Nielsen: 51-49 to Labor in NSW

Nielsen drops a bombshell with the first poll showing state Labor leading in New South Wales since Morris Iemma was Premier. UPDATE: However, the bi-monthly Newspoll turns in a very different result of 58-42 in favour of the Coalition.

You heard correct – the Sydney Morning Herald (I presume) has published a Nielsen poll of state voting intention in New South Wales which actually has Labor in front. This is, I am quite sure, the first poll to have Labor so placed in nearly six years. Labor’s lead of 51-49 comes from primary votes of 35% for Labor and 40% for the Coalition (UPDATE: And 12% for the Greens). These numbers courtesy of GhostWhoVotes; more no doubt to follow.

UPDATE: Despite all that, Barry O’Farrell maintains a healthy 50-30 lead over John Robertson as preferred premier, and has a positive net satisfaction rating (46% approve, 40% disapprove) while Robertson’s is negative (34% and 36%). The poll was conducted from Saturday to Wednesday from a sample of 1000.

UPDATE 2: Newspoll has different ideas, its bi-monthly reading for January-February producing a more normal looking result of 58-42 in favour of the Coalition. However, since this is derived from polling conducted over a two-month period, it can be surmised that this result fails to pick up backlash against the Coalition since the Independent Commission Against Corruption began investigating three Liberal MPs a fortnight ago, causing them to voluntarily withdraw from the party. The poll has the Coalition primary vote at 46% against 31% for Labor, with Barry O’Farrell holding a 49-19 lead over John Robertson as preferred premier.

Tasmanian election guide part one: Bass

Launceston-based Bass kicks off a five-part review of Tasmania’s electorates ahead of the March 15 state election.

Welcome to part one of a five-part B-to-L guide to the Tasmanian election, which I’ll eventually get around to gussying up with charts and photos and publishing as a Poll Bludger election guide in the usual fashion. We shall proceed alphabetically, so first up …

Bass covers the eastern part of Tasmania’s northern coast along with Flinders Island, and derives 70% of its voters from Launceston. Other centres include George Town, a Labor-voting coastal town at the mouth of the Tamar River, and the more conservative Scottsdale, a hub of surrounding timber and farming communities. Bass has long been an arm wrestle between the major parties at federal level, changing hands in 1975, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2004, 2007 and 2013. This has been reflected at state level both in terms of vote share and seat totals. Relatively mild shifts were recorded amid the statewide realignments to Liberal in the early 1980s and Labor in the early 2000s, and the division was the only one in the state which delivered equal numbers of seats to Labor and Liberal in 2002 and 2006.

This trend was disturbed by the 2010 election result, at which Bass joined Franklin as one of two electorates to record well above-par swings against Labor, in this case a 15.1% drop to 34.5%. The yield was divided roughly evenly between the Liberals, who were up 8.8% to 42.6%, and the Greens, who were up 7.4% to 21.0%. However, the seat result was again unchanged, with Labor and Liberal winning two seats each and the Greens winning one, as had been the case in 2002 and 2006. This reflected the extreme narrowness with which Labor failed to win third seats on the two previous occasions, and in particular the 138-vote margin of Greens member Kim Booth’s win over a third Labor candidate in 2006.

Labor’s aggregated vote share of 2.07 quotas in 2010 illustrates the difficulty they will have in sustaining the status quo in the face of a further swing. With both opinion polling and the 2013 federal election result pointing to a surge for the Liberals in northern Tasmania, a Liberal gain here looms as an indispensable element of any scenario in which they achieve a parliamentary majority. The Greens also cannot take a seat in Bass for granted, as illustrated by their failure to win a seat at the last election under the seven-member regime in 1998.

The senior of Labor’s two incumbents in Bass is Health Minister Michelle O’Byrne, who entered politics as the federal member for Bass from 1998 until her defeat in 2004. On contesting the state election in 2006, O’Byrne emerged as Labor’s strongest performing candidate in Bass, outpolling 17-year Labor veteran Jim Cox. She was promoted to Community Development Minister seven months after her election, and then to Environment Minister in February 2008 and Health Minister after the 2010 election. Reflecting the decline in support for Labor, O’Byrne’s share of the vote fell from 23.3% in 2006 to 17.8% in 2010. Her brother, David O’Byrne, was elected in the division of Denison at the 2010 election, and immediately elevated to cabinet. Both have backgrounds in the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union, and are accordingly aligned with the Left.

The second Labor candidate elected in 2010 was Brian Wightman, a former principal of Winnaleah District High School. Wightman won promotion to cabinet in the reshuffle caused by Treasurer Michael Aird’s retirement in November 2010, taking on the Attorney-General and environment portfolios. Wightman’s 5.9% share of the vote in 2010 placed him ahead of seemingly higher-profile candidates in Scott McLean, the forests division secretary of the CFMEU (4.8%), and Brant Webb, who won brief national fame as one of the two survivors of the Beaconsfield mine disaster in 2006 (4.2%)

Rounding out the Labor ticket are Andrew Connor, a Meander Valley councillor who works in information technology; Adam Gore, who has worked as a musician in the army and as a teacher; and Senka Mujkic, who works at the Migrant Resource Centre in Launceston and was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The highest-polling Liberal candidate in 2010 was Michael Ferguson, making his state electoral debut after serving as federal member for Bass from 2004, when he unseated Michelle O’Byrne, until 2007, when he was defeated by Labor’s Jodie Campbell. Ferguson polled an exceptionaly strong 25.0% to take a second Liberal seat vacated by former party leader Sue Napier, who bowed out a month before the 2010 election owing to a recurrence of the breast cancer to which she succumbed the following August. Ferguson was noted as a social conservative and a member of the state party’s ascendant Right, having been director of the Tasmanian Family Institute. He has accordingly been identified with causes including opposition to gay adoption laws, abortion and stem cell research.

In the wake of Napier’s departure, the only Liberal incumbent at the election was Peter Gutwein, who first won election in 2002 with 9.1% of the vote. His win came at the expense of fellow Liberal David Fry, who had filled a vacancy mid-term. Gutwein went against party policy in his debut term by calling for an end to old-growth logging, and was briefly dumped from the front bench after voting in favour of a Greens motion calling for a commission of inquiry into child sex abuse. He was restored after the 2006 election in education and further gained police later in the year, before recovering Treasury when Will Hodgman relinquished it in August 2008. Currently he holds Treasury together with forestry and industry.

The Liberals have a further three candidates vying for a hoped-for third seat for the party: Sarah Courtney, owner of a Tamar Valley vineyard; Barry Jarvis, the mayor of Dorset; and Leonie McNair, co-principal of the Launceston Preparatory School.

Kim Booth returned the Greens to Bass at the 2002 election after they emerged empty-handed at the last election held under the seven-member regime in 1996, and the first one for five members in 1998. Curiously, Booth’s background was as the owner and operator of a building and saw-milling company, and also as deputy mayor of Meander Valley. After running unsuccessfully in 1998, Booth was comfortably elected in 2002 as the party scored fractionally short of a full quota in their own right, easily making up the rest on Labor preferences. He had a much tougher time in 2006, when the Greens vote fell from 16.5% to 13.6%, and was initially thought by most observers to be headed for defeat. However, he eventually prevailed by 138 votes after benefiting from a high rate of exhausted Labor votes, and from Labor voters who crossed to the Greens after casting a personal vote for Michelle O’Byrne. There were no such problems in 2010, when the Greens vote rose to a new high of 21.0%. After the election, Booth revealed he had been the only dissenter in the five-person Greens party room against the Labor-Greens alliance which saw his collegues Nick McKim and Cassy O’Connor assume positions in cabinet. His running mate on the Greens ticket is Amy Tyler.

Others: The lead candidate of the Palmer United Party would appear to be Chris Dobson, a bus operator and former RAAF airframe fitter. Also on the ticket are Mark Hines, a former electrical engineer with the army; Tim Parish, a George Town councillor; and Brian Gunst, a teacher. There are two further candidates: Ray Kroeze of the Australian Christians, and independent Brett Lucas.

BludgerTrack: 50.7-49.3 to Labor

After wildly divergent results from Nielsen and Newspoll, it’s far from clear which of the two was the rogue, or if both were. For the time being, the BludgerTrack poll aggregate splits the difference.

The enterprise of poll aggregation has been thrown into a spin after one major pollster, Nielsen, reported a 53-47 lead to the Coalition last week, and another, Newspoll, reported a 54-46 lead to Labor this week – leaving a 1% gap between the outer edges of the two error margins (UPDATE: Nielsen was actually 52-48, so scratch that about the gap between the error margins). BludgerTrack plots a course through the middle, with some residual influence of scattered results from Morgan and Essential, to give Labor a 50.7-49.3 lead after a dead heat last week. However, that only converts to a two-seat Labor gain on the seat projection, with one seat added from the New South Wales tally and another from Queensland, leaving the Coalition one seat shy of an absolute majority. Labor’s primary vote gain comes mostly at the expense of the Greens, who lose a bit of air after inflating over previous weeks, while the Palmer United Party maintains a slow downward trajectory to record its weakest result since the election.

The dire result for the Coalition from Newspoll was reflected in the leadership ratings, which have caused Tony Abbott’s trend on net satisfaction to point downwards again after levelling off in the early new year period. The trendlines on preferred prime minister had likewise flattened out over the past month or two, with Tony Abbott record a lead of slightly below double figures, but it now looks to be narrowing again, at least for the time being. The one constant is Bill Shorten’s net satisfaction, the only measure in the Newspoll numbers that is not off trend. Shorten is accordingly down to a new low, as he has been with every update so far this year. He has, however, been spared the ignominy of crossing paths with Abbott, which he came within 0.3% of doing last week.

Newspoll: 54-46 to Labor

As other pollsters find support for Labor trending downwards, Newspoll breaks ranks with the Abbott government’s worst poll result since it came to power.

The second Newspoll of the year is a wildly off-trend result that has no doubt made life difficult for a) whoever has been charged with writing up the results for The Australian, and b) anti-Murdoch conspiracy theorists. The poll has Labor leading 54-46, up from 51-49, which is the Coalition’s worst result from any poll since the election of the Abbott government. The primary votes are 39% for the Coalition (down two), 39% for Labor (up four) and 10% for the Greens (down two). Despite that, the personal ratings find Bill Shorten continuing to go backwards, his approval steady at 35% and disapproval up four to 39%. However, things are a good deal worse for Tony Abbott, who is down four to 36% and up seven to 52%. Abbott’s lead on preferred prime minister shrinks from 41-33 to 38-37.

Elsewhere in polldom:

• Roy Morgan is more in line with the recent trend in having the Coalition up half a point on the primary vote to 41%, Labor down 1.5% to 35.5%, the Greens steady on 10.5%, and the Palmer United Party steady on 4.5%. Labor leads by 50.5-49.5 on both two-party preferred measures, compared with 52-48 on last fortnight’s respondent-allocated result and 51-49 on previous election preferences. The Morgan release also provides state breakdowns on two party preferred, showing the Coalition leading 52.5-47.5 in New South Wales and 55-45 in Western Australia, while Labor leads 54.5-45.5 in Victoria, 52-48 in Queensland, 53.5-46.5 in South Australia and 50.5-49.5 in Tasmania.

• The Australian National University has released results from its regular in-depth post-election Australian Election Study mailout survey, the most widely noted finding of which is that Tony Abbott scored the lowest rating of any election-winner going back to 1987. The survey asks respondents to rate leaders on a scale from zero to ten, with Abbott scoring a mean of 4.29 compared with 4.89 for Julia Gillard in 2010; 6.31 for Kevin Rudd in 2007; 5.73, 5.31, 5.56 and 5.71 for John Howard in 1996, 1998, 2001 and 2004 respectively; 4.74 for Paul Keating in 1993; and 6.22 and 5.46 for Bob Hawke in 1987 and 1990 respectively.

• The Age reports that a poll of 1000 respondents by UMR Research, commissioned by the Australian Education Union, finds Malcolm Turnbull (a net rating of plus 12%) and Joe Hockey (plus 2%) to be rated more favourably than Tony Abbott (minus 8%).

UPDATE (Essential Research): The weekly Essential Research has Labor’s lead steady at 51-49, with the Coalition up a point on the primary vote to 42%, Labor down one to 39% and the Greens up one to 9%. Also featured: “government handling of issues”, showing neutral net ratings for the government’s best areas (economic management, asylum seekers, foreign relations) and strongly negative ones for welfare, service provision and industrial relations. Worst of the lost is “supporting Australian jobs”, at minus 19%. The existing renewable energy target is broadly supported (39% about right, 25% too low, 13% too high); opinion of Qantas has deteriorated over the past year (11% say they have come to feel more positive, 25% more negative), and there is support for the government buying a share of it or guaranteeing its loans; and opinion on government moves to crack down on illegal file sharing is evenly divided.

UPDATE 2: The West Australian reports that a Patterson Market Research survey conducted before last week’s High Court ruling from an undisclosed sample size suggests the micro-party vote would wither if a fresh Senate election was held. The poll has the Liberals on 45%, up six on its Senate vote at the election, Labor on 32%, up five, and the Greens on 12%, up three. The Palmer United Party collapses from 5% to 1%, with all others halving from 20% to 10%. However, one wonders how good polls are at capturing the sentiment that causes indifferent voters to plump for micro-parties at the last minute.

South Australian election minus three weeks

An assortment of electorate-level news snippets as the March 15 South Australian state election moves closer into view.

There are now less than three weeks to go until polling day in South Australia (and indeed in Tasmania, which I’ll get around to eventually), which is around the time I start to take state election campaigns seriously. The all-important television advertisements can be viewed here for Labor and here for the Liberals. As is usually the case when a party has been in government for over a decade, it’s the opposition’s advertisements that pack the greater punch.

What follows is a quick review of noteworthy local developments, which have been drawn upon to update the relevant entries in the Poll Bludger election guide:

Napier (Labor 16.1%): Labor’s candidate to replace Michael O’Brien in its second safest seat is Jon Gee, secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union’s vehicle division. Gee prevailed in a vote of the party’s state executive over Dave Garland, a factionally unaligned official with the National Union of Workers. Following the collapse of O’Brien’s plan to relinquish his seat to Senator Don Farrell, Gee’s endorsement was described by David Washington of InDaily as “another assertion of Premier Jay Weatherill’s authority over the party’s dominant Right faction”. While Gee’s union is aligned with the Right in South Australia, it is not part of the bloc associated with Farrell and the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association. Lauren Novak of The Advertiser reported that Weatherill was keen to see the seat go to Gee due to his “close connections with the northern suburbs and Holden”.

Wright (Labor 4.6%): Danyse Soester, who has gained a high media profile as a parent concerned with the school sex abuse scandal and its handling by the government and the Education Department, has announced she will run as an independent against Education Minister Jennifer Rankine. Soester has won backing from Nick Xenophon, and has ruled out directing preferences to Labor or supporting them in government in the event of a hung parliament. Her announcement scored her a front page photo story in The Advertiser, although it was soon followed by a column in which the paper’s Amanda Blair dismissed Soester as “a poster girl for the conspiracy theorists”, and “a blow-up doll inflated at every media opportunity by the likes of Nick Xenophon and shadow education minister David Pisoni”.

Ramsay (Labor 17.8%): Anthony Antoniadis, the Liberal candidate for Labor’s safest seat, has gone to ground following the emergence of Facebook posts in which he made unflattering reflections on residents in the area he aspires to represent. The comments generally related to his experiences as manager of a news agency at the Parabanks Shopping Centre, a typical example reading: “Welcome to Salisbury. A mother speaking to her 6-year-old son: ‘Get out of my f*@%ing way and sit down. I want to play Keno.’”

Reynell (Labor 10.5%): Daniel Wills of The Advertiser reported on Thursday that multiple local residents had been left with “sorry I missed you” messages in very different styles of handwriting, all purporting to be from Labor candidate Katrine Hildyard.

Legislative Council: Liam Mannix of InDaily reports that the man who made preference harvesting a household name, Glenn Druery, is on a retainer from the state branch of the Shooters & Fishers Party. However, his endeavours might be complicated by a rival alliance based around the Liberal Democratic Party, with which Druery was once associated. The latter grouping has dubbed itself the Fair Minor Party Alliance, with Liberal Democrat principal Michael Noack claiming it encompasses five of the 11 small parties planning to run. Druery accuses it of running “front groups in the form of Smokers Rights and Hemp”. The distinction between the rival groups appears to be fairly loose, with most if not all micro-parties likely to preference each other ahead of the major and established minor parties.

Seat of the week: Boothby

Another trip through a South Australian federal electorate to mark the looming state election – this time the southern coastal suburbs seat of Boothby, a nut Labor is never quite able to crack.

Blue and red numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for Liberal and Labor. Click for larger image. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room.

The southern Adelaide electorate of Boothby covers coastal suburbs from Brighton south to Marino, extending inland to the edge of the coastal plain at Myrtle Bank and the hills at Belair, Eden Hills, Bellevue Heights and Flagstaff Hill. The seat’s Liberal lean is softened by the area around the defunct Tonsley Park Mitsubishi plant, the only part of the electorate with below average incomes and above average ethnic diversity. It has existed without interruption since South Australia was first divided into electorates in 1903, at which time it was landlocked and extended north into the eastern suburbs. Coastal areas were acquired when the neighbouring electorate of Hawker was abolished in 1993.

Boothby was held by Labor for the first eight years of its existence, and it remained a contested seat until the Menzies government came to power in 1949. This began a long-term trend to the Liberals which peaked in the 1970s, when margins were consistently in double digits. The seat’s member from 1981 until 1996 was Steele Hall, former Premier and figurehead of the early 1970s breakaway Liberal Movement. A trend to Labor became evident after the election of the Howard government in 1996, with successive swings recorded over the next five elections. The swing that occurred amid the otherwise poor result of the 2004 election was particularly encouraging for Labor, and raised their hopes at both the 2007 and 2010 elections. On the former occasion, Right powerbrokers recruited what they imagined to be a star candidate in Nicole Cornes, a minor Adelaide celebrity and wife of local football legend Graham Cornes. However, Cornes was damaged by a series of disastrous and heavily publicised media performances, and was only able to manage a swing of 2.4% compared with a statewide result of 6.8%. Perhaps reflecting a suppressed vote for Labor, the seat swung 2.2% in their favour at the 2010 election, compared with a statewide result of 0.8%. However, that still Labor 0.8% short of a win they had desperately hoped for to buttress losses in Queensland and New South Wales. With the seat off Labor’s target list in 2013, Southcott enjoyed a comfortable victory on the back of a 6.5% swing, which was 1.0% above the statewide par. Labor’s candidate in both 2010 and 2013 was Annabel Digance, who is now running in the seat of Elder for the March 15 state election.

Boothby has been held since 1996 by Andrew Southcott, who first won preselection at the age of 26 ahead of Robert Hill, the leading factional moderate in the Senate. The Right had reportedly built up strength in local branches with a view to unseating its bitter rival Steele Hall, and turned its guns on Hill as a “surrogate” when denied by Hall’s retirement. Unlike Hill, who went on to become government leader in the Senate, Southcott has led a fairly low-key parliamentary career, taking until after the 2007 election defeat to win promotion to Shadow Minister for Employment Participation, Apprenticeships and Training. After standing by Malcolm Turnbull in the December 2009 leadership vote, Southcott was demoted by a victorious Tony Abbott to parliamentary secretary, a position he has retained in government. Southcott’s preselection at the 2010 election was challenged by former state party president Chris Moriarty, following disquiet in the party over his fundraising record. However, Moriarty was heavily defeated, his challenge reported losing steam when Kevin Rudd’s first bid to return to the Labor leadership came to a head in February 2012.

Redcliffe by-election live

Live coverage of the count for Queensland’s Redcliffe by-election.

# % Swing 2PP (proj.) Swing
Andrew Tyrrell 177 0.7%
Sally Vincent (Family First) 586 2.5% -2.1%
Len Thomas 2,513 10.6%
John Marshall (Greens) 950 4.0% -2.7%
Gabriel Buckley 230 1.0%
Yvette D’Ath (Labor) 10,375 43.6% +12.9% 56.2% +16.3%
Talosaga McMahon 317 1.3%
Liz Woollard 279 1.2%
Kerri-Anne Dooley (Liberal National) 8,353 35.1% -14.1% 43.8% -16.3%
FORMAL/TURNOUT 23,780 71.7%
Informal 655 2.7% +0.3%
Booths reporting: 13 out of 13

9.49pm. The two-party results from the pre-polls have now been added. I’ve switched off booth-matching, so all swings shown above compare the current result with the final total from 2012.

8.30pm. All booths now in on 2PP, and around 4000 new pre-poll votes added on the primary vote. I’m guessing a two-party result for the latter votes is the last outstanding addition for the evening.

8.04pm. All booths in on 2PP now except Scarborough North. The latest additions have slightly moderated Labor’s winning margin.

7.57pm. All booths in on the primary vote, four outstanding on 2PP.

7.52pm. Redcliffe TAFE 2PP added, with four left to go on 2PP, and Scarborough the one straggler on the primary vote.

7.39pm. When I said Scarborough had reported before, I meant Woody Point. Kippa-Ring north has reported as well, as have seven booths all told on 2PP. So the Labor margin of 7% is looking solid.

7.36pm. Bally Cara 2PP result added, which has moderated Labor’s gain on the preference share considerably: now up 3.6%, with the LNP down 6.3%, and exhausted up 2.8%. Still a projected Labor winning margin of 7% though.

7.33pm. Scarborough booth added on the primary vote, leaving only two more to go, but with still only one booth reporting on 2PP.

7.30pm. The pre-poll votes also have 2PP results now, and here Labor’s gain on the preference share is more modest. However, the projection above is based on polling booth results only.

7.29pm. Finally a 2PP result, from Kippa-Ring South, and the projection is now using this result rather than the 2012 election to extrapolate across other booths. This has given a solid boost to the projected Labor margin, with Labor’s share of preferences up 9.7%, the LNP’s down 8.0%, and exhausted down 1.8%.

7.23pm. Andrew Bartlett relates: “Preferences from 86 Greens votes at Kippa Ring booth went 40 ALP, 4 LNP, 42 exhausted.”

7.19pm. Independent Len Thomas, who ran in opposition to anti-bikie laws, has his head above double figures.

7.16pm. Smallish Scarborough North booth added on primary vote, leaving three more to come; still nothing for 2PP.

7.13pm. Clontarf and Redcliffe South push projected Labor margin over 5%. Four booths outstanding on primary vote, and still nothing for two-party preferred.

7.11pm. Biggest booth in yet from Kippa-Ring, which produces a good result for Labor that pushes the projected margin to nearly 5%. Still no preference counts though …

7.09pm. Woody Point South added, projected Labor margin now reaches 4.0%.

7.08pm. Clontarf Beach added, slightly increasing projected Labor winning margin. Still no two-party results though, so this assumes 2012 preference flows.

7.06pm. Bally Cara and Redcliffe TAFE have reported on the primary vote. The former is a retirement village and comfortably the electorate’s most conservative booth. Respective two-party swings are 11.8% and 14.8%, well in line with overall trend and confirming an impression of Labor winning by 3-4%.

7.04pm. 2463 pre-polls added, which I don’t have configured for booth-matching, but the swing on them is perfectly consistent with the overall trend. I gather this is about half the likely pre-poll total.

6.59pm. Second booth in now, from Frawley, and projected Labor winning margin up from 2.6% to 3.5%. Still going off 2012 preferences here, so a small degree of caution advised.

6.52pm. So far, I’m going off the 2012 election preferences. The first two columns in the above table are raw representations of the primary votes, but the swing and two-party columns are based on booth-matched results.

6.48pm. The Humpybong booth is first out of the blocks, and it shows a Labor swing 12.7%, enough to overturn the overall 10.1% by a small margin. This was Labor’s best booth in 2012, or its least bad — the LNP margin was 57-43.

6pm. Polls have now closed, as ReachTEL reports an exit poll shows Labor headed for a comfortable victory. Stay tuned for coverage of results as they emerge, which should start to happen in three-quarters of an hour or so.

Redcliffe by-election: February 22

A week out from polling day, a Galaxy poll finds Queensland Labor all but certain to secure an eighth seat at next week’s by-election to replace former LNP member Scott Driscoll.

Saturday, February 22

Today’s the day, so I’m bumping this back to the top of the page. For a perspective on the campaign from someone who’s been following it more closely than I have, try Amy Remeikis of the Brisbane Times.

Friday, February 14

GhostWhoVotes reports that a Galaxy poll has Labor with a commanding 57-43 two-party lead from primary votes of 48% for Labor, 35% for the LNP, 6% for the Greens and 8% for “independents”, of which there are five. This is very likely an automated phone poll with a sample of about 500.

Wednesday, February 5

Time to bump this thread back to the top of the page for those wishing to discuss the campaign. The only particularly notable new information I have to provide is Antony Green‘s observation that the by-election timetable offers “the shortest period for postal and pre-poll voting that I have ever seen”, which is unlikely to have wholesome motivations.

Wednesday, January 15

Full results from the Lonergan poll: Yvette D’Ath (Labor) 53%; Kerri-Anne Dooley (LNP) 29%; John Marshall (Greens) 7%; Len Thomas (Independent) 5%; Gabriel Buckley (Independent) 3%; Talosaga McMahon (Independent) 2%.

Tuesday, January 14

The Guardian reports an automated phone poll of 891 respondents conducted from January 9-12 by Lonergan Research has Labor’s Yvette D’Ath headed for an easy victory with 53% of the primary vote. The only other detail provided in the report relates to questions concerning the most important issue, but I’ll hopefully be able to chase up the rest of the voting intention numbers tomorrow.

Monday, January 13

Antony Green on Twitter relates that February 22 has been set as the date for the by-election.

Thursday, December 19

I’m bumping this post up the batting order to bring news that a union-commissioned ReachTEL poll of 774 respondents conducted on Friday and Saturday had Labor on a handy lead of 42.1% to 35.3% on the primary vote, with the Palmer United Party on 8.6% and the Greens on 5.1%. That pans out to 54-46 to Labor based on the preference distribution from the 2012 election. This comes as the Liberal National Party announces its candidate will be Kerri-Anne Dooley, who was Family First’s candidate for the seat in 2012.

Thursday, November 28

Tony Moore of Fairfax reports that February 1 is looming as the likely date of both the Redcliffe state and Griffith federal by-elections, with Campbell Newman saying the election should be held after the Australia Day long weekend of January 26. Yvette D’Ath has confirmed she will run for Labor, while Jamie-Leigh Mason of the Redcliffe & Bayside Herald reports a number of names have been mentioned as possible Liberal National Party candidates, including Martin Hall, Hornibrook Bus Lines general manager and Redcliffe City Chamber of Commerce president; Michael Connolly, “organiser of a community rally for better government representation”; and Dean Teasdale, a property services company manager who run in Petrie at the 2010 federal election.

Wednesday, November 20

Hot on the heels of Kevin Rudd’s retirement announcement, Queensland voters are set to enjoy more by-election action courtesy of yesterday’s resignation from state parliament by Scott Driscoll, who won the northern Brisbane seat of Redcliffe for the Liberal National Party as part of the electoral landslide of March 24, 2012. Driscoll cited health reasons for his decision to resign, but it was obviously no coincidence that this followed immediately after a parliamentary ethics committee found him guilty of 42 counts of contempt of parliament, with the recommendation that he be expelled and fined $90,000. The charges relate to Driscoll’s failure to declare income received through his and his wife’s involvement in local retailers’ and community associations, and his claim in parliament to have ended his role as voluntary president of the retailers’ association, which the committee found “on the balance of probabilities” to be untrue.

The prospect of Driscoll’s expulsion, which Campbell Newman had called upon the committee to recommend in September, raises interesting questions about the right of a parliamentary majority to reverse decisions made by voters, particularly in circumstances where no criminal charges are pending. Expulsion of members is an ancient prerogative of the British parliament which its two houses retain to this day, but which our own federal parliament saw fit to deny itself through legislation passed in 1987. The only time the federal parliament had exercised such power was in 1920 after Labor MP Hugh Mahon made “seditious and disloyal utterances” in relation to British policy in Ireland. Mahon was nonetheless able to contest the ensuing by-election for his seat of Kalgoorlie, but was narrowly unsuccessful (which to this day remains the only occasion of a government winning a seat from the opposition at a federal by-election).

Numbers indicate 2012 state election booth locations and the size of the Liberal National Party two-party preferred vote. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room.

Today’s Courier-Mail reports that the only precedent for expulsion from the Queensland parliament goes all the way back to 1869, and even that would seem to belong in the separate category of disqualification. This occurred after voters in the central Queensland district of Kennedy, who were still new to the practice of democracy, saw fit to honour the renowned English radical parliamentarian John Bright by electing him at a by-election by a margin of 79 votes to 78. The Queensland parliamentary website relates that Bright’s election had been championed by advocates of a separate colony for central and northern Queensland, who hoped he might pursue their cause in the House of Commons. Bright never visited Australia and was naturally unable to assume his seat, and indeed “probably was unaware of his connection with the Queensland parliament”.

More concrete examples of expulsion emerged from the New South Wales and Victorian parliaments resulting from bribery, electoral fraud and “seditious libel”, though none occurred more recently than 1901. However, a modern precedent with parallels to the present situation emerged in New South Wales in 2003, when Malcolm Jones of the Outdoor Recreation Party — who had foreshadowed the result of the recent Senate election by preference-harvesting his way to a seat with 0.2% of the vote — was found by the Independent Commission Against Corruption to have engaged in corrupt conduct relating to parliamentary entitlements. The chamber commenced proceedings to follow up on ICAC’s recommendation that it consider expelling Jones, who like Driscoll solved the problem by resigning. But whereas Jones’s position was filled by another member of his own party as a casual vacancy, Driscoll’s departure will entail the expense and inconvenience of a by-election.

Redcliffe booth results map from the seat of Petrie at the 2013 federal election. Teal and red numbers respectively indicate booths with two-party majorities for the LNP and Labor. Map boundaries courtesy of Ben Raue at The Tally Room.

This will be the first by-election held in Queensland since the election of the Newman government, and while the existing LNP margin in the seat of Redcliffe is 10.1%, Labor will be more than encouraged by the recent example of the Miranda by-election in New South Wales, at which Labor candidate Barry Collier swept to victory with a stunning 26.1% swing. Working in Labor’s favour will be the circumstances that brought the by-election about, and perhaps also a perception of an unhealthy imbalance in the parties’ parliamentary representation, with 74 government members facing seven from the opposition. The amount of slack awaiting to be taken up by Labor is indicated by the federal election result, at which Labor’s two-party preferred vote was about 11.5% higher in the relevant booths than it had been at the state election.

However, a complication might emerge in the shape of the Palmer United Party, whose principal could well give vent to its hostility against Campbell Newman by bankrolling another high-profile campaign. While by-elections generally present propitious circumstances for parties who thrive on protest votes, the bar for a PUP candidate would be raised under the state electoral system of optional preferential voting, which would have deprived the party of many of the Labor preferences that Clive Palmer relied upon to defeat the LNP in Fairfax. So far, the only potential candidate to be discussed in media reportage is Labor’s Yvette D’Ath, who was narrowly defeated in the corresponding seat of Petrie at the federal election after two terms as member.

The by-election could theoretically be held as early as December 21, but as in Griffith it will presumably be delayed until after the school holidays. What follows is an updated version of the entry for Redcliffe from my 2012 election guide:

Redcliffe occupies the peninsula 25 kilometres north of central Brisbane which bears its name, along with Moreton Island. The LNP is strong at the peninsula’s northern tip around Scarborough, while the remainder leans to Labor. The electorate was created in 1960 and held for its first 19 years by Jim Houghton, first as a Liberal and later with the National/Country Party. The Liberals did not take his defection lying down, and the electorate became a battleground between the two parties throughout the 1970s. Only with Houghton’s mid-term retirement in 1979 did the seat return to the Liberal fold, the ensuing by-election being won by Terry White. White became leader of the party in August 1983 at the head of the disastrous anti-Joh rebellion which cost most of his colleagues their seats at the election held two months later. He eventually lost the seat when it fell to Labor in 1989, and now lends his name to a national chain of pharmacies.

The incoming Labor member, Ray Hollis, retained the seat on uncomfortable margins in 1995 and 1998 before picking up a 13.7 per cent swing with the 2001 landslide, but he was nearly brought back to earth in 2004 when Liberal candidate Terry Rogers picked up a 10.5 per cent swing. Rogers was rewarded for his performance with an uncontested preselection when Hollis retired mid-term in July 2005, which along with Terry Mackenroth’s departure initiated the twin by-elections of Redcliffe and Chatsworth the following month. Both were won by the Liberals, with Rogers securing a 1.2 per cent margin after an 8.3 per cent two-party swing. As with Michael Caltabiano in Chatsworth, Rogers’ parliamentary career did not survive beyond the end of the term: Labor’s defeated by-election candidate, Lillian van Litsenburg, prevailed on her second attempt at the September 2006 election with a 5.4 per cent margin that represented a 6.6 per cent swing to Labor compared with the by-election, and a 1.7 per cent swing to the Liberals compared with the 2004 election.

Van Litsenburg was a former school teacher and Redcliffe councillor associated with the Labor Forum faction. Scott Driscoll, a former national president of the United Retail Foundation, defeated van Litsenburg at the 2012 election with a 15.7% swing, slightly above the statewide result of 13.7%.