Saturday, June 18
Some discussion on Twitter in the wake of the Queensland result inspired me to consider the possibility that right-wing preference flows might yet deprive Labor of a third seat in Western Australia, a result that would appreciably weaken the new government’s hand in the Senate.
The answer is that they could if preferences indeed behave as they did in Queensland, which I have illustrated with one of two new sheets on my Senate projection spreadsheet, identified as “WA — Qld prefs”. This is because a strong flow of preferences to One Nation would give them an even chance of passing the third Liberal to make it to the final count, at which point One Nation would take the last seat on Liberal preferences. However, since One Nation got less than half the vote share in WA that they did in Queensland, it seems intuitively likely that they will also get a weaker flow. I have also included the same exercise using preference flows from South Australia, identified as “WA — SA prefs”, where the parties’ vote shares more closely resembled Western Australia. This too suggests One Nation has a strong chance of making the final count, but in this case they would fall well short of taking the seat from Labor.
It should be noted here that there is a dramatic difference between the strong preference flow to One Nation upon the LNP’s exclusion in the Queensland example and the weak flow upon the Liberals’ exclusion in South Australia — partly for the reason just noted, but also because the Liberal how-to-vote card in South Australia did not recommend a preference to One Nation, whereas the LNP card had them second. Western Australia is an intermediate case in this respect, since the Liberal card directed preferences to One Nation in nine seats but not in the other six. But in the event that minor party preferences flowed to One Nation only as strongly as they did in South Australia — and assuming this was still enough to put them ahead of the Liberals and into the final count — the flow to One Nation upon the Liberals’ exclusion would have to be fully as strong as in Queensland for them to then overhaul Labor, which hardly seems likely.
Friday, June 17
The fifth Senate button press has just been conducted in Queensland, and it’s the first that relates to a result that I considered in any way in doubt. As I thought highly probable but not quite certain, Pauline Hanson has held her seat at the expense of Amanda Stoker, the incumbent third candidate on the Liberal National Party ticket. The other seats have gone two LNP (James McGrath and Matt Canavan), two Labor (Murray Watt and Anthony Chisholm) and one Greens (Penny Allman-Payne). I’ll have more to offer on this when the preference distribution and ballot paper data are published.
Most interesting of those still to come is Victoria, where the last seat promises to be a very tight race between the incumbent third Liberal, Greg Mirabella, and Ralph Babet of the United Australia Party (a lot more on that here), which the AEC announces will happen at 10am on Monday. New South Wales, which looks certain to be three Coalition, two Labor and one Greens, will be conducted half-an-hour earlier. Still no word yet on Western Australia, which looks like Labor three, Coalition two and Greens one. No word yet on when those might be expected.
UPDATE: The Queensland Senate distribution is now up on the AEC site. It turned out that Amanda Stoker was not seriously in contention: when the exclusion of Legalise Cannabis left three remaining candidates chasing two seats, Stoker held 10.3% of the vote against 14.2% for Pauline Hanson and 13.9% for Labor’s Anthony Chisholm, who were duly elected in that order. Hanson substantially outperformed my projection based on 2019 preference flows, which only got her to 12.1% compared with 14.2% for Chisholm, with Stoker on 10.9%. This is perhaps consistent with what was seen in South Australia, where preferences among right-wing minor parties were tighter this time with less leakage to the Coalition. As noted in the previous post, this suggests Ralph Babet has a solid chance of poaching the last seat in Victoria from Greg Mirabella, contrary to what my model was suggesting.
The AEC announced half-an-hour ago on Twitter that Victoria’s Senate count will happen at 10am in Monday.
Oh dear, Pauline still has a job…. and we may even have a PUP representative in the Senate….
Message to Greens, Pocock and the Lambie team: Let’s make the above completely irrelevant, alongside their mates in the Coalition….
Thanks – post amended.
What about WA, William – that won’t be called today, will it?
Also, Hanson took the 5th & not the 6th seat. Labor’s No 2 (Chisholm) took the last seat. That was the surprise!
I should clarify that the AEC released the wrong order of elected candidates in its original post – that’s what K. Bonham said.
Seemingly no word yet on WA, but the AEC has just announced New South Wales will be 9.30am on Monday.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-17/qld-stoker-vs-hanson-senate-race-queensland-federal-senate-seat/101162456
Ignore the headline – read the text.
Update: The original tweet for the QLD Senate results featured an incorrect order for elected Senators. Apologies.
The correct order is:
1. James McGrath
2. Murray Watt
3. Matt Canavan
4. Penny Allman-Payne
5. Pauline Hanson
6. Anthony Chisholm
Huge result for the LNP to lose a QLD Senator, and only return 2 for the next 6 years.
I would rather Pauline than another Liberal. She won’t vote completely in lockstep with the Opposition and might give the Opposition a bit of grief.
Ditto the last seat in Victoria, I hope it’s UAP if its a toss-up between them and another “Liberal”. History suggests that the UAP’er will probably defect and might even become a decent independent.
If the 2025 Senate election follows the 2019 pattern, except that the ALP wins 2 seats in Qld (as it usually would), there should be an ALP-Grn Senate majority in 3 years’ time. We shall see…
The distribution has been published – further analysis now added to the post.
Interesting now that some of the the 2pp votes are coming in from those seats that aren’t Coalition/Labor contests.
Mayo is a seat I wouldn’t have ever picked as a Labor seat but Labor ahead on the 2pp 51.6-48.4. Sharkhie has always seen as a Liberal leaning independent, but clearly most of her support is coming from Labor voters.
A few fun observations from the Queensland senate distribution process…
1. The Greens were pushed over the line to a full quota by the exclusion of Clive Palmer – that’s right, Clive Palmer’s preferences got the Greens their seat.
2. The Greens were elected before Legalise Cannabis were excluded. Legalise Cannabis had received an extra 68,887 votes from preferences, whereas LNP received 77,701 votes from preferences at that point.
3. Only about half of Christensen’s votes flowed to Hanson when he was excluded. About a quarter flowed to Stoker. Just 7 votes (out of 5570) flowed to the Greens.
4. Pavlou, Dickson, and Christensen were knocked out sequentially. Interestingly, when Dickson was knocked out, a big chunk flowed to the Group A independent – which is probably a sign that a lot of Dickson voters just donkey voted beyond their vote for him (although Harris, the Group A Ind, was also an ex-PHON person).
Edit
That Fowler result continues to amaze. It now looks like it’s going to be the biggest rightward swing in the entire country, barring something weird happening with the 2PP of the remaining ballots. Perhaps they should rename the seat to Howler.
Paul Thomas @ 6.22pm
“That Fowler result continues to amaze. … ”
I’m not amazed: Ms Keneally has either lost or suffered an adverse swing in every election she’s ever contested. She’s the Jubilation T. Cornpone of Australian politics.
@steve
Babet may quit the UAP, but there’s little chance of him being a decent independent. He’s a full-blown cooker.
If he’s quits, he’ll be an Anning rather than a Lambie.
Does anyone know when the individual seat distribution of preferences will be made available? There’s a few seats that I’m curious about.
The problem in Fowler was not the candidate but the the sensitivity of someone being parachuted in……Those who bag KK are just indulging in sour grapes…….It is to be noted that the Liberals did not go so good either when they tried this stunt. As a local member, going through a selection process only to have it over ridden by HO makes the purpose of local membership choice somewhat pointless…….
“sprocket_says:
Friday, June 17, 2022 at 6:09 pm”…
Interesting olive branch thrown by Pauline to Albo…. Her vote is unlikely to be needed to pass legislation in the Senate, but she better makes sure to be seen to back the side that supports the battlers: the ALP.
“Tricot says:
Friday, June 17, 2022 at 8:20 pm
The problem in Fowler was not the candidate but the the sensitivity of someone being parachuted in……”
The Fowler result has been analysed in the wrong way, in my view.
Keneally got a primary vote of 30,973 and added 10,582 votes from preferences.
Dai Le got a primary vote of 25,346 (so much for the dislike of the “parachuted ones”) but added 19,002 votes from other preferences. So, it was the other preferences that actually delivered victory to Dai Le. Where did those preferences come from? Presumably she got the 14,740 votes from the Liberals. In addition, she still needed 4,262 votes, which could have easily come from the UAP (5,512). It’s clear that the decisive factor was the support of the Liberals (+ UAP?) for Dai Le.
Conclusion: per se, Dai Le “the local” didn’t defeat “the parachuted” Keneally. Keneally was finally defeated by Dai Le as an instrument of the Liberal party to get rid of the much hated former ALP senator (a prominent member of the trio: Keneally, Wong, Gallagher that the Liberals hated viscerally – remember the saga of Liberal party accusations against the trio following the tragic death of Kimberley Kitching).
‘The problem in Fowler was not the candidate but the the sensitivity of someone being parachuted in……Those who bag KK are just indulging in sour grapes……’
FMD, KKK has a proven track record of failure.
Pedantsays:
Friday, June 17, 2022 at 7:43 pm
I find solely blaming Kristina Keneally problematic. It means that we don’t have to consider whether candidate parachuting is problematic, and how parties should aim to improve their candidate choices and preselection process, since we can just blame Kristina Keneally for everything that went wrong.
I would argue that if such a narrow and personal lens is used to analyse what happened in Fowler, such a result is bound to happen again elsewhere.
Alpo at 9:04 pm
“…Conclusion: per se, Dai Le “the local” didn’t defeat “the parachuted” Keneally. …”
I simply note the results in Fowler in two-candidate terms, Labor vs. non-Labor. In 2019, it was 63.99 to 36.01. In 2022 it was 48.37 to 51.63. That’s a swing from Labor to non-Labor of 15.62%.
It’s simply delusional to see Ms Keneally as other than a gross electoral liability.
Alpo says: so much for the dislike of the “parachuted ones”
Friday, June 17, 2022 at 9:04 pm
What do you mean by this? The ALP in Fowler suffered an -18% swing against it, and potentially a large swing on 2PP terms (ALP vs LIB) as well (the TPP count looks only 1/2 complete). How is this not a significant statement against the ALP by voters?
You also mention that it was “preferences that actually delivered victory to Dai Le”. Why is this surprising? It appears preferences were needed in 136 electorates to decide the winner according to the AEC website.
Using your argument and words about the influence of preferences in deciding the winner, would you then agree that in Mackellar, where Labor and Greens preferences were key to Jason Falinski’s (LIB) defeat:
that ‘Sophie Scamps “the local (independent)” didn’t defeat “the Liberal” Jason Falinski. Falinski was finally defeated by Sophie Scamps as an instrument of the Labor party and Greens party to get rid of the much hated former Liberal member’?
It takes a lot to achieve a swing of -15% in a good year for your party. Actually, KKK would have been a much better fit for Parramatta.
Steve777 says:
Friday, June 17, 2022 at 5:24 pm
I would rather Pauline than another Liberal. She won’t vote completely in lockstep with the Opposition and might give the Opposition a bit of grief.
Ditto the last seat in Victoria, I hope it’s UAP if its a toss-up between them and another “Liberal”. History suggests that the UAP’er will probably defect and might even become a decent independent.
————————————————-
Not a hope of Babet becoming a decent independent. He is an anti vax real estate agent……..
Historyintime @ #23 Friday, June 17th, 2022 – 9:23 pm
It is not just offensive to the soon-to-be-former senator, but also to all victims of the actual KKK, that you so blithely use that term as a reference to her. Like her or hate her, she has done nothing to earn such a comparison.
Oh, and by the way – this is to both you and Pedant – you cannot compare 2CP margins when the two parties involved change between elections. There is no inherent reason to think that the 2CP margin would have been different if Dai Le, or someone much like her, ran in 2019.
Trying to compare them would be like trying to compare Melbourne 2004 with Melbourne 2007, for example. In 2004, Lindsay Tanner had a margin of 21.14%. In 2007, the margin was 4.71%… but these weren’t comparable, because in 2004, it was Labor vs Liberal, whereas in 2007, it was Labor vs Greens (Bandt). In an election year in which Labor swept to power, by your metric, Tanner lost more than 15%, and was clearly a bad candidate… except he wasn’t (and nearly got 50% primary vote). On the Labor vs Liberal 2PP, Tanner increased his margin by 1.13%. The only substantive change was that the Greens had slipped past the Liberals into the 2CP. And then in 2010, when Tanner retired, Bandt won the seat.
Keneally lost a big chunk of the Labor vote to Dai Le, but the Liberal candidate lost a big chunk, too. In an election where the biggest theme was independents sweeping to power in seats that major parties were taking for granted, Fowler follows the theme perfectly, and it doesn’t seem to be specific to Keneally.
To bring the discussion back to where it belongs in this thread (if you want to continue this, do it in the open thread), it’s interesting to see how Fowler’s 2PP count is progressing. At present, a little over half of the counting has been done. That being said, it’s likely that the ones that haven’t been completed are mostly the big ones – the PPVCs – plus some declaration type votes. And looking at the distributions of votes at the big PPVCs, I suspect that Labor will do a better on the remaining count. If I had to make a prediction, I’d say it’ll land somewhere around an 8% margin to Labor on 2PP.
An interesting morsel from the ACT distribution of preferences – the ALP ticket had more than a quota between them at the start of the count, but there was enough leakage that after the second candidate was excluded, the first candidate still didn’t have a full quota. Katy Gallagher had to wait for an independent candidate to be excluded to get across the line.
GlenO, Kristina Kercher Keneally *is* an “actual KKK”.
@Alpo: I guess you can make whatever semantic points you want, but at the end of the day Labor’s first preferences dropped by one third (!!) and, as I noted, there’s an 8.5% 2PP swing against (which, once you adjust for the national or NSW swing, looks more like a 12% swing relative to the overall environment, i.e. probably the biggest single-seat aberration in the entire election).
Whether that’s the result of a candidate who was a mismatch for the electorate, a candidate who is simply bad at electioneering, or (more likely) some of Column A and some of Column B, is an interesting question for ALP’s post-election M&M, but not one on which I have any views. I will, however, point out, as a fellow American, that comparing Ms. Kenneally’s immigrant story to that of Vietnamese boat people, many of whom likely have PTSD from the experience, is offensively tone-deaf.
@Historyintime: I mean, it depends on that Column A vs. Column B thing I just mentioned, but if Keneally has even half the swing against her in Parramatta that she did in Fowler, the Liberals flip the seat!
@GlenO: When you say “8-point margin” do you mean you think Labor will get 54% of 2PP, or 58%? Either of those look unlikely. I could see 56 or 57% if (as you hypothesize) the remaining vote centers lean more Labor than the current count. But Fowler has inverted national trends elsewhere (e.g. Keneally did better on postals and Liberals did better on in-person), so I’m not sure your hypothesis is a sound one. Will be interesting to see!
@CAF It took me a second to realize that “UG LI F.” stood for someone named F. Li who was ungrouped, as opposed to some sort of “G ‘Maebe A. Girl’ Pudlo”-like joke candidacy.
No, I am not making that name up; a person running under that name just qualified as a top two candidate in a U.S. House of Representatives primary in California:
https://electionresults.sos.ca.gov/returns/us-rep/district/30
“Pedant says:
Friday, June 17, 2022 at 9:42 pm…
Please stop the ridiculous Labor Greens Wars says:
Friday, June 17, 2022 at 9:58 pm….”
Again, you are both analysing the Fowler results superficially, ignoring the obvious campaign of the Liberal party and the media attacking Keneally. The campaign did work in Fowler, obviously. Another “parachuted” one, Andrew Charlton, in Parramatta, won his seat and no, stop all that crap that “he was a local”, he wasn’t, he was as “parachuted” as Christina.
On top of that, here commentators have the duty to be well informed, and you should be aware of the contribution that Keneally made in the Senate. It is that contribution that got Keneally in the crosshairs of the Liberal party… and they were successful in getting rid of her. It should have been that contribution that the voters could have taken into account to decide, but obviously they didn’t, I wonder why? Finally, if you are a voter you want your seat to have a strong representation in Parliament, somebody who can fight for you with a degree of success. The voters could have chosen a well trained fighter in Parliament, with significant power within the potential party of government (the ALP) vs. a nobody, only known locally, a former Liberal on top of that, who was running as an independent outside the context of the Teals. The fact that they finally chose the latter, especially via second preferences, should tell you a lot about “voter manipulation techniques”….
“Paul Thomas says:
Saturday, June 18, 2022 at 4:12 am”
Again, you join the list of those who point out the result, without making a serious effort to understand the causes.
Incidentally, you write: “Whether that’s the result of a candidate who was a mismatch for the electorate, a candidate who is simply bad at electioneering, or (more likely) some of Column A and some of Column B, is an interesting question “…. Not really, that’s not the “interesting” question, that’s just one question, you are missing the other ones available in my posts.
It looks to me that, perhaps subconsciously, too many people here operate on the belief that “the voters always get it right”…. hence Keneally was defeated because she deserved to be defeated, blah, blah. Don’t even get me started with the crap that “the voters always get it right”…… Some media companies don’t squander millions trying to manipulate the voters, even into voting against their own interests, in the assumption that the voters are fully independent and they always “get it right” no matter what….
With the benefit of hindsight, Keneally probably should have just run in Bennelong again.
The ‘counting’ not covered in the fall of Labor in Fowler is the effort put in by the Murdoch tabloid to blacken the name of KK. The contra Rupert spend, which dwarfed anything Clive Palmer forked out, was aimed predominately against Keneally- although they tried it against Andrew Charlton In Parramatta as well.
We get useful metrics in the US about how much is raised/spent by and for candidates and their boosters like the PACs – but limited here. The question could be, How much per vote do you needs to be spent to alter a result?
However, by pouring so much treasure into negative media against KK, Charlton and the Teals, there was little left for the main game of sandbagging the majority.
Historyintime at Friday 10.08pm re Kristina Keneally…
She is NOT KKK!
Her proper initials are KMKK.
To leave out the M is to participate in racist bullshit that attempts to smear her by association with a deadly-violent US terrorist movement.
So, STOP RETAILING RACIST BULLSHIT!
Mr Bowe, I call on you to consider Historyintime’s actions.
@Alpo: Special pleading notwithstanding, the inescapable flaw in your argument is that the Murdoch media environment was trying to convince people to vote Liberal in every district, and yet Fowler was one of only a handful of districts in which it seems to have actually worked rather than backfiring (and the ONLY one in which it worked well enough to come anywhere near flipping the seat; the Calwell/Scullin/Gorton results are alarming if you’re an ALP supporter but Labor has plenty of room to stem the bleeding there).
It seems rather important to understand why that is. Charlton also badly underperformed (based on surrounding seats he should have done 4-5% better), so the parachuting problem seems to be a real one. On the other hand, there’s a big difference between a 4% underperformance and a 12% underperformance.
@Sprocket: Mainstream media bias can certainly make a difference in a campaign, but it’s on the order of a couple of percentage points. Trump got much worse coverage in 2020 than in 2016 (in the sense that it was neutral-ish rather than tremendously biased in his favor), but it didn’t dent his numbers very badly.
As for party spending, that barely seems to move the needle at all anymore, at least for elections salient enough that people know who they’re voting for. (It can make a difference for candidates without name recognition.) Hard to believe ten percent of the voters in a safe Labor seat suddenly got brainwashed by Liberal Party propaganda without it spilling over into any adjoining seats.
I see that Jacqui Lambie’s father has died. He was the placeholder second candidate for the JLN in the senate. If for some reason the elected senator from the JLN, Tammy Tyrell, was to rule ineligible (which is not going to happen unless something was seriously overlooked with the Section 44) there would not be a candidate to replace her.
>How much per vote do you needs to be spent to alter a result?
Clive Palmer and Legalise Cannabis just provided a spectacular worked example that its not a simple linear relationship. Indeed the entire UAP campaign demonstrates that spending tons to promote garbage doesn’t work by itself.
>It seems rather important to understand why that is. Charlton also badly underperformed (based on surrounding seats he should have done 4-5% better),
Keneally was a considerably worse example – extreme NE of Sydney to extreme SW. Also Fowler was in the part of Sydney that got the harsher restrictions during COVID lockdown, and only got local government defending them because support for the lockdown was bipartisan. She was also Shadow Home Affairs minister in a seat with a large migrant population that probably has a lot of households that dont have a positive view on Border Force (and probably not keen on the idea of being ‘cost recovered’ from, which was Labor policy announced during the election. Finally of course a strong locally connected independent (not present in Parramatta), and Labor probably not realising early they were in trouble and allocating resources appropriately, while Parramatta was always seen as marginal.
Palmer’s huge spendathon ultimately helped Labor this time.
It is pretty obvious with hindsight that Kenneally should have stayed in the Senate – and the factions needed to work out a way to achieve that. Her absence is a significant loss for the Albanese Labor Government. I hope she returns (in 3 years time) to the Senate.
If NSW Labor had any sense (!), Tu Le should be endorsed as the Labor candidate for Fowler as soon as it is possible to do so, and a suitable job should then be found for her (maybe in the HSU) to give her the flexibility to campaign hard for the 18 months leading in to the 2025 election. It’s a strategy that was spectacularly success for SA Labor in the State election a couple of months ago and which Labor needs to adopt for 2025 to build an increased majority.
@Outsider: Presuming that they want her around in some capacity, but she’s a bad campaigner, why not just hire her as chief of staff for some relevant minister? Some people (such as, um, yours truly) are simply not cut out for elected office; that doesn’t mean they can’t aid a party.
Wherto for Kristina? For whatever reasons, I can’t personally understand, but she has an issue winning Lower House seats.
Some thoughts. There are a few Commissions of Inquiry however described on foot, KK would make an ideal Commisioner. The RoboDebt RC? Perhaps a seat on the FICAC bench?
I think that would be a better use of her talents than some ambassadorship
To a large number of voters Keneally (particularly those not of the NSW ALP Right) is associated with the disaster that was the NSW Government when she was Premier.
B.S. Fairman @ #40 Saturday, June 18th, 2022 – 12:19 pm
Actually, Tom Lambie was the third candidate. If Tyrrell were blocked as ineligible, it would be Sarah Groat, the second candidate, that would take the seat.
In the unlikely scenario that both Tyrrell and Groat were ruled ineligible, and Tom Lambie of course has passed away and also can’t win, then Andrew Conway’s recounter suggests PHON would win the seat. https://vote.andrewconway.org/Federal%20Senate/2022/TAS/Recount.html
Keneally was the wrong fit for Fowler – simple as that and her capacity is overrated. A good attack dog but not much in strategy. She can easily be replaced
Kos Samaras has some thoughts…