Author: William Bowe

Perth talk radio host and former West Australian editor Paul Murray tells erstwhile sparring partner Peter Brent of Mumble that he sees six seats as likely Liberal gains and six more as possibilities, with the most likely outcome being a minority Coalition government. Robert Wainwright of the Sydney Morning Herald thinks otherwise, reporting today that "the West Australian Labor government appears to have seized the momentum in the final days of a see-saw election campaign and is now a slight favourite to win on Saturday". The assessment is based on the Prime Minister’s refusal to lend substantial backing to the canal project and the Premier’s renewed interest in Albany, earlier reckoned to be a write-off. In light of the bucketing Colin Barnett is copping over his belated costings announcement and its $200 million hole, the Poll Bludger continues to favour the latter view.

Some recent updates to the election guide:

Albany (Labor 3.7%): The three-cornered contest for this seat has taken a confusing twist with Nationals candidate Beverley Ford dumping on the Coalition’s proposal to build a local hospital for $40 million, to the delight of endangered Labor member Peter Watson. Health Minister Jim McGinty had earlier described the hospital promise as "lunacy". Ford’s campaign manager has written to Peter Brent at Mumble talking up her chances; the Albany Advertiser reports that Professor David Black of Curtin University thinks her likely to finish third, but says she "can complicate the situation for the Liberal candidate". All five respondents in an Advertiser vox pop tipped Watson to win.

North West Coastal (Labor 5.4%): Rod Sweetman, the outgoing Liberal member for abolished Ningaloo who failed to win preselection elsewhere, continues to exasperate his former colleagues. The ABC reports that Sweetman has spoken highly of the Gallop government’s achievements in his electorate, saying it has been "a pretty good time of late for the Gascoyne region and particularly Carnarvon. We have been a very fortunate community over the last little while".

Kimberley (Labor 8.5%): Liberal candidate Ron Sos Johnston told a candidates’ debate on Wednesday it was "no secret that Barnett and myself are at loggerheads over the canal project and how he has gone about it". The Liberals appear not to have given up hope, unveiling late-campaign promises including a $500,000 birthing suite at Kimberley Hospital. Paul Murray thinks it more likely to fall than North West Coastal.

Central Kimberley-Pilbara (Independent 16.2% vs ALP): Independent candidate and former ATSIC WA chairman Barry Taylor has endorsed a boycott of the election by the community of Ngalingkadji in protest over lack of housing maintenance. Fifty-five votes were cast there at the federal election, 35 of them for the same Tom Stephens who will be Labor candidate at the state poll.

Collie-Wellington (Labor 2.6%): Liberals have been muttering darkly about the pace of an investigation into the leak of candidate Craig Carbone’s drink-driving record to the Sunday Times. It has been noted that Labor member Mick Murray’s wife works at Collie police station, though Murray denies her involvement.

Girrawheen (Labor 8.5%): Family First will direct preferences to Jon Kelly, Wanneroo mayor, Labor renegade and independent candidate, ahead of Labor member Margaret Quirk.

The Poll Bludger suspects that a proportion of his audience groans with dismay when he devotes a post to the upper house. Those thus inclined are asked to perservere with today’s sermon because it relates to that highly topical barbecue stopper, the prospects for Family First. A nugget of information that had earlier escaped notice was this article from Colleen Egan in the Sunday Times, reporting that Liberal internal polling has the new party tracking at 4 to 5 per cent in some areas. This site’s previous predictions for the upper house were based on the assumption that Family First would not greatly improve upon its Western Australian Senate vote of 0.85 per cent. Clearly this underestimated the party’s political sophistication, a lesson which should really have sunk in by now.

The reason Family First did not poll well in Western Australia was that it made no effort to, having correctly concluded that a Senate outcome of three Liberal, two Labor and one Greens was all but certain. This prompted it to devote its finite resources elsewhere, to great effect. Now that it faces the more realistic prospect of winning seats in the Legislative Council, the state branch has sprung into action. In its sights are the two regions that return seven rather than five members, South West and North Metropolitan, and perhaps also the five-member region of Agricultural. As Egan reports, the party has demonstrated its astuteness by targeting South West through regional television ads and North Metropolitan through suburban newspapers. In these areas, Family First could well manage the more plausible lower end of the 4 to 5 per cent range cited by Egan. This could be enough to deliver a seat at Labor’s expense in North Metropolitan, and to put them in the running in the other two regions.

Equally importantly, it could mean that their preferences save the day for One Nation-turned-New Country incumbents Frank Hough in Agricultural and Paddy Embry in South West. Embry will be further boosted by the occupant of second place on his party ticket, former Western Australian Farmers’ Federation president Colin Nicholls (a situation echoed in Mining and Pastoral where One Nation-turned-independent member John Fischer is joined by former federal member Graeme Campbell). If that can push his vote up to near double figures, a solid bloc of Family First preferences could be enough to deliver Embry a 12.5 per cent quota. Previously I had assumed that One Nation’s decision to put their former colleagues last would prove the death knell for all three. But if Family First performs well, and if the joint tickets of Paddy Embry/Colin Nicholls and John Fischer/Graeme Campbell prove as appealing as one might expect, there will be little of the right-wing vote left over for One Nation, which for the first time will be identified on ballot papers without the "Pauline Hanson" prefix.

The West Australian has a front page photo today of a congested Kwinana Freeway clogged with semi-trailers under the heading, "Q. Why will another 2000 trucks be sent down the freeway? A. To save one marginal seat". That seat being Riverton, where freight traffic through Leach Highway has been a burning issue since Labor pulled the plug on the Fremantle Eastern Bypass. Labor now proposes to send articulated vehicles on a detour around the electorate, a point nicely demonstrated by The West’s map of the route, the electorate and the bypass promised by the Liberals. The paper also reports that Stephen Smith has discovered some optimism since Sunday and now expects to Labor to win.

Some recent embellishments to the Western Australian election guide:

Alfred Cove (Independent 8.2% vs LIB): Voters in this electorate are being bombarded with advertising across all media from a bewildering range of interested parties. Radio ads for independent challenger Katherine Jackson tell listeners not to believe advertisements and media reports that she has cut a preference deal with Liberal candidate Graham Kierath. Workers compensation lawyer Paul O’Halloran appears to think otherwise, and has gone to the trouble of running his own radio ads boosting independent incumbent Janet Woollard (a "nice lady") and exhorting Jackson supporters to ignore her how-to-vote card and put Kierath last (she is in fact running a split ticket; those following the pro-Labor ticket are directed to put Woollard ahead of Kierath). Then there’s Graham Kierath’s blog, a project he has tackled with admirable enthusiasm.

Perth (Liberal 10.5%): The Poll Bludger hears that the Liberals are putting an unusual amount of resources into their campaign here, and that the Christian Democratic Party are spending a lot of money targeting the government’s gay law reforms. The electorate is home to much of Perth’s gay community, which counts Labor member John Hyde among its number.

Balcatta (Labor 10.9%): While this new seat is all but certain to remain in the Labor fold, Liberals are keen to note that Labor does not have the advantage of a sitting member, and that the federal seat of Stirling was won with swings of 6 to 8 per cent in the booths located in this electorate. In the more affluent part of the electorate covered by the state seat of Carine, two large booths swung to Labor.

Swan Hills (Labor 0.3%): Sensing that a triumphant Jaye Radisich might emerge as Labor’s electoral heroine, the party made her one of only three speakers at Labor’s belated campaign "launch" on Sunday, along with Geoff Gallop and Kim Beazley.

Cottesloe (Liberal 12.3%): Colin Barnett handed his opponents a gift last Wednesday when he told a candidates forum for his electorate of Cottesloe that he would place a five-storey limit on coastal high-rise, but only in his own electorate.

Collie-Wellington (Labor 2.6%); Murray (Labor 0.7%): Robert Wainwright of the Sydney Morning Herald reported on Saturday that Labor expects to hold Collie-Wellington but "struggle" in neighbouring Murray.

Labor powerbroker and federal MP Stephen Smith was quoted in The West Australian this morning saying his party was behind going into the final week of the state campaign. This is standard operating procedure for the Western Australian ALP, which in 1996 went so far as to concede defeat before polling day. Reporter Robert Taylor adds meat to the bones of Smith’s claims:

Recent Labor polling is believed to be calling a metropolitan-wide swing to the Liberals of about 1.5 to 2 per cent. If that were to hold in a uniform way, the seat of Swan Hills, at 0.3 per cent, and the new electorate of Mindarie, nominally Labor by 1.2 per cent, could fall. But coalition strategists list neither seat high on their lists of possible wins. After Bunbury, which is expected to fall, and Albany, where polling for the National Party is believed to show incumbent Peter Watson at risk, the coalition sees Geraldton and Murray, based around Pinjarra, as its best chances of wresting seats from Labor. The Government has poured money into Geraldton in the past four years and lawyer Shane Hill is regarded as a quality local member but both sides expect a sizeable swing to the coalition in country areas and on a margin of just 2.7 per cent, Mr Hill could fall victim. In the city, the coalition believes Joondalup and Riverton are stronger winning chances than Swan Hills.

This actually suggests that it is the Coalition which has its work cut out for it, as it must win five of the seven seats named to form a minority government. It also emboldens the Poll Bludger in his predictions, despite recent charges of unadventurousness, since seats that are line-ball going into the final week tend to fall the way of the government and/or the sitting member.

Also from Robert Taylor today was an acerbic piece on yesterday’s Labor campaign "launch", which included jibes to the effect that Tony Dean will not retain Bunbury for Labor and Graham Kierath will not recover Alfred Cove for the Liberals. Assessments have also emerged from two retiring independent MPs – Phillip Pendal, ex-Liberal independent member for South Perth, wrote in The West today that the Liberals are "quietly upbeat" about Geraldton as well as Albany and Bunbury, while Larry Graham, oft-quoted member for Pilbara and one-time Labor man, told Paul Murray on 6PR that he felt Labor to be in the "better position".

Those who get exasperated at the deluge of opinion polling that normally accompanies election periods should be enjoying the Western Australian campaign, which has gone an astonishing 10 days without a single published poll. The drought is broken today with the Sunday Times’ second Market Equity survey for the campaign. Although its small sample of 420 is not much to go on, the results are consistent with the Poll Bludger’s expectations in that Labor leads 41.1 per cent to 38.4 per cent on the primary vote with a rough two-party split of 51-49. The paper also features what to my knowledge is the only attempt to predict individual seat outcomes other than my own, courtesy of Colleen Egan and Grahame Armstrong. The layout of the web article is hard to follow, and the contributors are indecisive in some cases, but our respective assessments basically stack up as follows:

The Sunday Times article neglects to spell out for its readers what these predictions ultimately amount to, so the Poll Bludger can exclusively reveal that Armstrong is predicting a one-seat Labor majority, an outcome also allowed for by Egan who nevertheless inclines slightly towards a Coalition minority government. Peter Brent at Mumble says Labor by 11 seats; I reckon five.

UPDATE (20/2/05): The above statement about the Sunday Times article was based on the online version. The hard copy spelled out very clearly their respective predictions – ALP 29, LNP 27, IND 1 for Armstrong, LNP 28, ALP 27, IND 2 for Egan. This has enabled me to infer their predictions where only ambivalent comments were included in the article, so the "uncommitted" entries are now filled in.

After four weeks of indecision, the Poll Bludger has finally accepted that the picture is not about to suddenly get any clearer and that there is no merit in further delaying seat-by-seat predictions for the Western Australian election guide. I am tipping the Liberals to gain Albany and Bunbury from Labor and Roe from the Nationals, and to recover South Perth from retiring independent Phillip Pendal; and for Labor to recover Central Kimberley-Pilbara from retiring independent Larry Graham. That means 31 seats for Labor, 20 for the Liberals, four for the Nationals, two conservative independents and four more glorious years for Geoff Gallop’s Labor government.

The picture is far from clear, but there does seem to be a vague consensus among those most likely to know that the Coalition will fall short. The Poll Bludger understands that the Liberals consider Swan Hills a 50-50 proposition, which is bad news for them as it is a seat they definitely need to win. Labor won it in 2001 after trailing by 6.0 per cent on the primary vote thanks to preferences from One Nation voters, who were assumed to be set to return to the Liberals this time around. Labor’s competitiveness here suggests they will hold all their other metropolitan marginals, where they did not depend on preferences. Each has its own local variables in play – Mindarie is a new seat in which Labor will not enjoy the benefit of a sitting member, and local roads issues are working against them in Joondalup and Riverton. The outer northern suburbs is emerging as the key metropolitan battleground – home to Mindarie, Joondalup and Labor’s other suburban marginal, Wanneroo, as well as the Liberal seat of Kingsley where long-term member Cheryl Edwardes will take her personal vote into retirement (unless it transfers to her husband Colin, who is the Liberal candidate).

Outside Perth are a number of seats which might have been rated as Liberal gains if the campaign had not been dominated by the canal, which has little to offer voters in Geraldton, Murray, Collie-Wellington, North West Coastal and Kimberley. However, it remains conventional wisdom that the Liberals are likely to recover Albany and Bunbury. Bunbury is being put down to demographic change and the popularity of the Liberal candidate, local mayor John Castrilli; in Albany, the Coalition was damaged in 2001 by the mortgage broking scandal, which affected many locals and embroiled the defeated Liberal member, whereas Labor must now contend with the Devaugh collapse.

I am calculating that the National Party has damaged itself by cutting a preference deal with the Greens, in much the same way as the Democrats did through the deal with Family First at the federal election. Three seats that might have been called as gains from the Liberals – Greenough, Vasse and Moore – will instead stay in the blue column, and I have been fortified in my existing conviction that the Liberals will win Roe with the retirement of Nationals member Ross Ainsworth. The Greens by contrast have done splendidly out of the deal, which makes life easier for Paul Llewellyn in South West and puts Dee Margetts right back into contention in Agricultural.

It must be emphasised here that I have never been less confident in tipping an election outcome. Writing in The West Australian on February 12, amateur psephological website enthusiast Paul Murray hit the nail on the head when he wished "good luck to any commentator willing to pick the result with the wild card of Colin’s Canal", which had blurred "the previously evident points of comparison between Geoff Gallop and Colin Barnett". The Coalition, thought to be falling short in the suburbs but headed for big gains in the regions, has chosen to place all its bets on the sort of city-centric exercise that brought Jeff Kennett to grief; while Labor, damned for its profligacy and tax-raising, trails $730 million to $2021.2 million in the "spend-o-meter" tabulated last week by noted government mouthpiece the Sunday Times. The Poll Bludger accordingly reserves his right to make wholesale changes to his forecast between now and next Saturday.

Many thanks to reader Graham Allen who has kindly gone to the effort of producing Java applet Legislative Council election calculators, modelled on those he developed for his own amusement at the Senate election. These are now available for public enlightenment on the Poll Bludger’s upper house election page. You may need to download a Java plugin to get them to work – you can get this here. The calculators allow you to enter voting figures for each of the grouped tickets in the relevant region, and then determine the flow of preferences based on the tickets lodged by each group and thus to project the final outcome. There are a small number of complications that are smoothed over here. Voters of course have the option of choosing their own preferences by numbering every square rather than accepting the party ticket through the above-the-line option, although less than 5 per cent of voters exercise it and they rarely if ever determine the result. Of even less significance is the fact that Allen’s model ignores non-major party candidates other than those at the top of the ticket, rather than accommodate the meaninglessly complex tickets that some parties submit for whatever reason.

With the help of these calculators, the Poll Bludger has been able to make more educated guesswork than that offered earlier. The following assessments have been added to the summaries for each region:

Agricultural: The first four seats are very likely to go two Liberal, one Nationals and one Labor, but the final seat is an absolute lottery between Liberal, the Nationals, Labor, the Greens, Family First and even the Christian Democratic Party. If the Coalition falls short the Nationals’ surplus will be a handy dividend for the Greens, who will also get preferences from Liberals for Forests. If that puts them ahead of Labor, they will gather their surplus in turn and perhaps win the seat. If it doesn’t, Labor could win with Greens preferences. Family First or the CDP could snowball into contention through preferences from One Nation, New Country, the Citizens Electoral Council and each other. Frank Hough?s hopes of re-election have been dashed by One Nation’s decision to put his New Country party last, while One Nation themselves would have needed major party preferences to be a chance and are predictably not getting them. Given the high quota required in five-seat regions, the smart money is probably on a Coalition candidate winning the final seat.

East Metropolitan: The Greens’ vote will probably need to increase to at least 8 per cent from their 6.4 per cent in 2001 if they are to win the fifth seat at the expense of Louise Pratt. Any improvement in the Labor vote of 44.2 per cent will probably put the seat beyond the their reach.

Mining and Pastoral: By the Poll Bludger’s estimation, a result of three Labor and two Liberal is all but certain. John Fischer and his high-profile running mate Graeme Campbell have done very badly on preferences, scoring last or near-last place from the Greens, the Democrats and their old friends One Nation. To win they would need to almost match One Nation’s 2001 vote of 13.9 per cent. The Greens will not have Tom Helm feeding them preferences this time, and have not been put ahead of the major parties by One Nation as they were in 2001. This gives Robin Chapple approximately no chance whatsoever. The Liberals? already high hopes of recovering a second seat have been boosted by One Nation’s decision to put them near the top of the pile.

North Metropolitan: By far the most likely result here is a status quo result of three each for Labor and Liberal and one for the Greens. Most of the plausible alternative scenarios involve a drop in the Greens vote of 9.7 per cent in 2001 to 8 per cent or below, which would have to be considered unlikely. If it does happen, their seat could fall to the Liberals or Family First. In the even more unlikely event that the collective major party vote does not substantially improve, there’s a chance that Family First could win a seat at the expense of Labor rather than the Greens.

South Metropolitan: Unless the Greens lose ground from the 9.0 per cent they recorded in 2001, the result here is certain to be two Labor, two Liberal and one Greens. For Labor to win a third seat at the Greens’ expense would also require an improvement on their 43.0 per cent vote from 2001 or an unforeseen resilience in support for One Nation, who have put the Greens last.

South West: In the likely event of a subsidence of the large non-major party vote from 2001, the result here will be three Liberal, one Nationals, two Labor and one Greens. Most alternative scenarios involve the Nationals missing out. If Labor perform particularly strongly they might win a third seat; if voters do not return to the major parties to the expected extent, the outcome is anyone’s guess. New Country and One Nation have ruled each other out through mutually hostile preferences, but their vote could allow micro-parties Public Hospital Support Group and Liberals for Forests to snowball into contention if they can manage at or near 2 per cent.