Category: Federal Election 2013

The two territories have each been represented by two Senators since the 1975 election, following Whitlam government legislation which survived High Court challenges in 1975 and 1977. Whereas the state’s Senators serve six year terms which are fixed but for the possibility of a double dissolution, the territory Senators’ terms are tied to the House of Representatives, so that the Senators facing re-election had likewise done so in 2010.

The formula for election is the same as for the states, but it has very different consequences given that two Senators are elected rather than six. The quota in either case is one divided by the number of seats up for election plus one, so a territory election quota is 33.3% rather than 14.3% at a half-Senate state election, or 7.7% at a double dissolution. A party is thus guaranteed of a seat if it wins a third of the primary vote, which the major parties have only failed to manage on a small number of occasions: the Liberals in the Australian Capital Territory in 1983, 1984 and 1998, and the Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory on the one occasion they faced opposition from the Nationals in 1987. On each occasion, preferences were easily enough to get their candidates over the line.

Consequently, none of the territory Senate elections has produced a result other than one seat each for Labor and the main Coalition party. The most likely scenarios to disturb this would involve one or other major party winning both seats, in effect requiring it to win two-thirds of the two-party preferred vote, or one party failing to reach a quota and the preferences of minor parties and the surplus of the other major party coalescing behind a minor candidate. The only credible contender for the latter in the ACT is the Greens, whose task has been made more difficult by the Liberals placing them last on their preference order, such that it will no longer be enough for them to simply overtake the Liberals. However, as Antony Green notes, Labor could potentially face that difficulty in the Northern Territory, with all preferences favouring the Australian First Nations Political Party, an Aboriginal rights party which polled rather modestly at last year’s Northern Territory election. It would first need to get ahead of the Greens, whose own chances are negated by the Coalition having them last on preferences.

Australian Capital Territory

Labor’s Senate seat in the AUstralian Capital Territory has been held since 1996 by Kate Lundy, who became the party’s youngest ever female member of the federal parliament with her election at the age of 28 (since surpassed by Kate Ellis). Lundy served in opposition as parliamentary secretary from August 1997 and a junior minister from after the 1998 election, but was dropped when Labor came to power in 2007, perhaps going some way to explain her steadfast support for Julia Gillard during subsequent leadership battles. She recovered her parliamentary secretary status under Gillard after the 2010 election, then returned to the junior ministry in the sport, multicultural affairs and industry and innovation portfolios following Rudd’s failed leadership challenge in February 2012. After Rudd’s return in June she was dropped from sport, but retained her other portfolios. Lundy is a member of the Socialist Left faction.

The Liberal candidate is Leader Zed Seselja, who led the Liberals in the territory parliament from December 2007 and February 2013, including during the unsuccessful 2008 and 2012 election campaigns. Seselja secured preselection at the expense of incumbent Gary Humphries, whom he defeated in a party ballot in February by 114 votes to 84. Humphries had held the seat since 2003, earlier serving as the territory’s Chief Minister from OCtober 2000 to November 2001. Humphries supporters called a general meeting of the territory branch in response to his defeat, complaining that party members had wrongly been excluded from the motion to overturn it was defeated by 168 votes to 138. Success for the motion would reportedly have meant a new ballot encompassing 400 extra party members who were denied the first time around as they had not attended a branch meeting in six months.

The candidate for the Greens is Simon Sheikh, who has achieved a high profile as the founding director of GetUp! Other contestants for the preselection were Kate Hamilton, a former councillor in Leichhardt in inner Sydney, and local party member Stephen Darwin.

Northern Territory

Nigel Scullion has held the Country Liberal Party’s Northern Territory seat since the 2001 election. He had a brief spell as a junior minister in the Howard government, serving in the community services portfolio from January 2007 until its defeat the following November. Scullion sits in parliament with the Nationals, having joined it for parliamentary purposes in 2006 to prevent the Nationals from losing party status after Victorian Senator Julian McGauran defected to the Liberals. He became the Nationals’ deputy leader and Senate leader after the 2007 election defeat, but lost the latter position to Barnaby Joyce at the time Malcolm Turnbull became Liberal leader in September 2008. In opposition he assumed the agriculture, forestry and fisheries portfolios, moving to human services under Turnbull and indigenous affairs when Tony Abbott became leader in December 2009.

Labor’s candidate for the coming election is Nova Peris, who became nationally famous under her married name Nova Peris Kneebone when she became the first Aboriginal woman to win an Olympic gold medal as part of the women’s hockey team. She then switched to athletics and competed in the 400 metres individual and relay teams at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Peris was contentiously anointed as a “captain’s pick” by Julia Gillard in January 2013, redressing the party’s long-running failure to achieve Aboriginal representation in the federal parliament.

Coming in the wake of Labor’s disastrous showing in remote communities at the Northern Territory election the previous August, Gillard’s move seemed well timed. However, it came at the expense of Trish Crossin, who had held the seat since 1998 and was not of the view that the time had come for her to move on, and was achieved by overriding local preselection processes. It was also very widely noted that Crossin had been a supporter of Kevin Rudd’s February 2012 bid to return to the leadership. Vocal critics of the move included two former Labor Deputy Chief Ministers, Marion Scrymgour and Syd Stirling, along with Left faction powerbrokers Doug Cameron and Kim Carr. Scrymgour and another former Territory minister, Karl Hampton, expressed their displeasure by nominating against Peris for the vote by the party’s national executive, and it was reported that “at least two” of its 24 members voted against the Prime Minister’s wishes. There was speculation that Kevin Rudd might overturn Peris’s preselection upon his return to the leadership in June, but this did not transpire.

GhostWhoVotes relates that Galaxy has a national poll showing the Coalition leading 53-47, from primary votes of 35% for Labor, 46% for the Coalition and 10% for the Greens. We also have these latest additions to Galaxy’s series of 550-sample electorate-level automated phone polls:

• Three Perth seats have been targeted for the first electorate-level polls to emerge from Western Australia during the campaign. One of these, for the electorate of Perth, holds another distinction in being the first published opinion poll of any kind during the campaign to show a clear swing to Labor. It has Labor candidate Alannah MacTiernan leading Liberal candidate Darryl Moore by 58-42, compared with Stephen Smith’s 2010 margin of 5.9%. MacTiernan outperformed the state average by about 5% as the unsuccessful candidate for Canning in 2010.

• Less happily for Labor, the second poll shows Liberal member Ken Wyatt with a clear 55-45 lead over Labor candidate Adrian Evans in the state’s most marginal seat of Hasluck, which Wyatt holds for the Liberals on a margin of 0.6%.

• GhostWhoVotes also relates that a Brand poll has both parties on 42% of the primary vote, with no two-party preferred result provided. However, it would presumably give Labor member Gary Gray the lead over his Liberal challenger Donna Gordin. Gray polled 40.8% of the primary vote in 2010 to Gordin’s 39.4% (UPDATE: The two-party preferred turns out to be 52-48 to Labor).

• The other two polls are from Queensland, one being for the Townsville seat of Herbert, where Liberal National Party member Ewen Jones is given a 55-45 lead over Labor candidate Cathy O’Toole, compared with a 2010 margin of 2.2%.

• The second Queensland poll is from Herbert’s southern neighbour Dawson, and it shows LNP member George Christensen well clear of Labor candidate Bronwyn Taha with a lead of 57-43, compared with 2.4% in 2010.

UPDATE: Galaxy, which I have little doubt is doing the most credible work in the electorate-level automated phone poll game, now has polls for two further Queensland seats: one showing Kevin Rudd leading Bill Glasson 54-46 in Griffith, the other showing and Labor’s Shayne Neumann tied 50-50 with the Liberal National Party’s Teresa Harding.

Given the Senate’s logic of providing equal representation to each state regardless of population, Tasmania is the state whose voters have the greatest bearing on its make-up, the ratio of Senators to population being about 1:43,000 compared with roughly 1: 600,000 in New South Wales. Its effect over the past two election has been to tilt the Senate balance of power leftwards, with the state producing successive results of three Labor, two Liberal and one Greens: the only “four left, two right” results in any state at either election. All the indications from opinion polling are that there is little chance of this happening again this time, with Labor facing big losses in the lower house and the Greens carrying baggage from being in coalition with Labor at state level, as well as having lost Bob Brown.

The first six elections held in the era of six-seat half-Senate elections which began in 1990 produced an even division between left and right if the latter is deemed to include independent Brian Harradine, who came from a Labor background but was notable for his Catholic-inspired social conservatism. Harradine served as one of the chamber’s few independents from 1975 until his retirement after the 2004 election, winning re-election with 10.4% of the vote in 1993 and 7.9% in 1998. Harradine’s preferences helped deliver Labor a third seat on the former occasion at the expense of the Greens, but in 1998 fell only narrowly short of making to a third quota off their own bat and did not require Harradine’s preferences to win their third seat.

In the elections not contested by Harradine, the final “left” seat was a contest between the Democrats and the Greens (meaning the party’s predecessor the United Tasmania Group in 1990, the national party not forming until 1992) in which the Greens progressively achieved ascendancy. In 1990 it was Robert Bell of the Democrats who finished ahead of the United Tasmania Group, absorbing their preferences to move ahead of the third Labor candidate and win the seat on the back of their surplus. The Greens’ first win would have to wait until 1996, when Bob Brown returned to politics after ending his 10-year state parliamentary career in 1993 to unsuccessfully contest Denison at that year’s federal election. The Greens under Brown outpolled Robert Bell and the Democrats by 8.7% to 7.1%, and then made it to a quota with their preferences. The Greens were unable to repeat the feat in 1998, falling just short of winning a seat at the expense of the third Labor candidate despite being the beneficiary of preferences from One Nation (who polled 3.6%) as well as the Democrats (3.7%).

That was to be the Greens’ last failure to date, with Bob Brown polling very near a quota in his bid for re-election in 2001 and making good the shortfall with preferences from minor candidates, even before the exclusion of the third Labor candidate. Labor ended up 2.7% short of winning the final seat, the Liberals making it to a third quota off a base vote of 38.8% (2.715 quotas) with preferences from One Nation and a split Democrats ticket. Brown’s state parliamentary successor Christine Milne joined him as a second Tasmanian Greens Senator after the 2004 election, although unfavourable preference arrangements, including a deal between Labor and Family First similar to that which elected Steve Fielding in Victoria, meant she was only narrowly successful despite polling very near to a quota in her own right. Milne made it over the line with help from Labor-turned-independent Senator Shayne Murphy, who polled 2.2% and directed preferneces to her. The surge to the Liberals which bagged them the lower house seats of Bass and Braddon at that election secured them a clear three quotas in the Senate, again limiting Labor to two seats. The Greens burst through the quota mark when Bob Brown stood for re-election in 2007, polling 17.3%, and further improved to 19.7% in 2010 on the back of their best ever national performance, giving Christine Milne a much easier win the second time around. On both occasions the Greens surplus was sufficient to push Labor over the line for a third quota.

The likelihood of a three-left, three-right result at the coming election makes it intuitively likely that the Liberals will elect a third candidate for the first time in 2004. However, the election’s explosion of preference-exchanging micro-parties also raises the possibility that the seat will instead be won by another party of the right. The bar for such a result is raised somewhat in Tasmania because smaller fields of candidates and familiarity with the Hare-Clark system at state level results in a much higher take-up rate for below-the-line voting (20.2% compared with 3.9% nationally). However, the former factor has been diminished this time around by a bloated field of 54 candidates, smashing the state’s previous record of 32. While the Greens have a long way to fall if their hold on the third “left” seat is to be imperilled, they will have few sources of preferences in a Labor-versus-Greens contest should they fall below a quota.

The candidates elected from the number two and number three positions in 2007 have each been promoted a spot following the mid-term retirement of the number one candidate, Nick Sherry. In first position is Carol Brown, a principal of the state’s Left faction who entered the Senate in August 2005 when she filled a vacancy created by the retirement of Sue Mackay. The second position is occupied by Right faction member Catryna Bilyk, a former official with the Australian Services Union who publicly declared her backing for Julia Gillard during Kevin Rudd’s successful leadership challenge in June 2013. Number three on the ticket is Lin Thorp, who filled the vacancy created by Sherry’s departure in May 2012.

Lin Thorp first entered politics after winning election for the state upper house seat of Rumney in 1999, serving as Human Services Minister from September 2008 and then as Education Minister after the March 2010 state election. Her career was interrupted a year later when she was defeated in the periodical election for Rumney by a self-styled “independent Liberal” in Tony Mulder. She then won backing from her Left faction, including from Carol Brown and Premier Lara Giddings, to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Sherry, who had been factionally independent after the eclipse of his old Centre faction. Left powerbroker and Unions Tasmania secretary Kevin Harkins tellingly ruled himself out as a candidate for the Sherry vacancy on the grounds that he wished to stay with the union movement as there was likely to be “a very conservative government in just a tad over 12 months’ time”. Harkins was earlier dumped as the candidate for Franklin in 2007, which it was claimed was down to Kevin Rudd having confused him with Kevin Reynolds of the Western Australian CFMEU. He was again shut out of consideration for the Senate ticket in 2010, allegedly because Rudd did not want to admit to his earlier mistake.

The order of the ticket represents a factional arrangement in which the first and third positions go to the Left and the second to the Right. This was in danger of being disturbed by the merger between the Victorian and Tasmanian branches of the Australian Services Union, which had respectively been associated with their state parties’ Left and Right factions. The approach taken by the union in Tasmania was to delay its transfer to the Left for long enough to leave the existing factional deal undisturbed. Among those displeased by the arrangement was Kevin Harkins, who indicated that the Left should have moved against Bilyk due to her opposition to gay marriage.

The top two positions on the Liberal ticket preserve the order from 2007, being respectively occupied by Richard Colbeck and David Bushby. Colbeck first entered the Senate in February 2002 upon the retirement of Jocelyn Newman, Howard government minister and mother of the current Queensland Premier. He has been at parliamentary secretary since after the 2004 election, currently in the fisheries and forestry and innovation, industry and science portfolios. David Bushby, whose father Max was a 25-year veteran of the state parliament, entered the Senate in August 2007 in place of the retiring Paul Calvert. Like most Tasmanian Senators, Bushby has a low national profile, although he worked to address this in June 2011 by making a “miaow” noise at an unimpressed Penny Wong during a Senate committee hearing. Nothing became of a reported move to have Bushby demoted on the ticket to make way for a woman. Places for women were instead found in the number three position, which has gone to trade and investment adviser Sally Chandler, and number four, occupied by vineyard owner Sarah Courtney. Others in the crowded field of preselection aspirants were Kristen Finnigan, office manager of the Launceston Chamber of Commerce; Sue Hickey, a Hobart alderman; Jane Howlett, twice unsuccessful state election candidate for Lyons; David Fry, a state member for Bass from 2000 to 2002; and Don Morris, former chief-of-staff to state Opposition Leader Will Hodgman and the number three candidate in 2010.

Facing his first federal election for the Greens is Peter Whish-Wilson, who succeeded Bob Brown upon his retirement in June 2012. Whish-Wilson was described at the time by Sid Maher of The Australian as a “wine-growing, surf-riding economist”, and by Gemma Daley of the Financial Review as having “worked in equity capital markets for Merrill Lynch in New York and Melbourne and for Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong, Melbourne and Sydney”. He moved to Tasmania in 2004 and made a name for himself as the operator of Three Wishes Winery and a Gunns pulp mill opponent, running unsuccessfully in 2009 for the state upper house district of Windermere where the proposed mill site was located.

Other minor party candidates include Family First’s Peter Madden, founder of Heal Our Land Ministries and candidate for the Christian Democratic Party against Clover Moore in the seat of Sydney at the New South Wales election in 2011; Katter’s Australian Party’s Geoff Herbert, an agribusinessman from the Central Highlands; and Jacqui Lambie, a former soldier who unsuccessfully sought Liberal preselection for Braddon.

James J relates that Newspoll has published two further aggregated marginal seats polls to join the survey of five Sydney seats published yesterday. One targets the four most marginal Labor seats in New South Wales outside Sydney – Dobell (5.1%), Robertson (1.0%), Page (4.2%) and Eden-Monaro (4.2%) – plus, somewhat messily, the Sydney seat of Kingsford Smith (UPDATE: It gets messier – the Dobell and Robertson component of the poll was conducted, and published, two weeks ago, while the remainder is new polling from the other three seats). The collective result is 53-47 to the Liberals, suggesting a swing of 7%. The primary votes are 48% for the Coalition and 36% for Labor. The other targets the three most marginal Labor seats in Victoria, Corangamite (0.3%), Deakin (0.6%) and La Trobe (1.7%), showing the Liberals with a 53-47 lead and suggesting a swing of about 4%. The primary votes are 34% for Labor and 47% for the Coalition. Each of the three has a sample of 800 and a margin of error of about 3.5%. The Australian’s display of all three seats of results including personal ratings and voter commitment numbers can be viewed here.

Also today:

• Morgan has a “multi-mode” poll conducted on Wednesday and Thursday by phone and internet, which is different from the normal face-to-face, SMS and internet series it publishes every Sunday or Monday. The poll appears to have had a sample of 574 telephone respondents supplemented by 1025 online responses. The poll has the Coalition leading 53-47 on two-party preferred with respondent-allocated preferences (54-46 on 2010 preferences) from primary votes of 30.5% for Labor, 44% for the Coalition and 12% for the Greens. Of the weighty 13.5% “others” component, Morgan informs us that the Palmer United Party has spiked to 4%. The Morgan release compares these figures directly with those in the weekly multi-mode result from Sunday night, but given the difference in method (and in particular the tendency of face-to-face polling to skew to Labor) I’m not sure how valid this is. Morgan also has personal ratings derived from the telephone component of the poll, which among other things have Tony Abbott ahead of Kevin Rudd as preferred prime minister.

• JWS Research has some scattered looking automated phone poll results from various Labor seats which include one piece of good news for Labor – a 57.2-42.8 lead for Kevin Rudd in Griffith, for a swing against Labor of a little over 1% – together with a rather greater amount of bad news: Wayne Swan trailing 53.8-46.2 in Lilley (a 7% swing), Chris Bowen trailing 53.1-46.9 in McMahon (11%), Rob Mitchell trailing 54.7-45.3 in his seemingly safe Melbourne fringe seat of McEwen (14%), and Labor hanging on to a 50.6-49.4 lead in Bendigo (9%), to be vacated by the retirement of Steve Gibbons.

• The latest Galaxy automated phone poll for The Advertiser targets Kate Ellis’s seat of Adelaide and gives Labor one of its better results from such polling, with Ellis leading her Liberal opponent 54-46. This suggests a swing to the Liberals of 3.5%. The samples in these polls have been about 550, with margins of error of about 4.2%.

UPDATE: Galaxy has a further two electorate-level automated poll results, showing the Liberal National Party well ahead in its Queensland marginals of Herbert (55-45) and Dawson (57-43).

South Australia’s one extraordinary result in the era of six-seat half-Senate elections came with the election of Nick Xenophon in 2007, and it is this result that is to be revisited at the coming election. Xenophon won almost exactly a quota at the 2007 election with 14.8% of the vote (a quota being 14.3%), comparison of voting patterns for the lower and upper house suggesting he had poached 6% to 7% each from Labor and the Liberals, while the Greens’ Senate vote was stable at 6.5% despite a 1.5% increase for the party in the state’s lower house seats. Labor (0.4933 of a quota), Liberal (0.4698) and Greens (0.4542) candidates emerged with a very similar share of the vote after the top two Labor and Liberal candidates, but Labor thereafter remained becalmed while the Greens absorbed left-wing preferences and the Liberals absorbed right-wing ones. With Labor excluded, their preferences propelled Hanson-Young to a narrow win over Liberal incumbent Grant Chapman.

In Xenophon’s absence in 2010, the vote share for both major parties was up in the upper house (by 2.8% for Labor and 2.1% for Liberal) and down in the lower (2.4% for Labor and 1.6% for Liberal), while the Greens vote more than doubled to 13.3%. Preference from smaller left-wing parties pushed Greens candidate Penny Wright over a quota, winning her a seat at the expense of Labor’s third candidate, incumbent Dana Wortley. The final seat went to the third Liberal candidate, David Fawcett, after he cleared two hurdles: first emerging with 9.1% after the 7.9% right-wing micro-party vote consolidated behind Family First (another minor party founded in South Australia), and secondly emerging ahead of Dana Wortley at the final count by 16.1% to 12.4%.

South Australia had earlier been a stronghold of the Australian Democrats, which had its origins in the state. The Democrats’ strength through what were generally lean years for Labor in the state resulted in consistent results of three Liberal, two Labor and one Democrats from 1990 to 2001. That era ended with the national collapse in support for the Democrats at the 2004 election, their vote in South Australia falling from 12.6% to 2.3% and the six seats dividing between Liberal and Labor. A crucial factor in the Greens’ failure to win the seat that went to Labor number three Dana Wortley was the Democrats’ direction of preferences to Family First, which had they gone to the Greens would have propelled their candidate ahead of Wortley at a key point in the count.

Nick Xenophon is generally reckoned to be an excellent chance for re-election. However, the exact extent of his vote is hard to judge, Senate polling being scarce and generally unreliable. Any surplus he receives will divide between two preference tickets he has submitted, the guiding principle of which is that one favours the left and the other favours the right. However, both favour major over minor parties, which will assist the Liberals in their endeavour to stay in front of the right-wing micro-party preference bloc and give the Greens a higher hurdle to clear to stay ahead of the third Labor candidate. The Greens will be far from assured of putting a quota together even if they do emerge ahead of Labor, a strong alternative possibility being that the final seat will go to the third Liberal candidate. Should the final count be between the Greens and a Liberal, the Greens will at least pick up the half share of Xenophon preferences that went to Labor.

After a controversial preselection process, the Labor ticket reverses the order of the top two positions in 2007 by having Penny Wong in first place and Don Farrell in second. Wong entered parliament from the top position on the Senate ticket at the 2001 election, which was then reserved for the Left under a terms of a Left-Right alliance commonly identified as “the Machine”. The victims of this arrangement were the now defunct Centre Left faction, whose candidate Chris Schacht suffered demotion to the losing number three position after a 15-year career in the Senate. Number two on the ticket was the favoured candidate of the Right, Linda Kirk. Changing factional arrangements caused the Right and Left to swap their places at the 2007 election, resulting in Wong being demoted on the Senate ticket despite her promotion to shadow cabinet in March 2005. The determination of Don Farrell, the powerful state secretary of the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association secretary Don Farrell, to take the Right’s Senate seat meant he went straight to the top position. Kirk was required to make way for Farrell, bowing out of politics after refusing the consolation prize of lower house preselection in Boothby. She was variously said to have fallen from factional favour due to her backing of Kevin Rudd’s successful leadership bid in December 2006, her defiance of the SDA faction’s opposition to the RU486 abortion pill, and the dismissal of Farrell’s wife from her office.

By the time of last year’s Senate preselection, Penny Wong had risen to the senior cabinet portfolio of finance and established herself as one of the government’s most popular figures, while Farrell had managed only a parliamentary secretary position. The party’s state conference nonetheless resolved by 112 votes to 83 to maintain the existing factionally determined arrangement where Farrell had top position by virtue of being from the Right. This was widely criticised within the party and without, with NSW Left powerbroker Anthony Albanese declaring it a “joke” and an “act of self-indulgence”. The backlash caused Farrell to back down, agreeing to a swap of positions with a magnanimous Wong. The third place on the ticket has gone to Simon Pisoni, a Communications Electrical and Plumbing Union official and the brother of a senior state Liberal politician, Unley MP David Pisoni.

Preserving the order from 2007, the top two positions on the Liberal ticket are occupied by a noted Christian conservative in Cory Bernardi and a moderate in Simon Birmingham. Bernardi was an investment fund manager and state party president before he filled the Senate vacancy created by Robert Hill’s appointment as ambassador to the United Nations in March 2006. Bernardi’s selection marked a victory of the party’s conservative’s wing over factional moderates, of whom Hill had been a figurehead. The favoured candidate of the moderates was Simon Birmingham, a former staffer to Robert Hill and narrowly unsuccessful candidate for Hindmarsh at the 2004 election (for which Bernardi had again been a preselection rival). Birmingham had to settle for the number two position on the ticket, but entered the Senate earlier than planned when he filled the vacancy caused by Jeannie Ferris’s death in April 2007. Incumbent Grant Chapman was unable to improve upon his third position on the ticket from 2001, which proved to be a losing proposition in 2007.

Cory Bernardi has thus far had two interrupted stints as a shadow parliamentary secretary. The first began after the 2007 election and ended in December 2009 when he related that a Liberal MP had told him he only chose the Liberal Party over Labor “to get into parliament”, and did too little to conceal that he was referring to factional moderate Christopher Pyne. Bernardi returned to the role when Tony Abbott became leader in December 2009, but again resigned in September 2012 after telling parliament that legalised bestiality marked “the next step” after gay marriage. This was deemed “ill-disciplined” by Tony Abbott and “extreme” and “hysterical” by Malcolm Turnbull, but Bernardi has recently defended the comments. Simon Birmingham has had a more stable time of things, serving as a shadow parliamentary secretary since December 2009.

The third candidate on the Liberal ticket is Cathie Webb, a metallurgist and the state party’s vice-president.

Nick Xenophon first entered politics after winning a seat in the state’s upper house on a “No Pokies” ticket at the 1997 election, polling 2.9% and harnessing an 8.3% quota after preferences. Once established in parliament, Xenophon’s deft hand at media stunts facilitated an enormous boost in his public profile, securing him a stunning 20.5% of the statewide vote when he sought re-election in 2006. This was sufficient to elect his running mate Ann Bressington as well as himself, and came very close to electing the number three candidate on his ticket as well. An emboldened Xenophon announced his run for the Senate shortly before the November 2007 election was called, although he was hampered during the campaign by a public falling out with Bressington. Xenophon’s 14.8% Senate vote was some distance short of his state election triumph, but easily enough to win him a Senate berth from which his profile has been enhanced still further.

Sarah Hanson-Young’s win at the 2007 election made her the state’s first Greens Senator and, at 25, the youngest woman ever elected to the federal parliament. Hanson-Young was previously the student association president at the University of Adelaide and had more recently worked for Amnesty International. She twice contested the party’s deputy leadership unsuccessfully during her debut term, the first time after the 2010 election and the second after Bob Brown’s departure in April 2012.

Newspoll today brings a poll from a sample of 800 respondents from the five most marginal Labor electorates in Sydney – Greenway (0.9%), Lindsay (1.1%), Banks (1.5%), Reid (2.7%) and Parramatta (4.4%) – which suggests the whole lot will be swept away, and perhaps others besides. Labor’s collective two-party preferred vote across the five seats is put at 43%, which compares with 52.1% at the 2010 election. The primary vote has Labor down from 43.2% to 34%, the Liberals up from 42.8% to 52%, the Greens down from 7.9% to 7% and “others” up from 6.1% to 7%. On two party preferred, Labor is down from 52.1% to 43%. Tony Abbott is also given better personal ratings (47% approval and 46% disapproval) than Kevin Rudd (37% and 55%), and leads 46-40 as preferred prime minister. The margin of error for the poll is about 3.5%. Full tables from GhostWhoVotes.

UPDATE: Kevin Bonham observes in comments: “These five were all surveyed by Galaxy which averaged 48:52 in the same electorates, via robopolling, with a much larger sample size, last week. It’s not likely voting intention has moved anything like five points in a week. So either someone has a house effect or someone (most likely Newspoll) has an inaccurate sample.”

UPDATE 2 (Galaxy Adelaide poll): The latest Galaxy automated phone poll for The Advertiser targets Kate Ellis’s seat of Adelaide and gives Labor one of its better results from such polling, with Ellis leading her Liberal opponent 54-46. This suggests a swing to the Liberals of 3.5%. The samples in these polls have been about 550, with margins of error of about 4.2%.

UPDATE 3 (Morgan poll): Morgan has a “multi-mode” poll conducted on Wednesday and Thursday by phone and internet, which is different from the normal face-to-face, SMS and internet series it publishes every Sunday or Monday. The poll appears to have had a sample of 574 telephone respondents supplemented by 1025 online responses. The poll has the Coalition leading 53-47 on two-party preferred with respondent-allocated preferences (54-46 on 2010 preferences) from primary votes of 30.5% for Labor, 44% for the Coalition and 12% for the Greens. Of the weighty 13.5% “others” component, Morgan informs us that the Palmer United Party has spiked to 4%. The Morgan release compares these figures directly with those in the weekly multi-mode result from Sunday night, but given the difference in method (and in particular the tendency of face-to-face polling to skew to Labor) I’m not sure how valid this is. Morgan also has personal ratings derived from the telephone component of the poll.

In a spirit of providing a new post every day during the campaign over and above things like the Senate of the Day entries, today I offer the following scattered assortment of bits-and-pieces relating to contentious preference deals.

• The biggest headline-generator has been the Wikileaks Party, whose most contentious choices have involved a New South Wales ticket which places the Greens behind both the quasi-fascist Australia First and, more consequentially, Shooters & Fishers, and a Western Australian ticket which has the Greens behind the Nationals. Responding to an immediate backlash on social media, the decisions were put down to “administrative errors”, which appeared to involve paperwork being lodged by activists with different ideas about strategy from the party executive. Three of the most noteworthy critics of the arrangement have been Julian Assange’s Senate running mate in Victoria, academic and ethicist Leslie Cannold, who resigned complaining that the party’s democratic processes had been bypassed (albeit that this happened too late to affect her inclusion on the ballot paper); Julian Assange’s mother, Christine Assange, who said that if she lived in Western Australian she would vote for Scott Ludlam of the Greens, who has been the strongest parliamentary supporters of her son’s cause; and Julian Assange himself, who apologised for having “over-delegated” such matters to persons evidently less capable than himself. For all that, the preference arrangements have conferred tactical advantage on the party in some cases, such as in Western Australia where it will be fed preferences from Family First, the Katter and Palmer parties, and a lengthy list of smaller concerns.

• Four parties in Victoria remarkably failed to lodge preference tickets, which among other things offered a potent insight into the closeness of the relationship between them. This was further delved into by Andrew Crook at Crikey, who noted the same personages at work behind the Liberal Democratic Party, Stop the Greens, the Smokers Rights Party and the Republican Party. A source quoted by Christian Kerr of The Australian put the non-lodgement of the tickets down to matters having been “thrown into chaos as it became clear Labor would do a deal with the Greens”. This came as bad news to the Sex Party, which had dealt its way into a national arrangement with the parties concerned that also involved One Nation. To those angered to discover that the party had done Pauline Hanson a good turn in her bid for a New South Wales seat, the party weakly responded that “you have to put these lunatic parties somewhere”, while failing to acknowledge that in Hanson’s case “somewhere” was number 10 out of 110, ahead of Labor, the Coalition and the Greens.

• The complex of preference harvesters and opportunists willing to make deals with them has gifted Pauline Hanson with what occasional psephologist Polly Morgan describes as “an incredibly favourable preference flow”. However, Hanson faces the stumbling block that the Coalition have her placed last, so unlike other parties to the arrangement she does not stand to benefit from the surplus after the election of their third Senator, which in the context of the current election could be substantial. Indeed, Hanson’s candidacy may end up doing the left a good turn, as other right-wing candidates with the potential to be elected with help from Coalition preferences could instead get excluded at an earlier stage of the count by virtue of their failure to overtake Hanson. Should Hanson not poll quite so well as that, there are a range of potential scenarios for a seat to go to a micro-party. The most likely contender could be the Liberal Democrats, who have had a lucky break in being drawn as “Group A” on the enormous Senate ballot paper. Experience suggests this will substantially boost the number of votes they get from those confusing them with the Liberal Party, the Coalition ticket being a lot harder to locate (“Group Y” out of a listing the continues all the way out to “Group AR”).

• Labor has made the highly unusual decision to place the Liberals ahead of Andrew Wilkie in Denison. It presumably did so in the expectation that its preferences would not be distributed, the weakness of the Liberals in the electorate meaning the final count will most likely be between Wilkie and the Labor candidate, Jane Austin. However, the weekend’s ReachTEL poll of 563 respondents cast at least some doubt on this, showing the Liberal candidate leading Austin 23.1% to 18.0%. Wilkie’s position nonetheless appears strong enough to ensure his re-election regardless of how preferences are directed.

• Labor has entered a preference arrangement with Katter’s Australian Party in Queensland in which the latter will receive the former’s preferences for the Senate ahead of the Greens, in exchange for which the latter will direct preferences to Labor ahead of the Liberal National Party in Hinkler, Herbert, Flynn, Capricornia, Forde and Petrie. This could well entail the high price of having KAP Senate candidate James Blundell elected ahead of the Greens, a prospect that would be pleasing to an incoming Abbott government. As Steven Scott of the Courier-Mail reports, it has also caused some not unpredictable dissent in the KAP.

Western Australia has produced variations on the same result since the first six-seat half-Senate election in 1990: three seats for the Liberals, two for Labor and one for either the Greens or the Democrats. This reflects the fact that Labor has consistently been too weak to win a third seat, but never quite so weak that it was unable to deliver enough preferences to the Greens or Democrats to win them a seat. The state joined Tasmania in being a cradle of green politics, in large part due to the election in 1984 of Jo Vallentine as part of the short-lived Nuclear Disarmament Party (whose narrowly unsuccessful candidate in New South Wales was Peter Garrett). The profile Vallentine attained enabled her to win re-election as an independent at the 1987 double dissolution and as the candidate of the newly founded Greens WA in 1990, and their candidate Dee Margetts likewise outpolled a weakly performing Australian Democrats to win the final seat in 1993.

The Democrats vote surged over subsequent elections, progressively squeezing out Vallentine’s successor Christabel Chamarette in 1996 and Dee Margetts in 1998, while Labor’s direction of preferences to the Democrats ahead of the Greens won them one last victory in 2001. One Nation took a large bite out of the Liberal vote in 1998 and 2001, but on each occasion the early exclusion of the third Labor candidate left Labor, Democrats and Greens preferences deciding the final seat in favour of the Liberals. With the collapse of the Democrats in 2004, the three subsequent elections have followed the same pattern in delivering a clear three quotas to Liberal and two to Labor, with the final seat going to the Greens with help from Labor’s surplus. Their winning candidates were Rachel Siewert in 2004 and 2010, and Scott Ludlam in 2007.

The greatest prospect for a disturbance in the normal pattern is that the combined Labor and Greens vote falls substantially below three quotas, from its 2010 base of 3.05. The nightmare scenario for Labor in that circumstance would be winning only win seat, with the second left seat going to the Greeens and the other four to parties of the right. One possibility than then emerges is that the Nationals enter contention by absorbing a Liberal surplus and the vote of various right-wing minor parties together with that of Wikileaks, which has contentiously favoured them ahead of both Labor and the Greens. Critics of that decision include Christine Assange, the highly vocal mother of Julian, who has said she would vote for Scott Ludlam, a noted parliamentary champion of her son’s cause. There’s also a mathematical possibility that Wikileaks’ preference deals could indeed pay off for their candidate, Suresh Rajan, who would stand to absorb most of the micro-party vote in a four-way contest with the Nationals, the Greens and Labor, including such unlikely sources as Family First and the Clive Palmer and Bob Katter parties.

The Labor ticket is headed by debut entrant Joe Bullock, state president and former state secretary of the Right faction Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association. Bullock attained the position with the factional muscle of his own union together with that of the Left faction United Voice, part of a deal in which the nominee of the latter, Sue Lines, filled the casual vacancy created by the retirement earlier this year of Chris Evans. In doing so he effectively displaced from the Senate ticket his factional colleague Mark Bishop, who was his predecessor as SDA state secretary, and had the other incumbent, Louise Pratt, demoted from her number one position at the 2007 election. With suggestions circulating that Labor’s malaise in Western Australia might reduce it to a solitary seat at the election, the ordering of the top two positions was of greater than usual consequence, and the awarding of the only secure position to a factional heavyweight was widely criticised.

Louise Pratt entered politics as a member of the state’s upper house in 2001, having previously worked as an electorate officer to Carmen Lawrence and achieved prominence in Perth’s gay community. Her preselection for the Senate at the 2007 election was achieved with backing from the Left faction Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and its powerful state secretary, the late Jock Ferguson, which had withdrawn support from incumbent Ruth Webber following complicated preselection disputes ahead of the 2005 state election, with the effect that Webber had to settle for the losing number three position. Pratt won backing from an alliance of Left unions and the New Right, through a deal in which her vacant state seat went to Vietnamese community leader and “New Right” faction operative Batong Pham. Pratt’s success in securing top place was an early marker of the declining career fortunes of Mark Bishop, who had announced his intention to retire in 2006 before changing his mind after Kevin Rudd assumed the leadership that December. Bishop appeared set to be succeeded by the party’s state secretary Bill Johnston, another member of the SDA Right, who would instead enter state politics in 2008 as the member for Cannington.

Number three on the Labor ticket is Peter Foster, a councillor for the Shire of Ashburton in the state’s north and a prolific Twitterer.

The Liberal ticket is headed by David Johnston, a former state party president who entered parliament from the number two position on the ticket at the 2001 election. Johnston secured the top of the ticket in 2007, reflecting his promotion to the outer ministry portfolio of justice in March 2007. In opposition he was promoted to the shadow cabinet in the resources and energy and tourism portfolios, winning further promotion to defence at the time Malcolm Turnbull assumed the leadership in September 2008. Second on the ticket is Michaelia Cash, who was elected from number three in 2007 and now fills the vacancy higher up the ticket resulting from the retirement after 17 years of Alan Eggleston. Cash was an industrial relations lawyer before entering parliament, and is the daughter of a former Western Australian state MP, George Cash. She had initially been preselected for the all-but-unwinnable fourth position on the ticket, but was elevated to number three after the initial nominee for that position, Mathias Cormann, found a quicker route to the Senate by filling the casual vacancy created by the resignation of Ian Campbell. Cormann had in turn won preselection at the expense of 70-year-old incumbent Ross Lightfoot. Cash’s promotion up the order created an attractive opportunity in the number three position. This has been taken by Linda Reynolds, who was progressively chief-of-staff to former Senator Chris Ellison, a project director with defence company Raytheon, deputy federal director of the Liberal Party, and an adjutant-general with the Australian Army.

Seeking re-election for the Greens is Scott Ludlam, who entered politics at the 2007 election via a position as adviser to the other Greens Senator from Western Australia, Rachel Siewert, and previously with state MP Robin Chapple. Much of the publicity Ludlam has garnered during his term as a Senator involved his advocacy for Julian Assange, so considerable umbrage has been taken at the Wikileaks Party relegating him below Nationals candidate David Wirrpanda on their preference ticket. Wirrpanda is famous throughout the state as a veteran of 227 AFL games with the West Coast Eagles from 1996 to 2009, and was twice featured in a list of the ten most influential Aboriginal Australians in The Bulletin. The Wikileaks Party’s lead candidate is Gerry Georgatos, a campaigner for various causes who fell out with the Greens in 2009 after being eased out as its candidate for a state by-election.