Month: September 2007

• Glenn Milne identifies three election date options for the Prime Minister: “go to Yarralumla next weekend for a six-week campaign and a November 17 poll”, “wait another week after that and run to November 24”, or “let Parliament resume its scheduled sittings from October 15 to 25 then go to a December 1 poll”.

• Dennis Shanahan of The Australian summarises recent reports of internal party polling thus:

There have been reports ALP polling shows Labor can win 10 seats in NSW, including the seat of Eden-Monaro, which has changed hands with government since 1972. Equally ostensibly secret polling names unlikely seats in Melbourne, such as Goldstein, falling to Labor and seats in Adelaide such as Boothby and Sturt being added to the three more marginal seats of Makin, Wakefield and Kingston, in South Australia. In the Northern Territory Solomon is assumed to be gone, as are Bass and Braddon in Tasmania … Recently the Sydney Daily Telegraph reported on its front page: “Labor is set to secure such a massive swing in NSW that the Liberals have formally surrendered all hope of winning a single new seat anywhere in this state at the federal election. As Kevin Rudd arrived in Sydney last night to base himself locally for the next three days, Labor polling shows 10 NSW seats could fall its way.” The Australian reported on its front page: “Labor is headed for a landslide victory in the crucial federal bellwether seat of Eden-Monaro, according to leaked ALP research. The polling, obtained by The Australian, found the count would not even go to preferences, with Labor candidate Mike Kelly attracting 51 per cent of the primary vote over Special Minister of State Gary Nairn on 39 per cent”. The Melbourne Herald-Sun reported ALP polling showing that Labor “has dramatically expanded the number of target seats it hopes to win, with ALP elders declaring even previously rock-solid Coalition fortresses now in play”, including Goldstein, which is held by more than 10per cent.

• Friday’s West Australian (no link available) reports “growing concern within the Liberal Party that it may lose the blue-ribbon WA seat of Forrest at the coming election – not to Labor but to an Independent with a high profile”:

Noel Brunning, a former newsreader with Prime TVs Golden West News, is believed to be picking up strong interest among the voters despite his stop-start campaign. Internal Liberal Party polling is believed to have shown that Mr Brunning, 40, has a higher recognition in southern WA than either the Liberal candidate Nola Marino or Labor’s Peter MacFarlane. Forrest is being vacated by former minister Geoff Prosser at the next election and although the margin is a comfortable 10.5 per cent, the retirement of Mr Prosser after 20 years means the contest will be much closer. Not helping the Liberals campaign is the fact that the preselectors preferred candidate, Busselton Shire councillor Philippa Reid, withdrew from the contest late last year citing concern her involvement in Corruption and Crime Commission hearings into the $330 million Canal Rocks development would damage the party. Cr Reid’s relationship with divisive former Liberal powerbroker Noel Crichton-Browne was also causing concern within the party.

• After last week’s bad Boothby opinion poll and excruciating radio interview, John Wiseman of The Australian reports that Labor “closed ranks behind its South Australian glamour candidate Nicole Cornes yesterday, scotching suggestions that she might have booted an own goal with her latest media gaffe”. It now seems I might have been too quick to dismiss the poll’s finding that Cornes was doing particularly badly among women voters. While I don’t imagine he has too many fans among this site’s readership, Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun might have been on to something here:

I suspect it’s because they’ve never liked women who just get by on looks. It seems an insult to clever women and a threat not just to the plain. Cornes’ status as a second wife only speaks to that distrust and contempt.

• A $5 billion federal government roads package to be unveiled this week will reportedly include plans for a $2 billion upgrade of the Bruce Highway from Brisbane to Cairns, and a $1 billion upgrade of the Pacific Highway from Sydney to Brisbane. The latter is of significance to the sensitive north coast seats of Page, Cowper and Paterson, while the Bruce Highway funding targets Hinkler, Flynn, Herbert and Leichhardt. As noted this morning by Barrie Cassidy on Insiders, this has prompted newspapers in Melbourne and Adelaide to complain the southern states have been “snubbed”.

• The Griffith University’s regular VAMPIRE (“vulnerability assessment for mortgage, petrol and inflation risks and expenditure”) study has identified what the Financial Review describes as “11 marginal and fairly safe Liberal seats in which more than half of all households are facing petrol and mortgage stress”: Moreton, Bonner, Lindsay, Macquarie, Deakin, La Trobe, Wakefield, Makin, Kingston, Hasluck and Stirling.

• The last Brisbane Liberal remaining under the cloud of the “printgate” affair, Bowman MP Andrew Laming, has been cleared by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.

• The High Court has published the ruling that struck down legislation removing the right to vote from all prisoners in full-time custody.

• Having noted similar long-term trends, I thought it might be interesting to compare aggregated polling figures from Australia and New Zealand since the end of last year. New Zealand figures are a rough average of Roy Morgan and DigiPoll, Australia’s are from Reuters Poll Trend plus a September figure from Bryan Palmer.

Today’s Roy Morgan poll suggests that voters have, er, reacted sympathetically to Kevin Rudd’s tax gaffe. Or perhaps been driven insane by the onslaught of government advertising on television. Either way, they’ve published a headline figure of 54 per cent for Labor’s primary vote, which seems to have been enough to have caused their server to crash. More details as they come to hand.

UPDATE: Crikey email reports a two-party split of 60.5-39.5. The Coalition primary vote is down from 39.5 per cent to 36 per cent (for those interested, the Nationals vote is down from 3 per cent to 2.5 per cent). Labor’s primary vote in the previous survey was 49.5 per cent. This was a face-to-face survey with a sample of 972.

The north-eastern Adelaide electorate of Makin was created in 1984 from an area that had mostly formed the southern end of Bonython, a seat made safe for Labor by Elizabeth to the north-east (until its abolition at the 2004 election). Makin currently extends from Para Hills and Walkley Heights near the city to Tea Tree Gully and Greenwith at the limits of the metropolitan area. As my swing and vote result maps for Crikey demonstrate, Labor rules the roost as far east as Salisbury East and Modbury North, beyond which are suburbs with somewhat higher incomes. Census data prepared by George Megalogenis of The Australian shows the seat to be highly sensitive to interest rates, coming nineteenth on the ranking of electorates with the most mortgage payers and ninth on “couple families with dependent children paying off home”. However, it also ranks in the lowest quarter on mortgage burden (“median repayment divided by median income”) and the lowest third on “median household income for those paying off their homes”.

Makin was narrowly held for Labor from 1984 to 1996 by Peter Duncan, a former Attorney-General in Don Dunstan’s state government. A 4.8 per cent swing put Duncan on the Keating government casualty list at the 1996 election, and he was recently back in the news after being charged with fraudulently obtaining government grants for his plastics recycling company. His Liberal successor was former nurse Trish Draper, who emerged as a prime ministerial favourite after strong performances at the next two elections. The swing to Labor in 1998 was just 0.2 per cent, and she bettered her 1996 margin when she picked up a 3.0 per cent swing in 2001. Draper hit serious trouble in the lead-up to the 2004 election when it emerged she had taken a boyfriend on a study trip to Europe at taxpayers’ expense. This was in breach of rules limiting the benefit to spouses, and she was required to pay back nearly $10,000. Draper subsequently suffered a swing in every booth in the electorate, a trend that failed to carry over into neighbouring seats (with the exception of Adelaide, where Trish Worth was defeated by a 1.9 per cent swing). She nonetheless retained the seat with her margin cut from 3.8 per cent to 0.9 per cent, compared with a small statewide swing to the Liberals.

When Draper announced her intention to retire in July 2006, citing an illness in the family, Housing Industry Association national president Bob Day (right) immediately emerged as the preselection front-runner. Described in The Australian as a multi-millionaire housing tycoon, Day’s Home Australia owns brand names including “Homestead Homes in SA, Collier Homes in WA, Ashford Homes in Victoria, Newstart Homes in Qld and Huxley Homes in NSW”. No alternative candidates to Day were mentioned in the media, and he was unopposed when nominations closed in August 2006. Kim Wheatley of The Advertiser reported in March that Day had already spent no less than $100,000 on his own campaign, which encompassed “mini-rulers, notepads, calendars, newsletters and eight-page glossy brochures” along with half-page advertisements in local newspapers. Later reports spoke of thousands of personalised postage stamps produced for Day by Australia Post at 90 cents a pop, as well as dog jackets labelled “Bob Day for Makin”. He would thus have particular cause to have felt miffed by this week’s reports that the Liberal hierarchy has begged Draper to reverse her decision to retire, believing a sitting member would be better placed to retain the seat.

Labor has again nominated its candidate from 2004, former weightlifting champion Tony Zappia (left), who has been mayor of Salisbury since 1997 and was a councillor for many years beforehand. Zappia was widely reckoned to have been hard done by when he lost the 2001 preselection to the Right’s Julie Woodman, essentially due to his factional non-alignment. A repeat performance appeared to be on the cards at the 2004 election, when the factions cut a three-way deal that was to deliver Hindmarsh to Steve Georganas of the “soft Left”, Adelaide to Kate Ellis of the Right and Makin to Dana Wortley of the “hard Left”. The nomination of Wortley was to serve the purposes of soft Left warlord Nick Bolkus, as it would allow the party’s affirmative action target to be met without costing him his seat in the Senate. However, the arrangement displeased local branches as well as party hard-heads who were concerned that the crucial marginal seat should be contested by the most appealing candidate. Premier Mike Rann prevailed upon Wortley’s backers to throw their weight behind Zappia, and Bolkus shifted his focus to having the party loosely interpret its affirmative action requirement. His problem appeared solved when another Senator, Geoff Buckland, announced his retirement and backed former state deputy leader Annette Hurley to replace him. Perversely, Bolkus then decided that he too would call it a day, leading to suggestions he had only been holding on to thwart the ambitions of state minister Patrick Conlon (the member for Elder).

Although he failed to win the seat, Zappia’s creditable performance in 2004 prompted ongoing speculation that a parliamentary career still awaited him. It was suggested that state front-benchers Lea Stevens and Trish White might be persuaded to retire at last year’s election so their seats of Little Para or Taylor could be made available, but both stood firm. Zappia then emerged as the logical candidate for the looming Makin preselection, but The Australian’s Michelle Wiese Brockman reported that he was again “battling to win backing to stand from factional leaders”. Writing in the City Messenger newspaper, Christian Kerr noted talk that the Left and the Right might reach a deal to back Zappia, in which he would “vote with the Left in party forums in SA and with the Right in Canberra”. If that fell through, the nomination might instead go to his Salisbury Council colleague Chad Buchanan. Subsequent reports suggested that Zappia indeed secured cross-factional backing, and he has since aligned himself with the Left. Zappia suffered an embarrassment in March when it emerged he had provided a reference for Hells Angels bikie Terry John McKelliff, a client at his fitness centre who was later convicted of drug trafficking. There were some suggestions Zappia might have to stand aside in light of the precedent of Kelvin Thomson, who had recently quit the front bench for providing a reference to Melbourne gangland figure Tony Mokbel.

Adelaide’s Advertiser newspaper today carries a slightly curious poll of voting intention in Boothby, held for the Liberals by Andrew Southcott on a margin of 5.4 per cent. Conducted by phone from a sample of 649, it shows Southcott leading Labor candidate Nicole Cornes by an improbable 49 per cent to 32 per cent after distribution of the undecided. No two-party result is provided, but commenter Matthew Sykes has transcribed the paper’s large volume of generally unilluminating data from the poll throughout the previous comments thread. No doubt the Advertiser’s pollsters do their best, but my mind is drawn back to the final week of the state election campaign last March, when it ran a poll showing the Liberals neck-and-neck in Norwood and set to retain Hartley. Labor went on to win the seats with respective margins of 4.2 per cent and 4.6 per cent.

The Australian today offers another editorial on the subject of opinion poll commentary which, despite its querulous tone, is somewhat less absurd than its notorious dummy spit of July 12. The paper nonetheless contrives to exempt itself from its critique of the polling analysis glut, placing the blame on “the rise of the Galaxy Poll and Fairfax newspapers’ attempt to become competitive against Newspoll with its AC Neilson (sic) survey” (to say nothing of the efforts of “a number of internet blogs”). So when its reporter Tony Barrass observes a surprisingly weak Newspoll result for the Western Australian state government and finds federal implications galore, you can rest assured that this is not merely “the reporting of politics as if it were a sporting match”, such as you might get from Michelle Grattan. We should instead consider ourselves privileged spectators to the exercise of The Australian’s mystical power to unlock the hidden secrets behind the only opinion poll that matters.

• The past fortnight has seen much talk emerge from the Coalition camp of encouraging internal polling in sensitive seats. Tony Barrass of The Australian today reports that a Crosby-Textor poll conducted a fortnight ago had the Liberals on track to retain their 10 seats in Western Australia while also gaining another of the remaining five, Cowan. On Saturday, The Australian reported a “jump in the party’s support in the crucial seat of Bass”. This was apparently putting Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull under pressure to approve Gunns’ proposed Tamar pulp mill, regardless of the damage this would cause to his own position in Wentworth. The “senior Liberal source” behind the story reckoned that Turnbull’s seat was “not in trouble”.

• And yet, on the other hand, we also have reports the Liberals have begged Jackie Kelly, Warren Entsch, Kay Elson, Geoff Prosser, Trish Draper and Barry Wakelin to abandon their plans to retire, to improve the party’s chances of retaining their seats of Lindsay, Leichhardt, Forde, Forrest, Makin and Grey. Remarkably, Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday that Liberal polling showed Grey, held by a margin of 13.8 per cent, would be lost unless Wakelin stayed on. It was further reported he had briefly agreed to do so before changing his mind again, with his nominated successor Rowan Ramsey urged to smooth the path by stepping aside.

• On the other side of the fence, Paige Taylor of The Australian talks of Labor polling which shows it set to double its margin in Brand, the outer southern Perth seat being vacated by former leader Kim Beazley.

• Labor MP Gavan O’Connor, who lost preselection in his seat of Corio to ACTU assistant secretary Richard Marles, raised eyebrows by declining to farewell parliament during last week’s presumed valedictory speech. Mark Davis of the Sydney Morning Herald speaks of “a frisson of anxiety in Kevin Rudd’s office” at the thought of O’Connor standing against Marles as an independent.

• A huge round of applause for Luke Miller and his revamped Cassandra Senate election calculator, which allows us to set quotas and input our own preference tickets. This means it can be used to play out any hypothetical scenario not only for both half and full Senate elections, but also for all mainland state upper houses.

• I abandoned the practice of fisking newspaper commentary on opinion polls early in the history of this site, because it seemed too much like shooting fish in a barrel. Give thanks that Possum Comitatus harbours no such qualms.

How seriously to take this Fairfax/Nielsen online poll? It should be made clear from the outset that this is not one of your Sky News/NineMSN type jobs – its sample of 1425 was “selected from Nielsen’s ‘Your Voice’ database” to represent “a broad cross-section of the nation”. As the dedicated YourVoice website explains, this database consists of 90,000 people who have volunteered to provide market research data in exchange for prizes and, if they can put up with it long enough, gifts. The result of the poll is a 58-42 two-party lead for Labor, who also lead 50 per cent to 37 per cent on the primary vote. As the table accompanying the report makes clear, these results are remarkably similar to those of ACNielsen’s most recent phone poll, conducted from September 6-8.

The latest Galaxy poll, published in today’s News Limited tabloids, shows Labor’s lead easing imperceptibly to 56-44 from 57-43 last month. There has also been a one point exchange on the primary vote, with Labor down to 46 per cent and the Coalition up to 40 per cent.