At the end of the evening, a surprising election result hangs in the balance, with a remarkably long list of seats still up for grabs. What looked a slightly disappointing result for the Coalition early in the evening kept getting worse as the night progressed, with a number of seats that looked okay for them early on moving Labor’s way late in the night. Anything is possible, but I would now rate a hung parliament of some kind the most likely outcome, and it’s by no means impossible that it won’t be the Coalition forming the minority government.
At the 2013 election, the Coalition won 90 seats, Labor won 55, and others won five: one each for the Greens, Palmer United and Katter’s Australian Party, and two independents. Redistributions then took place in New South Wales, which lost a seat, and Western Australia, which gained one. In New South Wales, the Labor seat of Charlton in the Hunter region was abolished, but in the resulting reorganisation, Charlton’s neighbour Paterson went from Liberal to notional to Labor, as did Dobell on the Central Coast and Barton in southern Sydney. The three notionally Labor seats are now actual Labor seats, bringing the Coalition down to 87. In Western Australia, the new seat of Burt had a notional Liberal margin of 6.0%, but Labor blew the hinges off that with a 14% swing. Now let’s take a Coalition-centric look at what happened state by state.
In New South Wales, the Coalition has lost Eden-Monaro, Macarthur, Macquarie and Lindsay, and are going down to the wire in Gilmore. That brings them down to 83, with one on the endangered list.
In Victoria, there is little or nothing in it in Labor-held Chisholm and Liberal-held Dunkley. So that brings the endangered list up to two, but also brings one on to what I will call the opportunity list (which won’t be getting any longer).
In Queensland, Labor has won Longman and, following a late-evening turnaround, Flynn. Capricornia and Herbert look better for Labor than the Coalition, but I’ll nonetheless assign them to the endangered list, along with the genuinely lineball Forde, and Dickson where Peter Dutton will probably but not definitely make it over the line. Not surprisingly, Fairfax, which Clive Palmer won in 2013, goes back to the LNP. That brings them to 82, and intensifies the headache in trying to assess the situation by making it six on the endangered list.
In Western Australia, besides the previously noted Burt, Cowan could go either way. Now we have seven on the endangered list.
In South Australia, Mayo has gone to the Nick Xenophon Team as expected, bringing the best case scenario for the Coalition down to 81. Furthermore, the endangered list gets still longer with Hindmarsh lineball; Grey looking to me like a show for the NXT, with their candidate second and the Liberal member on an unconvincing primary vote of 41.6%; Boothby a less likely but still possible gain for NXT, if their candidate overtakes Labor by doing 4.6% better than him when the 13.4% Greens-plus-others vote is split three ways on preferences. Now our endangered list blows out to ten.
Tasmania at least is neat and tidy, with a surprisingly poor result for the Liberals costing them all of the three seats they gained in 2013, with Bass going on a second consecutive double-digit swing. And Labor won the Darwin seat of Solomon in a result that bodes ill for the Country Liberal Party government at their election in late August.
That brings the Coalition down to 77, which they can hope to push up to 78 if they win Chisholm. But then there’s that intimidatingly long endangered list of ten, and while they can hope to rely on the traditional tendency of postal votes to favour them, they would need to be very lucky to make it to a majority.
As for the cross bench, Andrew Wilkie, Cathy McGowan and Bob Katter were easily re-elected; Adam Bandt retains Melbourne for the Greens, and the NXT wins Mayo; and both NXT and the Greens could gain an extra two seats each with a bit of luck (quite a lot of luck actually, in the Greens’ case).
Ultimately, the spread of possibilities for the Coalition ranges from 69 to 78, while Labor’s is only slightly weaker at 63 to 75. If Labor falls below 65, it will do so by losing seats to the Greens, who would assuredly favour them to form government.
Now for the Senate.
In New South Wales, the Coalition wins five, Labor four, the Greens one and One Nation one, with the last seat up in the air. Based on my somewhat speculative preference model, Labor gets enough preferences for their fifth candidate to compete with the Liberal Democrats for that seat, but that may be overrating the Liberal Democrats preference flow based on their strong performance from top position on the ballot paper last time. The other possibility is that it goes to the Christian Democratic Party.
In Victoria, the Coalition and Labor get to four; the Greens should make it to two; and Derryn Hinch has won a seat. The last seat is anyone’s guess, but I’m inclined to think it will be a fifth seat for the Coalition.
In Queensland, there should be five Coalition, four Labor, one Greens and Pauline Hanson, and another tough call for the last spot. The Liberal Democrats are a surprisingly good show, but I wouldn’t rule out Family First.
In South Australia, four Liberal, four Labor, three NXT, one Greens. Surprisingly, Bob Day of Family First doesn’t look like he’ll make it.
Western Australia I expect will be five Liberal, one Nationals, four Labor, two Greens. In Tasmania, five Labor, four Liberal, two Greens and Jacqui Lambie.
I told my friend from Brisbane it was his fault 🙂
A few post-election thoughts.
1. Malcolm Turnbull is a dud politician, an empty suit spiv, who showed in his speech last night that deep down, he has no class. He took a gamble in calling this election, and it failed spectacularly. I’d be shocked if he is still Liberal leader by the end of this year.
2. Bill Shorten, by contrast, has really grown in my estimation over the course of this year. He is actually the first Opposition a leader to last a whole term since 2001, and in the process he has reunited Labor after its thrashing in 2013, seen off one prime minister, and most probably a second, and has put forward some substantial, brave and worthwhile policy. He will almost certainly be the next Labor PM, and quite possibly sooner rather than later. And I think he will make a pretty good fist of it when it happens.
3. The Greens had a disappointing night in the end, and my personal jury is still out on Richard di Natale. In an election with a large swing on offer against a conservative government, and one in which nearly one in four voters voted “other”, the Greens only increased their vote by about 1.5%, and failed to pick up Batman against a poor Labor incumbent. It could be that around 12% of the vote is the natural ceiling for them.
4. For a nation with so many political commentators, it’s safe to say that most of them are complete bullshit artists, with no greater insight than the rest of us. Nearly all of them were so enamoured by MT, that they were unable to see his fatal flaws. They all greeted his ascension to the top job with predictions about a decade-long rule, his risky gambit of forcing a double dissolution election as brilliant, and for the last two weeks were assuring us that the Coalition would be comfortably returned. It’s pleasing that so many of our compatriots can see through their crap.
5. At this point a minority Coalition government looks the most likely outcome (though not certain) but those promises of “stability” now look pretty hollow.
The AEC is not calling Grey, emphatically or otherwise. It has conducted two-party Liberal-versus-NXT counts in four booths in and around Port Augusta that are unrepresentative of the electorate as a whole, and the NXT leads in those four booths. If you extrapolate the preference distribution from those four booths over the electorate as a whole, which I don’t necessarily advise at this early stage, the Liberals retain the seat.
I channel-flicked to all 4 free to air stations and SKY.
The best commentator by far IMHO was Kristina Kennealy on SKY.
The commercials were tacky with their silly ejectors and crushers … juvenile to interpret a national election in such a way.
ABC has lost cred in that they are trying to compete with the commercials by injecting jokey silliness. Putting Morrison next to Wong meant they could hassle each other (Morrison bullying/steam-rollering wherever possible). More sensible would have been to have one anchor between the two opposing sides … as they used to do when they were in the actual tallyroom. I also suspect Antony Green was not impressed that he had to add bells and whistles to his computer modelling/simulations in order to make things attractive to the viewer.
If I remember correctly Reachtel picked the beginning of the move to Labor in Tassie 2 weeks ago and was ignored by the MSM and the CPG.
CC
I think the X man has as good as said he will support the party with the most number of seats. Add Katter and McGowan. i suspect Wilkie would be voting for stability so he would support money bills and confidence motions and treat the rest on its merits. As it should be.
DTT
I don’t think the AEC ‘calls’ anything. They just report what has been counted.
ctar1 @ #1446 Sunday, July 3, 2016 at 10:52 pm
…………………………………………
Yep.
I see Ulhmann as damaged goods as well as any number of others at the ABC.
He has been saying for weeks in ABC flagship News Bulletins that Labor would lose. He said it over and over and over and over.
He was wrong. Its turnbull in all sorts of strife.
Ulhmann has no credibility and should resign – just go.
Didn’t Uhlmann also say the coalition wouldn’t loose any seats and given Fairfax, increase by 1 or 2?
People like this never learn, are never wrong and are very good at manipulating the narrative in their own favour. I see him staying, just like so many other hacks that should have been kicked out long ago based on incompetence.
autocrat @ #1409 Sunday, July 3, 2016 at 10:23 pm
You don’t want to buck conventional wisdom when everyone else is following it to the letter. And conventional wisdom is that there is always a swing to conservative governments when the polls are showing 50/50. In this election there was the fact that Labor needed to do better than that to win a majority. And almost all the media lost sight of the very large possibility of a hung parliament.
So, like the proliferation of extreme weather events, we are seeing in politics a proliferation of extreme democratic political outcomes. And the media of the world are in denial.
ABC only are still quoting Antony Green that a Labor majority is not possible. Is this still correct?
[There are two main scenarios:
The Coalition picks up nine or more of the “in doubt” seats and can form a majority government.
The Coalition does not reach the 76 mark and Australia has a hung parliament.
Green says the Coalition will win more seats than Labor, so a Labor majority government is not a possibility.]
From the Uhlmann article linked by Dave at 11.01:
Anyone spot what’s wrong with this sentence?
diogenes @ #1415 Sunday, July 3, 2016 at 10:32 pm
So they do not lose any ballot boxes and we don’t have to have another election.
I recall him saying stuff like “oh in this state, there are all these seats in play, but.. lets given labor one or two”.. and that was the way he did the whole thing.
Actually, when you think about it, this election highlighted two things very strongly:
1) The electorate was ahead of the CPG in actually reading the true state of Turnbull’s fall from his dizzying heights. The polls showed a dramatic fall from grace while the CPG kept up with the ‘he has a secret plan, give him more time’ meme going long after it was apparent that Turnbull is an empty vessel with little to no political nous (which is really silly given they had an inside view of it back in 2009).
2) Shorten, sensibly, went back to old school electioneering using a solid platform of policy. Apart from the bus there were few bells and whistles … and he treated the electorate (and even the gallery – despite their obnoxiousness) like intelligent adults. TV and gallery, on the other hand, have become entranced by the bells and whistles. Some silly graphics people have come in to ‘sex’ up the coverage with shiny baubles to entertain the viewers.
And as a post script: the media said we were bored and disengaged/disinterested (and most people might have been) but I think this was an excuse for the CPG to be lazy and not do the policy homework etc. Instead they went for the colour and movement, easier, and plays to the dumbed down view they have of the electorate.
Fairfax and ABC are still reporting as if Turnbull will either lead a majority or minority government.
I would have agreed with this assessment last night, but things seems to have changed, such that so many seats are in doubt that it is still not clear which will be the largest party. Is this correct William? Is your state of play above still a fair assessment in your view?
william bowe @ #1453 Sunday, July 3, 2016 at 10:55 pm
Thank you William for confirm what a few of us having been saying.
I see Kevin Bonham has updated his blog with a post about Melbourne Ports and a post about Grey and other NXT seats.
http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/
tpof @ #1463 Sunday, July 3, 2016 at 11:08 pm
To be fair to Uhlmann, I think he was trying to draw a distinction between what T asserted – Labor’s claims were outrageous – and why they worked – because of the existence of evidence that refuted T.
Interestingly if things stay as they are (i.e. the party leading holds the seat) we could get 72 (ALP), 73 (Lib) and 5 (Oth) – Fateful numbers. If we swap Oakeshott and Windsor for Sharkie and McGowan it is 2010 redux (I think).
This is probably high-water mark for Labor though as it requires them hanging on to – Hindmarsh, Forde, Melb Ports and Flynn and other close seats where they are ahead. Also assumes Libs win Grey.
If NXT get Grey, ALP and Libs may be equal on 72 with 6 Others.
ALP need to pick up any or all of Chisholm, Dunkley or Deakin to do better than 72. I understand this may be unlikely given the meme of Libs doing better on Postals.
However, as William says – far too many moving pieces though to make predicting anything worthwhile.
Geez, I thought it would be all over by now and I could get on with life…
The way Massola writes, it’s as if the “Albo Camp” of senior Labor strategists and movers-and-shakers – who apparently talk exclusively to James because he’s, you know, one of Labor’s staunchest supporters and can be trusted implicitly- is giving Little Billy Shorten the benefit of the doubt and will most probably not decide to turf him now.
Gee, Bill would be breathing a sigh of relief at that, wouldn’t he?
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2016/election-2016-malcolm-turnbull-faces-backlash-as-blame-game-begins-20160703-gpxcr9.html
Turnbulls’ declaration that there would be no change to Medicare rang hollow.
Most engaged voters knew that ‘Medicare’ was Labor shorthand for the Health system:
– Forcing GPs to have to demand a co-payment;
– Payments for blood tests and the like; and
– Perverting the Pharmacological Benefits System so extra up-front payments are required.
All not part of Medicare but part of Universal Health care.
Two interesting things from Kevin’s blog posted I mentioned above.
1. There is some chance Andrea Broadfoot’s eligibility could be challenged, and what a mess that would cause if she won it and then the result was legally challenged.
2. There is a small chance that the Liberals could win Melbourne Ports.
I’m reading a lot about how shorten is “courting” independents, but I can’t see why he would be.
Apart from a polite, “How do y’do?” I think Bill would stay right out of it and let Turnbull hang himself.
It’s been a winning strategy so far for Shorten.
Diogenes
Your implicit criticism of Antony Green switching models on Saturday night is I think premature. When the final numbers come in, and all the postal and absent votes are counted, the normal movement towards the Coalition in these votes may be enough to give numbers of seats going towards the Coalition which are in line with Antony’s model’s prediction at about 10 pm last night ie about 73 decided for Coalition and 4 in doubt.
The question you raise Diogenes is a valid one, but I would prefer to see the final numbers so we can have an informed analysis before we come to judgement.
The result also shows that national opinion surveys that are sufficiently randomised to be accurate across a very large group can only ever describe the “whole”. They can never be sufficiently granular to capture sentiments in a very small scale. For example, a national poll that surveys 1500 voters, giving a 95% confidence level with an moe around 3%, should reflect the views of about 10 voters in each Federal electorate. It’s not possible to infer from the views of 10 voters in a Federal seat where 100,000 voters are enrolled just what, if any, changes are occurring in that particular seat, especially if those changes are very small.
In a seat where, say, the margin between the parties is less than 2%, a fully randomised survey sample of 2,400 voters would be required to get a high-confidence report on voting intention with a sufficiently small moe to be relevant.
When this is taken even further – say, down to neighbourhood level – national surveys have no chance at all of capturing changes in voting intention. So, for example, in the precinct where I worked yesterday, an actual 14% 2PP swing was recorded. Similar swings were recorded in other nearby areas. Such highly localised changes could be found by appropriate surveys, but you’d need to know where to go to find them. The only people who would know where to look are the parties. This is because they alone know where and to whom they’ve been campaigning. Properly designed national opinion surveys may capture as few as 3 voters in the population that registered swings of 10-12-14% in Cowan yesterday.
This really means that macro polling – which appears to be very accurate across very large scale populations – is good for exactly that.
If we want to know what’s going on in the street x street/suburb x suburb campaigns that decide very close contests in marginal seats, completely different polling techniques have to be used. The results yesterday suggest that Labor are really very, very good at this. Their effort worked.
Re pre-polls and postal votes:
Is it reasonable to think that as their numbers increase, their tendency to differ from the vote on the day would decrease?
Also, the firefighter dispute in Victoria seemed to only be really beaten up in the last week or so of the campaign. Is it possible that votes cast before that might be more favorable to
labor than those cast on Saturday?
So, I’ve had myself a bit of a politics free day today. I know the media have been on about these apparent fake medicare texts; but any more on the apparent fake CFA calls?
This is the second worst Primary Vote the ALP has ever received in it’s 110 Years of electoral history.
No matter how you spin it, it was a bad result for Labor with barely 1 in 3 Australians voting for them.
Jenauthor
The Canberra Press Gallery – the guys who have the insider knowledge and the expertise, supposedly – were confidently assuring us that both Rudd and then Gillard were safe just hours before both were rolled.
In a similar fashion, they were still gushing about Abbott when the polls made it clear that the public thought he was a dud (a conclusion, in the absence of real political analysis, the public was able to come to without any assistance from the media).
Over the last several years, the so-called insiders have consistently lagged behind the man-on-the-street when it comes to correctly understanding political events, which is all the weirder because they’re the ones supposedly telling the m-o-t-s what’s going on.
toby akers @ #1480 Sunday, July 3, 2016 at 11:47 pm
Yet the LNP have only managed, at best, to only just eek out a majority government by the slimmest margin. How bad must the LNP be going if it can only just, perhaps, form a majority government?
Bushfire
I linked earlier to an article where Cathy McGowan said she had been contacted by Turnbull and not by Shorten.
There’s probably a bit of the ‘if X is doing this, Y must be doing it too’ thinking on behalf of the media.
Just surfacing. Great result ALP. Ordinary result Greens. Parliament and Senate slowly moving to be more representative of Australia.
BTW my prediction Friday lunch time was:
ALP 71
LNP 72
Others 7
Senate – totally screwed.
Is still a possibility! Should have put money on it.
Notice Sky and other media commentators trying to save face by blaming Liberal officials for lying to them about the marginal seat poll results.
Bolt sticking spikey objects into Turnbulls whatsie …. LMFAO….
BRING BACK TONY! Good night and best wishes …
There is an outside chance that Eden Monaro might still be the bellweather.I know its a long shot but hoping.
If, in a couple of weeks time, the Libs find themselves shifting their junk from one side of the House to the other, I don’t think reflections on the size of Labor’s primary is really going to provide them with much comfort.
Abbott now favourite as next Lib leader $2.50 sportsbet
A few thoughts on the election result:
Mr Shorten should be safe in his job not least because he will have greatly enhanced his standing among the rank and file membership of the party, who could be expected to like the feeling that they are onto a winner.
Unlike in many elections where an opposition loses, there is no obvious policy blunder which brought them down, which has to be junked, and which creates a vacuum for a year or two: no “Medicare gold”, for example. On the contrary, the ALP should feel quite confident in being able to stick with the great bulk of what it has developed, fine tune it to cover any weak points they managed to get away with, and go out with confidence to “socialise” it, as they say in Indonesia. They can bang on about a Royal Commission into the Banks, housing affordability and making the rich pay their fair share of tax from now until the next election, and the more they do it, the more the ideas will sink in. This is going to put them on a very much stronger footing than the government, which is looking at the prospect of a looming and massive policy vacuum.
The relative weakness of many Ministers compared with their shadows was very much on display during the campaign, and that will be able to used to good effect in the Parliament.
Finally, you can see that the plebiscite idea is now going to give the government an ongoing world of pain. Watch for the massive fight over whether public money should be given to the yes and no campaigns. Labor should be pressing for the details as soon as Parliament resumes. (As it used to say on crackers before they banned them, “light the blue touch paper and stand a safe distance away”.)
http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2016/07/house-of-reps-postcount-2016-melbourne.html
Reps postcount: Melbourne Ports
http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2016/07/2016-federal-postcount-grey-and-other.html
Reps postcount: Grey and other NXT seats (though I haven’t done the others yet)
[If, in a couple of weeks time, the Libs find themselves shifting their junk from one side of the House to the other, I don’t think reflections on the size of Labor’s primary is really going to provide them with much comfort.]
Exactly. Toolman was going hard on this in his reporting — I guess that is ABC “balance”
Toby
[This is the second worst Primary Vote the ALP has ever received in it’s 110 Years of electoral history.
No matter how you spin it, it was a bad result for Labor with barely 1 in 3 Australians voting for them.]
So picking up about 15 seats is a bad result 😀 .
One small point you may have overlooked is that for most of those 110 years Labor did not have to contend with Greens on their left flank getting first preferences from ~10% of voters.
It is disappointing to see the decline in the quality of trolling on this site…I am almost starting to miss ESJ.
johncanb
I strongly believe you can’t call seats and then uncall them if you want to be taken seriously, even if the original call turns out to be correct.
Apart from thinking it will be better for Labor to let the Coalition implode through minority government, I have to admit that Eden-Monaro and Lindsay losing bellwether status will be an added plus. Hopefully they can now just be treated as normal marginals and not some kind of victory chalice, and everyone can stop obsessing about them.
It seems clear from the result that voters no longer care about cheering for a team, with Labor receiving it’s 2nd lowest primary on record and the Coalition failing to hold seats and a massive amount of voters going to other.
The seats that look to be lost seemingly are based on the performance of the local member. Poor local members are being dumped(hence the wild swings in some seats) while those who have good local presence were re-elected. No longer is about teams, it’s about the players.
As the Nationals won a seat off the Liberals do they get an extra seat in cabinet?
Re what Briefly says above, it’s true that you can’t be certain of a seat distribution from a given national 2PP, only that all else being equal and taking into account everything relevant it should be about-so-and-so. It looks like here one side has been more successful in targeting marginals than is usual for a given 2PP and Oppositions don’t usually do that!
But there is still the question of why public seat polls were so wrong in some of these seats. Macarthur and Bass are two examples where repeated published seat polls found things lineball (or in the case of Bass mostly Nikolic leading) and then at the end the incumbents get absolutely thrashed by an amount outside MoE of a single seatpoll let alone combined MoE of 3-4 of them. So either there’s supposed to have been a really late and really massive swing in those seats (in which case why not everywhere else) or the public seat polling had something badly wrong with it all along. (And not preferencing either – the differences between the polls and the results were massive!)
I am not at all partisan between the major parties these days and was tossing coins all down my Senate paper between various of their candidates, but pleased to see Labor ahead in Cowan + hope it remains that way. It would be nice to see that particular species of scare campaign against the sort of expertise the parliament could do with defeated.
Darren, barring some freaky late count development in a seat currently off my radar, I have the Coalition home in 69 seats, Labor home in 64, others home in five, and ten up in the air (though I haven’t yet absorbed Kevin’s notion that the Liberals might win Melbourne Ports). So they would need to break 8-2 to Labor for them to finish in front. Out of the ten, I would, in descending order of degree, rather be in the Coalition’s position in Dunkley, Chisholm, Gilmore and Capricornia, and Labor’s in Herbert, Cowan and Hindmarsh. There are three seats I don’t even care to speculate about:
– Flynn, because the LNP would make it home if they did as well on pre-polls and postals as last time, but that was apparently because they did well from fly-in fly-out workers, of which the electorate now has fewer with the end of the mining boom. Note that I called it for Labor in my fatigued 4am assessment in the post above, which hopefully won’t have Diogenes expecting me to hand in my psephologists’ licence;
– Forde, because there looks like being so very little in it;
– Grey, because we don’t know enough about the preference flow yet, but the early indications are encouraging for the Liberals.
One more point I should have covered on the election: Mr Turnbull’s reputation in some ways was a bit like the Wizard of Oz: to a certain extent people were projecting on him their own hopes, which he encouraged. That’s been fading a lot in the last six months, but yesterday, the bubble burst with a loud bang, and it won’t be possible to put it back together again. Remember how his support collapsed after the Godwin Grech affair? Watch for the same thing to happen in the next couple of months: I think his approval ratings will go through the floor, and I’d expect Mr Shorten to overtake him as PPM soon.
I suspect that a consciousness of these facts underpinned Mr Turnbull’s really shocking performance last night addressing the party faithful (but also the nation). He diminished his office, and confirmed how he has shrunk.
Two others whose bubbles have been burst at about the same time are Tony Nutt and Mark Textor.
How seriously can you expect to be taken if you persist in a view you know to be wrong? If the LNP are ultimately declared the winner in Flynn, should I continue to insist that it hasn’t happened?
Toby Akers
Sunday, July 3, 2016 at 11:47 pm
This is the second worst Primary Vote the ALP has ever received in it’s 110 Years of electoral history.
No matter how you spin it, it was a bad result for Labor with barely 1 in 3 Australians voting for them.
Well, the LNP haven’t really done all that much better, have they?