The 2025 Western Australian state election is scheduled to be held on 8 March 2025 to elect members to the

Parliament of Western Australia The Parliament of Western Australia is the bicameral legislature of the Australian state of Western Australia, forming the legislative branch of the Government of Western Australia. The parliament consists of a lower house, the Legislative ...

, where all 59 seats in the Legislative Assembly and all 37 seats in the Legislative Council will be up for election. Candidates will be elected to single-member seats in the Legislative Assembly via full-preferential instant-runoff voting. In the Legislative Council, 37 candidates are elected across the state, which functions as a single electorate.

Background

The 2021 state election saw

Labor Labour or labor may refer to: * Childbirth, the delivery of a baby * Labour (human activity), or work ** Manual labour, physical work ** Wage labour, a socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer ** Organized labour and the la ...

win one of the most comprehensive victories on record at the state or territory level in Australia. It won 53 of the 59 seats, surpassing its own record set four years earlier for the largest government majority and seat tally in Western Australian parliamentary history.

Electoral system

Candidates are elected to single-member seats in the Legislative Assembly via full-preferential instant-runoff voting. In the Legislative Council, 37 candidates are elected across the state, which functions as a single electorate.

Legislative Council voting changes

In September 2021, the McGowan Labor Government introduced the "one vote, one value" legislation to change the voting system for the Legislative Council at this election. Under the then-existing voting system for the upper house, which had been in place since 2005, voters were divided into six regions of unequal weight, each of whom were responsible for electing six candidates (36 in total). Three of the regions were based in metropolitan Perth, and three in the regions. This meant that a region like the Mining and Pastoral region had 16% of the average number of electors in the three metropolitan regions. The government proposed abolishing the regions and replacing them with what it called "one vote, one value" system, where the whole state functions as one electorate that elects 37 members. This increased the size of the council by one seat.

Group voting ticket A group voting ticket (GVT) is a shortcut for voters in a preferential voting system, where a voter can indicate support for a list of candidates instead of marking preferences for individual candidates. For multi-member electoral divisions with s ...

s, which were abolished for the federal Senate in 2016 and are utilised only for the

Victorian Legislative Council The Victorian Legislative Council (VLC) is the upper house of the bicameral Parliament of Victoria, Australia, the lower house being the Legislative Assembly. Both houses sit at Parliament House in Spring Street, Melbourne. The Legislative C ...

, would also be abolished. Votes are instead cast under an optional preferential voting system, requiring electors to vote for one or more preferred parties above the dividing line on the ballot paper, or at least 20 candidates below the dividing line. The legislation passed the parliament on 17 November 2021 and received

royal assent Royal assent is the method by which a monarch formally approves an act of the legislature, either directly or through an official acting on the monarch's behalf. In some jurisdictions, royal assent is equivalent to promulgation, while in oth ...

seven days thereafter.

Key dates

Elections are scheduled for the second Saturday of March every four years, in line with legislative changes made in 2011. While a fixed-term exists, the

Governor of Western Australia The governor of Western Australia is the representative in Western Australia of the monarch of Australia, currently King Charles III. As with the other governors of the Australian states, the governor of Western Australia performs constitutiona ...

may still dissolve the Assembly and call an election early on the advice of the Premier.Electoral and Constitution Amendment Act 2011 (WA), section 5

References

{{Politics of Australia Elections in Western Australia 2025 elections in Australia 2020s in Western Australia