Archive for February, 2009

Bligh v. The Borg

By
Ben Raue
 – February 23, 2009

It’s a delightful irony that, like “Honest John” before him, Lawrence Springborg’s LNP have taken to calling their leader “The Borg” with no apparent sense of irony or awareness of the meaning of the nickname. Springborg is heading into his third election as leader of the Opposition, this time as leader of the newly-merged “Liberal National Party”. Despite their best efforts to cloak themselves in Liberal garb (putting the “Liberal” before the “National” for one), the party remains clearly dominated by the Nationals, and has removed the ability of Liberal candidates in Brisbane to distinguish themselves from their country brethren.

Only two Liberal National MPs hold seats in the City of Brisbane, and one of those two, Tim Nicholls, has seen his seat of Clayfield switch to be notionally Labor following the recent redistribution. Without winning any seats outside of Brisbane, Labor is already within spitting distance of forming a majority, holding 36 seats just in the Brisbane area, with 45 needed for a majority.

brisbane

This demonstrates the biggest problem for the opposition. In order to win, the opposition must gain ground in Brisbane. Yet the Opposition has been dominated by the Nationals, with little support in South-East Queensland. With a National heading up the non-Labor side, Liberals have struggled to present a more urban image to their urban voters, resulting in pathetic results for the Liberals. In spite of their name, it appears that the LNP has worsened these problems.

It seems safe today that, barring a massive change in fortunes, Anna Bligh will be the first woman to win a state election in Australia, and the most successful female party leader in Australian politics. Springborg pointed out today that, with today’s electoral geography, the LNP cannot win on 50% of the two-party-preferred vote, with about 52% needed to get the swing sufficient, but it probably won’t be their problem. The LNP has so far demonstrated a remarkable similarity in its campaign strategy to the losing battles of 2001, 2004 and 2006, and something pretty big will need to change for Springborg to pull off a win.

Coming soon to the Tally Room: As well as covering the day-to-day events in the election campaign, I plan to run a series of posts on individual key marginal seats, breaking down the booth figures to give you an idea of the key areas in this campaign.

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Anna Bligh calling March 21 election

By
Ben Raue
 – February 23, 2009

Sky News is now reporting that Anna Bligh will go to Government House in Brisbane today to call an early election, presumably on March 28. More to come.

Update: So I was wrong, it was March 21. Unfortunately the news broke about five minutes after I left the computer and just got home. It’s a sign of how popular this story will be, that a one-line, inaccurate piece of election news is the most popular blog post of 2009. I plan to focus my coverage on my maps, and using maps to cover stories as they come along, although I’m hoping to be in Brisbane for the last few days of the campaign.

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The new Andrew Fisher biography

By
Ben Raue
 – February 22, 2009

I just finished David Day’s third book in what is rapidly becoming a series of biographies of Australia’s Labor Prime Ministers: Andrew Fisher: Prime Minister of Australia. This follows on the back of his John Curtin: A Life and Chifley.

Andrew Fisher’s story is one that has mainly disappeared from Australian political folklore, overshadowed by his primary rivals (Alfred Deakin and Billy Hughes) and the passing of time. Yet he was a central figure in shaping our modern party system.

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Queensland election preparations

By
Ben Raue
 – February 21, 2009

With the possible imminent calling of a state election in Queensland, I’ve moved ahead with plans for election night coverage, using my Google Earth map of the new Queensland boundaries, which you can check out here. There’s still some kinks to be worked out. For a start, the map seems determined to rotate 90 degrees, with the west pointing upwards on the map. It’s easy to fix this by clicking the north point on the compass, which will re-align the map.

I’m planning to do a lot more with this map. At the very least, I plan to embed recent results, candidates and the sitting MP’s details for each electorate. I’m also hoping to link the map to XML results from the ECQ and/or ABC elections, which would allow people to follow results in map form, and also follow it from within Google Earth. I’d ideally love to also set it up to change the electorate colouring according to results, but I don’t expect to be able to do that. I’m lacking in technical knowlege on this front, so if people can help with advice, it would be much appreciated.

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By-elections in WA?

By
Ben Raue
 – February 19, 2009

Via Pollbludger, reports out of Western Australia suggest that by-elections may be imminent in the seats of two of the former Labor government’s biggest figures: former Premier Alan Carpenter in Willagee and former Attorney-General Jim McGinty in the neighbouring seat of Fremantle. Pollbludger quotes from the Fremantle Herald, saying:

In the face of persistent rumours that veteran state Labor MP Jim McGinty is about to trigger a by-election for Fremantle by announcing his retirement, the Greens have called a war cabinet to talk tactics and anoint a candidate. It is all but certain they will choose South Fremantle’s Adele Carles, who came within a whisker of taking the seat at last year’s state election … Ms Carles says if the powerbroker is considering calling it quits he should do it so the by-election can coincide with the daylight saving referendum in May, saving thousands of dollars … The tom-toms have been beating for weeks that Fremantle mayor Peter Tagliaferri was the shoe-in as Labor’s choice to replace Mr McGinty. But more recently a senior union figure has emerged as a front-runner, which a Labor insider says had Mr Tagliaferri threatening to run as an independent (Word around the campfire is that this refers to Dave Kelly, one of McGinty’s successors at the LHMWU – PB). The Herald’s Labor source said Alan Carpenter also had to be taken into account: If the former premier decides to quit politics the union figure may prefer Mr Carpenter’s safe Willagee seat, which is not threatened by the Greens. This would leave Fremantle open for Mr Tagliaferri. But both Mr McGinty and Mr Tagliaferri are denying a by-election is imminent. “It’s no more than rumour-mongering,” Mr McGinty barked down the phone, adding he stood by the Herald’s report last November that he had no plans to go early but was unlikely to run again in 2013.

Junkies will remember the experience of election night last September as Antony Green’s computer flicked back and forth between a Labor win and a Greens win, due to erratic data entry from the WAEC. Whenever the Greens overtook the Liberals, they were calculated to win the seat. With the Liberals likely to avoid running in a Fremantle by-election, the Greens would be in with a very strong chance to win the seat. Rumours suggest by-elections could be held in parallel with a statewide referendum on daylight savings on May 16.

Updates: Bird of paradox in comments has given some greater information about the layout of Fremantle, and fascinating prospect of a popular centre-left local mayor running as an independent in a seat where Labor, Liberal and Greens all have about 1/3 of support, producing a complete free-for-all. He’s done a notional two-party-preferred vote for each of the 11 booths, coming out with 5 Labor booths, 5 Greens booths and 1 Liberal booth. I’ve turned these into a map of the electorate, although I’ve excluded Rottnest Island (where very few votes are cast, with the Greens coming first with 26 votes).

[geo_mashup_map add_overview_control="false" zoom=12 add_map_type_control="true"]

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Antony Green’s Queensland election guide

By
Ben Raue
 – February 19, 2009

With the continuing speculation of an impending Queensland election, Antony Green has launched the ABC elections guide to the coming election.

All the usual features, profiles of electorates, indexes by candidate, electorate name and margin, and my famous Election Calculator.

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Margins in strong Greens seats

By
Ben Raue
 – February 18, 2009

There are a handful of seats in the House of Representatives where the Greens are within spitting distance of winning the seat. In nearly all of them, however, the true margin is hidden by the AEC’s methods of measuring marginality. Margins are calculated by referring to the two-candidate-preferred vote, but this doesn’t take into account the possibility that a candidate in third place may overtake the second-place candidate and be in a winnable position.

Greens marginal seats run into what psephologists call “non-monotonicity”, whereby one group’s preferences are not reciprocated. In monotonic system, a candidate cannot be harmed by receiving an extra vote. In recent federal elections, Liberal preferences in strong Greens seats have been directed to the Greens over Labor, putting the seat in a position where a Green in third place might win against Labor in a 2CP count, on Liberal preferences, but the preferences are not reciprocated, with Greens voters preferencing Labor over Liberal. Thus a seat may be registered as a 19.5% margin for Labor, as in the case of Sydney, even though the Labor vs Greens margin would be much smaller. Even if the result isn’t reversed by a change in the order of elmination, it’s possible that a seat can shift from “Very Safe” to “Marginal”.

At the 2007 election, only one Greens candidate managed to come second after preferences, in the seat of Melbourne, where the Greens overtook the Liberals on preferences from minor candidates and registered over 45% of the two-party-preferred vote, making the seat marginal. But there are a number of seats that fit the criteria of Greens marginals but don’t appear as such on the pendulum. These criteria are:

  • A reasonably high Greens vote (above 15%).
  • A large gap between the two major parties, with the weaker of the two (usually the Liberal) very low (usually below 30%).

The Greens managed to attract 82.5% of Liberal preferences in Melbourne at the 2007 election. In order to determine the next five most marginal Greens seats, I translated this proportion of Liberal votes to the Greens, to determine a two-party-preferred vote between Labor and Greens. I excluded all seats where the margin between Liberal and Greens is greater than the Labor-Greens margin. For example, in the case of Grayndler, I calculated a 60-40 margin, and the Liberals beat the Greens by 2%. I assume that if the Greens were to gain 10% of the 2PP vote they would manage to overtake the Liberals.

Anyway, here is my calculations.

  1. Melbourne – 54.7-45.3
  2. Sydney – 55-45
  3. Grayndler – 60-40
  4. Cunningham – 61-39
  5. Denison – 61-39
  6. Batman – 62-38

Comments, anyone?

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UK election animation

By
Ben Raue
 – February 17, 2009

ukmap

I’ve come across an interesting election animation, showing the electoral map of every UK election since the Reform Act of 1832, showing the geographical distribution of Conservative, Labour and Liberal/Liberal Democrat seats since that time as a cartogram.

You can clearly see the shift over time, with the appearance of Labour in the late 1800s and the decline of the Liberals from the time that the universal franchise was introduced in the early 1920s.

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Double Dissolution possibilities

By
Ben Raue
 – February 16, 2009

Tim Andrews has written a post projecting what he thinks would happen to the Senate at a double dissolution or half senate election, concluding that either scenario would see the Greens control the balance of power, with Labor + Greens giving a majority, and no other possible combination of Labor and minor parties giving them a majority. This would have interesting policy consequences, as Labor would have a clear choice between working with Liberal or Greens, as opposed to the choice at the moment between Liberal or stitching together a deal with Greens, Xenophon and Fielding.

I don’t necessarily agree with a lot of Tim’s suggestions, but I thought it was an interesting exercise to come up with a result, so here goes.

I’m using Possum’s latest polling average, which gives 48.9% primary vote to the ALP and 36.1% primary vote to the Liberals, to predict swings between those two parties. This gives a 5.5% swing to the ALP and a 5.7% swing away from the Coalition, although this may vary, and I will also use common sense when plugging those numbers in.

I’m projecting the following results. For a half-Senate election:

  • ALP 36
  • LIB 29 (inc. CLP)
  • GRN 8
  • NAT 2
  • Xenophon

And for a double dissolution

  • ALP 36
  • LIB 27 (inc. CLP)
  • GRN 8
  • NAT 2
  • Other 3 (inc. 2 Xenophon and right-wing Queensland senator)

Full state-by-state breakdowns over the fold.

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RealClearWorld’s top 5 elections of 2009

By
Ben Raue
 – February 14, 2009

A few days ago the website RealClearWorld came out with a list of the five elections it considers the most significant of 2009. They are:

  1. Israel
  2. Iran
  3. Germany
  4. Japan
  5. Afghanistan

Well worth a read.

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