Victorian federal redistribution and other tales

In the event that we do face an election sooner rather than later, one difficulty Labor will have to factor in is what looks like an unfavourable redistribution in Victoria, draft boundaries of which were released during the election campaign. Despite the fact that the number of electorates in the state has not changed, the redistribution commissioners propose a radical overhaul that will abolish the rural electorate of Murray and create the new electorate of Burke in Melbourne’s northern outskirts. While this involves the abolition of a safe Liberal seat and the creation of a new one with a notional Labor margin of 10.8 per cent (as calculated by Antony Green on the basis of the 2007 results), knock-on effects make Corangamite and Deakin notionally Liberal, and McEwen (newly acquired by Labor at the recent election) very safely so.

According to the redistribution commissioners, the sweeping changes have been deemed necessary because relative population decline has made it unfeasible to preserve the existing northern regional trio of Murray, Mallee and Indi. However, this has been disputed in a highly critical submission from Tim Colebatch, a senior journalist for The Age, who calculates that one-in-six Victorian voters will be transferred to different electorates. Colebatch complains there has been a failure to account for future growth in outer suburbs and the inner city, which in partisan terms will mean bloated enrolments in nine Labor seats by 2018 and deficient ones in four middle suburban Liberal seats. It is tempting to speculate the commissioners have been influenced by the fact that redistributions of New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia turned Labor’s 83 seats from the 2007 election into a notional total of 88.

However, another submission from Jenni Newton-Farrelly of the South Australian Parliamentary Library reaches a very different conclusion. Newton-Farrelly has brought to the process her jurisdiction’s enthusiasm for electoral fairness, with reference to margins she has calculated from both the 2007 election and preliminary results from 2010. When these are adjusted to a 50-50 two-party outcome, Labor is found to receive more than its fair share: 20 seats to 17, with no margin in any seat lower than 1.4 per cent. On the results from the recent election, Newton-Farrelly finds the Liberals would have won Corangamite by 0.8 per cent and McEwen by 6.6 per cent, while Labor would have gained Aston by 1.5 per cent.

Elsewhere:

• Antony Green crunches the numbers from seven electorates where there were only Labor, Liberal and Greens candidates and finds “little difference between the 2010 preference flows and the flows in the same seats at the 2007 election”. This comes as a profound shock, as we were repeatedly warned not to trust two-party opinion poll results based on exactly this assumption. Dennis Shanahan of The Australian, for example, wrote on August 2 that Labor’s primary vote had fallen into “the fatal zone below 40 per cent, where the party has only a slight hope of winning, and then based only on heroic assumptions about the results and the delivery of Greens preferences”. I like to think that the moral of this story is that even in this jaded and cynical age, heroism can sometimes still win the day.

• Amusingly, Labor has pulled ahead at the time of writing on the AEC’s meaningless national two-party vote figure, which excludes results from eight electorates. In the past few days I have heard Andrew Bolt, Barnaby Joyce, Kerry Chikarovski and Kenneth Wiltshire (no doubt there were many others) use the progress score on this count to assert that the Coalition had won, which is very clearly untrue. As Peter Brent of Mumble points out, it is almost certain that the complete figures which will be available in a few weeks’ time will show Labor the winner, by however narrow a margin. Smarter Coalition operatives have been limiting their pitch to the perfectly reasonable observation that the Liberal and National parties won “more votes and seats” than Labor.

• In the comments thread from the Mumble post linked to above, Peter Brent tells a reader that “Newspolls will take a breather for a little while”. Speaking of Newspoll, here’s an exchange from Sunday’s edition of Insiders:

Barrie Cassidy: (The Australian) ran the results of a poll on Saturday, not talking about individual seast but country-wide, that more people were in favour of a minority Labor government than a minority Coalition government. Now Glenn, you’ve had some experience with this, they actually polled a week ago and published six days later. That’s unusual, isn’t it?

Glenn Milne: Well, it’s clear they didn’t like the poll results.

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.

3,234 comments on “Victorian federal redistribution and other tales”

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  1. centaur

    [I agree with Fred Nile that Burqas should be banned from pornography sites.]

    But you need to check the porn sites about 200,000 times just to make sure that it’s a problem.

  2. Andrew

    Did you consider that maybe Oakshott played it this way as a way to diffuse the hostility from the Libs. Imagine if he was abrupt and unapologetic about his decision, the Libs would have behaved even more feral than they did.

  3. thanks for the update b_g – isn’t there some tendency for people to misreport how they voted at the previous election though … particularly a bias towards the eventual winner?

  4. Well this says everything you need to know about f2f morgan polls:

    “Analysis of ‘past vote’ — how respondents claimed they voted at the recent Federal election shows, ALP (42.5%, 4.5% higher than actual ALP vote recorded at the 2010 Federal election) cf. L-NP (39%, 4.5% lower than the L-NP vote recorded at the 2010 Federal election).

    “The difference between the reported ‘past vote’ and the actual election result can be due to either — a Labor biased sample, or by an unwillingness of the part of respondents to admit to voting L-NP. This latter problem has been noted in previous polls over many years. Regardless of the reason for the difference, if the Morgan Poll is weighted correctly for ‘past vote,’ the estimate would be 50:50, exactly the same as the special SMS Morgan Poll conducted on Wednesday/Thursday this week.

  5. [Its F2F but still a nice number. Lets say that again

    Labor (54.5%) surges to lead ahead of L-NP (45.5%)]

    And morgan does it again…. the 1 poll before the election suddenly comes in alignment with all the other polls, while every other poll they have done for the last 3 years has been Labor biased.

    Can someone please explain to me why they only get it right just before the election

  7. [ 1. None of you have dealt with the censorship question I raised. Why not? ]

    I’ll deal with it, I think censorship is wrong. Criminal law is the correct avenue in the cases of exploitation. People have a right to view whatever they want unless someone/something has been harmed or exploited in the making or acquisition.

  9. JAMES J – I think quite a few people are probably a bit embarrassed about mentioning that they voted for Tony. I would be after his recent performance.

  10. [Labor (54.5%) surges to lead ahead of L-NP (45.5%)
    Before Rural Independents Oakeshott & Windsor deliver a Gillard Government]
    Looks like the unhinged one has had his one day in the sun.

  11. Why would people be too “shy” to admit they will vote for the Coalition but wouldn’t be too shy to admit they voted for the Coalition?

  12. The censorship argument is a red herring as well as a straw man.

    It’s already illegal to watch kiddie porn etc. They can catch people if they want to.

  14. [Finns – It’s not costing you a cent. I’m in my private practice.]

    Diog, it wasnt me, it was my amigo GG. i was simply asking about your well being :kiss:

  17. wasnt 7 who publised morgan lead up to election
    ok whos going to send it to riley

    and their abc will it still important

    will it be

    Breaking news. and bomb shell

  19. Maybe the 4.5% difference in how people thought they had voted.. people who dont take how-to-votes and others may just have got it wrong on their ballot paper. And judging by those test results, they were probably mostly in WA and QLD.
    🙂

  20. [And morgan does it again…. the 1 poll before the election suddenly comes in alignment with all the other polls, while every other poll they have done for the last 3 years has been Labor biased.]
    Morgan isn’t the only polling organisation that does this.

  22. [Posted Friday, September 10, 2010 at 3:53 pm | Permalink
    If you want to see the Morgan Poll report in the OO tomorrow look in the Obituaries section]

    now how many years have you had mrs bk in stitches lol.

  23. F2F Morgan polls have been entirely discredited. Now Morgan himself admits it’s got serious problems and gives us the numbers to confirm it. Why do they keep bothering with it?

  24. Diogs,

    “The censorship argument is a red herring as well as a straw man”.

    Is this an answer to that well known jibe that “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”?

  25. [I wonder if the coalition are keen to go back to the Polls.]

    One of the independents seem to think so and they said it was one of their main reasons for not going Lib.

    The media seemed to have got their panties in a knot about the independents not wanting to go Lib because they would probably win an election. My interpretation however was that the Indie was worried the coalition would WANT their government to fail to force another election as soon as possible.

  27. [Itep – we’ll take 2pts off for that and we’re still ahead.]

    From memory, the bias has been assessed to be in the range of 4 points. I prefer to just think of them as unreliable in general.

  28. [now how many years have you had mrs bk in stitches lol.]
    She sometimes doesn’t quite get my sense of humour but we’ve had 41 great years together.

  32. [I do need a new stylus for my aging turntable, does anyone know where they can be bought? So much vinyl going to waste.]

    Ari, buy a new TT, it comes with a new stylus

  34. If we expect maturity from the media it would be good to show it here.

    What do we know about this Morgan Poll

    1) Its face to face and most experts seem to agree this is not the most accurate method.

    2) Its answer on the one question that is related to fact (how you voted last time) is not in line with reality and when corrected back to reality the poll gives a 50-10 result on the 2PP now.

    3) There is no reason why the poll would have moved so quickly in any case – the independent hadn’t decided and Tone was at his hinged best.

    All in all lets call it rogue and keep our powder dry for a poll we can really celebrate. Otherwise we could be like the child who cried wolf.

  35. al paster

    if Julia calls another election. There will be leaks!! Actually, I wonder if the leaks occurred as a result of phone tapping. After all it seems to be endemic according to those in the UK.

  36. Stop The Cracks – No: 2

    Now, what do i use?

    [Labor (54.5%) surges to lead ahead of L-NP (45.5%)
    Before Rural Independents Oakeshott & Windsor deliver a Gillard Government]

  39. I wonder about Rudd hanging around in the background. It will be interesting to see if in the next few years assuming Gillard’s government starts flailing if he doesn’t make a challenge for leadership.

    Afterall he can hold no blame for Labors near election loss, yet can claim credit for their decisive win in 2007.

  41. [Its face to face and most experts seem to agree this is not the most accurate method.]

    i never understand why thats so, its the only poll i have ever been polled on
    some time ago and was completely honest

  42. I’ll bet Oakeshotts first words will be:” Thank you. I have decided to accept Prime Minister Gillard’s offer of a Ministry. I hope that offer will be the Ministry for Regional Development – but that is the PM’s call”.
    He will accept, and won’t stuff around. He will have been counselled.

  43. Looking at pictures of the big fire near San Francisco it struck me as strange that in fire-prone areas the Americans persist in usuing that strange particle board method of construction.

  44. 3038: Why should they report it? It’s clearly not reliable. There’s a pretty good reason why Morgan hasn’t been taken seriously by the media for a decade now.

  46. [All in all lets call it rogue and keep our powder dry for a poll we can really celebrate. Otherwise we could be like the child who cried wolf]

    ah but its nice to see a few red faces

  50. Finns

    [I was simply asking about your well being :kiss: ]

    Today I discovered that it isn’t a good idea to make jokes about Dr Patel with doctors of Indian background. I’m a bad boy.

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