| # | % | 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.
Hi
At my last look before this site went down, and at a brief glimpse this morning, Labor won the seat.
Seemed like that to me, anyway.
That says it all.
No matter what was predicted, championed, media driven, and was that a little humble pie on Insiders before I went elsewhere and taking no further notice all day?
[Labor’s win has come as a surprise to me, and I know I’m not alone in pseph-dom in this count]
Lets hope that along with oakshot’s little reminder puts an end to those in Labor doing the best to stop Gillard winning the next election.
It would seem that the Greens might stay like the Democrats. Senate success but failure in the MHR, unless elected by Lib-Lab preferences in the odd seat.
Some Labor supporters on here seem positively un-hinged in their comments. The Greens are just another Political Party.
It is a bit rich for the ALP to complain about a minor party arising to their “left” when they have followed the Libs to the “right”. It was inevitable. In the past most minor parties have come from the right. But that space is now well and truelly occupied by the Libs.
Nature abhors a vacuum and at present that is on the “left” of the political spectrum. For a time the Greens will fill it….
Thank god Labor has won something at last. Very grateful for a small merciy.
🙂 Toorak Toff, I think they have all moved somewhere else
@ swamprat
My problem with the Greens is their ability to ride in on their high horse and serve up mountain loads of amazing hypocrisy.
Adam Bandt actually complained about Labor winning the seat with “conservative” preferences, while at the same time, it’s precisely the same reason he won his own seat.
The Greens can be pleased that they won the primary vote which would be a first for the Greens in a lower house seat in Victoria and maybe anywhere.
The up coming redistribution may tip this seat into the Green column.
I found bemusing at the people being interviewed that claimed that they didn’t know what the poll was for and didn’t know it was happening, I would love to read the excuses for why they shouldn’t pay the fine.
So much for this seat being so very educated.
657
The Greens won the primary vote in Fremantle in 2009.
Tom – I thought the Greens may have. I don’t think that much can be read into the primary vote percentages for the number of candidates, lack of Liberal and low turn out makes it all relevant.
Both the ALP and the Greens can be happy for difference reasons and with the upcoming redistribution, the next election will be a different ball game.
It may have been you that said it but I agree the Greens could be confidence that they will be confidence in seats like Melbourne, Brunswick and Northcote and I am not sure if it is possible to tell from those numbers but I think Adam Bandt would be giving himself a 50/50 chance of holding.
Great Result.
Alp to win by-election because DLP preferences tipped the balance the ALPs way.
Now the ALP can return the favour at the next Senate, and Victorian Upper House elections.
Its time the ALP realised the Greens are not their friends, and labor true allies are the only other genuine Labor Party, the DLP.
660
A significant chunk of the votes that went to the DLP would have gone to the ALP had the DLP not run and thus the DLP cost the ALP money.
The DLP were never going to preference the Greens and so they did not make the difference.
Tom, so now you are saying that it is mainly ALP voters who vote DLP?.
Amazing, who would have thought that the DLP would be recognised as being mainly ALP supporters, when they are usually blamed as being the ALPs mortal enemy, by the left wing of the ALP.???
662
The ALP hated the DLP because they took votes from the ALP and gave then to the conservatives in preferences. Victoria, the Commonwealth and possibly Queensland had far more conservative government in the period 1955-73 because of the DLP taking votes that would otherwise have gone to the ALP.
I’ve been seeing a few reports, eg:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/labor-calms-tremors-over-seismic-shift-to-the-greens-20120722-22i9q.html
… misusing the word “majority” by claiming that the Greens “claimed a majority of the primary vote”.
The correct word is “plurality”. If the Greens had won a majority of the primary vote they would have won the seat without even needing to go to preferences.
I think this is a pretty good result for Vic Labor in all the circumstances. Yes there was a swing but it was a by-election with a sitting member vacating and with the Liberals doing something like open-ticket preferencing by failing to run a candidate (there’s a fair chance Lib voters would have voted for someone who did preference Labor, but some Libs might have just voted informal or not showed up at all.) Yes the primary vote was low but that is in a field more than twice as large as last election and in such a field there were enough alternatives that it’s not likely that many Libs voted 1 Labor.
I don’t think the result has any federal implications for the major parties, especially given that Vic is one place where the federal Labor vote is not holding up too badly. And speaking of not holding up too badly the ReachTEL robopoll didn’t miss by too much, overcooked the Labor vote a bit, but not too bad.
Oh, and the Greens should concede, of course. Conceding doesn’t cost you any rights should 1000 votes be miraculously found under the table somewhere. It’s just a nice thing to do to recognise that you are busted and assist with public understanding of the overwhelmingly likely result, rather than beating up false hopes and confusing people. In my experience the Greens have more poor form on this sort of thing than most.
One difference between those who voted Green and those who voted Labor is the thought that went into each vote.
How many people went into the booth and voted Labor because they always have without any thought about the issues, policies, etc? I suspect quiet a few.
But everyone who voted Green had to think just a little. And given the media bias against the Greens, given the saturation coverage that the Greens are “loony” and “extremists”, these voters had to move past all that to vote Green.
We talk about the significance of the Donkey Vote. But I suspect that this is unimportant compared to the advantage Labor have of its locked-in voters.
Any straw-person will do, MWH, when every other vote feels illegitimate.
Barking @640
One of the reasons I’m no longer active in the Greens is that I think their ‘marketing’ is terrible. The Green’s tend to campaign to those who already vote Green.
You need to be in the Green club to see that what the Greens want to do might have the same slogan as the major parties e.g. all say in their leaflets that they support “better public transport” but the majors mean business as usual and the Greens mean big change.
I want the Greens to say things that will educate the electorate about the facts (e.g. After 11 years of Labor, Victoria’s school teachers were the second lowest paid in Australia (or whatever the real figure is)). Compare transport spending under 11 years of Labor with other major world cities (i.e. to show that Labor are still spending on roads and underspending on public transport).
The Greens should present factual differences between Liberal/Labor and the Greens which give some Labor and Liberal voters a reason to consider voting for the Greens.
The Greens should not sell-out with preference deals (i.e. no deals with Family First). But they should have done better with those who’s policies align with the Greens (Ahmed, Sex Party), and if this fails, should have emphases in their campaign the difference between Labor and Green on core issues – e.g. for Ahmed voters pointed out the Greens public housing policy compared to Labors.
Or in short, I agree with you that the Greens are not doing as well as they should be in campaigning.
Marrickville Mauler @647,
The Greens did consult a constitutional lawyer, and they of course studies the CPRS legislation in detail. If such expertise is expected from each poster on PB then I fear this blog would be empty.
Note that this constitutional issue did not concern Labor and Liberal because neither were thinking that cuts larger than proposed in the legislation would ever happen. In fact the main point of the CPRS, as repeatedly said at the time, was to “give business certainty”, and that meant – here are the cuts that will happen, they might go a bit further but we will give you this much notice, and they won’t go further than this much.
The only problem with the CPRS (shared by Labor and Liberals current commitment to cut emissions by 5% from 2000 levels) is that this is far too little far too late compared with what Australia needs to do for its share of global response to prevent climate change.
Sad but true – it doesn’t matter if Abbott gets in and scraps the carbon tax. Perhaps it is good in that Australians then know that we are doing nothing, where with the carbon tax people are pretending that we are well on the way to preventing climate change.
psyclaw made a few more posts on page 13. Once again he has failed to read what I wrote earlier, so my rebuttals to his posts have already been said.
mwh@665
Tosh – absolutely self serving tosh.
What blackburnpseph meant to say was:
“I can’t think of any rational reason for disagreeing with you, so I’ll just post an insult.”
Thinking about it a bit more, the number of locked-in voters is fairly high. People who don’t follow the politics much and vote **** because they have voted that way for 20, 30, 40 or so years.
In a normal election ten years ago I would have guessed that the locked-in voters would be over 30% for each of Labor and Liberal.
So the magnitude of how things have changed for Labor over the last few yeas is much greater because non only are locked-in voters now a major part of their support base, but they must have lost many people who were locked-in for decades and for the first time in their lives are changing their vote.
This applies to discussions of the federal vote as well as to the results from Melbourne.
The arrogance is simply breathtaking…
And Andos’s inability to rationally debate what I’ve said is noted.
Hey Man, I tried to have a perfectly rational debate with you the other day, but your tendency to use straw men and misinterpretations of other peoples arguments makes it a pretty useless exercise.
By the way, I find you imputation that people who don’t vote the way you want them to aren’t ‘thinking’ about their vote to be offensive.
[One difference between those who voted Green and those who voted Labor is the thought that went into each vote.]
Statements like this (and I no you said you’re no longer active, but this sort of thing is too common from Greens supporters more generally) are two big parts of the Greens’ problem when it comes to winning seats they really “should” be winning. They think they’re smarter than everyone else and they say they’re smarter than everyone else, and that gets just a few people offside who might have otherwise supported them. Some people are suspicious when a political party comes across like an exclusive religious cult that divides voters into two classes – theirs and stupid.
The Greens polled 24% in Melbourne ten years ago. With the Green vote skewing youngish their vote now would be likely to include a lot of late-20-somethings voting for the 4th time having always voted Green. They’re just as “locked in” as your always-voted-Labor types, who are probably not that common in an electorate like Melbourne (cf safer Labor seats) anyway. The “media bias” angle is irrelevant to them because if they follow that media at all they don’t take it seriously and indeed even see its condemnations of their views as reinforcement.
Strange how in all my discussions of the Melbourne by-election where I claim that many people follow the how-to-vote card all the Labor people respond that this is not the case.
Yet Labor are happy to say that the Greens will not do well next election because when the Liberals stand and direct their preferences to Labor then Labor will easily win.
So why is it “offensive” to claim that some people just follow the card this election, but next election will be different because many Liberals will just follow the Liberal HTV card?
Case, point.
Arrogant prig
Next you will be saying that Green votes should get an extra weighting because people who vote that way REALLY CARE about the country
Is this the best responses you guys can come up with?
Why are so many on the more progressive side of politics descending into this nonsense…
Green voters aren’t ‘extremists’ and Labor voters aren’t ‘people who didn’t think their vote through enough’. Nor did Green’s prevent action on climate change or cause Tony Abbott to take the opposition leadership. IMHO it was a genuine political error on Labor’s part – they could have called a double dissolution and would have ended up with an increased margin of victory. Instead after calling the problem the greatest moral challenge of our time they sat back and tried to use it to wedge the coalition (quite successfully for some time) and THIS is what brought Abbot out of the wood work. It was trying to be just a little too clever for their own good that brought this about.
I think that Labor needs to stop attacking the left, hell it needs to move back that way instead of this steady creep to the right wing that leaves them looking like they stand for nothing. Joining Tony in attacking asylum seekers and the unemployed DOES NOT HELP because Labor will never be able to move as far to the right as Tony easily can and will.
The Greens on the other hand would be well advised to actually start at least attempting to stop making the perfect the enemy of the good and compromise enough to allow more effective government. Failure of both sides to do so only allows the LNP to attack the entire left as ineffective.
If there is still a chance to prevent the coalition taking power it lies in the two parties actually working together effectively, not in petty squabbling that has become so typical of progressive politics of late. Time to wake up – if the situation continues to the next election then we are going to have what looks like the most right wing and incompetent (the two aren’t always the same thing but in this case…) government we’ve had in quite some time. Mr Abbott isn’t even a conservative, he’s a bloody reactionary that wants to take us back to some idealized and mythical version of Australia and his strategy is targeting people in society least capable of defending themselves against it. That Labor and the Greens seem intent on taking shots at each other under these circumstances is frustrating and worrying to say the least.
MWH
PLEASE stop posting. You are acting very arrogant and are making regular Green members and supporters look very bad.
It is true that there are many who blindy follow HTV cards. We talk about rusted on voters all the time.
I know of many in the ALP who have joined “in order to drag it back to being a centre-left or at least a centrist party”
They have been trying this for the past 20 years and despite the fact that they think the ALP is drifting further right, they think they can still do something to change that.
If it hasn’t worked in 20yrs, I doubt it will. This shows, if not stupidity, then that they are not that smart tactically. My parents were part of that group but left 5yrs ago when it became obvious that voting Green or Democrat sent a better message.
There is evidence of smart and stupid people everywhere. In every party. A lot of people just want to vote as fast as possible and go home. Following a HTV is an easy way to do that.
So MWH is right, many don’t think about their vote. However I know for a fact that many vote Green for the simple reason that they like me. While I like who they are voting for, I don’t like the reason.
http://www.vec.vic.gov.au/Results/StateBy2012resultMelbourneDistrict.html
Candidate Party Preferred votes % of preferred votes
KANIS, Jennifer ALP 14209 51.40%
OKE, Cathy Greens 13437 48.60%
Last updated: Monday, 23 July 2012 06:38:05 PM
I might write more later, but I thought I should quickly add that my views are mine only, and I’m not a Greens member, and have not had any contact with the party for several years.
My point about locked-in or rusted-on voters was not saying that just Labor has this type of voter. Of course the Liberals also have many who vote Liberal because they always have. But when Labor is nationally polling only 36% and only got 33% in Melbourne, I think this shows that either it is just locked-in voters who are left or many who have been locked-in have changed.
Bazza – Remember that the Greens have already compromised to pass ALL 312 bills that Labor has put to the Senate. So, apart from the difference over AS, we already have a demonstrably effective government.
Have the Greens conceded or are they going to showboat for another few hours?
I just looked at the link from Mod Lib, and noted that not only is the voter turnout incredibly low but the informal vote is 8.5%, which is very high.
A lot of voters are saying “a curse on all your houses”.
It would be strange that the informals are really “a curse on both houses” if the turnout is so low. It is probably due to the high number of candidates.
Mate, have you done extensive research on the electors of Melbourne or do you just make things up?
First the Green voters are more thinking and now the voters are protesting against all parties.
Perhaps some voters were away from home and didn’t have the option of absentee votes, perhaps some people couldn’t be bothered to vote in a byelection that had no effect on government and perhaps 16 candidates is likely to lead to more informals in compulsory preferencing.
Who knows? but what we do know is that the Greens lost an election they thought they had in the bag. Perhaps you could use your superior Green thinking powers to analyse that.
psyclaw
amen three fold to your analysis of 2009 and greens – and there’s been contrition since
also to as – there needs to be some border policy – some pragmatism would have signed onto agreement with timelines, caveats and conditions that could sink it all in 12 months anyway … negotiation is art of politics, and sometimes as with climate and as there was everything to gain and only a little to lose
People tell me to stop posting yet Oakeshott and other Labor fan-boys are OK?!
I said BEFORE the election that the it makes little difference to analysing the electorate whether the Greens get 49.9 or 50.1% of the vote.
I think it a very reasonable conclusion that the low turnout and the high informal vote show voter disaffection with all parties. The reasons you give explain some of the low turnout and informal vote, but not most of it.
Does anybody know when the postal votes will be counted by?
Yes 50.1 vs 49.9 makes little difference but 48.5 vs 55 (which was what the “ALP internal polling” was saying as an indication of JGs terminal leadership) is a significant difference.
Oakeshott – I’ll put my trust in the AEC and hope that your figures are wrong. My expectation is that the two party preferred formal vote equals 100% (not 103.5%).
And 48.5% is about half. So it is still true to say that about half the voters preferred the Greens. And if getting only 33.3% of the primary vote in what used to be Labor heartland is a good result, what figure would you need to admit that the result was poor?
My point was that the expectation was the Greens would get 55 and JG would be gone. They got 48.5.
I live in Nats heartland but at the last election they got 33 2PP – demographics change and heartland is an emotive but not necessarily accurate term. Your lot have been predicting the fall of Melbourne since at least 2000. If you couldn’t win it this time you will never win it.
Well if the Greens had got 55 I don’t see why that means that JG would be gone.
And never say never in politics.
The VEC is doing a Sleeping Beauty.
Anyone have a handsome prince?
The Greens have conceded defeat in the by-election.
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/greens-concede-byelection-despite-bestever-campaign-20120724-22lns.html
[Antony Green @AntonyGreenABC
For posterity, full booth results for Melbourne by-election published at http://bit.ly/K0VxmQ #auspol #springst
11:31 AM – 10 Aug 12]