As Charles Richardson noted in Crikey last week, "as far as election watching goes, a Territory election is a good one for beginners because everything happens in miniature: smaller seats than anywhere else (4,000-5,000 voters in each), fewer of them (25), fewer candidates (only two or three in most seats), and less than three weeks of campaigning". The Poll Bludger is taking advantage of this state of affairs to apply a new degree of sophistication to his election night results watching, having mapped out a spreadsheet of booth results to calculate swings as the results come in without having to take Antony Green’s word for it (I am assuming that the NT Electoral Commission will be so good as to provide booth results on their website). Tonight this site will provide a running real-time commentary on these results on this site as quickly as his touch-typing skills (85wpm) and FTP upload speed will allow.
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.
Highlights of weeks two and two-and-a-half
Innumerable Bexes and five good-lies-down have elapsed since the Poll Bludger boldly amended his Northern Territory election predictions to award Labor a faintly ridiculous 17 seats out of 25. Nevertheless, he is sticking with them against his better judgement even though they no doubt flatter Labor to the tune of at least one or two seats. It needs to be stressed that when it comes to the Northern Territory, predictions like these are to be taken with a grain of salt regardless of who makes them. The list of reasons why these contests are hard to call is as long as your arm – the tiny size of the electorates, and the premium this places on local candidate visibility; the lack of polling, published or otherwise; high immigration and emigration rates between elections; and the modest scale of local media coverage. News Limited’s croc-tastic top end flagship the Northern Territory News is studiously careful to avoid boring its readers with too much politics, so much so that election tragics are likely to derive more joy from the humble weekly Alice Springs News. In this context, online forums such as Inside Politics and the one operated by the ABC’s website have taken on a new significance for those of us who just can’t get enough. As sources of information go these need to be treated with great caution, especially since they seem to be magnets for rabid CLP partisans.
The Poll Bludger has so far managed to avoid saying anything about either party’s policies, but this can be put off no longer. The centrepiece of the campaign has been the CLP’s promise to connect Darwin to the national electricity grid via a 3000 kilometre transmission line, with the $1.3 billion tab to be picked up by gentleman admirers in either the private sector or Canberra. The parallels with the Liberals’ Western Australian election promise to build a canal of similar length from the Kimberley to Perth hardly need reiterating, and the plan has received similarly short shrift from informed observers such as John Quiggin and Ken Parish. The overwhelmingly negative media response suggests that the policy will fail to achieve its objective of winning the CLP seats in Darwin’s much-touted northern suburbs, while also alienating voters outside Darwin who do not stand to gain. However, internet chat suggests Labor has a similar difficulty with its Darwin waterfront development, which has apparently fed into concerns in Alice Springs that the party is "Darwin-centric" while also failing to excite locals.
The other point of interest has been Labor’s newly acquired concern about "habitual drunks" – one of innumerable top end code words for "aborigines" – which led Clare Martin to announce a policy that would order repeat offenders to seek treatment or face imprisonment. Remarkably, this prompted Denis Burke to accuse Labor of chasing the "redneck white vote", sentiments heretofore unheard of from a CLP leader. Politically speaking, one suspects Martin has the better end of an argument that has helped neutralise resentment over Labor’s abolition of mandatory sentencing, and that Labor will accordingly enjoy a boost in Darwin and Alice Springs.
The Poll Bludger’s Northern Territory election guide remains your one-stop shop for electorate-level factoids, which will be embellished with the following nuggets when he gets time:
Goyder (Country Liberal 14.8%): Two independent candidates have added interest to this contest, with most fancying the chances of Litchfield shire president Mary Walshe. The CLP had long been trembling in fear at the prospect of a Walshe candidacy, although she may be handicapped by the circumstances of her entry. The Territory Times reported that Walshe was in "a frantic state of indecision" about whether to run when they spoke to her two hours before the nomination deadline, which she ended up meeting "just in time". She also entered the campaign with the burden of a recent 17 per cent rates hike at Litchfield. The other independent is Andrew Blackadder, chairperson of Freds Pass Management Board, whom the Territory Times reports was "knocked back for CLP preselection". The Northern Territory News reported on June 12 that internal polling results had the CLP expecting to lose to either Walshe or Blackadder. The paper seemed unduly excited to learn that a property owned by the CLP candidate, Keith Phasey, had been raided by police seeking information on the deaths of four Western Australian cancer patients who had been treated by his wife. Well-informed Inside Politics commenter "Bonnie" says "the Walshe family is the biggest name in Humpty Doo" and that "without the rates stigma, Walshe would win it by a street".
Daly (Country Liberal 9.5%): Dale Seaniger is widely being spoken of as one of the election’s most fancied independent candidates, along with the aforementioned Walshe and Blackadder. Seaniger’s job titles (variously "Thamarrurr Regional Council deputy chief executive" and "deputy council clerk at Wadeye") don’t look too exciting to me, but what would I know. The retirement of CLP member Tim Baldwin means the electorate is more precarious for the CLP than the margin makes it appear, given the enormous advantages of incumbency in the territory’s micro-electorates.
Greatorex (Country Liberal 9.0%): Opinion is sharply divided over the prospects for Labor’s high-profile candidate, Alice Springs mayor Fran Kilgariff, in her bid to unseat the CLP’s Richard Lim. Alex Nelson of the Alice Springs News reckons "no mayor of any town in the Northern Territory who has run for office in the Legislative Assembly has succeeded in translating their support at council level to the next tier of government", with the conspicuous exception of the current independent member for Nelson, Gerry Wood (Mary Walshe’s predecessor as Litchfield shire president). The Centralian Advocate reports that Kilgariff is running ads that make no mention of her being the Labor candidate.
Millner (Labor 1.2%): The Poll Bludger has variously heard it said that Paul Mitchell, the CLP member here until his defeat in 2001, is running as an independent to deliver preferences to the CLP’s Paul Mossman (by Kevin Parish), or because the CLP had lost confidence in Mossman (by the Northern Territory News). The latter theory is consistent with reports of a widespread view in the CLP that the party erred in preselecting its candidates too early, and with a Northern Territory News item on June 12 saying the party had "given up" on Mossman on the basis of internal polling, but still "hoped" Mitchell might win. The same day’s edition also carried this little item:
Two 14-year-old boys, Simeon Lawler and Tim O’Hagen, make a few dollars after school by delivering advertising material. They were letterbox dropping a brochure for Labor MLA Matthew Bonson when they noticed a man following them and removing the brochures. They confronted him – and, lo and behold, it was Paul. He told the lads the brochures had fallen out of the letterbox and he was just putting them back. They didn’t believe him.
Mossman has had a fair bit to say at the Inside Politics forum (posting as "PaulM"), or at least he did until recently. Labor spooks and local news outlets fell upon the site when it emerged he had said a 13-year-old American girl denied an abortion "should have just kept her legs closed", and that there were "plenty in line waiting their chances" to replace Denis Burke as party leader. The Northern Territory News reported on June 4 that nine people were enrolled at Mitchell’s residence, including his adult children, his sister-in-law and her partner, and a son’s girlfriend.
UPDATE (17/6/2005): The above assertion that the two online forums "seem to be magnets for rabid CLP partisans" has sparked this frank exchange of views at Inside Politics. In an unrelated development, I have decided that I should in fact withdraw a seat from Labor on the election guide, eventually settling for Araluen. That puts the tally at Labor 16, CLP six and independents three.
Rumble in the jungle
As the Northern Territory election loomed, the Poll Bludger’s gut feeling was that Clare Martin and Labor were on course for a landslide win that would rewrite the top end’s electoral rule book. After probing deeper I was surprised to discover that this view had little currency among those more closely familiar with Territory politics than myself, which led me to back down on some of my bolder seat predictions. I did so without conviction – as I commented at Troppo Armadillo after Ken Parish poked fun at me for calling Araluen for Labor, "I suspect that those who have watched Labor struggle over nine Northern Territory elections might prove a little slow to acclimatise to the entirely new circumstances now that Labor heads a stable government with a popular leader, and faces a divided rabble of an opposition. I would not be amazed if the CLP emerged with as few as six seats". One reason to doubt the orthodox view was the lack of polling in the Territory, without which even close observers are driving blind. But today Newspoll has filled the gap with a comprehensive survey of Darwin-area voters, the results of which have emboldened me to trust my original instincts. The survey covers an impressive sample of 1200 of the 54,000 voters in the 12 electorates surveyed and gives Labor a stunning 57-43 lead on two-party preferred, pointing to a swing of 9.5 per cent. Labor leads on the primary vote by 52 per cent to 40 per cent, compared with 43.8 per cent and 48.3 per cent in 2001.
The poll suggests that participants in various online forums who have been debating which northern suburbs seats might deliver victory to the CLP have been barking up the wrong tree entirely. The real question as far as Darwin is concerned is whether the CLP can hold back the tide in Port Darwin, which it holds with a margin of 7.3 per cent. The Poll Bludger’s assessment is that the incumbency factor will just barely save sitting member Sue Carter. There is little reason to doubt that there will also be a swing on to Labor in Alice Springs, despite their barren track record there in past territory elections (although they hold their own in local booths federally). Despite the exceptional circumstances that reduced the CLP margin to 2.0 per cent in 2001, such a swing should deliver Araluen to Labor. The margin of 9.0 per cent in the neighbouring electorate of Greatorex would normally make it a bridge too far, but Labor’s star candidate Fran Kilgariff could very well make up the difference. Further afield, the steady stream of bad publicity surrounding Labor’s candidate for MacDonnell, Alison Anderson, had me doubting the consensus view that her links with the local area would deliver her the seat, but Newspoll has emboldened me to keep this as a Labor gain. I have also decided to move the other CLP-held outback seat of Daly into the Labor column, where the Labor tide should combine with the departure of a popular sitting member to overcome the existing 9.5 per cent CLP margin.
A surge in the Labor primary vote might spell trouble for Loraine Braham, independent member for the Alice Springs seat of Braitling, who will need to stay ahead of Labor to override the CLP with their preferences. She managed this in 2001 with a fairly comfortable primary vote advantage of 34.0 per cent to 22.2 per cent, but the 10 per cent plus hike in the Labor vote projected by Newspoll might close the gap and return the seat to the CLP. I am nevertheless predicting that she will hang on. The other independent-held seat is Nelson in outer Darwin, where member Gerry Wood will have little trouble overcoming Labor, whom he outpolled 41.4 per cent to 9.7 per cent in 2001. Although the redistribution has slightly weakened his position, a likely poor show from the CLP should leave him in the clear. I expect that Braham and Wood will be joined on the cross-benches by Mary Walshe, independent candidate for Goyder, whose profile as Litchfield shire president should combine with the messy departure of outgoing member Peter Maley to deprive the CLP of another formerly safe seat.
With the election guide thus amended, the Poll Bludger officially offers the following crazy-brave prediction: 17 seats for Labor, three for independents and five lonely survivors from the CLP wipeout. Bryan at Palmer’s Oz Politics concurs, tipping Labor to win between 15 and 17 seats.
Highlights of week one
The Poll Bludger has not had much to say during the first week of campaign action for the June 18 Northern Territory election, and has little to add to this thorough review of the issues by Ken Parish at Troppo Armadillo. Also worth noting is the tracking of Centrebet odds at Palmer’s Oz Politics – it appears some serious money has gone Labor’s way in the last day or two. The Northern Territory Electoral Commission has published its list of candidates and the Poll Bludger’s election guide has been updated accordingly.
The biggest news to emerge is that Litchfield shire president Mary Walshe, who had earlier been approached by both Labor and the CLP, is listed as an independent candidate for Goyder. Despite its healthy CLP margin, the seat was already looking interesting given the circumstances surrounding the departure of sitting member Peter Maley, who was dumped first from the front bench and then from the parliamentary party. When speculation emerged in January that Walshe was planning to nominate, an unidentified CLP member told the Northern Territory News that Walshe would win the seat "comfortably". The News later reported on March 25 that she had decided not to run, but she has evidently had a change of heart.
Psephologist Charles Richardson has this to say in today’s Crikey newsletter:
As far as election watching goes, a Territory election is a good one for beginners because everything happens in miniature: smaller seats than anywhere else (4,000-5,000 voters in each), fewer of them (25), fewer candidates (only two or three in most seats), and less than three weeks of campaigning. But if the Northern Territory is a more exotic place, the fundamental truth is that it’s the same as the rest of the country: most elections are won or lost in the mortgage belt. It may be a land of wide open spaces, but wide open spaces don’t return many MPs: two-thirds of the seats are in suburban Darwin and Alice Springs. Labor’s safest seats are in the outback, but it won in 2001 because it swept the seven seats in Darwin’s northern suburbs. Those seven seats will be the battleground again, and it looks to be a pretty one-sided affair. Although some are very marginal – Millner the closest on 1.2% – all but one of the Labor members are contesting their first election as incumbents, a powerful advantage in such small electorates. Add the electorate’s indulgence towards first-term governments, and the disarray in the Country Liberal Party opposition, and it’s hard to see Labor being seriously troubled.
Centrebet confirms this view: its latest odds have Labor almost unbackable at 9-2 on, with the CLP about 11-4 against. With such favourable conditions, the Martin government will be aiming to increase its one-seat majority. (There are also two independents, but Labor would not like to have to rely on them.) It has hopes of finally breaking through in Alice Springs (either Araluen or Greatorex), and of picking off one of the two remaining rural CLP seats, MacDonnell and Daly. It must also be given a rough chance in Goyder, on the southern fringe of metropolitan Darwin, where the CLP lost its sitting member in controversial circumstances.
For his part, the Poll Bludger has shifted Goyder from "Country Liberal retain" to "Independent gain". Anyone else wishing to put their public reputation on the line can do so on this thread at the Inside Politics site. Among the contributors is Antony Green, who reiterates the following comment he posted at Palmer’s Oz Politics:
If you look at the 2004 Federal election results, with the exception of four booths, the federal results in Darwin and Palmerston booths are very similar to those recorded at the 2001 Territory election. In other words, a repeat of the 2004 Federal election results would go close to leaving the status quo at the Territory election. Solomon is CLP held because of the CLP majority in Palmerston, not because the CLP polled well in the northern suburbs. The four booths that differred were the two in Fannie Bay and the two in Wanguri. What was different there? They were the only two seats with sitting Labor MPs at the 2001 Territory election, which meant Labor’s vote was much higher in those four booths in 2001 than at the 2004 Federal poll. Labor’s Federal vote in 2004 was high enough to hold all its northern suburbs seats at the Territory election. That is, unless the sitting members are hopeless and actually manage to depress Labor’s underlying vote. I’ll leave it for people who live in these electorates to reflect on the merits and demerits of the sitting MPs.
Mind exercised
With the unstoppable Kim Beazley juggernaut powering on to certain victory at the next election, the Poll Bludger has been bombarded with emails demanding to know what sort of Senate an incoming Labor government might face. Well, one email anyway. For the benefit of anyone who has been suffering sleepless nights over this recently, I present for public enlightenment my humble reply.
It’s definitely possible that the Coalition could lose power and retain control of the Senate. In 2001 the Tasmanian Senate election result was Liberal 3, Labor 2 and Greens 1, even though Labor won all five of the House of Representatives seats. At the 1993 election when John Hewson went down to Paul Keating, the Coalition won three of the six Senate seats in every state except Tasmania, where Brian Harradine won the sixth seat. So unless the Coalition suffers a big defeat at the next election there is some chance that they would maintain their absolute Senate majority in opposition, and a very high likelihood that they would only fall one or two seats short (with one seat still held by Family First).
Therefore, I think it all but certain that an incoming Labor government would call an early double dissolution election, as did Bob Menzies in 1951 and Gough Whitlam in 1974 (the Coalition’s aforementioned strong performance in the 1993 Senate election precluded such a necessity in John Howard’s case, and Bob Hawke came to power at a double dissolution election in 1983). Given the very different arithmetic that applies when the states elect 12 members rather than six, such an election would substantially cut the Coalition’s Senate numbers. A few more half-Senate elections hence, Labor might again face the problem of a Coalition with at or near half the Senate seats if they are still in power, given that the Coalition finds it easier than Labor to win three seats from six in any given state. But the existence of the double dissolution mechanism means that governments will only suffer an opposition majority in the Senate if they are in too weak a position to face an election, the obvious example being Whitlam in 1975.
Place your bets
The Northern Territory is the only Australian jurisdiction that the Poll Bludger has never graced with his presence, and it must be conceded that the election guide predictions are a little wanting for first-hand local knowledge. The laughter from up north can be heard already – Ken Parish had this to say at Troppo Armadillo:
I’m a bit surprised that Poll Bludger William Bowe is apparently so sanguine about Labor retaining Millner. Maybe he doesn’t quite realise that the CLP has a long and quite successful history of running dummy independents in close marginal seats to maximise the party’s vote. The "independent" is invariably a close CLP associate and proceeds to swap preferences tightly with the official candidate. Phil Mitchell is very much in that tradition, and with a margin of around 90 votes I expect him to have a significant influence. I reckon Millner is a lineball proposition; I wouldn’t want to call it either way. As for the Pollbludger’s prediction that Labor will win the seat of Araluen in Alice Springs from the CLP, I don’t think so sunshine. Do you want to put money on it? Alice Springs is injun country for Labor, and I don’t see anything in the tea-leaves likely to change that scenario. I’d give Labor’s Fran Kilgariff (current Alice Springs mayor and daughter of a legendary former CLP federal member) a very rough chance of unseating the CLP’s Richard Lim in Greatorex despite a margin of some 9%, but I certainly wouldn’t have her as favourite. Generally I’d be surprised to see any seats change hands in Alice Springs.
I had perhaps naively assumed that Phil Mitchell was running because he thought he might win, and concede that I might have understimated the impact a high-profile dummy independent candidate can have in a concentrated Darwin electorate. But Parish’s opinion that the seat is a "lineball proposition" encourages me to maintain my assessment that the seat will stay with Labor, since I expect them to enjoy a bigger-than-anticipated overall swing. As for Araluen, I never wanted to put money on it, but am now persuaded that Labor’s traditionally low primary vote here makes it a long shot. The 134-vote two-party margin from 2001 was influenced by a CLP dissident running as an independent and directing preferences to Labor, and this scenario does not look like it’s about to be repeated. With the adjustment of this prediction, this site’s current projection is that Labor will win 14 seats, the CLP nine and independents two. For what it’s worth, the punters appear to share my rosy view of Labor’s prospects – Centrebet is offering $1.30 for a Labor win and $3.15 for the CLP.
The following snippets from Parish’s post were news to me:
• The CLP candidate for Millner, Paul Mossman, "has found himself in all sorts of trouble over some appallingly sexist statements he made on an Internet political discussion board". Mossman posted on an Inside Politics thread regarding a 13-year-old girl in Florida who had been denied an abortion, saying she "should have just kept her legs closed in the first place". The comment has since been removed but the cached Google page remains. Other comments on the site by Mossman include one stating that there are "plenty in line waiting their chances" to assume the CLP leadership, and several supporting views expressed by fellow commenter Philippe Gregoire, a man with far too much to say.
• It is rumoured that Goyder MP Peter Maley, who was dumped first from the CLP front bench and then from the parliamentary party, is considering running as an independent. Maley’s actions in returning to his lucrative legal practice while still serving as a parliamentarian do not bespeak a man who is keen to continue in politics, but the word is that he might nominate "purely to screw Burke and deny the seat to the CLP".
Long way to the top
The Poll Bludger is proud to unveil his seat-by-seat guide to the forthcoming Northern Territory election, to be held no later than October 15. This guide is probably more thorough than it needed to be for a parliament representing barely enough voters to account for two federal electorates, but two factors allowed its growth to get out of hand. One was the lack of anything better to do, given that there is unlikely to be another state election until South Australia goes to the polls on March 18 next year. The other was the nature of Northern Territory politics which, despite modest stakes and bite-sized Legislative Assembly electorates of roughly 4500 voters, turned out to be a lot more interesting than I had realised.
The modern era of Northern Territory democracy began in 1974 when a fully elected 19-member Legislative Assembly replaced the partly appointed Legislative Council that was established in 1947. The first eight elections for the Assembly, between 1974 and 1997, produced comfortable majorities for the Country Liberal Party. After failing to win a single seat in 1974, Labor’s representation remained stuck at the lower end of the six-to-nine seats range, which encouraged a conventional wisdom that gave Labor little chance of ever coming to power. It was felt the party was too closely identified with policies favourable to the indigenous population to win more than a handful of seats in metropolitan and pastoral areas, and that the small size of electorates (the Assembly increased from 19 to 25 members in 1983) provided sitting CLP members with insurmountable advantages of incumbency, since they were known personally to almost every one of their constituents. The failure of Labor to unseat a single sitting CLP member at the five elections between 1983 and 1997 meant the latter item in particular appeared to be carved in stone.
The 2001 election accordingly came as a shock to long-term observers. Led by an effective media performer in Clare Martin and facing a visibly tiring Country Liberal Party government (further burdened by what was then considered an unpopular Coalition government in Canberra), Labor picked up a 5.8 per cent swing and won a clean sweep of Darwin’s northern suburbs, winning Casuarina, Johnston, Karama, Millner, Nightcliff and Sanderson from the CLP. All but the latter two involved the defeat of a sitting member. Labor thus emerged with a bare majority of 13 out of 25 seats, a slightly fortunate outcome given that they trailed the CLP 40.6 per cent to 45.4 per cent on the primary vote and 48.1 per cent to 51.9 per cent on two-party preferred. All seven northern suburbs seats were won with margins of 7.2 per cent or less, the only comparably marginal CLP seat being Araluen in Alice Springs where they survived a 17.2 per cent swing to hold on by 2.0 per cent.
With Labor now in government, few of the existing items of conventional wisdom still apply. Previously, CLP claims that the sky would fall in if Labor ever came to power were impossible to disprove. Clare Martin’s government has not been without incident – it suffered from self-inflicted wounds over its zealous policing of pool fencing laws, a cause of major irritation in the top end, and the sacking of under-performing Health Minister Jane Aagaard in 2003. Its abolition of mandatory sentencing might also still rankle among an electorate notably concerned with law and order issues. But overall, the government and in particular its leader have projected an image of confidence and competence, and have not exhausted enough political capital to counter-balance the long list of factors now weighing in their favour. Chief among these is that the incumbency shoe is now on the other foot, with Labor enjoying the advantage of sitting members in all the important marginal seats. The Poll Bludger has two reasons to think this factor will be even more pronounced at the coming election. One is the tendency of voters to give new members the benefit of the doubt whey they first face re-election, which applies in all but one of the seven northern suburbs marginals. The other is the geographic concentration of these electorates, which has presumably made it a simple matter for the Martin government to concentrate largesse where it has been most required.
Party unity is another point in Labor’s favour. Labor has had no trouble galvanising behind the first leader ever to deliver it victory, whereas the CLP has faced the inevitable upheavals associated with adjusting to opposition after 27 years in government. In December 2003 the parliamentary party dumped Denis Burke, the leader who took it to defeat in 2001, in favour of Terry Mills – only to reinstall Burke in February after Mills stepped aside, conceding that he "wasn’t up to the job". While Burke’s return to the leadership was unopposed, few will be persuaded that the splits that led to his departure have been covered over. The CLP is going to have a very hard time persuading the electorate to trade in a stable government for a leader it has already rejected once, and who lost the confidence of his colleagues less than 18 months ago.
Labor’s failures in past Northern Territory elections have stood in contrast to its performance at the federal level. Until the creation of a second seat at the 2001 election, the federal electorate of Northern Territory was held by Labor as often as not. Since then, Labor has held the non-Darwin seat of Lingiari by bigger margins than the CLP has held Solomon, which remains highly marginal. Most of the exceptional circumstances that have underwritten the CLP hegemony at the territory level no longer exist, but many observers are maintaining an unwarranted caution about Labor’s prospects. The Poll Bludger is inclined to tip a sizeable swing in Labor’s favour, but such a swing will not necessarily deliver any new seats. The aforementioned Araluen is the only real CLP marginal, and the 2001 result here was distorted by preselection squabbles and high-profile independent challengers (despite a 17.2 per cent two-party swing, Labor’s primary vote was only up 1.6 per cent from 1997). The next most marginal CLP seat is Port Darwin (7.3 per cent), but local factors suggest that an eye should be kept on Daly (9.5 per cent), Goyder (14.8 per cent) and especially MacDonnell (8.5 per cent). For their part, the CLP reportedly has high hopes of winning Sanderson from Labor, but the Poll Bludger’s judgement is that the tide will be flowing too heavily in the other direction.
The power of one
These are momentous times in the electoral history of the Poll Bludger’s newly readopted home state of Western Australia, which is about to become the last state to abandon rural vote weighting for the lower house and adopt what is known, more or less accurately, as "one-vote one-value". After numerous amendments made to secure the support of the Greens and ex-Liberal independent Alan Cadby in the upper house, the bill finally completed its passage through parliament on Tuesday, just days before members elected on February 26 were due to take their seats and put the necessary majority beyond the government’s reach. The legislation as passed abandons Labor’s campaign promise that the five remote electorates in the upper house region of Mining and Pastoral would be quarantined from its effects. Instead, concerns about servicing of remote areas have been accommodated through a measure similar to that which operates in Queensland, in which electorates with an area of more than 100,000 square kilometres will be deemed to have a bonus enrolment of "phantom" voters equal to 1.5 per cent of the electorate’s area in square kilometres. Other electorates will have roughly 21,000 voters, compared with the current average of about 26,000 for metropolitan and 14,000 for non-metropolitan seats.
The bill provides for two extra members in each house, with the metropolitan area gaining eight lower house seats and the non-metropolitan area losing six. This is unambiguously bad news for the Coalition in general and the National Party in particular, but few who are not directly affected would argue that it amounted to a violation of natural justice. The existing system has produced all manner of absurdities, like the existence of tiny non-Perth urban electorates such as Mandurah, Albany, Bunbury, Kalgoorlie, Dawesville and Leschenault. Furthermore, the Liberal leadership chose to deal itself out of the game by insisting that there could be no merit in any alternative to the status quo. This troubled some of the wiser heads in the Liberal Party, as Robert Taylor reported in The West Australian on May 7:
(Liberal upper house leader Norman) Moore knew that Independent Alan Cadby, who holds the balance of power on the legislation, might be interested in a Liberal version of electoral reform. Mr Moore confirmed in Parliament yesterday that he met Labor’s Electoral Affairs Minister Jim McGinty to discuss the possibility of another model emerging … Mr Moore’s plan increased the size of the Legislative Assembly by four MLAs, kept the status quo in the Legislative Council and guaranteed five Lower House seats in the remote Mining and Pastoral region but within their existing boundaries. The effect of his model was to save two Lower House country seats and reduce the number of country seats transferred to the city from six to four … Mr Moore took his plan to Tuesday’s Liberal party room meeting and by all accounts then listened in amazement as Mr Birney turned the debate into a test of his own leadership. Mr Birney refused to discuss the plan, arguing that the Liberals would lose all credibility in the bush if they voted for the legislation no matter what eventual form it took in the Parliament. An argument was also put that by voting for a one vote, one value model, the Liberals would merely provide the Nationals with ammunition at the next election.
Birney must take a dim view of his country constituents if he imagines they would prefer the purity of the impotent to a sober display of pragmatism in the face of the inevitable. The result of Birney’s idealism in pursuit of a low principle is that lower house representation in the non-metropolitan south-west, currently home to 14 Coalition and four Labor members, will indeed fall from 18 seats to 12. Moore’s plan promised a better outcome for all concerned. Proposals to increase the number of politicians are always vulnerable to populist rabble-rousing, but adding all four new members to the lower house would have been easier to sell as a necessary boost to country representation (for some historical perspective on this matter, check out the remarkable list of Western Australian electoral facts assembled by shy Perth blogger "Ross of Rockingham" – among other things, it tells us that the original electorate of Murchison had 24 voters when it was created in 1890). As for Birney’s reported concern regarding the threat from the Nationals at the distant 2009 election, this seems an insignificant consideration at the best of times, especially now that the affected area will have fewer seats.
The Western Australian Electoral Commission has prepared an indicative map showing how non-metropolitan electoral boundaries might look under the new system, which projects some rather quirky outcomes. Since the Mining and Pastoral region accounts for roughly three-quarters of the Western Australian land mass, the Queensland-style model largely replicates Labor’s original proposal to maintain the strength of the region’s representation while providing for one-vote one-value elsewhere. However, there will now be very large discrepancies within these five seats, which will have to be dramatically redrawn. The WAEC projects the existence of a vast and sparsely populated new electorate called Eyre, covering desert emptiness from north of Kalgoorlie to the South Australian/Northern Territory border, which will have an estimated 9215 voters – substantially fewer than the smallest electorate under the current system, the absurdly compact south-west seat of Leschenault (12,104 voters). It is almost double the estimated 18,179 voters in the projected new Mining and Pastoral seat of Pilbara, which will take in relatively populous mining areas on the north-west coast.
Much has been made of the fact that Matt Birney’s own electorate of Kalgoorlie, the only one of the five Mining and Pastoral seats not held by Labor, will be abolished under the new model. Where the current electorate of Kalgoorlie is based entirely within the city that bears its name, the projected new electorate of Dundas will absorb the whole city and surrounding areas as far east as the South Australian border. While this might look impressive on the map, Dundas will add a mere 961 new voters to the current enrolment of Kalgoorlie for an increase of about 7 per cent. Birney’s margin at the February election was 2024 votes. The new legislation only slightly aggravates an already existing problem, namely the Liberal leader’s relatively insecure hold on what was traditionally a Labor seat. Other changes projected by the WAEC for the Mining and Pastoral region include the expansion of the state’s northernmost seat of Kimberley, which will boost Labor’s margin through the recovery of remote territory it lost at the previous redistribution, and the creation of Murchison, which is similar to the seat of Ningaloo that existed before the previous redistribution. This area has normally been considered Labor territory, but Ningaloo was won narrowly by the Liberals at both elections of its short life (1996 and 2001). Murchison joins Dundas as the other seat with a conspicuously small enrolment, in this case an estimated 10,019 voters.
As far as the major parties are concerned, these changes are a case of swings and roundabouts. The 12 seats that will replace the existing 18 in the non-metropolitan south-west are quite a different matter. The six seats tipped for abolition include four held by the National Party (Greenough, Merredin, Wagin and Stirling) and two by the Liberals (Leschenault and Dawesville). That leaves the following survivors:
Moore: The WAEC projects that this electorate will include all of the existing electorate of Moore except for the Shire of Toodyay, along with the northern half of the exisiting electorate of Merredin (which does not include Merredin proper) and most of the area of the electorate of Greenough. Moore looms as an interesting contest between the Liberals, who won the seat for the first time in 1986, and the Nationals, who had a morale-boosting win in Greenough at the expense of a sitting Liberal member at the February election and for whom Merredin is a party stronghold. The National Party members for Merredin (Brendon Grylls) and Greenough (Grant Woodhams) could be left contemplating a run against the newly elected Liberal member, Gary Snook.
Geraldton: Labor’s Shane Hill narrowly won the existing seat of Geraldton at the past two elections, but would have to do very well to hold it now that it is set to be augmented by more than 8000 new rural voters from the solid conservative seat of Greenough. The weak performance by the National Party in Geraldton at the recent election suggests that it will fall to the Liberals, but the newly elected Nationals member for Greenough, Grant Woodhams, could prove popular enough to buck the trend if obliged to seek refuge here in 2009.
Avon: The WAEC projects that this electorate will be augmented by one shire from Moore, four from Merredin and two from Wagin. None of this suggests the seat will become any less safe for the National Party, particularly in light of the stature of the sitting member, party leader Max Trenorden.
Murray: Located on Perth’s expanding southern fringe, the WAEC envisions this electorate making up the numbers by absorbing the southern half of the metropolitan electorate of Peel. This would make a fairly safe Labor seat out of one in which Liberal newcomer Murray Cowper prevailed by 198 votes at the recent election.
Mandurah: The WAEC projects the abolition of the existing electorate of Dawesville to boost the numbers in Collie-Wellington and Mandurah, with Mandurah set to take in the populous area north of the Dawesville Channel. Since the Liberals won Dawesville by 4.1 per cent and Labor won Mandurah by 12.3 per cent, this will still be a Labor seat but with a softer margin. Given that Mandurah was held by the Liberals before 2001, it looms as one to watch for the next election.
Collie-Wellington: The existing seat is over quota so this will not need to expand too dramatically to meet the new enrolment requirements. It will absorb the southern part of Dawesville while losing the Shire of Dardanup to Capel. Labor’s Mick Murray did well to blow out his margin from 2.6 per cent to 9.3 per cent at the February election, but the new additions will probably make life harder for him.
Capel: Capel will lose its ungainly appendage south of Busselton along with a small area in the north to accommodate the expansion of Bunbury, while gaining the Shire of Dardanup from Collie-Wellington in the north and most of the Shire of Bridgetown-Greenbushes from Warren-Blackwood in the south-east. This will do nothing to change its status as a safe Liberal seat in which the National Party would need to field an exceptionally strong candidate to be competitive.
Bunbury: Bunbury will expand to incorporate those areas of the City of Bunbury it does not currently include, from Leschenault in the east and Capel in the south, plus a further coastal strip west of Bussell Highway in the south. These changes will strengthen Liberals newcomer John Castrilli’s precarious hold on the seat.
Vasse: Currently hugging the Cape Geographe coast, this electorate will dramatically expand in area to accommodate all of the Shire of Augusta-Margaret River (currently in Warren-Blackwood) and most of the Shire of Busselton (taking in an area currently in Capel). This will strengthen the Liberal hold on a seat that should be a safe seat for them, although they have survived strong challenges from the National Party and an independent at the past two elections.
Warren: This electorate is less closely related to Warren-Blackwood than the name suggests, as it will include most of the abolished seats of Wagin and Stirling. It looms as a tense struggle between the Nationals and the Liberals. Affected members are Liberal veteran Paul Omodei, member for Warren-Blackwood; the newly-elected Nationals member for Stirling, Terry Redman; and Terry Waldron, Nationals member for Wagin since 2001.
Albany: Labor have done well to win Albany at the last two elections, enjoying narrow wins in a seat that was held by the Liberals from 1974 to 2001. Albany will now expand to take in an area from the National Party seat of Stirling, and while many of the new voters will be from outer Albany suburbs where Labor performs well relative to the remainder of Stirling, Labor successes will probably become even rarer here in future.
Roe: Roe will absorb the south-eastern corner of Merredin, including Merredin itself, and the Shire of Dumbleyung from Wagin. This is all National Party territory, which makes the seat doubly interesting in light of Graham Jacobs’ success in winning the seat for the Liberals in February after the retirement of the sitting Nationals member.
If the results from the last election were replicated under these boundaries, the Coalition would have won nine of the 12 seats, of which between one and four would have been won by the Nationals (who won five seats on February 26). The WAEC has not prepared an indicative map for the metropolitan area, but the seats would presumably have been won in proportions similar to the actual result – about 29 from 42, compared with 24 from 34. Throw in a status quo result in Mining and Pastoral and assume that the two independents would have held their seats, and you have Labor on 36 seats and the Coalition on 21, compared with 32 and 23 in the current parliament. Given that the Nationals would have borne the brunt of the cut in Coalition numbers, it is hard to see why Birney was terrified at the thought of losing votes to the Nationals, but relaxed about losing seats to Labor.
The other half of the bargain is that the Legislative Council will gain two extra members. The state will still be divided into three metropolitan and three non-metropolitan regions, but these will have six members each instead of five or seven. The principle of rural vote weighting will thus endure in the upper house, which is the only place where it belongs. This change was insisted upon by the Greens despite the Poll Bludger’s conviction (as argued here) that it was not in the party’s own interest. Labor correctly concluded that they would be little affected and were happy to oblige.