Mandy Nolan has been advertising that the Greens only need 1.8 per cent to win so l decided to give this claim a test run.
The best starting point is the distributed 2022 federal election results after elimination of all minor parties and Independents leaving the three major parties standing as follows: Nationals (35,533), ALP (33,379), and Greens (30,852) before the exclusion of the Greens which saw 85 per cent preference transfer of Green votes to the ALP – Justine Elliot elected.
The numbers I used were based upon the most conservative projection I could think of: total vote increase of 7,000, one per cent increase in the National and Green primary vote, one per cent decrease in the ALP vote and I applied exactly the same preference distribution percentage results as each party received in 2022. Take home result: ALP was still ahead of the Greens but there was only a few hundred votes in it.
This raised the interesting question, what if the Greens got on top of Labor – how would Labor preferences roll out? As Justine Eliot (ALP) has won the last several elections we have no information on which to make a sensible estimate of ALP preference flow to the Nationals and Greens. I did the numbers again assuming the Greens were one vote ahead of Labor and the Labor preference distribution was 60:40 in favour of the Greens. The take home result: Greens beat the Nationals by a few thousand votes! Final take home: the Richmond federal election is much closer than Mandy’s advertised prediction.
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