Green around the polls

Martin Turner
Editor, Medicus

It’s ironical that Australia’s leading psephologist is a man called Green. After all, Antony Green works for the ABC – an organisation falling over itself, and various employees, to prove it definitely has no bias. About anything. It’s hard to imagine how he’d fare there had he been raised as Antony Labor, Antony Liberal or Antony National, let alone Antony One Nation (stranger things have happened: WA politician Ben Dawkins has, after all, changed his name to Austin ‘Aussie’ Trump). Anyway, the fact he’s a Green seems neither to have roused a furious re-reading of the ABC Charter, nor led to any witch hunts from incensed politicians looking for perceived slights against their plans for world domination.

This guy is synonymous with elections of all stripes, and recently cast his eye on our looming State version: abc.net.au/news/elections/wa/2025/guide/preview.

Even if you know all the plot points, it’s a strange read. Not because we haven’t lived through its antecedents, but more because we have; and that time seems so wildly anachronistic. Try to get your head around this from Green’s analysis:
“Labor’s defeat of the Barnett government in 2017 produced the biggest Labor victory in the State’s history, a result then surpassed in 2021. Even if the Liberal and National parties recover every seat lost in 2021, Labor would still be in office with its commanding majority from 2017.”

Or how about this blast from the past?

“No other Australian election has seen a result as one-sided as the 2021 Western Australian election. In retrospect it was an election decided in early 2020 when Premier Mark McGowan closed the State’s borders as a Covid measure, and the move was initially opposed by the state and federal arms of the Liberal Party.”

So, following a redistribution, the starting party numbers for the 2025 election are Labor 54, National 3 and Liberal 2.

For majority government, the Liberal and National Parties need to gain 25 seats from Labor on a uniform swing of 23.3%.

This is a fancy way of saying, while we have lived through unprecedented times, and while reading your media feed in 2025 seems to have taken the unprecedented into the everyday, it’s still difficult to fully comprehend what has been transpiring in State politics over recent years.

There won’t only be a Green moving charts around on the night of 8 March. Others will do the math and cast their judgement on swings, and the concomitant roundabouts politicians will place on the various outcomes for their seats and parties. But there will be a new precedent set when we wake on 9 March. Based on the wild results of the last two state elections, one can only assume it will start to resemble something like, I kid you not, normality.