A reflection on two elections
A note from our WA state president, Lisa Griffiths
I don’t know about you, but I did not see that one coming! As we recover from back-to-back state and federal elections here in WA, I really thought I would be speculating on how a suitably humbled state Labor Government would interact with a new minority federal Labor Government. It’s ok, I won’t give up my day job!
WA State Election March 2025
I did try to give up my day job however, by running in the state election in my local seat of Bibra Lake as an independent. For those who are not aware, we were unable to run as Australian Democrats because we were ‘beaten’ by the new WA electoral act amendments around state registration, and were unable to meet the registration requirements in time to contest the election; one of the requirements was that we needed to register as a party a full 12 months before the election was held.
I got a magical ballot draw (1st spot) and I returned the highest percentage of the vote by a Democrat in WA in 29 years at 5.1%, and therefore qualified for electoral reimbursement. This meant that the generous member donation that I was using to fund my campaign was given straight back to the federal WA Senate campaign.
Federal election: May 2025
We had Senate campaigns in WA, Qld and Victoria, and a House of Representatives campaign in the seat of Banks in NSW.
While our Senate campaigns in WA and Qld didn’t get a sufficient percentage for reimbursement, we’ve improved markedly on their 2022 results, with a positive swing toward us across all WA electorates, and all but two Qld electorates, which should be celebrated.
Our Victorian Senate campaign had a number of challenges that meant we did not have the sort of results we were looking for. Legalise Cannabis and the Victorian Socialists had high profile candidates that dominated a lot of the minor party discourse, and while in 2022 we scored a very favourable ballot position being in column C, in 2025 we were in column L of a very large Senate ballot paper, which we can’t discount as a possible negative impact.
Historically we’ve not been a strong House of Representatives party; we’ve never held a HoR seat federally. In Banks we were focused on building community connections and outreach in the local government area of our candidate Phillip Pearce, to build on his recent local government campaign and to support a future campaign, which was not necessarily reflected in the final result.
However, it is apparent from the results federally that the public are ready for a change and we should be ready to keep fighting to be a part of it.
Overwhelmingly the feedback we’ve received at festivals and fair days, door knocking, and on pre-poll and polling day booths, is that the Democrats are important to people. We hold a special place in Australian political history and discourse, and people are not only glad to see us, they think it’s important that we’re here to represent the interests and needs of the country as a whole. Our increased vote in the two states historically considered most conservative, WA and Qld, reflects this.
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More people than ever are in search of political representation that is not the status quo; let’s show them that the Democrats are what they’re looking for.