Glenn Druery is one smart cookie. Having long ago mastered the art of harvesting preferences under the old group-voting option on upper house ballot papers, and having perfected the schmoozing needed to convince aspiring upper house members to fund his lotteries, he’s also picked up useful insights into how political journalists and the media operate. The beast constantly needs stories, column inches, headlines — something, anything.
Which is why Druery and his inevitable sobriquet “the preference whisperer” were on high rotation last week, letting it be known (as in “Druery has confirmed”) that he’d had discussions with newly independent WA senator Fatima Payman. Barring a double dissolution, though, Payman’s Senate spot is guaranteed until June 2028, so it’s hard to know what use she would have for Glenn’s skillset.
But there was more to the story, for Druery also relucantly admits to having been in talks with “Muslim community groups” amid scuttlebutt about the possibility of “Muslim teals” running against Labor in some electorates to capitalise on anger at the government’s approach to Gaza.
Does it matter that Glenn’s whispering days are over everywhere except in Victoria? At the federal level, the Turnbull government got rid of group-ticket voting just before the 2016 election — with the support of the Greens but in the face of hysterical opposition from Labor. No longer could voters unknowingly preference tiny parties they’d never heard of and wouldn’t like. The stated reasons for Labor’s opposition never made sense, but perhaps it saw the status quo as disadvantageous to the Greens.
And does it matter, when talk turned to “Muslim teals,” that Druery has never been able to do anything useful with preferences in lower house elections? Apparently not.
Once you take out the “whispering” there’s actually no story at all. But I couldn’t find this acknowledged, even once, in any of the mainstream accounts I’ve seen.
Druery has a history of making absurd claims about preferences in elections to the House of Representatives. Back in 2015, when the Liberal Party was taking legal action against the Liberal Democrats, or LDP, because their name could create confusion, the minor party’s sole senator, David Leyonhjelm, announced that the LDP would “preference” Labor over the Liberal candidate, Andrew Hastie in that September’s Canning by-election.
Earth shattering? Well, Druery certainly claimed to think so. The move could be “disastrous” for the government, he told the Australian. “We are going to potentially see something like (the 2013 NSW Senate election) happen again in Canning,” he opined. “The Liberal Democrats are number two on the ballot paper, they’re on the left hand side of the Liberal Party and many voters will be confused.” (The brackets in the quote are the Australian’s.)
There was more: “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say the results of this election could be in the hands of the Liberal Democrats if they’re clever and if they run a very smart strategy.”
Some of that made no sense whatsoever, though perhaps the newspaper was to blame. (I’m thinking of the reference to the NSW Senate ballot paper in 2013, when Leyonheljm was elected by voters who thought he was a Liberal, and the LDP’s spot on the Canning ballot, which has no effect on whether or not people follow their how-to-vote card.) And the rest was just wrong.
In the event, the LDP received — wait for it — 0.6 per cent of the primary vote in the Canning by-election. But it wouldn’t have mattered if it’d got 20.6, because despite its how-to-vote card “directing” preferences to Labor, the flow was 72.4 per cent to the Liberals. We don’t really know the exact effect those cards had, but it obviously wasn’t much.
The boys, unbowed, were at it again the following year, joined by Family First senator Bob Day, where during an ABC 7.30 interview they threatened vengeance against those who had voted for the abolition of group tickets. I wrote at the time about some of their fantastical claims.
One person who seems to have fallen for Druery’s pea and thimble is former Labor senator (1987–1990) John Black, who for at least two decades has been published on election matters in the Australian and, more recently, the Australian Financial Review. In last Saturday’s instalment he purported to apply to Australia the lessons of the big swings in last week’s UK election from Labour to independents in constituencies with a high Muslim population.
This is a legitimate topic, of course, and those numbers must have sent shivers up the spine among Labor MPs in electorates that share that characteristic, most of which are in western Sydney. Here, though, the treatment turned the question to farce, with this pièce de résistance revealing the grip of the Druery legend:
Looking ahead to 2025, it would presumably be the job of the preference whisperer, Glenn Druery, to try to round up a swap of preferences between One Nation, the United Australia Party, the Greens and an independent Muslim candidate before the combined 20-plus per cent of these votes leaked back to the ALP.
Slotting in a conservative estimate for the number of votes shifting from Labor to a Muslim “teal”/independent, Black finds one casualty, Peter Khalil in Wills. But under less conservative estimates, based on those British swings, Labor could lose “seats such as Werriwa, Macarthur, Holt, Barton and Lalor… to whichever party was left sitting on the preferential carousel when the music stopped.”
Leaving aside the improbability of the Greens signing up to a deal that would mean preferencing One Nation ahead of Labor, the “carousel” reference gives it away: Black is thinking of the pre-2016 Senate ticket system. How else could you imagine all those preferences aggregating to one “20-plus per cent” bloc?
As the Canning LDP example shows, parties and candidates can’t exercise much control over where their preferences go. Some have more success than others, with variables including how many volunteers they can bring out to thrust cards into voters’ hands, what kind of supporters they attract, and which parties they are attempting to send preferences to.
But a person voting for a “Muslim teal,” for example, is very unlikely to be persuaded to preference One Nation or even the Liberals ahead of Labor. For Black’s analysis to work, the proportion of obedient card followers has to be close to 100 per cent. In reality, it’s likely to be in the single digits.
So, do the dramatic swings in Britain’s high-Muslim population constituencies have implications for our Labor government? You bet they do.
Black got the electorates right: Blaxland (NSW), Watson (NSW) and Calwell (Victoria) are the Labor seats most vulnerable to the hypothetical Muslim candidate. (His suggestion that Wills could succumb to a random candidate from Druery’s gang is nonsense, but it is, after this year’s redistribution, rather vulnerable to the Greens.)
Two big differences between Britain and Australia, though, are demographics and the voting system.
Britain’s Muslim population, per capita, is roughly twice Australia’s (around 6 per cent versus 3 per cent) and that difference is roughly reflected in the proportions living in the larger “Muslim seats”: about 60 per cent Muslim there and 30 per cent here. All else being equal, this means less danger for Labor.
But the other variable — Britain’s first-past-the-post system versus Australia’s “number every square” — is, on balance, a negative for Labor. True, the chances that a split in the centre-left vote will lead to Coalition gains is close to zero, but the risk of some of those “Muslim teals” winning seats thanks to preferences from other candidates, particularly the Liberals, is significant. It happened against Labor in Fowler (and against Liberals for all six successful teals) in 2022.
Turnout and formality are also at play. The electorates in question tend to have low turnout, and the Sydney ones in particular have a high informal vote (partly because of confusion created by optional-preferential voting in state elections). Given the likelihood that voters from non-English-speaking backgrounds are particularly well represented in both groups, this would decrease the risk for Labor. But it also presents opportunities for community organisers to get the vote out and ensure people to make their vote formal by filling out every square.
This might be where someone like Druery would come in handy. As would help with filling out forms and liaising between candidates to try to optimise the flow of preferences.
Those how-to-vote cards won’t make much difference, but in a close contest every vote counts. •
