vaguerant

Sovereignty (the meme misspells the name) is a horse, not a horse lover. The meme is quoting something said by a horse.

I know we're not here to learn facts, but just in case.

https://checkyourfact.com/2021/08/06/fact-check-new-york-daily-news-article-woman-beheading-landlord-samurai-sword/

Ah, the learned helplessness<->weaponized incompetence spectrum.

I think what they mean is more that when the Coalition does better, the Greens have a better chance of winning than when they do poorly. In theory, the Greens could lose a seat not because Labor did better, but because the Coalition did worse.

Imagine at the 2022 election, the Greens win a seat on an election that goes like this:

• Liberal: 10,000
• Greens: 9,000
• Labor: 8,000

The preference flows from Labor go mostly to the Greens and the final 2PP is something like this:

• Greens: 15,000 (+6,000)
• Liberal: 12,000 (+2,000)

Then, at the 2025 election, the Liberal vote collapses. In order to keep the Greens and Labor counts the same, assume the Liberals all just moved out of the district.

• Greens: 9,000
• Labor: 8,000
• Liberal: 7,000

In this case, after preference flows, the result looks like this:

• Labor: 13,000 (+5000)
• Greens: 11,000 (+2000)

The only change in the primary vote is that Liberal lost 3,000 supporters, but as a result, Labor wins. That's how preferences work, but it is at least kind of weird that the right-wing vote collapsing moves the whole district further to the right instead of the left as you might expect. In a single-seat election like this, the ultimate deciding factor is "Who came third?"

Viewed another way, if your preferred candidate ultimately lands in second, then your vote was effectively not used at all. Your preferences were never taken into consideration because your candidate never got knocked out. Coming in third at least means your vote can still have an impact on the result.

The proportional representation system is more intuitive in cases like this. A right-wing collapse simply means that more of the left-wing candidates are elected, at the expense of the right wing. Instead of a right-wing collapse moving the district right, it moves to the left.

Working fine here at time of comment.

Second-last update of the night, unless the last one suddenly takes a lot longer. No significant changes, still close on primary/not close on preferences.

EDIT: Actually, I guess we're done, the tracker updated to show 40 of 40 polling stations reporting without the figures actually budging at all. And we're out of here.

12:04 PM AEST
40 of 40 centres reporting primaries

We're coming to the end now, with another recovery for Ali France's primary vote putting the candidates back within spitting distance, with Ali of course well ahead in 2PP.

11:37 PM AEST
38 of 40 centres reporting primaries

Bit of a recovery for Ali France's primary vote in this update as the 2PP softens slightly.

11:22 PM AEST
36 of 40 centres reporting primaries

11:04 PM AEST
35 of 40 centres reporting primaries

Don't stress or anything, he's still out, but for the first time in the night, Dutton has managed to drag his way into the lead for primary votes only. The result after preferences remains practically unchanged.

10:34 PM AEST
34 of 40 centres reporting primaries

Definitely. And while the Liberals have tried to claim they've been unfairly tarred with the orange brush, they deliberately tacked that way and it did not work. You had Dutton threatening to get "the woke agenda" out of school curriculums (notably set by the previous LNP government, so the woke agenda of ... Scott Morrison???) and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price literally saying MAGA.

Dutton continues to claw back some of the primary vote, but the 2PP refuses to budge thanks to strong showings from Climate 200 independent Ellie Smith and Vinnie Batten from the Greens. I'll include them both in this update to show why the primary votes are so different from the 2PP.

9:57 PM AEST
33 of 40 centres reporting primaries

From a four-way perspective, Dutton is thoroughly behind the left/centre-left candidates.