#WAvotes

[axvoter]

Blatantly Partisan Party Review I (WA 2025): Sustainable Australia Party–Anti-corruption

Prior reviews: federal 2013, federal 2016, VIC 2018, NSW 2019, federal 2019, federal 2022, VIC 2022, NSW 2023, plus my friend’s b_auspol review for WA 2021

What I said before: “I am aware of some well-meaning people in this party with centrist or centre-left environmental views, but the overall thrust is NIMBY and anti-immigration and I cannot in good faith offer any endorsement.” (NSW 2023)

What I think this year: Sustainable Australia (SusAus) is the party that has never had a name it didn’t want to change. Starting life as the Stable Population Party, they are registered in WA as “Sustainable Australia Party—Anti-corruption”, while at federal level they changed from “Sustainable Australia Party—Stop Overdevelopment/Corruption” to “Sustainable Australia Party—Universal Basic Income” in November 2023. If they could simply stop tacking slogans or policy principles onto their name, that would be grand.

Anyway, these geniuses who can’t settle on a name have reached quite possibly the dumbest solution to the housing crisis: instead of responding to the current demand for housing in Australia by increasing the supply of housing, they want to reduce supply and somehow make demand disappear. This is fantasyland nonsense. Demand outstripping supply cannot be waved away. There is legitimate debate on how to best increase supply and the extent to which the state or the private sector should provide housing. But SusAus are not here for any of that.

Instead, SusAus are here to push their barrow about “stabilising” the population. What this means is reducing immigration to Australia and promoting measures to reduce population growth in other countries. This sort of talk very quickly leads to racist ideas about certain peoples “breeding like rabbits” and towards eugenicist policies to limit who can reproduce and when. Comically, SusAus now have a statement on their website that “SAP is a pro-immigration party”. This is “my shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” territory and recalls for me how Health Australia kept insisting they were not an anti-vax party while peddling anti-vax policies. If you want fewer people to come to a country, you quite objectively are not pro-immigration. SusAus are anti-immigration and they are population nihilists who would prefer it if you simply had not been born because you made the population go up.

Despite this, SusAus goes on about how they support “a science and evidence-based approach to policy”. There’s a good point in the b_auspol review from 2021 that “when people start waving that around as a banner cry, there does tend to be rather an overtone of ‘if you don’t agree with us then obviously you are being illogical and emotional’.” SusAus continues that they do “not [have] a left or right wing ideology”, and almost anyone who ever says that is either too cowardly or too wishy-washy to state their actual position on the political spectrum, and they usually turn out to be on the right.

To be honest, I am not terribly interested in engaging with the rest of their policies because their core principles are discrediting. If you are an urbanist or a YIMBY, this is not the party for you and never will be. I’m an urbanist and I’m at least YIMBY-adjacent; I like compact and dense cities for their accessibility and cultural vibrancy and agglomeration effects that make things like public transport, education, and healthcare more efficient to provide. (I am wary of some of the more fervent anti-regulation strands of YIMBYism, conscious as I am of the dire living conditions of unregulated housing for poorer communities in the past.)

SusAus have at least expanded their rhetoric to criticise housing sprawl but they continue to go on about “inappropriate high-rises” and lord knows what that is: a high-rise that dresses immodestly? An apartment that says slurs? No housing is “inappropriate” if it puts a roof over somebody’s head and allows them to lead a happy, healthy life as part of the community. Sorry folks but nobody will like the appearance of every building. For a party that bleats about evidence-based policy, SusAus's attitude towards denser cities seems to boil down to “I don’t like change and that new block of apartments down the road doesn’t meet my own particular aesthetic values”.

If you want to really talk about sustainability, you talk about densifying cities and reducing sprawl. You talk about replacing old housing stock that is no longer fit for purpose so that people who currently live in draughty, mouldy old houses can move into well-insulated, energy-efficient modern housing. You talk about giving people more options about where to live and how they live. You sure as shit don’t talk about restricting housing, retaining unsustainable and inefficient urban forms, enforcing your aesthetic preferences, or embracing “fuck off we’re full” attitudes.

So, to conclude, what I say to people who want to reduce Australia’s population is this: you first.

Recommendation: Give Sustainable Australia Party–Anti-corruption a weak or no preference.

Website: https://www.sustainableaustralia.org.au/2025_wa_election

[witch-of-western-australia]

So it's been an hour since polls closed in Western Australia.

You love to see it

[ancient-string]

Voting in Australian like

[bendog]

What a crazy election night. I don’t think I’ll ever see something like this again. #auspol #wavotes #redtsunami https://www.instagram.com/p/CMW4XFujrud/?igshid=1t6gws3w16up1

[theseagullsarewatching]

Two things: state governments are leading the charge on climate action while Fed Liberals ignore it. So it's incredibly important who gets in. That's why I'm campaigning to help @thegreenswa have the balance of power in the Legislative Council and push Labor to act more on climate change. Secondly: The Greens aren't just about climate action! They're a well rounded party whose policies include helping renters. Did you know there's no limit on how much a landlord can increase the rent in one go? And during the current crisis this means tenants are being squeezed or risking homelessness. So hey! We have two key reasons to vote Greens: the future and the present. So get out there WA and vote! #wastateelection #wavotes #votegreens https://www.instagram.com/p/CMV8IwSD_lN/?igshid=t0d8nbp2pwlf

[guenthergroup]

You can track the status of your ballot if you sent it by mail… vote.vote wa.gov #vote #votebaby #wavoters https://www.instagram.com/p/CktI5ejpHaB/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[fredarose]

A glimmer of hope from Australia in otherwise dark political times globally: yesterday the biggest state (geographically) in Australia voted in their state election. The left-wing, pro-worker Labor Party won in a landslide. The racist One Nation party, led by Australia's own despicable version of Donald Trump, had a disastrously poor result despite getting ridiculous levels of media attention. An encouraging sign that when left-wing parties aren't just oppositional and instead advocate strongly for things that matter to ordinary people: jobs, apprenticeships, protecting penalty rates, protecting public assets, improving public transport etc. they can win big.

[storytime-writings]

They’ve called the election!!!! LABOR WINS FUCK YES BITCHES!!!!!!!!

SCREW THE FUCKING LIBERALS!!!!!!!

(btw for non-aussies, the liberals are a right wing party)

[thenichecornerr]

Having an all round good time on this election day

[jaclapham]

Serious political analysis in Straya. #auspol #wavotes #sausage #vegetarian #colingotdone

[axvoter]

Blatantly Partisan Party Reviews: 2025 Western Australian State Election

A new state election, a new edition of this blog’s reviews! Hello everyone, it’s time to discover what weird micro-parties are cluttering the ballots in Australia’s western third. Let’s have some fun.

It’s my first state election since moving to WA, and I have come here at the right time: Labor won such a massive landslide in 2021 that it could take control of the Legislative Council (the upper house of parliament) and they introduced a much more democratic method of election. This year is the first election under the new system, where the state at large will elect the upper house, replacing a gerrymander that favoured WA’s most lightly populated regions. I’ll say more about this below.

Election day is Saturday, 8 March 2025. Early voting commences today, Monday 24 February. As usual I will not review the Liberals, the ALP, or the Greens, because I assume that if you are reading this blog you probably already have some idea about where those parties stand and how you feel about them. I will review every other party contesting the election, plus all the independents contesting the Legislative Council. For the first time ever, I will review the Nationals because of the distinctive nature of WA state politics (I normally do not review any members of the federal Coalition), and although I had previously sworn off reviewing One Nation after getting bored of writing the same thing about a party everybody knows just as well as they know the majors, this time I have something to say about them.

You will receive two ballots at the polling place. The smaller one is for your local seat in the Legislative Assembly, the lower house of parliament, where government is formed. The Legislative Assembly has 59 seats that each elect an individual member via full preferential instant runoff voting. This means that on the ballot for your local seat, you must number 1 for your first preference, and then number all the remaining squares in the order of your preference.

No matter what happens, your vote will shape the two-candidate-preferred outcome: it will either sit with the elected candidate, or with the last remaining unsuccessful candidate. This means you should think carefully about the order of all candidates: the final contest for the seat might come down to your two least favourite candidates, so who do you hate less? For instance, you might have a raging disdain for the Liberal Party—but there’s a good chance you despise far-right racist or religious fundamentalist parties even more.

As for the Legislative Council (the upper house, a house of review), it used to have 36 members: six elected from six regions. These were designed to favour rural WA so strongly that in 2021, 25% of the state elected half the members. In the three regions covering metropolitan Perth, a candidate needed about 52,000 votes to win a seat; by comparison, in the most sparsely populated region, Mining and Pastoral, a candidate needed just 7,010! Most Australasian parliaments have in the past had a “country quota” to give regional areas more seats than they are entitled on a population basis. WA clung to such a system for the longest. It effectively meant Labor could never win a majority in the upper house—until McGowan’s landslide in 2021. Labor was therefore able to enact democratic reforms that embody the principle of “one person, one vote, one value”.

So, at this election, WA will elect 37 members to the Legislative Council on a statewide basis. Your vote is worth just as much as any other voter anywhere in the state, and the only people mad about this are furious idiots in towns nobody else wants to live in who think they deserve more of a say than anybody else. Here’s a tip for regional areas upset about not getting enough representation in Perth: be somewhere that more people want to live! But apparently “attract more residents by having more of the things people like and less of the things they don’t” is too much to ask for these entitled whingers.

Anyway, to win a seat on the Legislative Council, a candidate will need 2.63% of the vote. It’s going to be fascinating to see who gets in, as this is the lowest quota anywhere in Australasia. Labor and Liberal should each win somewhere between 10–15 seats, the Greens can hope for 3–4, the Nationals 1–2, and then we will see which of the minors get in. Preferences won’t play a tremendously large role but they will matter. Most seats will be won on a quota, but the last few will come down to preferences—either for a minor party seeking their one and only seat (say from a primary vote of 2.1%) or for the last candidate of a bigger party (e.g. Greens primary vote might be good for 3.7 quotas and they get the remainder of the fourth quota via preferences).

There are two ways to vote for the Legislative Council:

Above the line: you vote for a party or group of independents and accept their candidates in the order they are listed below the line. You must number 1 for your first preference, and then distribute as many preferences as you want. To get a square above the line, a party or group of independents must nominate at least 5 candidates. All parties/groups this election nominated at least 5 people; the one group of independents (column M) does not have their box labelled—only registered parties get that.

Pros: it’s much quicker; it is sufficient for the average voter to express their view

Cons: you cannot reorder candidates within a group; you cannot give preferences to ungrouped independents (there are five people standing solo, listed in the rightmost column)

Below the line: you vote for individual candidates in any order of your choosing. You must give a minimum of 20 preferences, and then you can keep preferencing as far as you want.

Pros: you can change the order of a group’s candidates; you can mix preferences between individuals from multiple parties; you can vote for ungrouped independents

Cons: it is way more time consuming; none of the ungrouped independents have a chance of victory and nor do down-ballot candidates for many groups (below about 3rd for most), so is it worth your time?

Whichever way you vote, I recommend distributing as many preferences as you feel you can—it makes your vote more powerful.

Every review will end with my recommendation of how favourably to preference a party. This is the recommendation system I will be using:

Good preference: a party with a positive overall platform that has few or no significant flaws for the left-wing voter.

Decent preference: a party with a generally positive overall platform but some reservations; or, a single-issue party with a good objective but by definition too limited in their scope to encompass the fullness of parliamentary business.

Middling preference: a party with a balance of positive and negative qualities, or a party with a decent platform undermined by a notably terrible policy or characteristic.

Weak or no preference: a party with more negatives than positives. Either give this party a poor preference or (in the upper house only) you might prefer to let your vote exhaust before reaching it.

This schema is flexible; I may, for instance, suggest a “middling to decent preference”. Every election, I link to my reviews of each party from previous elections, and this will be no exception. I have not reviewed a WA state election before, but my good friend b_auspol reviewed 2021 and I will link to her reviews; our politics are pretty similar, and I cannot think of any time we’ve had a notable divergence of opinion about a micro-party or obscure independent. I’m happy to endorse her takes.

[witch-of-western-australia]

I've never been so excited about an election!

[ancient-string]

The WA Liberal Party on their way to parliament

[ID Two people wearing black and fluro-green on a tandem recumbent bike. The faces of the two MPs of the WA Liberal Party are photoshopped onto the faces of the riders]

[worldnewsinpictures]

It wouldn't be an election without the inimitable AntonyGreenABC. #WAVotes #WAelection #WAPol Here's his election preview. That reminds me ... I'd better go vote ! I'll be watching to see Mr Green call it at 6:07 pm.... Want to see more about this and see what people are saying? -> https://worldnewsinpictures.com/waelection #AntonyGreenABC #AntonyGreenABCWAVotes #AntonyGreenABCWAVotesWAelection #HeresThat #HeresThatIll #election #inimitable #WAVotes

[nonprocycling]

RT @SenatorLudlam: when your environmental crimes visit you for coffee #NoRoe8 #SaveBeeliarWetlands #WAVotes #ByeBarnett https://t.co/yPBfsnIGLK

[anatomyofabeekeeper]

Getting ready for Seacompression, so it seemed like a good time to let you all know, it's your turn. #ivoted #bluewave #takethesenate #wavotes https://www.instagram.com/p/BpKdH7Clxs-/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1e0qts2plt0lj