Since the recent rise of One Nation, pollsters have had to deduce not just a Labor-Coalition two-party-preferred tally but also a Labor-One Nation two-party preferred tally. In recent polls, Labor has come in front in both tallies and the pollsters have therefore predicted that Labor will "win" the next election.

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By "win", they mean getting a majority in the House of Representatives. The Senate is hardly mentioned. But without getting legislation through the Senate, an Australian government is merely managing, not governing.

Former prime minister Paul Keating called the Senate "unrepresentative swill". Nonetheless, it holds the power to make Labor legislatively impotent after 2028 and that is looking increasingly likely.

Present polling has Labor on 27-28; the Coalition on 23; One Nation on 22-23; and The Greens between 10 and 14. Nearly all House seats therefore are likely to be decided on preferences. In the House of Representatives, preferences flow all over the place. Even with a preference deal between the Coalition and One Nation, there will be enough leakage to give Labor a lot of seats where its primary vote is quite weak.

The Senate is different. In the Senate count, preferences flow two ways: from the bottom up, when shrapnel candidates with a small percentage of the vote get excluded and from the top down, when the over quota of elected major party candidates gets distributed. The quota is 14.3 per cent - one seventh of the vote plus one to get one of the six seats in each state up for grabs.

As far as the Senate is concerned, the big difference since the One Nation surge has been the fall in Labor's vote from the mid-30s to the high 20s. When Labor's vote was in the mid-30s, in most states 28.6 per cent would be used to elect two senators with quite a few percentage points of over-quota preferences - nearly all of which would go to the Greens. With........

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