Killing populism: What Australia has to teach Britain

Small tweaks to the electoral system can fundamentally change the incentives and weaken people like Farage.

Photo by Jamie Davies on Unsplash

Your first, worst thought about Australian politics is that it is extremely similar to British politics. This seems obviously true at first and then increasingly profoundly untrue the more you get to know the place.

The similarities are immediately obvious. Australia has an uncharismatic centre-left prime minister who enjoys a huge majority but seemingly has no idea what to do with it. There’s a shattered centre-right opposition, crammed full of morons, in a state of advanced ideological disarray. There’s a resurgent far-right threatening on the wings. Hell, I walked around the New South Wales parliament and it looked like a mini-Commons in nearly every respect, except for the fact that it was cleaner and better maintained.

But once you get past these surface details, Australia and Britain seem to live in separate universes. If Australia feels like Britain at all, it feels like Britain around 2007, before the financial crash and austerity, before Brexit and Liz Truss. It’s not perfect. There’s poverty and ignorance, obviously. House prices are too high, young people are frozen out, and that issue could easily become connected to immigration rates in a viable populist attack. The asylum system is brutal and unkind. But on a fundamental level, Australia has just about managed to maintain the core promise of political life in a Western democracy: that things will be better for your kids than they were for you. In the UK, we have not.

You know what really feels different? It’s boring. Australian politics is beautifully, exquisitely, delightfully boring. It is boring in the way it used to be back home - sane, predictable, restrained, broadly rational, and consisting mostly of retail offers to voters rather than screeching rhetoric about identity and culture war. If I worked here, I would have a less interesting career and I mean that in the best possible way. The success of pundits and bloggers is inversely proportionate to the wellbeing of a society. If they’re having a good and interesting time it generally means everyone else is getting fucked.

Australia, almost alone among Western countries, has not really given populism room to breath. In the general election last year, a salivating imbecile of a man named Peter Dutton used his position as leader of the centre-right Liberal party to try and bring MAGA-style politics to Australia. In response, Australia handed him his arse. His party experienced a landslide defeat. He lost his seat. Populism was repudiated.

Why is this happening? Is it because Australians are somehow more politically evolved than Brits, Europeans and Americans? No. Is it because they are immune to racist or anti-immigrant rhetoric? Absolutely not. They love that filthy shit just as much as we do. It’s because the rules governing the electoral system have created a different set of incentives, which then provide for different outcomes.

They have created a system that values nuanced preferences rather than black-and-white winner-takes-all victory. It rewards politicians who reach out to the centre, rather than towards their base. It makes sure the views of everyone in society are heard and represented through policy. And it does all this through small, moderate changes to the electoral system.

Instead of the British system of first-past-the-post, Australia uses preferential voting. In Britain, we put a cross by the candidate we support and the candidate with the most votes wins. In Australia, they rank the candidates in order. Instead of just voting Labour, say, you’d vote Labour first, Greens second, Lib Dems third, Conservatives fourth and Reform fifth.

The winning candidate in a seat must secure a majority of the votes. Initially you count the first preference votes - the people who put that candidate first. Then you start redistributing votes for second preferences - people’s second best option - until a candidate gets over 50% support, at which point they’re declared the winner.

The most beautiful thing about this system is the notion of preference. In Britain, we choose a winner. This is extremely primitive - most people’s political wishes are more complex than that. But it also mutilates democratic thought. Instead of voting for who we most want to win, we are often forced to vote tactically for whoever we think is best placed to defeat the party we most want to stop. We’re forced into a game of Battleships, trying to figure out who is best placed to defeat Reform, or the Conservatives, or whoever else we’ve taken a dislike to.

In Australia, they simply describe their preferences. Very often, that will involve people giving their first preference idealistically to the party they most like and their second preference pragmatically to the adjacent ideological party most likely to win. It forces people to think about different versions of goodness, rather than black-and-white assertions of party support. It allows them to think both optimistically and practically, which is a winning combination of instincts.

Just like the UK, Australia is experiencing a long-term decline in the two-party system. In 1983, Labor won under Bob Hawke with 49.5% of the vote with just 6.9% of people voting for third parties. In 2025, Labor won with 34.6% of the vote, with 33.6% of people voting for third parties. Like Britain, Australia is also experiencing a two-bloc ideological divide between progressive voters on the one hand, who are typically university educated and living in big multicultural urban areas, and reactionary voters on the other, who are typically school educated and living in towns and rural areas.

In Britain, this change is sabotaging any sense of meaning in our democracy. We are utterly exposed to arbitrary, meaningless election results which do not represent the popular will in any meaningful way.

Take the Gorton and Denton byelection last month. As it happened, the Greens won, taking 40% of the vote to Reform’s 29% and Labour’s 25%. That’s what happened in that particular seat, but there will be plenty of seats at the next election where the demographics and the preferences will be slightly different. You could get a lot of results that look like this: Greens 30%, Labour 30%, Reform 35%. That is an insane result. It provides a Reform victory in a seat that is overwhelmingly progressive. It is an abuse of any sense of logic or democracy that this should be the case, but that is the kind of deformed outcome you get in a post-two-party system that still uses first-past-the-post.

Preferential voting acts decisively against that problem, because the Green voter would make Labour second preference and the Labour voter would make the Greens second preference. This allows voters to opt for their preference without giving up a stake in the question of who ultimately wins. It allows them to state their desires while still preventing their worst outcome.

The British system punishes diversity of thought within an ideological camp. It rewards whoever can monopolise the vote on their side of the great tribal divide. Margaret Thatcher managed this in the 80s, monopolising the right while the left split into Labour and the SDP. Keir Starmer managed this in 2024, monopolising the progressive vote while the reactionary bloc splintered into the Tories and Reform. The Australian system recognises diversity of thought within an ideological camp and makes elections about popular will rather than the delivery of an effective monopolisation programme.

Most importantly, it discourages movement towards the extreme and rewards movement towards the centre. Imagine that you are a candidate in an Australian election. You want to get first preference votes by speaking to your core supporters, sure. But then there is a secondary consideration. You also want to pick up second preference votes. And that means saying and behaving in a way that will appeal to voters who prefer other parties, making yourself palatable to them.

This doesn’t always work. The centre-right Liberal party in Australia, for instance, is going through a period of hysterical discombobulation. It is making the exact same mistake the Tories are making and fixating on voters lost to the right while ignoring the much more serious problem it has of voters it is losing to its left. It no longer possesses a single parliamentary seat with an expansive view of Sydney Harbour - a testament to how badly it has fumbled its support among Australia’s wealthy cosmopolitan voters.

But there is no electoral system which can solve the capacity for foolishness and self-harm in the modern conservative mind. There is no force on earth so powerful it can make stupid people recognise objective truth. All we can do is combine incentives with desired behaviour and hope that most people, most of the time, will act accordingly.

The system has ultimately worked very well. When the Australian centre-right party failed to recognise this incentive, others arrived to take advantage, as if by strength of market forces. In the 2022 election, 16 seats were won by candidates who did not win on first preference vote. Every single one of them had a Liberal party victory on first preference, but second preference votes saw them lose their seat in favour of seven Labor victors, two Greens, and seven independents. All but one of these independents were so-called Teal candidates - fiscally conservative, socially liberal centrist types alienated by the small-minded stubbornness of the mainstream right.

This was a decisive moment in the election. It’s hard to compare results under one electoral system with another because people’s behavior is different, but - you know - fuck it, let’s just play around with numbers for a laugh. Under first-past-the-post, that election would have made the centre-right the largest group in a hung parliament, with 73 seats, versus 71 for Labor and seven for independents. But under preferential voting, it translated to 77 seats for Labor, 58 for the centre-right and 16 for independents.

In the 2025 election, the new MAGA-style right-wing approach attacked woke and gender diversity and all that - you know the drill. It alienated urban moderate voters, particularly women and young people. And it got hammered, recording its lowest ever seat count and experiencing something close to liquidation in inner city and suburban Australia. The Teal independents held their ground.

There is a second reason for the Australian victory over populism. It is mandatory voting.

I have always opposed mandatory voting. In general, my instinctive response to any form of coercion is: no thanks fuck you. That is probably the single most irreducible aspect of my political personality. Mandatory voting, obviously, involves a form of coercion by the state on the individual.

Australia is generally an extremely compliant nation. I am deeply alienated by it. Hardly anyone smokes here. They’ve basically banned vapes outside of a pharmacy setting and although you still see people vaping, you see it far less than at home. The rules around alcohol purchase and consumption are tighter than in the UK. This is a society which follows rules. People say the same of Britain, but there is a greater degree of savagery and chaos in the British personality, as you will see on any weekend evening in our towns and cities.

I went to a free gig in a park in Adelaide. No-one was visibly drunk, literally no-one smoked or vaped, there was plenty of personal space and at the end we all left in an orderly manner. In the UK, no-one would have gotten out of that place alive. I felt terribly alone. I longed for women wearing short skirts in winter vomiting on street corners, mad drunks screaming at passers-by, someone eating a kebab next to a dead body, the great Hogarthian beauty of my country.

Mandatory voting is in line with the general Australian instinct towards rules and compliance. My instinctive distaste therefore remains. But when you break it down into a series of losses and gains it becomes very hard to resist.

In terms of state coercion, it is basically the same as jury service. Is there anything wrong with jury service? No. We therefore accept, as a liberal principle, that you can take away the freedom of the individual to not attend an event in order to maintain the civic health of a society. Mandatory voting asks for less time from the individual in exchange for a greater gain. There is also no real punishment for not voting. You get a $20 fine - a tenner basically. It doesn’t grow upon non-payment. It’s a token penalty without a meaningful civil implication.

I used to object to mandatory voting on the basis that people should be able to register their protests against all options by not voting. They shouldn’t be coerced into supporting one of the parties on offer, because they may not like any of them. But the mandatory element is not actually for the voting. It is to attend the polling station. What you do inside the polling booth is up to you. You can draw a cock on the ballot - this is naturally an option many people take - or leave it blank, or scribble over it. You still have the ability to spoil your ballot and register a protest.

The liberal consequences of mandatory voting are therefore pretty insignificant. But the liberal advantages of it are extensive.

In the UK, elections are won by targeting your vote and getting them out on polling day. Parties have detailed databases of who lives where, whether they’ve voted for them in the past and whether they’re likely to do so today. They target that vote and target that vote and target that vote. It is a remorseless professional campaign - a numbers game. We barely question this but of course it is completely irrelevant to any higher notion of what democracy is for.

In Australia you simply cannot win by targeting your core vote. This entire element of the electoral game has ceased to function, because turnout is around 90%. The base mobilisation approach is neutralised.

Instead, you have to stretch out your vote. You have to target voters who don’t care that much, who aren’t really that bothered, who have no pre-existing ideological disposition. Political incentives point towards broad inclusive messaging rather than targeted core-vote strategies.

Mandatory voting also brings in young voters. Australia gets between 90% to 95% turnout in each age group, including the young. And because they vote young, they get into the habit and keep doing it as they get older.

In the UK, we have a severe problem of variable voting levels by age group. Older voters are very likely to vote. Younger voters are much less likely. That’s why the last election saw the Tories promise to maintain the triple-lock pension for the old and reintroduce conscription for the young. It’s a basic question of incentives. In Australia, you are forcing that youth vote to be heard. By virtue of that, you are compelling the political system to respond to the full spectrum of societal demands.

There are surely other reasons why Australia has proved surprisingly immune to populist seduction - economic, psychological, cultural, whatever. But the incentives built into the electoral system must surely have a decisive role.

Why don’t we hear more about these Australian ideas in Britain? I suspect it’s because Australia, like the US, is right-wing coded. It speaks English, it is considered tainted by colonialism, it is the originator of many of the worst anti-immigrant policies implemented internationally, and it is the birthplace of many of the most morally decrepit conservative voices in the UK, from Rupert Murdoch to Lynton Crosby. It is the kind of country which right-wingers like to refer to and progressives do not.

This is why we hear about the ‘Australian points-based system’ on immigration but not about their electoral model. If a Scandinavian country had trialled preferential mandatory voting, I think we would hear more British liberals celebrate it.

Defeating populism is the great mission of our time. Australia has proved very good at it. We should be paying much greater attention to what they’re up to.

Odds and sods

This newsletter is available as a podcast - on Spotify, Substack or at the top of the page.

My piece for the i paper this week celebrated Starmer’s approach to the Iran war and thanked our lucky stars he was prime minister when it mattered.

This week I watched a lot of extremely middling films on airplanes while trying to get home. Materialists is a film which thinks it is idealistic, but is in fact astonishingly cynical. The Running Man has good politics but a poor script, weirdly underpowered direction and a flat leading man. But I had great fun watching Final Destination: Bloodlines. I laughed my head off at every death and in fact found it even more funny when the man in the seat next to me turned to look at what I was laughing at, saw someone’s head being ground up in a lawnmower, and then shifted visibly away from me.

I am now finally back in the UK and enjoying every raindrop, and every filthy stinking chaotic corner of London. See you next week you cunts.