#wavotes

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.

SCREW THE FUCKING LIBERALS!!!!!!!

Prior reviews (as the Democratic Labour Party, although whether this is them is debated—see below for why): federal 2013, VIC 2014 (1 and 2), federal 2016, VIC 2018, federal 2019, VIC 2022

What I said before: n/a, see below

What I think this year: Settle in, folks. Get some snacks, crack open a beer, and make yourself comfortable. Here is the most batshit review of this WA state election cycle.

On 13 February 2024, a group acting under the name of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) applied for registration at state level in WA. This took forever, and it was not until 16 September 2024 that the party was registered—with other parties achieving registration much more quickly in the interim (even One Nation, who are famously dysfunctional!). Not long afterwards, the Australian Labor Party introduced legislation to the state parliament to prohibit parties from registering with names similar to that of existing parties, akin to legislation that exists at federal level. This passed into law on 15 November 2024, with one clause specifying that if two parties currently on the register shared the same word in their official name, the party that had used the word for longest could claim it. The legislation was drafted intelligently enough to account for variant spellings, and the Democratic Labour Party had to change its name because its registration was much newer than the Australian Labor Party, who had the superior claim to "labo(u)r".

The DLP WA submitted a new name on 6 December 2024, and within the following quotation marks I am reproducing it exactly as formatted: “Stop Pedophiles! Protect kiddies!” Yes, American spelling of "paedophiles"; no, no capital K. This name was approved on 14 January 2025 and I will refer to them as SPPK from here on. Before the name change, the party had been courting Wilson Tucker—yes, the bloke elected in 2021 for the Daylight Saving Party off just 98 first preferences under the thankfully now-abolished system of Group Ticket Voting—but this new name was so bad that he pulled the pin and is not contesting the election at all.

It seems the name change got sufficient attention outside WA that the DLP (who for now are only registered in Victoria and the ACT) felt compelled to respond. And hoo boy, what a response! The DLP is adamant that they have “never been registered in Western Australia” and that SPPK “has absolutely no association with us and does not share our values, policies or democratic processes”. They instead urge their supporters in WA to vote for the Australian Christians, which to me is fascinating as the DLP is a historically Catholic party and the Australian Christians are historically Protestant.

But it gets thornier. There is no website for a party called “Stop Pedophiles! Protect kiddies!”, nor for a WA branch of the DLP, and I cannot find any social media accounts either (let me know if you can!). Their lead candidate for the Legislative Council—and 11 of 17 overall—is identified only by a first initial and their last name. Every other candidate for the Legislative Council (and I mean every single one for all other parties) is on the ballot under their full first name, not only their initial. This is plain weird.

The lead candidate for SPPK in the Legislative Council is one “H. Dolan”. The WA Electoral Commission’s register of political parties lists the SPPK party secretary as Hugh Dolan, who is presumably the same person. Back in 2022, a Hugh Dolan stood as the lead candidate for the DLP in North Eastern Metropolitan at the Victorian state election. Hugh’s son Thomas Dolan ran for Labour DLP as a candidate in the Bayswater (Victoria) electorate at the same election and came a very distant sixth, then he founded the short-lived Gen Z Party (never registered) and got dismantled in an interview with fellow gen-Z interviewer Leo Puglisi. In that interview, Thomas described his father as “this crazy old man” and referred to “all this party infighting” within the DLP. Thomas diverged with his father on a range of policies and left the party.

Has Hugh moved to Perth, registered the DLP at state level, and then been disowned by the rest of the party? Is this the latest chapter of the infighting that Thomas described? I genuinely cannot be sure because of the paucity of information from the party has left me with no way to confirm whether Hugh Dolan of West Perth is the same bloke who stood for the DLP in Victoria in 2022. It seems likely! But unconfirmed. Trying to track down this party online was frankly more tedious than trying to track down most random independents, and that’s quite something given how badly some of these people campaign. It mystifies me how Hugh Dolan found so many friends prepared to put their name on the ballot for the WA Legislative Council: there are 17 candidates for SPPK, with only the Liberals and Labor standing more on their slates. Dolan also somehow rustled up three SPPK candidates to contest Armadale, Joondalup, and Mandurah in the lower house! Wherever this party is organising and campaigning, it is not online where an ordinary voter can get the slightest idea of who they are or what their policies might be.

What I expected to write for this review was something to the effect that “it’s incredibly funny that a party aligned with Catholicism is running on an anti-paedophile platform given how many paedophiles the Roman Catholic Church has protected and how often it has sought to deny justice to victims of paedophilia”. What I got was something even more absurd.

I have never, and I mean never, in my 12 years of doing these reviews and 20 years of voting across Australia and NZ, found it impossible to get even a skerrick of information about the policy platform of an actual registered party. Well, here we are!

Recommendation: Give Stop Pedophiles! Protect kiddies! a weak or no preference in the Legislative Council. If you are in the Legislative Assembly seats of Armadale, Joondalup, or Mandurah, where you must preference all candidates, you need to make a judgement call on whether SPPK should go dead last as a totally unknown quantity, or whether to put them above known terrible quantities like One Nation. I personally would go dead last, as the DLP connection does not imply much positive.

Website: I haven’t found one!

Prior reviews: none, this is a group of independents standing together

This is a long entry, but if you’re a politics nerd you should enjoy it. I need to first explain how Western Australia’s new system for electing the Legislative Council works, and then I will introduce you to the cast of characters who comprise Group M—and they are quite the cast.

After the last election, the McGowan Labor government reformed the upper house to get rid of malapportioned regions and anti-democratic Group Ticket Voting, and introduced a method of electing the house statewide in a proportional manner. Voters alone determine where their preferences go now. You can either vote above the line for parties and groups of 5+ candidates, accepting the order in which each party or group lists their candidates, or you can vote below the line for individuals from parties, groups of independents, and ungrouped independents (i.e. people running solo, who are listed only below the line). If you vote above the line, it is optional preferences after 1; if you vote below the line, though, you must give at least 20 preferences to cast a formal vote.

A party or group of independents get a square above the line if they lodge 5+ candidates. If you submit 2–4 candidates, you get your own column but not a square above the line. Because almost all voters vote above the line, having no square there means your chances of winning a seat are only as good as those of ungrouped independents: totally non-existent. So, this is why Group M exists. It comprises three sitting independent members of the Legislative Council who want their own column with a square above the line and so they have roped in two friends to reach the magic number of five.

Who are these independents? They have made a website together under the banner “Vote Independent WA”, which rants against the major parties and especially against Labor for reforming the Legislative Council. It has predictable lies about how removing malapportioned regions and Group Ticket Voting disadvantages minor parties; the truth is, it will now be easier for minor party candidates to be elected, with just 2.63% of the vote required for a seat, but chancers cannot now exploit Group Ticket Voting backroom deals to win a seat with preferences from voters who never knew nor intended for their vote to preference them.

These candidates are cranks, but they’re cranks in their own ways. I mentioned lead candidate Sophia Moermond in my review of the Legalise Cannabis Party, for whom she was elected in 2021. To recap, she quit the party after making a name for herself as an anti-vaxxer, a transphobe, and an opponent of renewable energy from offshore wind turbines. Second candidate Louise Kingston entered parliament for the Nationals in 2023 on a recount after another Nationals MLC was convicted of child sex offences—and you’d think in those circumstances she’d try to present herself in the most positive light possible. Instead, she used her maiden speech to lament, of all things, the demise of the whaling industry. She left the Nationals in June last year after being preselected for an unwinnable spot on the Nationals’ ticket.

The third candidate might be the most, uh, colourful of the election. I mentioned him in my review of One Nation but could not fit everything there. Ben Letts Dawkins, nephew of former Labour federal treasurer John Dawkins, ran as the fifth candidate on the Labor ticket for the now-abolished South West Region in 2021. This was an unwinnable position even with Labor’s landslide victory; Labor won three of the region’s seats, and ordinarily Dawkins would not have got near parliament. In February 2023, however, Alannah MacTiernan resigned from parliament and the fourth candidate on the ticket from 2021 declined to take up the vacancy as he was preoccupied with his private business.

So, Dawkins unexpectedly became an MLC. The thing was, he had been charged with 43 breaches of a domestic violence restraining order and was ultimately convicted of 35, having pleaded guilty to them. The breaches were not severe enough to attract a conviction sufficient to disqualify him from the Legislative Council, but Labor expelled him before he took up his seat, so he sat as an independent, then for One Nation, and now again as an independent. Earlier this year, he added to his already chequered record by changing his name—yes, by deed poll—to Austin Letts Trump and is going around calling himself Aussie Trump. Full-on brainworms, this one.

The remaining two candidates are ballot filler to get the square above the line, and that square is a source of amusement to me. Why? Well, despite making a shared website, these candidates (at least the three sitting MLCs) are otherwise not campaigning together. Louise Kingston has said that they have “completely separate beliefs and policies”. That’s nice and all, but if they want to run separate campaigns and earn votes, they each really needed to get together enough friends to register separate groups of 5+ candidates.

Every single vote cast above the line will go to Moermond as she is listed first below the line. Above-the-line votes for Group M can only progress to Kingston if Moermond is elected, and those votes will progress at fractional value. Old mate Aussie Trump is at an even greater disadvantage (thankfully). I can’t tell if this was a collective decision to stand Moermond as the lead candidate despite their vaunted independence as candidates, or if Moermond successfully got one over Kingston and Trump, or if all three of them are not smart enough to understand how the system works. Given some of the other lies and misleading statements on their websites, I’m inclined to think they just don’t understand it. Maybe Aussie Trump has twigged because he registered a how-to-vote card with a recommendation to vote below the line and the only member of Group M to whom he recommends a preference is Kingston.

In any case, whatever the level of understanding these candidates have, Group M is actively spreading electoral disinformation via their website. They drew the second last column on the right-hand side of the ballot (the last column is, and always is, ungrouped independents). They claim, falsely, that “we have been placed on the far-right side of the ballot paper—[in] a deliberate move to make independents less visible to voters. The major parties have rigged thesystem [sic] to serve themselves, silencing opposition and limiting voter choice.” This is completely untrue. The ballot order for parties and groups is determined through a randomised draw conducted by the returning officer in accordance with schedule 2 of the Electoral Act 1907 (WA). Group M simply had the bad luck to be drawn last. They could have just as likely been Group A. Frankly, three sitting MLCs should understand this. Their rhetoric undermines trust in the electoral system, and I have lodged a complaint with the Western Australian Electoral Commission.

Recommendation: Give Group M (Vote Independent WA) a weak or no preference. Indeed, if you are planning to preference all the way, there’s a very strong case that these nutters should come last, especially Aussie Trump.