Two notable developments in the Batman by-election campaign:
• The Age has results of a poll conducted by Lonergan Research which, unusually these days, targeted only landline phones. The poll of 700 respondents found Labor leading 53-47, from primary votes of Labor 40%, Greens 39%, others 16% and don’t know 5%. However, it might be thought the lack of mobile phone polling could skew the result in favour of Labor. It should also be noted polling ahead of the Northcote by-election in November understated support for the Greens. The poll also found 36.2% of respondents had the impression Labor supported the Adani coal mine, 28.3% believed it did not, and 20.3% did not know, with 76% saying they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who opposed the mine, against 24% for less likely.
• With this week’s closure of nominations, it emerged that ten candidates had come forward, which is at the low end of normal for federal by-elections these days. The ballot paper order runs Yvonne Gentle (Rise Up Australia), Ged Kearney (Labor), Alex Bhathal (Greens), Kevin Bailey (Australian Conservatives), Tegan Burns (Australian People’s Party), Debbie Robinson (Australian Liberty Alliance), Teresa van Lieshout (Independent), Adrian Whitehead, Mark McDonald (Sustainable Australia) and Miranda Smith (Animal Justice).
There isn’t much information online about Adrian Whitehead, but came across a short bio.
https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/adrian
Kevin Bonham has updated his coverage of Batman with a comment about the Lonergan poll:
http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/batman-unique-by-election.html
Lucky Ged, has the state seat as a back-up retirement option.
To amend my previous post, Adrian Whitehead’s campaign page:
http://www.voteplanet.net
ESJ, if they lose Batman, I highly doubt Labor manages to hold Brunswick. You would think someone of Kearney’s stature might find a berth somewhere a bit better – maybe in the new seat that will be created in the Victorian federal redistribution.
There is a major different between Batman and the state seat of Northcote in that Batman is much bigger and more northern. There is a lot more older people in the north of the seat.
Also let’s not forgot that there is the issue of personal vote. The previous member for Northcote had a large personal vote and following. If anything, Feeney had a negative personal vote effect, having been shoe horned into the seat, hopeless as a local member and forgetful on issue of property ownership.
It will be close but I doubt it will be the walk over that Northcote turned out to be.
Always amused how Bowe offers qualified support for labor but straight bats it for the conservatives- hmmm!
Teresa van Lieshout seems to be quite a character.
http://www.smh.com.au/wa-news/canning-candidate-teresa-van-lieshout-behind-bars-after-court-noshow-20151109-gkuxow.html
Are you actually suggesting no Greens voters in Batman have landlines? Or that only Labor voters have landlines? That’s the old saw usually applied to Lib/Lab square-offs, where anyone with a landline is seen, probably wrongly, as being a doddering old conservative. Are we really saying in this poll Labor voters are cast as role-playing cliched Tories? The poll, like any research, would be weighted for age. As it is the only public poll available so far, the result is newsworthy.
Bookies continue to have the Greens $1.25 to $3.25 favourites, so I think I’m on safe ground in saying a 53-47 to Labor result is unexpected. No doubt the poll was weighted by age, but what kind of young people are they contacting? I tend to think there might be a bias towards people from migrant families living with their parents at the northern end of the electorate.
Kevin Bonham describes this as a “poll-shaped object” and explains his technical concerns with it -http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2018/02/batman-unique-by-election.html – besides which it simply a matter of record that electorate level polling in Australia does not yet have a track record of reliability – reputable pollsters now do a good job at the national and state level. Electorate level research is just that much more difficult.
I also replied to similar questions by the same poster in comments on that article.
Another thing which will be different to the Northcote by-election is the Australian Conservatives are running and may be seen by Liberal voters as a proxy. It will interesting to see how they perform. For comparison at 2016 the Liberals got just shy of 20%, so I reckon they might be able to crack double figures.
Donkey voters who start at Box 2 with a 1 and number down the paper in sequence, forgetting to mark Box 1, will lodge a valid vote for Labor.
Donkeys who miss the top two boxes will cast an invalid vote.
BSF,
Also factor in that RDN grew up in Reservoir and went to school in Bundoora – Batman born, bred and educated. He campaigned with Bhathal in the north during the 2016 election.
I live in Batman and campaigned actively for Clare Burns at the Northcote byelection last year.
This byelection seems very different. I door knocked a small segment of Thornbury today and saw more Ged Kearney corflutes in that small area than I saw for Clare Burns in the entire Northcote electorate last year.
Worse for the Greens, they do not have a single Alex Bhathal coreflute on Arthurton Road (a very busy east west arterial). There were at least eight for Lidia Thorpe on that strip last year.
Yesterdays ABC News National Wrap with Karvelas featuring Bhathal and Kearney:
http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/national-wrap/NC1822V004S00
Sportsbet have put out a press release saying 99% of the money coming in is for Bhathal. They’ve now got her at $1.10, against $4.50 for Kearney.
I can’t wait to read all the lengthy and convoluted explanations for the failure of some polls and betting agencies to predict the Labor win in Batman…. Keep up that creativity, it’s good for your brain!
The volume that Sportsbet takes on a by-election is not massive. They limit how much one can place on a candidate too (as they do with novelty bets…. it is a way of getting non-bettors to sign up). There are higher odds elsewhere at the moment.
Early voting has opened for the Batman by-election.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/feb/27/alex-bhathal-signals-batman-byelection-going-green?CMP=share_btn_tw
Does anyone have any comment on the Labor on-the-ground campaign in Batman? What is happening? Ged Kearney seems a good candidate, but bookies now have the Greens at $1.14?? I cannot recall such a big difference between polling and betting.
Socrates re polling and betting.
The poll – if we are still calling it that – is actually very good for the Greens. Considering the landlines issue and the heavy sampling of older voters, it still had the Greens 3% away from winning, a remarkable poll for the Greens.. This may be a landslide if the Over 35s with landlines are splitting nearly evenly for the Greens.
In terms of Ground game, the Greens machine is a well oiled machine and has been outperforming Labor over many years, when Labor didn’t have to do much or have enough vollies. So the ground game infrastructure of Greens vs Labor is stark as evidenced by Northcote.
Labor hasn’t had to campaign in these “safe” seats for a while and it shows. The betting market is correct. the 10 cents back is a better bet.
Damian24 the polling sample would be corrected for age, so the reason it’s suspect is because the small number of young people with landlines it sampled might not be representative, not that it’s ignorning the intentions of the youth entirely. Don’t get me wrong, I still think it’s a bad poll, but I’d say it just adds further uncertainty rather than being explicitly good news for the greens.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/batman-byelection-greens-hopes-of-winning-bolstered-by-youth-influx/news-story/1e62617207981cd31c656eaa88c85a59
Batman by-election: Greens’ hopes of winning bolstered by youth influx
Areaman.
People under 35 who would have a landline would be still living with their parents. I know it was weighted, but I don’t know any one of my friends who do not live with their parents who have a landline. Come to think of it, I don’t know any of my friends who answer their mobile let alone their landline (especially if it is a private number). So these polls really are not getting a good read of how young people are intending to vote.
The only people I know who have a landline are over 70 years old.
I live in the much aligned Reservoir, the ALP’s last bit of heartland in Batman. I have been door knocked by the greens last weekend (no sign of the ALP), see far more Alex posters around than Ged, and have got in the mail info from both the ALP and the Greens. Ged’s add kept interrupting my online viewing (so the ALP is spending some $$$). I have seen Alex at Rezza station, but not Ged.
I think 2018 is Alex’s time to shine, Ged will hopefully get the new Vic safe federal ALP seat (I am personally insulted that talented ALP women are given marginal seats, while the boys get the safe seats).
Damian24 you’re literally repeating the same point I made back at me. As I said people with landlines may not be representative of the you people as a whole.
The 17th of March is St Patrick’s Day…
There’s going to be an awful lot of green around as a result. I wonder what impact this might have on the by-election?
Unfortunately this will be another easy Greens win.
The Greens have preselected a poor candidate but the demographics are very much in their favor.
Means Labor starts at -2 at the next Federal election.
👿
Right now I am 50-50 between a Labor or Greens victory in Batman, although I believe the margin of victory for either party is going to be narrow (4% or even less). A Labor loss to the Greens in Batman would seriously embarrass Bill Shortern and scare Labor MP’s in both Wills and Melbourne Ports. I suspect the Liberals stayed out of the by-election to allow a Green victory and put pressure on Bill Shorten on leader.
The Liberals never ran a candidate at the Batman by-election following the death of Alan Bird, the incumbent ALP member, in 1962. The Liberals thought, given Bird’s big win in 1962, that the seat was ultra-safe. The DLP ran with their State Leader Jack Little, later to become a Senator, and a proxy for the Liberals was an Ivanhoe solicitor named McLeod no one had ever heard of. McLeod polled badly. He was backed by the Darby group in New South Wales, Darby being an Independent Liberal MP for Manly in the New South Wales Parliament. His views were to the right of the Tea Party but his anti-Communism was more than matched by the DLP. What lessons can be drawn? 1962 is a long time ago. Batman at that time included the Ivanhoe area, with East Ivanhoe being solidly Liberal. It did not go north of the Latte line, as present day Batman does. Northcote then was ALP heartland, despite the fact that the ALP Northcote Councillors were largely clowns. It was not a safe seat for the ALP at all. Only the ALP and DLP campaigned to any great extent, and corflutes then were relatively unknown. While Sam Benson, the ALP candidate, was parachuted in from outside he turned out to be a good local member after his election. In 1963 at the general election Benson retained his seat by only about 300 votes. Had the Liberals run in Batman in 1962 they would probably have won in 1963. This time boundary changes would have meant a certain ALP victory were it not for gentrification, with newer middle-class voters in the southern part of the electorate voting Green. In the past Batman was a classic study of ethnic politics. The ethnic factor is still there, but it will not influence the vote. ALP factions in Batman have previously stacked branches for internal representation at ALP Conferences. The ALP obtained loyalty from Greek voters, and to a lesser extent from other ethnic groups. That loyalty seems to be fading.