Category: South Australian Politics

Today’s Advertiser carries two interesting electorate level polls with impressive samples of around 550 voters, which provide support for two items of conventional wisdom about the coming South Australian election – that the Rann government will win a handsome majority, and that quirky independent MP Peter Lewis is gone for all money in Hammond. The first proposition is backed by a poll of voters in Stuart (top), a vast electorate covering the eastern part of the state in which Labor are competitive thanks to their strength in Port Augusta. It has Labor’s Justin Jarvis on 47 per cent of the decided primary vote against 42 per cent for Liberal veteran Graham Gunn (veteran seems almost an understatement for a man who entered parliament in 1970) for a lead of 52-48 on two-party preferred.

The Hammond poll (bottom) backs up Malcolm Mackerras’s assertion in Saturday’s Australian (where he predicted that Labor would pick up six seats overall) that Peter Lewis would "get done like a dinner". It shows Lewis in distant third place on 13 per cent of the decided vote compared with 48 per cent for Liberal candidate Adrian Pederick and 25 per cent for Labor (who unveiled James Peikert as their candidate earlier this week). If these figures are accurate, the best preference flow in the world would not be enough to boost Lewis to second place ahead of Labor, and even if it did the Liberal vote is close enough to 50 per cent to assure Pederick of victory. It also suggests that a majority of the voters abandoning Lewis are heading for Labor rather than Liberal – together with the Stuart results and Saturday’s Advertiser poll, this undercuts the notion that the Labor swing will be confined to Adelaide.

	Bass	Braddon	Denison	Franklin	Lyons	Total
Labor	39	41	35	37	48	42
Liberal	38	42	28	29	30	32
Greens	20	10	36	24	18	22

Also just to hand is a detailed breakdown of the EMRS poll for the Tasmanian election (above) which was published in the Mercury on Saturday. There are a number of reasons why these results should be treated with caution. While the total sample of 1002 is substantial, the margin of error blows out significantly when it comes to the seat-by-seat breakdowns. Even more troubling is the extremely high undecided rating (23 per cent in Saturday’s poll) that is a consistent feature of EMRS polling, which suggests they are making no effort to twist the arms of voters reluctant to declare a preference (larger polling agencies ask undecided voters who they are "leaning towards", and they usually get an answer). The following table, showing the course of aggregate EMRS polling over the past year, is probably more useful.

Regular readers will be aware that the Poll Bludger was hoping Tasmanian Premier Paul Lennon would hold off on an early election, in contrast to widely held expectations, so the campaign would not clash with that for South Australia (which will formally begin when Premier Mike Rann instructs the Governor to issue the writs, which he must do no later than Tuesday). As we now know, Lennon has gone one better than that and the Tasmanian election will be held on March 18, the same day as South Australia’s.

Comments on the previous post suggest there are only two historical precedents for this – on June 2, 1970, when elections were held simultaneously in South Australia (when the Dunstan Labor government defeated the one-term Liberal government of Steele Hall, which had signed its own death warrant by abolishing the state’s indefensible rural vote weighting) and Victoria (Sir Henry Bolte’s last win before retiring); and on February 8, 1986, when voters in Western Australia and Tasmania respectively re-elected Brian Burke’s Labor and Robin Gray’s Liberal governments. UPDATE (22/2/06): I thought this couldn’t be right, and so it has proved – yesterday’s Australian reports that this will be "the 12th time two states have held concurrent elections".

Unfortunately the Poll Bludger has not been keeping a spare Tasmanian election guide handy to deploy at the appropriate moment. I plan to devote thorough posts to each of the state’s five multi-member electorates over the coming weeks and then to assemble them on to a single page, which will hopefully be in business a good fortnight out from polling day. One small consolation is that there will no concurrent upper house election in Tasmania – an upper house guide for South Australia is on the increasingly daunting "to do" list.

In the absence of my own efforts, you could obviously do a lot worse than to peruse Antony Green’s guides for Tasmania and the South Australian Legislative Council. Also worth noting on the latter count is a newcomer to the online psephological community, Upperhouse.info, which will in due course feature an election calculator by Graham Allen similar to those he kindly developed last year for the Poll Bludger’s Western Australian Legislative Council guide.

With both campaigns under way early predictions of the likely outcome are rolling in thick and fast, not least in the comments thread accompanying the previous post. The early consensus is that the Liberals have no chance of winning government in Tasmania but that the Labor government is more than likely to lose its majority. In South Australia, polling over the last few months has contributed to a growing expectation that the Liberal opposition faces a complete rout. However, most locals who have expressed an opinion have sounded a note of caution, not least due to the recent tone of reporting in The Advertiser. The paper has recently excoriated the Rann government for allowing parliament to remain idle over summer, and has rated Rob Kerin’s early Liberal campaign launch as "an unusually refreshing display of backbone, courage and innovation". Be that as it may, a poll taken by The Advertiser on Wednesday and published yesterday (above) gave the Liberals no cause for comfort – Labor maintained its 11 per cent lead from the previous poll and widened its two-party lead from 55-45 to 57-43.

An EMRS poll published in today’s Mercury suggests the Tasmanian election is likely to be more interesting. The total sample of 1002 voters is extremely impressive – the aforementioned Advertiser poll covered only 722 voters, and was itself the most comprehensive poll the paper had ever conducted. It has Labor’s statewide vote falling to 32 per cent, compared with 25 per cent for the Liberals and 17 per cent for the Greens (it can be presumed that the undecided have not been redistributed, so these figures cannot be directly compared with the previous election – Labor 51.9 per cent, Liberal 27.4 per cent, Greens 18.1 per cent). Most remarkably of all, electorate-level results had the Greens leading Labor in the inner Hobart electorate of Denison by 36 per cent to 35 per cent, although a small sample size of 200 means this should be treated with caution. The Mercury rates the likely outcome based on these figures as 11 seats for Labor, seven for Liberal and five for the Greens.