Queensland candidate update

By
Ben Raue
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11

The candidate list continues to grow as we get closer to the Queensland election.

Nominations close at the end of next week, just in time for voting to commence the week after the ACT and New Zealand elections.

My list of candidates now includes 426 candidates. It might be a few days before all the latest updates flow through to the seat profiles (there’s 55 seats requiring updates) but you can see all of them on the spreadsheet.

So far I’ve identified 86 LNP candidates, 83 Labor candidates and 72 Greens. I presume all three parties will run a full slate of 93 candidates, so that’s at least 38 more candidates to come, bringing the total to at least 464, compared to 453 candidates in 2017.

The list also includes 44 One Nation candidates and 43 candidates for Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party. The Informed Medical Options party is next with 29 candidates. There are also 19 candidates for Legalise Cannabis Queensland, 13 for Katter’s Australian Party, 11 for the Motorists, 6 for Animal Justice, 5 for North Queensland First, and 15 independents.

On average there are 4.58 candidates announced for each seat. Nine candidates have been announced for Townsville (Labor’s most marginal seat) and eight for Whitsunday (the LNP’s most marginal, now held by North Queensland First).

Remarkably there are still no challengers announced for the LNP seat of Callide and the Labor seat of Woodridge.

Finally, here is the proportion of women running for the parties running the most candidates:

  • LNP – 29.1%
  • Labor – 39.8%
  • Greens – 48.6%
  • One Nation – 31.8%
  • United Australia – 14.0%
  • Informed Medical Options – 79.3%

Podcast #44: ACT election preview

By
Ben Raue
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1

Ben is joined by Kevin Bonham and Stewart Jackson to preview the upcoming election in the ACT.

This podcast is supported by the Tally Room’s supporters on Patreon. If you find this podcast worthwhile please consider giving your support.

You can subscribe to this podcast using this RSS feed in your podcast app of choice, but should also be able to find this podcast by searching for “the Tally Room”. If you like the show please considering rating and reviewing us on iTunes.

Mapping the candidate vote in the ACT

By
Ben Raue
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1

In ACT elections, it’s not just the total vote for your party that matters. It’s also how that vote is distributed between your candidates, particularly if you are one of the major parties.

Kevin Bonham coined the term “Ginninderra effect” to refer to what happened in the electorate of Ginninderra in 2012, where Labor polled 2.39 quotas compared to 0.61 quotas for then-Greens leader Meredith Hunter, but won three seats. A slightly less dramatic but similar result took place in 2016, with Labor polling 2.48 quotas and the Greens polling 0.58, but Labor winning three seats.

Labor can win three seats in these scenarios because their vote is distributed relatively evenly amongst their candidates, in particular amongst their top three candidates. Vote exhaustion means the last few seats are usually decided with less than a full quota, so three evenly-positioned Labor candidates can outpoll a Greens candidate with a vote higher than Labor’s third quota share.

In this post I’m going to explore how the vote for different candidates for each major party varies across an electorate in a variety of ways.

Continue

Groom by-election coming up

By
Ben Raue
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2

Federal MP John McVeigh announced his retirement two weeks ago, triggering a by-election for his seat of Groom.

The electorate of Groom covers the city of Toowoomba in southern Queensland, as well as nearby rural areas to the west of the city.

I’ve just finished my guide to Groom, which you can read here.

The electorate is very safe for the LNP – McVeigh polled over 70% of the two-party-preferred vote in 2019. Labor outpolled One Nation on the primary vote, but not by that much – 18.7% to 13.1%.

We don’t have any confirmation about who will run, but it appears that there may be some complexity around whether a future Liberal National MP would sit with the Liberals or Nationals.

Groom was first held in the 1980s by Tom McVeigh, father of the recently retired MP. The elder McVeigh was a National, but the seat was won by the Liberal Party at the 1988 by-election.

The younger McVeigh was first elected to state parliament to represent Toowoomba South in 2012 before moving to federal politics in 2016. McVeigh has a history as a Young National in the 1980s, but sits in federal parliament as a Liberal.

The previous MP, Ian Macfarlane, had been elected four times as a Liberal prior to the LNP merger, but in 2015 he announced plans to switch to sit as a National. This plan was supported by local party members but was blocked by the state executive.

If Groom was to switch from a Liberal seat to a National seat it would change the balance between the two parties in federal parliament – ultimately a change in the proportion of seats within the Coalition could change the numbers of ministers each party holds – but it wouldn’t mean much for voters on the ground, who would be voting for the Liberal National Party. Having said this, the prospect of the seat switching to the Nationals seems to have ended with Matt Canavan withdrawing from the race.

It seems unlikely that Labor will run. It seems possible that One Nation could come in the top two, but they won’t be best placed to pick up Labor voters, so I wouldn’t be surprised if an independent does better. Either way I’d be surprised if this race was at all close.

ACT election – early voting opens

By
Ben Raue
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0

Voting opened today for the ACT election, with election day to be held on October 17.

Elections ACT is seriously embracing early voting this year, strongly encouraging voters to cast an early vote to assist with social distancing.

(Check out my guide to the ACT election.)

This new approach can be seen in the selection of polling places.

There were six pre-poll voting centres in 2016 – this year there are fifteen. There were 114 election day booths in 2016 – this year there will be just 82, including the fifteen being used before election day.

Antony Green recently posted about the plans for election night. Pre-polling will be electronic, which should allow for very quick counting of those votes. If the commission is correct and 80% of votes are cast before election day, we should have most of the votes counted before 7pm, and those 80% will be able to be distributed as part of an interim distribution of preferences on the night.

I will be liveblogging on the night so will be on the job early to watch this flood of results whenever they come in, and if there is time I might also touch on the results from New Zealand.

Launching the ACT 2020 election guide

By
Ben Raue
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6

Voting starts on Monday in the Australian Capital Territory election, with election day to be held on October 17.

Voters will be electing twenty-five members of the Legislative Assembly across five electorates using the Hare-Clark proportional voting system.

You can now read the guide to this election.

The current government is led by Labor’s Andrew Barr, with one Greens minister. The current Assembly includes twelve Labor MLAs, eleven Liberals and two Greens.

The Liberal Party is very close to winning a twelfth seat in Murrumbidgee. Indeed you can argue that the increase in the Liberal vote in this electorate has turned the second Greens seat into a notional Liberal seat. But it will be a lot harder for the Liberals to win a thirteenth seat to win a majority and form government (likely in Yerrabi in the north).

You can click through to read each electorate’s guide here:

You can also use the following map to click on any electorate, and then click through to the relevant guide.

I will be back in a week or so with an ACT election preview episode of the podcast, and I will be live-blogging on election night, so stay tuned.

This work is made possible by the support of the generous people who support this website via Patreon. If you find this useful, please consider signing up as a donor via Patreon.

Victorian council elections – mapping federal results to wards

By
Ben Raue
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5

I haven’t seriously attempted to wrap my head around who is running in the Victorian council elections, which councils are dominated by one faction or the other, and which seats are in play.This is primarily because the VEC does not publish party affiliations for candidates, and until this year Labor has been sitting out of contesting the elections.

I don’t believe the Liberal Party has ever formally contested Victorian council elections, which mostly just leaves the Greens running formally. The use of postal voting also reduces my ability to use mapping to tell the result of the elections.

Still that doesn’t mean there’s nothing that can be done to map out the political balance of each council.

In this post, I have matched the election results at the 2016 and 2019 federal elections to the new 2020 ward boundaries. I’ll focus in on one council (Darebin) which I think is interesting, and I’ll post a statewide map and a spreadsheet so you can do your own analysis.

Continue

Victorian councils 2020 – how did the wards changed?

By
Ben Raue
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0

In yesterday’s post I looked at which Victorian councils were effected by the changes to the ward redistribution process earlier this year. In this post I’m going to look at how the wards changed in the fourteen councils which experienced a change.

Continue

Victorian councils 2020 – the impact of the Somyurek changes

By
Ben Raue
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2

Nominations closed yesterday for Victoria’s local government elections. Ballot papers will be sent out by mail in early October, with the votes being counted from October 24.

I’m not across the complexity of who is running so I won’t try and be across the candidates, but what I do now are the ward boundaries.

I posted a number of times earlier this year about the Victorian Labor government’s plans to change the rules around ward redistributions to push councils back towards single-member wards. The plans were pushed through parliament by the soon-to-be-disgraced local government minister, Adem Somyurek. He then used his newfound ministerial powers to switch a number of Victorian councils from multi-member wards to single-member wards, and prevented a number of others from switching in the other direction.

In particular I posted an analysis showing how the structure of Victorian local government elections has shifted away from single-member wards since 2004.

I have now finished my ward boundaries file for the 2020 Victorian council elections, which you can now download from my maps page. I’ve now posted full ward boundaries for the last four local government election cycles in the three biggest states, dating back to 2008.

In this post I’ll show some maps showing how many councillors each ward elects across the state, how the ratio of councillors to wards varies from place to place, and which councils were impacted by Somyurek’s changes. I’ve also updated the charts I posted in March to show the change in trajectory from the recent “reforms”.

Continue

Podcast #43: Queensland election preview

By
Ben Raue
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2

Ben is joined by the University of Queensland’s Chris Salisbury and Glenn Kefford to preview next month’s Queensland election.

This podcast is supported by the Tally Room’s supporters on Patreon. If you find this podcast worthwhile please consider giving your support.

You can subscribe to this podcast using this RSS feed in your podcast app of choice, but should also be able to find this podcast by searching for “the Tally Room”. If you like the show please considering rating and reviewing us on iTunes.

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