Hot on the heels of their Pembroke by-election win, the latest EMRS poll provides a further shot in the arm for the Tasmanian Liberals. The survey of 864 voters finds them ahead of Labor for the first time since David Bartlett replaced Paul Lennon as Premier in May 2008. The Liberals are up five points to 41 per cent, while Labor have crashed eight to 35 per cent. The Greens have also benefited from Labor’s collapse, up four points to 21 per cent. The news from the preferred premier ratings is even better for the Liberals: Will Hogdman is up six points to 37 per cent, taking the lead for the first time from Bartlett who is down nine to 30 per cent. Greens leader Nick McKim is up two to 15 per cent. Electorate breakdowns are also provided, for those willing to take such small sample sizes seriously. Much more from Peter Tucker at Tasmanian Politics.
Impending anarchy in Tasmania eh?
What has caused this turn around?
[What has caused this turn around?]
Bob Brown and those pesky Greens and Gunns 🙂
There’s a lot of undecideds in this poll.
That seems to be a feature of EMRS polls, for some reason.
Come on, we finally have an exciting poll and no one can be bothered discussing it!
Even Frank’s so stunned he’s dropped the mung beans/tofu/broccoli rubbish for “pesky”.
[Even Frank’s so stunned he’s dropped the mung beans/tofu/broccoli rubbish for “pesky”.]
Gold.
Greens 21 Labor 35? The numbers are getting closer all the time…
[What has caused this turn around?]
Nobody really knows and correlation isn’t causation (etc) but my hunch is the whole Ritchie/Pembroke nepotism thing (and the subsequent by-election candidacy farce?) was close to the final straw for those who’d hoped that Bartlett Labor could clean up the mess of the Lennon days rather than being a second instalment of it.
[That seems to be a feature of EMRS polls, for some reason.]
Anyone know how much the major pollsters pay their polling staff and how long they tend to keep them for?
Note that this again seems to be a weighted poll with 249 sampled in Bass and 142 in Lyons but no indication that weighting has been applied to the results to properly correct for that. Especially inappropriate since Lyons is probably Labor’s best electorate and one of the Liberals’ worst. However, as a source of error it is swamped by the high “undecided” rate.
5
Maybe they ask whether the voters surveyed are sure? Absolutely sure?
As I said approximately on the previous thread.
The inclusion of Nick McKim is an argument for making Adele Carles leader of the Greens in WA so she can be in the preferred premier polling there.
This may be a rogue poll (ie, one of the one in twenty outside the confidence level) and we won’t know that until we see the next one. But I tend to agree with Kevin above: since Lennon took over in 2004 the Tasmanian public appear to have taken the Labor government on trust, and it could be, after many false calls, that they now no longer believe that premier Bartlett can right the ship. If that is the case, there is probably not too much Bartlett can do as people will stop listening or believing.
One problem the Liberals have had since they lost government in 1998 is having a leader that the voters would accept as an alternative premier. Bob Cheek was a disaster, Rene Hidding was completely in Jim Bacon’s shadow, and Young Will Hodgman has found it difficult to shake off the “nice guy” tag without being seen as premiership material. Maybe this poll (Hodgman leads Bartlett by nine points on the preferred premier score) and the Pembroke by-election win have changed that perception. Maybe – but we need to see a bit more before we can say that for sure.
But the Libs have had their best week for yonks and it would be Will’s shout down at the pub tonight, for sure.
More here: http://tasmanianpolitics.blogspot.com/2009/08/emrs-labor-25libs-33.html
Oh where did all the posts go? The SA thread has over 5 times as many!
Looks like the Libs are ahead now in every state bar Victoria and South Australia and look set to control the Northern Territory by the end of the week.
So much for the “Liberals can never win” crowd that frequent this site! I wonder what Possum has to say about this with his extrapolation / calculation / algebraic / geometric and statistical explanations as to why the centre-right is so doomed and why we’re set to live in some socialistic, enviro-nazi hell hole for the rest of our lives?
#13
Let’s just wait and see. NSW almost certain to go, but far too early to call somewhere like Queensland yet.
And Tassie will almost certainly end up a hung parliament on these figures.
13
Luck of the draw. Tasmania is smaller (but this does not explain the entire gap).
PF went:
[I wonder what Possum has to say about this with his extrapolation / calculation / algebraic / geometric and statistical explanations as to why the centre-right is so doomed and why we’re set to live in some socialistic, enviro-nazi hell hole for the rest of our lives?]
Nothing at all – if you’d been paying attention you’d know that State and Federal elections have non statistical relationship with each other at the party level.
The Coalition doesnt have the same problem at the State level that they do at the Fed level because of the electoral demography of the smaller sized seats.
Also they’re not up against Kevin Rudd, and they’re not led by a discredited windbag.
Guess we will have to wait to see if its a trend. If these results stay true i would think their problems would go deeper than Allison Ritchie.
Even latley they have been getting bad healines even when it probably isnt even entirely their fault. But i think Bartlett is a tool so I dont feel bad. Only in Tasmania could Labor get in trouble for the actions of a Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2009/07/30/87751_tasmania-news.html
The sale of public assets as the correlation in Queensland showed (even before the corruption scandals) that privatizations don’t end to well for Labor governments. Esp Tote Tasmania in this case the goose that lays the golden eggs.
I know most places are having electricity prices increased but Tasmania has very high electricity prices to begin with.
http://www.examiner.com.au/news/local/news/politics/aurora-payg-cost-rise-relief-promised/1578214.aspx
Public transport prices going up (and like electricity owned by the government ie get all the blame)
http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2009/07/31/87921_most-popular-stories.html
Lots of little thing i know but they add up. A First term government could probably get away with all of them easily but there is alot of baggage already. Add to that there is no real STRONG incumbent vote in Braddon the very marginal seat. Also to be fair unlike other state governments they don’t have 2pp results to wallpaper over the cracks in opinion polls!
# 17
Rudd’s a windbag and within a couple of years he’ll be just as if not more discredited. Make the most of your time in the sun while you can, mate.
He’s not a windbag, he’s a technocrat. There is a difference.
Worth noting that the poll period was Aug 3-5 and the Pembroke walloping occurred on Aug 1 (at least the primary vote part of it) so it is a particularly bad time for the poll to be taken from Labor’s perspective.
I suspect that has amplified the swing and it’s especially notable that Labor has taken big hits in Denison and Franklin where the Pembroke saga would have had the most attention (up north it has not had much press.)
Possum ignores the far simpler explanation of the electoral cycle. The one advanced by Mumble’s Peter Brent for some time now.
Rudd is at the beginning of the cycle. His state Labor counterparts at the end of it. The older a government gets, the worse its fortunes get. That’s all there is to it.
Arguments about demography don’t wash because it’s the exact same voters who vote at state and federal elections. Nor do specious red herrings like “smaller sized seats”; a particularly ironic line to advance in a thread about Tasmania.
I didnt ignore it – there’s just more too it then that, and the electoral cycle wasnt what I thought PF was on about.
The demographics do wash – break open some GIS software and look at how in the cities – where the Libs need to win in order to form government – the strong voting areas for the Coalition are relatively isolated. With larger Federal seats, that usually means that those isolated areas start to get washed out with more evenly divided booths as the seat boundaries, by necessity, expand beyond those Coalition dense areas. But the State seats are small enough to incorporate much tighter communities of interest, giving the Coalition more bang for buck from their metropolitan electoral geography.
That gives the Coalition in Sydney and Melbourne a larger proportion of base seats to work off.
Then it’s swinging voters for the rest – which is where the electoral cycle kicks in.
But this has nothing to do with Tasmania – but that’s not what PF was talking about either with his jibe.
one day i’ll learn to do brief blog posts.
http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2009/08/new-emrs-opinion-poll-in-tasmania.html
Possum – of course that’s what PF was talking about. Anyone who asserts that the next Liberal Prime Minister hasn’t yet graduated from high school is ignoring the historically cyclical nature of Australian politics.
And the Liberal vote only looks isolated because their overall vote wasn’t strong enough. They won 47.3% of the 2PP vote in 2007 which isn’t going to win an election an any boundaries. Get that vote up and the seats will take care of themselves.
[Anyone who asserts that the next Liberal Prime Minister hasn’t yet graduated from high school is ignoring the historically cyclical nature of Australian politics.]
You’re taking snark too literally!
The point of that whole series was demonstrating how once safe Liberal seats are turning contestable as a consequence of demographic change which the electoral cycle then sits on top of. People arent mindless automatons that go “ooh we voted that way, now we’ll vote this way” like some bunch of Swiss clocks! More complicated stuff happens around and within the cycle.
Take the geography around the 2007 seat of North Sydney as the perfect example. That area has had strong demographic change for 3 Census running, and is turning naturally into a contestable seat at the Federal level. Yet that area is too big to be a single state seat, so what happens is that same area get’s split into at least two State seats with a few surrounding areas included regardless of how the state boundaries are drawn or will be drawn in the future.
When the political cycle is ALP, North Sydney Federally will be an ALP seat unless the boundaries massively change, when the cycle runs to the Libs it will become a Lib seat.
But previously, it was never a contestable seat.
Now look at the same thing at the State level. The State seat that takes in the Northern and Eastern areas of that geography will be for the foreseeable future a Liberal seat regardless of the political cycle, while the State seat that takes in the Southern areas will become contestable.
So when the political cycle swings to the ALP it will be 1 seat to Labor, 1 seat to the Libs (assuming for arguments sake that two seats envelope that North Sydney area), but when the cycle moves to the Libs it gives them 2 to the ALP’s zero.
At the State level, with the tighter boundaries, the Libs get the benefit of their clustered metro geography that they don’t receive at the Federal level with larger boundaries.
But 20 years ago it would have been 2 zip to the Libs at State and 1 to the Libs Federally for any arbitrary election.
That’s how the demography changes.
For the Libs to win, they can’t rely on people of a certain age to continue to push them over the line in tight elections and give them big seat hauls at the top of their cycle like they have done for over 30 years.
They have to get people under 65 to vote for them in proportions that they have always struggled to achieve (with the below 65 group).
I’m sure they’ll figure it out one day. But they have to restructure their politics to do it in a way the Liberal Party has never really had to before.
# 24:
You don’t need to. Your posts make for interesting reading, IMHO. The longer the better
# 25:
D W, that is what I was saying (except I put a more facetious tilt to it).
Politics in Australia is basically cyclical. There are variables that can alter this, however. Splits can leave major parties in the doldrums for a very long time (eg the Great Labor split), as can electoral barriers through gerrymandering (eg South Australia up until the 70s and Queensland).
For many years people used the same arguments that posters here resort to when discussing the UK Tories post Major. As demonstrated there, things can and will turn around eventually.
Canada typifies a liberal-democratic electoral system that, unlike Australia, is slanted towards a main party (the Canadian Liberals). As long as Quebec is part of Canada, the Conservatives will be at a significant electoral disadvantage.
Don’t agree at all with you on North Sydney Possum. I agree entirely with you about a problem the Liberal Party has with demography. It has exactly the same problem the Tories had after losing the 1997 UK election. Once the grip on the mortgage belt was lost, the party’s core base was suddenly older voters.
But unless North Sydney moves west of Pittwater Road in Gladesville, it will stay a safe Liberal seat for some time to come. There may be lots of young people in rental accomodation in the seat, but they all come from upper north shore homes. Rule number one of renting property on leaving hom in Sydney, no-one crosses the harbour bridge. You won’t find young riff-raff from the western suburbs renting property in North Sydney, so the young people moving into North Sydney are more conservative than young people in general. And even the big Chinese community around Chatswood is very different from the pockets you find in other areas like Strathfield and Hurstville.
[You’re taking snark too literally!]
No, not at all. Because whilst the Coalition is likely to be out of power for some time, I doubt it’s likely to be a much different length of time to the last two oppositions. (13 and 11 and a half years respectively.) You’re confusing cyclical problems for deep-seated ones.
Your analysis of electoral boundaries is uninteresting because there’s no evidence they gerrymander in the way that you imply. The federal coalition’s problem is their lack of votes, not the distribution of them.
Furthermore, I never asserted that the political geography is static. Of course it isn’t. But changing demography goes both ways. Labor under Rudd won Dawson and Bennelong for the first time, but at the same time failed to win back Keating Labor seats like Dunkley and Hughes.
SNIP: See article 2 of comment moderation guidelines – The Management.
Antony – when I look at the broad North Sydney area with the census at the Statistical Local Area level (which for others interested is the smallest effective level the census data is collated at) , as you move from one census to the next, you see quite strong change in some of those SLAs in the South end of the seat – and even though ( and I completely agree with you) a lot of that movement is from the Naw Shaw and the like (which the Census data verifies) – not all of it is. And it seems to be that small, grinding change that is walking almost hand in glove with the changes in the voting patterns in those booths at Southern end of the seat.
The same pattern is happening in Wentworth at the western and southern ends (although the base the change is coming off is slightly different) – and again in parts of Ryan in Brisbane.And the changing demographics at the SLA level seem to be slowly but surely expanding – I guess following some of the redevelopment corridors and general population churn from older money to new.
Something that I’ve found interesting of late is the way that as population density increases, it changes voting patterns permanently. In previous decades, some of that benefited the Libs and some benefited Labor (and none of it ever benefited the Nats one little bit). But if you look at areas over the last ten years where the population density has increased, the change in voting patters in those places has nearly always benefited Labor – the difference now seems to be whether it benefits the ALP a little or a lot (or increasingly whether it benefits the Greens).
David,
It’s not like this sort of thing has never happened before. Labor used to be strong in a fairly large number of country areas – then demographics changed. The Nats used to hold outer metro seats – then demographics changed.Changing demography does go both ways – but it’s moving much stronger against the Coalition than they are getting back anywhere else.
And the reason for that is pretty simply – a generation of people vote for the Coalition at higher rates than the rest of the population and always have done so. They are now dying and becoming smaller as a total proportion of the population and Libs havent replaced them with anyone else.
That’s where the total vote changes – the composition, like the inner city seat issue for instance, is where the distribution of the consequences comes into play, and that distribution still exists regardless of the where the electoral cycle happens to be at.
Possum,
Are you concluding that the Liberals were ” pre Baby Boomer” phenomenon that have exhausted their life expectancy.
[Changing demography does go both ways – but it’s moving much stronger against the Coalition than they are getting back anywhere else.]
In other words, much more places swung to Labor than the Coalition in 2007. Duh. That’s the cycle. Any demographic movements to the Coalition would’ve been swamped by the national swing to Labor in 2007.
One example of a seat where demographics have shifted in Labor favour is Corangamite. But look at the 2004 election result: it didn’t swing at all. For the fairly straightforward reason that any underlying shift towards Labor would’ve been counterbalanced by the national swing against Labor.
No David – it’s not about the 2007 election. We can remove the 2007 results and look simply at those from 91, 93, 96, 98, 01 and 04 and track the census changes over the same period to see the same pattern.
The 2007 result didnt actually do anything new on the demographic front – it simply continued on what had been happening for 20 years underneath the electoral cycle.
Where it happens at most obviously is the booth level rather than the seat level, although the changes in some of the inner city seats at the booth level are certainly, collectively strong enough to manifest as obvious changes at the seat level.
Greeny – the Libs will be fine as long they change their politics to accomodate the changes in the population.
But think about what that actually means? The next Liberal Party that sits on the benches will be much more different to Howard than either Rudd was to Keating, or Hawke was to Whitlam.
Large planks of what the Party is effectively (rather than rhetorically) built upon now will be jettisoned. The process to do that will probably cause a level of grief similar to that of the DLP for Labor.
[No David – it’s not about the 2007 election. We can remove the 2007 results and look simply at those from 91, 93, 96, 98, 01 and 04 and track the census changes over the same period to see the same pattern.]
Except if you stop at 2004, then you get a strong movement to the Coalition over that period of time.
[The 2007 result didnt actually do anything new on the demographic front – it simply continued on what had been happening for 20 years underneath the electoral cycle.]
Underneath the electoral cycle? Huh? Ohhhh I see… so a Coalition govt is merely the fluctuations of the electoral cycle but a Labor govt is the natural order of things. Right.
[Where it happens at most obviously is the booth level rather than the seat level, although the changes in some of the inner city seats at the booth level are certainly, collectively strong enough to manifest as obvious changes at the seat level.]
Um Possum, it was you who introduced the seat level analysis as an attempt to explain the difference between the Coalition’s federal and state level prospects.
[Except if you stop at 2004, then you get a strong movement to the Coalition over that period of time.]
No you dont actually – that’s the point! You dont get a strong movement to the Coalition in the places where the age and income demographics are shifting. They continued to shift regardless of what the larger electorate did – they certainly shifted in a statistically significant fashion over that period as a trend controlling for the wider swing at both the State and National level.
The reason I used seats way back yonder is because those particular seats all have a large enough number of areas undergoing this shift within them to change the overall seat results – making it easier to explain.
But it’s actually happening in a lot of smaller areas within seats all over the metro areas, where you have to use SLA’s and their local booths to see the pattern – but where in most seats ‘other stuff’ swamps it at the larger seat level.
Electoral cycles come and go – but if you think that’s all there is, you’re whistling dixie.
We’re going around in circles Possum. Of course if you isolate areas where the demographics are shifting in Labor’s favour, you’ll find the voting habits shifting in Labor’s favour. There is nothing profound in that observation.
But as Patrick correctly stated, the fact that the Coalition is now polling ahead of Labor in several states makes a mockery of the claim that demographics have consigned the conservatives to electoral oblivion. That’s the point that you have failed to adequately respond to.
28
So Sydney Harbour is rather like the Yarra politically then. Except that the Yarra is becoming less of a boundary with gentrification in the inner Northern and Western suburbs.
Just to belatedly go back to Tasmania…this is a fascinating poll and great news for those who like following elections! Nothing partisan necessarily, but it just makes things less predictable. Certainly I would think that Pembroke is a sign of one of the most substantial shifts/events in Tasmanian politics for the past decade. The Liberals being perceived to be competitive again is a huge change in the dynamic of Tasmanian politics and opens up the competition for those “majority government undecideds”. In the past they were always going to go back to Labor but the Libs growing credibility (extrapolating from Pembroke, which I think is fair enough) means (as others have said) that they can’t just bang on about majority government. It’s hard to see them engaging properly in the issue though, it’s just too fraught for them given past statements. Big test of Will H. is how he can manage the issue, as it’s in his interests to neutralise it rather than big it up as Rene Hidding did.
If Tasmania gets a hung parliament then what are the chances on an increase back to 35 being negotiated?
I’d think pretty low. I haven’t lived in Tasmania for a couple of years so the dynamics might be changing. There seem to be more people saying that the reduction was not a good move in hindsight, but that is very different to moving to increase the numbers. Everyone is happy to talk about the lack of talent and depth on the backbench (which seems to only have 1 or 2 people in it!) but there’s a bit of a disconnect in the public mind between that and (shock) increasing the number of MPs. I’d suspect that many people in the major parties would view it as a good idea but it’s not good PR to say so. If the Libs can remain competitive and the Greens vote doesn’t fall then it might change after a few elections. To have majority Government with the Greens getting 3-4 seats it means one big party has to restrict the other to 8 or 9 just to get a bare majority. It’s happened recently, but if it is to continue it requires big see-saws in votes between the majors (possible if undecideds just hate the Greens) or for the Libs to stay down forever. Ironically, a parliament of 35 would make a hung parliament less likely now as the Greens would still get 1 in each seat basically (give or take one in maybe Denison or Braddon) so the majors could be closer and still end up with someone having a majority.
Sorry folks – when I was banging on about SLA’s back there, I actually meant CCD’s.
Been working with SLAs lately so much that they’re apparently driving me batty.
[Of course if you isolate areas where the demographics are shifting in Labor’s favour, you’ll find the voting habits shifting in Labor’s favour. There is nothing profound in that observation.]
Which is half the story – the other half being that there is no counterweight movement elsewhere that balances this shift out for the Coalition, making it a net loss to them.
[But as Patrick correctly stated, the fact that the Coalition is now polling ahead of Labor in several states makes a mockery of the claim that demographics have consigned the conservatives to electoral oblivion. That’s the point that you have failed to adequately respond to.]
The States are a good example of how the pollitical fallout of demographic change works.
While in Sydney and Melbourne the smaller electoral boundaries allow the tightly clustered Coalition voting population to provide a larger number of rock solid seats, the increasing number of contested areas driven by demographic change makes it hard for the Coalition to win when their politics hasnt changed.
It’s already provided the NSW government with at least 1 term more than the electoral cycle suggested should be the norm. In Qld it’s two election victories and counting, in Victoria it will be another one as well.
It’s not that the Coalition can never win – it’s that they’ll win less often, that they will find it increasingly harder to win without a shift in their politics to focus on a new majority of the population, a majority which contains people that have never voted for them before.
I’m surprised anybody finds this rocket science. When you have a chunk of the population that has always voted at least 60/40 for the Coalition (those currently aged over 65) slowly reduce in population weight as they die off, unless those replacing this population vote at the same level, the overall vote for the Coalition structurally declines.
Those replacing this population do not vote 60/40 for the COalition. No other cohort votes anywhere near 60/40 for the Coalition.Even though those people moving into their 60’s now are increasing their Coalition vote as they get older, it’s coming off a much lower base than the generation before them – again, leading to a net loss for the Coalition.
Electoral cycles come and go – but the magnitude of the voter shift accompanying that cycle operates on top of a rusted on base vote for each side where the actual outcome is always base vote + electoral cycle shift.
If you have a higher base vote, you get higher TPP outcomes. If you have a declining base vote, you expect declining TPP outcomes.
The latter is what the Coalition have to deal with.
Anyway – I’m out, sorry to clog up your thread Bilbo.
Social change in Australia favours Labor: urbanisation, decline of Anglo popualtion, increasing education levels, women in the workforce etc. its the opposite of the 50s and 50s when social change worked against Labor. Similar story with the democrats in the US. Cyclical trends and political contingencies are overlaid on this trend, the Liberals can win, just as Labor might have won in 1954 and 1961, but it is more difficult for them than Labor.
“Which is half the story – the other half being that there is no counterweight movement elsewhere that balances this shift out for the Coalition, making it a net loss to them”
But there is counterweight movement, surely? Look at seats like Hughes, Macarthur, Aston, Latrobe, Dunkley, Cowan, Moore, Robertson…..seats that were held by Labor when last in office but were retained (or JUST lost) by the Liberals in 2007.
Sure – it doesnt balance though. A little of one doesnt balance a lot of the other.
And as I’ve mentioned before….EXACTLY the same arguments were raised about Labor after 2001 and especially 2004:
Shrinking demographics, ageing population favours the conservative parties, ‘heartland’ seats turning Liberal, a left-wing trade union party is out of touch iwith 21st century Australia………
I thought it was bulldust then, and I think the same arguments applied to the Coalition are bulldust now.
[And as I’ve mentioned before….EXACTLY the same arguments were raised about Labor after 2001 and especially 2004:]
Yeah, but only by journalists – you might as well be quoting stuff that you heard down the pub.
Do the math MDM – there was a chunk of the population that never voted Coalition less than 60/40. That group is shrinking and is being replaced by groups that don’t vote the same way, groups that have never voted even remotely close to that level of Coalition support.
Where that demographic change falls is where it starts to get complicated – but the actual change itself is what it is.
If your argument is that the core vote for the Liberals is shrinking, then I agree. But I’d submit that the core vote for both major parties is falling, not just the Liberals. The fact that you saw mortgage belt voters strongly back Howard yet give state Labor thumping majorities does suggest people are less rusted on than they once were.
Perhaps Labor’s position in government (state and fed) masks the weakness of their core vote- we saw under both Keating and Howard that swinging voters who back the government are mistakenly viewed as the party’s “heartland” voters. Maybe this is what gives the impression of a stronger core Labor vote?
bob1234
Posted Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 2:29 pm //….He’s not a windbag, he’s a technocrat. There is a difference….”
I think you underestimate Rudd. He is much, much tougher and far more disciplined than most people realize.