For the final word (or the final numbers to be more precise) in the endless possible  preference permutations of the Queensland Senate result, I went to the Senate calculator on the ABC website.

After testing a few different outcomes for about ten minutes, it simultaneously makes me feel much more hopeful and much more powerless. So much depends not just on my own primary vote, but how all of the other candidates poll relative to each other - although I must continue to emphasise that the bigger my primary vote, the better my chances.

I put in one set of numbers which got the Nationals elected to the 5th Senate seat and myself getting the 6th and final seat – and that was with myself on a primary vote of less than 5% and the Greens on 6.5%. But when I recalculated using exactly the same votes for every candidate, with the sole change of dropping the vote of Pauline Hanson by 0.04% and increasing the One Nation vote by the same amount, it got the Greens elected to the 5th seat and Family First to the final seat.

When I again used the same numbers as above, but took 0.3% off the Fishing Party and add that same amount instead to the Fishing & Lifestyle Party, it once again saw myself and Ron Boswell elected instead of Family First and the Greens.  Which (I think) means I should be cheering for the Fishing & Lifestyle Party to do better than the Fishing Party, even though the Fishing & Lifestyle Party put my 65th out of 65 candidates on their preference allocations (I have no idea why they especially felt the need to do that, but its nice to be noticed I guess).

It would take about 20 pages to outline all the different factors that could impact on my result, depending on what various other parties get relative to each other. But basically if I can poll higher than the Greens, I am in with a very good chance (without being a certainty). Otherwise, a lot depends on how Family First, Pauline Hanson and the Coalition poll relative to each other. The appearance of random chance with some of these calculations could give the impression that I may as well take it easy for the next couple of weeks and roll some dice instead, but the one very strong constant in amongst all the different permutations is that the higher my primary vote, the better the chance I have. (which is not very subtle way of urging you to vote for me - or if you don’t live in Queensland, urging everyone you know who does live in Queensland to vote for me)

To recap, the first 4 out of the 6 Senate seats available will be split 2-2 between Labor and Liberal. But the final two seats are open to at least six different contenders – myself as the Democrat incumbent, Ron Boswell as the National incumbent filling the 3rd spot on a joint Coalition ticket, plus challengers from Greens, Family First, Pauline Hanson and the 3rd person on the Labor ticket. When there are two open seats with (at least) six possible contenders, the order they are excluded becomes critical – and also very hard to predict, as it will rely in part on the impossible to predict votes from a large number of very different and in many cases quite small parties.

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