Archive for July, 2010

The declaration of nominations took place at midday yesterday at local electoral offices all over Australia. It took most of the day before lists of candidates appeared on the AEC website.

There has been a marked reduction in the numbers of candidates standing. The AEC reports that only 849 candidates have nominated for the House of Representatives, down from 1054 in 2007. This reduction is consistent across all states.

The ALP and Greens are standing candidates in all seats. Coalition candidates are standing in all seats. The Liberal Party is standing 107 candidates, and the Nationals are standing 16 candidates. The Queensland Liberal National Party and the NT Country Liberal Party are standing candidates in all 32 seats in Queensland and the Northern Territory.

In five seats, the Liberals and Nationals are both standing: in the Labor seats of Richmond and Throsby, the Nationals seat of Riverina, and the WA regional Liberal seats of O’Connor and Forrest. Throsby is a particular surprise, as a majority of the seat lies in the Illawarra region, very much an urban area.

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Apologies for the absence over the last week. I’m busily working on the election campaign for the Greens NSW and, as you’d expect, things are very busy right now.

I’m going to be at the declaration of nominations for the Senate in NSW at midday today. At the same time, nominations will be declared in all House of Representatives and Senate races (I assume in South Australia, Northern Territory and Western Australia, however, they take place at midday local time).

I doubt I’ll have my computer open, but I plan to do some tweeting from the event, so you can follow proceedings on my http://twitter.com/benraue.

Meanwhile, Poll Bludger last night reported three polls: two Morgan polls and a Galaxy. The Galaxy Poll has the two-party preferred vote at 50-50, with the Coalition leading on 43% primary vote, Labor on 37%, and the Greens steady on 13%.

The two Morgan polls (one face-to-face, one via telephone) both have Labor with comfortable leads over the Coalition, and with the Greens on 11%.

The Australian version of the ‘Straight Choice’ franchise was launched yesterday, at electionleaflets.org.au. Somehow they have already got a flow of leaflets appearing on the site, one of which particularly caught my eye.

Australia First has distributed a leaflet in the seat of Riverina that launches a very nasty attack against African refugees, using an image that conjures up nasty American racial conflict of previous generations, and with none of the subtlety you would expect of modern dog-whistle immigration politics.

The leaflet is posted below the fold, although you are warned that it is not a pleasant document:

Consider this post the open thread for federal election discussion today:

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The debate over the internet filter has demonstrated that an expertise in technology and social media doesn’t necessarily translate into political smarts.

Stilgherrian ripped apart those who seriously believed that Julia Gillard would replace Communications Minister Stephen Conroy with Senator Kate Lundy, a senator with so little factional support that she has been constantly under threat of losing preselection for her ACT Senate seat.

Many tweeters, including prominent anti-censorship activists, seem astounded that the Greens would make a preference arrangement with the ALP, unaware of any other issue on which the Greens might find Tony Abbott more objectionable than the Government’s censorship policies.

The worst example, however, has to be the campaign to get Victorian voters to vote below the line and put Stephen Conroy last on their ballots.

It is astounding that people would organise such an idiotic strategy, that is clearly doomed to failure. Among other reasons:

• No-one is going to know if anyone puts Stephen Conroy last. No “last preference” votes are counted, so we will have no idea if a large number of people will put Conroy last.
• It couldn’t possibly work. Conroy will be first on the Senate ticket for the ALP. So to stop him from winning you need to reduce the ALP above-the-line vote to below 14%, probably below 10% to be practical. Considering that the ALP vote in Victoria should be at least 40%, you would need 30% of Victorians to follow your advice.
• There’s a high barrier of entry. It’s actually quite difficult to vote below-the-line. You won’t get many people to do so.
• You’re ignoring all the other pro-filter Senators. You’re asking people to put Conroy lower on their ballot than Steven Fielding, the senator who has pushed an authoritarian and simplisticly conservative agenda during his time in the Senate and likely was the inspiration for the filter.
• It’s the party, not the minister. The ALP’s agenda is driven by the central party machine, not by ministers acting independently. There is no evidence that removing Conroy from his ministry, let alone Parliament, will have any impact on the ALP’s policies. In the process of saying “put Conroy last”, you are saying it’s fine for voters to vote for the other Labor candidates, those ones that may actually require those votes to win their seats.

If you actually want to change the policy agenda, you need to vote for a party that actually doesn’t support the policy. Campaigns against a single politician distract voters from the way politics actually works by personalising policy when it really is about greater forces. If you were somehow successful in knocking off Conroy (which is entirely impossible without the complete destruction of the ALP) it would not change the direction of the government.

I’m coming dangerously close here to advocating a vote for the Greens, but my point isn’t that people should vote Green, but if you don’t support a party’s policy, and that’s what you care about it, then you vote for a party with the policy you support. Idiotic campaigns to get people to give a last preference to a candidate for whom it doesn’t matter won’t help a jot.

We’ve had two polls come out in the last few hours showing remarkably divergent results.

Galaxy has brought out their second poll of the weekend. After a poll conducted on Thursday and Friday gave the ALP a lead of 52-48 on a two-party preferred basis, a poll conducted on Saturday night for the Nine Network has put the two-party preferred vote at an even 50% for each party.

In contrast, Newspoll, in its first poll in three weeks, has the ALP up from 53% to 55%.

Galaxy has a primary vote split of 44-38-12 in favour of the Coalition, while Newspoll has a split of 42-38-12 in favour of Labor.

Consider this an open thread for discussion of the federal election.