No I didn’t miss those words Grim.

Of course it is the final vote, after the allocation of preferences, that matters.

With OPV you have the choice of not allocating any preferences or allocating as many as you wish. So presumably a fair portion of the voters would allocate no preferences or just one or two.

Then as second and third and fourth preferences are sorted out at the end of the day, until the two-party-preferred vote is determined, we could easily end up with the winner not achieving 50%.

This must surely have happened with OPV in NSW and Qld. But I’ve never heard of the requirement to have a second vote in order to get the winner to have an overall majority of the vote.

Good point Ludwig. I can't recall that ever happening either.
As all ballots naming the weakest candidate without any preferences are set aside as 'exhausted', we can only assume:
a) a wide gap in primary votes
b) enough people listed preferences to carry the vote.
Either way, the 50% law still applies.
BTW, remember preferential voting only applies to the lower house, which normally fields a limited no. of candidates.
The Upper House is decided by proportional voting, which is a (crazy) horse of an entirely different colour.
And Qld doesn't have one.

The concept of preferential voting is excellent. The practice and understanding are a bit flawed. If we are unhappy about these systems, given that we are in a democracy, we voters should get together and put a proposal to parliament. We have already been able to change the law on political donations in NSW and more recently we have received an opportunity to vastly increase the community's involvement in planning. The reason that most of these things do not change is that we do not ask, don't ask the right people, don't ask persuasively enough or persistently enough. Democracy allows us to change almost everything that we don't like, instead of complaining about it. We have been doing that since 1986. Community lobbying is very effective. We do not have to put up with hopeless government or hopeless voting systems. Why don't you join us in Voterland?