Category: Western Australian Election 2005

Parts of the Poll Bludger’s Western Australian election guide could do with an update, and will get one either tonight or tomorrow. Among the new additions will be the following revelations courtesy of Colleen Egan of the Sunday Times and retiring independent MP Larry Graham:

Alfred Cove (Independent 8.2% vs LIB): Colleen Egan provides results from a Patterson Market Research survey showing that independent Janet Woollard is likely to keep former Court government minister Graham Kierath out of parliament by retaining this normally safe Liberal seat, in keeping with the long-held expectations of the Poll Bludger which have not been universally shared elsewhere. The figures quoted by Egan are 26 per cent for Kierath, 25 per cent for Woollard and 17 per cent for Labor. Clearly the undecided have not been distributed, but it is plain that on these figures Woollard would easily defeat Kierath on Labor preferences.

North West Coastal (Labor 5.4%): As Labor member for Pilbara from 1989 to 2000 and independent member since, Larry Graham knows a thing or two about politics in the north. Graham is retiring at the coming election and has lately been contributing reams of revealing copy to local newspapers. This week readers of the Northern Guardian were told that North West Coastal, a new electorate with notional Labor majorities of 5.4 per cent on two-party preferred and 9.6 per cent on the primary vote, was – "for some reason" – "the northern seat the Liberals are convinced they can win". The primary local issues are identified as Labor member Fred Riebeling’s decision to relocate his family to Perth; Hay’s campaigning for a greater share of mining royalties for local councils, on which "Riebeling has either been silent or maintained the Perth party lines" and "must be feeling a little silly as the party has now changed its mind"; and restrictions on fishing in expanded marine parks, which Riebeling has vocally opposed. Graham notes Riebeling’s earlier promise to resign if the Karratha to Tom Price road was not built in Labor’s first term, which it hasn’t been – fortuitously, the affected towns are no longer in his electorate. Graham also reckons that "in the eighties 1.5 to 2 per cent was considered safe, so 5 per cent should be safe enough to maintain a seat against the strongest of challengers" – I’m not sure which eighties he is referring to, but they can’t be the ones in which the Brian Burke-led Labor Party came to power with an 8 per cent statewide swing. Graham does not seem excited about the prospects of independent candidate Lex Fullarton, declaring the seat a two-horse race.

Central Kimberley-Pilbara (Independent 16.2% vs ALP): Graham is even better versed with goings-on in Central Kimberley-Pilbara, which largely coincides with his own existing electorate. In an article for the North West Telegraph, Graham reports that the seat "should be a safe bet for Labor" due to the Pilbara boom and a notional 16.5 per cent margin, but that the party is nervous that "the flow of the Libs, Barry Taylor, and the Greens preferences could see either Taylor or Young defeat Stephens". The scenario Graham paints for a Liberal win involves Young receiving large volumes of preferences from Taylor (a former ATSIC WA chairman) and the Greens, which hardly seems likely. The real threat for Stephens is that Greens preferences might put Taylor ahead of Young, whose own preferences might deliver him the seat if Stephens’ primary vote is substantially below 50 per cent.

Six weeks after the previous survey prompted The Australian to carry a front page headline reading "ALP faces poll rout in the west", it appears the elastic has snapped back. Yesterday’s Newspoll had the parties even on two-party preferred, with Labor up 7 per cent to 42 per cent on the primary vote and the Coalition down 6 per cent to 44 per cent. Labor’s figure is 3 per cent higher than any Newspoll result since the election of the Gallop government. The other remarkable fact is that despite the Coalition’s slump, it’s also their second highest result in that time. If the figures are accurate the non-major party vote at the coming election will fall by more than half, from 28.4 per cent to 14 per cent. All minor parties are affected – the Greens’ 6 per cent is their worst result since June 2002 and compares with their 7.3 per cent at the 2001 election; the Democrats have sunk beneath 1 per cent to score a "statistically insignificant" rating for the first time; and One Nation are clearly destined to lose all but about 1 per cent from their 9.6 per cent in 2001. Despite what my hit counter says, Western Australian voters have clearly been paying too much attention to this website because 43 per cent expect the Coalition to win against 36 per cent for Labor, although the Coalition had an even bigger lead on this measure going into the last election.

The Sunday Times has turned in a handy poll showing Labor ahead in Geraldton and Mindarie but heading for a drubbing in Swan Hills, although a collective sample of 450 suggests the results should be treated with caution. Unusually the report provides two-party preferred figures without distribution of the undecided – had this been done the results would have looked a little something like this:

		ALP	LIB	UND		ALP	LIB
Geraldton		49	41	9		54	46
Mindarie		44	37	18		54	46
Swan Hills		32	52	15		39	61

The results runs counter to the prevailing wisdom in that Labor are ahead in regional Geraldton and behind in suburban Swan Hills. Earlier reports suggested that the Liberals had been disappointed by recent polling in the latter electorate, while no less an authority than Paul Murray reckons psephologists should classify Geraldton as being held by an imaginary Liberal member and not by Labor’s all-too-real Shane Hill.

Former West Australian editor and current Perth talk radio king Paul "Mooner" Murray has stirred up a psephological pshitstorm with the following remarks in his regular Saturday column for his old paper:

Over the next few weeks, you will be bombarded by endless streams of so-called information about what are seen by the media as marginal seats. Much of it will be rubbish, because the media rely solely on one source of information to determine the swinging seats. That source is Antony Green, the competent psephologist employed by our state-owned national broadcaster (sometimes called the ABC – PB). Even the WA Electoral Commission uses his pendulum of swinging seats as its published guide. The problem is that the Green pendulum will not help you make sense of what is likely to happen in the election … his swings are calculated on the two-party preferred results of the 2001 election. That takes no account of the peculiar flow of preferences in that election which will not be reproduced in this one …. And that’s what makes the pendulum worthless.

Murray is certainly laying it on with a trowel with his contention that the two-party preferred measure is "worthless", which suggests that voters are idiotic automatons with no intellectual capacity to grasp the importance of their relative ordering of Labor and Coalition candidates – surely only true south of the river. But newspaper editors and talkback hosts do develop different ways of expressing themselves from academics and election wonks. Stripped of its provocativeness, Murray’s contention that the primary vote figures from the 2001 election will be a more useful guide than two-party preferred is worth examining. Constructing an alternative pendulum based on the difference between the parties’ post-redistribution primary vote from 2001 is easily done, since two-party preferred figures are not the only ones that Antony Green has calculated – they are however the obvious ones to use in ordering a table of the electorates, since two-party preferred is the only measure that puts Labor seats on one side and Coalition seats on the other.

The following table ranks electorates by order of primary vote majority, cutting out at the 10 per cent mark, with Labor majority seats on the left and Coalition (literally speaking since several of these seats had both Liberal and Nationals candidates) on the right. Which of the two tables proves more useful will be easily verifiable once the results are in. The seats are colour-coded according to who actually holds them on the notional post-redistribution two-party measure, with the difference between the major parties’ primary vote listed in the inner column and the total non-major party vote in the outer – the higher the latter figure, the more dangerous it is to draw conclusions from either the primary or two-party result (also note the pendulum at Mumble, which is padded out
with various other figures in recognition of what both Brent and Murray recognise as an unusual result from 2001). Alannah MacTiernan’s seat of Armadale, which is being factored into the Liberals’ best-case scenarios, is listed with its notional two-party margin of 6.6 per cent because the Liberals did not field a candidate in 2001.

22.4		0.4	KALGOORLIE
22.4		0.4	MINDARIE
23.8		1.2	RIVERTON	ALBANY	1.4		35.4
23.8		2.5	JOONDALUP	MURRAY	1.9		29.7
24.2		2.6	WANNEROO	BUNBURY	4.5		24.7
25.1		3.0	COLLIE-WELL.	DARLING RANGE	5.1		32.4
26.9		6.4	KIMBERLEY	SWAN HILLS	6.0		32.8
–		6.6	ARMADALE	KINGSLEY	7.2		24.4
14.2		8.2	BALLAJURA	GERALDTON	8.5		38.3
22.8		9.6	N.W. COASTAL	SERP.-JARRAH.	9.2		24.6

It may thus be inferred that under a first-past-the-post system (assuming such a system would not have prompted voters to have behaved differently), Labor would have fallen one seat short of a majority. It’s also interesting to note that the one seat they would have picked up at the Coalition’s expense would have been Kalgoorlie, held by Liberal leadership hopeful Matt Birney.

It has traditionally been the conservative side of politics that has been associated with fiscal prudence, but the Western Australian election campaign demonstrates how easily that worm can turn under the right political circumstances. The Coalition ended week one by securing the endorsement of the Nursing Federation with a promise to deliver on its claim for $50 million of funding to improve working conditions, a move which has earned comparisons with the Prime Minister’s late-campaign promise that no Tasmanian forestry jobs would be lost from old-growth logging bans. This overlooks the important distinction that John Howard trumped Labor with a policy that was massively less expensive than their own, which included an $800 million fund to compensate the timber industry that signally failed to achieve its political ends.

The state Coalition by contrast has calculated that it has the political capital to make the more extravagant promises due to the credibility deficit Labor incurred by breaking its 2001 campaign pledge not to increase taxes or charges. It has accordingly indulged in some conspicuous displays of targeted pork barrelling, such as its promise to "cut in" a section of the Mitchell Freeway extension through the marginal seat of Joondalup regardless of the cost. Labor now finds itself with the backing of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in criticising the Coalition’s largesse. The threat for the Coalition is that the currency of election promises may have been so debased that a Treasurer warning of a $44 million "black hole" might receive a more credulous audience than a Liberal leader in a Santa Claus outfit.

Let’s see what else is in the papers:

• A steady flow of newspaper headlines about the collapse of building contractor Devaugh is continuing to imperil Labor’s already precarious hold on the crucial seat of Albany. The Bunbury-based company was contracted in March 2004 to build the $20 million Albany justice complex and many local subcontractors were owed money when it collapsed, a matter of sufficient political sensitivity for the government to conduct a $621,000 bail-out. The West Australian reports that the administrator informed creditors this week that Devaugh "appeared to have become balance sheet insolvent from between June 30, 2002 and 30 June 2003". Robert Taylor of The West Australian suggests the government, and in particular Housing and Works Minister Nick Griffiths, was unduly eager to award the contract to a company based in Bunbury, its most marginal seat.

• Graham Kierath, Liberal candidate for Alfred Cove and ready-made leadership aspirant, continues to play hard ball in his bid to unseat independent member Janet Woollard. Fresh from what The West Australian’s Inside Cover dubbed the "Postergate" affair, Kierath last week lodged a complaint over Woollard’s description of herself as an "independent Liberal" in campaign material, which was given short shrift by the Western Australian Electoral Commission.

• Opposition Leader Colin Barnett made his debut entry as a comedian when he told a journalist who offered him hairspray at a windy outdoor campaign launch that he was "not after the gay vote". For some reason, Barnett’s stereotyping of the gay community as people who might be inclined to use hair products was received less warmly than that of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

At last, the long awaited sequel to Monday’s "country edition" specifically focusing on the city seats that Labor picked up at the 2001 election (and ignoring the possibility raised by some that Labor might be doing badly enough to lose seats they have held over a longer period):

Swan Hills (Labor 0.3%): Swan Hills changed hands when Labor was dumped from power in 1993, but the redistribution prior to the 1996 election improved the Liberal margin by 4.6 per cent. Going into the 2001 election, few gave much thought to the possibility that Labor would achieve the 9.7 per cent swing necessary to unseat Court government minister June van de Klashorst. Labor’s candidate was 25-year-old Jaye Radisich, who was about to enter her final year at law school. But as in neighbouring Darling Range, the scale of the anti-Liberal backlash surprised everybody, a 15.9 per cent dive on the primary vote making room for One Nation (10.9 per cent) and Liberals for Forests (5.5 per cent) and delivering a decisive 11.8 per cent swing to Labor. The corresponding federal electorate of Pearce went sharply the other way on October 9, the Liberals increasing 8.8 per cent on the primary vote and 6.0 per cent on two-party preferred. On December 13, Robert Taylor of The West Australian reported that party insiders believed Labor to be "firming" here against the statewide trend.

Mindarie (Labor 1.2%): As a brand new electorate with no incumbency factor in play, Mindarie is even less safe for Labor than its margin makes it appear. Their candidate is John Quigley, currently member for the abolished electorate of Innaloo some distance to the south. As a high-profile police union lawyer, Quigley was no stranger to media exposure before he entered parliament and has become even less so since. He has recently been at the centre of a furious row with The West Australian after he claimed editor Paul Armstrong threatened to "wage a war" against him unless he apologised for his criticism of a report that police officers had let him off with a caution for minor driving offences. Quigley had earlier entered the Coalition firing line after he sent a letter to the deputy police commissioner complaining of the treatment his son received when he was arrested for disorderly conduct at the 2002 Australia Day fireworks celebrations. Liberal candidate Michael Lowry is a former chief executive of mining company Griffin Group.

Joondalup (Labor 3.1%): Labor’s Terry O’Gorman won Joondalup from Liberal incumbent Chris Baker in 2001 with a narrow 0.5 per cent margin after a 6.3 per cent two-party swing. The seat is a rare example of the redistribution doing Labor a good turn, their margin given an extra 2.5 per cent padding. Present indications suggest that O’Gorman will need every bit of it. The key local issue is the Mitchell Freeway, the artery linking the northern suburban coastal corridor to the city. Both parties are promising an extension of the freeway to Burns Beach Road, but the opposition is promising extra funding to provide for the section through the suburb of Connolly to be "cut in" at the same level as adjoining areas, whatever the cost. Those who doubt that the Liberals think this issue is a winner are invited to inspect the effort that has gone into this press release.

Riverton (Labor 3.1%): One of Labor’s many surprise wins from 2001 came with the defeat of Workplace Relations Minister Graham Kierath in this southern suburbs seat. Labor member Tony McRae’s modest margin looks more precarious still due to the government’s abandonment of the Fremantle Eastern Bypass project and its likely impact on heavy freight traffic through the electorate.

Wanneroo (Labor 3.1%): Dianne Guise easily won this northern suburbs seat from Liberal member Iain MacLean with a swing of 7.5 per cent at the 2001 election. She has since kept a reasonably low profile and will be worried over the destination of the 9.5 per cent One Nation vote from 2001. Her Liberal opponent Paul Miles has named his campaign website www.doingtheextramiles.com – get it?

Ballajura (Labor 4.8%): One of the great mysteries of the early part of the campaign has been the Liberal Party’s tardiness in nominating a candidate for this classic marginal seat, in contrast to other seats where they don’t stand a chance. Ballajura was won for Labor in 2001 by John D’Orazio, the high-profile former mayor of Bayswater who tried unsuccessfully to unseat Liberal member Rhonda Parker at the 1996 election before succeeding on the second attempt with a 5.0 per cent swing.

Mandurah (Labor 7.7%): Technically a non-urban seat, being in the South West upper house region, though considered urban by most normal standards. Labor member David Templeman’s margin here has been padded from 4.9 per cent to 7.7 per cent with the redistribution, but is still less than the 7.9 per cent swing he achieved to win the seat in 2001. One reason to think that voters in the electorate might return to old habits is the impact of the mortgage broking scandal on the 2001 result, Mandurah being home to a large retiree population.

With the Gallop government reckoned by all to be in deep trouble, much is being said at the moment of the rarity of one-term governments in Australia. At the federal level, we need to go back to the onset of the depression to find a government that failed to win a second term, that being Jim Scullin’s Labor government of 1929-31. Ditto New South Wales; since Jack Lang’s eventful Labor administration of 1930-32, the Coalition government of Nick Greiner and John Fahey has been the shortest lived, lasting a fraction over seven years from its election on 25 March 1988. Victoria has been even more stable since Henry Bolte’s Liberals took office in the wake of the Labor split in 1955, experiencing only three changes of government since. While Tasmania’s system of proportional representation should theoretically be a recipe for unstable minority government, Michael Field’s Greens-dependent Labor administration of 1989-92 is the only example of one-term government in recent memory. Excepting Tasmania, there are only three clear cases of one-term government since the Labor split. There are many differences between them, but two common features stand out – the election of each came as a surprise, and they all coincided with a government of the same political stripe at federal level. Only the former applies in Gallop’s case.

Queensland: Rob Borbidge, National/Liberal (16/2/96-26/6/98): It had been expected that it would take more than two terms for the odour surrounding the Fitzgerald inquiry to lift from the National Party, especially since Labor premier Wayne Goss maintained the highest approval ratings in the land. But it all went awry for Labor at the election of 15 July 1995, at which Labor lost nine seats and suffered a swing of 7.15 per cent that reduced it to 46.73 per cent on two-party preferred. The government nevertheless held on by one seat, but this was lost at a re-election for the seat of Mundingburra after the Liberals made a successful legal challenge against the original result. The Borbidge government took office with the support of independent member Liz Cunningham on 19 February 1996 and immediately gave an impression of unpreparedness, whereas Peter Beattie smoothly assumed the leadership upon Goss’s departure and slowly got on top in the polls. But it was ultimately failure to manage the challenge of One Nation that sealed the government’s doom, rather the normal ebb-and-flow of two-party politics. The refusal by both Coalition parties to put the new party last on preferences at the election of 13 June 1998 had a devastating effect on support for the Liberals in Brisbane, where they lost six seats to Labor. But the real shock was One Nation’s success in winning 22.68 per cent of the vote and 11 seats, six from Labor and five from the Nationals. Labor were ultimately one seat short of a majority and took power with the support of two independents.

South Australia: David Tonkin, Liberal/National Country (15/9/79-10/11/82): Labor under Don Dunstan had been dominant in South Australia throughout the 1970s, at least partly due to serious divisions in the Liberal Party which had not fully resolved when Dunstan resigned due to ill health on 15 February 1979. Six months later the new premier, Des Corcoran, foolishly called an election 18 months before one was due. His own party was caught unprepared, and was duly surprised to find itself turfed from power by David Tonkin’s Liberals. Tonkin’s government soon found itself facing a global recession that hit South Australia particularly hard, manufacturing layoffs burdening it with the highest unemployment in the country. With the government’s fiscal position deterioriating, Labor’s election campaign warning that the Liberals’ promised tax cuts would create a "black hole" were proved correct. Labor also enjoyed an inadvertent stroke of good fortune when one of its members quit the party to allow legislation for uranium mining at Roxby Downs through the upper house, the blocking of which threatened to provide the Liberal Party with its greatest electoral weapon. Labor picked up a 5.4 per cent swing and four seats at the election of 6 November 1982, enough to give it an absolute majority of one in the 47-seat House of Assembly, with further breathing space provided by one independent Labor member.

Western Australia: John Tonkin, Labor (20/2/71-30/3/74): Not quite sure what it is about premiers called Tonkin that the Australian electorate finds so objectionable, but that mystery aside, this is the most useful example in terms of precedents for Geoff Gallop. The party had not been considered likely to win the 1971 election against Sir David Brand, who led a Liberal government that had been securely in power since 1959, but it nevertheless emerged with a one-seat majority. In many ways the circumstances were quite different to those facing Gallop – inflation was spiralling, unemployment emerged as a cause of great alarm after rising to an unheard-of 2.8 per cent, and the Labor government in Canberra was growing more unpopular by the day. One incident of the 1974 election campaign was sufficiently momentous that even eastern states folk might know of it. A rally at Forrest Place featuring Gough Whitlam, who could not be dissuaded from making a campaign visit to lend support to Tonkin, was gatecrashed by a horde of farmers enraged by the federal government’s cancellation of the superphosphate subsidy, who took the opportunity to pelt Whitlam with tomatoes and soft drink cans. The incident may well have elicited sympathy for Labor in the city, where the party’s vote actually increased, although it failed to win them any new seats. The rub for Gallop is that Tonkin’s government went under with the loss of three non-metropolitan seats, one of which was Albany. The others were Pilbara, which has a modern relative in the similarly vulnerable Central Kimberley Pilbara, and the long-lost electorate of Merredin-Yilgarn.

Saturday’s West Australian provided Westpoll (a.k.a. Patterson Market Research) results from surveys of 200 respondents in four well-chosen marginal seats, namely the regional battlegrounds of Bunbury and Albany and the marginal suburban seats of Joondalup and Riverton. The Gallop government would no doubt have been very interested to learn that the Liberals will win huge primary vote majorities in all four. Seat-by-seat breakdowns as follows: