Category: Federal Election 2013

The last of the major polls go as follows:

• A Newspoll survey conducted on Wednesday and Thursday from over 2500 respondents has Labor on 33%, the Coalition on 46% and the Greens on 9%, for a commanding Coalition lead of 54-46 on two-party preferred. Full breakdowns here.

• Nielsen concurs with Newspoll on both major parties’ primary votes in its poll of 1431 respondents conducted on Wednesday and Thursday, but has the Greens two points higher at 11%. Both The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald have exasperatingly declined to provide breakdowns, but from what I can gather from the printed copy, the poll has the Coalition ahead 56-44 in New South Wales and behind 51-49 in Victoria, while in Queensland Labor’s primary vote is on just 27% (under two Senate quotas, for those of you with an eye on that kind of thing).

• Morgan has a poll of 4937 respondents conducted by SMS, online and live interview phone polling which has Labor at just 31.5%, with the Coalition on 44%, the Greens on 10.5% and the Palmer United Party on 6.5%. This pans out to 53.5-46.5 on respondent-allocated preferences, but to 54.5-45.5 on the previous election preferences method used by Nielsen and Newspoll.

BludgerTrack has been updated with all of the above, and it continues to offer a rosier assessment for Labor than the betting markets in particular would suggest (though note that I’ve knocked on the head my idea of revising the preference model to grant Labor a bigger share of the Palmer United Party vote in Queensland, which has made two seats’ difference). As I’ve noted a number of times, this is mostly down to the consistent tendency of electorate-level polling to produce worse results for Labor than that national and statewide polling that are the bread and butter of BludgerTrack. To illustrate this point, and also for your general convenience, I offer below a complete listing to all such polls published during the campaign. Averages are also provided for the swings in each state, and by each pollster. What this suggests is that the automated phone polling by Galaxy, which has generally produced highly plausible results, has not been too far out of line with national polling, and it has generally offered highly plausible results. The live interview phone polling of Newspoll looks to have performed similarly, but that’s because its sample includes the unusual cases of New England and Lyne. Beyond that three automated phone pollsters who are relatively new to the game, and whose consistent findings of huge Coalition swings should accordingly be treated with caution.

Key: NP=Newspoll, RT=ReachTEL, Gal.=Galaxy, Lon.=Lonergan, JWS=JWS Research.

NEW SOUTH WALES
				N	ALP	L-NP	GRN	2PP	SWING
Dobell/RobertsonNP	13/8	505	35	50	8	46	-7
Lindsay		Lon.	14/8	1038	32	60	3	36	-15
Lyne		NP	14/8	504	26	51	7	41	+3
New England	NP	14/8	504	24	53	5	34	+1
Kingsford Smith	RT	15/8	610	38	47	10	48	-7
McMahon		RT	15/8	631	45	50	2	47	-11
Blaxland	RT	15/8	636	50	47	3	52	-10
Bennelong	RT	15/8	631	28	64	8	35	-12
Macquarie	JWS	15/8	710	35	51	8	45	-4
Lindsay		JWS	15/8	578	35	57	3	39	-12
Greenway	JWS	15/8	570	44	46	1	51	0
Banks		JWS	15/8	542	43	50	4	47	-4
Werriwa		Gal.	20/8	548	41	48	5	48	-9
Reid		Gal.	20/8	557	38	50	9	47	-6
Parramatta	Gal.	20/8	561	44	45	4	50	-4
Lindsay		Gal.	20/8	566	41	50	3	46	-5
Greenway	Gal.	20/8	585	45	46	3	49	-2
Barton		Gal.	20/8	551	44	44	9	52	-5
Banks		Gal.	20/8	557	40	47	6	48	-3
Barton		Gal.	20/8	575	44	44	9	52	-5
Banks		Gal.	20/8	575	40	47	6	48	-3
K-S/Page/E-M	NP	26/8	601	37	47	11	48	-7
ALP marginals*	NP	26/8	800	34	52	7	43	-9
McMahon		JWS	28/8	482	44	52	3	47	-11

Average swing								-6.1

* Parramatta/Reid/Banks/Lindsay/Greenway.								

VICTORIA
				N	ALP	L-NP	GRN	2PP	SWING
Deakin		RT	15/8	619	36	50	13	47	-4
Corangamite	RT	15/8	633	36	54	10	44	-6
Melbourne	RT	15/8	860	35	24	35
Indi		RT	15/8	611	18	47	6
Corangamite	JWS	15/8	587	36	48	10	47	-3
Aston		JWS	15/8	577	29	59	8	37	-12
La Trobe	Gal.	20/8	575	36	45	12	49	-3
Corangamite	Gal.	20/8	575	35	52	9	44	-6
Chisholm	Gal.	20/8	575	46	45	7	48	-8
ALP marginals*	NP	28/8	800	34	47	13	47	-4
McEwen		JWS	28/8	540	35	47	6	45	-14
Bendigo		JWS	28/8	588	40	40	9	51	-9

Average swing								-6.9

* La Trobe/Deakin/Corangamite								

QUEENSLAND
				N	ALP	L-NP	GRN	2PP	SWING
Griffith	RT	05/8	702	48	43	8	46	-12
Forde		RT	08/8	725	40	48	4	46	-2
Forde		Lon.	15/8	1160	34	56	4	40	-8
Forde		JWS	15/8	568	33	54	4	40	-8
Brisbane	JWS	15/8	607	36	50	9	46	-3
LNP marginals*	NP	20/8	1382	32	54	5	40	-8
Forde		NP	20/8	502	38	48	5	46	-2
Griffith	Lon.	21/8	958	38	47	11	48	-10
Griffith	NP	22/8	500	37	48	12	48	-10
Lilley		JWS	28/8	757	40	48	5	46	-7
Griffith	JWS	28/8	551	48	40	7	57	-1
Blair		Gal.	29/8	604	39	40	8	50	-4
Dawson		Gal.	29/8	550	34	48	4	43	-5
Griffith	Gal.	29/8	655	41	37	12	54	-4
Herbert		Gal.	29/8	589	36	47	6	45	-3
ALP marginals**	NP	30/8	800	38	42	8	49	-4

Average swing								-5.9

* Brisbane/Forde/Longman/Herbert/Dawson/Bonner/Flynn/Fisher
** Moreton/Petrie/Lilley/Capricornia/Blair/Rankin/Oxley								

WESTERN AUSTRALIA
				N	ALP	L-NP	GRN	2PP	SWING
Brand		Gal.	29/8	660	42	42	10	52	-1
Hasluck		Gal.	29/8	553	34	46	10	45	-4
Perth		Gal.	29/8	550	47	35	13	58	+2

Average swing								-1.2								

SOUTH AUSTRALIA
				N	ALP	L-NP	GRN	2PP	SWING
Hindmarsh	Gal.	22/8	586	41	44	10	50	-6
Wakefield	Gal.	26/8	575	44	35	7	55	-6
Adelaide	Gal.	29/8	571	40	39	12	54	-4

Average swing								-5.0

TASMANIA
				N	ALP	L-NP	GRN	2PP	SWING
Bass		RT	22/8	541	30	52	8	42	-15
Braddon		RT	22/8	588	36	51	4	43	-14
Denison		RT	22/8	563	19	24	11	
Franklin	RT	22/8	544	30	39	16	51	-10
Lyons		RT	22/8	549	30	47	11	44	-18
Bass		RT	03/9	659	28	54	10	41	-16

Average swing								-14.7

AVERAGE SWING BY POLLSTER
				N	 	 	 	 	SWING
Galaxy				22					-4.3
Newspoll			10					-4.7
JWS Research			13					-6.8
ReachTEL			16					-8.6
Lonergan			3					-11.3

Three more polls have emerged over the past 24 hours, though some of them already seem like old news. ReachTEL in particular will shortly be superseded when the results of the third such poll in consecutive days are revealed on Seven Sunrise at 6am. All three polls, together with new state breakdowns, have been thrown into the BludgerTrack mix. In turn:

• A Galaxy phone poll of 1303 respondents has the Coalition leading 53-47 on two-party preferred from primary votes of 35% for Labor, 45% for the Coalition, 9% for the Greens and 5% for the Palmer United Party. Full results including attitudinal questions from GhostWhoVotes.

• ReachTEL has Labor’s primary vote at 32.7%, compared with 35.3% on the result from the day before, with the Coalition down from 44.2% to 43.6% and the Greens up from 9.7% to 10.0%. The Palmer United Party meanwhile charges onward from 4.4% to 6.1%. This poll too has the Coalition leading 53-47 on two-party preferred. UPDATE: No need to amend the headline, because today’s poll is apparently 53-47 as well.

• Essential Research has an online poll of 1035 respondents with Labor on 35% of the primary vote (steady on Monday’s result), the Coalition on 43% (down one) and the Greens on 10% (steady). I’m also told the poll has the Palmer United Party on 4%, as did Monday’s result. On two-party preferred the Coalition lead is at 52-48, down from 53-47 on Monday.

UPDATE: Morgan has a poll of 3939 respondents conducted last night and the night before by SMS, phone (live interview I assume) and online which has Labor on 31.5%, the Coalition on 45%, the Greens on 9.5% and the Palmer United Party on 6.5%. The published two-party preferred figure is 53.5-46.5 to the Coalition, which I presume to be respondent-allocated. State breakdowns are promised this afternoon, and there will be a “final poll” both conducted and released this evening.

UPDATE 2: The Guardian has a Lonergan Research automated phone poll of 862 respondents showing the Coalition lead at a narrow 50.8-49.2, with primary votes of 34% for Labor, 42% for the Coalition, 14% for the Greens and a relatively modest 10% for “others”. It also features, for what it’s worth (not much in my experience), Senate voting intention: 29% Labor, 40% Coalition, 16% Greens and 8% “others”. This seems consistent with the general pattern of Senate polling to inflate the vote for the Greens (and, back in the day, the Democrats).

UPDATE 3: Channel Nine reports tomorrow’s Nielsen poll has the Coalition leading 54-46.

I’m running the above headline essentially because I have no new poll to trumpet for the following assortment of bits-and-pieces. The latest addition is yesterday’s large-sample ReachTEL poll, which was a relatively good result for Labor taking into account the past lean to the Coalition in this series. Its inclusion caused a 0.6% shift in Labor’s favour without affecting the seat projection, mostly because the improvement was concentrated in Victoria where there are few marginal seats. This isn’t the first time recently that the addition of a ReachTEL result has caused BludgerTrack to move in Labor’s favour, which raises the possibility that the series is not as pro-Coalition as it used to be. If so, the addition of the result with out-of-date bias adjustments attached might be causing the present BludgerTrack numbers to flatter Labor slightly. There has apparently been, for the second evening running, a poll conducted overnight by ReachTEL which will have been unveiled on Seven Sunrise by the time most of you are reading this.

(UPDATE: A less good result today for Labor, and another good one for the Palmer United Party. Labor’s primary vote is down to 32.7% and the Coalition’s up to 43.6%, with the Greens on 10.0% and Palmer on 6.1%. Two-party preferred is 53-47 to the Coalition. ReachTEL also has a very ugly result for Labor from the Tasmanian seat of Bass, courtesy of the Launceston Examiner, with Liberal candidate Andrew Nikolic on 51.8% and Labor member Geoff Lyons on 26.6%.)

Now to those bits and pieces. First, I address what looks to be one of the election’s most significant imponderables: the share of the vote that will go to micro-parties in the Senate. Much hinges on the answer, given the tightness of the preference arrangements between micro-parties and the extremely limited value of polling as a guide to the smaller details of Senate voting patterns. Tim Colebatch of Fairfax has run reports over the past week based based on what Antony Green’s Senate election calcalators come up with when seemingly plausible vote share scenarios are plugged into them, which have been partly inspired by simulations conducted by Poll Bludger commenter Truth Seeker (who details them on his own blog).

One particularly headline-grabbing observation was that Pauline Hanson might succeed in her bid for a New South Wales Senate seat at the expense of Arthur Sinodinos, who has the number three position on the Coalition ticket in New South Wales. Since Labor, the Coalition and the Greens all have Hanson last on their preference order, this can only happen if she and the various parties feeding her preferences collectively amount to more than a quota (14.3%). Colebatch argues that this is highly plausible: “In 2010, 29 micro-parties won 14 per cent of the vote between them. This time there will be 41 of them, and disillusioned Labor supporters could swell their collective vote to 20 per cent – easily enough for a Senate quota.”

This appears to assume that collective vote share of micro-parties will continue to expand as more of them enter the field. Evidence from the last three elections, which provide a common footing in that the Democrats and One Nation had faded from minor to micro-party status, provides some support for this. Excluding the unusual circumstance of South Australia in 2007, when Nick Xenophon polled a full quota in his own right, there are 17 state-level observations for modelling the relationship between the number of Senate groups and the vote share for micro-parties (which I take to mean everyone other than Labor, the Coalition and the Greens). The model I have derived is 0.243+(0.283*A)+(0.681*B), where A is the number of Senate groups and B is the “others” vote in the House of Representatives from the state in question. This has an R-squared of 0.517 and a p-value of 0.006, which is to say that the model explains 51.7% of the variation in these 17 results and has a 99.4% chance of being better than no model at all.

With unprecedented numbers of Senate groups at this election ranging from 23 in Tasmania to 44 in New South Wales, this suggests “others” votes ranging from 12.9% to 20.5% (going off the BludgerTrack projections for the lower house “others” vote), which is well in line with Colebatch’s expectations. However, there’s a considerable theoretical problem with the model in that it presumes the relationship to be perfectly linear. If this were so, the major party vote would disappear altogether if only enough micro-parties took the field. In reality, the rate of increase has to taper off, and the meagre sample of observations available offers no insight as to point at which it does so. My own guess though is that it kicks in fairly sharply before we reach the stage where we can start talking of an aggregate micro-party vote approaching 20%.

To offer some historic guidance as to the sorts of numbers you should be punching into the Senate calcalators, the table below displays the vote for micro-parties of various kinds in each state. “Religious” includes the Democratic Labour Party, although they no doubt occupy something of a grey area. The “right” category is exclusive of the “religious” one. “Left” is defined broadly to incorporate the Democrats and all environmentalist concerns, even ostensibly conservative ones. There were also parties and independents that were deemed not to fall into any of these categories, so the “total” column is not simply an aggregate of the other three.

2010		Relig.	Right	Left	Total
NSW		3.63	5.55	3.37	13.82
Victoria	5.35	3.83	3.28	13.2
Queensland	4.31	7.59	3.61	16.43
WA		3.71	2.66	2.81	9.92
SA		5	2.65	2.55	11.11
Tasmania	1.69	2.24	0.66	5.36
TOTAL		4.16	4.81	3.18	13.13

2007				
NSW		3.83	3.35	2.44	10.17
Victoria	3.77	1.24	3.16	8.72
Queensland	2.76	6.73	3.04	13.08
WA		3.57	1.1	1.84	7.04
SA		3.97	1.68	1.68	22.25
Tasmania	2.67	0.19	0.78	4.38
TOTAL		3.48	2.97	2.57	10.71

2004				
NSW		3.17	3.73	3.88	12.17
Victoria	4.16	1.55	4.18	10.98
Queensland	3.37	9.34	4.09	18.05
WA		2.73	2.82	3.05	9.22
SA		3.98	1.53	3.95	10.02
Tasmania	3.03	0.16	0.82	7.04
TOTAL		3.42	2.93	3.84	12.22

Now to some scattered bits of news for around the traps that I have recently used to supplement the seat-by-seat election guide:

Indi (Liberal 9.0%):Liberals have been telling journalists of serious concerns for Sophie Mirabella’s hold on Indi, where she faces a well-organised challenge from independent Cathy McGowan. The Guardian reports on widespread opinion polling being conducted in the electorate; the Weekly Times reports that Labor are campaigning strongly to boost McGowan; and The Australian reports some in the Liberal Party have been urging Tony Abbott to visit the electorate. The contest is another source of friction between the coalition parties, with former state Nationals MP Ken Jasper among those who are throwing their weight behind McGowan.

Melbourne (Greens 6.0% versus Labor): The Greens have been spruiking a poll of 400 respondents conducted for them by Galaxy showing Adam Bandt’s primary vote up 4% since the 2010 election, with “as many as four in 10” Liberal voters in the seat planning to ignore the direction of their party’s how-to-vote card that voters should favour Labor ahead of the Greens in their preference allocation. This is actually in line with the 35% rate of leakage in inner Melbourne when the Liberals likewise directed preferences against the Greens at the 2010 state election, which nonetheless wasn’t high enough to win them any of the seats they were anticipating. But taken together with the purported primary vote swing, it suggests a very close result.

McMahon (Labor 7.8%): The Liberal candidate for Chris Bowen’s western Sydney seat, Liverpool area police superintendent Ray King, has been defended by a series of police figures and corruption investigators after Labor claimed he had a “close friend” in Roger Rogerson, the notorious detective who was imprisoned in 1990 for perverting the course of justice. The claim has been denied by Rogerson as well as King, with retired assistant commissioner Geoff Schuberg complaining of a “grubby, baseless smear campaign”.

Forde (Liberal National 1.6%):The Australian reports that Forde MP Bert van Manen, who is fighting off a challenge from Peter Beattie, was the half-owner and recently resigned director of a financial planning firm which owed creditors more than $1.5 million when it collapsed last year. The report says administrators KPMG had told creditors of “unreasonable director-related transactions” behind the collapse. A Liberal spokesperson was quoted saying van Manen had personally settled with the main credtior, Westpac, but no comment was offered on $325,000 owed to three further creditors.

Greenway (Labor 0.9%): The Sydney Morning Herald observes a “systemic” silence among Liberal candidates in Sydney, “with multiple examples emerging of candidates pulling out of events or interviews”. The low profile assumed by Greenway MP Jaymes Diaz has been particularly widely noted, after he failed to show for a candidates forum in Blacktown last week.

Herbert (Liberal National 2.2%) and Dawson (Liberal National 2.4%): Sid Maher of The Australian identifies marginal seats on the central Queensland coast as the main targets for the Coalition’s promised curtailing of marine protected areas, a pitch at commercial and recreational fishers. A similar promise before the 2010 election was “credited with delivering the seat of Dawson”, by persons unidentified.

As part of my ongoing endeavour to bring the seat-by-seat election guide up to speed on potentially interesting seats that had previously fallen through the net, today I review the last seat which had remained unattended to in the potential Labor disaster zone of Tasmania.

Known until 1982 as Wilmot, Lyons covers what remains of Tasmania after the north-west coast (Braddon), north-east coast (Bass), central Hobart (Denison) and Hobart’s outskirts (Franklin) are naturally ordered along community of interest lines. It thus includes small towns on either side of Tasmania’s pronounced north-south divide, including New Norfolk outside Hobart and the southern outskirts of Launceston, along with fishing towns and tourist centres on the east coast and rural territory in between. The seat has moved with the state’s distinct electoral rhythms over the decades, being held by the Liberals from 1975 to 1993 and Labor ever since.

As Wilmot the seat was won for Labor in 1929 by the man whose name it now bears, Joseph Lyons, who had been Tasmanian Premier up until his minority government’s defeated in 1928. After assuming the position of Postmaster-General in Jim Scullin’s newly elected Labor government, Lyons and his followers split from the party in a dispute over economic policy in response to the Depression. Joining with the opposition to become the leader of the new conservative United Australia Party, Lyons emerged Prime Minister after a landslide win at the December 1931, and remained so until his death in 1939.

Labor briefly resumed its hold on the seat by winning the by-election held after Lyons’s death, but it was for the United Australian Party by Allan Guy at the next general election the following year. It next changed hands against the trend of a swing away from Labor at the 1946 election, when Guy was unseated by Labor’s Gil Duthie, who would hold the seat for nearly three decades until all five Tasmanian seats went from Labor to Liberal in 1975. The 9.9% swing that delivered the seat to Liberal candidate Max Burr the seat in 1975 was cemented by an 8.0% swing at the next election in 1977, and the Franklin dam issue ensured the entire state remained on side with the Liberals in 1983 and 1984. The realignment came when Burr retired at the 1993 election, when the loss of his personal vote combined with a sharp statewide backlash against John Hewson’s proposed goods and services tax to deliver a decisive 5.6% swing to Labor.

The member since has been Dick Adams, a former state government minister who had lost his seat in 1982 whose background is with the Left faction Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union, for which he once worked as an organiser. Adams survived a swing in 1996 before piling 9.3% on to his margin in 1998, enough of a buffer to survive a small swing in 2001 and a large one in 2004 when northern Tasmania reacted against Mark Latham’s forest policies, which had been bitterly opposed by Adams. The reaction against Labor in 2004 was reversed in 2007, when Adams picked up a 5.1% swing, and another strong performance by Labor in Tasmania at the 2010 election boosted his margin a further 4.0%. The Liberals’ candidate for the second election running is Eric Hutchison, a wool marketer with Tasmanian agribusiness company Roberts Limited.

A ReachTEL automated phone poll of 549 respondents conducted two-and-a-half weeks out from the election had Eric Hutchison with a commanding lead: 54% to 34% on the primary vote after exclusion of the undecided, and 55.8-44.2 on two-party preferred.

This morning’s Seven Sunrise (which the Liberal Party is carpet-bombing with advertising) has results from a ReachTEL automated phone poll, reporting primary votes of 35% for Labor, 45% for the Coalition and 4% for the Palmer United Party (remarkable unanimity on that figure from pollsters lately). (UPDATE: Full results here. The Coalition vote turns out to round to 44%, not 45%, and the Greens are on 9.7%.) The Coalition’s two-party preferred lead is at 52-48, down from 53-47 a week ago. Tony Abbott leads Kevin Rudd 53-47 on ReachTEL’s all-inclusive preferred prime minister rating, and 51% of respondents reported they favoured abolishing the carbon tax against 34% opposed.

In an otherwise quiet day on the polling front yesterday, AMR Research has published its third online poll of federal voting intention, conducted between Friday and Monday from a sample of 1101, showing Labor on 34%, the Coalition on 44%, and the Greens on 10%.

Finally, to give you something to look at, I’ve extended yesterday’s exercise of providing a state-level BludgerTrack chart for Queensland across all mainland states, with two-party preferred shown along with the primary vote. Once again, black represents the combined “others” vote. Note that the data gets “noisier” as sample sizes diminish for the smaller states. This is not as bad as it looks though with respect to the trendlines, as the outliers are generally from the smallest samples and the model is weighted to limit the influence.

Three Queensland seats newly fleshed out in the seat-by-seat electorate guide:

Fairfax (Liberal National 7.0%)

Fairfax covers the Sunshine Coast from Maroochydore north to Coolum Beach, the Bruce Highway from Palmwoods north to Eumundi, and a short stretch of the Mary River around Kenilworth. At the time of its creation with the expansion of parliament in 1984 it was centred around Noosa, which had previously switched back and forth between Wide Bay and Fisher. The creation of Flynn at the 2007 election caused Fairfax to be reoriented to the south, with Noosa and its surrounds returning to their old home of Wide Bay and Fairfax accommodating a smaller but more populous region inland of Maroochydore.

The seat’s inaugural member was Evan Adermann, who had held Fisher for the Nationals since 1972. When Adermann retired in 1990, the seat was contested for the Nationals by Senator and former Treasury secretary John Stone. However, this was at the post-Fitzgerald nadir of the Queensland Nationals’ fortunes, and Democrats preferences helped deliver the seat to Liberal candidate Alex Somlyay, a former private secretary to Adermann. Candidates occasionally fielded by the Nationals thereafter attracted progressively fewer votes. The seat entered the marginal zone after a One Nation-driven 13.3% swing in 1998 and a 9.4% swing on the back of Kevin Rudd’s strong statewide performance in 2007, but Somlyay added a considerable amount of fat to his margin at the two intervening elections.

Alex Somlyay had made it clear long before time that this term would be at least, and the general expectation was that his Liberal National Party successor would be James McGrath, who was the director of the party’s enormously successful 2012 state election campaign. However, McGrath instead opted to set a cat among the pigeons by contesting preselection for the neighbouring seat of Fisher, whose local branches had long been cultivated by Mal Brough with a view to returning to politics at the expense of sitting member Peter Slipper. McGrath promised local preselectors he would not seek to use Fairfax as a fallback option if his bid for Fisher failed, and he duly opted for a position on the Senate ticket when this transpired. The Fairfax preselection was instead won by Ted O’Brien, the Buderim-based managing director of government relations firm Barton Deakin. O’Brien prevailed over perennial bridesmaid John Conolly, a former coach of the Australian rugby union team who ran unsuccessfully against independent Peter Wellington in Nicklin at the state election, and was a surprise loser of the preselection for the Brisbane seat of Petrie despite having the endorsement of John Howard.

The LNP’s hold on the seat is unlikely to be troubled by Labor, whose candidate is Lifeline crisis line supervisor Elaine Hughes. However, a potential threat to them looms in the substantial form of Clive Palmer, who has targeted the seat for his run at parliament at the head of his newly established Palmer United Party. The value of Palmer’s mining interests has been put by Forbes magazine at $795 million, a chunk of which he is using to bankroll a national television advertising for his party as well as an intensive local campaign in Fairfax. Palmer’s entry into politics came as an associate of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, having been the director of his strikingly successful 1983 state election campaign and a backer of his quixotic bid for the prime ministership in 1987.

Palmer began raising the possibility of an entry into politics early in the current term, initially telegraphing an intention to run for LNP preselection in Wayne Swan’s seat of Lilley, to the consternation of many in the Coalition hierarchy including Tony Abbott. He did not in fact nominate for the Lilley preselection, despite having paid for billboard advertising in the seat, which he said was out of deference to Tony Abbott’s wishes. However, he kept open the possibility of running in either Fairfax or Kennedy. Palmer meanwhile became an increasingly loose cannon so far as his party was concerned, criticising Newman government ministers and complaining of the influence of lobbyists. This caused his membership of the party to be suspended, and he resigned from it a fortnight later and announced his intention to form his party. In March he announced that Fairfax was to be the base from which he was “running to be the Prime Minister of Australia”.

Hinkler (Liberal National 10.4%)

Hinkler covers a 90 kilometre stretch of the central Queensland coast, encompassing Bundaberg at the northern end and Hervey Bay in the south, and extends inland to accommodate Childers. It was created with the enlargement of parliament in 1984, and for most of its existence extended north to Gladstone. That changed with the creation of Flynn at the 2007 election, which caused Hinkler to be pushed southwards to accommodate Hervey Bay, previously in Wide Bay. Labor held the seat from 1987 to 1993, but it has otherwise been in Nationals and more recently Liberal National Party hands. The member since 1993 has been Paul Neville, who is bowing out at this election.

Neville enjoyed something of a charmed electoral life during his two decades in the seat, surviving by 510 votes in 1998 (when One Nation polled 19.3%, their preferences saving Neville from a substantial primary vote deficit against Labor) and 64 votes in 2001, and benefiting considerably from redistributions in 2004 and 2007. The latter gave him a timely 6.5% boost by detaching Labor-voting Gladstone, and he needed nearly every bit of it to survive a 6.7% swing at the 2007 election that reduced his margin to 1.7%. He may well have been saved from defeat by the performance of Labor candidate Garry Parr, who made headlines when he told the parents of a soldier serving with British forces in Afghanistan they were “English warmongers”. The seat’s former Labor member, Brian Courtice, also emerged in Coalition television commercials to inform the nation that “Kevin Rudd couldn’t go three rounds with Winnie the Pooh, so there’s no way he can stand up to the union bosses”. Neville enjoyed the full force of the statewide reversal in 2010, his swing of 8.9% being the third biggest in the state.

The New Liberal National Party candidate is Keith Pitt, who comes from a cane farming background and is now the managing director of workplace health and safety consultancy the Australian Safety & Training Alliance. Others mentioned as preselection contenders were Cathy Heidrich, a former newspaper proprietor and media and research officer to Paul Neville; Len Fehlhaber, a primary school principal; Cathy Heidrich, a media/research officer; Greg McMahon, a probation and parole officer; and Geoff Redpath, a Hervey Bay accountant; Chris McLoughlin, a staffer for state Bundaberg MP Jack Dempsey; and Bill Trevor, former mayor of Isis. Other candidates at the election are Labor’s Leanne Donaldson, a Bundaberg human relations consultant, and two former state MPs in David Dalgleish, who won Hervey Bay for One Nation in 1998 and is now running for Katter’s Australian Party, and Rob Messenger, Nationals-turned-independent member for Burnett who lost his seat last year and is running for the Palmer United Party. Hinkler is one of six Queensland seats where Katter’s Australian Party is directing preferences to Labor, as part of a preference deal that sees the KAP get the second preference on Labor’s Queensland Senate ticket.

Flynn (Liberal National 3.6%)

One of four new seats wrought by Queensland’s ongoing population explosion since 1998, Flynn was created at the 2007 election and was won the first time by Labor and the second time by the Liberal National Party. Central to the electorate is Gladstone, which had previously been accommodated by Hinkler since its creation in 1984 and Capricornia previously. It also encompasses the Capricornia Highway towns out to Emerald in the west, and the Burnett Highway through Monto to Gayndah in the south. The seat was substantially reduced in geographic size by the redistribution before the 2010 election, which transferred the interior Barcaldine, Blackall Tambo, Longreach and Winton shires to Maranoa and compensated it with the more densely populated Mount Morgan area south of Rockhampton.

With a Nationals margin of 7.9% on its creation, Flynn emerged as a key seat at the 2007 election, at which expectations of a dramatic swing in Queensland featured heavily in Labor’s calculations. Labor nominated solicitor and former Gladstone councillor Chris Trevor, who as candidate for the state seat of Gladstone a year earlier had done very well to reduce independent MP Liz Cunningham’s margin from 11.2% to 2.0%. Trevor picked up a swing of 7.9% that was slightly higher than the statewide result of 7.5%, and proved enough to give him a slender 253 vote victory. The shift to Labor was especially pronounced in its traditionally strongest areas: double-digit swings were recorded in Gladstone and surrounding areas nearer the coast, such that Labor won the latter booths en masse after losing them all in 2004.

Trevor reportedly had his path to preselection in 2007 smoothed by Kevin Rudd, and he publicly contemplated quitting politics when Rudd was dumped as leader. The 2010 redistribution appeared to do Trevor a good turn by substituting Nationals heartland for the declining mining area around Mount Morgan, which boosted his margin by 2.1%. However, that did not avail him against a swing that was roughly in line with the state average at 5.8%, and was particularly forceful in the area newly added by the redistribution. The victorious Liberal National Party candidate was Ken O’Dowd, owner of Busteed Building Supplies in Gladstone and further noted in the local press as a “racing identity”. Chris Trevor will again contest Flynn for Labor, having resumed his Gladstone legal practice since his electoral defeat. Flynn is another of the six Queensland seats where Katter’s Australian Party is directing preferences to Labor, as part of a preference deal that sees the KAP get the second preference on Labor’s Queensland Senate ticket.

Two new polls out today from Queensland, one being another of Newspoll’s composite marginal seat jobs, the other a statewide Nielsen survey of 1014 respondents. Taken together, the two continue a confounding pattern throughout this campaign of localised polling from Queensland painting a grimmer picture for Labor than polling conducted statewide. The Newspoll survey targets 800 respondents in seven of the state’s eight Labor-held seats – Moreton (1.1%), Petrie (2.5%), Lilley (3.2%), Capricornia (3.7%), Blair (4.2%), Rankin (5.4%) and Oxley (5.8%) – the odd man out being Kevin Rudd’s seat of Griffith (8.5%). The combined primary vote results are 38% for Labor (down from 42.4% at the 2010 election), 42% for the Coalition (up from 39.8%), 8% for the Greens (down from 11.0%) and 12% for “others” (up substantially from 6.8% – hold that thought). On two-party preferred, the result is 51-49 in favour of the Coalition, a swing of 4.7%. Importantly though, this has been determined based on preference flows from the 2010 election. Hold that thought as well.

The Nielsen poll as published in the Fairfax papers comes with a headline two-party preferred figure of 53-47, which is at least superficially encouraging for Labor in that it suggests a swing of 2% from 2010. Unlike the Newspoll result, this comes from respondent-allocated rather than previous-election preferences (hold that thought still further). However, the real story the poll has to tell lies in the primary vote figures. Labor is at just 31%, down from 34.6% in 2010, but the Coalition is also down slightly, from 46.5% to 45%. The Greens are on 8%, down on 10.9% at the 2010 election but at the high end of what they’ve been getting generally in Queensland in recent times (perhaps reflecting an improving trend nationally which is perceptible on the BludgerTrack charts). However, the really interesting result is that the Palmer United Party is on 8%, putting into the shade Katter’s Australian Party on 4%.

This cannot dismissed as one freak result, as it has been corroborated by other polling. Roy Morgan has twice had occasion over the last week to trumpet this phenomenon going on beneath the surface of its “others” result. The first poll, published on Friday, had the Palmer United Party at 4% nationally and 6.5% in Queensland. The second, published yesterday, maintained the 4% national result while finding the Queensland figure up to 7.5%. I’m advised that Essential Research also had the party at 4% nationally in its polling this week and at 9% in Queensland, after it barely registered in previous weeks. In fact, the three sets of Queensland polling I have seen over the past few days have all turned in remarkably similar results for Labor, Coalition, Greens and “others” alike.

A clearer picture emerges if the totality of polling from Queensland is plotted out since the return of Kevin Rudd. The chart below maps out the trend from 37 such polls from seven different pollsters, with the usual BludgerTrack accuracy weightings and bias adjustments applied. Black represents the combined “others” vote.

The starting point is a landslip in Labor’s favour after Gillard was deposed, which appeared to consolidate for a fortnight before entering a long and steady slide. Then came the announcement of the election date at the start of August and a two-week period where Queensland appeared to buck the national trend of the time by moving to Labor. This may very well have been a dividend from the recruitment of Peter Beattie, however much media reportage and individual seat polls might have suggested that there wasn’t one.

A new phase then appeared to begin a fortnight ago with the sharp rise of the “others” vote. This has coincided with an onslaught of television advertising from Clive Palmer which has seemed almost to rival that of the major parties. Whereas Palmer’s earlier advertising looked like it belonged on Vine rather than network television, his current efforts appear rehearsed and properly thought out – perhaps even market-researched. Most importantly, the substance of their message – tax cuts which pay for themselves and pension schemes that boost the economy by $70 billion – may well be striking a chord in offering voters the ever more scarce political commodity of “vision”, hallucinogenic though it may be in this particular case.

The other point to be noted about the surge in the “others” vote over the past fortnight is that it looks to be coming more at Labor’s expense than the Coalition’s. For one thing, this has significant implications for the party’s prospects of actually converting votes into seats. Mark Kenny of Fairfax’s take on the Nielsen result is that while it is “almost certain Mr Palmer’s party will not win a seat in the House of Representatives, it is in with a chance of gaining a spot in the Senate”. However, I’m not so sure about this on either count.

Clive Palmer himself is running in the smartly chosen Sunshine Coast seat of Fairfax, where the retirement of Alex Somlyay relieves him of the burden of having to take on a sitting member. The first task facing Palmer is to outpoll Labor, who scored 27.3% in 2010. Gouging votes directly at their expense will make that task a lot easier, as presumably will the fact the Greens (who polled a weighty 18.0% last time) are directing their preferences to him. Palmer’s next hurdle (inappropriate as athletic metaphors might be in his case) would be to overcome Liberal National Party candidate Ted O’Brien, which might not be so easy given Alex Somlyay’s 49.5% vote in 2010. Some credible seat-level polling from Fairfax would be very interesting to see. As for the Senate, lead candidate Glenn Lazarus faces the complication that James Blundell of Katter’s Australian Party has done better out of preferences, standing to directly receive (among other things) Labor’s surplus after the election of its second candidate.

The other point to be made regarding a movement from Labor to the Palmer United Party relates to the issue of deriving two-party preferred results from primary votes in opinion polls. This is always a slightly vexed question, as for most voters the act of vote choice runs no deeper than simply deciding “who to vote for”, be it a party or its leader. If that choice is for a minor party, the question of preference allocation – secondary though it may be for the voter concerned – is the thing that really matters with respect to determining the result. Since the decision is often driven by a how-to-vote card the voter does not see until they arrive at the polling booth, and is in many cases entirely arbitrary, there is limited value in an opinion pollster asking the voter what they propose to do.

For this reason, it has become standard practice over the past decade for pollsters to instead allocate minor party preferences according to how they flowed at the previous election. Only Morgan persists in favouring respondent allocation, with Nielsen conducting both measures while normally using the previous election preferences for its top-line results. Not coincidentally, the primacy of this method has emerged over a period in which the minor party landscape has remained fairly stable, with the dominant Greens being supplemented by a shifting aggregation of smaller concerns, most of them being right-wing in one way or another. However, it was always clear that the utility of the method would be undermined if substantial new minor parties emerged, particularly on the right. For example, the result of the 1996 election would have offered no guidance in allocating votes for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation when it exploded on to the scene a year later.

So it is with the Palmer United Party, at least so far as Queensland is concerned. It might have been anticipated that the party’s conservative provenance would have caused its preferences to behave much as other right-wing minor parties to emerge out of Queensland have done over the years, but the Nielsen poll throws that into doubt by finding that 62% of Palmer United Party voters (together with 55% of Katter’s Australian Party voters) intend to give their preference to Labor. It should be borne in mind here that these sub-samples are extremely small, and consequently have double-digit error margins. Eighty-six per cent of Greens voters said they would preference Labor, which is well above what’s plausible. Even so, it’s perhaps telling that the most recent national Nielsen poll, published the weekend before last, had the Coalition’s lead in Queensland at 55-45 on previous election preferences, but only 52-48 on respondent-allocated preferences – an enormous difference as these things go.

Taken together with the trends observable in the primary vote chart above, it would appear that the last fortnight has seen Labor lose votes in Queensland to the Palmer United Party, and that this pool of voters contains a much larger proportion of Labor identifiers than the non-Greens minor party vote in 2010. So while the recent rise of the Palmer United Party might not be good news for Labor in absolute terms, it may cause two-party preferred projections based on the normal pattern of minor party vote behaviour to be skewed against them. This certainly applies to the BludgerTrack model in its present form, for which I might look at adding a Queensland-specific fix (with the qualification that anything I come up with will of necessity be somewhat arbitrary).

UPDATE: AMR Research has published its third online poll of federal voting intention, conducted between Friday and Monday from a sample of 1101, and it has Labor at 34%, the Coalition at 44% and the Greens at 10%.

GhostWhoVotes tweets the latest weekly campaign Newspoll has the Coalition leading 54-46, up from 53-47 last week. Labor’s primary vote, which was up three last week, is this week down four to 33%, with the Coalition down one to 46% and the Greens up one to 10%. It follows that “others”, which was down three in last week’s poll, is this week up four. Tony Abbott has hit the lead as preferred prime minister, Rudd’s 54-40 lead last week turning into a 43-41 deficit. Rudd has also hit a new low on his net personal ratings, his approval down four to 32% and disapproval up six to 58%. Tony Abbott is down one to 41% and up two to 51%. The sample size on the poll is the normal size, in this case 1116.

Morgan has also reported its weekly multi-mode poll, this one from a sample of 3746 respondents contacted by face-to-face, online and SMS surveying, which has the Labor primary vote at 34% (down half a point), the Coalition down two to 43% and the Greens unchanged at 11%. This pans out to 52-48 on two-party preferred according to the Morgan’s headline respondent-allocated preferences figure (down from 53-47 last week), and 52.5-47.5 on the more usually favoured previous election preferences method (down from 54-46). It’s interesting to observe that Morgan concurs with Newspoll in finding a spike in the “others” vote, up 2.5% to 12%. Morgan particularly spruiks a result of 4% for the Palmer United Party nationally and 7.5% in Queensland, suggesting Clive Palmer’s intensive television advertising might be achieving results.

BludgerTrack has been updated with both sets of results, including the state breakdowns from Morgan, causing the two-party preferred to shift 0.7% in favour of the Coalition, and the Coalition to gain seats on the seat projection in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia, while losing one in South Australia.

UPDATE: Finally, Essential Research jumps on board, breaking with its normal form to publish weekly results from throughout the campaign rather than its fortnightly rolling averages. The latest week’s sample has the Coalition leading 53-47, out from 51-49 a week ago (the published 50-50 being down to a stronger result for Labor the previous week), with primary votes on 44% for the Coalition (up one), 35% for Labor (down one) and 10% for the Greens (down one).