Election minus two weeks

Candidate withdrawals aplenty, and the latest semi-regular round-up of intelligence concerning the state of the campaign horse race.

First up, I should note that elections will be held for two seats in Tasmania’s state upper house today (UPDATE: Make that three), as part of the 15-seat chamber’s cycle of annual periodical elections. Read Kevin Bonham’s rolling posts on the subject, for the electorate of Montgomery here and Pembroke here (UPDATE: and Nelson here), and you’ll be a lot better informed about it than I am. Nonetheless, I will make a probably half-hearted effort to live blog the results from 6pm this evening. Second up, a good word for the latest episode of the Seat du Jour series, which today covers the famous outer Sydney seat of Lindsay.

Now to business. The misadventures of sundry candidates are making it a constant challenge for me to keep my federal election guide up to date. The tally of candidates who will remain on the ballot paper despite having “withdrawn” to head off embarrassment for their parties now sits at six – although there is nothing to stop any candidate on the ballot paper winning election and taking their seat. Indeed, the two Senate candidates could theoretically win on recounts if the lead candidates end up being disqualified under some or other provision of Section 44 (or, in the case of One Nation candidate Malcolm Roberts in Queensland, re-disqualified). In turn:

• The second candidate on Labor’s Northern Territory Senate ticket, Wayne Kurnorth, was found to have shared anti-Semitic videos on Facebook in 2015, one of which featured popular British conspiracy theorist David Icke’s thesis that the world is run by shape-shifting Jewish lizards. Shorten overreached in distancing himself from Kurnorth, asserting he had never met him, a claim belied by a photo of the two that shortly emerged.

• Another “zombie” Senate candidate is Steve Dickson, who is placed second on One Nation’s ticket in Queensland. Dickson held the state seat of Buderim for One Nation for most of 2017, having previously been a Liberal National Party member since 2012. His troubles arose earlier this week when footage emerged of him offering poetic musings on the art of love while in a strip club, specifically relating to the deficiencies in that field of “Asian chicks”. This revelation for some reason reduced Pauline Hanson to tears during one of her daily appearances on commercial network television on Wednesday.

• Labor’s candidate for Melbourne, Luke Creasey, withdrew yesterday, two days after a report appeared in The Australian regarding his social media activity in 2012, at which time he was a 22-year-old university student. The most publicisied of Creasey’s infractions was to click “like” on what those who know their way around social media would recognise as a “psycho girlfriend meme”, in this case involving a joke about false rape allegations. He at first offered only an apology for what he acknowledged was “stupid, immature” behaviour, but a divide reportedly opened within the party between Creasey’s own Left faction, which wanted him to tough it out, and some on the Right, who insisted he be dumped. Importantly, The Australian reports the latter included Noah Carroll and Sam Rae, respectively the party’s national and state secretaries.

• Isaacs candidate Jeremy Hearn was one of two Liberals to announce his withdrawal on Wednesday, after it emerged he had written a number of comments on Facebook to the effect that the Muslim community wished to overthrow the Australian government and institute sharia law.

• Also pulling the plug on Wednesday was the Liberal candidate for Wills, Peter Killin, who wrote on a Christian conservative forum in 2016 that its readers should have participated in the Liberal preselection in Goldstein, as their doing so would have ensured the defeat of a “homosexual MP”, Tim Wilson.

• Jessica Whelan withdrew as the Liberal candidate for Lyons yesterday over anti-Muslim posts on Facebook, although she says she will continue to campaign as an independent. Whelan’s problems began on Wednesday when The Mercury reported she had posted that Muslims should not be allowed to live in Australia, and that Donald Trump should deal with Muslim-sympathetic feminists by giving them clitoridectomies and selling them to Muslim countries. She initially responded that the screen shots were fabricated, and referred the matter to the Australian Federal Police. Scott Morrison’s position on Thursday was that this was good enough for him, although he appeared to go to some lengths to avoid getting too close to Whelan when the two appeared together at a pre-arranged promotional opportunity at an agricultural show. However, Whelan appeared to change her mind about both the views expressed and their having been fabricated when she announced her withdrawal yesterday, prompting Morrison to complain he had been lied to. The Liberals will now encourage supporters to vote for the Nationals candidate, Deanna Hutchinson.

Horse race latest:

• In his column in the News Corp tabloids today, David Speers relates that “hard heads” in the Liberal Party doubt they can win. As one such reportedly puts it: “If we had another three months, who knows”.

• Steven Wardill of the Courier-Mail reported on Thursday that Labor sources said the party was “losing its grip” in Coalition-held marginals in regional Queensland where it led early in the campaign.

• Jennifer Hewett of the Financial Review reported on Monday that Liberals were “increasingly optimistic about internal polling” in Flinders, where Greg Hunt was “no longer at real risk”. Elsewhere in Victoria, Deakin was “considered solid”, although Corangamite was “much less certain”. The only seats in Victoria the Liberals were giving away were Dunkley and Chisholm.

• Andrew Clark of the Financial Review reports Liberal polling in Wentworth shows them “in a winning position, though the numbers are extremely close”, while in Warringah, Zali Steggall’s campaign is spruiking a poll that has her leading on the primary vote, with Tony Abbott said to be stuck on around 40%.

• For the second time in the campaign, the Liberals have provided the media – in this case Matthew Denholm of The Australian – with polling conducted by TeleReach that shows Bill Shorten with poor personal ratings in northern Tasmania. The poll gives Shorten a 29% approval and 63% disapproval rating in Braddon (compared with 55% and 37% for Scott Morrison), 37% approval and 56% disapproval in Bass, and 37% approval and 50% disapproval in Lyons. However, as was the case last time, no voting intention numbers appear to have been provided.

Self-promotion corner:

If you’re interested in my take on the state of play in my home state of Western Australia, you can hear a shorter version of it on Monday’s edition of the ABC’s AM program, or a much longer one on The Conversation’s Politics with Michelle Grattan podcast. Then there are my two paywalled articles for Crikey this week, lest anyone be worried that I haven’t been keeping myself busy lately.

From yesterday, an account of the importance of the Chinese community at the election:

Labor won enduring loyalty among many Chinese voters after the Hawke government allowed students to stay in Australia after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and John Howard did lasting damage with his suggestion that Asian immigration should be curtailed during his first stint as leader in 1988. When Howard himself suffered his historic defeat in Bennelong in 2007, the result was widely attributed to the transformative effect of Chinese immigration on the once white middle-class electorate. Increasingly though, the rise of China’s middle class is bringing affluent new arrivals with economic priorities to match, together with a measure of cultural resistance to the broader community’s progressive turn on sex and gender issues.

And from Monday, on Clive Palmer’s preference deal with the Coalition:

If Palmer can get ahead of the third candidate on the Coalition’s ticket, who will have what remains after the first 28.6% is spent electing its top two candidates, a quarter of their vote will then flow to Palmer, if Coalition voters’ rate of adherence to the how-to-vote card in 2016 offers any guide. That could give him a decisive edge over Malcolm Roberts of One Nation, his main competition for a third seat likely to be won by parties of the right. But so far as the Liberals are concerned, the significance of the deal is in showing up what a dim view they must be taking of their prospects, and their readiness to grasp at any straw that happens to come within reach.

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.

676 comments on “Election minus two weeks”

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  1. I dont see any of the coalition leaning independents that get elected forming a political party with moderate Liberals. I think that is a bit too out there. Mostly they would work with other independents in a loose alliance of sorts.

    Speaking of, I saw a completely decked out truck for an independent candidate for the seat of Robertson today inthe seat of Mackellar. If you know NSW geography its a bit of a far drive and the car is a long way by road from home.

  2. meher baba @ #88 Saturday, May 4th, 2019 – 9:53 am

    Michael: “Looks as if yet another Liberal candidate has a s44 problem: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/04/liberal-candidate-mina-zakis-eligibility-to-sit-in-parliament-questioned”

    Well, maybe, but it isn’t it an abysmal state of affairs that someone in such a situation should be barred from running for Parliament.

    I harbour a negativity towards judges, barristers and most other varieties of lawyers which I sometimes feel borders on the irrational. And then I am reminded of something like the High Court’s verdict on s44 and it sets me off again. What an enormous and unnecessary waste of time, money and effort that pedantic verdict has produced.

    I think this all goes to show that what we imagined or suspected was so is in reality fact.
    The Australian gene pool just does not have enough talent, read *human resources*, to fill up sundry councils,state parliaments,house of reps and senate.Hence we are now really scrapping the bottom of the pond for relatively sane,sincere,idealists who wish to honestly work for a better Australia and having gone to the trouble and done their homework before signing on to comply with the constitution.

  3. Dr Steven Hail of the University of Adelaide on why Bill Shorten’s promise of budget surpluses is so very damaging:

    Bill Shorten says he plans to have a budget surplus every year.

    This means he plans to remove money from the economy every year (or strictly speaking, to reduce the net financial assets of the private sector every year).

    No Australian government, except perhaps the Howard/Costello government, can ever have had such a plan.

    Given the already high level of private debt in Australia, and in particular household debt, it is a plan for an Australian recession.

    It is a remarkably foolish thing to say.

    Many people dislike me saying anything critical about the ALP. You would be surprised how many times people have contacted me to tell me so.

    However, aspiring to budget surpluses, when you never need to run them, and they are not currently even remotely appropriate to our macroeconomic circumstances or the state of private balance sheets, is very unwise, to put it mildly.

    I predict Bill Shorten won’t be able to run budget surpluses every year, but will be able to do a great deal of damage to our economy and create a good deal of unnecessary hardship if he tries.

    Because of where I live, my first preference in the lower house will go to an independent candidate.

    I say this reluctantly, as I know people won’t like me saying it, but despite the fact that the Greens too have not got the role of fiscal policy right as yet, in most constituencies, the best party (among the biggest three) to vote for is the Australian Greens.

    It remains true that the ALP should come above the LNP and the rest of the far right when reasonable people cast their votes, but I say that with a degree of reluctance, because that aspiration for budget surpluses is the height of folly.

    Actually, it is a sign of incompetence, in my opinion.

    If you think it is just electoral politics, then it is very unwise electoral politics. It is an aspiration he must fail to meet, and a commitment which will come back to haunt him.

    https://www.facebook.com/green.modernmoneytheoryandpractice/posts/2229633697119761

  4. lefty e @ #100 Saturday, May 4th, 2019 – 10:01 am

    Don’t be surprised if ScoFo’s “Latham handshake” Space invasion has pretty much finished the LNP off.

    He looked like a shit with no self-control. Shorto was just laughing at him, and the audience laughed along too.

    Can’t see that happening while the great man has his hand on the Free World Press.

  5. @nick

    independent candidate.

    Who are right leaning anyway or closet liberals.

    Guess which so called independent candidate said she will vote Tony Abbott?

  7. Rob oakshott and Tony Windsor are only true Independents.

    The rest are frauds, closet independents, or former Coalition members.

  11. Zoidlord says:
    Saturday, May 4, 2019 at 10:12 am

    Rob oakshott and Tony Windsor are only true Independents.

    The rest are frauds, closet independents, or former Coalition members.

    I’m pretty sure Rob and Tony were once Coalition members! 🙂

  12. I didn’t see the Latham handshake moment in that exchange that everyone else apparently did. But if they show the thirty seconds leading up to it, Morrison’s inability to grapple with the economic inequality issue is lethal to him.

  15. sceptic: “So you want the judges to decide which parts of the constitution should be upheld & which shouldn’t. An idiotic idea. You are totally undermining democracy”

    Reading your comment, I suggest that you shouldn’t throw words like “idiotic” around so lightly.

    If you are arguing, as it would seem, for US “foundationalist” view of the Australian constitution, please be aware that the concept expressed in section 44 of “adherence to a foreign power” as conceived by the authors of our constitution was meant to cover people who were not British subjects. At that time, there was no concept whatsoever of Australian citizenship – be that sole citizenship or joint citizenship – so the question of how you apply section 44 in 2019 would seem to me to have been necessarily one involving a rather complex and debatable interpretation of the laws. Eg, I’m sure the authors of our constitution would have found it quite weird that someone holding UK citizenship would be considered to have “adherence to a foreign power”.

    And, to go further: while not being a constitutional lawyer, I feel that it would have been quite reasonable for the High Court to have interpreted “adherence” as meaning something slightly less expansive than covering everything from currently holding joint citizenship to potentially having the right to apply to become a citizen of another country if only one wished to go to the trouble of finding out.

    I guess that, if by “democracy”, you mean elections, then the High Court’s decision was a blessing to democracy because it has already required the holding a lot of by-elections and I suspect this will continue in future.

  19. ltep: “Lots of great posts from meher baba this morning which I can only agree with.”

    Thanks. I can offer you the position of #2 ticketholder in my fan club: it’s only taken me six decades to find a second one! 🙂

  20. “I’m pretty sure Rob and Tony were once Coalition members!”

    They are both former National Party members. Tony Windsor was a National Party NSW MP but resigned from the party when he lost his endorsement (too sensible / rational to remain)? He stood for his seat and won as an independent, later winning a seat in the Federal Parliament as an independent.

  21. Sydney Metro Northwest opens on Sunday May 26th. I am sorry Daniel Andrews, you are miles behind NSW in terms of infrastructure.

  22. I think parts of the High Court decisions were a bit inevitable, but what is missed by the “do your homework” people is whether the constitutional provision as it stands serves a proper purpose any more or unduly limits the types of candidates we can have running for parliament in a modern Australia.

    Many bodies have looked at the provisions in the past and recommended substantial change – but no government to date has seen fit to attempt to bring the country along with it in modernising the provisions, although at state levels they’ve been altered from time to time.

    The Holly Hughes decision was pretty ludicrous though. What a mess.

  24. @Michael,

    I think you find NSW is far behind Queensland, currently have 2 open complaints with NSW Transport plus plenty regarding past issues.

  25. shiftaling:

    Here’s a screenshot of the moment. I think it looks worse when the exchange is replayed, rather than a still image.

    :large

  28. A thought from this morning’s thread.

    When the founders created Australia, the Country, it seems that they forgot to Australians, the people. 🙂

  30. Labor still ahead in 86 seats on Sportsbet with 2 weeks to go. There has been a slight narrowing in 3 weeks but it seems to be going the other way again in the last couple of days.

  31. Now the media has decided that “Candidate in trub for racist/sexist/homophobic/islamaphobic post” is a horse that runs they will now flog it to death. Over the next week there will be more Shocking! (TM all media outlets) reveals of Wayback machine generated social media posts, of ever-diminishing returns.

    After a certain point it’s just irrelevant – yet another way of the media ‘covering’ the election without actually deigning to do the hard work of reporting on or analysing real policy.

    Prepare for the social media shockers to become yet more marginal and tedious – it’s the “who eats the sausage most weirdly” media meme of this election.

  34. Zoidlord says:
    Saturday, May 4, 2019 at 10:18 am

    @Barney

    The difference being they WERE.

    So, what are “former Coalition members.”?

  35. Nicholas @ #103 Saturday, May 4th, 2019 – 10:05 am

    Dr Steven Hail of the University of Adelaide on why Bill Shorten’s promise of budget surpluses is so very damaging

    See, his whole thing comes across as disingenuous because not once does he bother to point out that the Coalition is campaigning on the idea that they’ll deliver bigger, better, and sooner surpluses than Labor.

    He just says denigrating things about Labor as if they’re the only party to campaign on “surplus good!”. Boring.

  37. On the supposed Steggall poll referred to in the AFR, this “rumour” has been floating around for a few days.

    On the surface, having the two leading contenders each around 40% doesn’t make sense, given that there are 8 other contenders, of which GRN and ALP, between them, polled 25% in the GetUP poll – a very consistent figure from other Warringah contests where Independents ran (Steggall was 23% in that).

    So, I went to the Steggall front desk and asked. The Front Desk may have been coy or may have not been in the know, but the best they could guess at was that it was the “leaked” Lib poll of a few weeks ago, which showed Abbott’s figures were “diabolical”, with a 12% swing on primaries.

    As Stirton said in the AFR, these rolling polls are very iffy. In Warringah, we get one every couple of days … but no results ever emerge.

    Some of these polls very definitely ARE iffy. A recent one to our house asked mentioned Jane Caro as a candidate. She never was, although there was febrile speculation and she made a few guarded comments. Pointing this out to the pollster was like water off a duck’s back.

    My bet is that Zali is still in the mid to high 20s. Signs inside that camp suggest a degree of panic.

  38. @Barney

    The others who think they are Independent but their character still thinks they liberal/conservative in mind.

  39. I agree with Meher Baba particularly on the issue of scoring debates. It’s like election policies- a particular leader’s debate tactics will win some voters and piss off others. The space invaders thing is case in point. I couldn’t bear to watch live but was keeping up with it via excellent comments here and on the Guardian. My impression from the commentary was that it was a Shorten KO blow. On watching the clip later, my immediate personal reaction was that Shorten could come over as a bit of a smartarse. The upside of the tactic though was that Shorten came over as unruffled by the Scomo aggression and as having some mental agility and humour. More importantly he robbed Scomo of any of the gravitas of being the incumbent PM (not that Scomo has a lot of that anyway). It made Scomo come over as just another brawling politician whose comments can be publicly ridiculed at will. On balance I think the upside of this tactic for Shorten outweighed the downside.

  41. Meher Baba, always nearly straying to the dark side.
    But in the end always playing the part of the Prodigal Son and returning, just in time, to his beloved Liberals.
    And, might I add, along the way fooling no one. LOL!!

  42. ltep: “The Holly Hughes decision was pretty ludicrous though. What a mess.”

    I must confess I still don’t entirely understand it. If there are any gun lawyers on here today, perhaps they can explain it, but my impression is that the ruling says that Hughes needed to keep entirely away from government employment between the date she nominated as a candidate to any future (and, most likely, never occurring) instance in which she suddenly becomes eligible to be placed in the seat as the result of a recount necessitated by the person who was elected ahead of her becoming unexpectedly ineligible due to a s44 problem. And this would be in a circumstance in which, because the recount hadn’t be held, she would have had absolutely no idea that she was next in line.

    Moreover, if the seat had become eligible due to a casual vacancy and if, having duly resigned from her position on the AAT, Hughes had been appointed to the position by the NSW Government, Hughes would have been perfectly ok and not affected by s44.

    Obviously this is the law, because the High Court says it is, but it makes absolutely no practical or moral sense to me whatsoever.

  43. Greensborough Growler @ #127 Saturday, May 4th, 2019 – 10:25 am

    Confessions @ #125 Saturday, May 4th, 2019 – 10:23 am

    shiftaling:

    Here’s a screenshot of the moment. I think it looks worse when the exchange is replayed, rather than a still image.

    <a href="” rel=”nofollow”>” rel=”nofollow”>:large

    That exchange is Morrion thinking he’s got Shorten right where Shorten wants to be.

    The spelling of ScoMo’s name as Morrion is very close to ‘moron’. A freudian slip?

  44. Red13

    “Meher Baba, always nearly straying to the dark side.
    But in the end always playing the part of the Prodigal Son and returning, just in time, to his beloved Liberals.
    And, might I add, along the way fooling no one. LOL!!”

    And yet almost always voting Labor, and almost certain to do so again on May 18. Go figure.

  45. C@tmomma@8:44am
    When I first posted my outrage against Adam Bandt because he sided in a parliament speech with Joyce ex-staffer over Joyce wife and family, this same Nicholas asked me to take a chill but considers Creasey has committed a sin by his rants on facebook as Uni student. So according to Nicholas one rule for Adam Bandt and another for Creasey. Hypocrite.

  46. max @ #139 Saturday, May 4th, 2019 – 10:33 am

    On balance I think the upside of this tactic for Shorten outweighed the downside.

    Morrison was the only one employing a tactic (which he stole from Trump). Shorten was doing an on-the-spot, spur of the moment (and effective!) counter. He didn’t walk into the debate thinking “I’mma call Morrison a space-invader; that’ll show him!”.

    What Shorten did took a lot more skill than what Morrison tried to do.

  47. Meher baba@10:36am
    But according to your earlier post Shorten is making it very difficult for you to vote for ALP because of his Franking Credit policy as you are beneficiary of current system. Another reason you gave for having difficulty in voting for ALP was ALP Climate chane policy. The thing is LNP do not have a CC policy and ALP has a reasonable policy initiatives.

  48. Dunno about that ar… there’s such a thing as tactics on the fly in my book….. and I think Shorten demonstrated agility by responding tactically as he did. There would have been any number of ways that he could have dealt with the situation that would have been less effective or adverse in their impact.

  49. Geoff Lambert

    Ive heard that polling is putting Abbott’s primary is somewhere between high 30s and low 40s which means he is vulnerable, but I havent heard much about how well Zali is doing.

    The Labor and Greens candidates in Warringah are not quiet people either so could be pulling more than 20% together, nevermind the 3-4% for Palmer and Susan Moylan-Coombes.

  50. a r @ #145 Saturday, May 4th, 2019 – 10:43 am

    max @ #139 Saturday, May 4th, 2019 – 10:33 am

    On balance I think the upside of this tactic for Shorten outweighed the downside.

    Morrison was the only one employing a tactic (which he stole from Trump). Shorten was doing an on-the-spot, spur of the moment (and effective!) counter. He didn’t walk into the debate thinking “I’mma call Morrison a space-invader; that’ll show him!”.

    What Shorten did took a lot more skill than what Morrison tried to do.

    I reckon the Labor camp would have war gamed situations that might arise during the debate given the format. Morrison is clearly a blustering in your face bully type and I reckon the reason that Shorten is smilin so broadly is that Morrison fell for a set play.

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