Newspoll: 53-47 to Labor

The first Newspoll in four weeks is well in line with other results to emerge from a busy weekend polling cycle, with Essential Research still to come.

The first Newspoll in four weeks has Labor leading 53-47, compared with 51-49 in favour of the Coalition last time. Primary votes are 38% for the Coalition (down five), 34% for Labor (steady) and 14% for the Greens (up three). Tony Abbott is down five on approval to 35% and up nine on disapproval to 56%, while Bill Shorten is up four to 35% and down one to 41%. Abbott’s lead as preferred prime minister has shrunk from 41-33 to 40-38.

This is the latest in a polling avalanche which has followed the interruption of Easter and Anzac Day, to which Essential Research is still to be added tomorrow. Three other polls published over the past two days have produced strikingly similar results on the primary vote, from which Newspoll differs in having Labor lower and the Greens higher:

• Galaxy, for the first time adding an online panel component to its live-interview phone polling to produce an enlarged sample of 1391, has the Labor lead at 52-48, with primary votes of 39% for the Coalition, 37% for Labor, 11% for the Greens and 6% for Palmer United.

• A ReachTEL poll conducted on Saturday, also from a larger-than-usual sample of 4016, has Labor’s lead at 54-46, with primary votes of 38.9% for the Coalition, 39.6% for Labor, 11.2% for the Greens and 6.0% for Palmer United.

• Morgan’s multi-mode face-to-face plus SMS poll, conducted every weekend but compiled fortnightly, has Labor leading 53.5-46.5 according to the conventional two-party preferred method that allocates preferences as per the result of the previous election, increasing to 55-45 when preferences were allocated by the respondent. The primary votes are 37.5% for the Coalition, 37% for Labor, 12% for the Greens and 5.5% for Palmer United.

UPDATE: And now Essential Research comes in entirely unchanged on last week, with Labor leading 52-48 from primary votes of 40% for the Coalition, 38% for Labor, 10% for the Greens and 5% for Palmer United. Questions on the deficit tax show the importance of wording in these situations – just as carbon tax questions got a more favourable response when the rationale for them was laid out, inquiry about “a temporary ‘deficit’ tax on high and middle income earners aimed at bringing the budget back to surplus” has support and opposition tied at 34%. However, 48% favour the proposition that “introducing a new ‘deficit’ tax would be a broken promise by the Abbott Government” versus 33% for “it is more important to reduce the deficit than stick to pre-election promises”.

Other findings have “management of the Australian economy” all but unchanged since a year ago, with a total good rating of 40% (up one) and total bad of 31% (down one), but with results by party support having changed beyond recognition; Joe Hockey favoured over Chris Bowen to manage the economy by 33% to 27%; Labor better than Liberal at “representing the interests of working families (47-20), Liberal a lot better than Labor at “representing the interests of the large corporate and financial interests” (54-13), and Liberal better at handling the economy overall (40-26); 23% very concerned about job losses, 34% somewhat concerned and 29% not at all concerned; 77% believing the gap between rich and poor to have increased over the last 10 years, with only 3% for decreased; 29% thinking their own financial situation good versus 26% for poor; “the cost of living” rated by far the economic issue of most concern (56%, with unemployment in second place on 11%).

Galaxy: 52-48 to Labor

The second in what looks like it might be a regular monthly series of Galaxy polls finds Labor opening a lead after a dead heat in last month’s poll.

The Sunday News Limited tabloids have a Galaxy poll of federal voting intention, conducted on Wednesday and Thursday from a sample of 1391 – quite a bit bigger than Galaxy polls have traditionally been in the past – which shows Labor leading 52-48 on two-party preferred, compared with 50-50 at the last such poll a month ago. On the primary vote, the Coalition is down four points to 39%, Labor is steady on 37%, the Greens are up one to 11% and Palmer United is up two to 6%. The poll also finds 65% opposed to the paid parental leave scheme proceeding “in the current budgetary environment”, compared with 23% in support. Seventy-two per cent say they would rate the proposed deficit levy a broken promise, after being prompted that “Tony Abbott announced before the election that there would be no new taxes”, compared with 21% who thought otherwise.

UPDATE: Possum, who reads more carefully than some of us, observes that the higher sample size is due to a change in methodology, with the live interviewing (which I believe in Galaxy’s case includes a subset of mobile phone polling) supplemented by an online panel.

UPDATE 2 (ReachTEL): The monthly ReachTEL poll for the Seven Network has Labor’s lead up from 52-48 to 54-46, from primary votes of 40% for Labor and 39% for the Coalition. More to follow.

UPDATE 3: Full ReachTEL results here, showing primary votes of 38.9% for the Coalition (down 1.1% on a poll conducted in fortnight ago), 39.6% for Labor (up 2.2%), 11.2% for the Greens (down 0.3%) and 6.0% for Palmer United (up 0.4%). Also featured are leadership ratings on a five-point scale, in which Tony Abbott has a very good or good rating from 26.5% (down 4.3%) and poor or very poor from 56.8% (up 5.0%), while Bill Shorten’s respective numbers are 20.8% (up 1.8%) and 42.2% (down 0.4%). A 1% deficit levy has a net unfavourable if applied at $80,000 per annum (34.2% to 40.7%), becoming strongly favourable at $180,000 (59.3% to 23.4%), but 60.2% believe such a levy would break an election promise against 23.5% who think otherwise. Co-payments for doctor visits have 33.5% support and 56.5% opposition, with 59.0% thinking it a broken promise against 28.4% not; and 47.2% would support reducing the size of the public service to bring the budget to surplus versus 34.3% opposed.

UPDATE 4 (Morgan): Morgan now offers its fortnightly result as well, part of a glut of polling as everyone returns to the party following consecutive long weekends (Newspoll to follow this evening). It adds to the general picture of a blowout in having Labor’s lead at 55-45 (up from 52-48) on respondent-allocated preferences and 53.5-46.5 (up from 52-48) on previous election preferences, the primary votes being 37% for Labor (up three), 37.5% for the Coalition (down one), 12% for the Greens (down one) and 5.5% for Palmer United (up half).

Huon and Rosevears live

Live coverage of the count for today’s elections in the Tasmanian Legislative Council seats of Huon and Rosevears.

# % Proj. 2CP Proj.
HUON
Robert Armstrong 4179 20.4% 56.8%
Jimmy Bell 3167 15.4%
Rodney Dillon 1681 8.2%
Peter Hodgman (Liberal) 5362 26.1% 26.1% 43.2%
Helen Lane 868 4.2%
Pavel Ruzicka 1308 6.4%
Liz Smith 3949 19.3%
TOTAL 20514 81.2% of enrolled voters
Booths reporting 25 out of 25
.
ROSEVEARS
Kerry Finch 11712 60.4% 60.9%
Don Morris (Liberal) 7689 39.6% 39.1%
TOTAL 19401 77.5% of enrolled voters
Booths reporting 15 out of 15

Monday night

Progressive preference distribution pretty much puts Robert Armstrong’s win beyond doubt. At the second last exclusion, Liz Smith looks set to drop out with 6411 votes to 6945 for Armstrong and 6941 for Peter Hodgman. Smith’s preferences then flow heavily to Armstrong, giving him a 10645-8080 victory. Hodgman might well have been the winner if it was Armstrong rather than Smith dropping out of the count, but the 543 vote gap that separates them is clearly insurmountable.

The table above has been updated with the latest counting, which included the addition today of 273 postal votes, and also with preference allocations based on the actual results rather than estimates based on past elections. Whereas the estimates had 56% going independent, 38% to the Liberals and 6% exhausting, the actual figures are 59% independent, 25% Liberal and 16% exhausting. I’ve turned off the projection for Huon, so this is all based on raw figures.

Sunday night

Rechecking and a handful of new votes have added 207 to the formal count in Huon, fractionally to the advantage of Hodgman and Smith and to the disadvantage of Armstrong, without changing the underly situation. Kevin Bonham reports that the “real action” of the preference distribution will start tomorrow afternoon.

Sunday

The Tasmanian Liberals have suffered a very disappointing result from elections which they hoped would expand their existing foothold of two seats in the 15-member Legislative Council, where Labor has only one member with all other seats held by independents. At the northern end of the state, Kerry Finch has been comfortably returned as the independent member for Rosevears despite being targeted by an aggressive Liberal campaign which painted him as “just like the Greens”. At the southern end, voters in Huon appear to have rebuffed the Premier’s uncle, Peter Hodgman, in his bid to return to parliament after 13 years.

A well-known family name is a considerable asset in Tasmania’s Hare-Clark lower house elections, which puts candidates into competition with the other candidates on their own party ticket. This has at the very least done no harm to the electoral fortunes of current MPs bearing the names of Hodgman, Bacon, Groom, O’Byrne, Ogilvie and Petrusma (a Ken Bacon won election for Labor in Lyons in 1998 and 2002, despite being no relation). However, today’s result in Huon might indicate that this is in no way transferable to the more conventional electoral system for the upper house, where voters operating in a by-election environment may well react adversely to family empire-building – and perhaps also to candidates seeking to enter parliament a few weeks short of their sixty-eighth birthday.

Hodgman ends the night’s counting with a primary vote lead over six independent rivals, of whom the front-runners are Huon Valley mayor Robert Armstrong and his council colleague Liz Smith. But with few voters traditionally availing themselves of the option to have their preferences exhaust (they are required to number a minimum of three boxes), the seat will most likely be won by whoever makes the final count out of Armstrong and Smith. Dissemination of how-to-vote cards at polling booths being forbidden in Tasmania, a considerable element of randomness can be expected in the distribution of preferences. However, the candidates’ ideological affinities offer at least some guide.

Smith was until recently a member of the Greens, whereas Armstrong is described by Kevin Bonham in comments as “a pretty mainstream pro-development right-winger”. Together with the little-known Helen Lane, there will be an early elimination of Rodney Dillon and Pavel Ruzicka, whom Bonham respectively describes as “a leftie” and “pro-forestry”. Jimmy Bell, who “seems Laborish”, is likely to go next, unless he receives an unexpectedly solid flow of preferences from Lane, Dillon and Ruzicka. It is entirely possible that a cumulative leftish lean among the aforementioned will stand Smith in good stead, and allow her to pull ahead of Armstrong. That might just give Hodgman a glimmer of hope if he receives a heavy flow of preferences from Armstrong. But if the final count comes down to Armstrong and Hodgman, it would be very hard to see preferences from the other candidates failing to flow decisively Armstrong’s way.

Election night

8.28pm. Huon: The Blackmans Bay booth is now added, finishing the count for the night, and it’s a belated good result for Hodgman, though he’s still a long shot at best. Armstrong holds a narrow lead over Smith, with preferences likely to determine who ends up emerging the victor over Hodgman.

8.17pm. Huon: Franklin added – a small booth, but a good result for Smith.

8.02pm. Huon: The decisive factor looks likely to be the preferences of Jimmy Bell, who is the “manager of Huon Valley PCYC”. I might intuitively expect such a candidate’s voters to favour Armstrong over Smith in particular, although I’m entirely ignorant of the personal histories of any of those concerned.

7.58pm. Huon: Margate, Cygnet and Sandfly added, the first being the largest booth in the electorate after yet-to-report Blackmans Bay. Cygnet and Sandfly are two of five booths to have been won by Liz Smith, who is now well ahead of Jimmy Bell again and only slightly behind Robert Armstrong, while Margate is a clear win for Hodgman. The two booths still to come are very large Blackmans Bay, where 3289 votes were cast at the state election, and much smaller Franklin, 531 votes.

7.43pm. Rosevears: All booths are in, in what may have been the quickest count I’ve ever witnessed (there being only two candidates obviously helped).

7.34pm. Huon: As the projected primary vote figure indicates, the weakest booths for the Liberals, namely those on the southern edge of Hobart (particularly Blackmans Bay, where 3289 votes were cast at the state election, more than double the largest booth to report so far), are still to come. Robert Armstrong looks best placed, but the outstanding booths are off his Huon Valley turf, so there’s no grounds at this stage to pick a winner out of Armstrong, Smith and Bell.

7.32pm. Huon: Dover added, a fairly small booth but a strong result for Armstrong.

7.29pm. Huon: Snug, Ranelagh, Mountain River and Howden added, together with 831 pre-polls. These have clipped Robert Armstrong slightly, putting Peter Hodgman back in the primary vote lead, while Liz Smith is back in third place over Jimmy Bell (who nonetheless won the Ranelagh booth, to add to his wins in Huonville and Judbury), albeit by the narrowest of margins.

7.24pm. Rosevears: Two more booths in, maintaining Finch’s clean sweep, leaving only Riverside to go.

7.21pm. Rosevears: 12 of 15 booths in now, together with 951 postals, and Kerry Finch has won all of them.

7.15pm. Huon: Things have shifted strongly in Robert Armstrong’s favour with the addition of Huonville, Geeveston, Port Huon and 1537 postal votes, to the extent that he now leads Peter Hodgman on the primary vote is looking a very likely winner. Another independent, Jimmy Bell, won the very large Huonville booth, and has now taken third place ahead of Liz Smith.

7.07pm. Rosevears: Beauty Point added; Kerry Finch still cruising to re-election.

7.03pm. Huon: Surges Bay and Woodbridge added, the latter being a great result for Liz Smith, who is now close to matching Peter Hodgman on the primary vote. However, it may be that the larger booths near Hobart end up telling a different story, at least with respect to Smith-versus-Armstrong.

6.56pm. Huon: Agfest, Cradog and Kettering added. Still looking very tight between Armstrong and Smith to see who emerges the challenger to Hodgman, whose vote is well south of where he would like it to be. So a disappointing picture overall for the Liberals.

6.54pm. Rosevears: Another three booths do nothing to dispel the picture of a clear victory for Kerry Finch.

6.50pm. Huon: Glen Huon and Judbury added. Weak results for Hodgman, who no longer has his projected lead. Armstrong heavily outpolled Smith in Glen Huon but Smith outpolled him in Judbury, which is interesting because the two booths are very close to each other. The booths in outer Hobart will be very important, and none of them have yet reported.

6.46pm. Huon: The Huon Valley municipality, of which Robert Armstrong is the very long-serving mayor, does not encompass Bruny Island, which is heavily over-represented in the results so far. It might also be that Armstrong will do better on preferences than Smith.

6.42pm. Huon: Barnes Bay, the third and final booth on Bruny Island, and Middleton, located on the mainland immediately opposite, have been added. Smith still ahead of Armstrong. The projection suggests Peter Hodgman will win narrowly, but I’m not at all confident about that – his primary vote is certain competitive, but not spectacular.

6.40pm. Rosevears: Further good results for Kerry Finch from Sidmouth and Glengarry. Barring a very different pattern in Launceston, he doesn’t look likely to be troubled.

6.39pm. The first booth in from Rosevears is Frankford, and while it’s very small, it’s good news for Kerry Finch.

6.35pm. 112 mobile votes added to the totals, but these aren’t being used to calculate the projections.

6.33pm. A third small booth, Alonnah, has reported, being the second one on Bruny Island. Smith again outpolls Armstrong. I’d recalibrate the charts to make her the second candidate, if results weren’t coming in so quickly.

6.32pm. Both Adventure Bay and Southport delivered 20% for the Greens compared with 16.8% for the entire Franklin electorate. Presumably Armstrong will do a lot better in booths in Huon Valley.

6.29pm. Another small booth added for Huon, Southport, delivers another very strong result for Liz Smith. I’ll check to see if these were particularly strong booths for the Greens, which might explain it. Otherwise, she rather than Armstrong might emerge as the biggest threat to Hodgman.

6.26pm. Results in from the very small Adventure Bay booth on Bruny Island. The numbers above include a particularly experimental two-candidate projection with preferences very roughly estimated from past form at Legislative Council elections, in which Robert Armstrong is presumed to be the strongest candidate apart from Peter Hodgman (although that’s not the case on these numbers), with 38% of preferences going to Hodgman, 56% to Armstrong, and 6% exhausting. However, that could well be too generous to Hodgman, so treat with due caution.

6pm. Polls have closed for today’s elections in the Tasmanian Legislative Council seats of Huon and Rosevears. This post will follow the results as they are published, using somewhat experimental projections based on comparison of the Liberal vote with the booth results from the March 15 state election.

Tasmanian upper house elections: Huon and Rosevears

Seven weeks after their landslide election win, Tasmania’s Liberals are hoping to remain on the front foot at tomorrow’s elections for two of the state’s 15 upper house seats.

Tomorrow being the first Saturday of May, it’s time for the annual periodical elections for Tasmania’s Legislative Council, in which either two or three of the fifteen electoral divisions go to the polls according to a staggered cycle that plays out over six years. These are very often somnolent affairs, the chamber being uniquely dominated by independents who mostly come to their roles via local government. Members once elected are hard to dislodge, and the contests are usually only competitive when one retires. However, things are rather a lot more interesting on this occasion, with the Liberals making an aggressive move on a chamber where they have traditionally had little or no formal representation. This comes seven weeks after a 16-year stretch in opposition ended with a landslide election victory, and parallels Labor’s efforts to make its presence felt in the chamber when the electoral wind was in its sails during the early years of Jim Bacon’s government. The high-water mark for Labor came when it made it to five seats in 2001, all located in and around Hobart, to which could be added the notionally independent Silvia Smith, who had been Labor’s federal member for Bass from 1993 to 1996. All that remains to Labor now is the northern Hobart outskirts seat of Derwent, where Craig Farrell succeeded former Treasurer Michael Aird upon his retirement in 2011.

The Liberals had long been unrepresented in the chamber until 2009 when Vanessa Goodwin won a by-election held after Labor’s Allison Ritchie resigned in the eastern Hobart seat of Pembroke, which Labor ignominiously declined to contest. Goodwin was joined last year by Leonie Hiscutt, who won the Burnie-based seat of Montgomery upon the retirement of independent Sue Smith. The chamber has traditionally included a number of members with links to the Liberal Party despite their notional independence, a conspicuous recent example being Paul Harriss, who vacated his seat of Huon to make a successful run as a Liberal candidate for Franklin in the lower house. The Liberals now hope to formally move the seat into the fold by running a high-profile candidate, and are also gunning hard for independent incumbent Kerry Finch in the other seat up for election tomorrow, Rosevears. Reviewing the two electorates in turn:

Huon

Candidates in ballot paper order: Robert Armstrong; Jimmy Bell; Rodney Dillon; Peter Hodgman (Liberal); Helen Lane; Pavel Ruzicka; Liz Smith.

Huon covers the southernmost parts of Tasmania including Blackmans Bay and Margate on Hobart’s southern outskirts, small towns to the south including Huonville and Cygnet, and the unpopulated southern part of the World Heritage area in the state’s south-west. Recently elected as a Liberal member for Franklin in the lower house, Paul Harriss came to the seat in 1996 having run unsuccessfully in Franklin at the state election three months previously and, as Antony Green puts it, “retained enough name recognition to win Huon as an independent”.

The big news in Huon is that the Liberals now hope to secure the seat on the strength of the biggest brand name in Tasmanian politics. Peter Hodgman is the 67-year-old uncle of the current Premier and the younger brother of his father, the late Michael Hodgman. While his other relations are somewhat better known, Peter Hodgman boasts a considerable CV in politics in his own right, including a previous stint as the notionally independent member for Huon from 1974 to 1986, which began when he succeeded brother Michael after he quit to run for the federal seat of Denison (unsuccessfully at first, but he prevailed on the second attempt in 1975). This was followed by 15 years as a state member for Franklin in the lower house, during which time he served as a minister in the Groom-Rundle government of 1992 to 1998. In 2001 he quit to run against Labor’s Harry Quick in the federal seat of Franklin, a long shot that failed to come off.

Joining Hodgman on the ballot paper are six other candidates, all independents. The most obvious competitor to Hodgman would look to be Robert Armstrong, who has been the mayor of Huon Valley since 2001, winning election on five successive occasions. Also in the field is Liz Smith, who has been on the Huon Valley council since 2002 and was until recently aligned with the Greens. Other candidates are Jimmy Bell, the manager of Huon Valley PCYC; Rodney Dillon, who works for Amnesty International; Pavel Ruzicka, a “sawmiller and specialist timber provider”, and Helen Lane, who runs a computer consultancy business.

Rosevears

Candidates in ballot paper order: Kerry Finch; Don Morris (Liberal).

Rosevears includes the western suburbs of Launceston, which provide about 60% of its voters, extending north-westwards to the coast through rural territory on the western bank of the Tamar River, encompassing the mining town of Beaconsfield and nearby Beauty Point. It has been held since 2002 by Kerry Finch, who was well-known locally after 24 years as a presenter for ABC Radio in northern Tasmania. Finch’s only competition when he faced re-election in 2008 was a low-profile independent, but this time he has a Liberal opponent in Don Morris, a former chief-of-staff to Will Hodgman who has more recently worked as an adviser to Ted Baillieu and Denis Napthine. The strategy of the Liberal campaign has been to portray Finch as “just like the Greens”, citing his support for same-sex marriage and “the job-destroying forest deal”, and opposition to the contentious Tamar Valley pulp mill proposal – a message it has promoted through television advertising and automated phone calls.

BludgerTrack: 51.2-48.8 to Labor

The only poll this week was Labor’s best result from Essential Research in nearly four years, but it hasn’t made much difference to the weekly poll aggregate.

Easter followed by the Anzac Day long weekend has resulted in a lean period for polling, with Newspoll very unusually having gone three weeks without. In an off week for Morgan’s fortnightly publication schedule, that just leaves Essential Research for this week, which I have so far neglected to cover. The poll has Labor’s lead up from 51-49 to 52-48, which is Labor’s best result from Essential since two weeks out from the 2010 election. On the primary vote, the Coalition is down a point to 40% and Labor up one to 38%, while the Greens are on 10%, losing the point that brought them to a temporary peak last week. Palmer United is steady on 5%, which is two points higher than four weeks ago. Other questions in this week’s Essential survey were to do with political party membership (26% say Bill Shorten’s proposed Labor membership rules would make them more likely to vote for the party versus 6% less likely and 59% make no difference; 72% say they would never consider joining a party versus 15% who say they would; 60% won’t confess to having ever engaged in party political activity), the fighter jets purchase (30% approve, 52% disapprove), republicanism (33% for and 42% against, compared with 39% and 35% in June 2012; 46% think a republic likely one day versus 37% for unlikely; 54% approve of the idea of Prince William being King of Australia versus only 26% who don’t).

As for BludgerTrack, Essential Research has had next to no effect on two-party preferred, and none at all on the seat projection, either nationally or any particular state. However, there is movement on the primary vote as the effects of Nielsen’s Greens outlier of three weeks ago fade off. That still leaves the Greens at an historically high 12.0%, but it still remains to be seen if they are trending back to the 9% territory they have tended to occupy for the past few years, or if they find a new equilibrium at a higher level. The Coalition is also down on the primary vote, which is beginning to look like a trend (it is only by the grace of rounding that its score still has a four in front of it). This cancels out the effect of the Greens’ drop on the two-party preferred vote for Labor, whose primary vote has little changed. Palmer United’s slight gain to 4.6% puts them at their highest level so far this year. There haven’t been any new leadership ratings since Nielsen, so the results displayed are as they were a fortnight ago.

WA Senate election finalised

The Western Australian Senate election result confirmed: three Liberals, one Labor, one Greens, one Palmer United.

The button has been pressed on the Western Australian Senate special election, confirming what has been clearly apparent since the first batch of postals were added to the count: the Liberals have won three seats, electing David Johnston, Michaelia Cash and newcomer Linda Reynolds; Labor has been reduce to one, electing newcomer Joe Bullock but with incumbent Louise Pratt defeated; Scott Ludlam has been re-elected for the Greens; and Zhenya “Dio” Wang will be a third Senator for the Palmer United Party. I await a scrutiny sheet of the preference distribution to fully probe the innards of the result, but here are a few things to chew on from the party vote totals.

• The table below divides the result into votes that were cast on polling day, namely ordinary and absent votes (also provisional votes, which are few in number and mostly from polling day), and those cast beforehand, namely pre-poll and postal votes. This is of unusual interest given the damage Labor was said to have suffered when Joe Bullock’s critical comments regarding his own party received widespread media coverage the day before the poll. Presumably this had something to do with the fact that the Greens picked up a 6.5% swing on polling day votes compared with a far more modest swing of 3.2% on votes cast earlier in the piece, and with Labor’s 5.2% swing on polling day comparing with 4.0% beforehand. However, the micro-party vote was also down on polling day and steady beforehand, which is consistent with them having done well in the September election out of voters reluctantly doing their bit to avoid the fine on election day, and sitting out the Senate election due to ignorance or apathy.

• That said, turnout was nothing like as bad as predicted, at 88.54% of enrolled voters compared with 92.77% in September. By contrast, the most recent House of Representatives by-election, in Kevin Rudd’s old seat of Griffith, had a turnout of 82.08% compared with 93.14% at the election. As Antony Green observes, this is likely to do with the considerable number of voters who don’t know what electorate they live in and are thus unaware of their obligation to vote, a situation that does not apply if the election is statewide.

• As has been widely noted, more Labor voters who went below the line gave their first preference to the number two candidate, Louise Pratt (5,390 votes), than to the number one candidate, Joe Bullock (3,982 votes). To my mind, a fairer electoral system would declare Pratt rather than Bullock the winner of the Labor seat. The only precedent for such a result that I’ve heard mentioned is the 2010 Senate election in Queensland, when Nationals loyalists saw that the number two candidate on the ticket of the newly merged Liberal National Party, Barnaby Joyce, polled 9136 votes against 8138 for his ticket-leading Liberal colleague, George Brandis.

UPDATE: The scrutiny sheet can be viewed here. The score at the final count was 188,169 to Linda Reynolds versus 176,042 for Louise Pratt, a margin of 12,127. Lest anyone was thinking below-the-line votes might have saved the day for Pratt, the projected margin on Antony Green’s calculator, which treats all votes as above-the-line, was in fact a slightly narrower 8109.

Setting the bar

The major parties are reportedly considering an interesting new approach to Senate electoral reform: denying you your right to have your preferences distributed if you haven’t chosen the right party.

UPDATE: The submissions are now available here, and it turns out the proposal excoriated below is only that of the Liberal Party, and not a major party unity ticket. The Labor Party proposes New South Wales-style optional preferential voting above the line. It is also only the Liberal submission that advocates photo identification when voting.

Dennis Shanahan of The Australian reports that the Liberal Party and the ALP will today make submissions to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Reform including, among other things, their recommendations for Senate electoral reform. Interestingly, it appears that both will advocate excluding parties from having their preferences distributed unless they clear a threshold of 1.4% of the primary vote. A common feature of proportional representation systems is that parties must exceed a certain vote threshold in order to win seats, but approaching the issue at the preferences end of the equation is something Sir Humphrey Appleby might have described as “novel”, having never been proposed by any disinterested authority that I am aware of.

While entirely impossible to justify, the appeal of such a proposal to the major parties is simple to discern. It is clear that the election result has led to unstoppable momentum for reform among those with a particular interest in such matters, even if that’s less obviously true of the public at large (an Essential Research poll conducted immediately after the election found 38% thought micro-parties in the Senate good for democracy, with only 25% opting for bad). However, if public submissions to the inquiry are anything to go by, by far the most favoured options involve the abolition of group voting tickets, which in the current manner of their operation are self-evidently an offence against democracy. With the objective of putting electoral outcomes back in the hands of the conscious decisions of voters, the obvious routes to reform are to follow the New South Wales example and distribute preferences only as far as voters purposefully allocate them, or require that voters number every box above the line.

By contrast, a preference threshold alternative could address the controversy directly at hand, namely the election of Senators from as little as 0.5% of the vote in the case of Ricky Muir, while maintaining the major parties’ power to corral preferences to the disadvantage of parties that might in fact clear a conventional election threshold, which are popularly set at around 5% (as is the case in Germany and New Zealand). The instructive case study here is the 1998 election, when the major parties all but froze out One Nation despite their success in polling over a million votes nationally (9.0% of the total). That left them with only one seat out of a parliament of 224, having narrowly achieved a Senate quota in their own right in Queensland. In economic contexts, such behaviour might be described as oligopolistic collusion, whereby established operators act in concert to deny new competitors access to the market.

In fairness, it might yet prove that the parties’ determination to seek an alternative to an election threshold has been inspired by Section 7 of the Constitution and its requirement that the Senate “shall be composed of senators for each State, directly chosen by the people of the State”. In rejecting a challenge to above-the-line Senate voting when it was introduced in 1984, the then Chief Justice of the High Court, Harry Gibbs, allowed that the section required that voters “must vote for the individual candidates whom they wish to choose as senators”, but did not accept that above-the-line voting amounted to anything other than a simplified means for doing so. The principle that the Senate electoral system must be based on choosing candidates rather than parties was nonetheless confirmed, and more than one authority has suggested that this would be violated by a provision that denied election to individual candidates on the basis of their party’s aggregate vote (note that, absent other reforms, candidate-based thresholds would exclude all major party candidates except those at the top of the ticket).

However, it’s very far from clear to me that a preference threshold would get around this, or that there might not be an alternative basis for challenging a system that denied some voters the right to have their preferences considered, while maintaining the privilege for those with the good taste to vote for the parties who are proposing the idea. It’s one thing to penalise a poorly performing party for failing to clear a threshold whose purpose is to ensure that members of parliament do in fact represent a reasonably significant constituency, but a preference threshold seems to place the penalty on those who vote for them. For the sake of clarity of expression, I wrote in the opening paragraph of this post of parties having “their” preferences distributed, which certainly encapsulates the depressing reality of how the system works at present. However, the foundation of any democratic system is that the vote belongs to the voter, and not to the particular party to whom they happen to give their first preference.

Happily, it does appear from Dennis Shanahan’s report that the submissions will grant some credence to the more honest alternative of optional preferential voting above the line. Other proposals said to be “pursued” or “examined” are a national electoral roll for both federal and state elections (difficult to argue with), photo identification when voting (more in the Liberals’ interest than Labor’s, so the precise wording here will be interesting to see), a tightening of the late-campaign advertising blackout, and the no-brainer of prohibiting people from serving as registered officers for more than one party.

Matters Northern Territorian

The Palmer United Party secures three new MPs, reports of troubling private polling for the Country Liberal Party government, and a big-but-not-big-enough swing to Labor in a by-election held a fortnight ago.

Enough going on in the top end lately that it seems opportune to rope them together into a blog post:

• The Palmer United Party has silently secured three seats in the 25-member parliament after recruiting the three remote-area indigenous MPs who quit the Country Liberal Party a month ago. Senior among the three is Namatjira MP Alison Anderson, who was elected as a Labor member in 2005, became an independent in 2009 and joined the Country Liberal Party in September 2011, easily winning re-election in 2012 by a margin of 18.6%. The other two are Arnhem MP Larisa Lee and Arafura MP Francis Xavier, who were two out of the three surprise CLP winners in remote seats at the 2012 election, contributing to Labor’s defeat despite their success at retaining all their seats in Darwin. However, a cloud hangs over Larisa Lee who faces a charge of aggravated assault, which could cost her her seat if it leads to a sentence of more than one year. In the meantime, Palmer United has doubled its total representation across Australia’s federal, state and territory parliaments, with Anderson, Lee and Xavier joining Clive Palmer as member for Fairfax in the House of Representatives, and Gaven MP Alex Douglas and Yeerongpilly MP Carl Judge in the Queensland MP. Glenn Lazarus, Zhenya Wang and Jacqui Lambie will shortly join them as Senators for Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania when the new Senate term begins on July 1.

• The Australian reported a fortnight ago that an automated phone poll of 881 respondents in Darwin, conducted by Telereach/JWS Research for an unidentified client, showed a 10% swing against the CLP since the last election, at which its territory-wide two-party preferred vote was 55.8%. The poll showed a minus 11% net approval rating for Adam Giles, a minus 23% rating for his deputy Dave Tollner, and a minus 4% rating for Labor leader Delia Lawrie.

• With counting completed for the April 12 by-election for the Palmerston seat of Blain, Nathan Barrett has retained the seat for the CLP by a margin of 3.2%, representing a swing to Labor of 10.0%. The CLP primary vote was down from the 61.6% recorded in 2012 for Terry Mills, who was at that time his party’s candidate for the chief ministership, while Labor’s vote was up only modestly from 33.6% to 37.3%. Independent candidate Matthew Cranitch, the president of the territory branch of the Australian Education Union, polled 8.7%, and directed his preferences to Barrett. The Greens and the Citizens Electoral Council, neither of whom fielded candidates in 2012, respectively polled 8.7% and 1.4%.