Week zero

The Coalition prepares to choose or confirm leaders, Section 44 rears its head once again, and a look at the aggregate two-party preferred numbers.

To allow for a separate thread for the late election counting, which can be found here, here goes my first post-election summary of relevant news to kick off a general discussion thread. Which is naturally less easy to do now that there are no polls or election horse race scuttlebutt to relate. Here’s what I’ve managed:

• Peter Dutton now appears certain to be elected unopposed as the new Liberal leader at the first meeting of the party room after the election winners have been confirmed. There appears to be strong support for the notion that the deputy position should go to a woman, names mentioned including Karen Andrews, Bridget Archer, Sussan Ley, Anne Ruston and Jane Hume. There were some suggestions that Andrews might seek the leadership, together with Dan Tehan, although it always seemed clear Dutton had the numbers.

• The Nationals party room will meet on Tuesday, which could see a challenge to Barnaby Joyce’s leadership from David Littleproud or Michael McCormack. However, the ABC reports it has been put to McCormack that it would be preferable to have a “fresh start”. Mike Foley of the Age/Herald reports Keith Pitt might put his name forward on the “off chance” that Joyce declines to stand, positioning himself as the heir to Joyce’s skepticism on net zero carbon emissions.

• Following her win over Labor’s Kristina Keneally as an independent for Fowler, it has been noted that Dai Le asserted on her Section 44 checklist as part of her nomination for the election that she had never been a citizen or subject of a country other than Australia. Queried by The Australian, constitutional law expert Anne Twomey offered the inuitively obvious point that this seemed unlikely given she was born in Vietnam in 1968 and remained there until her family fled in 1975. However, while a nomination may be rejected if a prospective candidate does not complete the checklist and provide supporting documentation is required, it would not appear a nomination is retrospectively invalidated if the information provided was later shown to be incomplete. The sole point at issue is whether Le does in fact have Vietnamese citizenship, which would appear unlikely based on the account of Sydney barrister Dominic Villa.

• The projections of both the ABC and myself are that Labor will win the final two-party preferred count by 51.8-48.2, from a swing to Labor of 3.3%. This is derived from two-candidate preferred counts between Labor and the Coalition in seats where one is available and estimates of other parties’ preference flows where they are not. I have Labor winning by 51.3-48.7 in New South Wales, a swing of 3.0%; 53.9-46.1 in Victoria, a swing of 0.8%; the Coalition winning 54.3-45.7 in Queensland, a swing to Labor of 4.1%; Labor winning 54.7-45.3 in Western Australia, a swing of 10.2% (their first win in the state since 1987 and best result since 1983); 53.9-46.1 in South Australia, a swing of 3.2%; and 53.8-46.2 in Tasmania, a swing to the Coalition of 2.1%.

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.

3,000 comments on “Week zero”

Comments Page 4 of 60
1 3 4 5 60

  1. Snappy Tomsays:
    Thursday, May 26, 2022 at 9:49 am
    Fun fact: the ALP 2PP for the ‘nation outside Qld’ is shaping as about 53.2%.

    Of 121 seats in the ‘nation outside Qld,’ Labor are likely to hold 71 or 72.

    Qld, state of denial.

    Sammy J perspective still holds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAMnSxCmgYY

    ST
    QLD is not the only ‘State of denial ‘. We can add TAS to that. How so?
    Libs not only retained their 2 seats in TAS but increased their 2PP in both seats against trend. And not only that ALP could lose a seat to Libs in TAS. QLD doesn’t have that dubious distinction. Yes, ALP lost a seat to Greens but not to LNP.

  2. Ven:

    And QLD didn’t surprise me. I am very disappointed with the way they voted but it is true to their form.

    Queensland swung, on current figures, by 4.1% to the ALP, which is a pretty decent effort – among the states it was only exceeded by WA (somehow the ACT managed over 5%, on what I had erroneously assumed must have been near to a high water mark for the ALP already!).

    On the pre-election pendulum we would have expected a uniform 4.1% swing to flip only one seat (Longman), an unfortunate side-effect of the lack of close Coalition marginals (there were only 3 under 3% – Bass [TAS], Chisholm [VIC] and Boothby [SA]). In the event, Lindsay stayed with the Coalition but Queensland flipped two seats slightly higher up the pendulum instead – Brisbane and Ryan – it’s just unfortunate for the ALP that these were apparently snaffled by the Greens instead.

    So in summary Queensland swung harder than the nation (albeit off a very low base) and also delivered more seats for that swing than the pendulum indicated.

  3. ‘Gettysburg1863 says:
    Thursday, May 26, 2022 at 10:43 am

    @ Boerwar 920am
    Boer, you disparage the comment about Greensland and quote the TPP 2022 stats.
    …’
    ====================
    Calling something ‘bullshit’ is not disparaging it if it is bullshit. It is just the truth.

    I understand that the Greens HAVE to dream of the future now, just like they have for the past 30 years.

    But, here is the thing. 88% of Australians gave their primary vote to someone else in the election just gone. The biggest contributors by far, proportionately, to the stat are Queenslanders.

    So, do stop with the delusions and the dreams.

    Oh, and East Germany is NOT an analogy for Queensland.

  4. ‘caf says:
    Thursday, May 26, 2022 at 10:48 am

    … delivered more seats for that swing than the pendulum indicated.’
    —————————
    So, does the pendulum say that it is now ‘Greensland’. Or the latter the Greens doing grandiose bullshit?
    Asking for a friend.

  5. So Finn Greens are welcoming nuclear power while Australia’s Greens are intent on closing down anything and everything to do with nuclear mining, exports and industry.

  6. ‘Historyintime says:
    Thursday, May 26, 2022 at 10:55 am

    Scotty’s going to stick around isn’t he? That 2GB interview did NOT have an elegiac air about it.’
    ======================
    Like shit sticks to a bear.
    Will Dutton give him a shadow spokesperson role?

  7. I was reading this article in The Guardian a few hours ago, and made some notes that might be of more general interest to this morning’s discussions.
    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/may/25/rural-news-corp-paper-delivers-sharp-rebuke-to-barnaby-joyce-over-nationals-climate-deniers

    DIVIDED WE STAND

    climate change is real and will affect all parts of the country, not just “leafy suburbs” in the city.

    What is it about the “leafy suburbs”? Why is it that some politicians need “the other”? Is it resentment? Those suburbs are good places to live. Wasn’t it a Liberal PM who popularised the idea of “lifestyle choices”? After a bit of reflection, I reckon it’s resentment. “Country folk” hate that they need the cities. And that hate sustains the Nationals. (We know it well in Queensland, a state that loves to hate its capital city.)

    A LAND OF OPPORTUNITY
    The article identifies a suite of lovely opportunities for the ALP.

    “We lost government on the weekend and that means we lost our capacity to influence policies on behalf of regional Australia who we represent.”

    – ALP could take these up.

    McCormack and Chester represent a split between south-eastern National MPs who want a softer stance on issues such as climate change

    – ALP could woo these blokes or at worst use them as a wedge.

    But exit polls done in key marginals found climate and environment policy was the top issue for voters in those electorates.
    …snip… The polling, conducted for Farmers for Climate Action, found more than 70% of voters considered “effective climate change” policies important to their vote. Between 42-44% of voters said climate change and environment was in the top three issues informing their vote.

    – A solid and committed Not-A-Green climate action group already exists. Align with them. Support them.

    “It provided powerful impetus for the teal independents to make successful raids on Coalition held city seats such as Kooyong in Melbourne and Wentworth in Sydney.”

    The theme that a vote for your local Liberal is a vote for Joyce cost the Liberals seats and so cost the Nationals power.

    My conclusion from all of this is that the Coalition is structurally weak, deep into its component parts. It is in serious trouble. The next few years will show us if it is fatally so.

  8. Boerwar

    “If Labor runs into the next election with unemployment starting with a six, inflation running at 10+, COL sky high, and a hundred thousand home owners with negative equity then Dutton will romp it in.”

    If I’m incorrect and the paradigm hasn’t actually changed then yes, I think you’re right. I sense though that voters are linking issues such as CC, FICAC and women’s rights/representation as being linked or as important as economics in which case the argument becomes more nuanced.

  9. Cronus
    It would be astonishing if ICAC, women’s equality, pollie dignitas, and climate change were still front of mind at the next election. The base ball bat anger dividend for all those was largely expended in this election.
    I reckon it will be back to the hip pocket nerve.
    And introducing new taxes for a spot of the old ‘budget repair’.

  10. C@tmomma @ #44 Thursday, May 26th, 2022 – 7:53 am

    I have a theory about Queensland’s results and their voters. They must have decided that they would be the bulwark that saw the Coalition elected again, so until you got down to SE Queensland where the results differed markedly, it was all as it was in 2019, and now it seems with the election of out and proud Global Heating idiots like Colin Boyce, worse. I imagine they, Matt Canavan and Colin Boyce and the Coal club, planned some sort of force majeure move on the Liberals, especially wrt Net Zero by 2050 commitments, if the Coalition had been returned and so they laid the groundwork for that during the campaign. Evil bastards.

    That reasoning doesn’t really hold up when you look at the numbers, though.

    In Queensland, there’s about a 4.1% swing against the LNP on primary vote, while Labor gained by 1.1% and Greens gained by 2.2%. There was also a swing from PHON to UAP, with the increase in UAP being at the expense of PHON.

    This holds up (to a slightly lesser extent) even if you restrict attention to non-metropolitan seats, where there was a 2.24% swing against the LNP, Labor and Greens each gained 1.22%, and the net change for PHON+UAP was a reduction by 0.78%. The 2PP swing to Labor is about 4.28% in non-metropolitan seats.

    It doesn’t seem to be a south-east phenomenon – in fact, rural seats seem to have gotten a better swing than outer metropolitan for Labor in Qld.

  11. Oliver Sutton says:
    Thursday, May 26, 2022 at 9:14 am
    “And QLD didn’t surprise me. I am very disappointed with the way they voted but it is true to their form.”
    “Queensland did surprise me, as a lifelong Queenslander. And I am very delighted with the way they voted.
    I recall a conversation here a few weeks back about reports that the LNP was in trouble in the ostensibly blue-ribbon Ryan: did that mean that Labor or the Greens were in contention? That question was answered decisively last Saturday.”

    Agreed, genuine cause for some optimism, especially because the selection of a third party (Greens) is a genuine move and choice. This gives progressives now two real options which I consider to be a bonus.

    The move to the Greens was a real surprise in terms of bucking the conservative trend and puts the QLD LNP on notice as I think these moves have the potential to provide momentum in the regions among the young in particular.
    Welcome to Greensland.

  12. What Finland has is an unreliable and vengeful supplier of fossil fuel. It also has one of the world’s biggest and newest nuclear plants.

    I don’t know whether it has prospects for wind energy but it has bugger all prospects for sun energy in winter.

  13. BW, all of which is irrelevant to the fact that Finland, unlike any other country in the world, has a long-term repository for nuclear waste.

    If you don’t have such a repository, and are using nuclear power, you are accumulating waste with no waste storage solution. Waste that needs to be securely housed for HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS. When you want to sell me your nuclear energy solution, tell me how much it’s going to cost to build the repository to store the waste from that solution.

    Or you have no solution.

  14. IMO the 2022 election win has a different feel about it to 2007.
    I think 2007 had an all about Rudd vibe. That’s not the case now.
    Albo presents as more down to earth…almost warts and all.
    There is an atmosphere of both relief and a quiet determination to change Australia and Albo’s years of experience gives him the political smarts that Rudd was lacking.
    A big challenge of course is the media.
    Years ago left leaning journos had the comfort in knowing that if they got kicked out of the rw media there was a chance they could be picked up by the ABC. That of course doesn’t apply now.
    So a first step is to clean out the ABC.
    The rw will whinge but so what. Get in there and do it asap

  15. Tanya Plibersek made a mistake referring to Dutton as Voldemort.

    Such comparisons are best left to cartoonists, comedians and the general public. Pollies dont have the luxury of letting their inner monologue escape: Voldemort comparisons, kartoffelkopf and Waffen-SS rank naming jokes are the quiet part that don’t need to be said out loud. Folk will make the connection themselves – and if not – cartoonists and comedians will do it for them.

  16. I know we have to think ‘onward progressive soldiers’, but Queensland is the base from with the Liberal/National recovery will come.

    The recovery will come hard and fast if inflation is up, unemployment is up, real wages keep their decades long downward trend, a hundred thousand Australians have negative equity in their houses, there are not enough resources for all the social service queues, company tax receipts are down and iron and fossil fuel royalties are down.

    Not a single one of these is impossible. As a set they are entirely possible.

    Oh, and one other thing. I did quite a bit of rural traveling before and during the campaign.

    Everywhere I went Palmer’s tens of millions were sticking it to the Coalition.

    I doubt whether he is going to bother with that in 2025.

  17. Late Riser at 10:55 am
    It’s a News Corpse paper so all very strange. Has Rupert decided that Climate Change as a battleground in his eternal ‘kulturkampf’ has run its course ?

  18. Dandy Murray-Honeydew @ #151 Thursday, May 26th, 2022 – 10:47 am

    Ray UK from earlier today:

    ‘Finland’s Green Party endorses nuclear power .. In a historic shift, Finland’s Green Party voted overwhelmingly to adopt a fully pro-nuclear stance at its national meeting’

    https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2022/05/finland-green-party-nuclear/

    Thanks for sharing this.

    Take note, everyone.

    Indeed. I wish the Australian Greens would do the same.

    The certainty of global warming now outweighs any risks associated with nuclear energy.

  19. Pi
    Repository? Second order issue, IMO, if your ambition is to destroy the nuclear industry. Which is the Australian’s Greens ambition.
    I would encase the lot in glass and drop it all into a subduction zone in the benthic depths.

  20. ‘Will Dutton give him a shadow spokesperson role?’

    Will he want one, or would it better for him to take a low profile for a while?

    Lose weight, write a book etc, take humble classes etc . Wait for the hoped for ‘well he wasn’t that bad’, mood shift.

  21. He was a student at the Parkland Florida school shootings. He was the face of that particular tragedy. Hope he is right.

    ——

    David Hogg
    I’ve been working on this for four years and spent every day studying in college the history of how we got here, political science, behavioral economics, and reflecting on how we win.

    Mark my words. This time will be different.

  22. Mexicanbeemer:

    Obama should add a fourth an independent electoral commission to set boundaries and run elections.

    Unfortunately for the US, it appears impossible to create any kind of genuine independent body there. The well has long since been poisoned, blown up, filled in, concreted over and replaced by a Starbucks. They just don’t have a political culture capable of creating such a thing – the political culture is “anything not explicitly prohibited by the rules is fair play”.

  23. In the early days of the Trump presidency the 538 team sketched out 14 (yes 14!) potential paths/themes for Trump’s rule. Interestingly while many of them bore no resemblance to actuality, there was not one of the 14 that closely nailed it on its own. The reality corresponded to a mix of several of them.

    Here are 3 simplified scenarios for the Albanese government, spanning best case to worst case:

    – Sunny uplands: Albo is a circuit breaker. His honesty, decency and openness to collaboration set a different direction to Australian public life. The generally positive sentiment enables the government to weather challenging economic circumstances. However economic conditions are improving towards the election, tangible progress has been made with renewable energy and climate related initiatives, ICAC is established and the Voice referendum is passed- the Liberals realising that the political costs of vigorously opposing it given the new Zeitgeist are too high. In 2025 Albo is reelected with an increased majority (Thanks Qld, Tas and NSW!) and consolidates the position in the Senate.
    – Muddling through: It’s not an easy time to govern. The cost of living pressures remain front and centre of politics with petrol prices in particular staying high. The government has limited capacity to control economic outcomes in the short or medium term, or to convincingly prosecute the narrative that it has inherited difficult circumstances. There are a few stuff ups by new inexperienced ministers and MPs. But ICAC gets up and there’s some progress on the climate agenda (the Greens and the Teals however aren’t entirely on board with what they see as an insufficiently rigorous ICAC model or the extent of climate action). The government is up and down in the polls but is returned in 2025 either narrowly in majority or minority with Teal/Greens support after losing some seats and gaining a few others.
    – Voldemort Rising: The Dutton led opposition, with vocal support from the Murdoch media, is on a full combat footing from day one. The difficult economy gives them no shortage of material and they relentlessly link this to a meme of Labor governments being incompetent economic managers. The new highly virulent Pi variant of COVID sweeps the world; Australian public health authorities recommend lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine boosters. The Federal and State governments are immobilised however given the political costs of new restrictions, and when some are introduced there is vocal opposition. The Voice referendum is deferred, with the support of most, but not all, indigenous community leaders, as it becomes apparent that right wing opposition will doom it to failure. Labor loses many seats in 2025 to a LNP with a small target agenda based mainly on messaging about economic competence. Dutton PM has a working majority in the House and a Senate that will allow him to get most things through.

  24. BW: “I would encase the lot in glass and drop it all into a subduction zone in the benthic depths.”

    Analyze it. Cost it. Get back to me.

    Scientists have been working on this problem for sixty years, and there is only one country that has produced a viable solution: Finland. One single solution in sixy years of trying. Every other country stores their waste in cylinders with design lives of 120 years (they started with design lives of 80 years), and the waste needs to be safely secured for hundreds of thousands of years. And if it leaks into the water table, it turns everything around it for thousands of kilometers into an irradiated wasteland. And ya can’t clean it up once the damage is done.

    And if you think governments have gotten better at building infrastructure over the past 50 years, you should probably sit down, because I’ve got some bad news to tell you.

  25. H
    He has a distinct pattern of behaviour.
    1. Get in.
    2. Start restructuring the organization to increase his power.
    3. Make friends. Promote your friends.
    4. Make enemies. Get rid of your enemies.
    5. Tell whoppers.
    6. Brag. Self-promote. Do not take accountability for failure.
    7. Hide what you are doing from everyone.
    8. Fail to follow institutional processes and arrangements.
    9. Wreck the joint.

    I can’t see him doing anything else because he seems to be hard-wired for this pattern.

  26. Pi
    I am sure you are right… somewhere in there.
    Back to my main point:
    The Finnish Greens have gone nuclear. The Australian Greens want to destroy nuclear.

  27. As I get older I see the carousel go past from time to time. Sometimes the riders change. The issue of nuclear power always returns to nuclear waste management. Always. Nuclear waste is a killer in every sense, including politically, at least so far. There was a brief glimmer of hope when “burning” the waste was proposed. (Not a chemical burn but nuclear one.) But that dimmed.

    There are only two “safe” ways to store nuclear waste. The first is to put it a long way away from yourself. Distance between you and it makes it safe. Australia was proposed as that safe place back in the 1990s. Australia said NO, and a few other choice things too. And given how small and generally populated the world is that’s about our only option. The second way is to change what it means to be “safe”, and that is more likely. We’ve done it recently with covid. If other things become more urgent then that is what we will do. We will learn to live with it. (Not today though.)

  28. So, does the pendulum say that it is now ‘Greensland’. Or the latter the Greens doing grandiose bullshit?
    Asking for a friend.

    I will take that as a comment.

    (But haven’t you heard? “If you want a friend in politics, get a dog.”)

  29. BW: “The Australian Greens want to destroy nuclear.”

    Not just to you, but to Dandy as well…

    If there’s no nuclear waste storage solution, and outside of Finland there isn’t one, I also want to destroy nuclear. This whole “someone else will sort that out” attitude is how we’ve gone some way to wrecking our climate. Personally I think it’s a bad idea to poison our aquifers for hundreds of thousands of years as well.

    Want my guess? Such a storage repository would cost tens of billions of dollars to build and take a decade or more. If that cost is added to nuclear energy, and it still is economically viable? Bonza. Til then, analyze it, cost it, get back to me.

  30. Boer – there is no need for Labor to moderate its demands, expectations or plans. It won a majority dont you know? It can do as it pleases.

    Peeps will be very understanding when the misery index hits double digits before Christmas. They will correctly attribute all problems to the previous govt not the current govt.

  31. Princeplanet says:
    Thursday, May 26, 2022 at 9:47 am
    “Boerwar: I guess as someone who lives in the Brisbane it’s just as hard for me to understand what motivates someone in far off Gladstone, Mackay, Rockhampton or Townsville. But to a lot of these people Brisbane might as well be Melbourne.”

    As I say, there are two Queenslands,

    1/ the far south east corner
    2/ then everything north of Noosa and west of Ipswich.

  32. Snappy Tom says:
    Thursday, May 26, 2022 at 9:49 am
    “Fun fact: the ALP 2PP for the ‘nation outside Qld’ is shaping as about 53.2%.
    Of 121 seats in the ‘nation outside Qld,’ Labor are likely to hold 71 or 72.
    Qld, state of denial.”

    Sammy J perspective still holds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAMnSxCmgYY

    We’ll catch up later this century, “Don’t you worry about that”.

  33. The only people who think nuclear is great are people who build nuclear plants, because they get paid to build the nuclear plants, and people who have nothing to do with construction. The cost of building these things is IMMENSE. They take decades to build, and quite frankly, they don’t provide enough energy for the expense. That’s not even including the fact that none of these spruikers ever include the cost of securely housing the waste for hundreds of thousands of years. How do we know this? They can’t even tell you how much it would cost to build a nuclear waste facility. Because they’ve never even built one. In 60 years.

    If you come up with a solution that houses the waste and provides the energy, tell me how much per MW it will be, and we can compare. If you can’t do that, you’re hiding the cost for someone else to pay. And if those nuclear waste storage facilities don’t get built we’re back to irradiated wasteland.

  34. Pi says:
    Thursday, May 26, 2022 at 9:58 am
    “Sometimes people like to change the curtains, because they just like to change the curtains.” https://t.co/yFerbtNdhj

    If after all she’s seen and written this is SM’s take on what happened then she’s as deluded as the Coalition and residing on another planet.

  35. Stephen Koukoulas @TheKouk
    It is looking more likely that inflation will be close to 9% by year end. This will be a huge issue – obviously – that needs to be addressed aggressively now. The policy errors of the RBA and Morrison govt are something to behold. In a very bad way.

Comments Page 4 of 60
1 3 4 5 60

Leave a Reply

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