With three weeks to go until polling day, ReachTEL has an automated phone poll from a sample of 1731 respondents, conducted on Thursday for the Seven Network, which records remarkably little change on its poll last week. On the primary vote, the Coalition is down 0.6% to 44.0%, Labor is down 0.2% to 34.8% and the Greens are up 0.2% to 10.2%. This time ReachTEL has treated to a respondent-allocated preferences result, but it’s exactly the same as the pollster got using 2011 election preferences last week from near-identical primary vote numbers, with the Coalition lead at 53-47. I wrote in Crikey last week that preference behaviour had traditionally been less variable in New South Wales than Queensland; this poll offers at least some evidence that that isn’t about to change, though more respondent-allocated results would be good to see. Hopefully Ipsos will come through at some point.
I haven’t had much to say about the election campaign so far as I’m busy getting my election guide in order, but by way of throwing you a bone, here is my calculation of what an electoral pendulum would look like if the results of the 2013 election were precisely replicated on state boundaries. The Coalition’s 54.35-45.65 win on two-party preferred translates into 58 seats for the Coalition and 35 for Labor. I’ll have more to say about this in Crikey tomorrow or the next day, but for now I’ll stick to noting that a very interesting pattern emerges with the seats on the North Coast.
Ah Oakeshott, you got me wrong. We have met in person, but before the days of Poll Bludger. You may be right about Myall Lakes, but a few Port types are rubbing chins and looking concerned about how things are panning out. Apparently the Nats are up in arms about the “rough deal” they are getting on local media. But the sea-change vote should see them home. The further north and west you go it gets ugly though.
And I was surprised the ALP got their deposit back on the Northern Tablelands. Richard Torbay pissed the Macarthy vote up against the wall. Sinkers can sleep peacefully up there. Draper in Tamworth is a different beast altogether. They don’t know how to make him look stupid without revealing their own genetic problems.
Rocket, I think the reason that seats like Coffs and Oxley (my two “local” seats: my family lives in Oxley, works in Coffs and has kids at school in both) are so safe for the Nats is partly because Labor basically run dead in them. Even with Stoner retiring from Oxley, we’re bombarded with Melinda Pavey this and Melinda Pavey that. Despite the fact that I’ll put both the Greens and Labor ahead of the Nats, I couldn’t name either of their candidates.
They don’t stick anything in the letterboxes (that I can understand – money’s got to go to more winnable seats) but they also don’t get much in the papers. The Greens are marginally better at working the local press than Labor, but the Nats are everywhere, even in the surprisingly left-leaning Coffs Advocate. Give a junior regional hack a press release, and you can be sure it will go almost word for word into the paper.
I’m not sure that the whole explanation, because Labor also run pretty dead in federal elections up here, but federal voting seems to be more about prospective PMs, and NSW elections more about the local members personally.
Lachlan Ridge @ 48 I have relatives in Cooma and feedback from them would concur. I have more knowoledge about Queanbeyan having moved from there only last year. I have many friends and family in the area and there’s not much love for Barilaro. Incidently he was a QCC Counciller (I have worked at QCC) and not much chop at that either.
Barilaro was also a QCC Councillor
Angry farmers in the Northern Rivers today dumped bags of manure in front of the office of Thomas George, the Nationals mp and candidate. They were then going on to Ballina to repeat the action at the Nationals’ campaign office there. This may be saying something about how the Nationals are likely fare in the election.
First we take the blue bus, then we take … So, it’s not a 49% selloff, it’s actually 64% !! Bambi lied
I was just looking at William’s election guide maps, and there’s one other thing that leapt out at me.
In Oxley, the Bellingen booth was shown as 61% TPP to the Nats. That’s sort of weird, as in the 2013 federal election, Bellingen was Labor’s strongest booth in Cowper, with a TPP of 60.4% for Labor, not the Nats.
Looking more closely at the 2011 NSW results, what happened was that in Bellingen the primary vote was 41% Nat, 40.5% Greens, 12% ALP. On 2PP it was 45% Nat, 29% ALP, 26% exhausted, which turns into 61/39 on 2PP once you exclude the exhausted votes. Pretty much the opposite result from the federal election with compulsory preferences.
Clearly, if two thirds of Greens votes are exhausting like they did in Bellingen, the ALP will struggle on 2PP with optional preferences. If Labor are to be any chance, they’ll need to convince Greens voters to preference them as a way of keeping the Coalition out, like they did in Queensland.