Talk:2022 Australian federal election

Katter's Australian Party leader

Since Robbie Katter doesn't even sit in Federal parliament, it seems odd to claim that he is the federal leader for KAP, even though he is considered the "national leader" of the party as a whole. Additionally, Bob Katter is the only federal representative for KAP, so it makes sense for him to be considered the federal leader. I don't quite understand whether "leader" has some prescribed meaning we're trying to adhere to, or we're just going with vaguely what the party have explicitly stated about themselves and what RS (news articles) have to say about the handover. RS (e.g. 1, e.g. 2) don't seem to mention that Katter is still the federal leader because they aren't reporting about that, and it should be obvious given he's the only federal representative. I can't find any news article which refers to Bob Katter since he stepped down as national leader. DpEpsilon ( talk | contribs ) 08:47, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

This article has undue weight given to the single-seat parties in the infobox. Why are the Greens on the top line? Why aren't the Nationals (15 seats) represented? Why aren't the independents there? They each have 1 seat too. --Surturz (talk) 00:13, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

The Nationals are represented, under the "Liberal/National coalition". If the Nationals were split off, the Liberal Nationals & Country Liberals would also need to, and that'd be too complicated for a Coalition that hasn't split since 1944. The criteria for minor parties for inclusion should be standardised, sometimes independents and minor parties are included, but sometimes not. Catiline52 (talk) 10:11, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

It's not complicated at all. We have boxes for the Greens, Katter, and Central Alliance, we can easily add the component parties of the Coalition, rather than hide them. Either that, or we are talking about Coalition vs ALP in terms of who can form government, so we should only have two boxes, for the two groups that are included in the two-party-preferred counting. The current infobox gives undue weight to the non-Coalition parties. --Surturz (talk) 00:28, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Describing the inclusion of minor parties in election infoboxes as undue weight is pretty laughable considering it's almost universal practice, including in other Westminster two-party systems such as New Zealand, the UK, and Canada. That said, I think it would be great to put this whole thing to bed by removing KAP and Centre Alliance and simply including the Coalition, Labor, and Greens in a single neat row. Simple, easy, pleasing. I don't think anyone would dispute that the KAP and CA, on the federal level, are now one-man and one-woman shows respectively. Unless there's a hung parliament, they're not substantial enough to be worth including. I don't think it's undue weight, but it is unnecessary fluff. What might actually qualify as undue weight is portraying the Greens as equally insubstantial as the other two by arbitrarily placing them on the same row when the Greens win 10% of the national primary vote and have the potential to win multiple seats (not to mention their Senate presence). Erinthecute (talk) 07:21, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

I am not saying that the minor parties should be excluded from the infobox, but rather that they have undue weight because they are included, but the National Party is not. The underlying problem is that the infobox tries to show both the two-party-preferred contest AND show the party-based contest. They are incompatible views of the election. We should choose one or the other, and I support showing ALL parties with a lower-house presence. --Surturz (talk) 02:50, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Polling Info in Infobox

An unknown editor has added polling info into the infobox. I have reversed this as I believe that information should not be there for a number of reasons, and that if it is to be placed there it should be following discussion. The reasons I believe that it shouldn't be included is that; a) it is not the norm in upcoming election infoboxes sitewide, b) the inclusion of a TPP figure requires either simply taking the TPP figure from the most recent poll, which might not be representative of the trend in polling and thus give the public a false impression, or the use of an aggregator, which, while not original research, is not entirely reliable vis-à-vis updating quickly and would require consultation about which aggregator to use, c) the inclusion of the preferred PM metric is one heavily biased to the incumbent (http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2020/04/why-better-prime-ministerpremier-scores.html) and in foregrounding it it can create a false impression in the reader as it implies an importance the metric doesn't have, and d) there is a very obvious link to the opinion polls in the infobox that, imo, removes the need to place polling information in the infobox, in addition to that link providing more information, that might be ignored if the headline figures are included in the infobox. Of course if the consensus is against me I will not stand in the way of including this information --Not Another NPC (talk) 01:16, 04 April 2021 (UTC)

I support not including polling information in the infobox, for the reasons above. --Canley (talk) 09:14, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

I strongly agree. Frickeg (talk) 00:34, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

While we are on the topic of giving a false impression, please can we move The Greens to the second row in the infobox, with the other single seat parties? The infobox uses a Two-party-preferred vote structure to omit the Nationals, and to be consistent with that, the minor parties should be grouped together on the second row as 'Others'. --Surturz (talk) 06:41, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Very happy with moving the Greens to the second row. While having parties with elected lower-house representation in the infoboxes is good, distinguishing those that have a genuine chance at government is good too. Frickeg (talk) 08:12, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Do we believe this should be done for the previous elections that put the Greens in the top row (2010-2019)? I support such a move, for the reasons above and for consistency. --Not Another NPC (talk) 12:25, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

It should be immediately obvious to anyone looking at the seat and vote tallies that the Greens are not a major party. The presence of the TPP sections already singles out the two major parties as special anyway. Also, the Coalition is displayed as a single force because that's how both the AEC and media report it, and they operate as a unit in both elections and in parliament. It doesn't have so much to do with the infobox using a "TPP structure" as much as with reflecting political reality. In any case, relegating the minor parties to the second row has very little impact on how people actually take the information in, and to be frank, looks awful. There's a big white gap on the top row. This debate has always baffled me. Which row the minor parties placed on is such a strange technicality to fight over. No other country, nor even any other Australian federal or state election infobox, reserves the top row for major parties only. There is no tangible benefit to doing it. It just looks odd. Erinthecute (talk) 11:39, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Next Australian federal election

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Next Australian federal election's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "AEC1":

• From Division of Fraser (Victoria): "Names and boundaries of federal electoral divisions in Victoria decided". Australian Electoral Commission. 20 June 2018.
• From Electoral system of Australia: AEC, Enrol to vote
• From Division of Bean: "Map: Division of Bean" (PDF). Australian Electoral Commission.
• From 2010 Australian federal election: "First Preference by Party". Australian Electoral Commission. Archived from the original on 23 August 2010. Retrieved 21 August 2010.

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 23:55, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

Andrews and Laming

I appreciate that losing party endorsement is usually a retirement in all but name. But not always, as we saw with Laming's attempt to get re-endorsed. And there have been other cases where a member who formerly represented a party went on to continue as an independent, or tried to. So, we need to make a distinction. Disendorsement is a decision of the party; retirement is a decision of the member. All we're saying about Andrews and Laming at the moment is that they've been disendorsed. Have they made any statements about not contesting the election? If so, I think the dates of those statements are more relevant than the dates of their disendorsements. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 00:16, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Andrews and Laming has not stated they will contest as independents and can be assumed to be retiring from federal politics. Contesting as independents would see their memberships revoked which is usually not preferred. Therefore, it can be assumed that their disendorsements are equivalent to not contesting the election, unless they announce otherwise. Marcnut1996 (talk) 06:08, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Generally we have required a specific announcement that a person is not contesting the next election before listing them - losing preselection is not enough, as it is far from unknown for the person in question to run as an independent in those circumstances. Sometimes the person never "formally" announces they're not running, they just don't nominate, so the preselection loss is all we have (Bronwyn Bishop for example). I do think the date of preselection loss is relevant, but needs to be accompanied by a retirement announcement. I disagree with "assuming" their disendorsements are equivalent to retirements, as that is simply not the case. Frickeg (talk) 06:45, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

That makes sense. Tony (talk) 07:34, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Weird ...

Just weird, having this pic of Robbie Katter as one of four at the top. He's not even a member of federal Parliament, and is virtually unknown. This formula for displaying pics at the top urgently needs to be modified. Tony (talk) 13:21, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

Now this one I actually agree with. If Bob Katter is not referred to as the leader (and it seems he isn't), it should simply be "no federal leader" as it is with CA. Frickeg (talk) 21:19, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

Better than nothing. Let's agree that this article should be readily understood by foreigners – that would be a good benchmark, no? In that vein:

The structure of the lower house – Labor, Liberals, Nationals, one Green, and independents – seems likely to pertain for the foreseeable future. A reasonable compromise would be that a party should have a minimum of five seats for their "leader" to be pictured at the top. I note, also, the arbitrary decision not to feature the Nats separately; I don't mind, but it's arbitrary. So there's no perfect way to do this – just worse ways and better ways.

Two other issues concern the display of a percentage after the number of seats. It looks at first as though "77 seats" comprise "41.44%" of the total seats, though attentive readers might work out quickly that it's not the case. We don't help them by keeping it a secret that the "41.44%" is the proportion of first preference votes (suddenly important a while ago among journalists and some party folk pushing their own agenda, and strangely the LP and NP first prefs were never expressed separately, when they stand against each other in some seats). Then TPP percentages (all that really matters in the end) are buried at the bottom with an acronym for "two-party preferred" that most foreigners (even Australians) will need to go elsewhere to distinguish from the unexplained percentages that appear above. We confuse by presenting too much complex information where it can't be explained.

I query the need to display each leader's seat and state in an infobox, which should be rationed to the most important information for a bird's-eye view.

What are the poor readers to make of Adam Bandt's "1 seat, 10.40%" ... does that mean he somehow won his seat with that percentage of the vote?

At the top: "On or before 21 May 2022 (half-Senate)/On or before 3 September 2022 (House of Representatives)" will cause stomach cramps for most Australian readers, let alone foreigners. Then we have, row by row, a noun group, a grammatical sentence, and a noun group: "All 151 seats in the House of Representatives/76 seats are needed for a majority/40 (of the 76) seats in the Senate." Really?

Why is there a gaping hole above "Centre Alliance" (which again creates problems by distinguishing between independents who form a "party" and those who don't)? It makes zip difference in the larger scheme. Why not list all members who are not members of parties with five or more seats at the bottom, without pics? Bandt and Katter would go there.

Incumbent Prime Minister is stuck right down the bottom (and is "incumbent" not redundant?).

We should discuss how to fix this messy and unhelpful infobox. It's in marked contrast with the rest of the article, which is very good. Tony (talk) 03:50, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

If we aren't going to take a party-based approach (i.e. include the Nationals), I say we just remove everyone except the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition. --Surturz (talk) 05:30, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

So, a few things here. First, pretty much everyone wanted to include the Nationals, but no one was able to come up with a sensible way of doing so. The problem here is the LNP and to a lesser degree the CLP, who complicate matters enormously. Either you have to (a) treat the LNP as a third Coalition party and give them their own box, despite them having no separate federal identity (yet), (b) include LNP totals and vote figures entirely within the Liberal totals given they are registered with the AEC as a Liberal branch, notwithstanding the fact that many LNP members are prominent Nationals and in the past have been Nationals leaders, or (c) divide the LNP vote between Liberals and Nationals based on the LNP agreement, despite the fact that not a single source does this. Much, much more discussion on this point can be found here. Including the Coalition as a single box was the least worst option - but if someone now can come up with something better, let's hear it!

Many of Tony's other points I more or less agree with, but I would argue they need to be discussed more broadly than merely here at the Australian project. The seats/percentages thing, the leaders' seats, the text at the top - these are all encyclopedia-wide standards. I'm not one for unthinking consistency, but I think here an international reader could well be more confused if they come to Australian pages having seen certain standards apply for every other country's elections and we're just doing our own thing.

I continue to oppose the exclusion of non-major parties from the infobox. I could see a way to supporting an adjusted set of criteria, but "more than 5 seats" certainly isn't it (assuming that means House seats). Exactly two non-major parties in Australian history (Nats, Lang Labor) would qualify under that definition. In fact, to my mind the single biggest problem with the infobox is that it includes no useful information whatever about the Senate. If a way could be found to include the Senate, I would strongly support a reconsideration of inclusion criteria (potentially excluding e.g. KAP, CA), as obviously we would need to include the DLP and the Democrats (excluded under current criteria) for elections where they won seats. Frickeg (talk) 07:30, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

It is indefensibly misleading to include a picture of Robbie Katter, who is not even in parliament, and exclude the National Party from the infobox. If we get rid of the photos entirely, that would give us space to do use a table (something like in Next United Kingdom general election) and include ALL parties. We could possibly have a background or thick border around the Coalition parties. --Surturz (talk) 04:14, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

I'd be in favour of including the National Party if a way could be found to style it within this infobox structure, because Suturz makes a fair point. I'm not opposed to something like that UK table in principle, but I don't see the point of having completely different tables on pending elections to those used on past elections, which still leaves the issue live in every past election. The Drover's Wife (talk) 11:37, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

On the question of how to include the Senate, I would suggest a system similar to that used for Italian elections (see 2018 Italian general election) . YttriumShrew (talk) 19:03, 11 September 2021 (UTC)