| # | % | Swing | 2PP (proj.) | Swing | |
| Ahmed (IND) | 1160 | 4.2% | |||
| Fenn (FFP) | 830 | 3.0% | |||
| Schorel-Hlavka (IND) | 64 | 0.2% | |||
| Nolte (IND) | 1293 | 4.7% | |||
| Perkins (IND) | 140 | 0.5% | |||
| Kanis (ALP) | 9221 | 33.3% | -2.3% | 51.4% | -4.8% |
| Collyer (IND) | 161 | 0.6% | |||
| O’Connor (IND) | 153 | 0.6% | |||
| Murphy (DLP) | 525 | 1.9% | |||
| Toscano (IND) | 205 | 0.7% | |||
| Mayne (IND) | 1308 | 4.7% | |||
| Borland (IND) | 203 | 0.7% | |||
| Whitehead (IND) | 168 | 0.6% | |||
| Patten (SEX) | 1822 | 6.6% | 3.7% | ||
| Oke (GRN) | 10072 | 36.4% | 4.5% | 48.6% | 4.8% |
| Bengtsson (AC) | 345 | 1.2% | |||
| TOTAL | 27670 | ||||
| Booths counted | 14 out of 14 | ||||
| Votes counted | 61.6% of enrolled voters | ||||
Monday
Rechecking and a little over 400 more postal votes have nudged Labor’s lead up from 754 to 772. Here’s a piece I had in Crikey yesterday:
Notwithstanding the Greens’ unduly stubborn refusal to concede defeat, it is beyond doubt that Labor is over the line in the Melbourne byelection. Its candidate, Jennifer Kanis, holds a 754-vote lead over Cathy Oke of the Greens, with only a few thousand votes outstanding and the tide of late counting running in Labor’s favour.
The result has surprised election watchers, national newspapers and, most memorably, Sportsbet, which went a step too far with its regular publicity stunt of paying out on sure-thing election results before the actual event.
As is often the case in byelections, there are enough intricacies in the result to allow interested parties to craft narratives to suit, be they Christopher Pyne comparing Labor-versus-Greens apples with Labor-versus-Coalition oranges, or Adam Bandt claiming a slight rise in primary vote share meant the electorate had “gone green”.
My own take on the result is that the Greens fell victim to an unexpectedly strong determination of Liberal supporters to deprive them of their votes.
One recourse was absenteeism, which saw turnout slump from 86.9% at the 2010 general election to no more than 67%. Another was informal voting, the rate of which shot up from 3.8% to 8.7%. Given the intensity of media interest, and the electorate’s high levels of educational attainment and civic engagement, these are remarkable figures.
Clearly some Liberal supporters managed to struggle their way through the ballot paper, but few seem to have given their support directly to the Greens, who have actually polled about 750 votes fewer than at the state election. That they were able to increase their overall share probably has more to do with relatively high turnout among their supporters than votes shifting in their favour.
Liberal votes instead scattered among the crowded field of minor candidates, of whom the best performers were Fiona Patten of the Australian S-x Party (6.6%), Stephen Mayne (4.7%), conservative independent David Nolte (4.7%) and the three Christian parties (6% combined), all of whom showed at least some tendency to poll most strongly where the Liberal vote had been highest in the past. Reflecting the pattern of Liberal preferences when they were directed against the Greens in 2010, these votes (which would have included a share of left-leaning supporters of Patten and Mayne) flowed about 60-40 to Labor.
Past state byelections had given the Greens cause to expect better. When the Liberals sat out the Marrickville byelection in inner-city Sydney in 2005, the Greens vote shot up 10.5%. In the Western Australian seat of Fremantle in 2009, Adele Carles claimed the seat for the Greens in the absence of a Liberal candidate by adding 16.5% to the party’s primary vote — and turnout actually increased.
That things were so different in Melbourne may well suggest that conservative voters are feeling more hostile to the Greens than they were a few years ago.
The result also fits a pattern of the Greens underperforming at state level in Victoria relative to federally. When Bandt won the federal seat of Melbourne in 2010, he polled 37.6% in the booths covered by the state electorate. This was almost exactly what Oke polled on Saturday, when the Liberals’ 28% share of the vote was up for grabs, and well above the 31.9% they polled at the 2010 state election. While this may partly reflect the fact that the hot-button issues for the Greens are most salient at federal level, it could equally be a reflection on a state parliamentary party that lacks a strong media performer.
As for Labor, while it can’t take too much joy at having dropped 3000 votes from the general election, it has room certainly for relief and perhaps even a flicker of satisfaction. Its primary vote has fallen 2.4%, which is about what pseph blogger Poliquant calculates as par for the course at byelections where the Liberals don’t field a candidate.
It is also clear that the 4.2% vote for independent Berhan Ahmed came largely at Labor’s expense, having been concentrated in a small number of booths where the Labor vote was correspondingly down (Stephen Mayne relates that Labor received about 80% of his preferences).
Certainly there are bad signs for Labor in the result as well, but they are nothing it didn’t already know about: that half its primary vote in Melbourne has vanished over the past decade, and that it is becoming increasingly reliant on preferences in stitching victories together. However, it has equally been reminded that such victories can indeed be achieved, and that however calamitous things might be for it in Queensland and New South Wales, in Victoria the ship remains more or less afloat.
Sunday
Apologies for the Crikey-wide outage that appeared to kick in at about 11.30 last night. The VEC has announced on Twitter there are only 1000 postal votes to come, although it would surprise me if the current count of 3728 pre-poll votes were the final story, given there were 6268 of them in 2010. However, even if there are a few thousand votes still outstanding, they will offer the Greens no prospect of overcoming a 754-vote Labor lead that will widen further with the addition of the remaining postals.
I have reset the above table so it just shows raw results, in doing so removing what was projected as a 0.5% lead to the Greens. This reflected a 6.7% swing to the Greens on booth votes, compared with an overall margin of 6.2% from 2010. The projection went on to be buried by the addition of 3000 postal votes, which the VEC unusually decided to get stuck into on election night (together with 3728 pre-polls, which behaved more in line with the polling booth votes and thus made little difference to the overall picture). The postals split 59.6-40.4 Labor’s way, and while this actually represented a swing to the Greens of 1.6% compared with postals in 2010, the effect was to drag the overall swing below 5%. Another factor was that the Greens did extremely well on absent votes in 2010, which by-elections don’t have.
Labor’s win has come as a surprise to me, and I know I’m not alone in pseph-dom in this count. I had expected to see a pattern similar to that in the 2009 by-election for Fremantle, which had supported Labor, Liberal and the Greens in similar proportions to Melbourne in the past, and where homeless Liberals appeared to fall in behind Labor’s rival by way of taking a kick at the main enemy. Besides the result, the most radical difference between the two elections was turnout. Very unusually for a by-election, turnout in Fremantle (which I am measuring in terms of formal votes cast) actually increased, from 79.6% to 83.5%. Even on a favourable projection, turnout in Melbourne appears to have slumped from 83.7% to around 63%, a result interestingly similar to the South Brisbane by-election held a few months ago to replace Anna Bligh.
This makes it instructive to consider the election in terms of raw numbers of votes rather than percentages. There are roughly 45,000 voters on the Melbourne electoral roll, of whom about 7500 can be expected not to vote at a general election. Normally this could be expected to increase at a by-election to around 11,000, but this time it shot up to 15,000. No doubt Liberal voters were over-represented here, and its tempting to contemplate how different things might have been if the Greens had chosen a candidate as attractive to Liberal supporters as Adele Carles proved to be in Fremantle. However, it should not be assumed that the collapse in turnout can be entirely understood in terms of Liberals sitting it out, as there were also 3000 fewer votes for Labor as well as 750 fewer for the Greens.
Liberal voters made their impact felt in a a 7500-vote increase for “others”, most of which was garnered by (religious) conservatives and liberals. The latter were particularly prevalent around the CBD, where the Liberals have a considerable constituency. The standout example was David Nolte, who polled around 10% in Docklands and East Melbourne and also at the university end of Carlton, but very weakly elsewhere. Another independent with strong localised support was African community leader Berhan Ahmed, who polled 15.9% in Hotham Hill, 10.5% in Carlton and 10.1% in Flemington, but only 4.2% overall. There was a corresponding drop in the Labor primary vote in these booths. The other minor candidates to recover their deposits will be Fiona Patten of the Australian Sex Party, who is on 6.6% overall and reached double figures in and around the CBD, and Stephen Mayne, who failed to crack 5% but has a notable base of support in East Melbourne (11.3%).
Saturday
11.22pm. While I’ve had my eye off the ball, the VEC has caught me off guard by adding huge numbers of postal (3066) and pre-poll (3975) votes, the former of which have, as far as I’m concerned, decided the result for Labor. Labor has received 1702 postals to just 1156 for the Greens, a split of 59.5-40.5: 1702 (59.5%) to 1156 (40.5%). Pre-polls have slightly favoured the Greens, 1914 (51.3%) to 1814 (48.7%), but the overall result is an unassailable lead 754-vote (1.4%) to Labor.
8.49pm. Examination of the results from 2010 shows up a very telling point: the Greens did exceptionally well on absent votes, scoring 54.4% on 2PP. However, absent votes are those cast in polling booths outside the electorate – which is to say that they don’t exist at by-elections, because there are no polling booths outside the electorate. That would seem to suggest that my projection is flattering to the Greens.
To those who are confused by all this – and in particular by the disparity between my figures and the VEC’s – what I have done here is calculated the swing on the booth results, which are all we have at the moment, and that swing is 6.6%. Labor scored 57.4% on booth votes in 2010, and 50.7% today. After other votes were added in 2010, Labor’s vote came down to 55.8% – so on that basis, a 6.6% swing would suggest they are headed for a narrow defeat. But as just noted, the reason they came down was that the Greens did so well on absent votes. The non-existence of such votes at this by-election puts a rather different complexion on things.
8.45pm. Flemington 2PP added, so the projection is final for the night.
9.35pm. With all but one booth now in on 2PP, my projection now leans a little further to the Greens. BUT … at this point, that matters less than what the dynamic of pre-polls and postals is going to be. There could be any number of reasons why they might be a little more favourable to Labor (in relative terms) than they were at the state election, and that’s all it would take. I’ll have a think about that and get back to you, but with the negligible exception of the one outstanding 2PP result, my projection has achieved all it’s going to achieve this evening, which is to say that it’s too close to call.
9.29pm. Still awating Docklands, Flemington, Melbourne and South Kensington on 2PP, remembering that all this is likely to do is nudge the preference share slightly in one direction or the other.
9.27pm. Final primary vote result in (Flemington), and it tips the Greens into the lead on my projection.
9.15pm. The addition of eight 2PP results in one hit didn’t change the complexion of things any: Labor’s share of minor preferences changed from 60% to 61%.
9.14pm. I’m back. We’ve now got 10 of 14 booths on 2PP and 13 of 14 on primary (Flemington the holdout), and it’s as close as close can be.
9.07pm. South Kensington and Melbourne have reported, but my spreadsheet’s crashed. With you in a minute or two …
9.00pm. Half-hourly results dump any moment now …
8.50pm. I’d say the VEC site is providing half-hourly updates, and we’ll get another blurt of results in about 10 minutes.
8.45pm. At North Melbourne booth, Stephen Mayne reports Labor got 32.5% of his own preferences, 92% of Nolte’s and 57% of the Sex Party’s.
8.38pm. Still to come: Flemington, Melbourne and South Kensington, and 11 of the 14 booths’ two-party counts.
8.37pm. Carlton Central and East Melbourne primaries added, and my projection is staying lineball.
8.31pm. The VEC has published 2PP results from three booths, which suggest my preference splits were exactly right after I made the adjustment just noted to Sex Party preferences.
8.28pm. After half an hour of silence, the VEC has just unloaded seven booths in one hit. Poor effort. My figures now align what ALP sources just told James Campbell. On intelligence from Stephen Mayne, I’ve adjusted Sex Party preferences from 70-30 to Labor to 50-50.
8.23pm. So the ALP has results from seven booths, but the rest of us only have two.
8.20pm. Sunday Herald Sun reporter James Campbell tweets: “ALP sources say vote it will come down to preferences but with almost half the booths reporting 1st preferences they are behind.”
8.17pm. Stephen Mayne reports East Melbourne booth primaries are ALP 466, Greens 436, Mayne 175, Sex 151, Nolte 144 – which suggests to me little or no swing, which would be an excellent result for Labor.
8.10pm. That RMIT booth has apparently gone 55-45 to Greens, which suggests a swing of about 7-8% – further encouraging the idea that it’s going to be close.
8.04pm. So in a nutshell, the Greens’ raw primary vote lead gets closed on my 2PP projection because a) the better performing minor candidates are preferencing Labor, and b) these two booths collectively were relatively strong for the Greens in 2010.
7.58pm. Twitter reports “catering situation at ALP HQ has improved”.
7.56pm. Keep in mind also I’m assuming 70% of those voting for minor candidates favour the party favoured on the how to vote card. The better performing candidates are tending to be those favouring Labor. If they show more (or less) independence than I’m presuming, the projection could be off.
7.47pm. Very similar swings in booth booths. Labor basically steady on primary vote, Greens up 6% and 4% respectively. Both booths broadly representative of the electorate as a whole as well, North Melbourne East a little above average for the Greens (remembering that the swing calculations take that into account).
7.45pm. North Melbourne East and Parkville booths added, and my word it looks tight …
7.40pm. Slowest count ever.
7.24pm. Conversely, more Twitter talk is of lineball results in Carlton, which is the Greens’ best area. Some actual results would be helpful …
7.21pm. Twitter talk is of 3% swing away from Labor and 7% to Greens – assuming this is off the primary vote, it points to a Greens win in the 55-45 vicinity.
7.13pm. Word on Twitter is that the Greens won the RMIT booth with 489 votes to Labor’s 300, which would be more than encouraging for them if so.
6.47pm. The fact that there are 16 candidates on the ballot paper might cause the count to be a little slower than usual.
6.25pm. Some further technical detail while you wait. Until booths begin reporting two-party preferred results, preferences will be distributed on the basis of 70-30 splits according to their how-to-vote cards, or 50-50 where no recommendation was made. When two-party booth results become available, the preference splits from booths which have reported two-party results will be projected on to the ones that haven’t.
6pm. Welcome to the Poll Bludger’s live coverage of the eagerly awaited Melbourne by-election count. Polls have closed, and the first results should be in in around three quarters of an hour. The table above will be display both raw and projected figures as the 14 booths progressively report. The first two columns will provide raw primary votes and percentages. The third “swing” column will show the primary vote swing for those parties which contested both this election and the 2010 election (Labor, Greens and Australian Sex Party), calculated by comparing the booths which have reported with the same booths at the election (which required some tinkering in one or two cases where booths have moved or are not being used). The two-party preferred swing will do the same. The latter will be compared against the total result from the 2010 election to project the outcome shown in the “2PP (projected)” column.
33.3 percent primary is woeful for Labor i fear, despite the win
That was basically the result federally in 2010, but very shock jock and coalition mouthpiece in the country would have you believe they were robbed.
Actually Rossmore, it’s you trying to spin a state by-election result as good for your girl Gillard.
So the 2pp swing is a tad under 5%
I’m calling it for Labor.
At this point of the night, 51.4% is too high a number to overcome, and there’s not enough incoming votes where the Greens can win from.
I think the Greens will be very angry at the minor parties that didn’t direct preferences to them.
You are a very bitter and twisted individual, Evan. Like your hero.
I have zero doubt about the headlines of the morrow:
Labor on the nose in Victoria: Julia Gillard is dead walking.
TLM keep your misogynistic alliterations out of this.
cityblue,
Welcome to The Concerns.
Von Kirsdarke,
Where did The Greens put Labor on their How To Vote card?
Do you still see a Green victory truth seeker
So, despite the hoopla & the heavyweights and the games and the sanctimoniousness all round from both sides the Lab/Green difference in Melbourne is smaller than a bee’s dick!
Could everyone get back to fighting Abbott et al now for a while perhaps?
TLM I celebrate ALP wins, in good times and bad times. Couldn’t give a stuff what u think.
Yes, woeful primary vote for Labor, but the commentary was that the seat would be won by the Greens Party and all signs are pointing to that not being the case
@ C@tmomma 510
I think the Greens put Labor 9th.
Abbott will take strength from this, if the alp can win with not a single policy then he can too…
Big win for Gillard, using Grattan’s logic
[You are a very bitter and twisted individual, Evan.]
c@tmomma,
He has some serious, deep-seated issues that boy.
@Oakeshott… I can’t see how the prepoll total number is right…
The low swing on postals has definitely changed my opinion. Don’t think I’ll be throwing money away now on betfair betting on the greens! 🙂
Spur212 514 for once I kinda agree with you
Actually, if ALP primary matched 33.3 in the next Newspoll, the 2pp would tighten appreciably. This byelection could be a significant turning point, simply because it went against pessimistic expectations.
Modus Ponens,
The “ponens” of yours is crap; more so for a long-disused language.
Do you have an argument worth contesting?
What is all this wailing, sobbing, and gnashing of teeth I hear? And why? There has been an election in which 100% of the party preferred vote has been to the parties of the left.
Where have the Tories been?
[Could everyone get back to fighting Abbott et al now for a while perhaps?]
Rod,
Possibly. If your more belligerent Green friends are prepared to stop throwing shit at us.
How does matthew franklin and news ltd feel
They were gloating that labor was finish because of Gillard
why people should be wary of opinion polls
A win is a win, and as a Labor supporter I’m delighted with the result.
More so that The Greens have been boasting about knocking off Labor in other inner-city State seats.
The result has no implications Federally one way or the other.
Although Grattan will no doubt use her twisted, tragic logic to suggest that, but for Gillard, Labor would have done better!!
It was clearly a State-based campaign, as it should have been.
Perhaps the “outage” was a PB meltdown caused by this news last night ? 🙂
[Rupert Murdoch quits as News International director]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jul/21/rupert-murdoch-director-news-international-quits
[Rupert Murdoch quits as News International director]
It pleases me no end to imagine the gut wrenching humiliation that he must be going through in the knowledge that his family name will now forever be associated with the stink of rotting fish.
On the Sex Party preferences in the Melbourne VIC election, its not great mystery why they preferenced the ALP before the Greens. I visited a booth yesterday (North Melbourne), speaking to various helpers from different parties. The ALP candidate was there too. The Sex party HTV card helper I spoke to explained that they had a big run-in with the Greens candidate (not the one who ran this time) in the last State election, and found the Greens hard to deal with, and a bit presumptive in dealing with other minor parties in pref deals. The run-in involved issues with the sex industry, with the 2010 Greens candidate making statements about banning brothels and the like. There may have been other issues too. The bad blood lingers apparently.
The helper I spoke to said that the values difference between the ASP & Greens parties was quite big. Sex party are pro small business, and while the Greens make noises about being pro small business the Sex party don’t see it in their actions. Mainly though, there seems to be a gap based on many of the female Greens members being a variety of feminists who are more censorious or anti sex industry, and the women in the Sex Party who see themselves as pro sex feminists. I can’t vouch for the accurancy of these summaries, just passing on what I’ve heard.
The whole preference thing was interesting in this election. I think the Greens assumed too much, didn’t even work enough on getting their ex candidate (and prior member of both the Greens & ALP) to pref them before the ALP, who said he preferenced the ALP based on prior good work for the African community. Before that was announced, the ALP seemed to assumed he’d pref to the Greens.
I love coming here because psephs make economists look good. 🙂
A great night for Labor, and well done to Jennifer Kanis and all her team. To defeat the Greens, The Age and the Murdoch press all in one go is a great achievement. Memo to all the above: this is what happens when you get cocky and don’t do your homework. Special memo to Michelle Grattan: this is what happens when you let your personal hatred for Gillard cloud your judgement. It’s Time to retire.
Thanks to Dennis Atkins on ABC Insiders today for letting us know that the highly ridiculous Senator Brett Mason from Qld, George Brandis’ BFF, and moralising hypocrite, was elected on Sex Party preferences last time around. Delightful.
Cassidy also made a decent fist of reviewing the week’s bulldust in the newspapers. He laid down a few traps for Stutchbury from the AFR, who in trying to defend his paper’s story about the unions “shifting away” from Gillard, once again demonstrated that he would make a good football commentator.
The interview with Ged Kearney was amusing for Barrie’s failure to get her to say anything at all about anything, except how passionate she is about fighting Tories. With some difficulty, given the number of times Barrie asked her about the leadership, Ged even managed to avoid saying the word “Rudd”.
Dennis Atkins observed that the only interesting aspect of the AFR non-story was that even after the smashing defeat for Rudd in February, and the series of stupid deadlines for Gillard to lie down and die that have already passed, someone is still grinding away in the background trying to resurrect his fortunes (and theirs).
So who fed the AFR the non-story about “shifting” unions? Was it Kevin Rudd, Joel Fitzgibbon, Robert McClelland, Steve Jones, John Murphy, or Richard Marles? And apparently ex-Senator Mark Arbib is telling anyone who will listen that Gillard will be out of office by September. Unbelievable. They are acting like a bunch of whiny, vengeful, self-interested cowards – small enough to fit in a phone booth – but according to the MSM, they are the only happening thing in politics.
Cassidy and Atkins agreed that the latest Gillard deadline, for a 38% (winning) primary by the resumption of parliament, and a year away from the election, is a complete nonsense. Well said chaps.
Meanwhile, back at the Melbourne by-election, I would happily see both the ALP candidate and the Greens candidate in my parliament. Two young, attractive and intelligent women who have something to say, and the energy to carry it through. Lovely. And not a Liberal in sight.
@Psephos –
I fail to see how the likely Melbourne by-election result is a defeat to The Age.
In the earlier thread on the by-election I pointed out many articles which were very biased against the Greens.
And in the massive coverage of federal Labor dissing the Greens, again The Age’s coverage was very pro-Labor, anti-Green.
@Leroy –
I’m pleased that the Sex Party person you talked to was knowledgable (and a volunteer).
I’m still very worried about the precedent of an industry funded party campaigning on issues of which one party it the clear winner yet preferring the other.
In the media I have seen the Sex Party where campaigning more on better public transport and less strict drug laws than any other issue (in fact I can’t recall reading anything about sex or censorship). That Patten had a spat with a previous candidate who on prostitution was not supporting Greens policy seems to have been the main reason for why they preferenced as they did – not good enough.
What annoys me in PB is that very often Labor supporters claim a moral reason for something, yet are more than happy to accept the bad thing when it is in their favour.
Yes – the press is very biased against Labor. Yes – I think this is a moral issue. But Labor supporters don’t care that the press are biased against the Greens.
And imagine the fuss if a mining company funded a political party who campaigned on issues that favoured Labor over the Liberals, yet directed preferences to the Liberals.
And any discussion of this in the press? No. But we did hear how Amed was a Green stooge (before he announced that he was preferencing Labor), and we did hear that Mayne had just done a deal with the Greens (for Melbourne City council) (In 2007 I did a preference swap with Mayne for him preferencing Green above Liberal and Labor if I preferenced him above them – and there was no flow on deals or other hidden agendas).
Given the huge anti-green rants from Federal Labor, the biased press in Melbourne, and the strange preference direction of some of the other candidates, it is not surprising that the Greens lost.
But given all of this, it is amazing that the Greens got a much higher primary vote than Labor, and it is of major significance that in two party preferred about half of Melbourne prefer Green over Labor.
Michael, fair enough – I agree my bile is mainly directed at Grattan. Living in Canberra, I usually only get the Age on Friday for the football.
[it is not surprising that the Greens lost.]
Then why is everyone so surprised? I certainly am.
The Greens need to work out how to play the preference game – they won’t win seats when almost everyone to their right, even a little bit, preferences someone else
I’m disappointed, but not surprised.
I think the Sex Party and Ahmed direction preferences made a big difference.
The biased press could have been taken into account, but I remember ages ago writing here about how The Age was very biased against the Greens and our PB host replying that what I said was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard.
Well done ALP on winning – always good to see the extremist Greens take a hit.
Must worry the ALP toget such a low FP.
[Must worry the ALP to get such a low FP.]
Preferential voting encourages political fragmentation, which is one of its downsides. But compulsory preferential compensates for that by requiring everyone to make a 2-party choice as well as voting for the fragment of their choice. Given that, the primary vote is not especially important, provided it’s high enough to keep you in the count. As I’ve pointed out before, lower house seats have been won with less than 20% of the primary, and in theory a party could win majority government with a very small primary, by preference harvesting.
Of course Labor would like to win primary majorities. But the changing class composition of Australia makes that increasingly difficult. Parties represent classes, and in Australia we have a new class, the inner-city, tertiary-educated, state-employed, high-income, non-family elite (to put it simply). A new class demands a new party, and lo, we have a new party to represent it: in both its high idealism (save the planet) and its selfishness (but no wind farms where I can see them). (This paradox is true of all classes of course.) Since this class is concentrated in what used to be solid Labor areas, naturally it takes votes from Labor (though mostly through replacement rather than conversion.) If we had a by-election in Thomastown, we’d see a very different result. What we really await, of course, is a by-election in a suburban or regional marginal. That’s where the main game in Australian politics always is.
Please sign and share a petition to force the ABC to limit the unbalanced exposure of the IPA on OUR public broadcaster.
http://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/abc-australia-stop-the-bias-towards-the-institute-of-public-affairs-ipa
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Flyer:
Psephos – The predictions of the damage due to global warming are only getting worse, and as http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/07/20/theres-a-da-xiang-in-the-room-new-greenhouse-emission-data/ shows, Australia’s response has been absolutely pathetic.
So I’m upset that the scientific and economic reality of the need to properly act on climate change can be so easily dismissed as “high idealism”.
[So I’m upset that the scientific and economic reality of the need to properly act on climate change can be so easily dismissed as “high idealism”.]
You assume I use “high idealism” as a pejorative. I don’t. On this subject I largely agree with the Greens. But I don’t take lessons on the need to properly act on climate change from a party which rejected the CPRS legislation purely for reasons of electoral advantage, thus forcing us into the sad saga of the carbon tax. We would have had a price on carbon two years ago but for Greens opportunism.
Antony Green is in Paris today, by the way. He must be really pissed off at missing all this excitement.
MWH
well, given that the Greens had a major input into Australia’s carbon pricing strategy, obviously at least some of the blame if it isn’t strong enough must lie with them.
I’m not sure why the Greens are already hailing this as some sort of heroic defeat.
The Liberal party basically gave them a significant slice of their first preferences by not running and the Greens poured a huge amount of resources into this race and still couldn’t defeat an embattled Labor party.
Great read above, thanks all – I too was surprised.
Mayne has his entrails readings here http://www.maynereport.com/articles/2012/07/22-0655-3852.html
Alot of analysis seems to be conducted on the preferences given on the HTV cards. How well did people follow the HTV cards? Where they available? (I’m guessing some of Mayne’s HTV and other minor parties’ HTV where downloaded by keen voters beforehand, but many(?) would be making it up at the booth if HTV cards were not at the booth)
MWH – have you seen McKibben Rolling Stone piece on AGW – very good I reckon – simply outlines the problem and the obstacle to solutions http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719
zoomster –
You are so locked into blindly supporting Labor that you can’t face facts.
Surely you know that there was lots of discussion between the Greens, Labor, and the independents to come up with some legislation that they would all support. The Greens had to make HUGE compromises to get this through.
Psephos –
The CPRS was rejected by the Greens because it locked in failure. Not only did it set boundaries for what future cuts could be made, all to be announced with long lead times, it effectively gave the polluters property rights over emissions. So though the timetable could be changed by parliament amending the CPRS legislation, if a future parliament wanted to make large cuts, under the constitution this could only be done by fairly compensating the polluters for their property – i.e. buying back permits which had been given away for free.
The Carbon Tax is equally as bad as the CPRS in that the cuts are too low and the compensation is too high. The huge difference is that it has not done anything to prevent a future parliament from making the huge cuts which are needed if Australia is going to play its part in preventing climate change.
What I find sad with PB is that none of the Labor fan-boys accept that to the Greens the CPRS and the Carbon Tax are very different. Instead of debating the reasons the Greens give, it is all just the Greens are evil / playing politics etc
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The no wind farm people seem to have a tendency to be Tories. The anti-wind farm movement is well connected with the current decidedly non-Green Coalition Government in Victoria.
I’m surprised the Crikey server didn’t explode from the sheer amount of hypocrisy in MWH’s post when he calls other people “fanboys”. The enormity of it maybe warping time and space as we speak.
The Greens (and their supporters) can pontificate about their high minded reasons for rejecting the CPRS and sticking to their ideals with little thought of compromise. They can remain on their high horses after next years election landslide and watch their beloved causes get casually discarded or reversed by the Coalition.
But hey, they remained true to their ideals right? It may not accomplish anything of note in the long term, but at least they have remained ideologically pure.
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The voting down of the CPRS was obviously also a negotiating tactic to get a stronger scheme. Had Rudd not shown a Scullinnite inability to call a DD on the most hostile Senate since Whitlam then it would probably have worked better.