, Legalise Cannabis link all other issues such as the economy, law and order, and the environment back to cannabis, with rather sweeping and unsubstantiated claims about how legalising weed will result in positive transformation in these areas. I am in favour of the party’s main goal but there are other parties out there with much broader platforms who endorse this measure (notably the Greens). I think it far more sensible to support a party who can articulate why cannabis should be legal within a suite of policies and an ideological purpose that addresses the fullness of parliamentary business.

I urge caution when approaching Legalise Cannabis because of the issues with candidate selection. If you do not have any personal knowledge favourable towards an individual contesting an election on behalf of Legalise Cannabis, I suggest that you put them below more stable and known quantities on the left and centre, but above the Liberals and far-right minors. Kevin Bonham describes the lead candidate in Tasmania, Matthew Owen, as a disability support worker with a large beard (can confirm) but not much else of note. The b_auspol review for NSW suggests that the lead candidate there, Miles Hunt, is a pretty serious campaigner for drug law reform and harm minimisation. I’ll tackle three other lead Senate candidates below: VIC, QLD, and WA (and I imagine the Something for Cate blog will also touch on the VIC ticket when they review Legalise Cannabis). SA and NT voters, you’ll have to look after yourselves, and anyone with a Legalise Cannabis candidate in their local electorate ought to do a quick search to figure out where to rank them.

The lead Victorian candidate is the best known of the bunch: Fiona Patten of the now-deregistered Sex-cum-Reason Party (yeah I did that deliberately), whom I reviewed many times, most recently for VIC 2022. Patten was a member of Victoria’s upper house from 2014 until 2022 and proved to be a positive influence, promoting social reforms with a left-of-centre emphasis on civil liberties. My initial wariness that her party was a mere front to promote the interests of adult industry bosses wore off as her career progressed. Back in 2016, the Sex Party ran a joint ticket with the HEMP Party, the former name of the party before us in this review, so perhaps it’s little surprise that Patten is running for them after Reason’s demise. Victorian voters can comfortably include Legalise Cannabis in the upper reaches of their preferences in my view.

A much less meritorious candidate tops the Legalise Cannabis ticket in Queensland: Belinda “Bee” Jones. If you have spent much time on Australian politics Twitter in recent years, you likely know who Bee is. She exemplifies the posters derided as “drips”, mostly Labor sycophants, but as Bee shows, such accounts are not always rusted on to the ALP. She stood as an independent for the 2023 Fadden by-election, mistaking her Twitter following for a potential constituency in one Queensland electorate: she came sixth (of 13) with 1.05% of the vote. Now she’s fronting Legalise Cannabis. I strongly recommend that Queenslanders send their vote to other left/centre parties first. Bee has won one election though: a “worst of auspol tweets 2022 edition” account on Twitter ran a bracket where the final ended up being one of her tweets against another one of her tweets! The winner? Bee proclaiming that she tweets from 9am to midnight to “hold politicians/media to account” for free. She’s nothing if not convinced her incessant (bad) posting is political praxis.

In WA, Jason Meotti, who was sixth on the party’s slate for the state election, is top of the ticket for their federal tilt. He is a financial planner who took a leading role in the WA branch of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation and contributed to WA decriminalising possession of small quantities of cannabis for personal use in 2003. At that time, he was involved with the Democrats: he stood third on their WA ticket for the Senate in 2004, as well as contesting multiple state races between 2001 and 2005, including topping their Southern Metropolitan ticket in 2005. A Jason Meotti stood for Grey Power at the 1991 Geraldton state by-election but I’m unsure if it’s the same guy (he was in his early 20s then and surely a bloke that young wasn’t running for Grey Power?). One Twitter account also says he was once the vice president for WA’s Young Nationals but I am unable to corroborate this. I do not know of any association between him and the Drug Law Reform Party of the mid-2010s. He seems an OK choice based on what I’ve been able to find.

Recommendation: As a general principle, give Legalise Cannabis a middling preference. If the party is on either of your ballots, investigate the specific individuals as some might merit a decent preference while others should only get a weak preference.