William Bowe
Editor of The Poll Bludger @PollBludger
William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, is one of the most heavily trafficked forums for online discussion of Australian politics, and joined the Crikey stable in 2008.
There's life in the old (Labor) dog yet. The NSW ALP romped home in a byelection on Saturday, with a 26% swing. Is this the first sign of recovery -- or a false dawn?
The Western Australian and South Australian Senate results under the microscope: which preference decisions mattered, and which didn't.
The picture in the Australian Senate is becoming a little clearer, with more seemingly insignificant candidates are excluded from the count.
The calls for reform in electing senators have grown louder after the weekend result. But what's the best model to fix it? Crikey's poll-cruncher examines the options.
Almost a quarter of Australians voted for small parties in the Senate this time around, and the bizarre flow of preferences has elected very strange micro-parties. Here's the state of play.
Wrapping up our guide of the Senate with a review of the two territories, which are unlikely to turn up any surprises on Saturday night.
Plenty of people have dismissed the Palmer United Party as a rich man's ego trip, but its potential for disruption shouldn't be underestimated.
outh Australia's one extraordinary result in the era of six-seat half-Senate elections came with the election of Nick Xenophon in 2007, and it is this result that is to be revisited at the coming election.
Given the Senate’s logic of providing equal representation to each state regardless of population, Tasmania is the state whose voters have the greatest bearing on its make-up, the ratio of senators to population being about 1:43,000, compared with roughly 1: 600,000 in New South Wales. Its effect over the past two election has been to […]
Western Australia provides the most consistent senate results, which is a nice change from Queensland, the other frontier state.
