With Victoria heading to the polls on 28 November, it’s time to put my numbers on the record. I predict a Coalition majority, a resurgent One Nation, and Jess Wilson as Premier and I explain exactly how I get there.
The last Saturday in November every four years is the fixed date for Victoria’s general election for 88 members of the Legislative Assembly and 40 members of the Legislative Council. That means this year’s election will be held on 28 November.
For the time being, I make just one prediction for the election of 40 members of the Legislative Council. It is that the sole Victorian politician elected in 2022 under the banner of Pauline Hanson, Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell, will again be elected as one of the five members for the Northern Victoria Region. For the rest I’ll wait until I know what electoral system applies. I know what should apply as I explained in Switzer Daily on 16 December last year. See “Why my vote is for the Legalise Cannabis Party”. But I have no guarantee that the Victorian Parliament will do as I advise. When I know I’ll contribute another article for Switzer Daily on this subject.
I am willing to be bold enough to predict who will be in government for the next parliamentary term. My predicted numbers for the Legislative Assembly are that the Coalition will have a majority, with 47 seats of which 38 will be Liberals and nine will be Nationals. The Labor Party will be the official Opposition with 32 members. The other nine members will be six for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (ONP) and three Greens. So, Jess Wilson will be the Premier.
The starting point for my calculations is the result of the election held on 26 November 2022. Returned to the Legislative Assembly were 56 Labor members, 19 Liberals, nine Nationals and four Greens. However, there was a by-election on 8 February 2025 for the inner metropolitan seat of Prahran. The vacancy was caused by the resignation of the then Greens member but the Liberal Party won the seat. Therefore, the current Mackerras Pendulum shows there as being 20 Liberal seats and three for the Greens, Brunswick, Melbourne and Richmond.
So, how do I get my present predicted numbers? Essentially, I interpret the opinion polls and to those polls I add my detailed analysis of this year’s South Australian state election. In respect of that election I made remarkably correct predictions in my pre-election article dated 11 March and titled “South Australian election predictions: Ashton Hurn will still be SA Leader of the Opposition”. Following the election I gave my interim analysis with the post dated 28 April titled “Bernardi’s bid: One Nation’s outrage at the will of the voters”.
In Victoria the average of the opinion polls gives the Coalition, Labor and One Nation 26 per cent of the intended vote with the Greens on 12 per cent and ten per cent for all others combined. I would be amazed if the ONP were to win 26 per cent of the vote but even if it did win the same overall vote as the other two the ONP would still be the most rejected of the three big parties. I say that because of the South Australian experience.
At the SA election in March there were 1,117,714 first preference formal votes cast. Distributed between the parties the votes were 419,626 for Labor, 256,022 for the ONP, 211,551 for the Liberal Party, 116,283 for the Greens and 114,232 for the combination of all the rest. However, the system in both SA and Victoria is one of single-member electoral districts with full preferential voting. In such a system it is the two-candidate preferred vote that matters.
Therefore, I did two important calculations. First: to all the cases of actual competition between Labor and Liberal candidates I added my own thoroughly researched estimates of the Labor-Liberal vote in the other seats. Labor’s total estimated vote was 651,951 (58.3 per cent) while the estimated total Liberal vote was 465,763 (41.7 per cent). That was a swing to Labor of 3.7 per cent on 2022. It was also the lowest Liberal vote since the modern Liberal Party was formed in 1944.
My second calculation was between the Liberal and ONP candidates. To all the cases of actual competition between Liberal and ONP candidates I added my own thoroughly researched estimates of the Liberal-ONP vote in other seats. The Liberal Party’s total vote was 627,351 (56.1 per cent) while the ONP vote was 490,363 (43.9%). That is why the Liberal Party is now the official SA Opposition. With the ONP as the most rejected of the three big parties it can safely be asserted the the Liberal Party continues to be South Australia’s alternative governing party.
There is no reason to doubt that this pattern will continue in Victoria. Since the ONP is best situated in rural seats I now give details of the nine seats predicted for the Nationals and the six predicted for the ONP. The nine seats to be won by the Nationals will be eight of their present nine plus Bendigo East currently held by Premier Jacinta Allan. The Nationals candidate, Andrew Lethlean, will win Bendigo East. However, I am not willing to name the sitting Nationals member who will lose his seat. I just feel sure there will be one as I now illustrate by describing rural South Australia.
The SA Liberals retained Schubert and Flinders handsomely but they also retained the Riverland seat of Chaffey purely due to Labor preferences. That pattern will continue in Victoria. The eight Nationals re-elected will include, say, four winning handsomely and, say, four winning purely courtesy of the preferences of Labor candidates who came in third.
So, what about the losing Nationals sitting member? My guess is that there will be one. The ONP will win the seat in much the same way as the ONP won Hammond and Ngadjuri in South Australia. In Hammond the sitting Liberal, Adrian Pederick, came third so his preferences elected Robert Roylance (ONP) over Labor’s Simone Bailey. In Ngadjuri the sitting Liberal, Penny Pratt, came third so her preferences elected David Paton (ONP) over Labor’s Tony Piccolo.
My guess at the six Victorian seats for the ONP is that four ONP candidates will win by taking outer metropolitan seats from Labor, one will take a seat from a rural Liberal incumbent while one will take a Nationals seat as described above. So, two of the six will win seats in the Hammond-Ngadjuri way.
There are, of course, two important differences between South Australia and Victoria. The main difference is that in South Australia there is a credited Labor government under Peter Malinauskas. In Victoria there is a discredited Labor government under Jacinta Allan. My experience is that when a government becomes discredited voters elect the direct opponents of that government. They do not go the roundabout way through preferences. For that reason I confidently predict both the Labor primary vote and that of Liberal-National will exceed the total primary vote of the ONP.
The second difference relates to the type of outer metropolitan seats the ONP might win. There were three such seats in Adelaide, namely Light, Taylor and Elizabeth, all of which are monocultural working class in character. Swings against Labor were 18, 17 and 16 per cent, respectively – but Labor held all three. The equivalent seats in Melbourne are multi-cultural in character. For these reasons I would say that if my six seat prediction for the ONP turns out to be wrong it is more likely that the number finishes up at four or five than that it finishes up at seven or eight.
But either way I predict a smallish ONP party room sitting on the backbenches in both houses and broadly supporting the Wilson-led Liberal-National coalition government.
