Sunday’s best: campaign launches, leaders debates, how-to-votes and more

Including a fair bit of second-hand inside dope on where the parties see their main threats and opportunities.

Anthony Albanese will today conduct Labor’s campaign launch today, a fact that I wouldn’t normally consider worth mentioning, such has been the decline of the ritual’s significance over the last few decades. However, Labor has increased the chances of the event being noticed by holding it in Perth, which will at least give his profile a badly needed boost in that city, where Labor is counting on picking up two or possibly three seats.

Elsewhere:

• The second leaders’ debate of the campaign will be hosted by the Nine Network next Sunday and moderated by Sarah Abo of Nine’s 60 Minutes, with questions posed to the leaders by Chris Uhlmann, David Crowe and Deb Knight, respectively of Nine’s television, print and radio arms.

• Labor’s how-to-vote cards can now be found on the candidate pages on its website. The Greens are second on all Senate tickets except Tasmania, where they are behind the Jacqui Lambie Network, presumably in the hope that the party will deprive a right-wing minor party of a place (or, less likely, third-placed Liberal Eric Abetz) while Labor and the Greens win three seats between them as before. As far as I can tell, Labor has the United Australia Party second last and One Nation last in every lower house seat with the curious exception of Dawson, where the United Australia Party is third behind Katter’s Australian Party and ahead of the Greens, which as far as I can see stands no chance of accomplishing anything other than compromising Labor’s national anti-Palmer message.

• Having spoken with “15 Liberal MPs in and outside the Morrison cabinet who are familiar with the Coalition’s election strategy and internal polling and who have campaigned in these seats”, James Massola and Anthony Galloway of the Age/Herald report the party is “increasingly nervous” that it will lose Kooyong, Goldstein, North Sydney and Wentworth to teal independents. After spending the earlier part of the campaign in marginal seats in both Sydney and Melbourne, Josh Frydenberg will spend the remainder of it defending his own seat of Kooyong.

• Mark Ludlow of the Financial Review quotes Peter Beattie saying Labor has “lowered its expectations” in Queensland, and says Labor is “now working to ensure there is no net loss of seats in the state”. Labor nonetheless remains hopeful in Brisbane and Longman. Similarly, the previously noted Age/Herald report relates that “strategists on both sides now believe it’s possible no seats will change hands in Queensland”, and further offers that the Liberals are targeting Labor-held Blair, though perhaps in hope more than expectation.

• Liberal attacks ads portraying Anthony Albanese as a puppet of Dan Andrews reportedly reflect hopes that hostility towards the Andrews government over COVID lockdowns has damaged Labor enough in outer suburbia to put McEwen, Corangamite and Dunkley in play. Paul Sakkal in the Sunday Age reports that “internal Liberal Party research in seats stretching from Frankston in the east to Geelong in the west shows Andrews’ net favourability rating is between negative 10 and negative 20”. However, the report relates the view of Redbridge Group pollster Kos Samaras that the Liberals are “barking up the wrong tree because his polling suggests state Labor’s vote is, on average, 7% higher than federal Labor’s in seats with geographical overlap”.

• Josh Zimmerman of the Sunday Times reports that “internal polling” credits Labor with a “slight lead” in the key Perth seat of Pearce.

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.

982 comments on “Sunday’s best: campaign launches, leaders debates, how-to-votes and more”

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  1. Interesting Resolve. Continued very low PV for Coalition. Labor also not great but Coalition would be a historic low it if played out surely.

  6. Resolve NSW
    ALP 40
    lNP 30
    GRN 12
    ONP 6
    UAP 3
    IND 4
    OTH 3

    This is a reflection of the hatred many in the NSW Liberal Party feel towards ScoMo

    Close enough to 60/40 to the ALP

  8. GlenO, at the end of the day it really is up to you. My consideration would be what is needed to ensure a non-Coalition Government for as long as possible. A minority government at a time when we’re looking to be facing hard economic times would probably not be great.

    But as I said, your vote is your choice.

  9. Greens have 16 in QLD.

    Calling bullshit on this Resolve (though maybe the cocksucker policy is working?)

  10. It’s hard to know if that’s Michaelia Cash or Katherine Deves!
    ______
    It’s the glorious Michaelia. You can tell from the friendly smile.

  12. “More than that, there’s real possibility that my vote could have a counter-intuitive effect.”

    I understand how the campaigns have a counter-intuitive effect, but how can your vote have a counter-intuitive effect? If you go with them as 1 and 2 then it’s a vote against the Libs whoever ends up in the stronger position.

    If you like some of the Greens platform, which seems to be a basic social democracy-type platform, then them getting in an extra seat won’t stop Labor repairing LNP damage or may push them on repairing it more thoroughly. They’d really be eaten alive by the Greens base if they sabotaged those efforts. The sillier parts of the platform are more an artifact of them having to pretend to have a full policy suite even though no one expects them to be in the position to implement it.

    Basically, if you want an ideological trend to social democracy, go with the Greens. If you want a stronger institutional Labor party, go with Labor.

  14. Resolve have a ‘interesting’ methodology…

    Because the Resolve Political Monitor asks voters to nominate their primary votes in the same way they would write “1” on the ballot papers for the lower house at the election, there is no undecided category in the results, a key difference from some other surveys.

    The latest survey included a significant change in the questions asked of respondents following the formal declaration of candidates by the Australian Electoral Commission on April 22. With candidates now known, the survey asked respondents about their support by naming candidates as well as parties as they appear on the ballot paper.

    Primary support for the Coalition fell from 35 to 33 per cent as a result of a 2 per cent fall in support for the Liberals while the Nationals held their vote steady at 4 per cent nationwide.

    While independent candidates are taking on Liberals with high-profile campaigns in key city seats, support for independents nationwide fell from 9 to 4 per cent nationwide as the poll restricted the number of seats where they are offered as an option.

  18. GlenO vote for Terri simple as that. To Upnorth: rugby league is the greatest game of all ( and the mighty Valley diehards the greatest team of all) and should be at the Olympics but the Broncos owned by the Murdochcracy, well I’m from Brisbane and I can’t stand them. My favourite player from the NRL was Jonathan for sure!!!!!

  19. GlenO. Vote 1 Terri. You mention the Greens have some good policy and I can see why people think that. I’d say you need to remember they can craft those policies knowing they won’t ever have to implement them. The ALPs policies will actually happen.
    I also think on Asylum Seekers it will take a term or 3 to undo the gross racism released by the LNP over more than a decade. I believe a more compassionate ALP position will need to evolve over time. Democracy takes time.
    But if you want to be sure of making the first steps on a necessary journey. Terri is the best bet. Max will achieve nothing at all.

  20. GlenO says:
    Sunday, May 1, 2022 at 5:53 pm
    Okay, I’ve been quite stuck as to whether I should vote Labor or Greens in the House in this election. …..
    ……
    I’m assuming that you’re looking for more than a simple partisan response (mine would be vote Labor). I think the key question for you to answer is which of the following is more important to you given the current state of our country:
    * A party with an achievable agenda for change and a wide spread of talent (who seem to have learnt the basic rule of when you don’t know, listen to people who do) that will both provide an immediate improvement in both basic competence and policy settings focussed on improving equity and opportunity, along with the placing of markers/foundations of future progress, but not provide immediate solutions to all our problems; or
    * A party that declares a broad range of generally progressive policies, but hasn’t established the details (or credentials) of how they would do it.

    That’s a choice only you can make. I suppose it depends on a combination of your appetite for risk and your assessment of how important it is to ensure actual and permanent (or at least sustainable) change

  21. nath @ #902 Sunday, May 1st, 2022 – 5:29 pm

    yabba says:

    Why are you so intimidated by Mensa? All it indicates is an ability to think straight.
    ____________
    Mensa is the worst kind of pompous snobbery.

    You have no idea whatsoever. Local Mensa has virtually nothing to do with any International society, except to apply the same rules for membership. That said, I have attended social events arranged by Mensa groups in London, Edinburgh and Toronto, and found them to be very similar to the Sydney group.

    In my personal experience it is simply a social club within which I have built up a circle of good friends, and can go to a dinner and drinks evening, a film evening, a bushwalk, or an event for kids with my grandkids, and be certain that I will meet others with a broad range of interests with whom I can have conversations which range a bit further than the weather, Joe’s last operation or the price of real estate. Some of them have really esoteric specialisations, like me, and quite a few like DA’s Friday cryptic.

    We have even been known to get into metaphysics or econometrics or astronomy.

    Nothing that would interest you. Really snobbish.

  22. Leroy @ #946 Sunday, May 1st, 2022 – 6:08 pm

    sprocket – that weird bouncing around with minor parties is one of the reasons I don’t rate Resolve that highly. Still, the overall movement back to Labor on any sort of TPP calculation is noteworthy, just not the final result.

    You’ve got to expect higher statistical noise when the percentages of minor parties are 10% or less.

  23. GlenO, I think Green and Labor preferences tend to flow back to each other in similar numbers (if anything Labor preferences historically tend to flow slightly more strongly to Greens than the other way around) so I don’t think that should be considered when you vote. PB naturally has a lot of dyed in the wool tragics which is not representative of the average voter.

    Personally I’m not hyper-partisan and view both Labor and the Greens mostly favourably. I like the Greens dental and mental health in Medicare policy as well as the plan to raise additional tax revenue from billionaires and corporate super-profits. I prefer parties that are stronger on trying to address inequity and listen to and act on expert advice. Labor is not giving much indication they are going to address inequity and climate issues as urgently as the Greens. So the conclusion for me is vote Green 1, Labor 2. You’ll have different priorities to me so I’ll leave it to you to decide.

    I suppose the difference between you and me though is that you live in a seat where the Greens are competitive whereas in my home seat of Swan they poll OK but not close enough to potentially win it. So there’s perhaps an additional sense for you as your undecided that a vote for the Greens might lead to minority government (not that its necessarily a bad thing), whereas my vote just serves to give them another $2.50 and signal to Labor that there is 1 more voter out there that would prefer a more progressive Labor party.

  24. https://www.pollbludger.net/2022/05/01/sundays-best-campaign-launches-leaders-debates-how-to-votes-and-more/comment-page-19/#comment-3885746

    In inner-city seats where the Greens overtake the ALP for the first time, the ALP to Greens preference flow is usually a touch higher than the Greens to ALP preference flow, likely mainly because ALP voters are unused to having their preferences distributed and are more likely to follow the How to vote card advice (the ALP and Greens are advising second preferences for each other in Griffith) and a small percentage of teal type voters who vote Green but preference the Coalition. I doubt that the LNP has any real chance in in Griffith (I think they will have a swing against them, Morrison is least popular in inner-city electorates) but the LNP probably has slightly lower chances against the Greens.

    Policies that parties both agree on are most likely to be areas of cooperation between the ALP and Greens in the Senate and the event of a hung parliament (although an ALP majority is probably more likely). Voters` choices between the ALP and the Greens has an effect on where they disagree, including the balance of compromise where the ALP and Greens disagree on how far to go on any given issue. Therefore if in policy disputes between the ALP and Greens you agree with the Greens more, the best advice is to vote Green (and vice-versa).

  25. Via Frednk:
    “Property Council Welcomes Australian Labor Party Housing Plan”

    Property Council?

    Wasn’t that ScoMo’s gig before he trounced Michael Towke 8 votes to 82?

  26. ”
    Leroysays:
    Sunday, May 1, 2022 at 6:08 pm
    sprocket – that weird bouncing around with minor parties is one of the reasons I don’t rate Resolve that highly. Still, the overall movement back to Labor on any sort of TPP calculation is noteworthy, just not the final result.
    ”

    +1

  27. ”
    Mexicanbeemersays:
    Sunday, May 1, 2022 at 6:10 pm
    LNP on 33

    Could it get any worse.
    ”

    Hard to believe. Isn’t it?

  28. ”
    sprocket_says:
    Sunday, May 1, 2022 at 6:11 pm
    Resolve NSW
    ALP 40
    lNP 30
    GRN 12
    ONP 6
    UAP 3
    IND 4
    OTH 3

    This is a reflection of the hatred many in the NSW Liberal Party feel towards ScoMo

    Close enough to 60/40 to the ALP
    ”

    Can I put it mildly. Wow!
    Because Resolve never had any of the parties in any of its polls( Federal or State) on 40 till now.
    If it is repeated on 21st of May 2022. It will be political bloodbath for LNP. Even seats like Hughes will fall.
    (I know I know that it is a State poll and not a federal poll)
    Chris Minns is one of the luckiest Pollies in Australia. Will this luck hold in March 2023 is Million dollar question.

  29. In the event of a fairly even hung parliament (say Lib 71/ Lab 72/others 8) do you think the independents would try to thrash out a deal with one side at all costs or do you think there’s a chance of a snap redo election?

    In the latter who do you think would likely win?

  30. Freya Stark @ #975 Sunday, May 1st, 2022 – 9:00 pm

    In the event of an fairly even hung parliament (say 71/72/8) do you think the independents would try to thrash out a deal with one side at all costs or do you think there’s a chance of a snap redo election?

    In the latter who do you think would likely win?

    Why do we even care to answer your spurious questions, posed to distract from the reality that your team is getting trounced!?!

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