15

Brisbane City Council – council results

By
Ben Raue
– Posted on March 20, 2016

This is the final of my three maps summarising key results from yesterday’s voting in Queensland. You can also check out my maps of the Brisbane lord mayoral results and the referendum results.

Overall, there was a swing to the ALP and away from the LNP, but it hasn’t been reflected in the ward victories.

The LNP primary vote dropped from 57.1% to 49.7%. Labor’s vote only increased from 32% to 33.8%, with the bulk of the swing going to the Greens, who increased their vote from 8.5% to 13.9%. This partly reflects that the Greens only ran in 18 wards in 2012, and ran in 26 in 2016.

On a two-party-preferred basis, Labor gained big swings in many LNP wards, but not in the ones that mattered.

The LNP has held on to all of their wards. Labor has lost its marginal ward of Northgate to the Liberal National Party, and Labor and the Greens are in a tight race for second place in the Gabba ward. Whichever progressive candidate comes second in the Gabba should easily defeat the LNP candidate on preferences.

Overall this leaves the LNP with 19 wards (up from 18), the ALP with five (down from seven), independent Nicole Johnston with her ward of Tennyson, and the Greens currently leading for their first Brisbane council seat.

(When the results are final and there is more time it would be worth examining whether there was an increase in preferences from Greens to Labor giving them those big 2PP swings, or whether it was just a drop in the LNP vote).

The following map can be clicked on to look at the primary votes and two-candidate-preferred figures for all 26 wards. We don’t have two-candidate-preferred vote figures in five wards. Understandably we won’t have a count in The Gabba until we know who is in the top two (although the ALP in winning about 59% in the ALP-LNP count). In Paddington, the ECQ originally conducted a count between the LNP and Labor, but the Greens overtook Labor.

For some reason in Tennyson, Pullenvale and Walter Taylor the ECQ included Labor in the notional count, even though they came third in those wards in 2012. It looks like Labor has again come third, so the ECQ will need to conduct a new count.

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3

QLD referendum results map

By
Ben Raue
– Posted on March 20, 2016

Queenslanders yesterday voted in a referendum on whether the state Parliamentary terms should be extended from three to four years, and that election dates should be fixed on a date in October.

The result was close, but the referendum passed. At the time of writing, Yes has 53.15% of the vote.

Yes is currently winning a majority of the vote in 72 out of 89 districts, and has won in every region of Queensland.

The following clickable map shows the vote in each of the 89 state electoral districts:

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0

Brisbane City Council – Lord Mayoral results

By
Ben Raue
– Posted on March 20, 2016

The Liberal National Party’s Graham Quirk won a second full term last night as Lord Mayor of Brisbane, the fourth successive win by the LNP after the two wins by Campbell Newman in 2004 and 2008.

He won comfortably with 58.9% of the votes counted so far after preferences, but even that was a swing of about 10% from the highs of 2012.

The following map provides the primary votes and two-party-preferred votes in the lord mayoral race by ward, including the swings from the 2012 results adjusted for the ward redistribution.

I’ll return later today with similar maps for the Brisbane City councillor elections and the statewide referendum.

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2

QLD election night live

By
Ben Raue
– Posted on March 19, 2016

10:20pm – Alright I’ll call it a night. I’ll come back tomorrow and put together some maps of the results. In summary:

  • The Yes vote looks like winning the referendum. Not by a lot, but remarkably consistently across the state, including in Labor and LNP areas.
  • Labor has gained a large swing across most wards for the Brisbane lord mayoralty, with the LNP’s vote after preferences dropping from 68.5% to 58.4%. Such a result would put Labor within reach of winning in 2020.
  • Labor has made no progress towards winning back the city council. They have lost one of their seven wards (Northgate) to the LNP, and look like losing another (The Gabba) to the Greens. While they gained big swings in many safe LNP wards, the ALP actually lost votes in the only seriously marginal LNP ward (Doboy).

10:07pm – The Yes case is winning in both Labor and LNP areas. Yes is winning 54.5% in the 44 seats which Labor won in 2015, while Yes is winning 52.8% in the 42 LNP seats. No is winning in the three seats won by Katter’s Australian Party and independent Peter Wellington.

10:03pm – I’ve just run updated referendum figures. Yes is now winning in all regions, ranging from 50.5% in regional South-East Queensland to 58.3% on the Gold Coast. We have no figures from Stretton, but Yes is winning 67 other seats and No is winning 21 others. The vote count is still more progressed in No areas.

9:55pm – In 2012, Labor won the mayoral vote in only one ward: Richlands. The new ward replacing Richlands, Forest Lake, had a notional LNP majority, so going in to tonight Labor had a mayoral majority in no wards. At the moment it looks like Labor has gained a majority in Forest Lake, Deagon, Moorooka and the Gabba. Labor’s swing is averaging at 9.95%, with swings over 10% in fifteen wards, and a negative swing in only one: Morningside.

9:47pm – In the inner-city ward of The Gabba, it looks like the Greens might be winning off Labor, in a similar way to what happened in Balmain at the 2011 NSW state election. We currently have half the booths in, and the Greens are on 33.6%, the LNP on 33% and the ALP on 31%. However the Queensland Greens report an “unconfirmed scrutineers tally” which has the LNP in first narrowly, with the Greens well ahead of Labor. On either of those sets of numbers you’d expect Labor preferences to elect the Greens over the LNP. Labor’s only hope is to overtake the Greens on primary votes or with preferences from the only other candidate, but on the current numbers that fourth candidate wouldn’t have enough votes to overturn the gap.

9:41pm – It appears that the LNP has held on strongly in its marginal wards. In Doboy the LNP has currently increased their margin from 1.8% to 4.4%. Labor’s vote is up substantially in a whole bunch of safe LNP vote, with swings of over 10% in Coorparoo, Enoggera, Runcorn, The Gap and Marchant.

9:38pm – Looking at the Brisbane City Council results, Labor are leading in six of their current wards on two-party-preferred vote (although I’ll come back to the Gabba). In Northgate, where Labor councillor Kim Flesser retired after 19 years, Labor is currently down 2.6% on the two-party-preferred vote which leaves them on 47.8%.

9:30pm – Breaking up the results by region, “Yes” is winning in every region except for those parts of South-East Queensland outside of Brisbane, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast. Even there, No only has 50.3%. We have 26.8% counted in the 11 seats in central Queensland, along with 15% in North Queensland and 22% in the remainder of SE Queensland but under 10% in Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast.

9:28pm – We have referendum data from 74 out of 89 electorates. In 56 of those electorates, “yes” is winning, often not by very much. Yes is only winning over 60% in nine seats. In the other 18, “no” is winning.

17.4% of the roll has been counted in the No seats, while 13.9% has been counted in the Yes seats. This suggests that Yes is likely to increase its lead, although I haven’t been able to take account of any trends within each seat, and we have no idea about how the remaining 15 seats will break.

9:17pm – I’ve now gotten around to looking at the results. I’ll give some analysis on the referendum in a minute.

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0

QLD election day open thread

By
Ben Raue
– Posted on March 19, 2016

Queenslanders are voting today in council elections, and on a referendum to change the constitution to have fixed four-year terms for the state Parliament.

I won’t be liveblogging results tonight as I’ll be out, but you can use this thread to discuss the results, and I might do occasional updates.

Antony Green will be covering the results at the ABC Elections website.

I’ll be doing post-election analysis, maybe late this evening or more likely tomorrow morning, so keep an eye out for that.

In the meantime, you can read through my guide to the Brisbane City Council election, which includes profiles of all 26 wards.

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36

The anti-democratic alternatives to Senate reform

By
Ben Raue
– Posted on March 17, 2016

Until Labor’s recent cynical turn against reforming the Senate, there was general agreement amongst the main political parties and electoral experts that something needed to be done to deal with the Senate. The number of candidates running for the Senate has skyrocketed, which has made it significantly harder for voters to vote (by making ballots bigger and making it harder to find who you want to vote for) and made it significantly harder for the ballots to be counted (as seen in the 2013 WA Senate count). It has also allowed minor parties on tiny votes to pile up votes and become viable candidates for election.

These aren’t the only reasons why Senate voting reform should happen, but they are the reasons why it’s so urgent and part of the reason why this issue has finally gained support from a major party after decades of major party indifference.

Apart from the current proposal, there have been a number of other “solutions” to these problems which, unlike the current proposal, do nothing to reduce the power and control of the major parties while making life harder for all minor parties, and would genuinely be bad for Australian democracy.

They should give fans of minor parties pause: there are alternative reforms which would make life much harder for small parties, and could be back on the table if the current proposal fails.

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0

Queensland council election – ward map completed

By
Ben Raue
– Posted on March 10, 2016

Screen Shot 2016-03-10 at 12.55.00 pmIt’s only nine days now until Queenslanders vote for their councils for the next four years (along with a referendum on fixed four-year terms for the state parliament), and I’ve finally finished my Google Earth map of the ward boundaries.

Sixteen councils have changed their divisional or ward boundaries since the 2012 election. Four of these are councils which have changed their external boundaries due to the reversal of a pre-2012 council amalgamation: Cairns, Tablelands, Sunshine Coast and Rockhampton. The restored councils which took in parts of those four, respectively Douglas, Mareeba, Noosa and Livingstone, will all elect their councillors at large without any wards.

The other twelve councils to change their wards are Banana, Brisbane, Bundaberg, Fraser Coast, Ipswich, Isaac, Logan, Moreton Bay, Redland, Scenic Rim, Townsville and Whitsunday.

You can download the map here.

I’m now focusing all of my attention on preparing my guide to the 2016 federal election, with seat guides due to start appearing in April. I’ll likely return with a small amount of analysis of the results of the QLD election and referendum after March 19, but apart from that I’ll be keeping my head down working on the federal election.

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5

Brisbane City Council guide finished

By
Ben Raue
– Posted on March 3, 2016

bcc2016-simpleVoters in Queensland will be voting on March 19 in local government elections, along with a referendum on fixed four-year terms for the state Parliament (which I’ve previously blogged about).

For the first time, I’ve put together a complete guide to the Brisbane City Council elections, similar to those I’ve done for state and federal elections.

The City of Brisbane is the biggest local government in Australia, with just over 1 million residents. The capital city councils in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide all cover a small inner-city section of the metropolitan area, but Brisbane covers a large expanse, more like big-city governments in places like London, New York or Auckland.

Read the guide.

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2

Senate reform – does exhausting votes help the party leading?

By
Ben Raue
– Posted on March 2, 2016

There’s been a lot of attempts by various people to predict the impact of Senate reform in terms of which parties will win and which parties will lose.

Some of this has been smart, and some of it has been quite dumb. Some has focused on the long-term tendencies, while others have been obsessively focused on the outcome under one narrow scenario where the Coalition wins a double dissolution comfortably, or freak out about outcomes that are just as likely under the current system.

I’ve generally tried to avoid getting too much into these questions. In general, I expect that party behaviour and voter behaviour will change in ways which are difficult to predict, and overconfidence in any particular outcome suggests that a person has an agenda to push (usually an anti-reform agenda).

(If you really want to have a better sense of likely outcomes, I can point you to Kevin Bonham, Antony Green and Adrian Beaumount‘s analysis. In short, both major parties and the Greens would have gained seats, in proportion to their vote, but the chances of a Coalition majority are not much greater than the current system.)

I wanted to specifically address a question raised in a bunch of places: does the left “splitting” its vote between Labor and the Greens disadvantage them relative to the Coalition, who run as a single ticket.

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7

JSCEM Senate reform inquiry – video highlights

By
Ben Raue
– Posted on March 1, 2016

I watched some parts of today’s JSCEM inquiry, and cut together a few short clips of interesting parts of the day. I thought I would post them on Youtube and here – if you have a section which you think was particularly interesting, let me know in comments and I’ll cut it and upload it.

Firstly, this 42 second interaction between Antony Green and Stephen Conroy about whether voters actively choose to vote above the line, or are ‘herded’ into it by a voting system that makes it much much harder to vote below-the-line. This is related to my blog post on informal rates amongst below-the-line voters.

Go below the fold for three more videos.

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