#wavotes25

Saturday, 8 March 2025, is election day in Western Australia. Roger Cook’s Labor government is almost certain to be returned; the question is how much ground the Liberal Party and their on-again off-again partners the National Party will regain after Labor landslides in 2017 and 2021. That second landslide, under previous Labor leader Mark McGowan, was one of the most astonishing in Australian history, with Labor holding 53 of the 59 seats in the lower house (the Legislative Assembly) and obtaining a majority in the upper house (the Legislative Council) for the first time. Next week, the Liberals might be able to form a cricket team from their members in the lower house—maybe even a footy team!

For election nerds, this election has added interest: the upper house is being elected via a new and much fairer electoral system. It is now elected on a statewide basis: no matter where you live, your vote is worth as much as that of anyone anywhere in the state. Moreover, the anti-democratic and discredited system of Group Ticket Voting is a thing of the past and your preferences will only go where you direct them. The quota for winning a seat in the upper house is just 2.63%, the lowest of any state, so although stringent criteria for party registration means that ballots are not cluttered with as many chancers and nutjobs as many recent Australian elections, it is very likely that several minor parties will win seats—some for the first time.

I’ve written my blog entries to demystify these minor parties and indies. I do not review Labor, Liberal, or the Greens, as I assume anyone reading this blog already has views on them; I have reviewed One Nation for the first time in years, and I reviewed the Nationals for the first time as there is unusual interest surrounding their campaign, which includes candidates standing against the Liberals in multiple seats in metropolitan Perth. All entries are written from a left-wing perspective sympathetic to democratic socialism and green politics, so calibrate according to your own predilections. I make no pretension to false objectivity—that’s why these are blatantly partisan party reviews.

When you go to vote, you will receive two ballot papers. The smaller ballot is for the Legislative Assembly, where government is formed. The number of candidates varies significantly between electorates. To cast a valid vote for the Legislative Assembly, you must number ALL squares in the order of your preference. Do not skip or repeat a number. If your preferred candidate is not elected, your vote transfers at full value to your second preference, and so on. You might receive a how-to-vote card from party campaigners: this is a suggestion only and you can fill out your preferences in any order you like. Ignore “no preference” in my recommendations below: it applies only to the Legislative Council.

The larger ballot is for the Legislative Council, which is a house of review. A thick line divides each column in two and you can vote either above the line OR below the line. Do not mix and match. All parties and groups with 5 or more candidates get a square above the line; these squares are labelled for registered parties, while the unlabelled square in Group M is for a group of five independents who are standing together. The final column at furthest right has five more independents running solo campaigns, and who are not affiliated with each other or any party; they do not get a square above the line.

Put simply: if you vote above the line, you are voting for parties; if you vote below the line, you are voting for individuals. Voting above the line means that your preference works through each party in the order you preferenced them, but you accept the order in which individual parties have listed their own candidates. Voting below the line means you can order individuals any way you want within and across groups.

To cast a valid vote for the Legislative Council above the line, place a number 1 in the square for the party of your first preference. You can then keep numbering as many or as few parties as you want. Why should you vote this way? It is quicker and easier. This is the best choice for most voters.

To cast a valid vote for the Legislative Council below the line, you must number a minimum of 20 candidates sequentially from 1–20. You can then keep numbering as many or as few people as you want. You should vote below the line if the following apply to you: a) you want to reorder candidates within a group and/or mix and match candidates across groups, b) you want to vote for ungrouped independents, or c) you are a completist like me who wants to indicate a preference for everyone. Be warned: if you plan to number all squares below the line, plan your vote beforehand so you can copy it in the booth.

Whether you vote above or below the line, the further you preference, the more powerful your vote will be. Give as many preferences as you feel you can provide in an informed manner.

Below are links to my reviews of parties and upper-house independents. The format is “party name (rough ideology / recommended preference)”. A good preference is a party with few or no significant flaws for the left-wing voter; a decent preference indicates a generally positive platform or a single-issue party with a good but limited objective; a middling preference is a mix of positive and negative qualities; a weak or no preference is mainly negative and either you should give them a poor preference or—on the big ballot for the Legislative Council only—let your vote exhaust if you wish.

Animal Justice Party (animal rights / middling to decent preference)

Australian Christians (Christian fundamentalism / weak or no preference)

Group M: five grouped independents (complete crackpots of varying flavours / weak or no preference)

Legalise Cannabis WA (single issue / middling preference)

Libertarian Party (far-right libertarianism / weak or no preference)

The Nationals WA (rural conservatism / weak or no preference)

One Nation (xenophobic far-right populism / weak or no preference)

Shooters, Fishers and Farmers (anti-environmentalist gun nuts / weak or no preference)

Stop Pedophiles! Protect kiddies! original entry, first update, and second update (farcical right-wing obscurities / weak or no preference)

Sustainable Australia Party–Anti-corruption (anti-immigration NIMBYs / weak or no preference)

Ungrouped independents: Sudhir Sudhir (right-wing of some sort / weak or no preference), Christiane Smith (rural conservative / weak or no preference), Jennifer McRae (adoptee advocate with no clear ideology / weak to middling preference), Peter McLernon (far-right crank / weak or no preference), Steve Walker (single issue: voluntary euthanasia / decent preference)

Western Australia Party / Anthony Fels in Churchlands (right-wing serial candidate / weak preference)

Happy voting and enjoy your democracy sausages!

Tomorrow is the WA state election. If you are curious about the minor parties contesting the election, I hope the index to my reviews is helpful in demystifying them.

And yes, you’re seeing the title correctly, this is a second update on my original entry about the party whose name has drawn more comments than any other party name this election: Stop Pedophiles! Protect kiddies! (SPPK) My initial review was based on as much information as I could find at the time, and upon picking up a few more scraps I wrote an update earlier this week.

Well, guess what. I have found their website. I thought I couldn’t find it. Nobody I spoke to could find it. Then I realised it had been staring me in the face the whole time: the WA Electoral Commission lists all candidates including contact details, which can be either an email address or a phone number. Some candidates have generic email addresses for their party, and this is true of SPPK: six candidates have their contact as [email protected]. So, I followed that, and whaddaya know, stoppedos.org is indeed their website.

It's not a terribly informative website, mind you: the website exists primarily to direct potential candidates to a contact form, with the party seeking submissions by 6 February. It doesn’t appear to have been updated since the party submitted their slate of candidates to the WAEC. To the extent that the website tells us anything about the party, it sheds little more light than the farcical how-to-vote cards I mocked in my first update—although it does show that they are aware of how to spell “paedophiles” the Australian way, as they shift between spellings.

SPPK seems to be convinced there are networks of paedophiles throughout society, and they would create a policing body to ferret out these paedophiles within “our government agencies, within churches, within schools and in daycares”. Nobody expects the SPPKanish Inquisition! I can’t help suspecting this is the sort of paranoia you develop if you spend all day consuming far-right conspiracist social media nonsense from the US and believe Pizzagate is real.

Beyond this the website just states they are “a conservative movement”, which rather understates things: A. Wilson, the candidate listed second, appears to be a man called Andrew Wilson with a lengthy history of being associated with white supremacists. The rest of this entry is largely based on some tips received from @dividebygaming, which I very much appreciate. This ABC article covers Wilson’s history from the late 2000s to the late 2010s, beginning in NSW with a neo-Nazi group attempting to hijack control of the NSW Humanist Society. Wilson then moved to Perth and ran a controversial and fortunately unsuccessful campaign for the Mosman Park council in 2017. The report also discloses that he worked with Radomar Kobryn-Coletti (11th candidate for SPPK, whom I mentioned in my first update) making far-right memes for Clive Palmer and Fraser Anning, including antisemitic content, and that both men belonged to a fascist group that attempted to take over the NSW Young Nationals.

Most of the SPPK slate are listed only by their first initial and last name, without their full first name. This is highly unusual: nobody else for any other party has done so. It seems to be to provide some degree of anonymity or deniability for candidates, and I think it’s fair to say that until proven otherwise one should be very wary of any SPPK candidate who has not given so much as their first name for the ballot.

In my previous entries, to save space I omitted two details about other SPPK candidates that on reflection are worth noting. Hugh Dolan (SPPK lead candidate and party secretary), before he stood for the DLP at Victoria’s 2022 state election, stood as the lead candidate for the Jacqui Lambie Network in Victoria at the 2016 federal election. Andrew Middleton (3rd candidate for SPPK) ran for the No Mandatory Vaccination Party as their lead candidate in the Mining and Pastoral Region at the 2021 WA state election. I reviewed No Mandatory Vax for the 2022 election and b_auspol covered their WA 2021 tilt.

It's also worth checking the WAEC’s live donation tracker. SPPK have received $64,561 in donations, which an ABC infographic indicates is the seventh most any party or individual has received this financial year behind Labor, Liberal, Greens, Nats, Kate Hulett (Fremantle teal independent), and Australian Christians. Of that total, $54,560 alone has come from Hugh Dolan across five donations between 26 October 2024 and 18 February 2025. The remaining $10,001 comes from two donations (one of $1!) on 4 November 2024 from the Frank McManus Foundation.

Why is this interesting? Well, recall from my original review that SPPK were originally registered in 2024 as the Democratic Labour Party, and that the DLP over east has disowned the SPPK as having “absolutely no association with us”. The Frank McManus Foundation is… uh, an official fundraising body of the DLP (also a separate home page calling it the “DLP Frank McManus Foundation”). It is named for the party’s founder. It seems the Victorian branch was telling porkies when they claimed to have “absolutely no association” with the WA DLP-cum-SPPK.

So, I have two speculative interpretations based on the above content. First, although SPPK seems obscure and hard to locate online, their website contact form soliciting candidates has probably circulated in private or low-visibility far-right settings, which would explain how 3edgy5u far-right meme machines have ended up on their ballot. Second, the DLP has not been honest in disowning the SPPK as unrelated and never related; this suggests that rumours I've heard of strong internal bickering and fractiousness have substance. Did Dolan move to WA, start a branch, and then fall out with members over east? It seems the DLP originally at least tolerated this branch and supported it financially, but events early this year (the name change? the candidates?) have made them keen to present themselves as having nothing to do with the party on the ballot.