Ben was joined by Donna Weeks, emeritus professor at Musashino University, to discuss this coming weekend’s Japanese general election, where new prime minister Sanae Takaichi will be attempting to achieve her own mandate.
South Australia will go to the polls in March for their state election.
The most recent polls predict an enormous landslide victory for the incumbent Labor government.
Ben was joined by George Hasanakos from pollster DemosAU to discuss the surge in support for One Nation, which has pushed them ahead of the combined Liberal-National vote in a number of polls, as well as the split in the Liberal-National coalition. They discuss how these two trends impact on how polls are conducted.
This podcast was recorded before the publication of polls by YouGov and Essential that continued the continuing trend.
The recent divisions between the Liberal Party and the Nationals, which seem to have culminated in the Nationals ending the coalition this morning, have made me think of the long history of the smaller conservative coalition partner exercising it’s influence over the larger party’s leadership.
Comments have been a problem for a while, with a large volume of comments, often off-topic and not of high quality.
As a solution to this problem, I have implemented a new policy. Only logged-in users can comment, and only those who are Tally Room members can log in. That’s people who donate $8 (+GST) per month, plus some grandfathered users who give $5 per month and have been doing so since before the price rise.
For the final blog post of 2025, I wanted to look at a question that has come up regularly in the comments, and on psephological websites: how meaningful is the two-party-preferred vote, particularly in “teal” seats where Labor isn’t locally competitive, yet is either winning or coming close to winning the two-party-preferred vote.
There has been a lot of conversation recently about implementing fixed four-year terms for the federal Parliament, with Anthony Albanese indicating support and some reporting that Don Farrell, the special minister of state, is considering whether to move on the issue.
Recent reporting, and my own experience, indicates that the federal Labor government is seriously considering an expansion in the size of the Australian federal parliament, echoing the previous expansions in 1948-49 and 1983-84. But they are yet to commit to the issue.
A lot of people would love to know how the electoral map would change if the parliament was expanded.
We’ve already been able to get some idea of what might happen by looking back at the historical experience from the 1948-49 and 1983-84 expansions. But the political system has changed since 1984, as has the map.
Ben was joined this week by Osmond Chiu, Per Capita research fellow and contributor editor for the Labor Left magazine Challenge, to discuss the factions of the Australian Labor Party.
Read Osmond’s 2020 piece in Jacobin on the history of Labor’s factions.