Here is something worth knowing before Nepean on 2 May and Farrer on 9 May - and any election - federal, state, local.

If you vote 1 for a community independent - or for any candidate who is not one of the two frontrunners - your vote is not wasted. Not even close. The Australian voting system was specifically designed to make sure that does not happen. Most Australians do not know this. Many major parties are counting on that.

I am not a political scientist or an electoral analyst. I am an Australian citizen who has spent years working in civic engagement and campaigns, and I have had to learn this system from the ground up - because civics education in Australia is nowhere near as good as it should be. This article is written for everyday Australians in exactly that spirit. It explains how voting works for the House of Representatives, most state lower houses, and many local council elections. The Senate uses a different system - proportional representation - which we will cover separately. For Nepean and Farrer, this is your guide.

First, what happens elsewhere

In the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, elections use first-past-the-post. The candidate with the most votes wins - even if that is only 30 or 35 per cent. Everyone else’s votes count for nothing. No majority required. Just more than anyone else.

This is why voters in those systems are constantly told to vote tactically - meaning, vote for the lesser of two evils rather than the candidate you actually support. It is a system that structurally rewards the two major parties and punishes everyone else. And it produces exactly the two-party duopoly many Australians are frustrated with - but mistakenly believe they also have.

They don’t.

The 2024 UK general election made this painfully visible. The Greens received nearly two million votes - 6.7 per cent of the national vote - and won four seats. One seat for every 485,000 votes. Political scientists called it the most disproportionate election in British history.

In February 2026, the UK Greens won their first ever Westminster by-election - Gorton and Denton - with more than 40 per cent of the vote. Their slogan: “make hope normal again.” Their strategy: deep local organising in communities where people genuinely knew and trusted them. Importantly, they won despite their voting system, not because of it. Imagine what that same energy could do with a system that actually helps rather than hinders.

That system is ours.

How preferential voting actually works

Australia uses preferential voting for the House of Representatives, most state lower houses including the Victorian Legislative Assembly where Nepean sits, and many local council elections across the country - though rules vary by state and council, so always check the ballot paper instructions.

How it works: You number every candidate in order of preference. 1 is your first choice. 2 is your second. And so on.

When votes are counted, if no candidate has more than 50 per cent of first preference votes - almost always the case in a competitive contest - the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Everyone who voted 1 for that candidate has their vote transferred to whoever they marked as 2. If that second choice was already eliminated, the vote keeps moving - to your third choice, then your fourth - until it reaches a candidate still in the race.

Your vote never stops. It never disappears. It keeps working until it helps elect someone. This is why numbering every box matters - the more preferences you mark, the further your vote can travel.

A vote for Tracee Hutchison in Nepean does not help the Liberals if Hutchison is eliminated. It flows to whoever you marked as 2. You decide where it goes - not the party, not anyone else.

The how-to-vote card - what it is, who wrote it, and why you don’t have to follow it

When you walk into a polling booth, volunteers hand you a how-to-vote card showing the order a party recommends you number your ballot. Most people assume it is an official document. It is not. It is produced by the party or candidate and reflects preference deals negotiated between parties - often in backrooms, sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with your interests.

You do not have to follow it. It is a suggestion, not an instruction.

At federal elections and in Victoria - including Nepean - you must number every box. Leaving any blank makes your vote informal.

NSW state elections use optional preferential voting. You only need to mark a 1. However, if your candidate is knocked out and you only voted 1, your vote exhausts and stops counting. Numbering your preferences fully gives your vote the best chance of counting all the way. NSW local council rules vary by council - always read the ballot paper instructions carefully.

Tasmania uses a different system entirely - Hare-Clark, a form of proportional representation where multiple members are elected per electorate and candidates need roughly 12 to 17 per cent of the vote depending on the electorate size, rather than a majority. It is significantly more representative than single-member preferential voting. How-to-vote cards are banned by law within 100 metres of Tasmanian polling places. Tasmanian voters decide entirely for themselves. Which is, when you think about it, how it should work everywhere.

Community independent candidates approach how-to-vote cards differently from the major parties. Some hand out a card showing only “Vote 1” - with no numbers directing further preferences. This is deliberate. Unlike the major parties whose preference deals are negotiated behind closed doors, community independents want you to decide where your preferences flow. That hands the responsibility to you - which means numbering your ballot carefully, in an order that reflects your values. You decide. Not them.

What this means in Nepean and Farrer

In both contests, the preferential system means you can vote for the candidate who best represents your values, interests, and requirements - and know that if they do not make the final two, your vote flows to your next preferred candidate still standing, rather than disappearing.

Both community independent candidates - Tracee Hutchison in Nepean and Michelle Milthorpe in Farrer - have polled strongly enough to be genuine contenders. Neither is a wasted vote. The preferential system makes that possible.

The argument that voting for an independent is throwing your vote away is not just wrong. In Australia’s system, it is the reverse of the truth. Voting for a candidate you don’t believe in - because you are afraid of wasting your vote - is the only way to guarantee your values, interests and requirements go unrepresented.

Preferential voting is one of Australia’s most significant democratic achievements. It was designed to give ordinary Australians genuine freedom of choice without strategic penalty - the freedom to vote for who you actually want, not just who you think can win.

Most Australians who have ever voted for their second choice out of fear never needed to.

You are free to vote for who you actually want.

Your Vote. Your Future.

You know what to do.

Onward we press

Sue Barrett is the founder of Democracy Watch AU and Before You Vote. Before You Vote publishes every Tuesday and Friday. If this was useful, send it to five people.

Numbers have a way of cutting through the noise. Last week, some numbers landed that every Australian voter - and every Australian politician - should sit with.

RedBridge Group director Kos Samaras, one of Australia’s most rigorous electoral analysts, has released polling data that tells a clear story about where public opinion actually sits right now.

Sixty-one per cent of all Australian voters blame Trump for rising fuel costs. Only 14 per cent blame Albanese.

In an environment where cost of living is the dominant political issue - where petrol prices are hitting household budgets hard, where people are genuinely struggling to afford to drive to work - nearly two thirds of Australians are looking at Washington, not Canberra, and saying: this is on you.

The petrol price crisis has a direct ancestry - one that runs through decades of Western governments deciding their oil interests mattered more than other nations’ sovereignty. We are paying for those decisions at the bowser.

The number that changes the calculus

The headline figure is striking. But the number underneath it is the one worth sitting with too.

Thirty-nine per cent of One Nation voters blame Trump for rising petrol prices. To be precise, 38 per cent blame the Australian Labor government. The base is split almost evenly. That is not a clean win for anyone. But it is a profound vulnerability for any politician who has bet everything on the populist right’s loyalty to Trump. Nearly four in ten of their own voters are looking elsewhere for the cause of their pain - and that fracture is where accountability enters.

As Samaras observed: this is the environment any Australian politician has to navigate when they are seen nodding along to MAGA world. An environment where an old ally has created a fuel crisis significant enough that people cannot afford to drive to work. An environment where that same ally now treats Australian companies worse than Russia.

Then came the pharmaceuticals

The Trump administration has imposed a 100 per cent tariff on Australian pharmaceuticals - hitting our medicines harder than almost any other nation. The PBS system, which has kept medicines affordable for millions of Australians across generations, is now directly in the crosshairs of a foreign government’s trade policy.

As of this writing, negotiations are underway, however no carve-out has been secured. Every day without an exemption is a day Australian families face the prospect of paying more for the medicines they need to stay alive. Any political figure who spent the last year cosying up to Trump’s orbit now has to answer this. Not in theory. In specifics. Why did Australia get hit at the maximum possible rate? What did that relationship deliver for ordinary Australians?

These are not partisan questions. They are the minimum accountability questions a democracy requires.

The culture war win that wasn’t

Certain Australian political figures calculated that aligning with Trump - adopting the language, the posture, the culture war framing - would deliver a political dividend. What they did not calculate was that the same movement would impose tariffs on Australian medicines, drive up petrol prices felt by their own voters, and create a sovereign risk that walked straight through their front door.

As Samaras put it: they may have thought they scored a culture war win. Instead, a cost-of-living liability just arrived at their address.

There is a way out - but not overnight

Sun and wind do not pass through the Strait of Hormuz. No war has ever been fought over sunshine. No cartel can price-gouge the wind. Once a solar panel is on a roof or a community battery is charged, no foreign government can weaponise that energy or hold it hostage.

The transition to renewable energy is not just an environmental imperative - it is a sovereignty strategy. It’s a cost-of-living strategy. But let’s be honest about the timeline. No solar panel will replace the diesel in a combine harvester tomorrow morning. No wind farm will fuel a road train crossing the Hay Plain next week. The short-term pain at the bowser is real.

What renewables will do, over time, is reduce the money leaving Australian communities for global oil markets. Every kilowatt-hour generated locally is a dollar not sent to a cartel. We can already see what this looks like in practice. In Indi - the federal electorate in north-east Victoria (next to Farrer) - eleven community energy groups are keeping energy dollars circulating in local shops, services, and families rather than flowing to distant power companies. In the Bega Valley, a circular economy is taking shape where local energy, local food, and local business reinforce each other. These are not experiments. They are blueprints.

The petrol price crisis has done something years of climate advocacy could not quite achieve: it has made fossil fuel dependency personal, immediate, and impossible to ignore. The spell is breaking. The question is what we build next - and how honest we are about the timeline.

What this means in Nepean and Farrer

In Farrer on 9 May - a federal seat in regional southern New South Wales - the cost of petrol, the price of medicines, and the future of the Murray-Darling are the daily reality of communities voting. One Nation’s David Farley is polling at 28.7 per cent. The question for every Farrer candidate is not who they blame for the petrol price. It is what they would actually do about it - and what their relationships and allegiances have already cost.

In Nepean on 2 May - a Victorian state by-election - the direct federal levers are one step removed, but the cost of living, the pharmaceutical safety net, and the question of who puts local community interests first are just as present.

Ask every candidate in both contests: what do you say to the nearly four in ten voters who blame Trump for their petrol price? What do you say to the family whose medicine costs are now at risk? What exactly would you do differently - on fuel, on medicines, on sovereignty - starting tomorrow?

A vote is not just an expression of anger or identity. It is a decision about who you trust to put Australia’s interests first - in a world where that question has never been more consequential.

Apply the five questions. The answers are there if you look.

Your Vote. Your Future.

You know what to do.

Onward we press

Sue Barrett is the founder of Democracy Watch AU and Before You Vote. Before You Vote publishes every Tuesday and Friday. If this was useful, send it to five people.

Every election campaign is full of promises. Housing. Cost of living. Better hospitals. Safer streets. A stronger economy. You have heard all of them. You will hear them again.

Too many of them are not policies. They are slogans. And some are something more deliberate - propaganda. Statements designed not to inform you but to produce a feeling. To make you afraid, or angry, or reassured, without giving you anything specific enough to hold anyone to account.

New research from the University of Canberra confirms what many Australians already suspect: in the two weeks before the 2025 federal election, 60 per cent of adults came across election misinformation. Only 41 per cent felt confident they could tell whether online information was true. And when people saw something they suspected was false, 44 per cent ignored it rather than checked it - not because they didn’t care, but because they were overwhelmed and burned out.

This is not a personal failing. It is the intended effect. Learning to tell the difference is one of the most useful civic skills you can develop. Here is how.

What a policy actually is

A real policy commitment has five elements. It names a specific problem with evidence of its scale. It proposes a specific action to address it. It identifies who will do it and when. It explains what it will cost and how that cost will be met. And it falls within the actual powers of the level of government the candidate is seeking election to.

Not all five need to appear on a billboard. However, when you dig into what a candidate is actually proposing, all five should be findable. If they are not - if you cannot find a number, a timeline, a cost, or a named person responsible for delivery - you are not looking at a policy. You are looking at an intention dressed up as a promise.

The difference matters because intentions cannot be held to account. Specific commitments can. A candidate who promises to “invest in healthcare” has given you nothing to measure them against. A candidate who promises to rebuild a specific hospital by a specific date at a specific cost has given you a standard. Hold them to it.

That last element - does it fall within the actual powers of the level of government they are seeking - is where most political promises collapse entirely.

The Tim Wilson test

At the 2025 federal election, Tim Wilson ran in the Victorian seat of Goldstein on three themes: lower inflation, safer communities, and affordable homes. Real concerns. Every Australian who heard them probably nodded. Which was exactly the point.

Inflation is set by an independent Reserve Bank, not a federal MP. Policing and community safety are state responsibilities. Housing approvals are primarily state and local. Wilson was running for a federal seat. He knew what the job was. He was betting that voters did not.

His campaign was also turbocharged by $1.58 million in attack advertising full of lies against the then sitting MP Zoe Daniel - run through proxy groups who have still not officially declared who they are, where their money came from, or who directed the campaign. If you do not know who is funding the advertising trying to influence your vote - and you have no way of finding out - that is the problem right there.

As I told the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters in November 2025: what happened in Goldstein 2025 was a warning. What happens next is a choice.

South Australia has truth in political advertising. Nowhere else does.

South Australia is the only jurisdiction in Australia where it is illegal to publish a political advertisement containing a false or misleading statement of fact. Candidates can be investigated and ordered to retract. The law has teeth.

Everywhere else in Australia - at federal elections, in every other state, in every council election - you can say almost anything in a political advertisement. No legal requirement for it to be true. No penalty for a campaign built on deliberate falsehood.

Zali Steggall has introduced Truth in Political Advertising bills in the federal parliament across multiple terms. The major parties have refused to pass them every time. Ask yourself why - especially given that 83 per cent of Australians, according to the University of Canberra research, support truth in advertising laws at a national level. The public is not the problem. The parliament is.

Your vote is a decision. For that decision to be genuinely yours, the information shaping it needs to bear some relationship to reality. When campaigns are built on false claims, lies, and propaganda, and proxy groups funded by undisclosed interests, your vote is not being informed - it is being harvested. Every false claim that goes unchallenged, every misleading proxy ad that runs without disclosure, drowns out the real issues and the real voices of ordinary Australians trying to make an informed decision.

What propaganda looks like

A slogan is vague. Propaganda is vague and deliberate - designed to activate fear, grievance, or threat rather than describe a plan.

Watch for language that names an enemy without evidence. Claims about what will happen if the other side wins, with no source. Statistics without context - crime is up, but compared to what, measured how, in which area? Promises framed as protection from something terrible rather than a specific plan to do something good. And watch for advertising that does not clearly identify who paid for it.

The test is simple: does this give me anything I can verify? If the answer is no, you are looking at something designed to manipulate, not inform.

Before Nepean and Farrer

Two by-elections are coming. Nepean on 2 May - Victorian state parliament. Farrer on 9 May - federal. For every candidate, ask the same questions. Does this promise fall within what this level of government controls? Is there a specific commitment with a number, a timeline, a named project? Is it costed? What is their record on the things they are promising?

The map of what each level of government controls is on the Before You Vote website. Use it before you vote.

Research consistently shows most Australians want the same things - a decent life, a fair go, affordable housing, healthcare that works, a future our children can count on. What divides us is the noise deliberately manufactured to make us forget that. Algorithms reward outrage. Proxy groups fund disinformation. Political campaigns activate fear rather than inform judgement.

A policy gives you something to check. A slogan gives you something to feel. Propaganda gives you something to fear.

You are entitled to know the difference - and to demand that the people seeking your vote tell you the truth.

Everything you need to cut through the spin is at beforeyouvote.com.au. Free. Independent. For every Australian who suspects they’re not getting the full story.

Your Vote. Your Future.

You know what to do.

Onward we press

Sue Barrett is the founder of Democracy Watch AU and Before You Vote. Before You Vote publishes every Tuesday and Friday. If this was useful, send it to five people.

Before You Vote is now live at beforeyouvote.com.au — a free civic education resource for every Australian who wants to cut through the spin. Share it with five people who need it.

Let me say something that has been building for a while.

There is a saying I keep returning to: a crisis does not develop character. It reveals it.

We are living through one of the most consequential periods in Australian and world history. Democracy itself is under direct assault - from authoritarian strongmen who have decided elections are optional, from billionaire tech oligarchs who have purchased enough platforms and politicians to reshape entire societies in their own image, and from the deliberate dismantling of the institutions that have kept the worst impulses of power in check since 1945.

Here at home the stakes are just as high. The cost of living is grinding down people who can least afford it. A generation is locked out of housing while tax concessions protecting negative gearing and capital gains stay untouched. The clean energy transition that could lower power bills and create regional jobs is being delayed - not by physics or economics, but by fossil fuel interests that have purchased enough political compliance to keep their business model alive at everyone else’s expense. And a federal Labor government with one of the largest parliamentary majorities in modern Australian history is sitting on that mandate like it might break.

The Albanese government has 94 seats. Ninety-four. Use them.

This is the crisis. And what it is revealing about our leadership class is deeply uncomfortable.

Political scientist Allan Patience wrote last week that Australia is being led by unserious people. He is right. But I want to go further. The problem is not just unseriousness. It is cowardice. A political class so captured by polling, so beholden to vested interests, so terrified of losing the next election, that it has forgotten why it wanted to win in the first place.

Amy Remeikis, Chief Political Analyst at the Australia Institute, makes the case in Where It All Went Wrong (simonandschuster.com.au/books/Where-It-All-Went-Wrong/Amy-Remeikis/9781761822117) that today's housing crisis, the gas giveaways, and the rise of One Nation are not accidents - they are the accumulated consequences of a political class that chose compliance over courage decades ago. In her essay "If Australia Could Be Brave" in What's the Big Idea? (australiainstitute.org.au/store/a-time-for-bravery) she asks the question that hangs over every election: what would it look like if our leaders stopped appealing to wolves and started challenging them? It is the right question. We are still waiting for the answer.

What failure of nerve looks like in practice

It looks like a government with a strong majority and a clear mandate on housing affordability, still unable to move on negative gearing reform despite the evidence, despite the need, despite the 94 seats.

It looks like an opposition that has abandoned the work of policy altogether - offering no costed alternative on housing, energy, or the economy. Angus Taylor’s Liberals and Matt Canavan’s Nationals are not yet functioning as an alternative government. They are offering grievance and culture war in place of answers. That is not what serious times require.

It looks like the National Anti-Corruption Commission - fought for by crossbench members, promised by Labor - clearing the political architect of Robodebt without finding anyone of ministerial rank responsible. A scheme that extracted $750 million from 470,000 vulnerable Australians using a method officials knew was illegal. People lost everything. Some lost their lives. Rick Morton, who has covered this story longer than anyone, called the NACC’s findings a catastrophic breach of public trust.

It looks like foreign policy that shifts with external pressure - from Washington, from alliance obligations, from diplomatic relationships with governments whose conduct raises serious questions under international law - while the language of independence is maintained. Citizens are entitled to ask whether Australia’s foreign policy positions reflect Australian values and Australian interests, or someone else’s.

It looks like fossil fuel policy that protects incumbent industry at the expense of the transition every credible economist says is necessary and every climate scientist says is urgent.

This is not leadership. This is middle management. In serious times, middle management is not enough.

What the evidence shows about who is doing the work of leadership

The fairest way to assess any politician is the same way Before You Vote assesses every candidate: by the record, not the rhetoric. What did they introduce? What did they change? Who did they hold to account? What specifically did their community receive?

When you apply those questions to the current parliament, some names hold up.

Andrew Wilkie resigned from the Office of National Assessments rather than stay silent about false intelligence used to justify a war - the only intelligence official in Australia, Britain, or the United States to do so publicly - and from the crossbench secured $340 million for the Royal Hobart Hospital and introduced the foreign political donations ban that the major parties took years to catch up with. Zoe Daniel (former MP of Goldstein) secured the amendment that made Australia’s 43 per cent climate target a floor, not a ceiling. Monique Ryan and Zoe Daniel drove the gambling advertising reform campaign with evidence and genuine community backing, building on the landmark inquiry led by the late Labor MP Peta Murphy, who recommended a full online gambling ban while fighting terminal cancer - an act of legislative courage that shames the inaction that followed her death. Monique Ryan drove the $3 billion HECS debt relief that gave 3 million Australians their financial lives back. Helen Haines delivered the national Cheaper Home Batteries Program from the crossbench without ever holding a ministry. Allegra Spender produced a fully costed tax reform white paper - the kind of structural thinking the major parties have set aside. Zali Steggall has introduced Truth in Political Advertising bills across multiple terms - the question of whether politicians should be allowed to lie to voters, which the major parties still refuse to answer.

These are not gestures. These are laws changed, debts cancelled, emissions protected, money returned to ordinary Australians.

In the Senate, Independent David Pocock has demonstrated what consistent, evidence-based accountability looks like - scrutinising government spending in estimates, championing FOI and whistleblower protections, and applying crossbench pressure that has materially improved legislation. His record of showing up when it was hard is exemplary. Greens senators Barbara Pocock and David Shoebridge have done substantive accountability work in the same chamber too, however the Greens carry a narrow and real critique: there have been moments, most notably on housing legislation, where holding out for policy perfection has meant blocking measures that would have helped real people right now. The tension between advocacy and delivery is genuine, and the people most affected by delayed progress rarely have the luxury of waiting for perfect.

The next elections in play are Nepean on 2 May - a Victorian state by-election and Farrer on 9 May - a federal by-election. If you want to make your vote count and create a better future for you, your family and community then apply the same five questions we apply to every candidate at every level of government. What does this level of government actually control? What is their actual record? Who is funding their campaign? Who are they accountable to? What specifically are they promising - and is it costed? Ask those questions of every candidate on your ballot. The record will tell you what you need to know.

The saying that keeps coming back to me

There will come a time when leaders act like dogs, and there is no shame.

I wrote about this in January 2025 - a warning as old as civilisation about what happens when people entrusted with power abandon virtue and serve only themselves and their masters. I do not think we are all the way there. But I can see the direction.

What stops it is citizens who refuse to lower the standard. Who ask what kind of person this is before they ask what party they belong to. Who look at the record - not the press release, the record — and decide accordingly.

A crisis does not develop character. It reveals it.

Nepean votes in five weeks. Farrer six weeks after that. The federal budget three days later. In every one of those moments the question on the ballot is the same.

Who showed up when it was hard?

Your Vote. Your Future.

You know what to do.

Onward we press

Sue Barrett is the founder of Democracy Watch AU and Before You Vote. Before You Vote publishes every Tuesday and Friday. If this was useful, send it to five people.

Before You Vote is now live at beforeyouvote.com.au — a free civic education resource for every Australian who wants to cut through the spin. Share it with five people who need it.

After every federal election, the Australian Electoral Commission writes cheques to political parties.

The amount is calculated per vote. At the 2025 federal election the rate was $3.386 for every eligible first preference vote received by a party or candidate who cleared a threshold of 4 per cent in their seat or state. In February 2025, parliament legislated to raise that rate to $5 per vote, indexed to inflation, from the next federal election onwards.

The total paid after the 2025 federal election was $93.85 million. From public funds – tax payer money. Roughly $4.50 from every Australian adult.

Most Australians have no idea this system exists.

I didn’t either - until I got involved in a federal election campaign and someone explained it to me. I was stunned. Not that it exists - the reasoning behind it is sound - but that nobody had ever told me. That alongside everything else my vote does, it was also generating a direct cash payment to a political party from public funds. Once you know, you cannot unknow it. And once you look at who received what after the 2025 federal election, some very pointed questions arise.

Why it exists

Public funding of elections was introduced in Australia in 1984 with a straightforward purpose: reduce the influence of private money on politics. If parties receive guaranteed income per vote, the theory goes, they are less dependent on donors - and less beholden to whatever interests those donors represent.

The rules are these. Any party or candidate who receives at least 4 per cent of formal first preference votes is entitled to the per-vote payment, capped at actual electoral expenditure. They must lodge a claim with evidence of what they spent. The AEC reviews every claim before paying.

This applies equally to Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals, the Greens, One Nation, community independents, and other minor political parties. Every vote above 4 per cent generates the same per-vote return regardless of which party received it.

Who got it and how much?

The AEC publishes every payment on its Transparency Register. The headline figures from 2025 tell the story clearly.

Labor received approximately $20 million. The Liberals approximately $16 million. The Nationals around $7 million. The Greens approximately $12 million. Community independents collectively received $3.35 million - every dollar earned by candidates who ran transparent campaigns, disclosed their donors in real time, and refused fossil fuel and corporate industry money.

One Nation ran 147 House of Representatives candidates and received approximately 1.09 million first preference votes nationally - 6.4 per cent of the House vote, their best federal result since 1998. At $3.386 per vote their public funding entitlement before the expenditure cap was in the vicinity of $3.7 million. For a party that won no lower house seats. The precise figure paid is on the AEC Transparency Register, verifiable by anyone.

Pauline Hanson, who leads that party, has attended 53 per cent of the Senate divisions she could have participated in since 2016, according to They Vote For You. The public funded her salary throughout. The public funded her party’s campaigns. The public is entitled to ask what it received in return.

Who is gaming it - and how

Here is what the system did not anticipate. A party does not need to win a seat - or intend to win a seat - to collect public funding. It needs only to field candidates and clear 4 per cent somewhere.

Several minor parties field candidates across dozens of seats they have no prospect of winning specifically because dispersed vote shares can accumulate above 4 per cent in enough places to generate substantial public income. The party collects the funding, continues operating, and fields candidates at the next election - funded partly by votes cast by people who had no idea their first preference generated a cash payment to party headquarters.

Running candidates is itself an electoral expenditure that justifies the funding claim. The system designed to free politics from private money has created, at its edges, a mechanism for harvesting public money through electoral participation alone.

South Australia - the world’s most interesting experiment

Last Saturday’s SA election operated under a different model. SA became the first jurisdiction in Australia - reportedly the first in the world - to ban political donations entirely from 1 July 2025. In their place: public funding per vote, administrative funding for parties, and a policy development allowance.

Every vote cast on Saturday directly funds the party that received it - through public money, not private donors. One Nation’s 22 per cent will generate public funding from South Australian taxpayers. So will Labor’s 38 per cent. So will the Liberals’ 19 per cent.

SA designed this to remove mining billionaires and corporate interests from the equation. In one sense it is cleaner. In another it makes the accountability question sharper: if the public is now the only funder, what is the public entitled to expect?

What you are actually doing when you vote

The public funding system rewards votes. It does not reward performance. A party can receive millions in public funds, attend half the votes in parliament, introduce no legislation of benefit, and collect the same per-vote payment as a party that worked every day.

The AEC does not assess whether what a party did was worth $3.39 per vote. That assessment is yours.

Before Nepean on 2 May (State). Before Farrer on 9 May (Federal). Before every election: ask what they did with the public funding and the public salary they already received. What did they introduce? What did they change? Who did they hold to account?

Every first preference vote above 4 per cent generates $3.39 from public funds - rising to $5 at the next federal election. You are not just expressing a preference. You are directing a payment from the public purse – our money – taxpayers’ money.

I wish someone had told me that decades ago. Now you know.

Your Vote. Your Future.

You know what to do.

Onward we press

Sue Barrett is the founder of Democracy Watch AU and Before You Vote. Before You Vote publishes every Tuesday and Friday. If this was useful, send it to five people.

Here is our new website: Before You Vote

https://www.beforeyouvote.com.au/

South Australia just handed One Nation its best state result in nearly 30 years. Before the rest of Australia follows, it is worth looking at what is actually on offer and what genuine community representation looks like alongside it.

Last Saturday, South Australians voted. Labor won a comfortable majority - currently 28 seats in the 47-seat parliament, with counting still underway in nine electorates. That part was expected.

What caught many off guard was the strength of the vote on the other side of the ballot. For weeks, One Nation was dismissed by commentators and major parties alike. But the results show we cannot afford complacency.

State-wide, One Nation pulled around 5.4 per cent of the primary vote. However, raw numbers do not tell the full story. In outer suburbs and regional towns, their vote hit double digits. In some seats, it exceeded 20 per cent. The strongest state result One Nation has had anywhere in Australia since 1998.

The Liberal Party did not just lose. They were structurally displaced - finishing third or fourth in more than two dozen seats. Voters who had backed the Liberals for decades walked.

One question deserves a direct answer. What does One Nation actually offer?

Just prior to polling day, Pauline Hanson was asked about policy costings. Her response? Asking for policy costings is a “stupid question.” Because One Nation has never been serious enough about policy to survive real scrutiny.

One Nation doesn’t build or cost policy - it sells slogans.

One Nation SA’s platform: cheaper energy through coal and nuclear, reduced immigration, scrapping renewable energy subsidies. No costings. No implementation plan. No explanation of how a state parliament - which does not control the national energy grid, immigration, or federal energy legislation - would deliver any of it.

A YouGov poll during the campaign found that 52 per cent of One Nation’s own voters said they felt unrepresented by the major parties. Only 10 per cent said they actually supported One Nation’s policies.

Most people who voted for One Nation on Saturday were not voting for One Nation. They were voting against something else.

What the geography shows

Kos Samaras of RedBridge Group noted the demographic pattern: outer-suburban communities under mortgage and rental stress, lower formal education attainment, industrial employment belts, and regional towns carrying deep anti-establishment sentiment. “The SA result is not an anomaly,” he said. “It is an accelerated version of a national story.”

However, here is the part voters rarely get told. One Nation has a thirty-year pattern of electing members who discover, once inside parliament, that centralised control and internal conflicts make it impossible to represent their constituents. Sarah Game quit in 2025. WA’s Ben Dawkins left in 2024. Queensland’s Stephen Andrew resigned before the 2024 election. The people One Nation elects frequently end up sitting as independents - or quitting altogether.

Two by-elections. Two choices.

Now look at what is actually on offer in the next two contests.

Nepean - Saturday 2 May (Victorian state)

Labor and One Nation are not running in Nepean.

• Tracee Hutchison (Community Independent): Born at Rosebud Hospital, she has specific plans to rebuild it, fix infrastructure, and address the rough sleeping crisis.

• Anthony Marsh (Liberal): Promising a $340 million rebuild of Rosebud Hospital -the same promise the previous Liberal MP made in 2022. The hospital was not rebuilt.

• Sianan Healy (Greens): Running on properly funding the hospital, protecting green spaces, and affordable housing.

• Peter Angelico (Libertarians): The former Liberal Party member is running for the libertarian party.

Farrer – Saturday 9 May (Federal)

Labor is not contesting. The field includes:

• Michelle Milthorpe (Community Independent): Came within a fraction of defeating Sussan Ley in 2025. Her platform covers the Murray-Darling Basin, a new Albury hospital, and aged care. Endorsed by Pocock and Haines.

• David Farley (One Nation): Polling at 28.7 per cent.* His priorities: slash migration, scrap net zero. When asked about the Albury hospital, his position was that it “would lie with the party.”

• Brad Robertson (Nationals): Former military commander campaigning on healthcare, water management, and local industry.

• Jake Lewis (Liberal): Former army officer and Griffith business owner running on healthcare, water security, and cost of living.

• Richard Hendrie (Greens): Long-standing advocate for a new single-site Albury hospital.

*Like One Nation state and federally, Farley campaigns without costed policies. When pressed on costing during the SA election, Pauline Hanson called the question “stupid.” One Nation does not publish costed platforms.

A reactionary vote sends a signal. A considered vote sends a demand.

The contrast is not subtle. In Nepean, a Liberal candidate promises what was already promised and never delivered. In Farrer, a One Nation candidate has no hospital policy of his own - it “would lie with the party.”

Alongside them are community independents and Greens candidates who have lived the issues, done the work, and can tell you exactly what they will do.

The anger driving One Nation’s numbers is real and should not be dismissed. However, a vote cast for a party whose leader dismisses policy costings as a “stupid question,” with no costed plans, directed by central control that has driven out its own elected members for three decades - that vote is unlikely to deliver the hospital, the infrastructure, or the water reform anyone is actually waiting for.

Before Nepean. Before Farrer. Five questions for every candidate:

1. What does this level of government actually control?

2. What is their actual record?

3. Who is funding their campaign?

4. Who are they accountable to?

5. What specifically are they promising, and is it costed?

South Australia has spoken. The question is what we say next.

Your Vote. Your Future.

You know what to do.

Onward we press

Sue Barrett is the founder of Democracy Watch AU and Before You Vote. Before You Vote publishes every Tuesday and Friday. If this was useful, send it to five people.

Before You Vote Website coming soon.

Recent BYV Articles

• Why I Started Before You Vote - and what we are actually up against

• Federal, State, Local Governments - who controls what and why that matters to you

Here is something that happens at almost every election.

A local councillor gets doorknocked by someone furious about the state of the hospital. A federal MP fields complaints about potholes on a suburban street. A state member gets called about the ABC.

Nobody is stupid. They are working with a map that was never properly given to them.

Australia has three distinct levels of government. They control different things. They are funded differently. They answer to different people. Confusing them - which most of us do, some of the time - is one of the most reliable ways to waste a vote.

I will be honest with you. For a long time, I was one of those people. It wasn’t until I got involved in civic campaigning that my awareness was properly raised - and when it was, something shifted. I understood why my vote at each level mattered differently. I understood what I was actually choosing. And I realised how much I had been underestimating my own power.

And here is the thing - some politicians are counting on you not having it. Tim Wilson ran billboards in the 2025 federal election campaign with three promises: lower inflation, safer communities, affordable homes. Inflation is influenced by the Reserve Bank, which is independent of government. Safer communities means policing - a state responsibility. Affordable homes depend heavily on planning and zoning - also state. He was running for a federal seat. He knew what the job was. He was betting you didn’t.

He wasn’t alone.

This is the map.

Federal Government - The National Framework

The Commonwealth Parliament in Canberra controls the things that operate at national scale.

Defence and national security. Immigration and citizenship. Foreign affairs. Income tax and the federal budget. Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. Aged care. Universities and the HECS system. The ABC. Centrelink and social security. Industrial relations and the minimum wage. Corporations law.

When you vote for a federal member - in the House of Representatives and the Senate - these are the levers you are pulling.

Federal governments do not fix your local road. They do not run your state hospital. They do not decide whether your suburb gets a new school. What they do is set the national policy framework and control the national budget. Where that money flows, and on what terms, shapes everything else.

State and Territory Government - Your Daily Life

This is the level that most directly affects how your day actually goes - and the level most Australians understand least.

State and territory governments run the public hospital system. They fund and regulate state schools. They manage police forces and the court system. They control land use, planning, and housing approvals. They build and maintain most major roads. They run public transport. They regulate electricity and water infrastructure within their borders. They administer TAFE and vocational training. They run emergency services.

If the hospital waiting list in your city is unacceptable, that is a state government question. If the train is late, that is a state government question. If housing approvals in your suburb are blocked or rubber-stamped for developers, that is mostly a state government question.

State elections matter as much as federal elections. Frequently they matter more.

Local Government - Closer Than You Think

Local councils are the level of government people most often dismiss - and least often vote in thoughtfully. They should not be dismissed.

Your council controls local roads and footpaths. Parks, libraries, and community centres. Development approvals for homes and businesses in your area. Waste collection. Local planning rules. Some childcare and aged care services. Swimming pools. Sporting grounds.

When a development goes up next door that changes the character of your street, that went through your council. When the footpath outside your home is dangerous, that is your council’s responsibility. Councils are also where many future state and federal politicians begin. The culture of local government - how transparent it is, how responsive, how captured by developer interests - is downstream of who votes in local elections and how seriously they take it.

Why This Map Matters - Three Elections, Right Now

Here is how perfectly timed this explainer is.

Tomorrow, Saturday 21 March 2026, South Australians go to the polls in a state election. On 2 May, Victorians in the state seat of Nepean vote in a state by-election. On 9 May 2026, Farrer votes in a federal by-election.

Three elections. Two different levels of government. Two completely different sets of levers.

In South Australia today, all 47 seats in the House of Assembly and 11 of the 22 seats in the Legislative Council are up for election. The issues that matter most - hospitals, schools, housing, roads, public transport, planning - are exactly the things state governments control. If you are a South Australian and someone promised you something in this campaign, the map above tells you immediately whether they can actually deliver it.

On 2 May, Victorians in the state seat of Nepean - the southernmost tip of the Mornington Peninsula - vote in a state by-election. The seat fell vacant after Liberal MP Sam Groth resigned. Community independent Tracee Hutchison, a broadcaster and journalist born and raised in Rosebud, is running on a platform of rebuilding Rosebud Hospital, fair infrastructure funding, and genuine local representation. These are state government responsibilities - and a candidate whose platform maps precisely onto what a state MP can actually deliver is worth noticing.

In Farrer on 9 May, it is a federal contest. Community independent Michelle Milthorpe’s platform - a royal commission into Murray-Darling water management, telecommunications infrastructure, federal funding agreements for a new Albury hospital - maps precisely onto federal levers. That precision is itself worth noticing. A candidate who knows what the job controls, and asks for it specifically, is a different proposition to one trading in slogans that belong to a different level of government entirely.

Three elections. Same map. Use it.

The Two Questions Worth Asking Every Time

Before you vote - at any level - ask:

What does this level of government actually control?

Then: What has this candidate or party specifically promised to do with those controls - and is it costed?

Not vague commitments. Specific ones. The record and the detail are always there. They are rarely what the campaign wants to talk about. That gap - between the record and the campaign - is where Before You Vote lives.

Next Tuesday: what the Farrer by-election is really about, and the forces already moving into the electorate.

Most Australians were never properly given this map. If it was useful, send it to five people - including the one person in your life who always blames the wrong level of government. You know who that is.

Your Vote. Your Future.

You know what to do.

Onward we press

Sue Barrett is the founder of Democracy Watch AU and Before You Vote. Before You Vote publishes every Tuesday and Friday.

About Before You Vote

Before You Vote is a free, independent series helping Australians cut through the spin, understand the system, and vote in the best interests of their family, their community, and their future - not for someone else’s agenda.

It publishes twice a week on Substack. Every Tuesday, a topical piece decoding what is happening right now in the current election cycle - the candidates, the forces, the campaign beneath the slogans. Every Friday, a plain-language explainer building the civic knowledge most of us were never properly given - how the system works, who funds what, and how to read what you’re actually voting for.

To get you started, here are five questions worth asking about every candidate at every election - federal, state, or local.

1. What does this level of government actually control? Does what they’re promising fall within the powers of the role they’re seeking? Or are they promising things they cannot deliver?

2. What is their actual record? Not their promises - their record. How have they voted? What did they actually deliver?

3. Who is funding their campaign? Disclosed donors tell you something. Undisclosed proxy group advertising tells you something else entirely.

4. Who are they accountable to? A party candidate answers to a party machine and donors as well as their community. An independent answers to their community alone. The accountability structure matters.

5. What specifically are they promising - and is it costed? Slogans are not policies. Specific, costed commitments that fall within the powers of the role are the standard worth holding every candidate to.

It’s free. It’s independent. It works by sharing.

If this was useful, subscribe and send it to five people.

Your Vote. Your Future.

We are one of the only countries in the world where voting is compulsory - and in Australia, that means all the way down. Federal parliament. State and territory governments. Local councils. Every level of the system that shapes your daily life.

Voting is a civic duty. One of the most serious responsibilities a democracy places on its citizens.

Most of us know that. We show up. We get the democracy sausage. We do our bit.

What most of us were never given is what comes before the sausage. The understanding of what we’re actually choosing, who is trying to shape that choice, and why it matters far more than we’ve been led to believe.

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed - for the people who designed it.

Understanding that is the first step to changing it.

In 2024, only 43 per cent of Year 6 students and 28 per cent of Year 10 students met the proficient standard in Australian civics - the lowest result since national testing began. The median Australian adult can correctly answer only two of seven basic political knowledge questions.

We require every citizen to vote. We have never adequately prepared them for it.

Into that gap walk the people who have built entire industries around it. Party machines that need you voting on habit rather than record. Corporate donors who need their investment protected. Third-party proxy groups - registered weeks before an election, funded by sources never disclosed, dissolved quietly after the votes are counted. Coordinated social media operations spreading claims designed to produce the response a lie would produce, without quite being one.

These are not shadowy theories. They are documented, operating in plain sight, and growing more sophisticated with every cycle.

In the 2025 Goldstein campaign, $1.58 million in anonymous proxy attack advertising was deployed against a single independent MP in a single Melbourne electorate. The donors have still not been officially identified. The independent herself published every donation voluntarily, in real time, before any law required it.

One side wanted you to know exactly who was paying. The other side needed you not to know.

Your vote is worth millions of dollars to people whose interests are not yours.

They know that. Now you do too.

I have spent nearly a decade watching this up close. I managed Zoe Daniel’s successful 2022 campaign in Goldstein. I gave testimony to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters about what coordinated proxy campaigning actually looks like on the ground - not in theory, but street by street.

I have also watched what happens when communities decide to pay attention. Goldstein. Indi. Warringah. Kooyong. Communities told their votes didn’t matter, that safe seats were permanent. They found out what they were actually choosing. Then they chose differently.

Every election, someone is counting on you not paying attention.

Before You Vote is for the people who decide to pay attention anyway.

Not to tell you how to vote. That is yours entirely - your values, your family, your community, your call.

But to give you what you need to make that choice for yourself, not for someone else’s agenda. This means explaining how the system works - the three levels of government most people conflate, how preferential voting functions, what your local member can and cannot do, how a policy promise becomes or doesn’t become law. It means naming the forces in each election with evidence, not rumour. And decoding policy plainly, so that when you walk into that polling booth - as you must, at every level of government - you are choosing what you actually want. Not what you have been manoeuvred into fearing.

Fear is a political strategy. Knowing that is your defence against it.

We are not going to honour our civic duty by opting out. We are going to honour it by showing up informed. Because if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

We start in Farrer.

On 9 May 2026, the people of southwestern New South Wales vote in a federal by-election to replace Sussan Ley, who held this safe Liberal seat for 25 years before leaving after a leadership contest conducted entirely on the basis of what was good for the Liberal Party. What was good for the people of Farrer did not rate a mention.

The ballot will be crowded - and that is itself the first lesson.

Michelle Milthorpe, a teacher from Jindera, is running as a community independent. The Liberals have selected Raissa Butkowski, a community lawyer. The Nationals are contesting for the first time since 2001. The Greens, Family First, and People First are all running. And One Nation has David Farley, whose 2012 comments comparing then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard to a “non-productive old cow” resurfaced the moment he entered the race.

Every candidate represents something - a set of values, a set of donors, a set of interests. Some align with the people of Farrer. Some do not. Working out which is which is exactly what Before You Vote exists to do.

Milthorpe ran in 2025, won every polling booth in Albury, and finished second with a margin of 6.2 per cent. In a by-election, that is not a wall. It is a door. Her platform is specific: a royal commission into Murray-Darling water management, a public hospital for Albury, telecommunications for communities that cannot reliably call triple zero, childcare, aged care. Not slogans - the commitments that emerge when a candidate answers to her community rather than a party machine.

For the next eight weeks, Before You Vote will be covering Farrer. If you don’t live there, think of it as a live case study. A crowded field. A safe seat suddenly in play. Community money versus dark money. Specific policy versus fear and identity. Every tactic used in Farrer will be used somewhere near you. Everything we learn together makes us better prepared when our turn comes.

The people running disinformation campaigns have millions of dollars. We have each other.

If this was useful, send it to five people today - a friend, a family member, someone who’s been meaning to pay more attention. That’s the only way informed voting spreads. Person to person. Kitchen table to kitchen table. Exactly the opposite of how they do it.

Your Vote. Your Future.

You know what to do.

Onward we press

Sue Barrett is the founder of Democracy Watch AU and Before You Vote. She served as Campaign Manager for Zoe Daniel’s successful 2022 Goldstein campaign and gave testimony to JSCEM 2025. Before You Vote publishes every Tuesday and Friday.

About Before You Vote

Before You Vote is a free, independent series helping Australians cut through the spin, understand the system, and vote in the best interests of their family, their community, and their future - not for someone else’s agenda.

It publishes twice a week on Substack. Every Tuesday, a topical piece decoding what is happening right now in the current election cycle - the candidates, the forces, the campaign beneath the slogans. Every Friday, a plain-language explainer building the civic knowledge most of us were never properly given - how the system works, who funds what, and how to read what you’re actually voting for.

To get you started, here are five questions worth asking about every candidate at every election - federal, state, or local.

1. What does this level of government actually control? Does what they’re promising fall within the powers of the role they’re seeking? Or are they promising things they cannot deliver?

2. What is their actual record? Not their promises - their record. How have they voted? What did they actually deliver?

3. Who is funding their campaign? Disclosed donors tell you something. Undisclosed proxy group advertising tells you something else entirely.

4. Who are they accountable to? A party candidate answers to a party machine and donors as well as their community. An independent answers to their community alone. The accountability structure matters.

5. What specifically are they promising - and is it costed? Slogans are not policies. Specific, costed commitments that fall within the powers of the role are the standard worth holding every candidate to.

It’s free. It’s independent. It works by sharing.

If this was useful, subscribe and send it to five people.

Your Vote. Your Future.