Category: Federal By-Elections

9.31pm. So much for the last entry. Patrick Gorman’s projected two-party vote is now 61.6%.

9.18pm. It’s only based on 1000 votes from Leederville and Northbridge, and suburbs further out might tell a different story, but the first two-party results in Perth suggest Patrick Gorman is headed for a fairly modest winning over the Greens. Conversely, Josh Wilson is outpolling the Greens two to one in Fremantle.

9.00pm. The Devonport PPVC result is also nothing special for the Liberals, so the door has closed on them in Braddon now.

8.55pm. First figures from Perth don’t bear out ReachTEL’s indication of a strong Liberal Democrats result, with more of the homeless Liberal vote going to independent Paul Collins.

8.53pm. Labor think they have Braddon in the bag, and the Burnie PPVC result that has just come through might explain why: the Liberals have copped an 8.7% hit on the primary vote there. Only Devonport and Queenstown PPVCs, plus postals, yet to come.

8.20pm. Labor still tracking for a winning margin approaching 5% in Longman.

8.13pm. The first PPVC in from Braddon is Ulvertstone, which has only 513 votes. It’s indeed a bit better for the Liberals than polling day votes, with their primary vote down by 2.1%, compared with 6.6% overall – although that’s still less than what they need.

8.10pm. So there has been no swing at all out of the polling day booths in Braddon, which have produced around 47,000 votes. That means the Liberals need to conjure a swing of around 7.5% out of probably 10,000 pre-polls and 7000 postals. Which doesn’t seem terribly likely.

8.02pm. Only the PPVCs to come from Braddon now. Polls have closed in Perth and Fremantle.

7.52pm. The projected Labor margin in Braddon is down to 2.0%. Two more polling day booths to report in Braddon, plus the four pre-poll voting centres, which could yet disgorge many thousands of votes. However, it seems to be agreed that it’s time to pull the plug on the LNP in Longman, and Georgina Downer is conceding defeat in Mayo.

7.40pm. A bit of dispute on the ABC as to whether the LNP is getting 70% or 60% of One Nation preferences in Longman. They will need for it to be very high indeed, and for something highly dramatic to happen in the pre-poll voting centres.

7.38pm. A very quick count in Braddon, where the momentum against Labor is levelling off. The AEC now projects a 2.6% Labor margin, but the potential for a different dynamic from the pre-poll voting centres means a measure of caution is still advised.

7.25pm. I’ve now got primary vote swings of 8.6% against Labor and 6.7% against Liberal in Braddon, with Craig Garland now barely into double figures. Labor’s projected two-party is continuing its slow decline, now at 2.2%. Given the trend as larger booths come in, and the unknown factor of the large pre-poll voting centres that will come in later in the evening, I wouldn’t be ready to call this.

7.24pm. We’ve now gone from around 7000 to around 14,000 primary votes counted in Longman, and the earlier trend is continuing: Labor holding steady, Liberal down around 14%, One Nation on around 15%. So looking like a surprisingly solid Labor win. No surprises in Mayo.

7.18pm. The situation is still a little elusive in Braddon: two-party projections point to a Labor win, but the primary count is well ahead of it, and the Labor primary vote there is beginning to sag. Bit of a lull in Longman counting, but the early indications are extremely strong for Labor.

7.12pm. Picture beginning to change in Braddon as larger centres do less well for Craig Garland. The ABC now has the Labor swing at 2.7%, which is down from over 4% earlier. The AEC computer is calling it for Labor, but given that trend, this should be treated with caution at the moment.

7.10pm. Count progressing a little quick than I’d figure in Longman, and here too Labor are doing quite a bit better than expected, holding their own on the primary vote while One Nation gouges double figures out of the LNP.

7.02pm. There are some reasonably serious primary vote numbers in now from Braddon, and that earlier picture is still holding: Craig Garland is on 16.3%, and Liberal are down more than Labor. The first two-party results suggest this is converting into a two-party swing to Labor.

6.50pm. Still only 1591 votes counted, but the early dynamic in Braddon is that Craig Garland is doing very strongly, coming in at the high teens, and he’s gouging the Liberals twice as heavily as Labor. If this kept up, Labor would win pretty handily on preferences from 35% of the primary vote.

6.40pm. The first two small booths in from Braddon are Moorleah (183 votes), where Craig Garland has a fairly spectacular 26.8%, and Waratah (139 votes), where he has a rather more modest 10.8%. For the time being though, he’s gouging double figures out of both major parties’ primary votes.

6pm. Polls have closed in Braddon and Longman, and will do so in half an hour in Mayo, and two hours in Perth and Adelaide. Results for small booths in Braddon should start coming in very shortly, but it will have to wait an hour or so for anything meaningful from Longman. For my own benefit more than anything, I have mocked up summarised booth results for Braddon and Longman which will, when there’s actual data to plug into them, will show booth-level primary vote totals, percentages and swings for the Labor, Liberal(-National), Greens, One Nation and Craig Garland (both the latter two are identified, wrongly, as “IND”). Other than that, the AEC publishes its own perfectly good booth-matched projected results (though not nearly enough besides), which can naturally be found at the official results page.

As Super Saturday dawns, The Australian brings us perhaps the two most heavy-duty seat polls yet published in Australia, with Newspoll surveying 1015 respondents in Longman and 1002 in Braddon between Tuesday and Thursday. In both cases Labor records a lead of 51-49, putting them at the high end for Labor’s polling record throughout the campaign. Labor is credited with a solid improvement on the primary vote compared with the 2016 election result, from 35.4% to 40%, while the Liberal National Party is down from 39.0% to 36%. This gives Labor the buffer it needs to deal with One Nation, up from 9.4% to 14%, and their stronger flow of what I presume are respondent-allocated preferences to the LNP. The Greens are on 5%, compared with 4.4% in 2016. In Braddon, the primary votes are Labor 40% (unchanged on 2016), Liberal 43% (up from 41.5%), the Greens 5% (down from 6.7%) and independent Craig Garland 8%.

As did the YouGov Galaxy polls for the News Corp tabloids last week, the poll asked respondents how they would vote if Anthony Albanese rather than Bill Shorten were leading the Labor Party, which in both cases would supposedly have lifted Labor to leads of 55-45. Candidate approval questions found 37% satisfied with Labor’s Susan Lamb in Longman and 47% dissatisfied, while Justine Keay in Braddon was on 42% and 41%. Trevor Ruthenberg’s military medal issues apparently haven’t registered, with 61% saying they would not influence their vote, 22% saying it made them less likely to vote LNP, and 16% of people who were presumably going to vote LNP anyway implausibly indicating they would be more likely to vote LNP.

Legalise Vaping Australia has published results of ReachTEL polling from the neglected seats of Perth and Fremantle, which turn up no surprises so far as their finding that both seats will be easily retained by Labor is concerned. However, the results are notably weak for the Greens, who record 18.6% in Perth and 17.0% in Fremantle after exclusion of the undecided (8.7% and 6.1% respectively). In particular, the Greens are placed slightly behind the Liberal Democrats in Fremantle, who clearly stand to harvest votes from homeless Liberal supporters.

On to more important matters, namely the Longman and Braddon by-elections, and some historical context for them. Much is being made of the fact that the only time a government party has gained a seat from the opposition at a by-election was in the fairly unusual circumstance of Kalgoorlie in 1920, after Labor member Hugh Mahon was expelled from parliament for seditiously describing the British Empire as a “bloody and accursed despotism”, apropos its recent conduct in Ireland. However, by-elections in highly marginal opposition-held seats have been a far from common occurrence, particularly in recent times. The last time there was a by-election in an opposition-held seat with a margin of 5% or less was in November 1983, early in the life of the Hawke government, when the Liberals retained the Brisbane seat of Moreton with a slight swing in their favour.

The histogram below shows the spread of swings for or against the government at the 67 by-elections that produced a Labor-versus-Coalition two-party result since 1949 (sourced from this Parliamentary Library paper). Thirteen recorded swings to the government, of which eight occurred in opposition-held seats, but in no case were they sufficient to gain them the seat. Ten of the pro-government swings were bigger than Labor’s 0.8% margin in Longman, and five were bigger than the 2.2% margin in Braddon.

The mean result, indicated by the peak of the distribution curve, is a 4.0% swing against the government. However, the dispersal is great enough to suggest 0.8% pro-government swings occur 20.7% of the time, and 2.2% swings occur 14.5% of the time. On this basis, the chance of one or the other being lost by an opposition that faced both simultaneously would be 32.2% (assuming the two results were independent of each other). This is no doubt inflated by two outlier results: Australian Capital Territory in 1970 (13.8%) and McPherson in 1981 (16.2%). With these removed, the likelihood of a 0.8% swing to the government is 13.5%; the likelihood of a 2.2% swing is 8.2%; and one or the other is 20.6%.

Developments, and further reading:

• Matthew Denholm of The Australian reports a Liberal tracking poll sample of 500 voters has Brett Whiteley edging to a 51-49 lead over Labor’s Justine Keay in Braddon. Party sources credit this to their targeting of independent Craig Garland, who is said to be down from 9% last week to 5% this week. Garland is a crusty local fisherman who polled 3.1% at the state election on a campaign against fish farming, but Michael Koziol of Fairfax reports he is “building a brand beyond that niche, connecting with disaffected working class voters and even some Liberals”. With Garland directing preferences to Labor, the Liberals fear a repeat of the 2016 election, when the Recreational Fishers Party polled 5.7% in Braddon and 4.9% in Bass, respectively producing preference flows of 63.1% and 67.0% to Labor. The Liberals have been duly keen to portray Garland as an “extreme green”, and to exploit an assault conviction recorded against him in 1993 over an altercation involving a group of his friends and two off-duty police officers. This extended to the Prime Minister telling reporters that “violence against women, violence against police, can never be accepted, must always be condemned”.

• Pauline Hanson has taken an oddly timed break from politics to go on a cruise off Ireland and Scotland, citing exhaustion. Meanwhile, the party’s candidate in Longman, Matthew Stephen, has faced a series of claims of unpaid debts and wages from subcontactors and workers for his tiling business. However, Renee Viellaris of the Courier-Mail reports One Nation’s campaign has been more professional than recent form: its how-to-vote cards, thought previously to have been “too wordy and hard to understand”, have been made visually punchier and clearer in their recommended preference order (in this putting the LNP ahead of Labor), and the party promises an organised polling booth presence and tighter scrutineering.

• Acres of psephological goodness on offer in Kevin Bonham’s review of the Longman by-election.

Today’s News Corp tabloids have YouGov/Galaxy polls with modest samples from four of the five seats facing by-elections on Saturday, conducted Tuesday to Thursday last week. These turn the knife by asking a supplementary on how respondents would vote if Anthony Albanese rather than Bill Shorten were leader, an exercise that rarely goes well for the incumbent. In roughly descending order of interest:

• In Longman, Liberal National Party candidate Trevor Ruthenberg is credited with a 51-49 lead over disqualified Labor member Susan Lamb, which turns into a 53-47 lead for Labor under the Albanese hypothetical. Primary votes are Labor 37%, LNP 34%, One Nation 18% and Greens 5% (respectively 43%, 33%, 15% and 4% under the Albanese scenario). With the One Nation primary vote so high, much depends on the flow of their preferences: respondent allocation of preferences in the poll suggest they will heavily favour the LNP, whose two-party lead compares with a 51.5-48.5 lead to Labor if the preference flows from the 2016 election are applied. Sample: 578.

• The poll in Braddon has primary votes of Labor 40%, Liberal 44%, independent Craig Garland 7% and Greens 4%, which comes in at 50-50 both on the previous election preferences and the published result. The Albanese question has Labor leading 53-47, and the respective primary votes at 44%, 42%, 6% and 4%. Sample: 504.

• Another poll showing Rebekha Sharkie well ahead in Mayo, by 59-41, from primary votes of Rebekha Sharkie 47%, Georgina Downer 35%, Labor 9% and Greens 7%. The Labor primary vote is at 12% under the Albanese scenario. This result also finds 69% of respondents area satisfied with Sharkie’s performance as member for Mayo, with only 16% dissatisfied. Sample: 540.

• Labor leads the Greens 66-34 in Fremantle, from primary votes of Labor 49% and Greens 22%. With Albanese, that becomes 68-32 and 52% to 21%. Sample: 541.

Separately, two electorate-level ReachTEL polls:

• Yesterday’s Sunday Mail had a ReachTEL poll of 770 respondents in Longman, conducted on Thursday. After exclusion of the 3.9% undecided, the poll had primary votes of LNP 39.4%, Labor 37.3%, One Nation 14.5% and Greens 4.4%. Here too, respondent allocation of preferences results in an LNP two-party lead of 51-49, which would reverse if 2016 preference flows were applied.

• A poll for the Australian Forest Products Association in Braddon had Labor leading 52-48, although I’m struggling to see how they get there from the primary votes and preference data provided. After exclusion of the 4.6% undecided, the primary votes are Liberal 42.7%, Labor 36.0%, Craig Garland 9.3% and Greens 7.0%. For Labor, this compares unfavourably with 2016 election results of Liberal 41.5%, Labor 40.1% and Greens 6.7%, which converted into a two-party result of 52.2-47.8, little different from the poll. The poll reportedly credits Labor with a 67.4% flow of respondent-allocated preferences which, while strong, is very similar to what they got at the election. The poll was conducted on Thursday from a sample of 810.

Latest news to relate from the by-election campaign trails, almost all of it relating to Longman:

• The Longman campaign has been hit by the bombshell of a Courier-Mail report that Trevor Ruthenberg, the Liberal National Party candidate, wrongly claimed to have received the Australian Service Medal in his state parliamentary biography. Ruthenberg claims to have innocently confused the award for distinguished service with his Australian Defence Medal, granted to those who serve for four years or more, as Ruthenberg had done with the Royal Australian Air Force. This offers an uncomfortable parallel with Barry Urban, the Western Australian state Labor MP whose false claims led to his resignation and the staging of the Darling Range by-election on June 30.

• The Liberal National Party and One Nation are denying a preference deal, but each has the other in seventh place on their how-to-vote card. Since both have Labor’s Susan Lamb placed lower, this is as good as second. One Nation has copped flak for placing Lamb behind Jim Saleam, Australia First candidate and former leader of neo-Nazi group National Action, in consequence of its decision to place Labor and the Greens last. Another distinction of the One Nation campaign has been the involvement of Mark Latham, who recorded a robocall message for the party in which he branded Bill Shorten a liar and urged a vote for minor parties.

• A report by Amy Remeikis of The Guardian relates the view of a Labor strategist that the One Nation how-to-vote card is unlikely to prevent Labor getting around 40% of their preferences, and that the party’s support is “overstated”. The report also reveals a straw poll of 100 people at a Caboolture shopping centre captured only about twenty who knew the by-election was happening, not a single one of whom could name either major party candidate.

• A ReachTEL poll of Braddon on July 6 recorded, after exclusion of the 6.2% undecided, a 38.7% primary vote for Labor and its Section 44 casualty, Justine Keay; 45.7% for Liberal candidate Brett Whiteley; 8.5% for independent Craig Garland; and 4.7% for the Greens. No two-party result was provided, but Kevin Bonham has applied 2016 preference flows to produce a result of 50.5-49.5 in favour of the Liberals. The poll was conducted for The Australian Institute from a sample of 700.

Latest dispatches from the front line of the July 28 by-elections:

• The Courier-Mail had a ReachTEL poll yesterday of 814 respondents from Longman, and as with earlier such polls, it showed Liberal National Party candidate Trevor Ruthenberg with his nose in front of Labor’s Susan Lamb, with a two-party lead of 51-49. However, this is actually the narrowest of ReachTEL’s three results so far: a poll for Sky News on May 30 had it at 52-48, and one for the Australia Institute on May 10 had it at 53-47. Furthermore, this is Labor’s best set of primary vote numbers so far: after exclusion o the 4.1% undecided, the results are LNP 37.0%, Labor 40.7%, One Nation 15.3% and Greens 3.4%. With preferences flowing as they did in 2016, these results would convert to a 54-46 lead to Labor – although One Nation were directing preferences to them on that occasion, which doesn’t seem likely this time out. The Sky News poll had 53% of all independent and minor party preferences going to the LNP, compared with 63% in this poll: on that basis, Labor would leave 51-49.

• Dennis Atkins of the Courier-Mail further relates that the paper has drilled 200 local residents face-to-face, presumably by collaring them in public places, which suggests the biggest issues to be Caboolture Hospital, particularly in relation to lack of parking, and congestion on Bruce Highway. Labor has promised a $10 million chemotherapy clinic for the hospital, and accused the government of cutting funding to it by $2.9 million over four years. The latter claim was described by Malcolm Turnbull in parliament a few weeks back as an “outrageous lie”. Jared Owens of The Australian reports One Nation is “campaigning on the notion that local hospitals „can’t cope‟ amid a surge of immigrants”.

• According to Graham Richardson in The Australian, “Labor insiders believe they have no hope of holding on to the Tasmanian seat of Braddon and are worried that Longman is running at 50/50 while the momentum has swung against them”. Similarly, Paul Bongiorno wrote in the Saturday Paper a fortnight ago that Labor has “no illusions” about retaining the two seats. Given Labor also thought they were on 38% of the primary vote in Darling Range, my piece for Crikey cast doubt on the proposition that Labor insiders are much better placed than the rest of us to pick byelection results in advance.