Election | Analysis confirms Liberals have to address women & environment
Australian election analysis
While it will be weeks before the full vote is in, counted and tablulated, there is sufficient first-preference vote data available to start drawing conclusions as to what happened to the Liberals. An analysis of first-preference votes reveals the critical role independents played in hurting the conservative parties.
The chart below classifies each political party as either (a) left-leaning, (b) right-leaning, or (c) independent. By grouping parties in this way and consolidating their first-preference votes, we find that left-leaning parties secured about 6.61 million votes (48.59%). The major party in this group, of course, is Labor.
Right-leaning parties, with the Liberal and National parties as the main contributors, received about 5.97 million votes, or 43.92% of the overall total. Teals and other 'independent' candidates secured just over 1 million votes, accounting for 7.48% of the total. The majority of these Teal and independent voters were formerly Liberal voters.
If the independents' support were to flow back to the Liberals, the right-leaning parties would secure an absolute majority of first-preference votes—comfortably over 50%.
Post-election commentary suggesting the Liberals need to embrace harder-line conservative policies—such as abandoning net-zero—is not supported by first-preference vote analysis. Independents are the key to conservative success, and net-zero emissions is a well-supported policy among this group, along with female empowerment. As painful as it may be to conservatives, the analysis points to a need for more progressive policies.
Popularity of Barnaby Joyce (& Albanese)
The chart below shows the twenty most popular politicians as assessed by their raw first preference votes. While this is only interim data, it reveals that only two Liberals make the list and both of them have relatively low profiles, Tony Pasin and Simon Kennedy.
