Tasmanian Senate entrails examined

As the finalised Senate results are unrolled one by one, a deep dive into the preference distribution from Tasmania.

A summary of what remains to be resolved of election counting:

• The button is yet to be pressed on five of the eight Senate counts, with Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory completed and fully published. More on the Tasmanian result below.

• The Coalition-versus-Labor two-party preferred preference count for Farrer is 54% complete, with the remainder presumably to be knocked over today. Only then will we have a definitive total for the national two-party preferred, but the remaining uncertainty is relevant only to the second decimal place: to the first, the Coalition will finish with 51.5%, a swing of either 1.1% or 1.2%.

• Preference distributions for lower house seats are yet to be published, though in some cases they have assuredly been conducted. As noted previously, only with the distribution could the theoretical (though not practical) possibility of One Nation winning Hunter from Labor be ruled out.

I will be taking a deep dive into each Senate result as they are reported. As discussed here, none of the results are seriously in doubt, with the highly arguable exception of Queensland.

The chart below shows how the late stages of the preference distribution for Tasmania proceeded, after the election of the first three candidates and the elimination of lower order candidates and parties (the latter included independent Craig Garland, who managed a disappointing 3475 votes, compared with the 6633 he polled at last year’s Braddon by-election). The first three were the top two on the Liberal ticket, Richard Colbeck and Claire Chandler, and the first on Labor’s, Carol Brown. Both Liberal and Labor polled clear of two quotas (the primary vote totals can be found here), but owing to Tasmania’s high rate of below-the-line voting (28% in this case), neither scored over two quotas on above-the-line votes alone. However, Chandler was promptly elected after Colbeck as most of his below-the-line votes proceeded straight down the Liberal ticket.

The situation for Labor was more complicated owing to Lisa Singh, who again had to campaign for below-the-line votes to retain her seat after the party placed her fourth on the ticket. This she was able to accomplish at the 2016 double dissolution, when she won Labor’s fifth seat from number six on the ticket. This time though she had the effectively impossible task of winning one of two Labor seats from number four. Singh scored 5.68% of the first preference vote, slightly down on her 6.12% in 2016. This meant she remained in the count longer than the candidate one place above her, who on both occasions was John Short, but she was well behind the second candidate on the Labor ticket, Catryna Bilyk, who received all the above-the-line votes remaining after the election of Brown.

As the chart demonstrates, the race for the last three seats was not close – Labor was always going to win a second seat; Liberal and Labor were both only slightly in excess of two quotas; and the respective vote shares of 12.57% for the Greens and 8.92% for the Jacqui Lambie Network guaranteed them both a seat. Nick McKim of the Greens edged over the line to take the fourth seat after the preferences of various minor parties were distributed. Bilyk and Lambie were both pushed over a quota at the point where Singh was excluded, very slightly behind One Nation candidate Matthew Stephen, although it would have made no difference if Stephen had gone out first. The result was thus clear-cut enough that all elected candidates achieved quotas in their own right, which is not guaranteed under the new Senate electoral system under which some votes can exhaust.

The table below records “four-party preferred” preference splits for those parties that failed to win seats (including Craig Garland as “Group O”).

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.

445 comments on “Tasmanian Senate entrails examined”

Comments Page 8 of 9
1 … 7 8 9

  1. Diogenes
    says:
    Monday, June 17, 2019 at 8:09 pm
    Are the CFMMEU and ETU “left” unions? I can never work out why some are right and others left.
    I would have thought miners, builders and electricians would be right.
    _______________________________________
    Many unions have had historical fights over which wing controls said union. The ETU had good old battle in the 50s and 60s over being left or right. the left won.

  2. https://www.pollbludger.net/2019/06/17/tasmanian-senate-entrails-examined/comment-page-7/#comment-3205200

    The various construction unions (except the AWU) tend to be militantly left wing, due to a history of tough fights on various issues including safety. The extractive parts of the CFMEU are also left but some state branches have been more keen on protecting their industries (forestry in Tasmania in 2004, Mining in Queensland in 2019).

  4. Setka is a product of the building industry. The Melbourne building industry is very productive but it is not tea and scones at nine.

  5. Although in the UK the equivalent of the ETU was communist controlled in the 50s before becoming a right wing union.

  6. Senior Labor insiders said the audited revision of AWU membership numbers reinforced their view that Mr Shorten’s union had over-inflated its numbers for many years, contradicting past claims by him and others that it was “growing”.
    They said it helped explain why Mr Shorten, as Labor’s federal leader, had needed to turn to the left-wing CFMEU to consolidate his power in the ALP, and even shore up his leadership from a possible ­Anthony Albanese challenge.
    GRAPHIC: Pumping up the numbers
    When Mr Shorten led the AWU before entering parliament in 2007, the CFMEU was his bitter union enemy, clashing repeatedly with him over policy and competition for members.
    Mr Shorten is now close politically to Victorian CFMEU firebrand John Setka.
    The CFMEU had regarded the Shorten-led AWU as a “boss’s union” that undercut wages to boost its membership rolls.

    https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/awu-membership-audit-reduces-bill-shortens-power-base/news-story/0a46dfb7c0531c2bfbf402615265c56f


  9. nath says:
    Monday, June 17, 2019 at 8:39 pm
    …
    ion. The ETU had good old battle in the 50s and 60s over being left or right. the left won.

    It may surprise you; but the 60’s was over 50 years ago.

  10. frednk @ #366 Monday, June 17th, 2019 – 8:52 pm


    nath says:
    Monday, June 17, 2019 at 8:39 pm
    …
    ion. The ETU had good old battle in the 50s and 60s over being left or right. the left won.

    It may surprise you; but the 60’s was over 50 years ago.

    It’s why he hasn’t kept up with the fact that the ETU, at least in NSW, is in the Right of the ALP. 😆

  11. frednk
    says:
    Monday, June 17, 2019 at 8:52 pm

    nath says:
    Monday, June 17, 2019 at 8:39 pm
    …
    ion. The ETU had good old battle in the 50s and 60s over being left or right. the left won.

    It may surprise you; but the 60’s was over 50 years ago.
    _________________________
    It may surprise you that the Victorian ETU is a left wing union and actually donated $325,000 to the greens in 2010.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-08-18/etu-defends-big-donation-to-greens/948606

  12. It’s why he hasn’t kept up with the fact that the ETU, at least in NSW, is in the Right of the ALP.
    ______________________
    well I live in Victoria, so why would I give a shit about NSW.

  14. nath @ #371 Monday, June 17th, 2019 – 8:57 pm

    In fact from 2010 to 2018 the VIC ETU left the ALP and backed the Greens:

    A spokesman for the ETU said the ETU Victoria has donated a total of $780,766 to the Australian Greens Victoria Branch for Adam Bandt’s campaigns since 2010 including money for the 2016 Federal election.

    https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/etu-victoria-branch-returns-to-the-labor-party-fold-20180521-p4zglc.html

    And Dean Mighell got the royal order of the boot for his troubles. 😆

  15. nath @ #370 Monday, June 17th, 2019 – 8:54 pm

    It’s why he hasn’t kept up with the fact that the ETU, at least in NSW, is in the Right of the ALP.
    ______________________
    well I live in Victoria, so why would I give a shit about NSW.

    How incredibly parochial of you. It’s just that you were trying to sound like you knew what you were on about. Clearly, you didn’t.

  16. And Dean Mighell got the royal order of the boot for his troubles.
    _______________________
    Funny that he left in 2013 and still the ETU backed the greens until 2018. So maybe it’s just another C@tmomma delusion. Yep it is. Dean resigned, was not pushed.

  17. Anthony Albanese has returned fire over union leader John Setka’s threat to withdraw ALP funding, warning Mr Setka is wasting his money on a legal challenge and has shamed the Labor Party.

    The Labor leader said he won’t back down from his plan to expel the CFMMEU leader from the party.

    “I think that John Setka, over a long period of time, has brought the party into disrepute,” Mr Albanese told Sky News on Monday.

    “There’s just a range of public commentary going back for a few years now that aren’t consistent with Labor views and aren’t consistent with the views we want to put out there about representing all Australians.

    “He used his kids to send a very frank message to the ABCC (the Australian Building and Construction Commission), he gave a speech at a rally in Melbourne where he spoke about knowing where people live and people won’t be able to go to their local sporting clubs and their local activities. It essentially was an attempt at intimidation that can only be viewed in that way.”

    The New Daily has been told the Federal Police investigated Mr Setka’s Melbourne speech over the intimidation claims, and informed him that no crime was committed.

    Mr Albanese also rejected Mr Sekta’s claims that his reflection on Rosie Batty’s work and its impact on the legal system were not disparaging.

    “It was very clear that was the context. He says he was misinterpreted by I certainly can’t place any other interpretation,” Mr Albanese said.

    “The person sent out to defend him on those issues, of course, said that he never mentioned Rosie Batty – so he obviously wasn’t paying a great deal of attention.”

    https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/good-news/2019/06/17/albanese-setka-labor/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PM%20Update%2020190617

  18. I’d say this was a pretty good record from Dean:

    “Since (he) took over (the ETU in 1995) its number of members has grown from about 8500 to close to 20,000 while assets have swelled from $8 million to $52 million. It is probably the richest union in the country. Wages for workers in electrical contracting have nearly tripled during his reign and on the desal plant electricians were able to earn in excess of $150,000 a year.

  19. Israel Folau finds a soul mate in Tennessee. Except the American isn’t waiting for LGBTQ people to burn in hell, he wants them executed. He’s also a preacher and a police officer.

    Authorities in Tennessee are reviewing all pending cases involving a Knox County Sheriff’s Office detective after he gave a sermon at his church that called for the government to execute members of the LGBTQ community.

    “They are worthy of death,” Grayson Fritts said in a June 2 sermon at All Scripture Baptist Church, a small church in Knoxville that he leads.

    The church posted the sermon online and then removed it, according to The Washington Post. The video was picked up by the Tennessee Holler, an independent liberal news outlet, and edited into a six-minute clip.

    “God has instilled the power of civil government to send the police in 2019 out to the LGBT freaks and arrest them and have a trial for them, and if they are convicted, then they are to be put to death,” he said in the clip.

    https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/14/us/tennessee-preacher-cop-lgbtq/index.html

  21. It was well known; and as cat has pointed out Dean Mighell got the boot for his troubles.
    __________________________
    just another C@t fabrication that you have swallowed whole.

  22. frednk @ #354 Monday, June 17th, 2019 – 6:44 pm

    Setka is a product of the building industry. The Melbourne building industry is very productive but it is not tea and scones at nine.

    Setka isn’t an aberration. Two words: Joe McDonald, cut from the same cloth. Although at least Setka looks like he’s set foot on a construction site sometime in the last decade.
    https://insider.thewest.com.au/august-2017/up-the-workers/?utm_source=thewest.com.au&utm_medium=homepagetile&utm_campaign=insideraugust&utm_content=uptheworkers

  24. nath
    The desal is finished; and one thing an electrician will scrub from his resume is working there. It was an all round disgrace. If your a builder don’t assume you can run a contracting firm is the lesson learnt.

  25. C@tmomma says:
    Monday, June 17, 2019 at 9:00 pm
    nath @ #370 Monday, June 17th, 2019 – 8:54 pm

    It’s why he hasn’t kept up with the fact that the ETU, at least in NSW, is in the Right of the ALP.
    ______________________
    well I live in Victoria, so why would I give a shit about NSW.
    How incredibly parochial of you. It’s just that you were trying to sound like you knew what you were on about. Clearly, you didn’t.
    _______________________
    If you can’t behave yourself c@t I’ll have to intervene which I would prefer not to being a peaceable filmmaker and all.

  26. Lucky Creed

    I think your characterisation of tradies historically being small businesses and always voting Libs is inaccurate.

    Some trades like plumbers and leckos have for decades been small businesses in the main, often family based with 4 or 5 tradies (who were not self employed)

    Carpenters, brickies, boilermakers, machinists, hairdressers, and many other trades worked for wages in large enterprises or small to medium enterprises.

    My father, a carpenter, worked for a building company. The company employed about 10 carpenters, 4 or 5 brickies, a lecko, a plumber, and had one large truck and a truckie. They built houses from go to whoa. The idea of subcontracting trades to small self employed tradies was unheard of.

    Now the building trade is so “contracted out” to self employed tradies that some so called building companies do not actually employ a single tradie. They simply organise subcontractors.

    Making it even more complicated is the fact that some traditional trades are split into small specialties. There are no “carpenters” now. There are specialist carpenters to put house frames up, install kitchens, hang doors, do fine trims (skirting), and to do eaves. My next door neighbour does eaves and only eaves.

    This sub contracting regime and the sub specialties within traditional trades has resulted in the build growth industry being entirely comprised of millions of self employed tradies ……. driving big utes, non working wife driving a big SUV and on the payroll as “secretary” and often working short days and only 4 days a week. They live all around me.

    And yes, they vote conservo. Not my father though. He was a carpenter working for wages. He was a working man, not a self employed business man-tradie. And he never once voted conservo.

  27. Setka

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-17/cfmeu-victoria-branch-threatens-to-cut-financial-support-to-alp/11218344

    The union’s divisional branch management committee issued a statement saying it “unconditionally supports Mr Setka” and passed four resolutions to take to the union’s national executive meeting in Canberra this week.

    Those resolutions labelled the demand for Mr Setka’s resignation a “political” act and called on the union’s national executive to issue a public statement of support for him.

    The management committee said if the expulsion threat was carried out “all financial and in-kind support to the ALP [would cease] immediately from the Victorian branch of the CFMEU”.

    The resolution was passed unanimously by members of the branch committee.
    :::
    The committee noted that a handful of unions were calling for Mr Setka to resign.

    “Following these calls, and as of today, the Victorian branch of the CFMEU will no longer recognise traditional long-held membership coverage and demarcation lines with unions that have attacked this branch,” one of the resolutions said.

  30. Just the load of crap that C@tmomma posts about Dean Mighel is just astounding. With the usual no evidence saying that he was booted out when in fact he resigned and still stayed with the union in an advisory role for a while. Dean’s successor Troy Gray just last year donated 50k to the Victorian Socialist party. But here we have C@t and her parrot frednk saying that he was booted by a membership that disagreed with him. Just lies.

  35. Albo starting to sound a little bit desperate.
    Read something last week reportedly from a labor insider.
    “If you throw a punch at someone like Setka, you better make sure it knocks him out”

  36. What Mighell is doing:

    https://www.3aw.com.au/former-union-boss-combines-love-of-horses-and-treating-mental-health-issues/

    After 25 years as the boss of the ETU, Mr Mighell has founded a charity, the Path of the Horse which brings together people suffering mental health issues.

    He works with veterans suffering PTSD, children with autism and people seeking better mental health.

    He spoke to Neil Mitchell about how the horses he cares for help people to “work on ways to get calm” and manage trauma.

    Path of the Horse: http://www.pathofthehorse.com.au/

  37. Funny that people were saying that Dean was booted when the trade union royal commission examined how after he had been supposedly ‘booted’ that he was then a director of a company owned by the ETU, and was paid as a consultant by another ETU controlled company. Somehow the Royal Commission didn’t feel that he was being booted from the ETU.


  38. Diogenes says:
    Monday, June 17, 2019 at 9:13 pm

    So what changed for tradies to all become self employed contractors?

    For medium to large contracts they are not. What has changed is the certainty of work. They move from one contracting firm to another depending on who has the contracts. It is my humble opinion the industry is in a real mess.

  39. frednk
    says:
    Monday, June 17, 2019 at 9:16 pm
    nath
    Things are becoming clearer. Fighting old battles are we.
    _______________________
    As a former member of the young liberals I’m sure you’ve got some old battles left too.

  40. frednk, why don’t you outline your liberal party activities and which Liberal leaders you supported and which ALP leaders you used to mock at your dinners?

  41. nath @ #374 Monday, June 17th, 2019 – 9:02 pm

    And Dean Mighell got the royal order of the boot for his troubles.
    _______________________
    Funny that he left in 2013 and still the ETU backed the greens until 2018. So maybe it’s just another C@tmomma delusion. Yep it is. Dean resigned, was not pushed.

    Why did he resign?

    Oh, and a ‘delusion’? Maybe I didn’t have it exactly right because I don’t really give a flying fig about the Victorian ETU? 🙂

    But I did find this comment about Mighell interesting:

    bob kernohan said…
    It was Mighell’s unions support for Shorten, in ALP preselecton, that ensured that Shorten defeated the sitting member Bob Sercombe in a bitter preselection.

    And this:

    Of late, Mighell has disaffiliated his union from funding Labor – in fact he’s closer to Bob Katter.

    It is the latest move – the ETU donated $50,000 to Katter, that has attracted fresh criticism.

    Katter’s background as a National MP in the Bjelke-Petersen government is not forgotten in union circles when thousands of jobs were cut in the electricity industry.

    Katter says he wants Mighell in the Senate as he tries to draw links between his party’s rural base and the labour movement.

    ‘‘He is a bloke of colossal personal force and personal courage, the bastard is as tough as nails,’’ he says.

    ‘‘I would love to have him as a Senator, a member of parliament, anything at all, he’ll go to one of those positions eventually … we need that leadership, the country needs that leadership.’’

    That appears unlikely but the link between the two, the rural conservative and the left wing union official is not as odd as it seems. Both Mighell and Katter’s politics are in a sense from a pre-1983 or even a 1950s Labor Party, before it embraced the free market.

    https://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2013/03/dean-mighell-pulls-the-pin-at-the-etu.html

  44. Dean’s views on Katter are completely irrelevant to whether he was ‘booted’ as you said or resigned. Your pathetic attempts to muddy the waters when proven to be a liar yet again.

  45. The youngest child forcibly removed by the Trump Administration from its family was 4 months old. I wonder if these forced removals were happening when Trump told Turnbull our irregular migration program management was harsher than his.

    With each one that arrived, the on-call caseworker at Bethany Christian Services in Michigan had 15 minutes to find a foster home for another child who was en route from the border. On a brisk winter day in February 2018, Alma Acevedo got a message that caught her breath: “4 months. Boy.”

    …

    Constantin was ultimately the youngest of thousands of children taken from their parents under a policy that was meant to deter families hoping to immigrate to the United States. It began nearly a year before the administration would acknowledge it publicly in May 2018, and the total number of those affected is still unknown. The government still has not told the Mutus why their son was taken from them, and officials from the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment for this story.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/us/baby-constantine-romania-migrants.html

  47. It’s just the same old lies.

    The dirt on Albo
    Glady’s girlfriend on stage
    Tony Burke’s brilliant legal career
    No that’s not a telecommunications tower, it’s a ‘muslim call to prayer thingy’.

    etc. etc

  48. nath @ #402 Monday, June 17th, 2019 – 9:29 pm

    Dean’s views on Katter are completely irrelevant to whether he was ‘booted’ as you said or resigned. Your pathetic attempts to muddy the waters when proven to be a liar yet again.

    You mean, it had nothing to do with this:

    ONE of Australia’s most controversial union leaders is under investigation over the sale of his union’s majority stake in a financial advisory company for allegedly a tenth of its value and with the loss of more than $500,000 in future revenue.
    Victorian Electrical Trades Union boss Dean Mighell is fighting two Federal Court cases and an independent audit ordered by the union’s national leadership after an internal probe found “financial irregularity” over the deal.

    Mr Mighell, forced to resign from the ALP in 2007 after being branded a “thug” by then Labor leader Kevin Rudd, was last month reported to Fair Work Australia for allegedly refusing to open the ETU’s books on Southern Alliance Financial Services, which gave members advice and ran a union investment fund. Despite company documents confirming the 2005 sale, with the then transfer of the union’s 65 per cent stake to minority shareholder and financial adviser Tony Devin, the annual reports of the ETU (Victoria) showed it still majority-owned SAFS until the end of 2010.

    And, according to the internal probe, the ETU wasn’t paid the $48,355 sale price until March last year – several months after Mr Mighell first began to face questions about the ownership status of the company. The probe, backed by the union’s nationwide divisional council, is the latest stoush in the increasingly bitter relationship between Mr Mighell and several of his ETU counterparts around Australia.

    https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/industrial-relations/victorian-electrical-trades-union-boss-dean-mighell-faces-questions/news-story/810a707347ae515b711e5ff1398a1a29

  49. nath says:
    Monday, June 17, 2019 at 9:21 pm

    frednk
    says:
    Monday, June 17, 2019 at 9:16 pm
    nath
    Things are becoming clearer. Fighting old battles are we.
    _______________________
    As a former member of the young liberals I’m sure you’ve got some old battles left too.

    Actually I’m pretty calm about the whole thing. Young Liberals was a great place to meet young women at an age when meeting young women as a pretty positive activity.

    The way I see it Nath, moderates in the Liberal party have gone and so have the socialists and communists in Labor. The socialists and communists are using the Greens to fight old battles.

    Politics being circular is seeing the Liberals and the Greens combine to fight centralist labor. Your a classic example.

  50. Guess that eHarmony-esque weekend advertorial puff piece of the new Liberal leader didn’t go down too well with everyone. 😀

    Western Australia’s peak business lobby has released a damning assessment of newly-elected Opposition Leader Liza Harvey’s policies, warning they are “out of step” with the business community and put the state’s budget repair at risk.

    The Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s (CCI) criticism of the Liberals — a party whose support has traditionally been rooted in the business community — was in stark contrast to the recent praise it heaped on the Labor Government’s recent State Budget.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-17/liza-harvey-attacked-by-wa-cci-over-economic-policy/11218022

Comments Page 8 of 9
1 … 7 8 9

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *