GhostWhoVotes reports tomorrow’s Age will feature a Nielsen poll showing state Labor with a handsome 53-47 two-party lead, with both parties’ primary votes believed to be in the high thirties. More to follow.
Reflections on the Miracle of Democracy at Work in the Greatest Nation on Earth
Newspoll: 63-37 to Coalition in NSW
The latest bi-monthly Newspoll survey of NSW state voting intention finds Labor plumbing lows previously undreamt of, as graphically illustrated by The Australian. The Coalition’s two-party lead is equal to that recorded by federal Labor in the poll of February 29-March 2, but otherwise unprecedented in Newspoll history – remembering that NSW’s optional preferential voting system is likely to make matters even worse for Labor by starving them of Greens preferences.
Labor’s primary vote has fallen two points on the previous two surveys to 23 per cent, for which The Australian’s Imre Salusinszky can only identify one precedent: the 22 per cent recorded by the Queensland Nationals in 1989, which hardly seems applicable as it coexisted with a 25 per cent vote for the Liberals. More instructive is that Labor’s vote is below the nadirs of John Bannon and Joan Kirner, who on various occasions recorded 25 per cent. The Coalition meanwhile is steady on 46 per cent, while the Greens tide continues with a three point gain to 17 per cent – just six points shy of Labor.
Barry O’Farrell has also leapt to a 42-35 lead as preferred premier, after drawing level on 39 per cent in the previous poll. His approval rating has spiked five points to 48 per cent, with disapproval steady on 32 per cent. Kristina Keneally on the other hand is up six points on disapproval to 50 per cent, with her approval rating steady on 39 per cent.
Newspoll: 52-48 to Labor in Victoria
The Australian reports the latest Victorian state Newspoll has Labor with a two-party lead of 52-48, a return to reality after the 55-45 lead they recorded in the July-August survey. However, the headline-grabber is the 19 per cent Greens vote (up two), dragging Labor down three points to 35 per cent with the Coalition up four to 40 per cent. John Brumby’s personal ratings are 45 per cent approval and 42 per cent disapproval, down three and up one on last time, while Ted Baillieu is on 39 per cent (steady) and 42 per cent (up one). Brumby’s preferred premier lead has narrowed from 52-27 to 49-31.
Thanks to the magic of the internet, we can now draw seat projections from Antony Green’s state election calculator, which asks of us two-party scores for both Labor-Coalition, which Newspoll gives us, and Labor-Greens, which it doesn’t. However, Newspoll does paint a beautifully straightforward picture of the Greens gaining 9 per cent on the primary vote since the 2006 election and Labor losing 8 per cent, with the Coalition treading water – making it a fairly simple matter of crediting the Greens with a two-party swing of 8 to 9 per cent. This puts Labor on 47 seats out of 88 and has the Greens right on the cusp of winning Northcote, to add to the lower hanging fruit of Melbourne, Richmond and Brunswick (and pushing them into second place in a brace of Melbourne Liberal seats). Assuming three seats as a more realistic scenario, and taking the re-election of independent Craig Ingram in Gippsland East as a given, hung parliament scenarios begin to occupy a big chunk of the two-party bandwidth: from 50.8 per cent for Labor at the top end (where the calculator gives Labor 44 seats out of 88 in scenarios where the Greens win three) to 48.0 per cent at the bottom. And that’s leaving aside the possibility of major party applecarts being further upset by the emergence of new independents.
However, all of this rests upon the assumption that the Greens will continue to receive Liberal preferences, and a growing chorus of voices can be heard within conservatism urging them not to. This was joined yesterday by John Howard, who said his party had “nothing to gain” from assisting a party that was “worse than Labor” – not that he was ever observably squeamish about the practice in his own time. Mixed with any genuine concern about a Greens threat to the fabric of society is frustration that the Liberals get nothing in return for their generosity, either in the form of preference deals or a realistic prospect of parliamentary support in the event of a hung parliament. Exercising their preference muscle, the Liberals would hope, would help keep Greens minds focused during such negotiations in future.
The threat certainly gives the Greens a lot to think about, providing Bob Brown with further cause for distaste about the preference negotiation merry-go-round. Adam Bandt’s victory in Melbourne rested heavily on the Liberals playing their normal preference game: Labor’s Cath Bowtell had a narrow lead when their candidate was excluded at the second last count, but obedient Liberal voters then proceeded to break 80-20 Bandt’s way on preferences. Without these preferences flows, seats in the lower house would become a distant prospect indeed – and they would also find life that little bit harder when competing with Labor for final seats on their more familiar upper house turf.
UPDATE: Now we have a small sample Morgan phone poll which concurs with Newspoll’s 52-48, but gets there from very different primary vote figures: 40 per cent for Labor, 42.5 per cent for the Coalition and 13 per cent for the Greens. Preferred premier is similar to Newspoll, with Brumby leading 47.5-32.5, but both leaders’ personal ratings are much worse: Brumby is on 36.5 per cent approval and 49 per cent disapproval, with Baillieu on 33 per cent and 46 per cent. The poll was conducted in two stages over the previous fortnight with a sample of 415 and a margin of error of about 5 per cent.
Newspoll: 52-48 to Coalition
GhostWhoVotes informs us that tonight’s Newspoll has the Coalition opening a 52-48 lead. More to follow.
UPDATE: Matthew Franklin of The Australian reports “Newspoll chief executive Martin O’Shannessy said tonight that Labor had suffered a six-point plunge in primary support outside cities”, prompting speculation the fall has been driven by the Murray-Darling Basin report. Primary votes are apparently little changed on the previous Newspoll survey, which had Labor at 35 per cent, the Coalition at 42 per cent and the Greens at 14 per cent – but they must have changed at least some to have wrought a two-point shift in the Coalition’s favour on two-party preferred. No doubt GhostWhoVotes will reveal all shortly.
UPDATE 2: GhostWhoVotes has full results here. Labor’s primary vote is down two to a new low of 33 per cent, the Coalition is up one to 43 per cent and the Greens are steady on 14 per cent. The move is reflected on personal ratings, with Julia Gillard down four on approval to 44 per cent and up four on disapproval to 37 per cent, and Tony Abbott up two on approval to 41 per cent and down one on disapproval to 46 per cent. However, Gillard has held even on preferred prime minister with a lead of 53-32, with both leaders up a point on last time.
UPDATE 3: James J notes in comments that this is Labor’s lowest primary vote since 3-5 December 2004, equal lowest since 20-22 August 1993, and second lowest since Newspoll began in 1985.
Victorian election stuff
Past time for a new thread for discussion of the looming Victorian state election. The campaign period will officially begin with the issue of the writs on Melbourne cup day (November 2), but thanks to fixed terms we all know the date will be November 27. Morgan has released some qualitative research findings, the upshot of which is that John Brumby is less unpopular than Ted Baillieu. The Victorian Electoral Commission has a state election page in action (including, praise be, polling booth locations on Google Maps), Antony Green’s election guide is open for business and Ben Raue at The Tally Room so far has entries for 47 electorates out of 88 completed for his election guide. My own effort has been hampered by post-federal election fatigue and will probably have to wait to mid-campaign.
Nielsen: 51-49 to Coalition
GhostWhoVotes tweets that an imminent Nielsen poll has the Coalition with a 51-49 lead, their first in any poll since the election. Labor’s primary vote is 34 per cent (compared with 38.0 at the election), while the Coalition is on 43 per cent (43.6 per cent) and the Greens are on 14 per cent (11.8 per cent). More to follow.
UPDATE: In spite of everything, the poll has Julia Gillard’s approval up four points on Nielsen’s pre-election poll to 54 per cent, with her disapproval down two to 39 per cent and her lead as preferred prime minister opening from 51-40 to 53-39. Tony Abbott’s approval rating is down a point to 45 per cent and his disapproval is up one to 50 per cent. This is substantially better than his recent showings in Essential Research (39 per cent approval and 45 per cent disapproval last week) and Newspoll (39 per cent approval and 47 per cent disapproval the week before), perhaps suggesting Nielsen’s sample was skewed somewhat to the Coalition.
Other findings of the poll show it’s far from just voting intention on which the public is almost evenly split:
• Forty-nine per cent were opposed to Australian involvement in Afghanistan with 45 per cent in favour, marking little change on a year ago.
• Fify per cent were opposed to asylum seeker families and their children living in the community while their claims were processed, with 47 per cent in favour.
• Fifty-one per cent felt Murray Darling Basin policy should prioritise communities and farmers while 43 per cent would prefer it prioritise the environment – whatever that might mean. Seventy-nine per cent apparently profess themselves in favour of “a balanced outcome between community and farmer needs on the one hand and the environment on the other”, which I guess means as many as 21 per cent would prefer an unbalanced one.
• Forty-six per cent support a price on carbon, with 44 per cent opposed. As Michelle Grattan notes, “backing for an ETS before the election was between 56 and 60 per cent”.
The poll was conducted between Thursday and Saturday from Nielsen’s usual sample of 1400 and margin of error of a bit over 2.5 per cent.
A couple of other things:
• A Tasmanian trouble-maker will withdraw his High Court challenge against the validity of Liberal Senator Eric Abetz’s election on the basis of section 44 of the Constitution, which forbids dual citizens from running for parliament – Abetz having shown the poor taste to have been born in Germany, and renunciation of citizenship being something of a grey area. The complainant, described by the Hobart Mercury as “wealthy northern Tasmanian antiques dealer John Hawkins”, has agreed to drop the case after being provided with a document in which Abetz renounces his German citizenship. This was dated March 9, 2010, which according to Hawkins implies Abetz had indeed held dual citizenship when he filled a casual vacancy in 1994 and won re-election in 1998 and 2004. He could thus have faced problems if his position had been challenged in the 40-day post-election period in which challenges can be lodged – although he could always have resumed his position after getting his house in order if a compliant seat-warmer had held his vacancy in the interim.
• Labor turned in a poor show at Saturday’s by-election for the Brisbane City Council ward of Walter Taylor, which covers a strongly conservative area south-west of the city around Indooroopilly. At the close of counting Liberal National Party candidate Julian Simmonds had scored an easy victory with 57.1 per cent of the primary vote (down 6.5 per cent on the 2008 election), with Greens candidate Tim Dangerfield on 23.5 per cent (up 8.4 per cent) well ahead of Labor’s Louise Foley on 16.8 per cent (down 4.4 per cent). The by-election was necessitated by Jane Prentice’s election to the corresponding federal seat of Ryan in place of disendorsed LNP incumbent Michael Johnson.
• There was another minor electoral event a fortnight ago with a by-election in the Northern Territory electorate of Araluen, where Country Liberal Party member Jodeen Carney had called it a day due for health reasons. CLP candidate Robyn Lambley had no trouble winning a two-horse race with 1935 votes (68.0 per cent) against Labor candidate Adam Findlay’s 909 (32.0 per cent). This marked a swing to Labor of 6.7 per cent on the 2008 election, bearing in mind that candidate factors have an enormous impact in electoral districts of this size.
UPDATE 2: The latest Essential Research survey shows the two parties still locked together on 50-50, with Labor up a point on the primary vote to 41 per cent and the Coalition unchanged on 44 per cent, and the Greens down one to 8 per cent (an unusually low Greens vote having become an established feature of Essential Research polling). On Afghanistan, the poll concurs with Nielsen in having 47 per cent favouring a full withdrawal, against 10 per cent who want more troops and 30 per cent who believe the number should remain unchanged. Party best to handle Afghanistan produces yet another split decision, with Labor on 33 per cent and Liberal on 32 per cent. A question on the Murray-Darling Basin is framed in somewhat more sensible terms than Nielsen’s, with 49 per cent supporting the proposition that the amount of water taken from the system should be reduced against only 20 per cent who disagree. However, a question on detention centres elicits a harsher view, with 53 per cent disapproving of the government’s decision to move children and families into the community against only 33 per cent approving. Fully 63 per cent believe the government’s approach on asylum seekers is “too soft”, with only 18 per cent saying they are “taking the right approach” and 7 per cent believing their stance “too tough”. Only 25 per cent believe Labor the batter party to handle the issue against 37 per cent for the Liberals.
Morgan: 54-46 to Labor
The latest Morgan face-to-face poll, this time combining results from two weekends of surveys to gain a sample of 1661, has Labor’s lead at 54-46, making the previous 55.5-44.5 look all the more like an aberration. Labor’s primary vote is down a point to 43 per cent while the Coalition is up two to 40.5 per cent, with the Greens down 1.5 per cent to 10.5 per cent.
Victorian federal redistribution: take two
Following the public consultation process into the draft Victorian federal boundaries that were unveiled in August, the redistribution commissioners have announced they have essentially junked their original proposal and gone back to the drawing board. Unusually for a situation where the number of electorates had not changed, the original proposal was for a radical rearrangement in which the electorate of Murray on the border of New South Wales was to be abolished and a new electorate of Burke created in Melbourne’s northern outskirts. The response to this was sufficiently hostile that they have now decided on a more conventional course of action that merely tinkers with the 37 electorates that currently exist. Since this clearly amounts to a “significantly different” proposal to the original, the public inquiry process will begin anew.
I have not had time yet to examine the new boundaries in any detail, but since the original proposal was very bad news for Labor (while it created a new Labor seat in Burke and abolished a Liberal seat in Murray, it also made Liberal seats out of Labor-held Corangamite, Deakin and McEwen), it presumably follows that they will be more than happy with the plan to pursue a more conventional approach. More to follow.
UPDATE: Patricia Karvelas of The Australian reports Coalition MPs are “furious” with Murray MP Sharman Stone for her successful efforts to have her seat restored, at the expense of her party’s broader electoral interests.
Essential Research: 50-50
The latest Essential Research survey confirms the picture of last week’s Newspoll in showing a decline in Tony Abbott’s popularity, but essentially no change in voting intention. Labor has in fact lost its 51-49 lead on two-party preferred, but the primary vote figures are all but unchanged with the Coalition steady on 44 per cent, Labor down a point to 40 per cent and the Greens up one to 9 per cent. Tony Abbott’s approval rating is 39 per cent, down four points on when the question was last asked in the September 20 poll, while his disapproval is up seven points to 45 per cent. Julia Gillard on the other hand is steady on both approval (45 per cent) and disapproval (37 per cent), and her lead as preferred prime minister has widened from 47-35 to 49-33. Questions on expectations for the economy, personal financial situation and job security find respondents leaning towards optimism, while one on the Murray-Darling Basin has 36 per cent believing the government should “purchase water rights from irrigators willing to sell” rather than “leave existing water allocations in place” or “compulsorily buy water rights from irrigators and farmers” (17 per cent each).
No accounting for taste
Matthew Franklin of The Australian reports a Newspoll survey commissioned by conservative think tank the Institute of Public Administration finds Australians’ views on electoral reform are the opposite of my own: 70 per cent back compulsory voting, while “more than half would prefer first-past-the-post voting to the preferential system”.
Now for some other matters I’ve been keeping on the back-burner due to post-election ennui:
• Tim Colebatch of The Age offered a litany of evidence last month on the extent of public disaffection expressed at the August 21 election, which seemed especially concentrated in areas traditionally strong for Labor. The turnout of 93.2 per cent, meaning votes cast as a percentage of enrolled voters, was the lowest since the introduction of compulsory voting in 1925. Furthermore, the informal vote rose from 4.0 per cent in 2007 to 5.6 per cent in 2010. Anecdotal evidence of large numbers of blank ballot papers have led to talk of a “Mark Latham effect”, although Peter Brent at Mumble observes it was actually 2007 that was the aberration. However, one of the reasons proffered for the lower informal vote on that occasion was a lower number of candidates (no doubt a consequence of an increased deposit, one of the few agreeable features of the Howard government’s 2006 electoral law changes). That the number was lower still this time brings the disaffection hypothesis back into play. Speaking of Latham, his column in the Australian Financial Review on September 23 argued the election amounted to a rejection of two-party politics with reference to a combined major party vote of 71.8 per cent, when measured as a percentage of enrolled voters rather than votes cast. The Australian’s Cut and Paste section then proceeded to completely miss the point in response. Brian Costar and Peter Browne at Inside Story calculate that the non-voting rate as a proportion of the adult population was 21 per cent, the main culprit being an enrolment regime that uses the power of data-matching to strike those with incorrect enrolments from the roll rather than update their details. The solution to this problem, automatic enrolment, has now been adopted at state level in New South Wales and Victoria, but is opposed at federal level by the Coalition for completely spurious reasons which are examined in another article by Peter Browne and Brian Costar.
• A fortnight ago, the Australian Electoral Commission released a report into the pre-polling irregularities that led to the exclusion from the count of 2977 votes in Bootbhy and 1306 in Flynn. The difficulties in each case related to the reform that allowed pre-poll votes to be treated as ordinary rather than declaration votes, and thus to be admitted to the count on election night. This required protocols concerning the security of ballot boxes which had not applied when each vote was contained in a declaration envelope and later subjected to individual scrutiny – in particular, a requirement that boxes not be opened during the three week pre-polling period. At the Oaklands Park pre-polling booth in Boothby, the polling official emptied the ballot boxes at the end of each day and transferred their contents to larger boxes, so as to keep “an ongoing detailed record of the number of ordinary ballot papers and the various categories of declaration votes issued”. On polling day the boxes were taken to the Boothby scrutiny centre for counting, at which point the Labor scrutineer noted the ballots inside were “stacked and flat” rather than “disordered and jumbled” in the usual fashion. There were two separate incidents in Flynn. In Blackwater, an official opened the boxes and counted the votes upon the final closure of pre-poll voting the day before the election, based on a set of instructions from the district returning officer intended to detail procedures for ordinary booths on polling day. At Emerald, the officer had opened the box on a number of occasions “to rearrange the papers and create more space”, and then applied new security seals (the officer had been provided with extra seals on request to the divisional office, which should have rung alarm bells at the time). This came to light due to procedures used to identify and record the seals. The net effect of the votes’ exclusion in Boothby was to cut Liberal member Andrew Southcott’s winning margin by 339 votes; I am not aware of the impact in Flynn, but the eventual Liberal National Party margin was 5720 votes.
• Ruminating on Labor’s malaise is very much in vogue this season, as demonstrated by the post-election review process being undertaken by party elders Steve Bracks, Bob Carr and John Faulkner, and the publication this week of Power Crisis: The Self-Destruction of a State Labor Party, by former NSW state MP Rodney Cavalier. Writing in The Australian, Cavalier calls for a secret ballots in preselection votes and a prohibition on candidates who in the past five years have been members of the “political class” (“those on the staff of ministers, ALP office and union officials who do not come from the industries the unions represent”). Lenore Taylor of the Sydney Morning Herald reports NSW Labor is planning to choose candidates in selected electorates by conducting open primaries, either through a straight vote or “a hybrid of an open-to-all-comers vote and the usual branch member system”. This follows the lead of the Nationals in the independent-held seat of Tamworth and Victorian Labor in Liberal-held Kilsyth. Disappointingly for Cavalier, the latter process turned up Vicki Setches, electorate officer to upper house MP Shaun Leane.
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