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.

Getting the upper house in order: part two

As outlined in the earlier instalment, Greens leader Bob Brown has a bill before parliament that will require above-the-line Senate voters to determine their order of preferences by numbering every box, rather than allowing their one chosen party to make their decisions for them. The Greens presume, no doubt correctly, that Labor voters required to engage their minds will baulk at favouring right-wing over left-wing minor parties regardless of what the how-to-vote card says. The Bob Brown model is similar to that introduced for the New South Wales Legislative Council at the 2003 election, with the significant difference that voters will need to number every box to record a formal vote. The New South Wales system of optional preferential voting requires voters to number only as many boxes as they desire, after which their vote exhausts. This would deal with the main problem of the Bob Brown model identified in my earlier post, namely the spike in the informal vote when voters are required to number too many boxes. Perhaps the Greens admire the mathematical elegance of the existing system, but it is just as likely that they suffer an aversion to optional preferential voting born of lower house state elections where they have lost the preferences that indifferent major party voters were once obliged to give them.

If this is so, their fears with respect to multi-member upper house elections might be misplaced. A paper by Antony Green for the New South Wales parliament informs us that 78.6 per cent of voters carried on their habit of marking one above-the-line box at the 2003 Legislative Council election, so that most votes exhausted rather than carry on to other parties. After nine Labor, seven Coalition and one Greens candidate were elected with full quotas, four seats still remained to be won. At that point, second Greens candidate Sylvia Hale led the field with 0.89 of a quota followed by Gordon Moyes of the CDP with 0.67, Labor’s tenth candidate Tony Catanzariti with 0.60 and John Tingle of the Shooters Party with 0.45. The high exhaustion rate meant that few preferences were distributed after this point and the four aforementioned candidates won their seats in the order listed. This underscores the point that unless a result is exceptionally close, optional preferential voting will deliver the final seats to whichever candidates get closest to a full quota on their own primary vote, in place of the current lottery created by monolithic preference transfers.

Had this happened in last year’s Senate election, the Greens would easily have defeated Family First in Victoria and Tasmania, where they respectively suffered defeat and an unnervingly narrow victory. The outcome would otherwise have been the same, with the Coalition still winning its four seats in Queensland, the major parties still monopolising New South Wales and South Australia, and the Greens still winning a second seat in Western Australia. In light of the primary vote figures, these were not unreasonable outcomes. It is harder to say what the outcome would have been under Brown’s proposed model of full above-the-line preferences, but it almost certainly would not have favoured the Greens more than optional preferential. Now that the party can no longer rely on tight preference arrangements with the Australian Democrats, all the Greens have to gain from compulsory preferential voting is continuing access to preferences from the major parties who invariably favour the Greens over each other. From a purely self-interested perspective, it is a debatable point as to whether this justifies the system for the Greens. Apart from the small surplus that major parties pass on when they exceed three quotas, the Greens can only access major party preferences if they perform well enough to overtake their third candidates, and performances of such strength would usually win them the seat under optional preferential voting. Nor should they overlook the possibility that Brown’s amendment will not produce hugely different outcomes to the current system, given the notoriously obedient attitude of major party voters towards how-to-vote cards.

Looking beyond the interests of the Greens, it becomes even harder to maintain an argument for compulsory over optional preferential voting, which would keep the informal vote to a minimum and give voters the widest range of options in directing their vote.

Upstairs, downstairs

The re-elected Gallop government yesterday secured passage of its latest one-vote one-value legislation through the Western Australian Legislative Assembly, in readiness for the return of the Legislative Council in two weeks. Labor will then have until May 21 to convince dumped ex-Liberal independent Alan Cadby, at which point the newly elected members will take their seats and again put a constitutional majority beyond Labor’s reach. The Greens have always supported one-vote one-value, and earlier this week The West Australian reported that Cadby had indicated his support for the bill. The West also reported that "up to five" Liberal members wanted the party to cut a deal with Labor.

The current bill differs from the one Labor went to so much trouble over between 2001 and 2003 in two important respects: it quarantines the five remote electorates that constitute the Mining and Pastoral upper house region, which delivers on a widely ridiculed election promise, and it increases the size of the upper house from 34 to 36. The former measure is the source of objections from the Greens and at least one of the lower house independents, who favour a Queensland-style method of regional vote weighting over Labor’s on-the-run election promise to protect mostly Labor-held seats. New Liberal leader Matt Birney said there was "nothing more certain that the Greens are going to reject the quarantining of the Mining and Pastoral (region) and therefore the government will come to Kalgoorlie and the Goldfields and say, ‘I’m terribly sorry about that promise we made during the election campaign, but unfortunately we are not able to keep it’." But Labor’s manoeuvre presents Birney with a tactical difficulty of his own because it protects his seat of Kalgoorlie, which would probably become notionally Labor under the method favoured by the Greens. Since the Liberals appear resigned to the likelihood that Cadby will support the legislation in one form or another, there is a growing view that the party should accept the inevitable and negotiate with Labor over the head of the Greens to achieve the best possible outcome.

The other change in the new-look legislation, which alters the size and composition of the Legislative Council, is quite startling and has been surprisingly little discussed. The legislation that came before the last parliament maintained equal numbers for the metropolitan and non-metropolitan zones despite the disparity in population, thereby accepting the principle of rural vote weighting in the upper house while rejecting it for the lower. Now Labor proposes to give with one hand, by protecting the five Mining and Pastoral seats in the lower house, while taking with the other, by adding four metropolitan and removing two non-metropolitan seats in the upper house. The Council will remain divided into three metropolitan and three non-metropolitan regions, but the former will have seven members (and will include north, south and central metropolitan regions as opposed to the existing north, south and east) and the latter only five. This is surely a tactical gambit on Labor’s part; perhaps they are providing room for Cadby to extract a face-saving concession for the country, or preparing the way for Coalition acceptance of two extra members, a desirable but unpopular outcome.

While the Greens have been critical of the Mining and Pastoral innovation, anything they have had to say about increased metropolitan representation in the upper house has escaped the Poll Bludger’s notice. It is a highly significant point because it introduces a dimension of self-interest which is missing while the debate remains confined to the lower house, where they will find it nearly impossible to win seats in any circumstance. The new measure is certainly at odds with the model the Greens forced upon Labor as the 2001 legislation went through parliament, which put an enlarged Council on the table for the first time by providing for each region to have six members. If Jack Lang spoke truly when he told a young Paul Keating "always put your money on self-interest, son, it’s the only horse that always tries", Labor’s new proposal would seem likely to win their support because it will produce low quotas in the metropolitan area where their vote is highest. Comparisons with Tasmania seem instructive, given that Labor and the Liberals joined forces in 1997 to thwart the Greens by reducing the number of members for the five lower house electorates from seven to five. Where previously the most common outcome had been 3-3-1, the Greens were now now lucky to get a look-in. That said, the situation in the Western Australian upper house is more complicated because the Senate-like combination of full preferential and above-the-line voting makes outcomes so unpredictable that anyone hoping to twist the existing system in their favour will eventually be left looking foolish, as various preference negotiators have recently discovered.

The Poll Bludger has gone to an absurd amount of trouble to construct the results that the various systems would have produced given the voting figures from the last two state elections, assuming all votes had been ticket votes (which is true of all but about 5 per cent of votes cast).

26 February 2005 10 February 2001
ALP LIB NP GRN OTH ALP LIB NP ONP GRN AD
Current system (34) 16 15 1 2 – 13 12 1 3 5 –
Agricultural (5) 1 3 1 – – 1 1 1 1 1 –
Mining and Pastoral (5) 3 2 – – – 2 1 – 1 1 –
South West (7) 3 3 – 1 – 2 3 – 1 1 –
East Metropolitan (5) 3 2 – – – 3 2 – – – –
South Metropolitan (5) 3 2 – – – 2 2 – – 1 –
North Metropolitan (7) 3 3 – 1 – 3 3 – – 1 –
Old legislation (36) 17 16 1 1 1 14 14 1 3 3 1
Agricultural (6) 2 3 1 – – 1 2 1 1 1 –
Mining and Pastoral (6) 3 3 – – – 3 2 – 1 – –
South West (6) 3 3 – – – 2 3 – 1 – –
East Metropolitan (6) 3 2 – 1 – 3 2 – – 1 –
South Metropolitan (6) 3 2 – – 1 3 2 – – – 1
North Metropolitan (6) 3 3 – – – 2 3 – – 1 –
New legislation (36) 16 16 1 1 2 12 13 1 4 5 1
Agricultural (5) 1 3 1 – – 1 1 1 1 1 –
Mining and Pastoral (5) 3 2 – – – 2 1 – 1 1 –
South West (5) 2 3 – – – 1 2 – 1 1 –
East Metropolitan (7) 4 2 – – 1 2 3 – 1 1 –
South Metropolitan (7) 3 3 – – 1 3 3 – – – 1
North Metropolitan (7) 3 3 – 1 – 3 3 – – 1 –

Above all, these results show up the vagaries of the Legislative Council electoral system, and by extension that for the Senate. The Greens won a seat in the five-member Mining and Pastoral region in 2001, but they would not have done so if there had been six members. The lower quota would have resulted in a greater surplus carrying through to Labor’s third candidate, preventing him from being eliminated before the Greens and thereby delivering them his preferences. They would have been similarly deprived if there were six rather than seven seats in South West, but not if there were five. The 2001 election was in all respects an unusual result, but the equally grim assessment for the Greens under a six-seat model at the recent election seems less haphazard. Unless the Greens either break through their existing 8 per cent primary vote ceiling or find new sources of preferences to replace the Democrats, they will struggle to win outside of seven-member metropolitan regions. Their narrow win in the seven-member non-metropolitan region of South West in February was an exception to prove the rule, as it was achieved through a preference arrangement with the Nationals; the seat would otherwise have gone to Family First.

As for the major parties, none of the three models seems to offer either side particular advantages relative to the other. In fact, Labor’s current proposal to boost metropolitan representation would have strengthened the Coalition’s position at each of the last two elections. The only exception is that the six-by-six model seems more attractive to the Coalition than to Labor, despite Labor’s acceptance of it during the last parliament. With six members in each region the Coalition would stand a good chance of winning fourth seats in Agricultural and South West, which Labor might very occasionally manage in Mining and Pastoral or the new Central Metropolitan region. The Coalition would thus stand a reasonable chance of winning an overall majority whereas Labor would have little or none. In terms of their collective interest in freezing out the minor parties, it appears that a seven-seat region can be relied upon to return at least one non-major party candidate, so however many such regions exist is a minimum figure for the numbers on the cross-benches. Six-seat regions are a 50/50 proposition, while five-seat regions will return all major party members more often than not (the 2001 election being an exceptional case, as in so many other respects).

Another point worth noting is that more seats means an increased likelihood of micro-party candidates being elected from a very small percentage of the primary vote. At the recent election the Christian Democratic Party would have won a hypothetical seventh seat in East Metropolitan, and the Fremantle Hospital Support Group would have achieved what it very nearly managed in the five-seat South Metropolitan region if there had been either one or two extra seats. One might also be mischievous enough to cite the South Metropolitan seat that the Democrats would have won in 2001. Of course, there could be other remedies for this, such as those raised in the previous post on Bob Brown’s proposed Senate reforms.

UPDATE: Monica Videnieks reports in today’s West Australian that Alan Cadby gave his "clearest signal yet" that he will support the legislation, while the Greens are insisting on both the six-from-six upper house model and Queensland-style regional vote weighting in place of a quarantined Mining and Pastoral.

Getting the upper house in order

Bob Brown and the Greens have a worthy but self-interested bill before the federal parliament which aims to correct the injustice whereby Family First won a Victorian Senate seat at the Greens’ expense with barely a fifth of their primary vote, and very nearly did the same in Tasmania. Similar issues arose in the Western Australian election, when a similar system very nearly delivered seats to the Fremantle Hospital Support Group and Christian Democratic Party despite miniscule public support. Brown’s solution is to require above-the-line voters to number all boxes sequentially, rather than just one. This will solve the current problem where 95 per cent of voters never engage their mind about where their preferences will go, that decision being made for them by the party machines.

While this is a logical solution to an acknowledged failure of the current system, it inevitably presents its own problems. One is the matter of ungrouped candidates, who for whatever reason do not lodge grouped tickets and are placed in the far right column of the ballot paper, with supporters required to number every box. This column would have to be done away with and each candidate given their own column and above-the-line option. At last year’s election there were four such candidates in New South Wales along with 29 grouped tickets. A repeat situation under the Brown model would require voters to number 33 boxes, which brings us back to the reason above-the-line was introduced in the first place: the high informal vote when voters are required to number too many boxes. Thirty-three was the exact number of candidates who ran for the Senate in New South Wales in 1980, the last half-Senate election before the situation was deemed to necessitate an above-the-line option. This number leapt to 62 at the double dissolution election of 1983, and there would presumably be a similarly enlarged field if a double dissolution occurred today. This would mean a return to the high informal voting rates at those elections – 9.4 per cent in 1980 and 11.1 per cent in 1983, compared with 3.5 per cent last year.

At this point counter-measures begin to suggest themselves, each of which is a subject in itself. They include optional preferential voting, with voters only required to number as many boxes as they choose before their vote exhausts, and placing greater obstacles before candidates wishing to nominate. These options have parallels with reforms implemented for the New South Wales Legislative Council after the farcical "tablecloth" election of 1999; these reforms and their relevance to the Senate will get a going over in a forthcoming post.

Hours of fun

Praise be, for the 2004 Australian Election Study is now available online, along with all other such surveys going back to the 1987 election. These provide intensely detailed information on the voting behaviour, attitudes, demographic profile, television viewing habits and hair and eye colour of 2000 respondents, along with the facility to easily cross-reference the various results. The Poll Bludger was not aware that this magnificent resource was so freely available, which appears to be a recent innovation of the Australian National University’s Research School of Social Sciences.

What now then

The Poll Bludger’s Western Australian Legislative Council guide has now been padded out with post-match reports for all six regions. For those of you who don’t care much, the important thing is that Labor and the Greens fell one seat short of what was needed to pass one-vote one-value legislation. But since the results do not take effect until May 21, the government has two months in which to persuade departing member Alan Cadby to allow it through as a parting gesture to the Liberal Party which dumped him for preselection. For those of you who do care much, the entries read as follows:

Agricultural: Barring the exception of 2001, Agricultural has returned four Coalition and one Labor members at each election under the current system. But this was the first time the region returned three Liberal and one Nationals member rather than two of each. The key to this outcome was a 9.4 per cent rebound in the Liberal vote to a historically typical 39.4 per cent, whereas the Nationals’ 19.3 per cent was only 0.3 per cent higher than last time. Labor’s vote was up from 20.2 per cent to 26.7 per cent, but their only serious source of preferences was the Greens (4.4 per cent) and they fell short of the 33.3 per cent required for a second seat. Lachlan Dunjey of the Christian Democratic Party narrowly missed out on the fifth seat from just 1.9 per cent of the vote, having been boosted by preferences from Liberals for Forests, One Nation, New Country and Family First. This left him a fraction behind the Liberals’ third candidate (who had received preferences over the CDP from the Nationals and the Democrats) at the second last count. Another coat of paint and it would have been a case of Rowe’s elimination delivering decisive preferences to Dunjey, and not the other way round.

East Metropolitan: Labor cracked the 50 per cent mark, up from 44.2 per cent to 50.6 per cent, which meant three easy quotas on the primary vote. The Greens’ only chance was to win a seat at the expense of the Liberals, but their stable 6.5 per cent vote was too low for this to be a serious prospect. The Liberal primary vote of 32.1 per cent was close enough to two quotas that preferences from the Christian Democratic Party and Family First put them well over the line.

Mining and Pastoral: Mining and Pastoral returned to normal in returning three Labor and two Liberal members, which has been the outcome at each election under the current system except 2001. More than half of the 25.2 per cent vote for independents and One Nation in 2001 returned to the majors, with Labor up from 39.5 per cent to 44.0 per cent and the Liberals up from 26.7 per cent 35.7 per cent. This gave them both two clear quotas on the primary vote, but only Labor had enough of a surplus to remain in the hunt for the final place. They ended up winning it because their minor party opposition was split between the Fischer/Campbell ticket, which scored 6.0 per cent of the primary vote and received preferences from the CDP and the Liberals, and the Greens, who scored 7.6 per cent and received preferences from the Public Hospital Support Group, Liberals for Forests and the Democrats. The mutual hostility of these two groups meant the elimination of one was always going to send a decisive quantity of preferences to Labor at the other’s expense. However, Labor’s primary vote was still markedly below the pre-2001 norm whereas the Liberals equalled their 1996 result.

North Metropolitan: A straightforward outcome with Labor (42.4 per cent) and Liberal (40.3 per cent) each scoring three quotas on the primary vote without enough of a surplus to freeze the Greens out of the final place. This was despite a slight easing in the Greens’ vote from 9.7 per cent to 8.8 per cent, or 0.7 of a quota.

South Metropolitan: The talk of the early count was the prospect that the final seat would go to Murray McKay of the Fremantle Hospital Support Group, who polled just 1.3 per cent. But in one of those strange twists characteristic of systems combining preferential voting with proportional representation, a resurgence by the Liberals later in the count ensured that the seat stayed with Labor. This was because the Liberals had the Christian Democratic Party ahead of FHSG on preferences, which ultimately allowed the CDP to get their nose ahead of FHSG at a crucial point in the count. Had this not happened, the distribution of preferences after the CDP’s elimination would have put the FHSG ahead of the Greens, whose preferences would then have got them ahead of Labor. Instead, the elimination of the FHSG unlocked the preferences of left-leaning parties who had favoured the Greens over the CDP, whose subsequent elimination unlocked the preferences of right-leaning parties who had favoured Labor over the Greens. Lynn MacLaren’s failure to retain the seat for the Greens was the most disappointing of their three upper house defeats, the result of a fall in the primary vote from 9.0 per cent to 7.8 per cent. This was still more than the Greens polled when Jim Scott was successful in 1993 and 1996, but since then the Democrats’ share of the minor party vote has shifted largely to parties hostile to the left.

South West: Well might Wilson Tuckey be cranky with the National Party, whose decision to preference the Greens ahead of Family First decided the contest between the two for the final seat. Had Labor or the Greens won one seat elsewhere, the National Party would effectively have signed its own death warrant by facilitating an upper house amenable to one-vote one-value legislation. The Nationals might argue that their candidate could have got past the Greens if the Coalition vote had been just slightly higher, in which case the Greens preference deal would have delivered them the seat at the expense of Family First – to which the obvious response is that the deal itself, with a party held in very low regard by the Nationals’ rural constituency, cost them the very votes that might have allowed this to happen. Instead the Greens were able to retain their seat despite fading from 8.5 per cent to 7.6 per cent on the primary vote. One Nation collapsed from 14.2 per cent to 2.2 per cent, from which a mere 0.7 per cent wound up with Paddy Embry. This made room for substantial improvements by both Liberal (from 35.4 per cent to 39.0 per cent) and Labor (from 30.7 per cent to 37.7 per cent), whereas the Nationals sank further from 6.2 per cent to 5.4 per cent.

With the Western Australian election now put to bed, the Poll Bludger can kick back a little and enjoy a looming quiet stretch on the electoral calendar. For election junkies desperate for their next hit, the forecast for the next 12 months is as follows:

Tasmania: Thanks to the apple isle’s nifty system of annual rotating elections for the 15 Legislative Council seats, one fifth of Tasmanian voters will go to the polls on May 7 in the first electoral test for Premier Paul Lennon. The three electorates up for grabs are Murchison in the north-west, which is being vacated by conservative independent Tony Fletcher; the Launceston-based Paterson, held by Council President and independent Liberal veteran Don Wing; and most interestingly of all, the Hobart outskirts seat of Rumney which Lin Thorp narrowly won for Labor in 2000. With nothing else on the horizon, these elections will get the full treatment. Lennon may call an election for the House of Assembly at any time, but when Opposition Leader Rene Hidding suggested he would do so at some stage this year Lennon was quick to rule it out. By the Poll Bludger’s count the latest he can go is November 25 next year, but a date nearer the anniversary of the election of July 20, 2002 is more likely.

Northern Territory: The Territory’s first ever Labor government is up for re-election at some time year. Chief Minister Clare Martin must call an election for the 25-seat Legislative Assembly for no later than October 15. The four-year anniversary of the 2001 election falls on August 18.

South Australia: The next election is scheduled for March 18, 2006, although the government can go early in the event of a deadlock between the houses. If there has been any talk of Premier Mike Rann plotting for an early poll, the Poll Bludger has not heard of it.

One-horse race

Labor’s easy win in the Werriwa by-election is unlikely to go down as a watershed in Australian political history, but it provides a nice fillip for Kim Beazley by offering a contrast to the Cunningham debacle under Simon Crean. It will also enhance the prestige of others associated with the campaign, specifically New South Wales ALP general secretary Mark Arbib, subject of this revealing article by Mark Steketee in Wednesday’s Australian. Bumping aside Brenton Banfield from preselection may or may not have been a stroke of genius, but it was clearly astute to install another local in his place however little known he may have been. Labor was able to trade off the fact with newspaper advertisements noting that 10 of Chris Hayes’ 15 rivals lived outside the electorate (one as far away as Double Bay), which succeeded in tarring the other five with the same brush. For large numbers of unengaged voters, the perception that Hayes faced a cast of opportunistic blow-ins provided the prompt that was needed to make up their minds.

At the close of the evening’s count Chris Hayes emerged with 55.3 per cent, 2.7 per cent more than Mark Latham managed (the "2.01%" swing recorded by the Australian Electoral Commission suggests pre-polls and absentee votes ran against Labor last time). The other 15 candidates all finished well short of 10 per cent, with unofficial Liberal candidate James Young leading the field on just 7.9 per cent. There were vaguely noteworthy performances from the Greens’ Ben Raue, up from 3.1 per cent to 5.7 per cent, and Janey Woodger of Australians Against Further Immigration, whose 4.8 per cent was assisted by the donkey vote but might also have been boosted by recent talk of importing workers to cover skills shortages.

The Christian parties scored an impressive 8.2 per cent between them, Family First outperforming Fred Nile’s Christian Democrats with 4.3 per cent of the vote. Despite the influence of the 2000-strong congregation of the Liverpool Christian Life Centre, the Family First vote comes as something of a surprise. Neither party contested Werriwa at the federal election, but as Bryan Palmer of Palmer’s Oz Politics notes, the "mainstream protestant" Christian Democratic Party performed far better in New South Wales than the "Pentecostal-aligned" Family First. In Werriwa, the Senate vote was 2.4 per cent for the CDP against a mere 0.6 per cent for Family First. The 5.2 per cent who came on board for the by-election would presumably have voted for a Liberal candidate had one been available.

Apparently Deborah Locke’s campaign attracted more attention outside the electorate than in, as she finished in ninth place with 3.2 per cent. The others who did better were independent Joe Bryant (3.9 per cent) and Charles Doggett of One Nation (3.5 per cent). The AEC guessed that James Young would finish in second place by partnering him with Hayes for the notional two-candidate preference count, and it is likely that they will be proved correct. The point is entirely academic because Hayes is credited with 70.0 per cent of the two-candidate vote and this is not likely to change much regardless of who gets the silver after preferences.

Belated Werriwa overview

So about this by-election then. Tomorrow the voters of Werriwa return to the polls due to the retirement of former Labor member Mark Latham, whose life story does not need repeating here. Nor does the make-up of the electorate, which has changed little since the federal election guide entry was composed last year.

When Latham pulled the plug on January 18, two questions emerged – who would be the Labor candidate, and whether the Liberals would bother. Local lawyer and Campbelltown mayor Brenton Banfield was reckoned to be the best-credentialled Labor contender, and many were unimpressed by the manner in which he was bumped aside. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 12, Alan Ramsey quoted (at length, naturally) from a detailed testimony by Banfield ally John Dowling that was mailed to branch members. Dowling complained that factional heavies assured Banfield he would not have to face a preselection vote, but withdrew their support when focus groups suggested he could fall victim to negative campaigning over his legal work for sex offenders. Banfield was persuaded to step aside and the nomination instead went to Australian Workers Union official Chris Hayes. Most saw this as a less-than-inspiring outcome.

In early February, newspaper reports quoted “Labor insiders” anticipating a 10 per cent swing to the Liberals, enough to deliver them the seat. This was obviously nonsense, as indicated by the Liberals’ ultimate failure to field a candidate. Laurie Oakes offers a far more plausible story in this week’s Bulletin:

Polling by the major parties after Latham quit showed quite clearly that the Liberals would be wasting their time if they entered the by-election contest. There was no resentment over Latham’s departure. Werriwa voters accepted that the former leader was entitled to pull out because of his health problems. In summary, the view was: ‘The poor bugger copped a walloping. His health suffered. He wants to spend time with his family. That’s fair enough’. And there was an added consideration: ‘Anyway, Howard’s got a big enough majority. He doesn’t need to win this one’.

With no threat from the Liberals, Labor’s remaining fear is of a repeat of the 1991 by-election in Wills or the 2002 by-election in Cunningham, respectively lost to independent Phil Cleary after the retirement of Bob Hawke and the Greens’ Michael Organ after the retirement of Steve Martin. Many in the party expressed concern that the unpopularity of the state government and the large field of 16 candidates might provoke unpredictable behaviour from voters. Significant local issues include the recent Macquarie Fields riots which took place in the electorate, and the Carr government’s hugely unpopular closure of the local Orange Grove shopping centre which benefited Labor patrons Westfield but left a number of locals without jobs.

One major difference with Cunningham is that this is not historically strong territory for the Greens, who have nominated 19-year-old Ben Raue. By general acclaim the candidate best placed to pull off an upset is Deborah Locke of the unregistered People Power party, a former fraud squad detective whose whistle-blowing was credited with bringing about the Wood Royal Commission into police corruption. Locke’s candidacy has generated valuable publicity including a Sunday Telegraph back cover and a 2GB interview. Stephen Mayne of Crikey reports that “the three independents who will be handing out HTVs across the electorate, former Labor branchstacker Sammy Bargshoon, Ned Mannoun and James Young, have all decided to give their preferences to Locke ahead of the other key contenders”, since they mutually agree she has the best chance of winning.

The best-known of the remaining candidates are Joe Bryant, a former Blacktown deputy mayor, and James Young, a Liberal Party member and former staffer to Jackie Kelly. Bryant took great pride in being described as a “Liberal trojan horse” by former Labor premier Barrie Unsworth when he ran for election two decades ago, and the Blacktown City Sun reported on March 8 that he “became a well-known local figure for his fight with the Commonwealth Bank”. Young is considered likely to absorb much of the homeless Liberal vote, and like Bryant he will deliver a solid flow of preferences to any non-Labor contender who emerges from the pack. Also worth noting is Sam Bargshoon, who turned against Labor after being burned by the Orange Grove closure and scored 4.9 per cent of the vote when he ran against Latham last year.

For all that, a Labor win would have to be considered the likely outcome. Writing in the Canberra Times on March 1, Malcolm Mackerras noted the following differences between the current circumstances and those of the Cunningham by-election:

First, the sudden and wholly unexpected nature of (Latham’s resignation) means there is not likely to be any high-profile independent candidate waiting in the wings. Here there is a major difference with Cunningham, where speculation that Labor MP Stephen Martin would resign was rife for six months before he actually did resign. Second, there are interesting sociological differences between Cunningham and Werriwa. These suggest that Cunningham is the sort of Labor seat where the Greens might fluke a one-off win. By contrast, Werriwa is not in that category of safe Labor seat … (the parliamentary library’s “relative socio-economic disadvantage” index) for Werriwa is 950 (in 17th place out of 150) compared with 1014 for Cunningham (at 104) … The third reason I expect Labor to win Werriwa lies in the difference of party leader. Simon Crean was leader at the time of Cunningham, Kim Beazley at the time of Werriwa.

These perceptions have been further strengthened by recent political developments. The rise in interest rates and the government’s decision to send more troops to Iraq, blamed for their recent slump in the opinion polls, have given traction to Labor’s appeal for voters to “send John Howard a message” by voting for Labor directly. Most persuasive of all to the Poll Bludger’s mind is the number-crunching done by Bryan Palmer at Oz Politics which suggests that historically speaking, Labor’s vote is likely to fall little if at all from the 52.6 per cent recorded by Mark Latham at the federal election. My own calculations suggest that Labor picks up roughly 20 per cent of the non-Labor vote as preferences at by-elections which are not contested by the Coalition, although this fell as low as 15.7 per cent at the Cunningham by-election. Even on the latter figure, Labor would need to fall to about 41 per cent if they were to lose the seat. This would entail the loss of 11 per cent from their primary vote at the October election, substantially greater than the 6.2 per cent decline that cost them Cunningham. Accordingly, it is the Poll Bludger’s considered judgement that Labor can rest easy.