There is a lot of hot air and hypocrisy surrounding the politics of preferences. No one is innocent of this charge. He or she who is without fault in this regard should feel free to throw the first stone. Base motives regularly go hand in hand with high principles as far as candidates and political parties are concerned.
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At each election there is at least one controversy, often more, about aspects of preferential voting. We are already in the middle of one about One Nation preferences with the major parties challenging each other to “Put One Nation Last”.
The starting point of any analysis of such controversies is that Australian federal elections are conducted under an electoral system, introduced in 1919, which includes preferential voting for both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Under this system voters are compelled to list their second and subsequent preferences on the ballot paper and these preferences are distributed when the votes are counted. The individual voter makes the decision and candidates have no choice but to accept the preferences they are given regardless of where they come from.
Where One Nation votes are distributed to other candidates, which will be in every seat except those rare ones in which the One Nation candidate finishes in the top two in the count (either the winner or the runner up), candidates from the major parties will be the beneficiaries of One Nation preferences whether they like it or not. Only the most highly principled candidates will not ‘like’ it as it will help their cause and may even determine the election outcome in their seat.
Voters can do what they like in the secrecy of the ballot box but in Australian elections they are ‘advised’ how to list their preferences on the ballot paper by how-to-vote cards which are distributed to voters by party volunteers.
Anyone who has served as a polling booth volunteer knows that some voters refuse to take any HTV cards at all and rush through the throng of volunteers to get to the safety of the polling booth, some conspicuously take just one and refuse others, sometimes rudely, while many charitable souls accept quite a few even if most end up in the rubbish bin. It is all part of the circus atmosphere on the day.
HTV cards matter to the final outcomes but it is not an exact science. Preferences go in all directions and the patterns cannot always easily be explained. The preferences of the major parties are rarely distributed in House of Representatives elections as they are almost always one of the final two candidates in the count.
Therefore, their HTV preferences are usually a symbolic gesture, a statement of what they think about the other parties, putting their major opponents and their betes-noir last or second last with a flourish.
The Senate is different for the major parties as their preferences will often be distributed when the final Senate seat in each state is determined.
There is some logic to the general patterns. An exchange of preferences between Liberals and Nationals in so-called three-cornered contests is usually disciplined as are Green preferences to Labor (about 80 per cent). That makes ideological sense.
But sometimes the candidate in question matters, with some being personally more attractive to the other party’s voters than others, as does the order on the ballot paper.
The so-called donkey vote straight down the ballot paper can interfere with HTV advice. Some parties also have voters who are more disciplined than others.
Back in the 1950s, for instance, Democratic Labor Party voters were known to be especially disciplined and followed HTV cards, while, later, Australian Democrat voters were demonstrably independent as a matter of principle.
In theory candidates have no say in how other candidates advise their supporters about their second preferences. But in practice negotiation is commonplace and generally ethical.
All candidates, other than those in safe seats who are confident they will poll 50 per cent or more of the primary vote must try to maximise the preferences of voters whose first preference is going to another candidate. That is just common sense.
Such negotiation is generally centralised when it is between political parties which are running teams of candidates. That centralisation can be national or state-based and is often conducted by party officials rather than candidates.
In general, the major parties need the support of minor parties and independents in the House of Representatives and seek it out, while the situation can be reversed in the Senate where minor parties vying for the final seat can benefit from the support of major parties. So minor parties can offer support to major parties in the lower house in return for major parties supporting them in the Senate where they really have a chance to win.
That brings us back to the fight between One Nation and the major parties. Some of it is symbolic and is used by the major parties to demonstrate their ideological purity and their principled positions on issues like race and guns. They can demonstrate this by distancing themselves as far as possible from One Nation in public campaigning.
But some of it is very practical and influenced by the party hard-heads who are doing the numbers in individual seats and worry about winning and losing during the election.
The trade-off is between what preference decisions in individual seats may do to the party brand across Australia. One Nation preferences will matter in individual seats, especially in Queensland. But gaining one or two seats may be outweighed by losses elsewhere if the whole brand suffers.
John Warhurst is an emeritus professor of political science at the Australian National University.
