As a beautiful woman with big hair and a bigger voice, armed with a nonsensical, precision-engineered power ballad, Delta Goodrem was always going to appeal to the camp tastes of Eurovision; she’s Olivia Newton-John 2.0.

And after her performance of Eclipse in Eurovision 2026’s second semi-final on Thursday, Australia’s odds shot up from fourth to second, rocketing past Greece and Denmark to rank behind the favourite to win, Finland.

Australia’s pre-eminent scholar of Eurovision, Jess Carniel, who is an associate professor at the University of Southern Queensland, predicts Australia will make the top five, bar any disasters.

“I don’t like being overly enthusiastic about it because I’m the kiss of death – if I say they’re gonna win, they don’t win,” Carniel says. “Finland’s probably got it, which means I’ve just condemned them to lose.” So congratulations Australia!

Why is Australia included in Eurovision in the first place?

For one, we Australians love ridiculousness. Eurovision watch parties were popular in Australia long before we joined the competition in 2015, despite the crushing time difference. The often-touted line is that Australia’s viewership is driven by its European migrant population – but this doesn’t entirely hold water in 2026.

“It’s driven by migrants across the board,” says Carniel, who literally wrote the book on this topic (titled Understanding the Eurovision Song Contest in Multicultural Australia).

“A lot of Asian Australians love Eurovision because it plugs into their cultures. In my research I got talking to somebody who was from a Filipino background and their family loved watching Eurovision in Australia because it reminded them of the song competitions they had in the Philippines. Our ties to Europe was a specific narrative that helped to build the business case for us to join in.”

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which runs Eurovision, let Australia join because there was a good business case for it – specifically because Australia’s multicultural broadcaster SBS had been getting good numbers for Eurovision locally since it began showing it in 1983, and the idea that Australia could help establish a regional Asia Pacific song contest (which we then didn’t do).

“It was not just because Australia really loves Eurovision, which is often trotted out. You don’t get to join just because you want to join,” says Carniel.

How does Eurovision’s scoring system work?

How much time do you have?

The Eurovision winner is decided 50% by jury votes and 50% by televotes from viewers in each participating country, as well as a “rest of the world” vote.

Each country has its own jury, made up of seven music industry types balanced in gender, profession and age. They use four specific judging criteria to rank all the songs in the Eurovision final: the artist’s vocal capacity, performance onstage, composition and originality of the song, and overall impression. Countries cannot vote for themselves.

Twelve points go to the jury’s No 1 choice, 10 points go to their No 2 choice, then eight to one go to the rest, to make a top 10.

The public can vote by phone, SMS or the Eurovision app. The public’s vote works like the jury’s: 12 points to their No 1 pick, one point to their No 10 pick, and audience members cannot vote for their own country.

Viewers in non-participating countries can still vote, but they are lumped together as the “rest of the world”, which counts as a single country.

Carniel predicts that “Delta will do really well with the jury vote, but I’m not quite sure if people are feeling the song enough to vote for it.” That said, her fame could be enough to push her over the line.

Is there an art to winning Eurovision?

The world’s greatest minds have been studying this. According to analysis by Spotify of previous winners, the perfect tempo for a Eurovision entry is 127 beats per minute – just the right beat for dancing. (Delta Goodrem’s song Eclipse is 134 BPM, according to the boffins at SongBPM.com.)

Carniel says there is a risk by getting too precise with a Eurovision bid.

“So many countries have tried hard to come up with the winning formula – but if you do a song that is too paint-by-numbers, it might be hitting all of those characteristics but it might not win,” she says. “The winning song usually needs something that really connects with the audience in some way, whether it’s the performance itself or whether they’re driven by some other kind of sentiment. If we got to the point where winning was formulaic, it wouldn’t be half as fun as it is.”

Like Romania’s BDSM-but-make-it-opera entry, Choke Me: “I don’t think that’s the kind of song you can grow in a lab, you know?”

If Australia wins Eurovision, does that mean Australia gets to host it?

Sadly no. According to EBU rules, if Australia wins, it must “co-host” the event with a full EBU member country within Europe. Australia is only an “associate member”.

There is a precedent that suggests what might happen: when Ukraine won in 2022, it could not host the next year due to the Russian invasion. Instead, the UK – that year’s runner-up – hosted it in Liverpool, with the BBC sharing duties with Ukraine’s public broadcaster. So if Australia wins, it will probably be offered to the runner-up – most likely Finland.

Also, there’s that pesky time difference. “We’re in a really weird time zone to be able to broadcast to Europe – we’re always watching it at 5am,” says Carniel. “Even countries on the eastern periphery of the contest boundaries host it at really strange times – Azerbaijan’s shows were at midnight local time to make sure that it would be screened at prime time in the rest of Europe. If we put on a show at 5am in Australia, that would be an insane experience for the fans who travel to attend.”

Will the juries vote against Australia because it’s not in Europe?

All the signs say no. When Australia came second in 2016 with Dami Im, she actually had the most jury votes (320) but lost on the public vote, leading to Ukraine winning.

Carniel says the EBU desperately wants to avoid any sign that the jury system is corrupt or biased, especially amid the geopolitical sensitivity surrounding the competition this year.

“Dami Im’s performance shows juries will score something that they think is good. If it did turn out that they were conniving to keep Australia from winning, then that would be illustrative of a bigger problem for Eurovision that would need to be addressed,” she says. “Keeping Australia out because it’s not European is probably one of the lowest concerns that juries would have.”

The prevailing theory among fans is that the jury vote has preserved objectivity in the competition in recent years as Israel’s public vote has shot way up after the 7 October attack. “It’s not that Israel sent bad songs, but they have sent paint-by-number jury songs for the past two years, expecting to win them over when there were better songs there with better performances,” says Carniel.

Eurovision Asia is launching in Thailand in November – will Australia leave Eurovision to join that instead?

I could write an 10,000 word essay on Australia’s inability to reconcile that it is part of Asia and not the northern hemisphere.

EBU rules state that countries can only perform in either Eurovision or Eurovision Asia – meaning that Australia has to make the call on where its allegiances lie.

Carniel is torn on what Australia will do. “I look at this through a diplomatic lens – what are the benefits of participating in either one?” she says. “I’d be kind of sad to leave OG Eurovision, but I’d be sad to be missing out on the Asian one too.”

Will Delta’s piano levitation thingy win her more points?

It bloody well should!

Carniel says sending Our Delta with flashy production values was a deliberate strategy, shaped by Australia’s failure to make the final for the last two years. The federal government even chipped in an undisclosed amount towards her bid this year – not something every entry gets. She has a fan in prime minister Anthony Albanese, who said after she got through: “I think she’s a ripper.”

“I think there was a little bit of fear about how people would read a third non-qualification,” says Carniel. “Personally, I think not qualifying for Eurovision is just part of the game, and an experience that every country except Ukraine has had – but it also says in some way that we don’t belong there. So this was us definitely bringing out the big guns – it’s Delta, pyrotechnics, a cherrypicker, a little bit of everything. A showstopper.”

• The Eurovision grand final will be broadcast in Australia on SBS from 5am AEST on Sunday 17 May