Federal Politics 2022-2025 – The Poll Bludger

Weekend miscellany: duelling pendulums, Tasmanian seat polling and more (open thread)

Summarising federal redistributions ahead of the looming election, polling pointing to a status quo result in Tasmania’s federal seats, and various other electoral news.

Antony Green has published a pendulum display of post-redistribution seat margins for the federal election along with some explanation of what this entails. He did so exactly as I was finalising my own parallel effort, which I present here in the shape of a mock-up of the entry page for the federal election guide I’m hoping to publish around mid-January (a Western Australian election guide will precede it by a couple of weeks).

The margins shown are simply those from the 2022 election where no redistribution has been conducted, but the redistributions for New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and the Northern Territory require a process of distributing the votes from 2022 across the redrawn electorates. The Northern Territory redistribution is still in the public consultation phase, but I have taken a punt on the proposed boundaries (in this case simply a matter of drawing the line between Solomon and Lingiari) being adopted as they seem impossible to argue with, and it appears Antony Green has reached the same conclusion.

I believe the redistribution calculation methods used by Antony and I are identical with respect to how they handle ordinary votes, (i.e. those cast on election day or at pre-poll voting centres), but we have presumably adopted different methods to deal with the difficult question of “non-static” vote types that are published in aggregate for the whole electorate with no further indication of their geographic variation. I haven’t crunched the numbers too thoroughly, but the biggest anomaly I can see is that we have landed 0.5% apart in the substantially redrawn seat of Chisholm. We are in agreement that the margin in Deakin is a tiny 0.02%, but where he has it in favour of the Liberals, I make the seat to be notionally Labor.

Where we substantially differ is in seats with an independent is part of the equation. Calculations here are necessarily speculative, as independents will not have been on the ballot paper in newly added areas (where transfers have been conducted between teal seats, this can be dealt with by treating them as a collective). Antony has a method involving comparison of House and Senate vote shares which he says is “imperfect, but so are all alternatives”. The imperfection of my method, which gives independents no primary votes from newly added areas and allocates only the preference flows they might have expected from the other candidates, is that it’s very harsh on the independents, a fact most apparent with respect to Kooyong, where my 0.1% margin for Monique Ryan compares with Antony’s 2.2%.

Complete accountings of my redistribution calculations can be observed through the following links, for New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and Northern Territory.

Polling and electoral developments of note:

• This week’s Roy Morgan poll had the Coalition leading 52-48, out from 51-49 a week before, from primary votes of Labor 28% (down two, their worst result of the term), Coalition 38% (down half), Greens 13% (up half) and One Nation 6.5% (steady). The previous election two-party measure was a dead heat, unchanged on last week.

• The Australian reported last Saturday that a EMRS poll covering all five seats in Tasmania pointed to a status quo result of two Labor, two Liberal and one independent. In Labor’s precarious seat of Lyons, a generic party-based question has Labor on 34%, Liberal on 31%, the Greens on 11% and Jacqui Lambie Network 4%, while a separate question specifying candidates had 40% for Labor’s Rebecca White, 31% for Liberal candidate Susie Bowers and 9% for the Greens. The Liberals were well ahead in Braddon, leading 44% to 27% on the primary vote with the Greens on 9% and JLN on 7%. In Franklin the results were Labor 36%, Liberal 35% and Greens 11%, suggesting Labor would survive a substantial swing.

• Liberal MP Paul Fletcher announced this week that he will not recontest his seat of Bradfield. Fletcher retained the seat by 4.2% in 2022 in the face of a challenge from teal independent Nicolette Boele, who will run again at the coming election. His announcement comes shortly after teal independent MP Kylea Tink said she would not contest the seat following the abolition of her existing seat of North Sydney, much of whose territory will be transferred to Bradfield. The Sydney Morning Herald reports on two contenders to succeed Fletcher as Liberal candidate: Gisele Kapterian, an international trade lawyer and former staffer to Julie Bishop who shares Fletcher’s moderate factional alignment, and Penny George, director of corporate affairs at AstraZeneca and wife of state upper house member Scott Farlow. Kapterian was endorsed last year as the candidate for North Sydney, but had the rug pulled from under her with the seat’s abolition.

• Liberal MP Ian Goodenough, who lost preselection in his northern Perth suburbs seat of Moore to former Stirling MP Vince Connelly, has surprised nobody by announcing he will seek re-election as an independent. Connelly was the member for Stirling, part of which is now the southern end of Moore, from 2019 until its abolition in 2022. Goodenough claims to have been told that “opportunities might arise that would be of benefit” if he didn’t run.

• The Australian’s Feeding the Chooks column reports former Senator Joanna Lindgren is “poised” to be preselected as the LNP’s candidate for the Ipswich region seat of Blair, held for Labor by Shayne Neumann on a margin of 5.2%. Lindgren served in the Senate for a year after filling a casual vacancy but failed to win re-election at the 2016 double dissolution. Trevor Evans, who lost Brisbane to the Greens in 2022, is expected to again be chosen as the party’s candidate for the seat at a preselection to be held today, though he faces an opponent in Fiona Ward, a past federal and state candidate and regular preselection aspirant. Two contenders are named for the party’s preselection for Lilley, held for Labor by Annika Wells on a 10.5% margin: Kimberley Washington, a former staffer to LNP-turned-independent Senator Gerard Rennick, and Dylan Conway, an army veteran and founder of a mental health charity.

• Sarah Elks of The Australian reports Clive Palmer has launched a High Court bid to overrule a section of the Electoral Act that disallowed him from re-registering his United Australia Party for the next election after his voluntary deregistration of it in September 2022. The report quotes electoral law expert Graeme Orr saying the section exists to prevent newly deregistered parties having their names poached and did not reckon seeking to de-register and re-register, the “obvious reason” for which was to avoid having to make financial disclosures.

• The Victorian state by-election for Prahran will be held on February 8, with the ballot paper draw to be held on January 17. Tony Lupton, who held the seat for Labor from 2002 to 2010, has announced he will run as an independent, calling his former party’s decision to forfeit the contest “cowardly”. The Liberals will choose their candidate in a preselection ballot today.

• South Australia’s state redistribution has been finalised. Ben Raue at The Tally Room has taken a much closer look than I have, and concludes that the already minimal changes from the proposal have become even more conservative in the final determination. One change is that the seat of Frome will become Ngadjuri, owing to concerns raised that the seat’s namesake had been involved in a retribution attack on an Aboriginal encampment.

• Poll Bludger regular Adrian Beaumont offers an overview of results for last month’s US presidential and congressional elections with a more optimistic take for Democrats than most commentators, especially their prospects at the November 2026 midterm elections.

Newspoll: 50-50 (open thread)

Labor moves back to parity on two-party preferred in Newspoll, but Resolve Strategic finds their position continuing to deteriorate.

The Australian reports the first Newspoll in four weeks has an even result on two-party preferred, where the Coalition led 51-49 last time. Primary votes are little changed, with Labor steady on 33%, the Coalition down a point to 39%, the Greens steady on 11% and One Nation up two to 7%. Anthony Albanese is steady at 40% approval and down a point on disapproval to 54%, while Peter Dutton is down a point to 39% and steady on 51%. Albanese’s lead as preferred prime minister has widened from 45-41 to 45-38.

Also featured is a suite of questions on leader attributes that Newspoll has been running on a semi-regular basis since 2010. Dutton scores small leads on experienced, has a vision for Australia and understands the major issues, and a large lead on decisive and strong, for which Albanese’s 44% is significantly worse than for any of the previous prime ministers covered. Albanese’s two good marks are a 57% to 45% lead over Dutton on cares for people, and a 58% to 47% deficit on arrogant. The poll was conducted Monday to Friday from a sample of 1258.

UPDATE: I had missed that Nine Newspapers also have the monthly Resolve Strategic poll, which gives Labor its worst result of the term, their primary vote down three to 27%. The Coalition is also down, by one point to 38%, with the Greens up one to 12% and One Nation up two to 7%. Personal ratings for both leaders have significantly weakened: Anthony Albanese is down six on approval to 31% and up six on disapproval to 57%, while Peter Dutton is down five to 40% and up two to 42%. The poll continues to record a tie on preferred prime minister, shifting from 37-37 to 35-35. Other findings include 59% saying they are worse off since the 2022 election, with only 13% better off; 36% saying Dutton and the Coalition would improve things more over the next three years, compared with 27%; and 44% expecting the Coalition will win the next election, compared with 33% for Labor. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Sunday from a sample of 1604.

Weekend miscellany: Accent-RedBridge MRP poll, JWS Research polling, preselection latest (open thread)

A modelled election result forecast now rates the Coalition more than likely to emerge with the most seats in what still looks like being a hung parliament.

Accent Research and RedBridge Group have published their third quarterly multi-level regression with post-stratification (MRP) poll, which survey a large national sample (in this case of 4909, conducted from October 29 to November 20) and use demographic modelling to project a detailed seat-by-seat election result. It records a continuing deterioration in Labor’s position: where the first result had Labor on a minimum 73 seats with another nine two close to call, and the second had it down to 64 with 14 too close to call, now Labor is down to 59 with too-close-to-call still at 14. With the Coalition credited with a clear lead in 64 seats, this means the poll gives Labor no chance of retaining a majority on the present numbers, with the probability of the Coalition doing so at 2%.

The seats that get the Coalition from their present 55 to 64 are Bennelong, Gilmore, Macarthur, Paterson and Robertson in New South Wales; the by-election loss of Aston in Victoria; the new seat of Bullwinkel in Western Australia, which is notionally marginal Labor; Lyons in Tasmania; and Lingiari in the Northern Territory. Potential further gains are Dobell, Hunter, Macquarie, Reid, Shortland and Werriwa in New South Wales; Chisholm, Corangamite, Hawke and McEwen in Victoria; and the teal seats of Mackellar in New South Wales and Curtin in Western Australia. Conversely, Labor is rated a chance of gaining Casey in Victoria and Sturt in South Australia. A line chart display of the national primary vote looks to me like it has the Coalition on 39%, Labor on 31% and the Greens on 11%.

Also:

• JWS Research has results from a survey on attitudes to the US presidential election result, which was rated negatively by 51% and positively by 28%. Here as in the US, a wide gender gap was recorded, men being 35% positive and 40% negative compared with 22% positive and 60% negative for women. The survey was conducted November 8 to 11 from a sample of 1000.

• The JWS Research survey was conducted in tandem with its quarterly True Issues issue salience survey, which found concern about cost-of-living at a new high: 61% named the issue unprompted when asked to identify three the government should be most focused on, up twelve points since August. It also ranks last out of 25 on a measure of the government’s performance, behind interest rates and housing affordability, with its best scores being for defence, innovation, mining and provision of public services. Another finding of the survey was that 49% supported the government’s cut to HECS debts, with 32% opposed. The latter finding was approximated by the last Resolve Strategic poll, which Nine Newspapers this week reported found 54% supportive and 27% opposed.

• Anthony Albanese has asked the Labor national executive to intervene in the preselection process for the Sydney seat of Barton with a view to favouring his Left faction colleague Ashvini Ambihaipahar, a regional director for the St Vincent de Paul Society, Georges River councillor and unsuccessful candidate for Oatley at last year’s state election. The seat will fall vacant with the retirement of Linda Burney, the member since 2016 and likewise a member of the Left. Others seeking the position include Sam Crosby, who also has a director role at the St Vincent de Paul Society, and was formerly executive director of progressive think tank the McKell Institute and unsuccessful candidate for Reid in 2019; Shaoquett Moselmane, a former member of the state upper house; and state upper house member Mark Buttigieg.

• The Guardian reports state party president Leah Blyth is the front-runner for Liberal endorsement to fill the South Australian Senate vacancy created by the retirement of Simon Birmingham. Whereas Birmingham is a leading moderate, Blyth has the backing of arch-conservative Senator Alex Antic. Adelaide councillor Henry Davis is also nominating with a promise to represent the “sensible centre”, but The Advertiser reports he has “acknowledged he would not be favourite”.

Federal polls: Essential Research, Roy Morgan, ANU survey (open thread)

More polls showing a tight race on two-party preferred, plus the first in what promises to be a multi-wave series gauging changes in attitudes between now and the federal election.

The fortnightly Essential Research poll has a broadly static result on federal voting intention, with a two-point gain for Labor to 32% coming at the expense of the Greens (down two to 11%) rather than the Coalition (steady on 35%). One Nation is up a point to 8% and undecided is unchanged at 5%. The pollster’s 2PP+ measure reverses the last result in having the Coalition leading 48-47, with the balance undecided. Questions on government performance on various issues suggest support for its social media policies, as do findings that 45% favour “strong regulation” to “prevent online harms” against 24% for the offered alternative of “absolute freedom of speech on digital platforms”, and that large majorities are in favour of various limitations on free speech. Further questions find “reduced tariffs and regulation” viewed positively by 37% and negatively by 33%, and the government’s performance on affordable housing rated positively by 20% and negatively by 54%. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Sunday from a sample of 1123.

The weekly Roy Morgan poll has Labor down one-and-a-half to 30% and the Coalition up the same amount to 38.5%, with the Greens and One Nation steady on 12.5% and 6.5%. The Coalition leads 51-49 on two-party preferred, reversing last week’s result. The two-party measure using 2022 election preference flows is 50-50, where Labor led 51.5-48.5 last week. The poll was conducted Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1666.

The Australian National University’s Centre for Social Policy Research has results from the first survey of what promises to be a multi-wave series tracking changes in voting intention and related attitudes between now and the election. With due regard to the fact it was conducted in October, the survey records Coalition support at 38.2%, Labor at 31.8%, the Greens on 11.8% and 9.5% uncommitted, with a Sankey diagram on page 44 suggesting the Coalition’s gains have been in roughly equal measure from Labor and “other party”. The survey also finds 40% satisfied and 60% dissatisfied with the direction of the country, and similar results for the federal government. Still less trusted are political parties, traditional media, religious institutions and most especially social media. Asked to place themselves on a ten-point left-to-right spectrum, 47.0% of women and 37.3% of men chose the median option. The survey was conducted October 14 to 25 from a sample of 3622.

Monday miscellany: Senate resignations, preselections, campaign finance latest (open thread)

Simon Birmingham calls it a day, Labor’s Tasmanian Senate ticket sorted, and campaign finance reform stalls in the Senate.

Newspoll has not reported on its more-or-less usual three-weekly schedule, but the usual weekly Roy Morgan should be along later today, followed by the usual fortnightly Essential Research poll tomorrow. In other developments:

• Simon Birmingham, Shadow Foreign Minister and Senate Opposition Leader, announced last week he will retire from parliament by the end of the year. As well as creating a vacancy for his South Australian Senate seat, his departure has resulted in the Senate leadership going from a leading moderate to a factional conservative in Western Australian Senator Michaelia Cash.

• Labor in Tasmania has confirmed its Senate ticket will be headed by Left faction incumbent Carol Brown followed by Right-aligned newcomer Richard Dowling, adviser to state Labor leader Dean Winter and former director of public policy with Meta. Matthew Denholm of The Australian reports Jessica Munday, Left-aligned secretary of Unions Tasmania, withdrew after recognising she lacked support, but now hopes to fill the casual Senate vacancy created by Anne Urquhart’s looming bid for the lower house seat of Braddon. Munday was subject to a party disciplinary process earlier this year after featuring a poster for Labor-turned-independent member David O’Byrne in her yard during the March state election campaign.

• Lachlan Leeming of the Daily Telegraph reports three candidates have nominated for preselection to succeed retiring Nationals member David Gillespie in Lyne: former Berejiklian-Perrottet government minister Melinda Pavey; Alison Penfold, senior adviser to Gillespie; and Forster-based accountant Terry Murphy.

• Hawkesbury councillor Mike Creed has been preselected as Liberal candidate for the Sydney fringe seat of Macquarie, held for Labor by Susan Templeman on a post-redistribution margin of 6.3%.

• The flurry of legislation the government was able to pass through the Senate last week did not include its campaign finance reform bill, which was pulled from the notice paper after a failure to land an agreement with the Coalition. Michelle Grattan at The Conversation reports the Liberals sought to “insert a potential legal time bomb” in the form of a provision that would likely mean the entire bill would be invalidated if the High Court found against any of it in the seemingly likely event of a High Court challenge. The Liberals also pushed for higher donation caps and disclosure thresholds and less generous caps for peak bodies, being specifically concerned about the ACTU. The responsible minister, Don Farrell, says consultations will continue over summer, seemingly with both the Coalition and the cross-bench.

Federal polls: YouGov, DemosAU and Roy Morgan (open thread)

A new federal polling entrant produces results well in line with the general trend, while Roy Morgan finds Labor with its nose back in front.

Two new federal poll results to relate:

• New-ish polling outfit DemosAU has published what I believe to be its first national federal voting intention result, recording a 50-50 split on two-party preferred from primary votes of Labor 32%, Coalition 38%, Greens 12% and One Nation 7%. The full report for the poll, which was conducted last Tuesday to Thursday from a sample of 1038, features breakdowns by gender, age, education, residential tenure and personal income.

• The weekly Roy Morgan poll has Labor recovering a 51-49 lead on the headline two-party measure, reversing last week’s result, from primary votes of Labor 31.5% (up two-and-a-half), Coalition 37% (down two), Greens 12.5% (down one) and One Nation 6.5% (steady). The two-party measure based on preference flows from 2022 has Labor leading 51.5-48.5, after a dead heat last time. The poll was conducted Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1663.

UPDATE (YouGov): And now a third. YouGov, which has typically reported on Fridays, has its first federal poll since September, showing a dead heat on two-party preferred, unchanged on last time. The primary votes are Labor 30% (steady), Coalition 38% (down one), Greens 13% (down one) and One Nation 9% (up two). Anthony Albanese is steady at 36% approval and down two on disapproval to 56%, while Peter Dutton is steady at 40% and down two to 48%. Albanese holds an unchanged 42-39 lead as preferred prime minister. The poll was conducted last Friday to Thursday from a sample of 1515.

Too much money business

A deep dive into campaign finance reform legislation, federally and in South Australia.

The federal government’s proposed changes to campaign finance laws, to take effect in 2026, passed through the House of Representatives on Wednesday with the support of the Coalition and the opposition of the cross-bench. It will shortly come before the Senate, where the Coalition plans to move amendments to increase proposed spending caps and disclosure thresholds. Katina Curtis of The West Australian reports Labor maintains suspicions that the Coalition “might string talks along but backflip at the last minute for pure politics”, and is duly “keeping its options open” for a late deal with the cross-bench. In the absence of such a deal, Curtis further notes that amendments to the regime will assuredly feature in post-election horse trading in the event of a hung parliament.

That the 227-page bill looks set to proceed swiftly to enactment without a parliamentary inquiry has drawn criticism from constitutional law expert Anne Twomey and former NSW Supreme Court judge Anthony Whealy, the former concluding that the High Court will likely “end up doing the job instead”. At issue is the doctrine of implied constitutional freedom of political communication, by which the court disallowed the Hawke-Keating government’s attempt to ban political advertising in the electronic media, and more recently caps on third party spending in New South Wales. Twomey perceives two potential difficulties: that the spending caps are “so high that it undoes their aim”, and would make it difficult to establish that the laws serve a legitimate purpose justifying limitations on political communication; and that the bill’s provisions, as noted below, tend to favour parties over independents and incumbents over challengers.

The main provisions of the bill are as follows:

• What Graeme Orr of the University of Queensland describes as “the headline the government wants us to focus on” is that federal electoral donations will be capped at $20,000 per donor per year, increasing to $40,000 in election years, with individual donors allowed to donate no more than $640,000 in total. However, this is calculated at the level of the state or territory branch, such that an enterprising donor could contribute $720,000 to a party over a three-year term, plus extra for by-election campaigns. Joo-Cheong Tham of the University of Melbourne law schools notes loopholes include exemptions for union affiliation fees to Labor (uncapped, unlike similar laws in New South Wales) – and, “most significantly”, a failure to apply to donations made by candidates to their parties, which would seemingly amount to ongoing carte blanche for Clive Palmer.

• Caps on spending set at $90 million for general party spending and $800,000 for individual electorate campaigns. As proof against a legal challenge, this would barely clip Clive Palmer’s wings: his party spent $83 million on its 2019 campaign onslaught, and $70 million in 2022. The latter is an issue for the teals, whose campaign spends in some cases exceeded $2 million, which explains the Coalition’s enthusiasm for the package. Katina Curtis of The West Australian notes that spending caps are fair enough to the extent that “limiting donations without limiting spending heavily advantages people who have their own wealth and don’t have to pass the hat around”. However, the two distinct caps mean that parties trying to see off independents will be able to match their local campaign spend, and trump it by targeting the electorate with further spending that doesn’t mention their candidate, or mentions them alongside Senate candidates. Caps can also encourage third-party spending, which has reached its apotheosis with the “super PACs” that dominate election campaigning in the United States.

• The threshold for public disclosure of donations, which the Howard government hiked from $1500 to an indexed $10,000, will be cut from $16,900 to $1000. The Libeals are continuing to grumble about this, arguing that small businesses will feel too intimidated to donate to them. The bill will also dispense with the notoriously lax requirement that disclosures be made only twice yearly, henceforth to be monthly, then weekly during the campaign period, then daily in the week before and after election day.

• The public funding that currently allocates $3.35 per vote to candidates who exceed 4% will have the rate increased to $5. There will further be administrative funding amounting to $30,000 per lower house member and $15,000 per Senator, advantaging incumbents over challengers.

Meanwhile, the South Australian government last week introduced legislation to ban nearly all political donations and fill the gap with public funding, a move that has attracted the interest of The Economist. It may also yet attract the interest of the High Court, with Peter Malinauskas conceding the “challenging” task of drafting the legislation around the objections that might arise.

Weekend miscellany: economy, nuclear and abortion polling, preselection latest (open thread)

More signs that economic sentiment may have turned the corner; Labor recruits a former state leader for a key state in Tasmania; and more besides.

With every pollster in the game bar the increasingly intermittent YouGov having weighed in over the past fortnight, it’s likely that a lean week awaits on the federal polling front, barring the usual weekly Roy Morgan poll. Besides the other new post on campaign finance, that leaves the following to relate:

• SECNewgate’s latest Mood of the Nation survey finds signs of improving economic sentiment: 35% confident and 65% not confident inflation will decrease over the coming year, compared with 31% and 69% in September, and 35% (up eight) anticipate the economy will improve over the next three months, with 38% thinking it will get worse (down eight). Labor is rated better to tackle the cost of living by 29% with 30% favouring the Coalition, reversing the result in September. It also finds 33% support lifting the nuclear energy ban with 42% opposed, and 64% saying they would be less likely to vote for a party that restricted access to abortion rights, compared with only 11% for more likely. The survey was conducted October 31 to November 4 from a sample of 1417.

• Labor has confirmed two existing political figures as candidates for federal seats in Tasmania, with former state leader Rebecca White confirmed as the candidate for Lyons, which she has served at state level since 2010. Incumbent Brian Mitchell, who survived a 4.3% swing to hold out by 0.9% in 2022 (a correction after the Liberals disendorsed their candidate mid-campaign in 2019), agreed to go quietly, saying the party should “grab her with both hands” if White sought a federal career. The north-western Tasmanian seat of Braddon, where Liberal member Gavin Pearce will retire after boosting his margin from 3.1% to 8.0% in 2022, will be contested for Labor by Anne Urquhart, who has served in the Senate since 2011. Among the many factors considered by Kevin Bonham are the recount that will be required to fill White’s state parliamentary vacancy, and the appointment to fill Urquhart’s Senate vacancy.

• A Liberal preselection for Mackellar, which teal independent Sophie Scamps won from the party in 2022, was won by James Brown, chief executive of the Space Industry Association of Australia, former state RSL president and former son-in-law of Malcolm Turnbull. Other candidates included Michael Gencher, executive director of Israel advocacy group StandWithUs; Brook Adcock, former Qantas pilot and founder of Pandora Jewellery; David Brady, chair of Deafness Forum Australia; and Paul Nettelbeck, director of a foreign aid not-for-profit; Lincoln Parker, a defence analyst; and Vicky McGahey, a high school teacher. Nothing came of a reported push to reopen nominations so that Sophie Stokes, former Commonwealth Bank executive and wife of former New South Wales Planning Minister Rob Stokes, might be persuaded to run in a field deemed to lack a strong female contender.

• A particularly interesting state by-election looms in Victoria after the resignation of Prahran MP Sam Hibbins, who quit the Greens last year after admitting to an affair with a staff member from his office. The seat has successively been held by Labor, Liberal and the Greens over the past two decades, reflecting a close three-way dynamic similar to that of the partly corresponding federal seat of Macnamara.

Page 1 of 36

1 2 … 36 Next »