In the 1975 federal election, minor parties and independents combined accounted for only 4% of the primary vote. In 2025 – 50 years later – this has increased to 34%, the highest ever recorded since the emergence of the two-party system. For the first time at the national level, minor parties and independents collectively received more votes than the Liberal-National Coalition, which received 32% on 3 May.

Even while Labor secured a historically large majority of seats, the major parties’ collective vote share declined, continuing a trend that has played out in Australia’s states and territories.

While Labor’s landslide victory in May saw a slightly diminished number of crossbench MPs, the number of non-traditional contests, where the final two candidates are not just Labor and Liberal/National, increased. Even where non-major party candidates lost this election, more than ever came a narrow second, and are positioned well to win next time.

Since my colleagues Bill Browne and Minh Ngoc Le wrote about this phenomenon in October, there have been five elections – and the major party vote fell in four of them.

The major party vote fell in the Western Australian state election by 11 percentage points, by 4 percentage points in the ACT territory election and by 1 percentage point in the Queensland state election.

Only in the Northern Territory did the major party vote increase in a recent election (by 7 percentage points) due to the collapse of the Territory Alliance – a centrist party that received 13% of the vote in 2020. Despite this, the major parties still received almost 10% less of the vote than they did in 2012, just over a decade ago.

The rising vote for minor parties and independents is a continuation of a trend that has been going on for decades.

In the first few years of the 1980s, there were elections in every state and at the federal level; at every one of these elections, the major parties – Labor and the Liberal–National Coalition – won over 85% of the popular vote between them. In Queensland in 1983, the year Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s National Party won a sixth consecutive term, major parties won 97% of the vote.

Votes for non-major party candidates are now consistently over 30% in the federal House of Representatives and are growing in most states and territories.

From 1980 to 2025, primary votes for minor parties and independents increased federally in every state and the Northern Territory. The only exception is the ACT, which recorded a large protest vote against being granted self-government in its first election.

The growth in support for minor parties and independents is apparent in every corner of the country. In New South Wales, for example, the minor party and independent primary vote was 5% in 1981 and 28% in 2023 – an at least fivefold increase.

The increasing support for minor parties and independents is reshaping the Australian political landscape. Over the last 20 years, all nine jurisdictions in Australia (the six states, two territories and the federal government) have experienced some form of power-sharing government. Australia’s largest state, NSW, and its smallest, Tasmania, both currently have minority governments, and the Australian Capital Territory has had minority or coalition governments for all but four of its 36 years of self-government.