Every significant detail from the May 2025 federal election is now available to the general public so now is a good time for me to make a broad final commentary for Switzer Daily.

I begin by comparing my predictions with the results, and note that two parties have performed better than I expected and three have performed worse. The two performing better are Labor and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. The three performing worse are the Liberal Party, the Nationals and the Greens.

That Labor performed better and the Liberal Party worse places me in the company of every pundit of whom I am aware – except I made specific seat predictions and they did not. Labor gained 12 seats from the Liberal Party not predicted by me and retained one notionally Liberal seat (Bennelong) against my prediction. So, here is my excuse. Based upon opinion poll findings, I guessed that the aggregate two-party preferred vote would split 52.2% for Labor and 47.8% for Liberal-National. But the final distribution is 55.2 for Labor and 44.8 for Liberal-National. So, there has been an unexpected 3% swing to Labor.

Although my personal guess at the aggregate two-party preferred percentages has been wrong, my pendulum has enjoyed yet another triumph. It is clear from my pendulum that four seats change hands for every 1% swing in votes. Therefore, it is entirely consistent with pendulum theory that an error of 3% in one prediction would lead to an error of 12 in seats. That is exactly what has happended. The deviations from uniform swing have cancelled out exactly. As I have remarked several times before, quoting David Butler: “Electoral history is littered with unexpected landslides.” That’s the system of single-member electoral divisions for you. This system is very landslide-prone.

Pauline Hanson has every reason to be delighted with this result. She has seen off the latest rival pop-up party financed by that charlatan Clive Palmer. If she were to send me a scrubbing brush to get the egg off my face, I would accept it with grace. I did not predict that her party’s vote would rise so greatly. The extra Senate seat she won in New South Wales was a seat I predicted would be retained by the then Nationals deputy leader Perin Davey. The extra Senate seat she won in Western Australia was a seat I predicted would be won by the Liberal Party. She now has four senators of whom three have six years ahead of them. Her party’s overall Senate vote was 899,296 or 5.7%, up 1.4 from 2022.

The Nationals have performed worse than they want people to believe. While it is true that they held their overall percentage of the House of Representatives vote at 6.7%, they lost the NSW seat of Calare to a defecting ex-Nationals independent – as well as losing their deputy leader. See above. While their incumbent members on average held their vote, so did Liberal Party incumbents hold their vote in rural seats. The reason why the Nationals can claim success is that both Coalition parties held their vote in rural Australia, but the Liberals went badly backwards in the cities.

In my Switzer Daily predictions, I correctly forecast that Labor would gain Brisbane from the Greens. However, I expected them to hold their other three House of Representatives seats. My excuse for mis-reading Melbourne is that I did not fully understand the damaging effect to Adam Bandt of the boundary changes to his seat. There was no redistribution in Queensland so the three Queensland Greens did not suffer that damage. My excuse for mis-reading Griffith is that I was taken in by the publicity hunting of Max Chandler-Mather. I correctly predicted that the Greens would win six Senate seats, one in each state.

Both the Nationals and the Greens have been subjected to further humiliation post-election in the form of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price defecting from the Nationals to the Liberals and Dorinda Cox defecting from the Greens to Labor. I wish both parties luck in their determination to re-gain both seats. I think both will succeed in that endeavour.

The Senate electoral system was one of “winner takes all” from 1901 to 1949 and proportional representation from 1949 to the present day. Without doubt the most left-wing parliamentary term was when Ben Chifley was prime minister in the 18^th Parliament (1946-49). Labor enjoyed large majorities in both houses. That’s “winner takes all” for you. So, what about the situation under PR?

I think historians will have trouble deciding whether the 43^rd Parliament or the 48^th Parliament was the second most left-wing. The 43^rd was when Julia Gillard was prime minister. From 1 July 2011 there were 31 Labor senators, 34 Liberal-National, nine Greens and two independents. So, Labor plus Greens numbered 40. In the forthcoming 48^th Parliament from 1 July 2025 there will be 29 Labor senators, 27 Liberal-National, ten Greens, four Hansonites and six others, Palmer’s man in Victoria, Ralph Babet, who goes under the name of “United Australia Party”,  plus Lambie, Payman, Pocock, Thorpe and Tyrell. So, Labor plus Greens will number 39.

Finally, a personal story. I was born in August 1939. In those pre-Whitlam days, one gained the right to vote at age 21, so my first federal votes were cast in the Division of Bradfield in December 1961. I voted for the Liberal Party’s Senate team and for my local Liberal member, Harry Turner. His Bradfield win was the biggest for the Liberal Party at every general election when he was the Liberal candidate, in 1954 (unopposed), 1955 (unopposed), 1958, 1961, 1963, 1966, 1969 and 1972.

When I married in October 1972, he sent Lindsay my wife and I a cheque for $25, a generous wedding gift in those pre-inflation days. (Adjusted for today's inflationary times, it's a little over $300). I remember him and his wife Mildred fondly.

In May 2025, the final vote in Bradfield was 56,144 for “teal” independent Nicolette Boele and 56,088 for the Liberal candidate Giselle Kapterian, a margin of 26 votes. The names of the two biggest parties have remained the same but the party system has changed. The boundaries of Bradfield now retain the whole of the then Bradfield to which the Willoughby local government area has been added. Artarmon then was in Bennelong and the rest of the now Willoughby council area was in North Sydney, now abolished. The number of Bradfield electors enrolled to vote was 54,173 in December 1961 and in May 2025 it was 126,914. In those days NSW had 46 members of the House of Representatives. Today it still has 46.