The Australian left rises: What everyone is missing about the election results

I was at the ACT Greens' election party last night, and it is fair to say the mood was subdued as their lower house seat count may well fall. It needn’t have been, last night was a victory in a string of triumphs.

For many, the story of last night’s Australian election will be Albanese’s near unprecedented two-party-preferred margin of victory, not seen in 50 years. Certainly, that’s likely to have the greatest short-term impact, there’s a larger story, though, that has been neglected because it’s happened more consistently than quickly: the rise of electoral forces Left-of-Labor. In less than ten years, this bloc has increased in size from a bit more than a third to a bit less than two-thirds the size of Labor.

The inexorable rise of the Left-of-Labor vote has, through 2016, 2019, 2022, and 2025, taken the Left-of-Labor vote from 11.7% to 21.9% in the Senate. The Senate is our best guide here because: 1. Various small parties can be inconsistent in running in particular electorates, and 2. misunderstandings of how our voting system works sometimes prevent people from voting for their favourite in the lower house out of a misplaced fear of “wasting” their vote.

We are, of course, relying on preliminary votes for our 2025 results, but if anything, it is likely that later counted votes will favour the Left-of-Labor bloc a little more.

Counting as left of labor: The Australian Greens; Legalise Cannabis Australia (earlier incarnations and joint tickets included HEMP, the Sex Party/HEMP alliance in 2016, and “Legalise Cannabis” state variants); the Animal Justice Party; FUSION and every micro-party that rolled into it over time (Science Party, Pirate Party, Secular Party, Climate Emergency Action Alliance, Vote Planet/Planet Rescue, Innovation Party, Science-Cyclists ticket, Whistleblower Protection, etc.); Victorian Socialists; Socialist Alliance; the Indigenous/Aboriginal Party of Australia; Australian Progressives; the short-lived Drug Law Reform Party ticket in 2016; and Senator David Pocock (counted from 2022 onward).

A few of these (e.g., Fusion- or some aspects thereof) may be debatable, but wouldn’t shift the result much. Many of the debatable parties did relatively better in earlier elections, so not counting them would make the trend even larger.

To sum up, the Left-of-Labor vote has grown by over 1% per year over the last four cycles. If this trend continues, Mirablis dicta it will be 25-30% within two cycles and the Left-of-Labor will regularly win 2 out of 6 senate seats per state- the red chamber indeed. Even in this election, there is still the possibility of a second Left-of-Labor senator in Western Australia, as the Legalise Cannabis Party may still win.

I do not mean any of that as a prediction- no guarantees can be made that the trend will continue- but by extrapolating the trend, a trend that has already run for many elections, we see how powerful it is.

You might think that this is just a trend toward minor parties which has favoured the right as much as the left, but that is not so- between 2016 and 2025, the Right-of-Coalition vote has only gone from 13.6 to 14.8, counting as Right-of-Coalition:

On the populist-nationalist or religious-conservative wing One Nation, the United Australia Party / Palmer United, Family First, Australian Christians, the Christian Democratic Party (Fred Nile), the Democratic Labour Party, Shooters Fishers & Farmers, Katter’s Australian Party, Rise Up Australia, Australian Liberty Alliance / Yellow Vest ALA, Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party, Australia First Party, Informed Medical Options Party, Aus Values Party, Trumpet of Patriots and the 2025 “Shooter/Katter/Rennick” cluster tickets; on the economic-right or libertarian side I included the Liberal Democrats (now re-branded “Libertarian” Party), the Great Australian Party, the Australian Federation Party, the Small Business Party, Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives, and the Citizens Electoral Council / Citizens Party. (Centrist or mixed formations such as Jacqui Lambie Network, Reason, Centre Alliance, “Teal” independents, Sustainable Australia-UBI, Xenophon, Hinch, etc. were NOT considered right of coalition.)

So there has been no rise of ‘extremism’ or ‘populism’ ‘on both sides’ in Australia, despite what David Speers’ adjacent commentariat of Australia might have you believe.

The rise of the Left-of-Labor bloc has been ignored for three reasons: 1. Because, as mentioned above, it has (wrongly) been amalgamated into a story about minor parties outside the Overton Window “on both sides” which the data doesn’t support. 2. Because it has happened consistently over a long period of time at a moderate pace. 3. Because of a focus on the number of seats won, which in a non-proportional system is a terrible guide. However, the non-representativeness of a system of single-member seats also means that things can change quickly. If this trend continues - if the Left-of-Labor bloc hits 25-30%-, “all of a sudden” we will see seats flip to Greens and leftwing independents in the dozens, and then this trend will be impossible to ignore.

The old mole burrows.

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Edit: An astute commentor raised the following point- what about non-leftwing voters who vote for a single issue “left party”. If this is happening- and it likely is- the overwhelming majority of cases would be Legalise Cannabis voters. We could take out Legalise Cannabis altogether, but a reasonable adjustment- representing the fact that Legalise Cannabis supporters are somewhat less leftwing than the other parties but still more leftwing than the median voter- and eyeballing preference flows, would be to halve the percentage of voters supporting Legalise Cannabis and predecessor parties like HEMP.

The story remains broadly the same- about 1% growth per year, taking us from about 10 to about 20% of the vote.