I’m afraid in depth analysis of the result will have to wait until I’ve slept for just about the first time in 48 hours. I’ll just observe that that BludgerTrack thing on the sidebar isn’t looking too flash right now, to which the best defence I can offer is that aggregators gonna aggregate. Basically every poll at the end of the campaign showed Labor with a lead of 51.5-48.5, and so therefore did BludgerTrack – whereas it looks like the final result will end up being more like the other way around. The much maligned seat polling actually wound up looking better than the national ones, though it was all too tempting at the time to relate their pecularities to a past record of leaning in favour of the Coalition. However, even the seat polls likely overstated Labor’s position, though the number crunching required to measure how much by will have to wait for later.
Probably the sharpest piece of polling analysis to emerge before the event was provided by Mark the Ballot, who offered a prescient look at the all too obvious fact that the polling industry was guilty of herding – and, in this case, it was herding to the wrong place. In this the result carries echoes of the 2015 election in Britain, when polling spoke in one voice of an even money bet between the Conservatives and Labour, when the latter’s vote share on the day proved to be fully 6% higher. This resulted in a period of soul-searching in the British polling industry that will hopefully be reflected in Australia, where pollsters are far too secretive about their methods and provide none of the breakdowns and weighting information that are standard for the more respected pollsters internationally. More on that at a later time.
Morning all.
I quite understand BK’s taking a break from Dawn Patrol. I feel extremely hung over even though I only had a couple glasses of wine last night.
Three more years wasted
Last screed for now.
What went wrong with the polls? As William stated, they don’t give much away about their methodology, so it’s difficult to be certain.
But there are a few things we do know about the ways in which the electorate has changed over the past decade or so.
1) Ever-growing numbers of people have ditched landlines and now exclusively use mobile phones. While it is still possible to contact these people, it’s much more difficult for the pollsters to work out their geographical spread. Anyone who has ever worked in a polling booth can tell you that a significant proportion of voters don’t actually know in which electorate they live.
2) Starting in the Howard years, Australia has experienced an historic wave of migration from Asia, Africa and the Middle East: a development comparable to the massive influx of migrants from Europe during the immediate post-war period. What do we know about these people’s attitude to opinion polling? Are they even prepared to talk to pollsters? If not (and it seems highly likely that the response rate among migrants will be much lower than for the population as a whole), how do the polling companies adjust their results to take account of this trend?
3) The “shy conservative” phenomenon- particularly in terms of Queenslanders voting for PHON – is clearly a thing. And it might also encompass a large swag of devout Muslim and Christian voters – particularly recently-arrived migrants – who are far more disturbed about developments such as SSM, transgender rights, abortion, etc. than they would be prepared to be open about to someone like an opinion pollster.
I reckon the explanation for how the pollsters got it so wrong can be found from a combination of the above things. And perhaps also a bit of the “herding” tendency: it’s possible that the raw results of that last Newspoll weren’t quite as rosy for Labor as they were reported as being. My mind turns again to Wong’s surprisingly pessimistic comments at about 6 pm last night: Labor must have had access to some polling results that were rather different to the publicly-available ones. Maybe Newspoll, Galaxy, Ipsos et al should track down whoever it was that did that polling for Labor and ask for some tips.
Clive Palmer spent $40m to siphon 2% of the protest vote and cycled it straight back to the LNP.
Warrigal
Some very good points here.
I felt GetUp was neutralised early in the campaign with the Tony Abbott Lifesaver advert. It just really clanged with the electorate, and after that no one listened to them.
I also agree that environmental activism needs the support of the locals, and this is an important lesson. Antony Green declined last night to say explicitly that the anti-Adani movement caused large swings to the Liberals in seats surrounding the Galilee basin. Instead he just showed the swings. 9 – 10% against the ALP in all these seats.
Here we go in Eurovision. Go Kate!
1. Labor’s ad campaign was crap.
2. Daniel Andrews’ win in Victoria was a false flag that led Labor up the garden path.
3. Polls are an increasingly useless metric in the age of the smart phone.
4. And, as my son succinctly put it:
‘Who isn’t going to vote for more money for themselves!?!’ And that’s what the people on between $40000 and $200000 did. It might only be $11 per week, instead of $11000 but in an age of deliberate wage stagnation, that’s better than nothing.
5. Oh, and Unions, and what they are trying to sell, are toxic.
The STOP ADANI campaign had dogged Shorten’s campaign appearances for the past weeks
They were fighting Labor not the COALition
Likewise Greens were fighting Labor not the COALition
So Queenslanders don’t like Victorians and don’t like strong women and live in a one News empire town
Neoliberalism got three more years. We in the 1% will keep syphoning wealth out of the People of Australia in spite of a small bunch of us being very happy to be Social Democratically more redistributive.
My conscience lost, my bank account won… How should I feel?
My take is that people voted self-interest through the line (be it taxes, mining jobs or franking/gearing) and never warmed to or trusted Shorten/Bowen.
New ALP team please a complete break from RGR era.
And there are so many of us who just want to switch off for months etc. I myself overcome with this exhausted desire to sleep it all away.
My plea is to the diehards on this site, a bit of humility and treat others with a bit more respect… all the self-righteous know it all dismissal of any anti-groupthink was offputting always but now exposed as zero cred as well.
My personal kudos to Nath. Copped a sustained bollocking from the intelligentsia here but stuck to his guns. Vindication is yours. As an avid reader and relyer of this site for 12 years, i hope more people like you turn up – and that the 80% of posts by the 10% speaking to themselves also gives way. They know no more and no less than anyone else who follows this stuff passionately.
C@t,
I somehow thought that Australia has got over the anti-union stance, which was cheered on by the Fairfax media in particular, but I actually think you are correct. Shorten came out of unions = Shorten nasty and untrustworthy like the weasels in Wind in the Willows.
Crikey is pretty tainted with this view also. I now understand why – members of the Fairfax family are major financial backers of Crikey.
Alpo,
Yep 🙁
Fitzsimon’s comments this morning are symptomatic of an attitude among the silvertail left that dates back at least to Whitlam’s loss in 1975: the people wouldn’t vote for your beloved Labor Party, so you turn on the people for being a bunch of selfish, uncivilised morons.
IMO, Labor’s failure to connect to voters was largely the party’s responsibility. The electorate was not greatly enthused by the Coalition under ScoMo and were prepared to move their votes elsewhere if they could discern an appealing alternative: we can see from the results in Warringah, Indi, Wentworth (where, even though she will probably end up losing, Phelps performed surprisingly strongly), the surprisingly strong Greens showing and even, in a different way, from the strong PHON result in Queensland.
But the voters clearly didn’t warm to Labor. And I don’t think climate change had much to do with it at all. I reckon 99 per cent of the problem was 1) Shorten and 2) Labor’s tax policies and divisive rhetoric about the “big end of town”. I reckon a large swag of voters – perhaps more than a million – are increasingly concerned about climate change, but nevertheless voted Liberal yesterday. As far as I’m concerned, it’s perfectly understandable: if a significant part of your income – or that of a close family member (eg, parents) – is derived from earnings from investments, then – as the old saying goes – voting Labor yesterday would have been like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.
Maybe Fitzsimons is right that a lot of Australian people aren’t that smart. But they’re certainly smart enough to vote in favour of their own financial wellbeing.
Plibersek will run for the leadership. I wonder if it will be unopposed.
As ARthur Sinodinos said last night, climate change was an issue for the Liberals, just in their safe seats like Higgins, Warringah, Kooyong etc.
Warrigal
We in the south (especially as the C-M is paywalled) were not aware of Clive all-pervading influence. At least, I wasn’t. I am convinced that Clive won the election for the Libs.
Berejiklian is the reason Scomo won. There should be a statute of her in Liberal headquarters today. When you compare her government and hodgekinson in Tas with the incompetent ALP Qld gov. That easily explain the swings in those state which won the liberal government.
People generally just want services for their government. They want their government to get out of the way. They want the minimum of taxes for the maximum of service. Both berejiklian and scomo has delivered. The economy is in good shape, there are no disasters in health or education and people are generally happy. Berejiklians victory should have alerted the ALP to this issue but it did not.
Shorten horrible first week of campaign probably turned the tide. When you are promising $300-$500 billion changes to the economy. People has got to trust you are competent. Shortens super stuff-ups ie telling someone with 200k income he will look into his tax cut (when he was planning to raise taxes on him) and fence sitting on Adani was large red flags for people who are just waking up to the campaign. After that all ALP ads with Shortens face on it was excellent advertising for the liberals
The economy is going well people have jobs the budget is back in surplus the government is generally delivering. This is really a repeat of the Kim Beasley disasters. In this environment people want little change and playing class warfare has never worked and just turned the middle class against shorten. And the people he was pork barreling the unemployed and the young all vote ALP to begin with. For me this was just Beasley part 2
Just my 2 cents
Is this Barrie’s final Insiders?
The issue of women candidates fell flat, and I worry about the rights of women being eroded by the Christian right.
Human rights didn’t get a mention….
Am booking a holiday to NZ to lift my spirits. BB’s campervan trip has inspired and may take my time to return.
Clive advertised heavily in our local paper here, esp last week.
No matter who the new labor leader is , they are going to be attacked by the media , i just wish the new leader and all of others in the labor party stop playing nice and be more aggressive against the attacks by the media and the libs/nats.
People don’t like change. Even if they’re struggling, it’s in a world they know and understand.
Look at how hard it was to bring in such an obviously beneficial change as Medicare – or indeed, any of the big reforms brought in by Labor.
I’m not arguing for a small target strategy, because the world we live in demands change (which might be part of the problem, of course – here’s one thing I don’t have to…). It means that if you want big changes, you might need to factor in a stategy which covers a couple of election cycles.
Oh, and it would appear that Dutton et al were right – Malcolm Turnbull depressed the Liberal vote!
I shall stay here because
a. I would miss so many of the PB community.
b. I want to experience the full analysis, not skip over it, like the debriefing after a battle, or counselling after a bereavement.
c. I do not support Plibersek being given a hospital pass like so many other females.
d. Not Albo, please. We need a totally fresh face.
Edit: my keyboard is sticky as I just tipped a cup of coffee into it.
Quasar says:
Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 7:26 am
Am booking a holiday to NZ to lift my spirits. BB’s campervan trip has inspired and may take my time to return.
—————–
Thats how i feel also , leave the country and try to recoup no hurry to come back
c@tmomma: “‘Who isn’t going to vote for more money for themselves!?!’ And that’s what the people on between $40000 and $200000 did. It might only be $11 per week, instead of $11000 but in an age of deliberate wage stagnation, that’s better than nothing.”
Good point made by your son.
My mind keeps going back to election nights past and this comment brings back memories of 1977, when the Libs were running with tax cuts (heavily skewed to the top end, but offering something for everyone) and Whitlam was running with no tax cuts for individuals, but instead to abolish payroll tax on the grounds that it represented a “tax on jobs.”
Under the mastermind Eggleton, the Libs turned this policy debate into, on the one hand, the Libs offering voters a “fistful of dollars” and, on the other hand, Labor tax cuts for big business.
Perhaps the textbook instance of winning elections by keeping it simple for voters.
The key thing in political campaigning is strategy. It’s much more important than how good your ads are or even the quality of your leader. With a slightly better strategy, Shorten could still have won, even though people don’t really trust him. They never really trusted Howard or Abbott, and yet they both enjoyed resounding wins from opposition.
As I said in an earlier post, Labor’s strategy this election totally sucked. The dud polling by Newspoll, etc misled everyone – even the Libs – into thinking that, against all the received wisdom, Labor’s divisive strategy of wealth redistribution was striking a chord with swinging voters. On Friday night, Rowan Dean and a bunch of other goofs on SkyNews spent a whole hour ranting and railing against the stupidity of the Australian people and how they’d somehow come to adopt the same attitudes as the people of Venezuela.
Like the rest of us, they believed the opinion polls, but the polls had it wrong, and the instincts of posters like AE and Mundo were right.
Sad evening for those that wanted a more equal and caring Aus.I have to say thatI have no faith in polls after this result.
Fwiw the coalition won…….just. They may not be majority or a very slim one if that. Can they stay scandal free……? If economic conditions turn to crap will the coalition go to austerity…?
When the dust has settled Labor needs to look at how many seats they will need to win at the next election to get a majority of one in the house and work there arses off winning just those seats. Forget the big picture and go after the seats to win.Delegate two or three members of parl plus locals and work on a specific electorate to win it.
Visit the electorates, talk to the people who live there and get a feel for what they want and develop polices that will make them want to vote for them.
Start it now.
Scott @ #120 Sunday, May 19th, 2019 – 7:27 am
Should begin by prosecuting s44 cases against coalition members elected who appear to have a problem.
Not inspired by any of the three contenders, TP, Albo, Bowen. Never seen Plibersek excel, Albo’s okay but veers dangerously into yesterday’s man and I don’t see Bowen crashing through Murdoch/LNP wall.
I do like the members get 50% of the vote for the leader and I hope some new blood gets the gig
Where is the informal vote at? Can’t find it on aec website.
ajm
Yes, stop being defensive and attack LNP wherever possible.
ajm says:
Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 7:32 am
Should begin by prosecuting s44 cases against coalition members elected who appear to have a problem.
—————————
Yes
Dutton should be the first one on the list
Isn’t Dutton under a S44 cloud?
Snap Scott! 😆
Well, I got the herding business right, jsut in the wrong direction! The big lesson I’ve got from this is that voters don’t care about policies unless they hurt them. Tony Burke for leader, please.
lizzie @ #116 Sunday, May 19th, 2019 – 7:20 am
I think I will change my Gravatar back to the foil hat one ❗
I suppose that a Federal ICAC is out of the question ❗ 😈
Well folks, I’ll leave it to others to sort it all out; there is plenty of time.
What a sad and sorry place Australia has become.
I’ll be going into lurk mode as I move back from all sorts of active involvement in politics.
#Don’tBlameMeIFuckingVotedLaboronPB
I am a sad man today. I despair of my fellow Australians.
Murdoch minions, and Palmer, just look what they have done.
I will switch off for a while, until the cognitive dissidence abates.
antonbruckner11 @ #133 Sunday, May 19th, 2019 – 7:38 am
Seconded. Presentable, can be passionate, good at picking the high and low points in the political cycle.
Confessions: “Plibersek will run for the leadership. I wonder if it will be unopposed.”
Gee I hope not. She’s totally embedded in world of the silvertail, inner city “elite” left and is also a very poor communicator with just about zero ability to cut through on any issue.
Albo is the go. Or, if not him, Chalmers (who isn’t that great, but has the enormous benefit of being a right-winger from Queensland).
A big hell no to Plibersek, Albo and (god help us) Bowen. Other alp fanatic pals (not here) calling for Penny Wong… madness
Im going to check out this Calare dude
One must dust ones self-off and continue onwards always onwards.
Well that didn’t go according to expectations. So, what happened? As you might expect this election loss sits in many places so here’s my best take:
1. Australia just had its Hillary Clinton moment. People took a long hard look at Bill Shorten and could not bring themselves to vote for him. The Labour Party members foreshadowed this 6 years ago when they voted against him in large numbers, but the Parliamentary Party believed otherwise.
2. Fear is a fundamental human emotion which governs behaviour. All we heard was that Labor was going to tax everything and take everything and the majority of Australians believed this. I have always had difficulty in understanding why people don’t like change. I thrive on change, but I have learnt over the years that this is simply not the case for most people.
3. The LNP outcampaigned Labor. This feeds into my two points above, as much as many of us hated the way this campaign was run by the LNP they proved again that if you lie long enough, big enough and loud enough people will believe you. Ironically Labor did this well in the 2016 election and almost took it. Scott Morrison made this about himself and Bill, we never saw the LNP cabinet and for good reason.
4. Individual greed outstripped collective wealth sharing. The Majority of Australians did not agree with Labor’s policy platform of wealth redistribution. This one is a little more complicated and gets to the roots of some of the failings of liberalism as a societal structure. Liberalism has been supper good at bringing people wealth, but it has done so at the cost of community as we become more self-centric, clubs, groupings and community-based gatherings are becoming weaker and the interests of the self are becoming stronger. Go read a book about it, this can’t be broken down in a post.
5. The Green’s Adani caravan hurt Labor in Queensland. Controversial in some circles but not in Queensland. The Adani caravan reminded me of what was known as the Children’s Crusade of the year 1212. A group of children making their way to Jerusalem to save the holy city. Once they got out of Europe they were all captured and sold into slavery. The same happened with the Green’s Adani caravan, once they got north of Brisbane they hardened central and northern Queenslanders against the environmental movement as jobs became more important than climate change.
So, did I see this coming? Yes and no. Humans are super good at looking at the evidence in front of them and then totally ignoring it and making conclusions which the evidence doesn’t support.
I haven’t fully discussed the past 6 months of campaigning that I was part of. I made about 700 phone calls, 500 ended up as messages but I spoke to about 200 people. I felt I convinced maybe 5 people to change their opinion. Look to the above points to what people told me. They didn’t like Bill, they didn’t believe in the policy agenda of Labor, they believed what the LNP was saying and they hadn’t really like Malcolm Turnbull but liked Scott Morrisons.
On the day I saw it time and again, I was at a blue booth and it voted about 60/40 to the LNP, I went to a pre-poll booth to scrutineer, I saw it very early when they poured the votes out, they split 70/30 to Peter Dutton within minutes.
The polling was pretty much wrong.
On the polling blogs there was suspicion at the herding of the polling. Not one poll said 54/46 to the LNP in Qld, not one said 52/48 to the LNP nationally. I spoke to a Labor party lady (older and with a landline), she had been polled 6 times and said the same thing every time. So, the polling companies’ sampling was wrong, she should have been polled once and then removed from their samples.
So, what does this mean for Australia? Hard to say, but by 2022 when the next election is due as a county we will have had 20 years out of 26 as a county ruled by conservative government. No political party will ever put forwards an ambitious progressive policy agenda again. The LNP learnt this in 1993, now Labor has learnt this.
Do I stand by my support and campaigning for Labor?
Hell yes.
I believe and always have that the government should support services like health, education, and social safety nets. The profit at all costs motive will destroy us as we endlessly seek to exploit diminishing resources. Climate change is not an economic argument it is an existential crisis.
antonbruckner11 says: Sunday, May 19, 2019 at 7:38 am
Tony Burke for leader, please.
*********************************************
Was my choice way back when ….. still is
I feel so sorry for Shorten as he worked his little butt off to “meet the people” and brought the Labor party back together as a team. The Libs ran a campaign on him as untrustworthy, knowing he was a danger.
lizzie @ #122 Sunday, May 19th, 2019 – 7:30 am
I absolutely agree. If Plibersek and ‘Albo’ are the answer, Labor are asking the wrong question.
I would, however, not absolutely agree that nath was right all along about Bill Shorten because all nath did was engage in the same grudge match against Bill that the Coalition did, which influenced a LOT of people, and nath continuously over-emphasised Bill Shorten’s Union era sins, as did the government and the media, when so many employers have taken away so much more from workers. So please don’t be blinded by nath’s so-called brilliance, he simply engaged in the same war here that the anti Labor/anti Bill Shorten forces engaged in elsewhere. His ‘insight’ was simply effective mimicry.
Its a very disappointing result and it seems Australia has voted for the status quo, a LNP minority Government.
People always say they want “leadership” and “honest” politicians with vision but yesterday when it came to the crunch they squibbed it in favour of a fear campaign and a Government who can’t even tell us their agenda.
Labor put their cards on the table and was honest with the electorate and after this result we can now look forward to consecutive election campaigns where nothing risky is said or proposed out of fear of offending anyone. Then those difficult decisions will have to be made and the population will get even more resentful because it was “sprung” on them. Now I have to wonder who is going to pay for things like the $8 Billion and growing we give to people fortunate enough to have shares. It sure as hell won’t be the privileged few.
Call me a whinger if you want but I feel I have every right to be disappointed in the decision Australia made – it even looks like Gladys Liu might make it over the like in Chisholm, which for me tells me everything you need to know about the result. Fear and lies win elections.
Luke: “Not inspired by any of the three contenders, TP, Albo, Bowen. ”
Gawd, is Bowen going to run? He was a big contributor to last night’s loss. He needs to move to a different portfolio, something like Foreign Affairs or Infrastructure, and rebuild his image.
I have a sinking feeling that Plib will surge into the leadership on the back a wave of goodwill among party members. And I really don’t think she has it: certainly not in terms of running a convincing political narrative.
On the other hand, she’s very good looking and perhaps that’s a more important factor than I realise: after all, we do live in a rather superficial age.
meher:
I’d prefer Jim Chalmers over Plibersek, Albo or Bowen to be honest.
Bugler:
I thought Chisolm was an ALP gain?
One thing about the zeitgeist becoming clear to me… have to appeal to voter self-interest. Creating a more caring/fairer/better society or system gets no value these days. Perhaps because nobody believes you. Democrats in 2020 take note!
I’m preferring to look on the bright side. Last night’s loss will make a 2022 win all the more sweeter.