A classic from the vault

Time for a new thread. For the want of anything better to hang it off, I hereby reprint my piece in Crikey last week on prospects for the Senate. This does not mean discussion on this thread need be relevant to this topic.

Like so much else this year, speculation about the Senate election has been guided by “the narrowing”: that mystical force that would drive swinging voters to the Coalition once the campaign focused minds on economic management. It’s now clear to all but a dwindling band of die-hards that this hasn’t happened and isn’t about to.

It is thus necessary to revise the view that the Coalition will be strong enough in the Senate to make life difficult for an incoming Rudd Government. The Liberals and Nationals instead find themselves in danger of losing a swag of seats, which opens up a dizzying range of possibilities for the Greens.

A case in point is Kerry Nettle’s bid for re-election in New South Wales. Earlier in the year it seemed safe to assume there would be a traditional three-all split between left and right, with Nettle fighting a probably losing battle with Labor’s number three, Senator Ursula Stephens. In that context, any improvement in the Labor vote would have been damaging for Nettle. Now it seems Labor might be strong enough to win Stephens a seat without excluding Nettle, perhaps even bequeathing her a measurable surplus as preferences. That would boost Nettle’s chances of overtaking and defeating the Coalition’s third candidate, Senator Marise Payne.

The story is similar in Victoria, given that Labor and the Democrats have thought better of repeating their 2004 preference exchanges with Family First (who nonetheless have a vague chance if they can match their vote at the state election).

There has been a further stroke of good fortune for the Greens with the entry of independent Nick Xenophon in South Australia. Such is Xenophon’s popularity that he looks likely not only to win a quota in his own right, but also to deliver the Greens a substantial surplus. This could help their candidate Sarah Hanson-Young overcome the third Labor candidate, Cathy Perry.

Bob Brown should have no trouble winning a seat in Tasmania, the question being how the remaining five seats will divide between Labor and Liberal. There is familiar talk that Brown might do well enough to also carry running mate Andrew Wilkie over the line, but this at least seems a little too optimistic.

The two states where Labor’s strength does not help the Greens are Western Australia and Queensland. Western Australia does not look likely to produce the huge swing required to cost the Liberals a third seat, so a strong hike in the Labor vote has the potential to squeeze out the Greens. Nonetheless, their candidate Scott Ludlam remains the firm favourite.

Labor is also becoming hopeful of winning a third seat in Queensland, which it has never done before at a six-seat half-Senate election. On the other side of the ledger, there is a chance that the Coalition will lose the seat of Nationals Senator Ron Boswell to Family First, who will harness the entire right-of-centre vote if they get ahead of Pauline Hanson. It’s hard to see how Hanson herself could put a quota together, despite all that has been written about her minor successes in preference negotiations.

The remaining wild card is the Australian Capital Territory, where Greens candidate Kerrie Tucker threatens an historic win at the expense of Liberal incumbent Gary Humphries. This would be especially significant because territory Senators’ terms are tied to the House of Representatives, so that an end to the Coalition’s absolute majority would take effect immediately.

While it is likely that not all of these potential Greens wins will come off, they will probably have around five Senators joining the two continuing from the 2004 election, to be joined on the cross benches by Nick Xenophon and continuing Family First Senator Steve Fielding. The Coalition will be reduced from its current majority of 39 seats out of 76 to around 35, while Labor should increase its current 28 seats by four.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,322 comments on “A classic from the vault”

Comments Page 25 of 27
1 … 24 25 26 27

  1. The undecideds will go with the trend anyway, methinks.

    Those that have made their decision prior to polling day will vote earlier rather than later.

  2. Faulkner…

    now you play with fire.

    This guy I know (as much as anybody does) I eat with him a few time’s a month so and he would make a terrible frontline pollie..

    This guy is extreme in his own way

    steady,targeted,flesh eating but with heart (if it still beats after) kinda way.

    Good guy, frightens shit outa me every time he asks who drove me to dinner!

  3. Shock Liberal loss: O’Connor

    Wilson Tuckey to lose to the Nats. The fix is in, all preferences lead to the Nats.

    Centrebet has the Nats in from $26 to $9 but still good money to be had.

  8. Here in Footscray Nicola is our local member. We are very happy with her. She wrote to me today and wished me well, whilst encouraging me to vote for new leadership and stuff like that. Hope she ends up as Health Minister, I think she’d be very good at it. And stop being so mean about Mar’n Ferg’n. He can’t help it if he has the subtlety of a steam engine and the grace of a slug. I pray to the heavens that he is not made Minister for anything more important than arranging the catering for caucus meetings (although come to think of it he could probably manage to poison the majority).

    On the other hand, I think it would be very nice if Garrett ended up as Environment Minister. Think of how much fun we could have by telling our Frence friends that that bald guy from Midnight Oil is our enviro supremo? In any event, he’s more competent than he’s looked in the campaign and he will provide the right sort of grit to the oyster of cabinet considerations on economic-environmental stuff. Rudd needs few annoying but noble Ministers, IMHO.

  9. Just home and listening to the Howard interview on 7.30. Great Fun. Give Howard his due ‘Just 4 a moment lets talk about the 21 century Kerry’
    and reading the last few hundred comments a wierd thread for a while but agian great Fun. Would note that the lib screamers at the bar where a little down tonight.

  12. Glen: Since you only read the Australia
    Make sure you don’t miss this gem
    [‘While Mr Rudd does not have a deep background in running a business, he has experience as a diplomat, a consultant with KPMG, as a newspaper contributor and in public sector management. In truth, he has probably had more real-world experience than Mr Howard, who worked as a suburban solicitor, had before entering politics.’]

  13. 1142
    Generic Person Says:
    November 20th, 2007 at 11:52 pm
    No 1135

    “….Mad Cow, in the last several days, I’ve been labelled as intellectually incapacitated, stupid, dickhead, idiot, homophobe, loser, imbecile and so forth. All such personal attacks are from those of leftist persuasion….”
    …..
    And the list is not complete. Even in my doting leftage I could summon up a few more apt terms. But who cares. I am just passig time until e-day arrives. Where oh where is possum and the salve of a logical mind!

  15. Dyno @ 1165 on the worst-case-scenario issue (the scenarios that can see Howard can scrape back in).

    Isn’t there another possibility: that voters who have been polled for the past 12 months have been giving their real opinions — they do want to change — but then just get wobbly in the polling booth?

    Isn’t this what happened to Hewson in 1993?

  16. [ I have a rather unfashionable policy of disallowing anti-Christian bigotry on this site. ]

    Saint William,

    I’m sure you’ll be rewarded in Bloggers Heaven.

  17. What the Papers Say. Delroy.

    SMH.

    UN Climate Change. Bali. Must ACT, says person in charge. Name missed by me. Window of opp, 15 to 20 years.

    Observation, Lou Robson. Puts him at odds with John Howard, not Kevin. See Kyoto.

    Let’s see how the SMH reports this.

    The other papers have interesting stuff. New stem cell research. How execs milk even more money.

    Over to you.

  18. Solomon, NT.
    A 3 way local abc radio open forum was held today in Darwin.
    Damien Hale spoke well, the Green candidate (Nurse) was very clear and strong and Dave Tollner was unfortunately unable to do anything other than regurgitate party catch phrases. Hale would have strengthened his position further from this, was the concensus afterwards.
    Verdict– Nothing dramatic or “I’m hoping” — Ink in Solomon as a Labor gain on Saturday night.

  19. Just watched the 7.30 Report. I thought it was pretty impressive, especially the way Kerry exposed the fraud of Howard’s historical record, but I didn’t see the knockout blow that you guys saw.

    But O’Brien certainly won on points, and towards the end, he was playing with him like a cat with a mouse. The ethics line was brilliant.

    The problem with Howard is that he will never admit he’s wrong, even when the facts are laid out before him. He’ll simply lie to try to get out of it, as he did tonight on enterprise bargaining. That robs the viewer of the satisfaction of seeing him grovel; then again, there’s only so many times he can use the line ‘that’s for others to decide’. I’d like to see the little sh!t pinned down to the floor with his arm twisted up his back (metaphorically speaking, of course), forced to cry ‘Uncle!’ but I doubt if we ever will.

    Will be interesting to see Kerry up against Rudd. There’s a fair bit he can get Rudd on – especially the me-tooing – so he may come off just as poorly as Howard has. I have no objection to the me-tooing, btw. If he needs to do that to win the election, then go for it. But I don’t think Rudd will get an easier ride.

    Still, no matter. No one watches the program except people like us.

  23. No 1212

    The suburban solicitor moniker is not correct. He has worked for one of the most prestigious law firms in Australia, Mallesons Stephen Jacques, which is located in the CBD, as was his own smaller firm.

  24. I wish KOB had gone a little further with Howard on the 22% cash rate and the effect of having housing loans capped at 13%, like no money and businesses going bust. Still, nice work. The usual ‘Howard Hmm’ could be heard when the questions he didn’t like came up.

  25. [Ink in Solomon as a Labor gain on Saturday night.]

    Are you sure? I have it in pencil, but don’t know if I should go over the pencil with ink?

    I guess I could, I have some liquid paper that I can use to correct it if you are wrong.

  27. mad cow, agree there’s no reason in theory to discount “upside risk” on Labor.
    Howard is, however, so “uncool” (I’m not commenting on whether that’s a bad thing, just making a pop-culture observation) that you’d have to think the ranks of those who’ll vote for him, but won’t admit it, are likely to have led to some over-estimation of the Labor TPP.
    We will know soon!

  29. [The suburban solicitor moniker is not correct. He has worked for one of the most prestigious law firms in Australia, Mallesons Stephen Jacques, which is located in the CBD, as was his own smaller firm.]

    He also worked as an advisor to Clayton Utz when shadow minister for Industrial Relations. Since this is unparliamentary he was censured.

  31. [I’d like to see the little sh!t pinned down to the floor with his arm twisted up his back (metaphorically speaking, of course), forced to cry ‘Uncle!’ but I doubt if we ever will.]

    VBOTW, oh yes you will, about 8.45 EDST, you’ll get your wish!

  33. On the Nuclear Plants, lateline was talking about the USA companies GE etc eyeing off Australia as the prize market as the US is just building it s first Nuke Station in 29 years since the Three Mile “accident”

    Howard has 25 planned for Australia so can see why they are getting all excited.

    Lateline said that they cost about $7 billion dollars each to build, ie about $175 billion in total.

    Given that Turnball got slung a few back after the rainman company that got the $10 million dollar grant any info out there on the Nuke companies throwing a bit the libs way.

    I had a look on the donations website, biggest donor I could find was Free Enterprise company that slung a million the libs way.

    Anyone know who they are?

  34. Betamax:

    I voted for Hewson in 93 and he lost it in the last week of the campaign. Couldn’t answer the tough questions when it mattered most and I well remember when people who had previously wanted a change of government started getting cold feet about the new GST he was promising. There’s no such thing to scare people this time around.

  35. Betamax @ 1215, anything’s possible I guess.
    Hewson had gone off message a lot towards the end, though. And that “15% on everything” line from Keating, whilst basically a falsehood, was cutting through pretty well by election day.

  36. BTW– very amusing “local nt” start by the abc presenter.
    First the latest Cricket score had to be read out then a lead introduction from her that “the seat of Solomon is another one of those bellweather seats in this election”. Hmmmm, it has only existed for the previous 2 Federals so kinda true but it was very funny.
    Viva the Territory.

  37. No 1233

    It is a media and ALP furphy that the Coalition is going to build nuclear power plants.

    All Howard intends to do is to remove the legislative blocks on nuclear powerplants after which private companies can bid to build nuclear plants subject to all relevant safety regulations.

  38. VoterBoy – your more distant perspective is telling. Howard just looked like dishoenst smarmy lawyer and the stuff about denying the Keating IR record and moving on from history when ot made him look bad is transparently and shortsightedly tactical, and being tactical ends up leaving him exposed strategically – which is what has happened to his re-election chances. But of course no-one in the RW is watching the 7:30 report, Lateline, Insiders (apparently almost literally no-one except PBers actually watch the latter). They don’t give a rat’s. Which is why JWH will lose his!

    Apparently the FTSE is up. Has this continued? Is there blood around today? (Just wonder whether global economic meltdown is likely before Saturday night local).

  40. voterboy @1219, I love the way Kerry spoke about ‘ethics’ like he was engaging in a guilty pleasure. We were all having a great laugh at that point.

    Thing is, Howard has kept people in the ABC scared of really taking him to task over ethics. And the real joy in that interview was watching Kerry letting loose knowing he will never have to deal with Howard and his attitude to the ABC again.

    Oh happiness.. Oh joy!

  42. I think GP is right about about Howard’s pre-politics career, this “suburban solicitor” line was (I think) another Keating invention. Keating was brilliant at this stuff, made him dangerous because in the end people believed it even if it was wrong.

  44. [It is a media and ALP furphy that the Coalition is going to build nuclear power plants.

    All Howard intends to do is to remove the legislative blocks on nuclear powerplants after which private companies can bid to build nuclear plants subject to all relevant safety regulations.]

    Stop splitting hairs. You are saying they aren’t going to build power plants, they are just going to allow power plants to be built.

    This is the sort of mealy mouthed semantic garbage that has moved 1.5 million of your voters to Labor.

  46. A dashing young Downer in tights
    Took delight in delivering the frights
    Before TV reporters,
    All manner of voters,
    And even the League of Rights

  47. No 1240

    I don’t think so mad cow. Howard has been one of the most accessible Prime Ministers in history and he’s always willing to front up to the 7.30 report, Lateline and other mediums where appropriate.

  48. Swing Lowe @ 1195, thanks for link to Oz editorial. It’s not advocating a vote for Rudd, but it reads as if they expect him to win, as if they’re addressing the next PM.

Comments are closed.

Comments Page 25 of 27
1 … 24 25 26 27