This triangle is going to help us explain how Australian politics has fundamentally changed.
Like typical triangles, it has three sides, and three corners.
But this one has special meaning — each corner represents different electoral groups.
In the bottom left, Labor. In the bottom right, the Coalition. And at the top, every other party and independent.
We're going to plot electorates on this triangle, according to how the people in them vote.
The closer an electorate is to a party's corner, the more people in that seat voted for that party.
It might seem a bit complicated, but it's important because it lets us visualise voting patterns in three dimensions, rather than just focusing on the two big sides of politics.
At the extremes, if an electorate is right at the tip of Labor's corner in the bottom left, 100 per cent of people marked Labor as their first preference.
The same goes for the Coalition's bottom-right corner.
For other parties and independents, their 100 per cent marker is at the top.
The only way a candidate would ever get 100 per cent would be if they were the only candidate. That just doesn't happen in Australia.
All of our seats are somewhere within the triangle's messy middle.
If a seat appears right in the centre of the triangle, it means Labor won exactly a third of the primary vote, the Coalition won a third of the vote, and everyone else combined won the final third.
This is the result in Grayndler in 2022, a seat with one of the highest Labor votes in the country.
It also happens to be the seat held by the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese.
This is Maranoa in 2022, the seat with the highest Coalition vote in the country.
It's held by the National Party leader, David Littleproud.
And this was the result in every single seat in the last election.
Red seats were won by Labor, Blue by the Liberal and National parties, and Grey by anyone else — that includes the Greens, Katter's Australian Party and independents.
Crucially, there are 24 seats in the top section, where the vote for independents and minor parties beat both Labor and the Coalition.
Crossbenchers won 15 of those seats, while the major parties managed to win the other nine on preferences.
The number of independent and minor party MPs elected was the highest we'd ever seen in the modern political era.
In other words, there are a lot more of these seats than there used to be.
In fact, the whole way Australia votes has undergone a titanic shift over recent decades.
So, a quick reminder: what you're looking at right now are the results in every electorate from the 2022 election...
And now we're going to rewind 50 years so you can see just how much things have changed.
Here's what the results looked like in the 1975 election.
Quite the shift, right? (Scroll back up a touch to take another look.)
In 1975, the Whitlam government had just been turfed out of office, and voters swung behind Malcolm Fraser's Liberal Party.
This was back in the era when the two major parties had complete domination of politics.
That's why all the electorates are concentrated towards the bottom of the triangle. Politics was mostly an arm-wrestle between the two biggest players on the left and the right.
Smaller parties and independents were yet to flex their muscles.
None of the seats are anywhere near the middle, let alone the top of the triangle.
Election after election, seats swung left and right like a metronome.
But gradually, the seats also started to drift upwards.
It wasn't evident in every single election, but over time minor parties started to grow their vote, including the Democrats, and later the Greens.
Independents, too.
Although none of them got elected.
Until 1990, when one finally broke through.
This is Ted Mack, the independent member for North Sydney elected to federal parliament in that election.
He's often referred to as the "father of the independents".
The first one elected since World War II, he wrote the playbook for modern day independents.
But that was just the beginning...
Watch as the electorates continue to drift upwards.
More and more cross into the top third.
In 2001, Tony Windsor entered federal parliament as the member for New England.
In the same election Bob Katter was re-elected in Kennedy, but for the first time as an Independent after he left the National Party earlier that year.
The crossbench was slowly growing.
In 2010, Australia elected a hung parliament.
At that election the crossbench grew to six. Katter and Windsor were joined by Rob Oakeshott, Andrew Wilkie and the first Greens member Adam Bandt.
And in recent elections we've seen the seats start to separate out even more.
Nearly all electorates in 1975 clumped into a tight band toward the bottom of the triangle, but by 2016 they were spread far wider.
We're seeing much more diversity in voting patterns, with local issues often coming to the fore.
An old cliché has come true.
"Safe seats are a myth in 2025," Labor MP Jerome Laxale says. "I've learnt throughout my time that people will back you if you work for them, if you're honest and genuine, regardless of your political party."
Liberal MP Keith Wolahan agrees: "When I speak to colleagues in Canberra, even those on really healthy margins, they're looking over their shoulder thinking, is my seat facing a contest that hasn't happened before?"
"It's a healthy thing because it forces members to never take their seats for granted."
2019 gave a few more MPs cause to look over their shoulders.
That was the year Zali Steggall entered parliament, defeating the former prime minister Tony Abbott in his seat of Warringah.
And if people weren't paying attention then, they certainly were by 2022.
ANU political scientist Jill Sheppard says nationally, the major party vote share didn't fall very much between 2019 and 2022.
"What was different was that enough candidates just got over the line," she says.
"I don't think this is a blip, but I also don't think that 2022 came out of nowhere.
"It was built on the back of decades of major party decline and independents just slogging away, chipping away at a rock face, and finally they broke through."
The big question now is... will that upward drift continue for another election?
We won't know until next Saturday, but the long-term nature of this trend suggests we probably won’t see any radical change of direction.
And the latest polling also suggests the drift away from the major parties is largely holding.
This is what the result would look like based on a recent model from polling firm RedBridge, which uses surveys to estimate vote share across all 150 electorates.
It's important to note — polls like this shouldn't be seen as telling us how many crossbenchers will win, let alone exactly which ones.
But what we can see, and what traditional polling averages also confirm, is a lot of electorates are still clumped in the middle of the triangle.
Here's a similar model from another pollster, YouGov.
It too suggests this decades-long trend is looking relatively stable, with seats gradually creeping into the grey area and potentially out of the major parties’ grip.
Labor strategist Lachlan Harris has his eye on the trend too.
"That's 40 years of data telling you one story," he says. "That's a lot of great prime ministers, average prime ministers, great opposition leaders, average opposition leaders, recessions, booms, all sorts of different factors.
"Nothing has turned that slow, inexorable decline."
About the data
- Results data for federal elections since 1993 was compiled from publications of the Australian Electoral Commission.
- Results data for federal elections before 1993 was compiled from Psephos, Dr Adam Carr's election archive.
- “L/NP” comprises all votes for candidates from branches of the Liberal Party, National Party, Liberal National Party of Queensland, and Country Liberal Party in the NT.
- Where more than one candidate from a coalition party has contested the same election, their votes have been aggregated into a single L/NP figure.
- “OTH” comprises all votes for candidates that are not from either the Labor Party or L/NP, including independents.
- In the 2010 data, WA National Tony Crook's seat of O'Connor is counted as an L/NP seat but he is also regarded as a crossbencher, as the WA Nationals were not party to the federal Coalition agreement.
- Seats change over time due to redistributions. When they are created or abolished, seats disappear or appear in this graphic during the transition between election results from different years.
- YouGov and RedBridge models are both multi-level regression with post-stratification models, which model a large number of survey results across all 150 electorates. The YouGov MRP is based on 38,629 surveys conducted between February 27 and March 26. The RedBridge/Accent Research MRP is based on 9,953 surveys conducted February 3 and April 1.
- In the 2025 RedBridge model, some seats are classified as "too close to call" — these are shown in a lighter grey shade.
Credits
- Reporting: Casey Briggs
- Design: Ben Spraggon
- Development: Simon Elvery and Julian Fell
- Editing: Matt Liddy and Cristen Tilley
