Further to my Switzer Daily article of 21 January 2025: Mackerras on return of President Trump https://switzer.com.au/the-experts/malcolm-mackerras/mackerras-on-trump-202/ I note that the second presidency of Donald Trump is now clearly emerging to be just as big a disaster as the first presidency of this man. That such would be the case was predicted by me in my Switzer Daily article posted on July 19 last year: June 27 and July 13 gave Trump the 2024 election https://switzer.com.au/the-experts/malcolm-mackerras/june-27-and-july-13-gave-trump-the-2024-election/ That article included this further prediction: Mark my words. The second Trump aberration will be just as bad for America as the first.

When I get into conversation with Americans or Australians of the type I describe as “Americanists”, the question typically revolves around the American political system, and it then inevitably moves into a discussion of the electoral college method by which the President is chosen. Consequently, I think it appropriate for me to put into print my view of this system which is so peculiarly American. The President of lots of countries is popularly elected and none of them would contemplate the idea that the country in question should copy America. The reverse is always the case.

I have taught American politics at university level since 1974, and my students have been surprised to learn that I defend the electoral college system. My defence doesn’t take the form of suggesting this system should be copied by any other country. Rather, it takes the form of asserting that it accords with all the other features of American democracy.

There are four federations in the world whose politics I have taught: the USA, Germany, Canada and Australia. The way I classify them is to say that America differs from the other three in that the US is a federal federation where the other three are national federations. The conduct of elections best illustrates the point. In Germany, Canada and Australia, national elections are conducted nationally. In the US, they are conducted by the states and local governments. So, in the national federations, the same rules apply throughout. That is not the case in the USA. For example, in Maine, preferential voting applies and (mark my words) other states will follow in quick time. At present, the other states have first-past-the-post voting and counting of votes.

For example, suppose one votes for Jill Stein, the perpetual candidate for the Green Party. Outside Maine, that’s a wasted vote. By contrast, the Maine elector could vote first preference Green and second preference Democratic or Republican. In other words, Maine recognises the right of the voter to transfer her/his vote from an excluded candidate to one who is still in the count. Like Australia and Ireland do. The electoral college system merely acknowledges that such is the way America does its democracy. According to the aphorism “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” we can be sure that this system is permanent. I have always taken the view that if a system is clearly permanent, one might just as well defend it.

Apropos of Maine, readers may be interested to know that the rural second congressional district is naturally Republican. In 2024 it gave 212,763 votes to Donald Trump and 176,789 to Kamala Harris. However, it re-elected its Democratic member of the House of Representatives, Jared Golden. He had first won the seat in 2018 by defeating then Republican incumbent Bruce Poliquin who had led Golden on the primary vote. However, the distribution of the preferences of a third candidate gave Golden a final vote of 142,440 to 138,931 for Poliquin who was furious – as was his party. But the people of Maine had, at a referendum in 2016, voted for this system which is known in America as “ranked choice voting”.

My main argument in favour of this system takes the form of noting the results of all presidential elections in my lifetime. In 1940, 1944, 1948, 1952, 1956, 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2020 and 2024 the man who won the presidency also won the popular vote. That is 20 elections. By contrast there were only two elections to “misfire” as the Americans say it. The first was in 2000 when Republican George Bush junior polled 50,455,156 votes and Democrat Al Gore polled 50,992,335. Details of the second case are given below.

The Trump propaganda machine has had remarkable success in persuading people that he has performed much better in the voting than was actually the case. By contrast, Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024 performed far better in votes than people seem to understand. That point is best understood when people know that Biden defeated Trump in 2020 in a landslide – yet the Trump propaganda machine has persuaded a substantial minority of Americans that the 2020 election was “stolen”.

Consider these points. First, the popular vote for Biden was 81,282,965 votes and for Trump 74,223,509, a margin of 7,059,456 votes. Second, Biden won eight of the nine swing states. He lost only North Carolina but he won the other eight swing states, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Here is where my argument about the electoral college comes in. After the 2016 election I became convinced (as did many other pundits) that the electoral college system was loaded against the Democratic Party. However, following 2020, my analysis told me that the bias had disappeared. But American pundits thought otherwise. They are much better mathematicians than I am, so they were able to demonstrate by using multiple regression analysis that I was wrong.

Therefore, I have decided to compare like with like by considering the two cases of narrow Trump wins against female Democratic candidates.

The first case was 2016 when the result was this:

Hillary Clinton (Democratic)                 65,853,652 votes        51.11%             232 electors

Donald Trump (Republican)                 62,985,134 votes        48.89%             306 electors

Margin                                                  2,868,518 votes

Clinton carried three swing states, Nevada, New Hampshire and Virginia. Trump carried the other six.

The second case was 2024 when the result was this:

Donald Trump (Republican)                  77,302,169 votes       50.75%            312 electors

Kamala Harris (Democratic)                 75,015,834 votes        49.25%            226 electors

Margin                                                  2,286,335 votes

Harris carried only two swing states, New Hampshire and Virginia. Trump won the rest. However, the interesting feature of the above statistics is that Harris won 226 electoral college votes, only six fewer than Clinton won in 2016. That is accounted for by the fact that the two women won the same states except Nevada which Clinton carried, and Harris lost. To me that indicates the supposed bias in the system against the Democratic Party (illustrated so dramatically in 2016) has clearly now disappeared.

I am a mere bush mathematician but my way of proving this proposition is to compare the two results in this way. First, look at my pendulum following the 2016 election. Whereas the national Clinton figure was 51.11 per cent her figure in the tipping point state of Wisconsin was 49.59 per cent. That is a difference of 1.52 per cent. Second, look at my pendulum following the 2024 election. The national figure for Harris is 49.25 per cent but her figure for the tipping point state of Pennsylvania is 49.14 per cent. That is a difference of only 0.11 per cent. The difference between the two statistics has fallen by 1.41 per cent. I take that as proof that the bias in the system has disappeared. I’ll be very interested to learn what the American statisticians conclude after they have done their sophisticated multiple regression analysis.

So, why has this occurred? I would say that Clinton wasted her vote by doing exceptionally well in these big states she won: California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey. She also polled reasonably well in Texas and Florida, but she lost those so her respectable vote was useless to her. Meanwhile, Harris still easily won California, New York, Illinois and New Jersey and lost Texas and Florida by big margins. She used her vote much more economically than Clinton had done.

So, the case for keeping the electoral college is strong and I confidently predict that in 2028 the candidate who wins the presidency also will win the popular vote.

On Saturday 8 March, the Labor Party will have a good night in Perth. It will be in great contrast to the night exactly four weeks earlier on Saturday 8 February when, as I predicted in my last Switzer Daily article “Setback looming for Victorian Labor” https://switzer.com.au/the-experts/malcolm-mackerras/setback-looming-for-victorian-labor/ their night in Melbourne was characterised by weeping, wailing and the gnashing of teeth.

In Western Australia’s case, let me begin at the beginning. At the last general election, held on 13 March 2021, Labor secured 59.9% of the primary vote and 69.7% of the two-party preferred vote. In seats the result was 53 for Labor, four for the Nationals and two for the Liberal Party, Cottesloe in the metropolitan area and the rural seat of Vasse in the south-west. The Nationals won three wheatbelt seats (Central Wheatbelt, Moore and Roe) and the remote seat of North West Central. There are no Greens or independents, and the total Legislative Assembly number is 59 seats.

At the 2021 general election, both the leader and deputy leader of the Liberal Party lost their seats. So, with the Nationals becoming the bigger party in the Legislative Assembly the new Leader of the Opposition became Nationals leader Mia Davies. She has now “retired” by which I mean she will not re-contest her seat of Central Wheatbelt on 8 March. Instead, she will contest (unsuccessfully in my prediction) the new federal seat of Bullwinkel at the federal election I predict will be held on 12 April. So, the state Leader of the Opposition is now Shane Love, Nationals leader and member for Moore. On the other side of politics, Labor’s leader was Mark McGowan from 2012 to 2023. More importantly, he was the 30^th Premier from March 2017 to June 2023, since which date Roger Cook has been the 31^st Premier.

During the term of the 41^st Parliament (2021-24), there were two by-elections, both caused by resignations. The first was in North West Central where the National Party’s Vince Catania had been the member. The by-election took place in September 2022 and was a contest between the National Party winner Ms Merome Beard, who finished with 3,071 votes, and the Liberal candidate Will Baston who finished with 2,008. The second was in McGowan’s seat of Rockingham where the contest was between the Labor winner, Magenta Marshall who finished with 13,412 votes and an independent Hayley Edwards who finished with 8,443 votes. There was a Liberal candidate who performed so poorly as to be eliminated - and his preferences distributed!

These two by-elections illustrate the nature of Western Australia’s bias in favour of rural and remote electoral districts. In North West Central the number of electors was 10,904 at the redistribution in November 2019 and 11,189 at the by-election. Its area was 820,591 square kilometres, the biggest in the state. In Rockingham the numbers were 27,975 electors at that redistribution and 30,213 at the by-election. Rockingham’s area then was 49 square kilometres. It is a typical urban seat in terms of its size and number of electors.

Another redistribution was completed in December 2023. To the surprise of no one, it saw the abolition of North West Central and a new seat created in Perth’s rapidly growing outer southern suburbs. That seat, to be known as Oakford, will be safe for Labor so the interesting question is what will happen to Merome Beard. The abolition of her seat was accompanied by the abolition of Moore, the seat held by Love. The upshot is that the two will contest the new seat of Mid-West, it being, in effect, an amalgamation of Moore and North West Central.  Love will contest as the leader of the National Party, who is technically also Leader of the Opposition. Beard will be the Liberal candidate. In other words, Beard wanted to stay with the Nationals but, when thwarted of her wish to stay in Parliament in a safe Nationals seat, she defected to the Liberal Party. Mid-West is very rural, covering the area surrounding Geraldton. Its northern-most town is Carnarvon. Its southern-most town is Dalwallinu.

The media do not treat Love as though he is Leader of the Opposition. The alternative Premier, they say, is Libby Mettam, the member for Vasse and now Liberal leader. The latest Newspoll asked voters who should be Premier with 54 per cent nominating “Roger Cook”, 34% saying “Libby Mettam” and 12% saying “Other”.

I attach hereto my new pendulum based on the new boundaries. The number of notional Labor seats now is 54 (up one) and the number of notional seats for the National Party is three (down one). The Liberal Party stays at the two seats it won in March 2021. This pendulum is posted on my website. Any reader who wants a hard copy, just write to me asking for one. I have plenty of spare copies.

My Legislative Assembly prediction is for a biggish swing against Labor, reducing it from 69.7% of the two-party preferred vote to 57.7%, a swing of 12%. On a perfectly uniform swing that would leave Labor on 43 seats, increase the Liberals to 12 seats and give the Nationals four. While the swing against Labor will not be perfectly uniform, I know from experience that the deviations of swing on my pendulum cancel out – so that is my prediction, 43, 12 and 4. Will there be any Greens or independents? I don’t think so, but it would not entirely surprise me if teal independents took Fremantle from Labor and Cottesloe from the Liberal Party.

Although most attention will be given to the election of 59 members of the Legislative Assembly, there will also be an election for 37 members of the Legislative Council, with all 96 members in the 42^nd Parliament serving for four-year terms. The Legislative Council result in March 2021 was that Labor won 22 seats while the combination of all the rest was 14 members, total 36. However, that was the result under the “bad old system”. There has since been a genuine democratic reform whereby all 37 members will be elected from the state voting as one electorate under a proportional representation system. My predictions are 15 Labor, 11 Liberals, three Nationals, three Greens, two Legalise Cannabis Party and one each for the Daylight Saving Party, the Animal Justice Party and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party.

What politicians call “democratic electoral reform” is often seen by outsiders as being a stitch up of one kind or another - and I often find myself in the company of such cynical outsiders who say that. For example, my recent Switzer Daily article on Victoria’s democracy was posted on 30 August last year and titled “A cynical stitch up is ready to be debated” https://switzer.com.au/the-experts/malcolm-mackerras/a-cynical-stitch-up-is-ready-to-be-debated/ This WA case, however, is exceptional. For those who want to read me further on this subject I refer you to my article “WA implements a genuine democratic reform” https://switzer.com.au/the-experts/malcolm-mackerras/wa-implements-a-genuine-democratic-reform/  It was published in Switzer Daily on the morning of 24 November 2021.

Next Saturday, 8 February, some 80,000 formal votes will be cast in different parts of Melbourne. They will be the first Australian votes counted for 2025 and may serve as a guide to other Australian election results later in the year. The votes in question will come from by-elections for two electoral districts in Victoria’s Legislative Assembly, Prahran and Werribee. Prahran is very markedly south-eastern inner metropolitan and includes the suburbs of Prahran, South Yarra, Windsor and much of Saint Kilda. Werribee is just as markedly south-western outer metropolitan and semi-rural and is based on Wyndham City but includes Werribee and Little River and reaches on to Port Phillip Bay.

My predictions are that Prahran will be won by the Greens candidate, Angellica Di Camillo, while Werribee will be won by the Liberal candidate, Steve Murphy. Runner-up candidates, therefore, would be Rachel Westaway (Liberal) in Prahran and John Lister (Labor) in Werribee.

The way in which these by-elections came about speaks volumes to what Australian politics is like these days. Prahran had a 42-years-old male Greens member, one Samuel Hibbins, known as Sam. He resigned his seat on 23 November. Why? Because his Greens parliamentary colleagues in effect forced him to resign. He had had a brief affair with a staffer. That’s what the moralising Greens are like. A Labor, Liberal, National or independent member would not have resigned his seat for such a reason. In the case of Werribee, the member was Labor’s 65-years-old Tim Pallas who was Treasurer in the Andrews and Allan Labor governments. In the good old days, he would have retired at the expiration of his term as Werribee member in November next year. Instead, he resigned his seat on 6 January 2025 – but the media describe him as having “retired”.

A look at the history of these two seats suggests that both are marginal. Back in the days of Henry Bolte and Rupert Hamer as Liberal Premier, the member for Prahran was the great cricketer Sam Loxton (Liberal) and the member for Werribee was Neville Hudson (Liberal) but when John Cain’s Labor government was in office from April 1982 to August 1990 both went to Labor. During the Kennett years (October 1992-October 1999) the Liberal Party won back Prahran and was highly competitive in Werribee without winning it. Then Ted Baillieu was Liberal Premier from December 2010 to March 2013 and these two seats split. Prahran had a Liberal member, a certain Clement Newton-Brown, but the name “Werribee” was dropped in favour of the more metropolitan name of “Tarneit” for which Pallas was the member. However, the idea that Prahran is more Liberal than Werribee, though historically correct, has been thrown out the window by boundary changes and demographic change. The reverse is now the case.

The Labor Party is in a bad way in Victoria at the moment, so bad in fact that it has decided not even to contest Prahran which seat Labor seems to accept is now permanently in the column of the Greens. So, what about the Liberal Party? According to my current Victorian pendulum, the Liberal Party needs a swing of 12.1% to take Prahran from the Greens and a swing of an even 11% to take Werribee from Labor. Those statistics, however, are misleading in the current context. Werribee covers territory in which the Liberals now do pretty well whereas Prahran covers territory in which the Liberal Party is going backwards.

Nominations for both seats closed on Friday 24 January and the positions on the ballot paper were drawn by lot. Three interesting features were revealed. The first was the number of candidates. There will be 11 candidates for Prahran and 12 for Werribee. Those are high numbers. Bear in mind that the system is one of full preferential voting. Therefore, we may expect yet another very high informal vote of about 10% in Werribee and a higher-than-normal number of informal votes in Prahran.

The second interesting feature applies to Prahran. There is an independent candidate whose name is Tony Lupton. That name rang a bell with me, so I checked my records and found that Tony Lupton was the Labor member for Prahran from November 2002 until November 2010 when he was defeated by Clement Newton-Brown (Liberal). Lupton should get good support reflecting Labor supporters who are reluctant to switch their primary votes from Labor to Greens consequent upon Labor’s decision not to stand a candidate.

The third interesting feature is that the Liberal Party got lucky in the draws for ballot paper positions. In both seats the Liberal candidate is second. In Prahran the Liberal candidate, Rachel Westaway, is just below Nathan Chisholm (independent) while in Werribee the Liberal candidate, Steve Murphy, is just below Raheem Rifai of the Greens. The serious candidate of the left in Prahran, Angelica Di Camilla of the Greens is placed 8^th while Labor’s John Lister is at number 11 in Werribee.

Finally, readers may be interested to know I am now predicting that the federal election will be held on 12 April, the last Saturday before Good Friday. In expectation of this date, I have l posted my newest pendulum on my website at www.malcolmmackerras.com. It is the first of my Australian pendulums to appear and is titled “Mackerras Pendulum Federal 2022 Result, Adjusted for Aston by-election April 2023, and for new boundaries in 2025”.

The world is now ready for the new Trump term to begin on Monday January 20. In my opinion it is very appropriate that US flags should be flown at half-mast – even though that is a sign of respect for the late Jimmy Carter, the 39th President (1977-81) and not disrespect for Donald Trump who was the 45th President (2017-21) and will be the 47th from 2025 to 2029.
We have seen the first day of meeting of the 119th Congress on Friday January 3 – of which more below. We have also noticed that January 6 this year witnessed the peaceful transfer of power, as also occurred on January 6, 2017. As to why January 6, 2021, saw an insurrection to stop the peaceful transfer of power – that will be debated for many years, but my take is given below.
In the meanwhile, one set of statistics has been missing. So far, we have not been told the final count of the popular vote recorded for the November 2024 presidential election. I give it below, showing the equivalent votes for the 2016 and 2020 elections.

It is important that these statistics should be recorded because they enable reputable analysts to counter the propaganda of so-called “conservative” commentators (of which the most offensive have been Rowan Dean and Paul Murray) who insist that Trump won in 2024 by a landslide, even as they accept that the 2020 election was “stolen”.
Let me give the definition of “landslide” as found in my 1964 edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. In its figurative use landslide is described as “a great majority of votes, an overwhelming victory, especially in an election.”
On that basis none of the three elections contested by Trump could be described as a landslide. All the reputable analyst can say is that the biggest popular vote was given to Joe Biden in 2020. One can also note that Trump won the popular vote in 2024, but his win was smaller than that enjoyed by Hillary Clinton in 2016. A Trump admirer could also say that he won 63 million votes in 2016, 74 million in 2020 and 77 million in 2024, so his vote is on the rise.
In my Switzer Daily article posted on July 19 last year (“June 27 and July 13 gave Trump the 2024 election”) https://switzer.com.au/the-experts/malcolm-mackerras/june-27-and-july-13-gave-trump-the-2024-election/ I predicted that Trump would win the popular vote, and the opinion poll published with my pendulum on election day in the Sydney Daily Telegraph and the Melbourne Herald Sun also pointed to that outcome. Therefore, I am not surprised that Trump did win the popular vote narrowly in 2024. But note also something else I wrote in that Switzer Daily article. “Mark my words. The second Trump aberration will be just as bad for America as the first.”
What these statistics tell us is that the vagaries of the electoral college system presently favour the Republican Party. That being so those vagaries conceal the reality which is that the Democratic Party has been the natural majority party since the 1992 presidential election. For my defence of that proposition read below.
The chutzpah of Donald Trump knows no bounds, but his propaganda skills have been useful to his party. Looking at the three sets of statistics shown above it is incredible that the biggest victory (Biden in 2020) is the one described as “stolen” while Trump’s two narrow wins should be accepted as okay. In any sensible world all three would, without question, have been accepted as okay. All three results were decisive.
How, therefore, could this absurd situation have arisen? The answer I give is that since 1978 the Republican Party has been the one to play hardball. When the Democrats have responded in any way the Republicans have been able to pretend that it has been the Democrats who have played hardball. The reality is that the Republicans started this process, and I use the year 1978 because that is the year Newt Gingrich was first elected to the House of Representatives. Trump’s propaganda skills leave those of Gingrich for dead, but it was Gingrich who started this process. He was first elected to a Georgia congressional district in 1978 and was leader of the Republicans from 1995 to 1999 (and therefore Speaker) but took his throwing of bombs too far – so he became an embarrassment to the party and was displaced by a more moderate Republican.
The comments made above may well give the impression of me as a boastful man. To counter that impression, I now record that on 23 January last year my Switzer Daily article was titled “Trump will not get a second term” https://switzer.com.au/the-experts/malcolm-mackerras/trump-will-not-get-a-second-term/ My fallibility is demonstrated by my need to cancel that prediction - which I did in the July article.
However, notwithstanding its lack of wisdom that article it did contain some information which I now repeat regarding the 24th and 26th President, Grover Cleveland who served two non-consecutive terms, 1885-89 and 1893-97.

Now for a trivial detail. There have been 45 men serving as US president – but Cleveland and Trump are counted as two men. That is why Trump will be the 47th President.
Let me now explain why I refer to these four presidential terms in the way I do. The 1885-89 term was the first Cleveland aberration while the 2017-21 term was the first Trump aberration. The 1893-97 term was the second Cleveland aberration while the 2025-29 term is the second Trump aberration.
The point is that the two parties have never been equal. One or other has been dominant over different periods. After a shortish period known as “the era of good feelings” the American polity settled into “the First Democratic Era”. During that period Democratic candidates won in 1800, 1804, 1808, 1812, 1816, 1820, 1824, 1828, 1832, 1836, 1844, 1852 and 1856. The party of the right was then known as the Whigs. Its candidates won only twice, in 1840 and 1848, elections clearly described by historians as aberrations.
Historians are nearly unanimous in the opinion that Abraham Lincoln was America’s greatest president. His Republican Party re-aligned the party system, so we had “the First Republican Era”. In that period Republican candidates won in 1860, 1864, 1868, 1872, 1876, 1880, 1888, 1896, 1900, 1904, 1908, 1920, 1924 and 1928. Democratic candidates won only in 1884, 1892, 1912 and 1916.
Historians are nearly unanimous in the opinion that Franklin Roosevelt was America’s greatest president in the first half of the 20th Century. His Democratic Party re-aligned the party system again, so we had “the Second Democratic Era”. In that period Democratic candidates won in 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, 1948, 1960, 1964 and 1976. Republican candidates won only in 1952, 1956, 1968 and 1972.
Again, historians are nearly unanimous in the opinion that Ronald Reagan was America’s greatest president in the second half of the 20th Century. His Republican Party won massive victories in 1980, 1984 and 1988 in what is often referred to as “the Second Republican Era”.
I insist that the period from 1992 to the present day should be described as “the Third Democratic Era”. My basis for such an assertion has been to add up all the presidential votes from 1992 to 2024. The result is that 560 million votes have been cast for Democratic presidential candidates and 526 million for Republican candidates. Democratic candidates have enjoyed good wins in 1992, 1996, 2008, 2012 and 2020. Republican candidates have won the popular vote narrowly in 2004 and 2024. Republican wins of the presidency in 2000 and 2016 were due entirely to the vagaries of the electoral college system.
Very early in this article I gave the 2024 popular vote. I now give the 2004 popular vote – but I also give the same kinds of detail for the following election in 2008. I give 2008 because it constitutes a very good omen for the 2028 election.

There is a further detail in the above to which I invite attention. In 2004 Bush enjoyed a better popular vote win than did Trump in 2024, a margin of 3,012,171 votes compared with 2,286,335 votes for Trump. Whereas the Bush percentage of the two-candidate vote was 51.2 for Trump it was only 50.8 per cent. Indeed, Trump’s win in 2024 was the poorest since Richard Nixon’s first win in 1968.
On the basis of his pretences about the 2024 elections the convicted felon Trump will claim a mandate to make radical changes to American society. He has no mandate. In the House of Representatives, the 2024 result was only 220 Republicans to 215 Democrats meaning that when the 119th Congress first met on January 3 the Republican candidate for Speaker Mike Johnson collected only 218 votes to 215 for the Democratic candidate Hakeem Jeffries.
The Senate is better for the Republicans with their 53-47 majority. However, the US Senate is like its Australian counterpart in being unrepresentative swill. The House of Representatives has 435 members with each member representing some 700,000 people. It is truly democratic. The Senate is not. But the Republican Party will hold a Senate majority for the whole Trump term while losing its House of Representatives majority at the mid-term elections in November 2026.
It won’t take very long for the American people to realise how right they were to kick Trump out in 2020 and how foolish they were to restore him to the presidency in 2024. In the meantime, I have demonstrated the similarity between Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump. Each was a candidate for the minority party in an era of the opposite party being the majority party. That is why I describe their four terms as aberrations.

“Electoral history is littered with unexpected landslides.” That was the favourite aphorism of my friend the late Sir David Butler (1924- 2022). He was the eminent psephologist of the United Kingdom and that was one of the many perceptive comments he used to make. It is very true, and I can attest that it is quite rare to have a very close election preceded by pundit predictions that it would be very close. I learnt as long ago as 1961 that very close elections typically come as a shock as was the case in December that year when Bob Menzies was universally expected to win handsomely his sixth straight election - only to be treated to the shock of a very close result, a genuine “cliffhanger”.

During 2024 I have publicly commented upon, and made predictions for, overseas elections in India, Ireland, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. I have also done that for several Australian by-elections, for state elections in Tasmania and Queensland and for territory elections in the Northern Territory and the ACT. All those elections went as I predicted but that is not important. What is important is that two of them illustrated the Butler aphorism. The two cases are the Northern Territory general election on Saturday 24 August and the US presidential election on Tuesday 5 November. Both were preceded by the frequent saying of “it will be very close” and in both cases many historians have pronounced the result to have been a landslide. The two cases of my predictions can be found in Switzer Daily for July 19 “June 27 and July 13 gave Trump the 2024 election” and for August 2 “Is Labor set to lose power in the Northern Territory?”.In the former case I made this further prediction: “Mark my words. The second Trump aberration will be just as bad for America as the first.” In the latter case my further comment came with a question: “With a run of elections ahead, will a potential loss in the Northern Territory be the first pin to fall for Labor? Here are my predictions.”

In both these cases I correctly named the winner but did not do particularly well on the details – but at least I was willing to name a predicted winner and did not resort to the standard non-prediction of “it is too close to call”. My favourite election for 2024, therefore, must be one of these two, so my decision has been made of the basis of my joy or gloom at the result. The NT result gave me joy, so that becomes my favourite. My view of Trump is that he is a charlatan and a criminal. He seems to have one virtue: he is not a drinker. Apart from that I see him to be wholly without merit or virtue of any kind. I’ll leave my analysis of that election until January 2025 and content myself for the moment to say that I wish my prediction had been proved wrong.

For the Northern Territory, my prediction was that Lia Finocchiaro would be the new Chief Minister in a majority Country Liberal Party government with 14 seats. In the event the CLP won 17 seats so I was wrong to predict the CLP would not gain the then Labor seats of Casuarina, Drysdale and Sanderson. However, my understating of Labor’s disaster did not end there. I believed that I was predicting a bad result for Labor when I wrote that Labor would hold nine of the 15 seats it had pre-election. In the end Labor held only four, all remote seats with significant aboriginal populations, Arafura, Arnhem, Daly and Gwoja.

Labor’s other losses begin with Nightcliff to the Greens. Nightcliff was Labor’s strongest win in 2020 and during the count it appeared that it would remain with former (failed) Chief Minister Natasha Fyles. However, in a surprise development the CLP candidate, Helen Secretary, fell into third place and her preferences were expected to favour Labor as per her “how-to-vote” recommendation. They were so undisciplined in the end that the Greens candidate, Kat McNamara, finished with 2,252 votes compared with 2,216 for Fyles. That meant Labor did not retain a single seat in the populous Darwin-Palmerston region where the party had won eleven seats in 2020.

Adjoining Nightcliff to its south is Fannie Bay, a seat I predicted would be lost by Labor to the CLP. That happened, but not in the way I expected. The sitting Labor member, Brent Potter, came in third. After the distribution of the 187 preferences of Leonard May (Independent), the count was 1,918 votes for the CLP winner Ms Laurie Zio, 1,424 for the Greens candidate and 1,319 for Potter. As demonstrated below, Potter would have won if he had come in second on the earlier counts – but whereas the Greens preferences were discipled to favour Labor over the CLP the Labor preferences were very undisciplined, meaning that the CLP won the seat. So, the Greens thought they could snatch two seats from Labor. They succeeded in Nightcliff – but had the effect of giving Fannie Bay to the CLP.

The fifth unexpected Labor loss was the Darwin northern suburbs seat of Johnston. It went to an independent candidate, Justine Davis. As in Fannie Bay Labor lost the seat because its sitting member, Joel Bowden, came in third and Davis finished with 2,425 votes compared with 1,782 for the CLP candidate Gary Strachan. Therefore, Labor won the two-party preferred vote with the CLP in seven seats but had only four wins. The three unusual cases were Fannie Bay (Labor 2,442 votes, CLP 2,219), Johnston (Labor 2,224 votes, CLP 1,983) and Nightcliff (Labor 2,908 votes, CLP 1,560).

As is so often the case, the Labor disaster in seats was essentially due to its very low overall vote. Labor is back to 1997 in that regard. At that election Labor scored only 42.1% of the two-party preferred vote compared with 42.7% in 2024. At the intervening elections Labor’s shares were 48.1% in 2001, 59.1% in 2005, 50.5% in 2008, 44.2% in 2012, 57.3% in 2016 and 53.9% in 2020. The best way to understand this election, however, is simply to look at my pre-election and post-election pendulums which are attached at the end of this article.

In January next year, my first article for 2025 will be my analysis of the US presidential election. It will be posted before the second Trump aberration begins on January 20. My main question to ask myself will be whether his win can be described as a landslide. I have answered that for Australia’s Northern Territory. It was a landslide victory for Lia Finocchiaro and the CLP.

In the meanwhile, I wish readers a happy Christmas and a bright and prosperous New Year.

Antony Green AO, chief elections analyst of the ABC, provides a very good commentary on election nights and his blog is most useful for those who are much into the details of Australian elections. The citation for his AO, awarded in 2017, reads: “For distinguished service to the broadcast media as an analyst and commentator for state and federal elections, and to the community as a key interpreter of Australian democracy”.

It may sound odd, but this is the man I think of as my main opponent in matters of electoral reform - but he is not my only opponent. Born in March 1960, Green has been joined by a younger man born in the seventies. His name is Kevin Bonham, and he is a Tasmanian. Like Green, he works hard at his psephology and runs a useful and readable blog. Unsurprisingly, both these men have large fan clubs.

Being aware of their opinions and personal situations, I wrote an open letter to them in June 2021 that I posted on my blog that bears the title “Unrepresentative Swill”. Their reactions differed noticeably. Green has never mentioned my name. Bonham, by contrast, quotes me on his blog. I find that endearing. His quotation from me is to the description I gave to both and each individually. “He is a pragmatist and a propagandist who panders to the greed of the powerful.”

So, what do I mean by that? Essentially, it means that I have noticed who the winners (almost always) are from the electoral reforms they want. The winners are almost always the machines of big political parties. Green and Bonham supply them with “democratic principles” that justify what the machines of big political parties want.

When it comes to having principles, I say that the opposites of Green and Bonham are the members of the Proportional Representation Society of Australia. They really do have democratic principles, which explains why their successes are so rare. I have never been a member of the PRSA, but I am something of a fellow traveller. That is why there is a street in Canberra named after a former long-term PRSA president, one Bogey Musidlak (1953-2017). For further information about “Musidlak Rise” in the Canberra suburb of Denman Prospect, readers are asked to consult my blog. It is now generally accepted that he should be described as the father of Hare-Clark in the ACT.

“Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good” is my motto when it comes to electoral reform. The problem with that, however, is deciding just what is good. And there is a special problem in today’s Australia – deciding whether Glenn Druery is good, bad or indifferent. If he is bad (as many assert) the top priority must be to drive him out of business. By contrast, that is not one of my priorities.

Glenn Druery is the man who has become known as “the preference whisperer” and he is now the chief of staff to WA Senator Fatima Payman. He became famous in September 2013 when he was able, using clever preference arrangements, to secure the election to the Senate of the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party’s Ricky Muir. Coming from rural East Gippsland Muir was a senator for Victoria from July 2014 until the double dissolution of May 2016. He became the symbol of the argument that the Senate cross bench was choc-a-bloc full of “micro party senators who won their seats with very few votes by gaming the system” with help from Druery and his ilk.

In the present context the important fact to know is that only one Australian jurisdiction keeps the institution of the group voting ticket that was once so helpful to Druery for Senate elections. The jurisdiction is Victoria where there are 40 members of its Legislative Council elected on the basis of five being elected from each of eight regions.

And it is Victoria I now seek to discuss because in July this year there was issued a two-volume report from the Electoral Matters Committee of the state’s Parliament. It is titled “The conduct of the 2022 Victorian state election”. While the report is magnificent, I have a problem with it. When it comes to the big controversial question, Antony Green and his fan club have driven its main recommendations. Essentially, the report says: “Glenn Druery is a bad man who must be driven out of business immediately.”

On the other hand, page 244 of the second volume of the report quotes my submission where I wrote: “I have a favourable view of Druery’s business, but I am quite happy for it to close as a by-product of any decision to install a genuinely good system.”. In my opinion the present Victorian Legislative Council system is the third best PR system in Australia, being exceeded in virtue only by the Tasmanian Hare-Clark system and the ACT variant of Hare-Clark. They are the best and second best, respectively. If the Committee’s report were adopted Victoria would, in my opinion, have the worst system.

Essentially, the report says: “Victoria should copy the new Senate system”, a system I denounce as “wholly without merit or virtue of any kind”. So, why my denunciation? Well, I condemn it because it is dishonest, and its ballot paper is voter unfriendly. But my biggest objection is that the legislation for it compels the federal Electoral Commissioner to tell voters lies about Senate voting and to pump out misinformation in the name of “public education”. If Victoria were to copy the Senate system, then both federal and state Electoral Commissioners would be compelled to tell lies to voters and to pump out misinformation about their systems.

By contrast, I think holders of the position of Electoral Commissioner should tell voters the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

(The words “wholly without merit or virtue of any kind” are what I said when appearing before the committee in person. I do not find them quoted anywhere in the report, notwithstanding that Volume 1 comes to 89 pages and volume 2 comes to 362 pages.)

So, what do I expect? I predict that my present campaign will succeed which would mean that the 2026 Victorian state election would be conducted without any change in the system. Then during the next Victorian parliamentary term there will be appointed a genuine independent inquiry headed by a respected judge (or, perhaps, former Governor of Victoria) and two or three genuinely independent, highly reputable persons. That will be followed by a referendum in which the people will endorse the new system – and all its principles.

So, the final result will be a Victoria divided into three regions, each electing 12 members, making a total membership of 36 in its Legislative Council. A by-product will be that Druery will be out of business. He will, however, be happy to know that he can get a highly paid job on the public purse. He will also be content to know that he has played an important role, courtesy of his contribution to the health of Australia’s democracy.

Finally, I began this article by mentioning the citation for Antony Green’s AO and that he was born in March 1960. I should mention that I too have the letters AO after my name, given on Australia Day 2006. My citation reads: “For service to the community by raising public awareness of and encouraging debate about the political process in Australia and other western democracies, and through commitment to reform and improvement of the electoral system, and to education”. I was born in August 1939. Therefore, of the three living psephologists mentioned above I am the oldest, Green is the second oldest and Bonham is the youngest.

As the Australian political pundit who prides himself on his willingness to predict election results, I have noticed four Saturdays in the foreseeable future being the fixed dates for Australian state and territory elections. They are 24 August for the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly, 19 October for the ACT Legislative Assembly, 26 October for the Queensland Legislative Assembly and 8 March next year for both houses of the Parliament of Western Australia. There will also be a federal election in the first half of next year on a date to be announced.

I plan to offer predictions on all of these. Unfortunately, however, the most difficult to pick is the event occurring first – the election this month of 25 members of the NT Legislative Assembly. However, I am predicting that there will be a change of government. That would mean the new Chief Minister will be Lia Finocchiaro of the Country Liberal Party replacing Labor’s Eva Lawler.

The reason for my reticence is that I am not aware of any significant recent and reliable opinion polling – and that is normally the main source for punditry. Therefore, I must rely on the three other tools, the laws of electoral history, the betting odds and by-election results. Two of the three point to a change of government – so I have decided to predict Labor’s defeat at the hands of the CLP.

During the term of the parliament now dissolved there have been three Labor chief ministers. The first was the successful Michael Gunner. He became Leader of the Opposdition in April 2015 and then led his party to two successive election victories in August 2016 and August 2020, thus becoming the 11th Chief Minister. The trouble began when he retired in May 2022. His retirement was for genuine family reasons. The party passed over his deputy, Nicole Manison, and chose Natasha Fyles, the first case of an NT Labor leader from the left faction. She was the 12th Chief Minister, and a failure. Then Manison was passed over again in favour of Eva Lawler who became the 13th Chief Minister in December last year.

Commenting on Natasha Fyles in December 2023 a seasoned observer by the name of Matt Cunningham wrote this: “The official reason for the resignation of Natasha Fyles was her failure to declare shares in a mining company. But her leadership had been on life support for months. When she took over from Michael Gunner 17 months ago Labor was still a warm favourite to be re-elected in 2024. Since then, the party’s fortunes have nosedived.”

Lack of space prevents me from giving other cases that may be likened to this. Suffice it to say that there are laws of electoral history which say that a government in this situation goes out of office at the next election.

In this case my second tool of prediction is the betting odds. For the Northern Territory Sportsbet has the CLP at $1.60 and Labor at $2.40. That is better for Labor than in Queensland where the Liberal National Party is on $1.20 and Labor on five dollars. However, it does suggest Labor’s defeat in the NT, even if it is not as guaranteed as in Queensland.

On the other hand, Labor’s record at by-elections is pretty good – and this brings me to my detailed predictions which are made with the attached Mackerras Pendulum in mind. I begin with the right-hand side and confidently predict that the CLP will win the seven seats shown as CLP while the two seats shown as independent will be won by independents.

I predict that the CLP will take these six seats from Labor: Blain, Port Darwin, Fong Lim, Fannie Bay, Karama and Wanguri. That would give the CLP 13 seats, leaving Labor with nine and three independents. So, I am predicting a majority CLP government.

Now here I must give some details about these marginal seats. The first is that Daly was won by the CLP at the August 2020 general election but was taken from the CLP at the by-election in September 2021. That fact is shown on the pendulum. Second, the Palmerston-based seat of Blain is a sure CLP gain but the Labor member, strictly speaking, is an independent, having broken with the party. Third, there was a by-election for Arafura in March 2023 and the Labor vote rose substantially.

So, in my band of marginal Labor seats there are three in the middle I predict Labor to hold, Arafura, Daly and Drysdale, in this latter case because the Chief Minister, Eva Lawler, is the member for Drysdale.

That leaves one exceptional case. I predict Labor to lose to the CLP Wanguri in Darwin’s northern suburbs. It is a natural Labor seat but the sitting member, Nicole Manison, is retiring in circumstances that are very bad for Labor.

Finally, two further things should be mentioned. The first is that there has been what I describe as a “trivial” redistribution of seats. The ideological passion for “one vote one value” in Australia is such that the Northern Territory and South Australia review their electoral boundaries during each parliamentary term. This produces what I call “trivial” redistributions – and such a case might suggest I should revise the pendulum attached. However, no seat name has changed, and no seat has changed parties notionally - so I thought it best simply to ignore this trivial redistribution.

But there is one detail to note. There has been a variation in the boundary between the adjoining Palmerston seats of Blain and Drysdale. Therefore, the buffer statistic for Blain should be 1.4 per cent, not 0.2 per cent. That for Drysdale should be 5.4 per cent, not 7.9 per cent. Not that it matters. The CLP will win Blain and Eva Lawler will hold Drysdale,

The other point is this. There are 153,500 electors enrolled to vote in this election. That is an average of only 6,140 electors per division, tailor-made for good local members. Hence there is bound to be much variation in the swings.

I predict a ten per cent swing, reducing Labor from 54 per cent of the two-party preferred vote to 44 per cent. However, I confidently predict Labor to hold Arafura, Daly and Drysdale but those retentions will be partly offset by the Labor loss of Wanguri described above.

Back on Tuesday 23 January there was posted on Switzer Daily an article by me titled “Trump will not get a second term” https://switzer.com.au/the-experts/malcolm-mackerras/trump-will-not-get-a-second-term/. I find myself now somewhat regretting writing that article - although it did contain some interesting historical information. The question raised, however, remains, and it is this: to what extent can we compare the 1884, 1888 and 1892 presidential elections with those of 2016, 2020 and 2024?

One similarity quickly springs to mind. The Democrat Grover Cleveland (!885-89 and 1893-97) is presently the only former President to have served two non-consecutive terms. In my article “Nixon and Trump: two failed Presidents” https://switzer.com.au/the-experts/malcolm-mackerras/donald-trump-the-worst-most-failed-us-president/  I showed a table of presidential greatness as measured by historians. It rated Cleveland as “high average”, coming in at number 13 out of 44 past presidents. He was the 24^th and 26^th President, the Americans counting him as two men. By contrast with Cleveland, Donald Trump sits at number 44 out of 44 past Presidents. In other words, American historians rate Trump as the worst former US President, a view with which I agree.

It is now clear that Trump will get a second term after all. He will be described as number 45 and number 47, with Joe Biden as the 46^th President. How will historians then rate Trump? I think I would find myself compelled to place him at number 14, just one rank below Cleveland. That would make Democrat James Buchanan (1857-61) and Republican Warren Harding (1921-23) the two worst Presidents.

Readers who go to my January article will note the title I gave to it. That title was “Trump will not get a second term.” I have never previously predicted in public print who would be elected on Tuesday 5 November 2024 - only who would not be. Here I must confess to wishful thinking. While in private conversation I would typically say that Biden would be re-elected in 2024 I was hoping all along that Biden would give way to Kamala Harris. That was quite a strange hope to have.

It certainly shows how superior our Australian democratic system is to the American. Yet many Americans would claim their system is more democratic. The highest office in the US is the President and every American voter participates in that choice, both in the primaries (which determine who would be each party’s candidate) and at the general election in November. The highest office in Australia, by contrast, is the prime minister and he or she is chosen by an electorate to be their local member and by the party to lead it. Who are we to say that our system is more democratic? My answer to the question is to assert that our system is not more democratic than the American, but it works much better. That is why at Australian referendums the result we so often get is: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, that being a suitable Americanism to describe our situation. Australia is the lucky country.

So, what about this fond hope I have had that Biden would give way to Harris?  Clearly, I have not been the only election analyst to entertain such a hope. As recently as last Saturday morning, the Democratic election guru and strategist James Carville was quoted by two journalists in The Weekend Australian on pages 17 and 22. The full quote is: “Joe Biden is going to be out of the 2024 presidential race. Whether he is ready to admit it or not. His pleas on Monday to congressional Democrats for support will not unite the party behind him. Mr Biden says he’s staying in the race, but it’s only a matter of time before Democrat pressure and public and private polling lead him to exit the race. The jig is up, and the sooner Mr Biden and the Democratic leaders accept this, the better. We need to move forward.” To see that quote in the paper see Paul Kelly on page 22.

The problem is the very democracy of the Americans. Biden won a whole heap of primaries giving him all those delegates to the Democratic National Convention at Chicago in August. Are they to be ignored in the pretence that really the American system can be converted into the Australian? Idiotic though the American system is that is the reality.

This article is titled “Thursday 27 June and Saturday !3 July were days that gave Trump the 2024 election.” The former date is when the debate took place between Biden and Trump at Atlanta, Georgia. It was shown on Australian television on the morning of Friday 28 June and universally thought to have been a disaster for Biden. Last Saturday 13 July was when the assassination attempt was made on Trump’s life at Butler, Pennsylvania. The debate effectively killed Biden, the hope of the Democratic Party being alive only by virtue of the fond one mentioned above. Then the shooting last Saturday meant that Harris will not want to hold the poisoned chalice of being the Democratic candidate. Nor would Gretchen Whitmer. Nor would Gavin Newsom.

So, how will the presidency of Biden be seen by historians? I would say that he has been an excellent president but that he has bungled the politics of the 2024 election as comprehensively as could be imagined. That is why he has been left holding the poisoned chalice. So, no one else now wants to be the Democratic candidate in 2024. Historians will see it that way. He has made his bed, and he must lie upon it. He must also contend with the opinion of historians that he behaved selfishly by continuing his campaign. He should never have sought a second term. Once it became clear that he was not fit for a second term he should have released his delegates at the August convention.

And what about Trump? I see him as someone of questionable character and with radical policies who wants the presidency so that he can pardon himself. Like his friend Vladimir Putin he does not care about ordinary people. They are losers to him. For Putin they are cannon fodder. For Trump they are voters fit to be manipulated. His achievement has been to place himself above the law with help from his mates on the Supreme Court which he has stacked in the past and will stack in the future.

For the Democratic Party there is one reason for hope about the future. Trump will not be able to be a candidate in 2028 so both big parties will go through the democratic processes of primaries and the rest. The person who wins the nomination of the Republican Party (presumably Vice-President Vance) will carry the baggage of Trump who will surely suffer a disaster at the mid-term 2026 elections as big as the disaster of the 2018 midterms. The Democratic Party candidate, by contrast, will be in a pretty good position. Mark my words: the second Trump aberration will be just as bad for America as the first. Therefore, the Republican candidate in 2028 will be rejected just as comprehensively by the voters as Trump was in 2020.

Some day in October I’ll contribute another article for Switzer Daily giving details of my predictions. For the moment, however, I am predicting that the electoral college will divide 327 votes for Trump and 211 for Biden. In 2020 the division was 306 for Biden and 232 for Trump.

Now that we have a date for the British general election the time has come for me to make my predictions. However, I have already done that in two Switzer Daily articles over the past year. They were on 18 September last year titled “Could British and Scottish PMs learn from Anthony Albanese?” https://switzer.com.au/the-experts/malcolm-mackerras/could-british-scottish-pms-learn-from-anthony-albanese/ and on 4 November also last year “Come October 2024 Sir Keir Starmer will be the British Prime Minister” https://switzer.com.au/the-experts/malcolm-mackerras/come-october-2024-sir-keir-starmer-will-be-the-british-prime-minister/ I repeat. It has been clear for the last two years that Sir Keir Starmer will be the British Prime Minister leading a majority Labour government, his Labour Party having made big gains from the Conservatives supplemented by good gains from the Scottish National Party.

I now make these supplementary predictions. The three big party English leaders, Rishi Sunak, Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Ed Davey of the Liberal Democrats will all hold their seats, but former leaders Liz Truss (Conservative) and Jeremy Corbyn (formerly Labour but now seeking re-election as an independent) will be defeated, finding that Labour has won their seats. Labour will also win the seat formerly held by Boris Johnson. As I explained in my “Switzer Daily” article last year the Conservative party was very lucky to win that by-election. See my article posted on 1 August 2023 “Conservatives retain banished Boris Johnson’s old Commons seat.” I now make these supplementary predictions. I now make these supplementary predictions. https://switzer.com.au/the-experts/malcolm-mackerras/conservatives-retain-banished-boris-johnsons-old-commons-seat/ For one further prediction see below.

Meanwhile, there is another aspect of this election that interests me. I am struck by how big the House of Commons is – given the size of the country. There are 650 members, a number that should be reduced.

The British electoral register has not yet been published but my estimate is that there will be 48,760,000 electors compared with 46,017,235 in May 2010, 46,425,476 in May 2015, 46,826,481 in June 2017 and 47,563,988 in December 2019. In my sentence above I have given the dates for the last four general elections with the first three having been held on traditional dates in the middle of the year when the days are long, and the nights are short. For purely political reasons, Boris Johnson chose a winter election on an unprecedented December day. Fortunately, Rishi Sunak has chosen to revert to a date likely to be popular with the public – but such an excellent choice will not rescue his doomed campaign.

With a total of 650 members of the House of Commons the average number of electors per British MP has been 70,796 in 2010, 71,424 in 2015, 72,041 in 2017 and 73,175 in 2019. On my calculations it will be 75,015 at this election. Compare that with the Australian House of Representatives. On the most recent count late in April there were 17,817,771 electors, an average of 118,785 electors per member.

There has been a redistribution of seats for the House of Commons based on the principle of “one vote, one value”. This will result in there being 543 seats for England (up 10), 57 for Scotland (down two), 32 for Wales (down eight) and 18 in Northern Ireland (no change). The electoral system remains as always, voluntary voting and single-member constituencies with first-past-the-post voting and counting of votes. This system works very well for these parties: Conservative, Labour, Scottish Nationalists, Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland and the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru.

Though most unlikely to be changed this system is highly controversial because it punishes any party that has widespread support but no local or regional concentration of its vote. The three parties so disadvantaged are those of Brexit, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party. This latter party has a significant number of members in the national parliaments of Australia and New Zealand but only one of the 650 members in the House of Commons. Meanwhile, the Brexit party has changed its name to Reform UK. It will win no seats for its ten per cent of the vote, the consequence of the even spread of that vote.

One thing the United Kingdom has in common with Australia is the existence of advantaged electorates. In the United Kingdom, they are the island constituencies of Na h-Eileanan an lar (Western Isles of Scotland), Orkney and Shetland (islands in the far north of Scotland), and Ynys Mon (an island off the Welsh coast that used to be called Anglesea). I don’t have their current numbers, but I know their populations are not growing and their boundaries are unchanged. In December 2019, their elector numbers were 21,106 for Western Isles, 34,211 for Orkney and Shetland and 51,925 for Ynys Mon.

The Australian equivalents are Clark in Tasmania (Hobart), Solomon in the Northern Territory (Darwin) and Lingiari covering the whole outback of the Northern Territory. Their current numbers are 74,507 for Clark, 73,112 for Solomon and 79,643 for Lingiari. With numbers like that Clark and Solomon could very easily be average British constituencies. The area of Lingiari is greater than that of the entire United Kingdom. And remember that each of the 151 members of the Australian House of Representatives represents an average of 119,000 electors in his/her electoral division.

Suppose that a future British parliament were to decide that its size should be reduced. It decides: each MP should represent the same number of electors as each Australian federal MP. Were that to prevail the House of Commons would be reduced from 650 members to a mere 400.

The month of March 2024 saw four by-elections for seats in Australian lower houses of parliament. In my private conversations and emails before each polling day, I correctly predicted the winner in all four cases. However, I was so lacking in confidence in respect of Ipswich West (Qld) and Dunstan (SA) I thought it wise not to put my predictions into public print. And there was no point in forecasting a Labor win for Inala. Such a prediction would be of little more value than predicting Vladimir Putin to win in Russia. So, I decided to put into public print my forecast for Dunkley only. I did that in my article of 12 February “Labor will win Dunkley”.

My analysis below is in chronological order and all statistics are in two-party preferred votes. I begin with Dunkley which was a very good win for Labor.

General Election, 21 May 2022

Peta Murphy (Labor)               53,865 votes              56.27%

Sharn Coombes (Liberal)        41,857 votes              43.73%

Margin                                     12,008 votes

Mackerras By-election Prediction, 2 March 2024

Jodie Belyea (Labor)               46,000 votes              52.27%         Down 4.00%

Nathan Conroy (Liberal)         42,000 votes              47.73%         Up 4.00%

Margin                                       4,000 votes

Final By-election Result, 2 March 2024

Jodie Belyea (Labor)               48,019 votes              52.70%        Down 3.57%

Nathan Conroy (Liberal)         43,093 votes              47.30%        Up 3.57%

Margin                                       4,926 votes

My first comment on the Dunkley by-election is that the result was predictable. Most well-informed pundits made essentially the same prediction as I did. My second comment is that this situation is without precedent – subject to what I write below.

This is not the first time that the candidate for the modern Liberal Party gained votes at a federal by-election caused by the death of a Labor member while Labor was in office. It is the second time. The first case was the Fremantle by-election resulting from the death of Labor Prime Minister John Curtin on 5 July 1945. The by-election was held on 18 August 1945. It was won by Kim Edward Beazley (Labor) but there was a 14% swing to the Liberal candidate, Donald Cleland. Beazley’s margin was 14,129 votes, down massively from the margin Curtin had achieved at the August 1943 general election landslide Labor win. Labor under Ben Chifley went on to a biggish win at the September 1946 general election - but clearly Fremantle is not a satisfactory precedent for Dunkley.

On the other hand, one can look to the conservative side of politics and take the case of the first Aston by-election held on 14 July 2001. The popular Liberal member Peter Nugent had died, and the Howard government seemed to be in very great trouble. The Liberal candidate, Christopher Pearce, won the seat with 50.6% of the two-party preferred vote compared with Nugent’s 54.2% at the previous general election in October 1998. So, the swing against the incumbent government was only 3.6% (the same as in Dunkley) and such a low swing was seen as a good omen that Howard would enjoy a third general election win later that year.

The strikingly low Dunkley swing is rightly seen as a good omen that the Albanese government will enjoy a second general election win in May 2025. But Peter Dutton’s position is nowhere nearly as difficult as was the position of 2001 Labor leader Kim Christian Beazley (son of the Beazley member for Fremantle noted above) who had already lost the 1998 general election, that being Howard’s second win. For Dutton, therefore, he can afford to lose in May 2025, but he cannot afford to lose again in May 2028. If he does lose that election, he would become the Liberal Party’s equivalent of Labor’s Beazley junior.

The above is a description of the more-or-less semi-distant past from which the future is speculated. Now let me discuss the present – the two by-elections in Queensland on Saturday 16 March and the one South Australian by-election last Saturday. In the case of Queensland my statistics are nearly final. For Dunstan (SA) I say merely that Labor has won the seat.

The Queensland by-elections were unambiguously bad results for Labor. Steven Miles lost Ipswich West on a swing to the LNP of 17.9% and (arguably) nearly lost Labor’s strongest Queensland seat of Inala on a swing of 21.3%. These by-election results combine with the most recent Queensland opinion polling to tell me that I am on track to be correct in my long-standing prediction that the LNP will win the October 2024 state election. See my article of 11 December last year “My Australian predictions for 2024”

Last Saturday there was a by-election for the inner-metropolitan Adelaide seat of Dunstan caused by the resignation of Steven Marshall (Liberal). He was the Premier of South Australia from March 2018 to March 2022. Labor needed a swing of only 0.6% to take Dunstan which on my SA pendulum was the Liberal Party’s most marginal seat. At the general election on 19 March 2022 there were 12,135 votes for Marshall and 11,875 for Cressida O’Hanlon (Labor) who has contested the by-election for Labor - and has won the seat.

My prediction – that O’Hanlon would win the seat – was the conventional private conversation prediction among Adelaide pundits, all of whom asserted that Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas is still in honeymoon mode after two years in office. To that I added my own knowledge of what former Liberal premiers are like. They place their own convenience ahead of every other consideration. The interests of the party do not matter to them. Thus, Sir Eric Willis (NSW) lost a general election in May 1976 and resigned his marginal seat of Earlwood in June 1978. Labor won the by-election in July 1978. Then Jeff Kennett (Victoria) lost a general election in September 1999 and the first thing he did was to resign his marginal seat of Burwood. Labor won the by-election in December 1999.

Finally, SA Liberal Premier Rob Kerin lost office at a general election in February 2002 but stayed in his seat of Frome. He should have retired at the expiration of that 50^th Parliament but chose to lead the Liberals again in March 2006. He resigned his marginal seat of Frome (which then included Port Pirie) in November 2008. Early in 2009 the Frome by-election was won by a pro-Labor independent, Geoff Brock, who has been a thorn in the side of the Liberal Party ever since.

This should be understood. All that happened last Saturday was that Labor won a by-election in a natural Labor seat. The seat of Dunstan was long held by Labor leader Don Dunstan in the days when it was called Norwood. Hence the new name of Dunstan. This by-election was quite un-necessary but reflects an unfortunate feature of modern politics. In the good old days, politicians would “retire” at the expiration of a parliamentary term. Most politicians still do that. But if you are a former premier or prime minister you can resign your seat and the media will help you by saying the MP has “retired”. I would say the member has “resigned”.

Finally, last Saturday there was also a general election in Tasmania. When every vote has been counted and every seat determined I’ll contribute another article to Switzer Daily analysing the results.