Australians don’t like sore losers. We are a country that celebrates near misses, unlucky defeats or even unexpected successes (see: Steven Bradbury). Generally, we recognise that if you fall short, you should accept your lot and march on. Now, it seems there’s an exception to this rule: federal elections.

Since the historic outcome of the May 3 election (historically good for Labor, historically bad for the Liberal Party), there has been a growing chorus of those who argue that because their team didn’t win, preferential voting is to blame.

Some claim the Liberal Party lost by historic margins because of preferential voting. Pictured are new party leader Sussan Ley and former leader Peter Dutton.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

A feature of Australian elections for more than a century, preferential voting was originally a promise from then Nationalist prime minister Billy Hughes, gaining support within conservative circles after the 1918 byelection for the West Australian seat of Swan.

Labor’s Ted Corboy, a young returned serviceman who had seen action at Gallipoli and in France, was up against the Country Party candidate Basil Murray, the Nationalists’ William Hedges and an independent, William Watson.

Corboy secured 34.4 per cent of the vote, enough under the then first-past-the-post electoral system to make him the new member (and, at 22, the youngest person ever elected to the House).

Between them, Hedges and Murray gathered 61 per cent of the vote, but without preferential voting, they were left in Corboy’s wake.

The Hughes........

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