Some news items from the past week of local tactical significance, plus, for your convenience, a revised version of yesterday’s electorate seats table incorporating corrections and a few things I’d missed, and the latest reading of BludgerTrack inclusive of Friday’s Ipsos and ReachTEL polls (see below).
• In a corrective to recent published marginal seat polling and the resulting impression that Labor is not getting the swings where it needs them, Laurie Oakes reports Labor polling shows them picking up 6% swings in the Hunter region seat of Paterson, giving them a lead of 57-43; the Central Coast seat of Robertson, for a lead of 53-47; and the Perth seat of Hasluck, putting them at 50-50 (compared with a 53-47 to the Liberals in the ReachTEL poll). In the Perth fringe seat of Pearce, which Christian Porter holds for the Liberals on a margin of 9.5%, the swing is said to be 9%.
• Bill Shorten yesterday promised the federal government would contribute $400 million to a north-south rail link in western Sydney accommodating the proposed site of the Badgerys Creek airport, which would be particularly advantageous in the seats of Macarthur, Werriwa and Lindsay.
• Malcolm Turnbull travelled to Townsville on Monday to promise $1 billion of Clean Energy Finance Corporation funding would be devoted to supporting the Great Barrier Reef, through concessional loans to agricultural projects and sewage treatment plant upgrades. Target seats include Leichhardt, Herbert, Dawson, Capricornia and Flynn.
• The Nationals are taking Cowper seriously enough to have had Barnaby Joyce visit the electorate on Tuesday to promise $1.25 million on an upgrade of the Port Macquarie airport.
• The Liberal candidate for the winnable Melbourne fringe seat of McEwen, Chris Jermyn, was in the news for the third time during the campaign on Thursday, when The Age reported the Christmas Hills address at which he was enrolled was an “empty block of land”. The Australian reported yesterday he was actually enrolled at a house in Wallan, but it appears he was enrolled at the Christmas Hills address when he voted at the 2013 election.
confessions @ #776 Sunday, June 19, 2016 at 8:10 pm
I think the question is what single reason is there to keep this government.
I reckon 51-49 Labor Did Kenny look happy or not when he announced it?
Look, you can be as pragmatic as you like, just dont play this pathetic ‘my party is progressive left’ just so you can sleep at night. Just looking at the policies of the labor party without all the bullshit spin, the policies are right wing neoconservative. Nothing like the greens or any true progressive leftist party. Slightly more moderate than the lnp stated policies,but right wing nonetheless. Am I wrong? How?
Zoid – if it was 51-49 to the Coalition the line would be “Coalition to win in a landslide.”
Labor getting 51-49 is “neck-and-neck” while 52-48 to Labor would be “too close to call”.
Jenauthor @ 8.29pm and Boerwar @ 8.32pm: The question of what vote the ALP might need to win is almost always answered incorrectly, because the seats-votes relationship is not deterministic. That means that at best you might hope to put probabilities on a coalition or ALP win, given a particular split of the vote. One might draw an analogy with quantum mechanics.
Nearly all the stuff you see asserted on this topic is therefore misguided, because it doesn’t attempt to estimate probabilities. (There are exceptions, including the Monte Carlo simulations which Possum used to run some years ago on his Pollytics blog.)
Estimating the probabilities is itself a challenge, and there are different ways in which the problem can be approached, none of which is intrinsically right or wrong. The state of the art models are those produced by Gary King and Andrew Gelman, which have been cited in opinions of Justices of the US Supreme Court. See:
http://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/writeit.pdf?m=1360038994
and
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/electoral3.pdf.
There’s a detailed discussion of these issues in Bernard Grofman and Gary King, “The Future of Partisan Symmetry as a Judicial Test for Partisan Gerrymandering after LULAC v. Perry”, Election Law Journal, vol. 6, no. 1, 2007, pp. 2-35.
The most recent of King and Gelman’s models has been reflected in a software program called JudgeIt, which King distributes through his website. See http://gking.harvard.edu/judgeit.
I’m not aware that any of the analysis that’s been done in Australia uses this model, so in that sense it’s all prehistoric.
A modest disclaimer: I wrote a thesis over 30 years ago on probabilistic modelling of the seats-votes relationship in single-member constituencies, which has since been essentially superseded by the work cited about.
LW
Your trolling is so gauche.
If it was 51/49 LNP, Kenny would have desribed it as “woohoo!” accompanied by a fist pump. He would’ve said “wow” but that’s already patented.
They really do a good job building up anticipation for polls. I can’t even go to bed now.
Briefly would be at home in England with first past the post voting. In Australia with preferential voting there are more opportunities for small parties to get involved. But we still here the claims about wasting votes for minor parties, Greens are campaigning against Labor etc.
I have some sympathy with the argument that the Greens would do better to campaign in a smarter way eg the Bandt initiative to promote a Labor Greens agreement in a minority government was just grist to the LNP mill. When there are likely to be 1 or 2 Greens and another 3 or 4 cross-benchers in the HOR why get everyone focussed on the difficulties of minority government. Greens should be campaigning to elect a majority Labor government with an increase in Greens MHRs. Doesn’t stop competitive contests in Melbourne, Batman etc but the overall goal is clear.
M
I award you 10/10 for probabilistically baffling me with bullshit.
Sounds like Kenny wasnt too excited so 51-49 Labor for me.
TPOF:
Indeed!
Can’t answer my question cause you know the truth. Resort to insults. Lovely.
8h
Josh Taylor @joshgnosis
Shorten says Turnbull’s NBN policy is like his PMship: “over promise, under deliver and take forever to get to the point” #AusVotes
+1 to bill for that one.
Wakefield:
That would be too pragmatic for the Greens to countenance.
Boerwar @ 9.05pm: My pleasure.
someone asked for video for today – supposedly here:
http://australianpolitics.com/2016/06/19/shorten-alp-campaign-launch.html
Lee Wool. Petulance is neither endearing nor informative. Thank Musrum for STFU.
Gorilla,
“Maybe just an hour of Tony Jones…..”
Kevin Rudd shows how it’s done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHPij5Q9geQ
Greg Jericho @GrogsGamut
This advert seems to be suggesting the Liberal Party is useless but we might as well stick with them.
confessions @ #446 Sunday, June 19, 2016 at 2:23 pm
Yeah, it was left to Gillard to do that.
Sounds like Kenny is spinning a bad result. 51 or 52 to Labor. If there was a shift to the libs, he would have wet himself.
Thanks Michael
Marko Milinkovic @AusLoafer
“Ironically,the property behind me will still qualify for #NegativeGearing under ALP” #ausvotes #auspol #FakeTradie
Lee Wool – if your intention is to look like a jumped up blow in you seem to be succeeding. How about some measured commentary rather than than throwing punches in all directions. To suggest that the Greens have the answers for a radical change in Australia is mostly hyper-ventilating. The Greens are ok on some issues but have all sorts of problems from a comprehensive socialist perspective.
Actually, the gracious way Gillard greeting Shorten and gave him 2 kisses shows she can put any tactical betrayals behind her like he is doing.
Kenny wasn’t exactly high fiving Nick Cater when he commented so on that basis alone I’m going for ALP ahead.
This is how we parse things around here…
Cue the “behind in the key marginals however” analysis from Uhlmann, Kenny M and Co.
On whether Mr Turnbull will appear on Q&A with the flu: part of the risk is how your voice can be distorted. I remember once hearing Gough Whitlam speaking in Parliament when he had a bad head cold, and he sounded like a seal honking, not at all his normal well-spoken self: it was almost laughable. Mr Turnbull can’t afford to have people laughing at him at this stage of proceedings.
So this duck waddles into a pub, jumps up on a stool, puts his bill on the bar and looks up at the barman…
“got any grapes” he asks.
“no” replies the barman and the duck waddles out.
Next day same thing happens, “got any grapes?”, same barman says no and the duck walks out.
Next day same thing happens, “got any grapes” and the busy barman tells the duck to rack off.
Next day same thing happens, “got any grapes” and the barman says “f off, next time you come in here asking for grapes I am going to nail your f’ing bill to the bar”.
Next day, the duck waddles in, up on the stool, bill on the bar and says………..
Wakefield, you serious? Don’t fool yourself, labor, as usual is shit scared of corporate press so has gone faux rabid against greens. Pathetic faux outrage gesture politics. Greens have offered an aliance with labor. Labor throws it in greens faces then are expected to campaign for labor. Wtf?
……………. “got any nails”?
“no”.
“got any grapes?”
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t reckon the sight of Gillard is anywhere near as powerful in reigniting memories of the RGR era than Rudd is. I was happy to see Gillard there today, and just as happy not to see Rudd there.
50-50 is my guess.
Two kisses Jen!
But did their cheeks actually touch/
Heavens to betsy.
Jenauthor
You speak truth!
A few elections ago, there was at least one other seat which had ‘bellwether’ status (McEwen??), having been held by whoever it was in government since federation.
And then it wasn’t , and so we never hear of it again…
AB:
Yep, me too for precisely that very reason.
jenauthor @ #811 Sunday, June 19, 2016 at 8:29 pm
It’s true in about the same way that if you toss 20 coins you expect to get about 10 heads and 10 tails but you just might someday get 17 heads and 3 tails. Labor could get a really lucky distribution and win with, say, 49.5 2PP but they could also get unlucky and lose with 52.5. If the swing is, say, 3.5%, then they’ll win some of the seats on 5%, but they’ll also miss some of the seats on 2%. More likely they’ll miss more of the latter because of personal vote effects.
Not everyone just reads seats off the pendulum and assumes those below the swing fall and those above it don’t. William and I both treat seats as having a probability of falling in our projections.
Simon that was pretty bad.
I am a bit worried about this flu business with Malcy. All this touching and hugging with the hoipoloi. He’d have no resistance. Unlike Shorten, who has had lot more exposure to commoners.
Simon
It was bad, but made me laugh.
Labor foolishly did itself an enduring disservice by disowning Keating for years and years.
It appears that Labor has learned from experience.
Rudd, who lives in the US but who was in Russia on important personal business, was unable to attend. But the signal was clear. Had he been about, he would have been welcome as were Hawke, Keating and Gillard.
I must say I was surprised to see that Gillard has had her devil’s horns surgically removed.
K17- Yeah i agree about Kenny.You can read these Liberal plonkers like a book.
AB
Rudd wouldn’t have been able to decide if he should sit on Gillards’ left or right or both.
A dilemma.
The RGR wars are burned into the memories of protagonists here, but I’m not sure that the broader community really cares any more. With all that’s happened, even 2013 seems a long time ago, several PMs in fact. The coalition clearly can’t make much of it in their campaigning, as it invites the obvious rejoinder.
More generally, it’s easy to forget how willing people are to forget the past about a party if they think (or want to think) that a problem has been solved. The Liberals were essentially in a mess from 1969 to early 1975, but it didn’t stop them winning big once Fraser came along and pulled everything together.
LW – if there is to be arrangements, alliances or whatever between Greens and Labor it might be best to negotiate that quietly and sort out the various issues involved. Putting a public challenge by Bandt on Q & A was pretty close to 100% counter-productive.
It is also doubtful if Greens trying to be in formal alliances helps the Greens. Greens would be best to offer confidence in any minority government and leave all other issues to be voted on merit.
Thanks Kevin B – wasn’t having a go at you guys if that’s what you’re thinking! Just challenging the accepted beliefs (mainly because I am a contrary soul and as a writer, cliche is the BIGGEST no-no there is) but also because norms are only ever norms if they are always perpetuated.
Greens arent running for pm. Shifty shorten is. If labor were an actual leftist party, there would be no greens. Do you think I’m happy having no effective choice between neoliberal and neoliberal light? I wish I did and so do most greens voters. The best we can do at the mo is hold them to account in the Senate when the situation presents.
Zoomster @ 9.17pm: You must be tired. Think for a few moments about the naming of “McEwen”, and you’ll see why it can’t have existed since Federation.
Without getting into RGR wars again, a few comments on the absence of Kevin Rudd.
First, he could well have had other fish to fry anyway – he is the most likely of the four former PMs to be outside Australia at any given time.
Secondly, Bill Shorten made it quite clear that Rudd’s absence was not welcomed by going out of his way to utter some kind words about him from the stage (and bear in mind that key members of Shorten’s front bench – notably Bowen and Albanese – were longstanding Rudd supporters during the Troubles).
Third, whatever individuals here think of Rudd – victim or villian – the fact is that his absence was probably helpful in that he would not have gotten the same welcome as Gillard, as evidenced by the Whitlam funeral. Fair or not, it would have sowed a seed of discord.
Finally, I predict that in 10 years or so – especially if Labor win power this time or the next – Rudd will slip into the Labor pantheon. He was an election winner. And he has not gone out of his way since leaving office to cause any grief to the party and its prospects.
For all that, the real story of the day was Shorten’s policy announcements and pressing his claims for his leadership and his team having the same narrative, direction or what you will that the Hawke government had. The only former PM whose presence really, really mattered was Hawke’s. And that was because it underpinned Labor’s legitimacy as the party of Medicare.
Apparently Bill said ‘Aint see nothing yet’ what does he mean by that?