Time for a new thread, so here’s some very scattered thoughts that it occurs to me to share at this late hour:
• I had a piece on the Senate result in Crikey yesterday, and have been keeping a low profile on Poll Bludger in part because I’ve been busy fielding inquiries from media outlets eager to hear an election wonk’s take on the whole affair. If you’d like to comment on the progress of late counting in the Senate I’d encourage you to do so on the dedicated thread, or at least re-paste your comments there after leaving them on this one.
• I’d also like to encourage those with particular insights to offer on late counting in close lower house seats to share the love in the relevant comments threads, which can serve as useful clearing houses for information for those of us trying to keep up. Note that these posts can be accessed through links near the top of the sidebar.
• So what the hell happened in Fowler? There was, as we know, a much milder swing against Labor in western Sydney than media hype and certain local opinion polls had primed us for. However, that scarcely explains the thumping 8.8% swing enjoyed by Labor journeyman Chris Hayes. What presumably does explain it is Liberal candidate Andrew Nguyen, chosen by the party with a view to snaring the Vietnamese vote in Cabramatta, who suffered swings approaching 20% in that very area. As to what Vietnamese voters might have known about Nguyen that the Liberal Party did not, I cannot even speculate. However, it won’t be the only question the party has to ask itself about its candidate selection processes in New South Wales, for the second election in a row.
• It wasn’t a very good election for Bob Katter, who failed in his bid to bring new allies to Canberra and had his seemingly impregnable hold on Kennedy cut to the bone. One reason of course was that he was squeezed out by Clive Palmer (with due apologies for the unattractiveness of that image). However, another was very likely a preference deal he cut with Labor which in the event did neither party any good. I would also observe that this is not Katter’s first failed attempt at empire-building. At the 2004 Queensland state election, Katter organised an alliance of independents with a view to activating discontent over sugar industry policy, and the only one to poll a substantial share of the vote had done nearly as well without Katter’s help at the previous election. Even the much-touted successes of Katter’s Australian Party at last year’s Queensland election involved it a) absorbing probably transient protest votes which formed part of the huge swing against Labor, and b) electing two members who could just easily have won their seats as independents. Katter’s constituency would evidently prefer that he stick to being an independent local member, and limit his broader ambitious to bequeathing the family firm to his son.
• As well as witnessing an explosion in the micro-party vote, the election has at the very least seen the rate of informal voting maintain the peak scaled at the 2010 election. Limiting it to ordinary election day votes to ensure we’re comparing apples with apples (pre-poll and postal voters being generally more motivated and hence less prone to informal voting), the informal vote rate has progressed from 4.18% to 5.82% to 5.92%. Presumably the Australian Electoral Commission will be conducting a ballot paper study to let us know how much this is down to proliferating candidate numbers leading to inadvertent mistakes, and how much to disaffection leading to deliberate spoilage of ballot papers.
• If I do say so myself, my BludgerTrack poll aggregate performed rather well. The Coalition’s two-party preferred vote is at 53.15% on current counting, which is likely to edge up towards the projected 53.5% as the remaining votes come in. Better yet, there’s a good chance the state seat projections will prove to have been exactly correct, allowing for the fact that the model did not accommodate non-major party outcomes such as the possible wins for Clive Palmer in Fairfax and Cathy McGowan in Indi. No doubt this is partly down to luck. There was some imprecision on the primary vote, with the Coalition about a point too low and the Greens about a point too high (though the model in fact scaled down the latter from the pollsters’ published results), with the circle being squared by a preference allocation method that proved over-favourable to the Coalition, based as it was on the 2010 election result (although I’m pretty sure it still performed better than a method based on respondent allocation would have done).
Nonetheless, the model was certainly successful enough to confirm the wisdom of its basic premise that the best way to read the campaign horse race is to a) only pay attention to large-scale polling, i.e. national and state-level results, b) adjust pollsters for bias according to their past performance where sufficient observations are available from recent history, c) instead use the pollster’s deviation from the aggregated poll trend where sufficient observations are not available, and d) weight the results of each pollster according to how historically accurate/consistent with the trend they have been. As to the performance of the polls themselves, I’ll have a lot more to say about that when all the votes are in. In the meantime, here’s a broad brush overview from Matthew Knott at Crikey.
*bows*
Dr William Maloney – MHR Melbourne 1904-1940. Described as a “harmless ratbag”; one of the great eccentrics of the house.
Page didn’t posthumously lose – he was in a coma on election day and thus technically alive.
Psephos 2795
After 42 years not surprised, bet some of the cockies never got over that
Can we get a link to the actual Guardian page where that photo appears, to prove that it’s not a fake-up?
al Qaeda’s head is a doctor.
Boerwar
Global warming is good for preventing wildfire in the USA 🙂
2013 has the least amount of wildfires in the last ten years and the 2nd least amount of area burnt in ten years.
Media coverage of disasters is sky rocketing though and a price on media coverage is required to reduce media emissions.
http://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/nfn.htm
While on the subject of MP doctors, how many federal MPs and senators have died in Parliament House (old and new). I can think of three of the top of my head: Sir Frederick Holder, Senator Keith Laught, and Senator Clive Hannaford.
But also greatly loved by the people of West Melbourne, then a slum, to whom he provided free medical service all his life. He also holds the record for the longest service on the backbench – 36 years.
Well, it wasn’t known that Page had lost until after he’d died, was it? His illness probably did have something to do with that anyway, since he obviously couldn’t campaign.
Dr Maloney was a good one. I believe the longest-serving member never to hold a portfolio?
Dio
Until this morning the IOC was headed by an orthopod
Ernie Roberts (ALP, Adelaide) slipped on the polished marble of Queen’s Hall and cracked his skull open, in about 1914.
Not sure about dying in the House, pedant, but you’re mentioning Holder reminds me of two other doctor MPs, Dr Carty Salmon, the second Speaker, and Dr Gratton Wilson, MP for Corangamite. Together with Maloney they tended Holder after his collapse. Of course Holder died at the Victorian Parliament House.
and they don’t come much more political than the IOC! :devil:
Israel to pay Zygier’s family $1.2 M for snuffing him..
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-11/israel-may-compensate-family-of-australian-ex-mossad-agent/4950612
*your mentioning Holder …
OC
Had to be an orthopod, didn’t he.
He has very straight feet?
Who can name two federal MPs who were murdered? (No, not Harold Holt.)
I was reading newspaper reports of Holder’s death. Newspaper reports were much more interesting then. Holder was carried from the chamber to his office by four attendants using a rug as a stretcher and then took 12 hours to die while Salmon, Wilson and Liddell (another dr/mhr) tendered to him.
Pauline Hanson?
Lemonade Ley probably murdered his opponent but I guess that doesn’t count.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/liberal-andrew-nguyen-western-sydney
Good one Diogenes. That video of Hanson was on TV the other day and it was an absolute knee slapper to see it again.
The United States of Paranoi
___________________________
An interesting new US book which looks at the role of paranoia and conspiracy theories in Amerian life
The author says it has been a constant theme in US history,linked with the belief in forces that endanger the very existance of the USA’from within
Far from being new this view goes back to the start of the USA and has links to the many odd religious cults which flourished… and still do… in the USA
The recent “Birther” stories about Obama are just a new version of such paranoia..as well as the stories of his being a Marxist sent to destroy the USA…or a Moslem..planning to enforce Sharia law
I have just spent 6 weeks in the USA visiting family there
and never fail to be amazed and delighted at the sort of paranoia that one hears on talk-backs and the like…or in the mouths of the most rabid right-wing shock-jocks
As well a seeing family(I have an American daughter-in-law and an American grandson)my wife and I travel widely…and we use AMTRAKs long -distance trains…one effect of this is that one gets to meet people in the dining cars and lounge/bar cars of the trains..and have conversations with strangers….
who are often meeting exotic Australians like us for the first time(“Of my…you speak such good English…” or ” How do you go home..by boat ?”…or when told of our visits to New York..”My…I guess you were amazed at the department stores”)…wonderful stuff !!
and one can draw out all sort of notions and paranoi.. in conversation
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-nation-of-birthers/
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-nation-of-birthers/
Psephos: well, Fred McDonald for one … by his successor, Thomas Ley. The other … give me a minute …
The only other ones I can think of are all state MPs (Ley’s other victim Hyman Goldstein, Percy Brookfield, and of course John Newman).
Yes, I’m counting that, although it was never proved.
You won’t find it under by-elections, because it was after he left office.
Also two federal MPs (that I know of) killed in action?
The two killed in action were William Johnson in WWI and Arnold Wienholt in WWII.
Frickeg 2798
A bit before my time and as I sai to Phesphos the cockies around here would have never have got over it
One of the more or perhaps least successful medical politicians was John Mildred Creed who was a member of the NSW parliament for 47 years but achieved very little except for the Inebriates Act.
Maybe the good folk of Cabramatta weren’t able to take a 70yo first-time candidate seriously.
I know it won’t be under by-elections (I would’ve remembered that!). I’m just cycling through all the people I can think of …
Psephos
Know Donald McKay was one ,just cannot recall other one
Psephos @ 2819: William Tevlin Arthur and Frederick McDonald (the latter “missing, presumed murdered”, by, or at the instigation of T J Ley, supporter of proportional representation).
Psephos: “Maybe the good folk of Cabramatta weren’t able to take a 70yo first-time candidate seriously.”
Well, while I think about the other murder victim, how many MPs and senators served into their 80s?
Andrew Peacock was not killed in action in Vietnam, unlike 521 other Australians, because he didn’t go, despite his enthusiasm for sending other people. (And people ask me why I became a Labor voter…)
pedant: Ohhh. I had no idea about Arthur.
Interesting but little known fact:
Lemonade Ley kept Eugenia Falleni’s dildo in the drawer of his Macquarie St parliamentary office desk (source- the always reliable J T Lang)
Psephos
Think other one was John Newman
Yes, Bill Arthur (Lib, Barton, 1966-69) was stabbed to death by a bit of rough trade he picked up in Telopea Park in 1982.
Western Australian Senate – Analysis Ticket votes Double Dissolution Non Weighted Surplus Droop Quota
Elected Candidate Group
1 JOHNSTON Liberal
2 BULLOCK Australian Labor Party
3 LUDLAM The Greens (WA)
4 CASH Liberal
5 PRATT Australian Labor Party
6 REYNOLDS Liberal
7 FOSTER Australian Labor Party
8 BROCKMAN Liberal
9 THOMAS Liberal
10 DROPULICH Australian Sports Party
11 WANG Palmer United Party
12 BALDERSTONE Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP) Party
If Wikileaks had a few more votes they would have been elected instead of the HEMP party with a double dissolution count
Psephos @ 2843: Of course Arthur’s murder made the news in Canberra at the time. I seem to recall that it happened at the Lakeside Hotel.
Is that a prediction?
A senior public servant of my acquaintance was bashed nearly to death in Telopea Park around the same time. He had to be invalided out. It was a dangerous place. I don’t know if it still is, but I made a point of not going near it when I lived in Canberra.
Optional Preferential Voting:
Be careful for what you wish for.
In Victoria’s Western Metropolitan Upper-house seat Bob Smith lost his seat to the Greens because of optional preferential. The Holly Trinity voted below the line and only preferenced Christian Group and stopped. This was enough to elect the Greens ahead of the ALP Candidate by default. Had they preferenced to ALP ahead of the Greens the ALP would have won the seat.
McKay was never actually an MP. He stood against Grassby as a Lib in 1974, but the Country Party’s John Sullivan won.