The Sunday after Super Saturday

A good night for Bill Shorten as Labor lands a surprisingly emphatic win in Longman, and does enough to get home in Braddon.

While Labor’s by-election performances were nothing special in historical terms, it was undeniably a good night for the party, thanks largely to an unexpectedly clear win in Longman. Five campaign opinion polls had Labor slightly behind in the seat, before the election eve Newspoll found them edging to a 51-49 lead. Labor actually appears headed for a winning margin of around 4%, bolstering a fragile 0.8% margin with a swing of 3.4%. The big surprise was the near double-digit fall in the Liberal National Party primary vote, which leaves them struggling to crack 30%. This is well below the 34% attributed to them by Newspoll, to say nothing of a series of ReachTEL results that had them approaching 40%.

The LNP slump rendered redundant what everyone imagined would be the decisive factor, namely the flow of One Nation preferences. Despite this, One Nation were the other big winner in Longman, adding around 7% to their 9.4% vote from 2016. This indeed flowed a lot more strongly to the LNP than in 2016, reflecting the party’s how-to-vote card recommendation and the fact that they clearly picked up much of the LNP’s lost support. After receiving 56.5% of One Nation preferences in 2016, Labor looks to have scored only a third this time.

The Braddon result was less good for Labor, notwithstanding that they have clearly won, and that this looked in doubt throughout the campaign. The main change from the 2016 result is that independent Craig Garland scored a creditable 11.0% (although it may come down a little in late counting), chipping a few percent away from each of Labor, Liberal and the Greens. Rebekha Sharkie’s win in Mayo was of about the anticipated scale: her present lead over Georgina Downer after preferences is 8.6%, compared with her 5.0% margin in 2016. Sharkie’s primary vote performance was even more robust, up from 34.9% to around 45%. This bespeaks one poor aspect of the by-elections for Labor – after playing dead at two successive elections, its vote in Mayo has fallen all the way to 6.0%.

In the two WA seats, Josh Wilson did notably better in Fremantle than Patrick Gorman did in Perth, although neither was in the least bit troubled. Wilson gained 11.6% to gain a clear majority on the primary vote, with the Greens treading water at 17% and the Liberal Democrats garnering enough stray Liberals to land in the low teens. Despite the 42.3% Liberal vote from 2016 being up for grabs (compared with 36.9% in Fremantle), Labor only made a negligible gain on the primary vote in Perth, with the Greens also only up slightly. The rest spread among a large field of 15 candidates, with independent Paul Collins the strongest performer among claimants to the Liberal vote. Turnout was notably subdued in Perth and Fremantle, and looks likely to settle at around 70%.

If you click on the image below, you will find an accounting of the swings in Braddon and Longman and, in the former case, an projection of the final result. Since the swing on votes counted in Braddon thus far is exactly zero, it concludes Labor’s existing margin of 2.2% will be maintained. Also featured are regional breakdowns for Braddon and Longman, with the former broken into the larger towns (Burnie, Devonport and Ulverstone) and the remainder, and the latter into Bribie Island area and the remainder. This doesn’t turn up anything particularly interesting: especially in Longman, the swings were remarkably uniform. Craig Garland’s vote was a little lower in the larger towns, but there was otherwise little distinction to speak of in Braddon.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

813 comments on “The Sunday after Super Saturday”

Comments Page 12 of 17
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  1. poroti says: Sunday, July 29, 2018 at 4:31 pm

    phoenixRED

    Speaking of great Aussie bands. The Crow Eaters had a concert for Georgina yesterday.
    .
    The Angels – No Way Get Fucked Fuck Off – The Gov – Adelaide
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-VZP1pCIL8

    ***********************************************************

    Even better – for some reason I just don’t get the Georgina Downer vibe – she seems totally devoid of ANY personality and comes over as a vacuous air-head whose whole political existence and as a person is related to her surname

  2. [The thesis being that they are a cohort who for cultural reasons would never vote for Labor directly. When PHON is absent these are LNP primary voters, but having jumped on Pauline’s bandwagon at least some find themselves able to put Labor above the LNP once they’re in the both. I’d add as speculation that these are basically cultural voters – but once they’ve put their cultural marker down with PHON they are free to vote their economic interest.

    These voters don’t even need to be near the majority of those LNP voters who throw a protest vote for One Nation to be devastating to the LNP. If the LNP was to say lose 8% of their PV to PHON in a seat even if only 10% of those voters find themselves freed to pref Labor when they would have previously been LNP primary votes you are talking about a 1.5% swing on 2PP. And that’s before you get to direct changes in voting as clearly happened in significant numbers in Longman.]

    I’d also suggest they’re low information voters typically, so they would not fully understand the difference between putting Labor at ‘8’ and the Liberals at ‘9’ being a “Labor vote” — that is, apart from the AEC party funding model, that was as good as a Labor ‘1’ vote, but they’d never believe you even if you told them.


  3. An under-studied aspect of preferential voting is the extent to which some voters might be open to switching their preference only if they can find somebody else who they like (rather than the other major party) to vote 1 for. Some voters have class-based or habit-based resistance to “voting Labor” or “voting Liberal” that may not extend to preferencing.

    I would agree with that 100%, voted green for several elections with second preference to Labor after Tamper completely pissed me off. I voted Labor when I stated thinking this guy has got to go, halfway is not good enough.

  4. Prof/C@t

    My EXACT point when I said ‘lay off Peg’ is that it IS William’s decision who can post and what they can post.

    Argue with someone’s argument … not the person. That was ALL I was saying!

  5. DisplayName @ #533 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 4:06 pm

    Silos aside (agree with that part), Julia Baird seems to lament that talking heads interviewed by other talking heads are insufficiently represented on her show. She compares people who have a very loud voice, and a public platform from which to throw it, with people who have neither. Why does she think the latter like twitter? Are we supposed to sympathise with the strong who feel persecuted by the weak? Perhaps she could consider less lecturing of those who feel voiceless and powerless and try to work out how to include them in the conversation in a healthier fashion :-P.

    Well said. Like most of these content providers, Julia Baird gets a bit uppity when various ‘randoms’ on Twitter gave the gall to criticise the self proclaimed gatekeepers.

  6. DL,

    That is a different kettle of fish. A voter as low information as that is basically voting randomly unless they are following a htv.

    Of course if they are completely random and you are getting a percentage of such low information voters going from LNP 1 to PHON 1 you are basically going to see 50% of these who aren’t following a card having their vote find it’s way to Labor.

    We could only speculate on how large a cohort this is but for sure the larger the pull from LNP to PHON the better for Labor.

  7. frednk,

    Actually, you’re not what KB is talking about (unless I’m misreading you and you were a Lib voter up until 2001).

    In the context of the Greens it would be more like a ‘Doctor’s Wives’ Liberal who would never dream of voting for those Union Thugs in Labor deciding to vote Green, and then having made that leap deciding preferencing Labor above the Libs is ok (because preferences aren’t really ‘voting’)

  9. C@tmomma says:
    Sunday, July 29, 2018 at 3:54 pm
    zoomster @ #516 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 3:51 pm

    So why didn’t Garland run for the Greens? Not middle class professional enough for them? Or did he consider them a waste of time?
    I would imagine they are trying to court him right now. He’ll probably tell them to naff off. He seems like a pretty sensible fellow.

    While I don’t live in Tasmania, I do have a connection with the Braddon electorate. The Greens had a strong presence in Tasmania under Bob Brown because he promoted policies to protect the local physical environment and which were relevant to people living in the State.

    It should be remembered that most people in Tasmania live within easy driving distance of areas where there may be a contest between maintaining the natural environment and industrial or extractive uses such as clear felling of old growth forests or construction of dams. It’s not a case of living in say, Sydney and protesting about woodchipping old growth forest trees. Those forests are effectively in your own ‘backyard’ if you live in Tasmania.

    Since the change in Greens policies to include a raft of non-environmental topics (as espoused by their current leader) the attractiveness of the Greens to Tasmanian voters has diminished. This goes a long way to explaining the fall in their share of the vote. Mr Garland would find it difficult to fit into the Di Natale Greens Party of today.

  12. Diogenes @ #9347 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 4:35 pm

    Wombat et al
    Talking about drugs, I was told that Dr Harris used oral alprazolam combined with intranasal ketamine to sedate the kids in the cave. The US team suggested half would die so the rescuers had to get diplomatic immunity in case it went bad.
    I also heard the rescue was superbly organised. Absolute textbook. Hence the excellent outcome.

    That makes more sense than the use of repeated iv midazolam throughout the extraction, which is what was quoted from one source. Alprazolam is the shortest acting oral agent, and the ketamine is dissociative, not sedating at lower doses, so the kids were not unconscious or fully anaesthetised for the extraction. I suspect that the kids had iv lines and the rescuers were shown how to use iv midaz as a backup (subcutaneous midaz, which we use quite a lot in palliative care, has an peak effect onset time of 5-10min – which is not ideal if drowning) – though getting access to an iv cannula while underwater has its problems. The intranasal ketamine is seriously off label – no wonder the users required government level immunity.

  13. The Prime Minister will have to drag his government out of a trough of diminished confidence, as he faces Opposition Leader Bill Shorten whose leadership has been reinforced.

    Labor’s victory in four seats that it previously held might have seemed inevitable in the Liberal retrospective view. But there are other difficulties to come.

    …The Prime Minister will soon have to release Philip Ruddock’s report on protecting religious freedom, an issue sourced directly to unhappiness among Liberals that a big majority of Australians backed same-sex marriage.

    That will cause much chatter within the Government and result in Liberals and Nationals again focused on competing views internally.
    …On August 15 Parliament returns and five newly-elected MPs will be sworn in — none from the Government.

    Coalition backbenchers will have to watch as three former sitting Labor members are returned, plus a new Labor face, plus a re-endorsed minor party MP.

    The swearing-in ceremony will relive this weekend’s results, to much Labor chortling.
    …One distressing outcome of the by-elections is the insistence by Mr Turnbull that Labor lied its way to Longman victory.

    The threat is the Coalition will decide it should lie to survive a federal election. Further, it underlines the Liberals’ inability to counter whatever lies Labor launched.

    The Prime Minister’s frustration was obvious today.

    “It is a big challenge, but we are taking the approach, as I’ve said publicly, of treating it like Whac-A-Mole — you just have to keep on rebutting them with facts,” he told reporters.

    https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/special-election-results-just-a-curtain-raiser-for-problems-for-prime-minister-malcolm-turnbull/news-story/392f0be1f61b8756ca9b9d2749e3b3fa

  14. This bears repeating. The lies are coming from Turnbull and his mob.

    One distressing outcome of the by-elections is the insistence by Mr Turnbull that Labor lied its way to Longman victory.

    The threat is the Coalition will decide it should lie to survive a federal election. Further, it underlines the Liberals’ inability to counter whatever lies Labor launched.

  15. Kevin Bonham @ #513 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 3:35 pm

    Updated my live comments with some comments re Garland and the swings in Braddon:

    http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2018/07/super-saturday-by-elections-live-and.html

    Another excellent analysis and my thanks for your efforts.

    The point about commercial bias to a 50/50 split is well made. Unless there is a contest then consumers of media turn off to pursue other interests. So, the incessant focus on personality politics is just a means for the media to keep their readership engaged and keep the conversation going. That parties can win votes with allegedly unpopular Leaders is no surprise. Neither is the unerring unreliability of single seat polls. However, we, the consumers are badgered every day that the latest version of these metrics are somehow important.

    It was interesting the other day following the merge of Fairfax and Nine that it would herald the death of quality journalism. You only have to read the wall to wall “Killbill” coverage to know that ship sailed a long time ago.

  16. Mike Carlton‏ @MikeCarlton01 · 18h18 hours ago

    Can’t wait to read 4000 beautifully crafted words from The Australian’s Paul Kelly explaining what “Turnbull must do next…”

  17. Trumble = Trump. Just say whatever bullshit comes to mind and incessantly accuse everyone else of being lying fakes.

    But I wouldn’t worry about it Lizzie. The true ugliness of Trumble is always front and centre when the turd is under pressure. The ultimate downhill skier. His little run off having it easy is over. Now he’s not got everyone looking away from the disaster that is his PMship. He’ll grossly over reach because that’s what he does.

  18. ANTONBRUCKNER11 @ #517 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 3:45 pm

    Julia Baird mentions the issue (non disclosure of donations) and then runs away from it. Hey, Julia, ban all “think tanks” that don’t publically disclose their donors. If that puts them in a “silo”, fantastic.
    P.S. I’m still waiting for my invite onto the Drum. I’m not a “think tank” but I am a “thinker”. What’s wrong with me?

    Political reporting is all about think or thwim!

  19. Another reasons for guns to be banned world wide:

    The Age
    ‏Verified account @theage
    55s56 seconds ago

    Polar bear shot dead in attack on Arctic cruise

  20. Good – Point!

    Michelle Rowland
    ‏Verified account @MRowlandMP
    3h3 hours ago

    Michelle Rowland Retweeted Shorten_Suite

    Fresh from pointing at voters & corflutes, The Pointer from Point Piper points at everyone today – except himself.

    😀

  21. Harumph
    Tried to leave a comment on Mr. Denmore’s fine blog and got blocked as a suspected bot! Tried again under my proper name pointing out I had been using my Pollbludger moniker and the same thing happened.
    If you’re out there Mr. Denmore and would like more comments, please check the spam file.

  22. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/29/donald-trump-golf-environment-sssi-damaged-broken-promises

    Normally the site’s conservation status would have prevented any significant development. But Trump said that, if he was refused permission to develop on the southern end of the SSSI, he would withdraw from the entire scheme. He also claimed that, when completed, the land there would be “environmentally enhanced and better than it was before”. The Trump Organization said last year its environmental approach to the course had been “first class”.

    That view is disputed by conservationists. “It’s been ruined from a virgin, undeveloped wilderness site into something that’s relatively manicured,” said Dr Jim Hansom, a specialist in coastal ecology at Glasgow University. He told a recent BBC Scotland documentary the site had lost the key features that led to it being given protection. The decision to approve the course was met with anger by conservation groups. “It appears that the desires of one high-profile overseas developer, who refused to compromise one inch, have been allowed to override the legal protection of this important site. And we fear this sets a precedent that will undermine the whole protected-sites network in Scotland,” Aedán Smith, head of planning and development at RSPB Scotland, told the Times.

    Trump – whose visit to his other Scottish golf course at Turnberry this month triggered protests – infuriated conservationists in the US this month by proposing to weaken the landmark law that saved the bald eagle, the wolf and other species from extinction.

  24. It would seem that the coalition have no idea how or why they lost the by elections (apart from the WA ones).
    From opposition they tried full on RWNJ. That worked for one election. Then they tried pretending to be moderate, while still being RWNJ. That worked for one election. They could try actually being moderate, but Howard killed that idea 20 years ago.
    Its fair to say that Turnbull is a dud, but the nut jobs think it is because he isn’t a nut job. If they gave the job to Dutton, that might save the furniture in queensland, but it will tank in NSW and Vic. If only they had developed some policies in opposition, they might be in a better position today.

  25. Meanwhile, the world is awash with new alltime temperature records..

    Climate change. The world on fire: New temp. records

    UAE: 51.4°C
    Africa + Algeria: 51.3°C
    Tunisia: 49.2°C
    LA: 48.9°C
    Baku: 42.7°C
    Japan: 41.1°C
    Kabul: 40.5°C
    Montreal: 36.6°C
    Swedish polar circle: 32.5°C
    Baltic Sea: 25°C

  27. ratsak @ #556 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 4:45 pm

    DL,

    That is a different kettle of fish. A voter as low information as that is basically voting randomly unless they are following a htv.

    Of course if they are completely random and you are getting a percentage of such low information voters going from LNP 1 to PHON 1 you are basically going to see 50% of these who aren’t following a card having their vote find it’s way to Labor.

    We could only speculate on how large a cohort this is but for sure the larger the pull from LNP to PHON the better for Labor.

    That the Libs would countenance some sort of preference swap with ON is poisonous to their Brand beyond a specific seat like Longman.

  28. citizen @ #559 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 4:56 pm

    C@tmomma says:
    Sunday, July 29, 2018 at 3:54 pm
    zoomster @ #516 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 3:51 pm

    So why didn’t Garland run for the Greens? Not middle class professional enough for them? Or did he consider them a waste of time?
    I would imagine they are trying to court him right now. He’ll probably tell them to naff off. He seems like a pretty sensible fellow.

    While I don’t live in Tasmania, I do have a connection with the Braddon electorate. The Greens had a strong presence in Tasmania under Bob Brown because he promoted policies to protect the local physical environment and which were relevant to people living in the State.

    It should be remembered that most people in Tasmania live within easy driving distance of areas where there may be a contest between maintaining the natural environment and industrial or extractive uses such as clear felling of old growth forests or construction of dams. It’s not a case of living in say, Sydney and protesting about woodchipping old growth forest trees. Those forests are effectively in your own ‘backyard’ if you live in Tasmania.

    Since the change in Greens policies to include a raft of non-environmental topics (as espoused by their current leader) the attractiveness of the Greens to Tasmanian voters has diminished. This goes a long way to explaining the fall in their share of the vote. Mr Garland would find it difficult to fit into the Di Natale Greens Party of today.

    The Black Wiggle would have difficulties getting in to the shoes of the fisherman.

  29. Fresh from pointing at voters & corflutes, The Pointer from Point Piper points at everyone today – except himself.

    I’m doing a leadership course this year, and the most recent module is on leading teams. One of the team dynamics theories separates leader qualities into above and below the line behaviours.

    Below the line characteristics include blame, mistrust, looking to shift responsibility and using terms such as ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’ etc. Above the line characteristics involve personal responsibility, communication and using terms such as ‘we’, ‘us’ and so on.

    Not hard to figure out what group Turnbull is in.

  30. Commentators have mentioned “the Labor machine” with a slight curl of the lip, as if it’s NOT FAIR that Labor supporters work with energy and enthusiasm.

    From previous comments, I understand that LNP has to buy some “volunteers”. Tough.

  31. Hedgehogs suffering in England, frogs gawn

    UK heatwave: Hedgehogs starving and frogs wiped out as extreme weather takes its toll on wildlife independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-n…
    Hedgehogs brought to rescue centres ‘very skinny, very hungry and desperately needing water’

  32. ratsak @ #557 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 4:51 pm

    frednk,

    Actually, you’re not what KB is talking about (unless I’m misreading you and you were a Lib voter up until 2001).

    In the context of the Greens it would be more like a ‘Doctor’s Wives’ Liberal who would never dream of voting for those Union Thugs in Labor deciding to vote Green, and then having made that leap deciding preferencing Labor above the Libs is ok (because preferences aren’t really ‘voting’)

    I’ve always seen a lot of the vote of minors like the Greens as a “parked” vote. People are sitting on the bridge, thinking of which side of the river to be on. As I always point out with 80% of preferences from the Greens going to Labor, they are really just preference collectors for Labor. With the further segmentation of the electorate and the the rise of micro parties and ON Kevin Bonham seems to be identifying a cohort that is using there preference flow to change sides.

  34. I think it’s quite telling how Turnbull has reacted to the elections, i.e., no capacity to look at either himself or their policies. And as for Georgina Downer and the execrable Alexander, I’d bet they’re still blaming all those pesky blow ins.

  35. Hoover Dam helped transform the American West, harnessing the force of the Colorado River — along with millions of cubic feet of concrete and tens of millions of pounds of steel — to power millions of homes and businesses. It was one of the great engineering feats of the 20th century.

    Now it is the focus of a distinctly 21st-century challenge: turning the dam into a vast reservoir of excess electricity, fed by the solar farms and wind turbines that represent the power sources of the future.

    The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, an original operator of the dam when it was erected in the 1930s, wants to equip it with a $3 billion pipeline and a pump station powered by solar and wind energy. The pump station, downstream, would help regulate the water flow through the dam’s generators, sending water back to the top to help manage electricity at times of peak demand.

    The net result would be a kind of energy storage — performing much the same function as the giant lithium-ion batteries being developed to absorb and release power.

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/24/business/energy-environment/hoover-dam-renewable-energy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

  37. sprocket_ @ #575 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 5:37 pm

    Meanwhile, the world is awash with new alltime temperature records..

    Climate change. The world on fire: New temp. records

    Indeed. Things are happening fast now. And will of course happen ever faster in future.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/extreme-heat-wildfires-worsened-climate-change-say-scientists-n895496

    Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research said Friday that now it “reads like a prediction of what has been happening and will continue to happen as long as average temperatures continue to rise with ever-increasing emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. It’s no mystery.”

    It’s certainly no mystery to anyone with enough basic mathematics to read a simple graph …

    https://www.climatelevels.org/

    Why is this not the top story every day in every media outlet? What’s wrong with us?

  39. I only saw last 5 minutestes of “Insiders”. Did Nicky Savva on Insiders say that Malcolm is having continuous run of bad luck? She said that on Insiders in Sept/ Oct 2016 after horrible 4/5 weeks for MT government (ofcourse nothing changed much after that)
    Mark Kenny also coined a phrase that MT has Midas touch in reverse.

  41. In a world where mass media advertising and online advertising are becoming increasingly ineffective it is telling that the L/NP are expending time and energy whinging about the volunteer standing armies that Labor, teh Unions and GetUp! have rather than reflecting on why it is they can’t get tens of thousands of people to door knock, phone bank and hand out HTV’s for them.

  42. Greensborough Growler @ #582 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 5:47 pm

    ratsak @ #557 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 4:51 pm

    frednk,

    Actually, you’re not what KB is talking about (unless I’m misreading you and you were a Lib voter up until 2001).

    In the context of the Greens it would be more like a ‘Doctor’s Wives’ Liberal who would never dream of voting for those Union Thugs in Labor deciding to vote Green, and then having made that leap deciding preferencing Labor above the Libs is ok (because preferences aren’t really ‘voting’)

    I’ve always seen a lot of the vote of minors like the Greens as a “parked” vote. People are sitting on the bridge, thinking of which side of the river to be on. As I always point out with 80% of preferences from the Greens going to Labor, they are really just preference collectors for Labor. With the further segmentation of the electorate and the the rise of micro parties and ON Kevin Bonham seems to be identifying a cohort that is using there preference flow to change sides.

    There is also the possibility of (say) a young finance professional brought up in a Labor household who votes Green to satisfy his/her conscience and then preferences the Libs because that is where their economic interest lies.

  43. Ven @ #589 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 6:02 pm

    I only saw last 5 minutestes of “Insiders”. Did Nicky Savva on Insiders say that Malcolm is having continuous run of bad luck? She said that on Insiders in Sept/ Oct 2016 after horrible 4/5 weeks for MT government (ofcourse nothing changed much after that)
    Mark Kenny also coined a phrase that MT has Midas touch in reverse.

    Everything he touches turns to shite!

  44. That the Libs would countenance some sort of preference swap with ON is poisonous to their Brand beyond a specific seat like Longman.

    Oh of course the knock on effects are much wider than a specific seat, or even state.

    But it’s easy to overstate them too. When you have Trumble running around blaming Sudanese youths for all the world’s ills (and supposedly gaining in the polls at the same time) how much damage could a more formal arrangement with Hanson be in terms of losing votes in areas not so PHON positive?

    If Trumble wasn’t a complete dope he’d have adopted Howard’s position of decrying Hanson whilst stealing her policies. He’s basically adopted the policies, but is providing Hanson status and relevance.

  45. There is also the possibility of (say) a young finance professional brought up in a Labor household who votes Green to satisfy his/her conscience and then preferences the Libs because that is where their economic interest lies.

    Indeed.

  47. ajm @ #592 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 6:03 pm

    Greensborough Growler @ #582 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 5:47 pm

    ratsak @ #557 Sunday, July 29th, 2018 – 4:51 pm

    frednk,

    Actually, you’re not what KB is talking about (unless I’m misreading you and you were a Lib voter up until 2001).

    In the context of the Greens it would be more like a ‘Doctor’s Wives’ Liberal who would never dream of voting for those Union Thugs in Labor deciding to vote Green, and then having made that leap deciding preferencing Labor above the Libs is ok (because preferences aren’t really ‘voting’)

    I’ve always seen a lot of the vote of minors like the Greens as a “parked” vote. People are sitting on the bridge, thinking of which side of the river to be on. As I always point out with 80% of preferences from the Greens going to Labor, they are really just preference collectors for Labor. With the further segmentation of the electorate and the the rise of micro parties and ON Kevin Bonham seems to be identifying a cohort that is using there preference flow to change sides.

    There is also the possibility of (say) a young finance professional brought up in a Labor household who votes Green to satisfy his/her conscience and then preferences the Libs because that is where their economic interest lies.

    Indeed! But, that does not seem to be overly the case atm.

  48. Mark Kenny joins a horde of other GPG journos who tell us today what any thinking person knew a long time ago. And who participated enthusiastically in “Kill Bill”? Surely not Mr Kenny?

    After months of intense surgical fire under a Turnbull government strategy dubbed “Kill Bill”, what’s the outcome? Still Bill.

    Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, the great persister, has once again been underestimated by the government, by many commentators, and more than a few doubting Thomases on his own side.

    The Labor leader’s message to electors was as pithy as it was relatable: bigger hospitals versus bigger banks; attention to services and wages versus corporate largesse.

    Labor’s campaign alchemised the government’s ideological adherence to big business tax cuts as a supposed jobs and wealth creator, turning it instead into the political equivalent of arsenic.

    https://www.canberratimes.com.au/politics/federal/coalition-byelection-fail-a-setback-of-sobering-proportions-20180729-p4zu94.html

  49. Grimace, I said earlier that in a political environment where there is a lot of disenchantment with politicians, I would have thought that a ground game suddenly becomes critical because it actually connects with people.

  50. In a world where mass media advertising and online advertising are becoming increasingly ineffective it is telling that the L/NP are expending time and energy whinging about the volunteer standing armies that Labor, teh Unions and GetUp! have rather than reflecting on why it is they can’t get tens of thousands of people to door knock, phone bank and hand out HTV’s for them.

    Well it’s easier than trying to come up with policies that make their vested interest owners happy without screwing over everyone else.

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