Analysis and discussion of elections and opinion polls in Australia
It’s way past my bedtime, so readers will have to make what they will of the following last-minute poll results. Tomorrow I will reconsider my South Australian election guide assessments one last time, and most likely make a few adjustments in Labor’s favour.
Firstly, today’s Newspoll for South Australia:
Secondly, today’s Advertiser poll:
Thirdly, yesterday’s Newspoll for Tasmania:
Finally, yesterday’s Taspoll results from The Mercury.
No Advertiser poll today – presumably they are holding back for tomorrow. Roy Morgan has produced its traditional day-before poll, but it’s hard to take seriously even by their standards. The sample is a mere 420, and the surveys were conducted "on the weekends between February 4/5 and March 11/12". Separate results are provided for the periods "before election announcement" and "after election announcement", although the former figures are too out-of-date to be of any conceivable interest. The results are at least consistent, with all Morgan’s figures from this year putting Labor on an impossible 50.5 per cent of the primary vote. The Liberals have actually faded during the campaign, from 33 per cent in the previous poll to 30.5 per cent in the latter period of the current one. This one’s going straight in the bin.
In today’s Advertiser, Greg Kelton says that "Labor sources claim their internal polling shows them with a very good chance of winning outer suburban seats such as Newland, Bright, Mawson and Light", giving further reason to think they will not win Hartley and Morialta, as the Poll Bludger election guide currently predicts.
Election punditry has been an agreeably straightforward matter during the South Australian campaign, with published opinion polling and reported internal polls all pointing in much the same direction. That’s all changed with two polls in today’s Advertiser covering the neighbouring electorates of Norwood and Hartley, located due east of the city. Taken on Tuesday and covering around 500 voters in each electorate, the polls suggest the Liberals are well in contention to gain the former and likely to retain the latter.
Rightly or wrongly, the Poll Bludger is reluctant to junk his overall hypothesis on the basis of one poll, although it has to be noted that it’s the first to be published since the Liberals’ major policy announcements, campaign launch and belated television advertisements. The straw at which I will grasp is the steady rise in the undecided vote across the Norwood polling, which has now reached a remarkable 18 per cent. If the universal expectation of a Labor win is encouraging swinging voters to think again, it might be that a shift in the polls will be enough to bring them back on board. It’s also worth mentioning that the result is consistent with reports of Labor polling showing it on course to win seats in the outer suburban mortgage belt, but making less headway nearer the city. Other noteworthy local factors are a tradition of last-minute swings to the Liberals in Norwood, where Ciccarello had an unexpectedly close run in 2002, and the stubbornness of booths in the southern part of Hartley (the more middle-class and white-bread part of the electorate) which have a tradition of resisting broader Labor swings at both state and federal elections.
These promise to be the first in a flurry of polls over the final days of the campaign. A comment left on this site indicates that The Advertiser was conducting further polling yesterday, so it should have more results up its sleeve tomorrow, presumably statewide this time. Roy Morgan should put what remains of its reputation on the line tomorrow, with Newspoll to follow on Saturday morning. If they all point to a big swing back to the Liberals, a wholesale revision might be in order. Until then, two seats have been given back to the Liberals in the Poll Bludger election guide, although not the two covered by the poll. They are Unley, a normally safe Liberal seat just south of the city which could only have fallen under a Labor best-case scenario, and Mount Gambier, where the buzz locally suggests sitting independent Rory McEwen will struggle to stay ahead of the Labor candidate, whose preferences he will need to overcome Liberal challenger Peter Gandolfi.
Some further additions to the election guide:
Light (Liberal 2.6%): Liberal member Malcolm Buckby has become a target of Labor ads publicising a statement he made at a meeting at Northside Church in Gawler, which was told that while the Liberals would "try to maintain the promises we put out to the electorate running up to the election … not every one is going to be delivered". The Liberals have protested that he was referring in part to the potential for obstruction by the upper house (although there doesn’t appear to be anything about this in the full transcript released today to The Advertiser), and accused Labor of reaching "a new low by secretly filming part of a church service and using it in a political advertisement". The church concurs, telling The Advertiser today that its hospitality had been abused by Labor.
Unley (Liberal 9.1%): The Electoral Commission has forced Liberal candidate David Pisoni to withdraw a radio advertisement critical of "Labor’s infill plan" and its impact on suburban housing density. This has not been the only stumble related to the Liberals’ advertising campaign. Today, The Advertiser reports that the Liberals have been compelled to amend a television advertisement, correcting a claim that South Australia had the country’s "worst waiting lists" to "worst emergency waiting times". An earlier ad had to be corrected because it misspelled Labor.
As the South Australian election campaign limps into the home strait, the re-election of Mike Rann’s Labor government appears as much a foregone conclusion as ever. That’s despite earlier reports that Labor hard-heads were worried about what the Liberals might have up their sleeve in the final week, for which the cash-strapped party has been waiting before unloading its television commercials (except in Mount Gambier – more on that below). Unlike Labor’s ads, these are not available on the party website, so the Poll Bludger is not aware if they have landed any surprise killer blows. Despite good press last week for Liberal policies to build a highway between Adelaide and Victor Harbour and give first home buyers a $3000 grant (on top of the $7000 already provided by the federal government), the nervous talk from the Labor camp was probably an attempt to manage expectations. It was contradicted by a report in The Weekend Australian saying Labor was "confident of capturing Adelaide’s outer suburbs", where internal polling shows Mike Rann’s campaign pitch had "resonated".
One television advertisement that has raised eyebrows has been Labor’s effort showing a flat-footed Rob Kerin mumbling and bumbling in response to a query as to why he wants to be Premier. Internet surveys conducted by Graham Young of On Line Opinion have prompted him to tell Adelaide’s Independent Weekly that voters have been left cold by the ad:
Labor has been riding high in the polls, but the party’s recent advertisements that take a vicious swipe at Rob Kerin’s leadership of the Liberal Party have not been well accepted by voters. As a consequence, the standing of Premier Rann has been lowered, according to our latest state election focus group and questionnaire responses. Even more alarming for Labor is that the ads have left Kerin almost unscathed, and will also guarantee stronger votes for independents and minor parties in the Legislative Council. But still the Liberals are yet to put forward a proposition that voters will buy.
Having only just got around to viewing the infamous ad, I suspect there might be a gap between voters’ conscious reaction to it and its effect on their voting behaviour. During my visit to Adelaide a fortnight ago, I told a stunned hotel owner that I was there to observe the election campaign. After he recovered, the first point he could think to make was the very point the ad is making – that Kerin gives the impression he would be happier in opposition. And it is an axiom of election campaigning (for me at least) that the most effective advertisements are those that reinforce existing perceptions. In this respect, the use of Kerin’s first name in the ad’s punchline ("does Rob really want the job?") seems like a nice touch, emphasising the popular view that Kerin is a good bloke who doesn’t have the steel in his spine to meet the demands of leadership.
I happen to be reading a book at the moment by American academics Stephen Ansolabehere, Roy Behr and Shanto Iyengar called The Media Game: American Politics in the Television Age, which makes the following observation about the 1988 presidential campaign:
Immediately after the Republican convention, the Bush campaign began an unrelenting attack on Dukakis’s positions on major issues, his record as governor of Massachusetts, and his commitment to basic American values. Inexplicably, the Dukakis campaign failed to respond directly to these charges for over a month. Most post-mortems of the 1988 presidential campaign emphasised the significant payoffs to Bush that resulted from the Dukakis campaign’s inability or unwillingness to confront these ads. The Dukakis campaign violated Roger Ailes’s first axiom of advertising strategy: "Once you get punched, you punch back".
"Punching back" is the very antithesis of Kerin’s style, and such negative campaigning as there has been from the Liberals has played the ball rather than the man. Ansolabehere, Behr and Iyengar ultimately conclude that the main effect of attack ads is to dampen voter turnout, but this of course is not a consideration under compulsory voting. A local variant on the effect might be to drive up the vote for minor parties and independents, and here Young’s assessment sounds on the money.
It does appear that there is one card the Liberals can play in the final days, and for all I know their television ads may be doing just this. It relates to fiscal responsibility and taxation, and the dividend available to them by virtue of their dangerous promise earlier in the campaign to cut 4000 jobs from the public service. By contrast, Labor’s promises – which, in the estimation of Michelle Wiese Bockmann of The Australian, "account for $700 million over four years" – are to be funded largely by "efficiencies". Combined with discontent over land tax, the Liberals have the opportunity to at least narrow the gap with a credible pitch at the hip pocket nerve.
Some recent and future updates to the election guide:
Mount Gambier (Independent 25.0% vs Liberal): Allan Scott, millionaire trucking magnate and publisher of the Border Watch newspaper, has stood down editor Frank Morello after the Border Watch ran a number of articles on Friday seen to be critical of the Liberal Party and its candidate, Peter Gandolfi. The move has also prompted the sudden resignation of Lechelle Earl, the writer of the articles and the paper’s chief-of-staff. Craig Bildstein of The Advertiser wrote on Saturday that "everyone The Advertiser spoke to suspects millionaire businessman Allan Scott is the chief financier" of a local Liberal campaign that has been "flush with funds", with "widespread reports that the Liberals spent $50,000 on TV advertising between October and January". Yesterday The Advertiser reported that it "has learned that Labor candidate Brad Coates last week threatened to withdraw $6000 worth of advertising from the Border Watch because of concerns that the paper was ‘too pro-Liberal’".
Florey (Labor 3.6%), Newland (Liberal 5.5%) and Wright (Labor 3.2%): Labor has promised to take back control of Modbury Hospital (located in Florey, but of interest to Newland, Wright and other less marginal neighbours), which was sold to private operator Healthscope by Dean Brown’s Liberal government in 1995. An anti-privatisation assessment of the hospital’s history under Healthscope can be found on the University of Wollongong website. Concerns about standards at the hospital have been widely reported in recent weeks, with the Sunday Mail talking of "GPs earning at least $2400 a shift" to "supervise foreign interns at Modbury Hospital after staff complaints of potential risks to patients". The Liberals have put the cost to the government of Labor’s promise at $5 million a year.
Mawson (Liberal 3.5%), Heysen (Liberal 9.9%) and Finniss (Liberal 15.9%): The Liberals have made a keynote election promise to replace the notoriously dangerous road that currently links Adelaide and Victor Harbour with a $130 million four-lane highway. The announcement scored an encouraging front-page headline ("Kerin to fix killer road") in The Advertiser, a paper many have faulted for coverage that seems tailored to curtail the extent of Labor’s victory. The following day, Treasurer Kevin Foley accused the Liberals of being $200 million out on their costings, but Greg Kelton of The Advertiser reports that the Liberal estimate was supported by both the RAA and the Committee for Adelaide Roads.
Morialta (Liberal 3.6%): The Weekend Australian reported that Labor are less confident about Morialta than "mortgage belt" seats further from the city, specifically Mawson, Bright and Newland.
After last night’s sort-of-triumph in the Victoria Park by-election, the morning has brought two opinion polls to warm the Labor supporter’s heart. After a quiet week on the polling front from the previously prodigious Advertiser, its News Limited stablemate the Sunday Mail has published a survey of 607 voters showing Labor with 45 per cent of the decided vote against 37 per cent for the Liberals, for a two-party lead of 55-45 – which fits in nicely with this site’s election guide predictions.
In Tasmania, the Launceston Examiner has published the second EMRS poll of the campaign showing Labor’s statewide vote up on the previous survey from 40 per cent to 44 per cent, with the Liberals down from 33 per cent to 28 per cent and the Greens down from 22 per cent to 18 per cent, with 10 per cent undecided. I will ferret around to see if I can locate a table, so stay tuned.
Readers who think they’ve seen it all are invited to take a fresh look at the Poll Bludger’s South Australian election guide, which is now equipped with a number of exciting new features. The main point of interest for most readers is the predicted outcomes for each seat, an exercise in which I continue to indulge against my better judgement. At the risk of putting myself off side with my most trusted South Australian advisers, I have (at least for now) succumbed to the psephological herd mentality and backed a worst-case scenario result for the Liberals. That means a uniform 5 per cent swing that will see off all the seats held by less than that margin, namely Hartley, Stuart, Light, Mawson, Morialta and Bright – although the Liberals’ $150 million Victor Harbour Highway promise might yet save Robert Brokenshire’s bacon in Mawson.
Despite the retirement of the sitting member, I have tentatively given the Liberals the benefit of the doubt in Newland (held by 5.5 per cent), while going out on the opposite limb in Unley (held by 9.1 per cent). The latter judgement is made without confidence, but the Advertiser poll showing Labor ahead 51-49 remains the best intelligence available, and I have also heard corroborating reports of panic in the Liberal camp. I expect Karlene Maywald to retain Chaffey for the Nationals, and for independent members Bob Such and Rory McEwen to be returned in Fisher and Mount Gambier, although the latter may be a wild card. With the departure of independent member Peter Lewis (and even without it), the Liberals should have no trouble gaining Hammond.
Also new to the guide is a feature called "Parish Pump", devoted to the type of local level information that passes under the radar of the mainstream media. Admirers of the guide are invited to marvel afresh at the entries for Norwood, Adelaide, Giles, Napier, Cheltenham, Port Adelaide, Hartley, Stuart, Light, Mawson, Heysen, Morphett, Schubert, MacKillop, Flinders, Mount Gambier and Chaffey. I have also maintained my tradition of appending electorate-specific blog snippets under the "Campaign Update" banner, although this time the entries are identified by what is known in the newspaper trade as a dinkus – which, unlike that for Parish Pump, was not pinched from another website.
Over on the Poll Bludger’s side of the continent, the Victoria Park by-election to replace retired Premier Geoff Gallop will be held tomorrow, and this site will offer its usual up-to-the-minute (well, up to about two minutes anyway) updates of the booth results as they come in, complete with swing calculations based on comparison of booth results with those from the 2005 election. A big round of applause is in order for all who have contributed to the comments threads (here and here), which have possibly been the most productive in this site’s history. Clearly the electorate is not wanting for civic virtue – I challenge to the good people of Gaven in Queensland to at least try and match their efforts in their forthcoming by-election campaign.
Our good friends at Upperhouse.Info have done their bit to inform speculation on the likely election outcome for the South Australian Legislative Council with a nifty, easy-to-use election calculator. Just plug in your guess of each party’s total vote, and it chews through the mind-numbingly complicated preference flows (based on the almost-accurate assumption that everyone will vote above the line, thereby accepting their favoured party’s order of preferences) and spits out the result, quick as a flash.
The preference tickets for above-the-line upper house votes are now available courtesy of the South Australian Electoral Office. Antony Green has crunched the numbers and concluded that Family First’s Dennis Hood is looking good; that the Greens and Democrats are in direct competition for a place that will almost certainly go to the former; and that a preference swap between the two means No Pokies MP Nick Xenophon must do well enough on the primary vote plus preferences to reach a quota before the swap comes into play (unless the Greens do well enough to get elected early, in which case he will get Democrats preferences). Xenophon’s only direct sources of preferences are from the minor candidates who appear on the second row of the ballot paper, who Antony tells us accounted for less than 0.2 per cent of the vote in 2002. That number should be higher this time due to the the crop of former and current major party MPs who are contesting as independents, of whom Peter Lewis and Ralph Clarke are sending preferences straight to Xenophon.
Antony’s calculations are built on broad assumptions about the overall vote outcome, of which the only one that is inconsistent with my expectations is that Xenophon will poll "around 1-3%". No doubt Saturday’s Advertiser poll showing No Pokies on 10 per cent was way off the mark, but Xenophon’s popularity seems genuine enough that he should poll at least at the higher end of Antony’s scale. Antony is also sticking with the likely outcome of five seats for Labor and four for Liberal while countenancing the unlikely possibilities of one extra in each case. If I am correct in my hunch that Xenophon will get through on his own strength, someone will have to miss out somewhere – either the fifth Labor candidate, the fourth Liberal, the stronger performer out of the Greens and the Democrats, or Family First.
What follows is a simplified guide to the preferences of the various players (listed in ballot paper order), stripped of marginal candidates and obfuscations. Of the latter there are relatively few, with only Peter Lewis’s ticket sending numbers all over the shop. I have excluded all lists with only one candidate, with exceptions made for current and former MPs Peter Lewis, Ralph Clarke and Terry Cameron. Speaking of minor players, I am very surprised to discover that the No Rodeo Cruelty group is not in the race – on my recent visit to Adelaide I was struck by the extent of its poster coverage, which was almost comparable to the major parties, but a lack of political nous has apparently led it to concentrate its efforts on the lower house where it will wield little or no influence.
One Nation: Shooters Party; Family First; Peter Lewis; No Pokies; Dignity for Disabled; Nationals; 50% Liberal, 50% Labor; Democrats; Greens; Terry Cameron; Ralph Clarke.
Family First: Nationals; One Nation; Shooters Party; Peter Lewis; Dignity for Disabled; Terry Cameron; Liberal; No Pokies; Labor; Ralph Clarke; Democrats; Greens.
Labor: Greens; Family First; Dignity for Disabled; Shooters Party; No Pokies; Democrats; Nationals; Ralph Clarke; Liberal; Peter Lewis; Terry Cameron; One Nation.
Liberal: Family First; Dignity for Disabled; Nationals; Democrats; No Pokies; Terry Cameron; Shooters Party; Peter Lewis; Ralph Clarke; Labor; Greens; One Nation.
Nationals: Family First; Liberal; Democrats; No Pokies; Shooters Party; Labor; Greens; Ralph Clarke; Dignity for Disabled; Peter Lewis; One Nation; Terry Cameron.
Shooters Party: Family First; One Nation; Nationals; Peter Lewis; Labor; Liberal; Greens; No Pokies; Dignity for Disabled; Terry Cameron; Ralph Clarke; Democrats.
Greens: Ralph Clarke; Peter Lewis; Democrats; No Pokies; Labor; Dignity for Disabled; Terry Cameron; Nationals; Shooters Party; Liberal; One Nation; Family First.
No Pokies: Ralph Clarke; Dignity for Disabled; 50% Greens, 50% Democrats; Nationals; Peter Lewis; Terry Cameron; Shooters Party; 50% Liberal, 50% Labor; Family First; One Nation.
Democrats: Dignity for Disabled; Greens; No Pokies; Ralph Clarke; 50% Liberal, 50% Labor; Nationals; Peter Lewis; Family First; Terry Cameron; Shooters Party; One Nation.
Dignity for Disabled: Democrats; Shooters Party; Family First; No Pokies; Greens; Peter Lewis; Ralph Clarke; Nationals; Liberal; Labor; Terry Cameron; One Nation.
Terry Cameron: Family First; Democrats; No Pokies; Greens; Dignity for Disabled; Shooters Party; Liberal; Labor; Nationals; One Nation; Peter Lewis; Ralph Clarke.
Peter Lewis: Nick Xenophon (No Pokies); Family First; One Nation; Shooters Party; Ann Bressington (No Pokies); Dignity for Disabled; Nationals; Democrats; Greens; Ralph Clarke; Terry Cameron; Liberal; Labor.
Ralph Clarke: No Pokies; Labor; Greens; Democrats; Dignity for Disabled; Peter Lewis; Shooters Party; Nationals; Terry Cameron; Liberal; Family First; One Nation.