The Australian Electoral Commission joins the redistribution wonk party with its own set of estimated margins for the looming federal election.
The Australian Electoral Commission has published its post-redistribution margins for New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia, holding off for the time being on the Northern Territory as the redistribution there has not been finalised. This involves two sets of numbers: two-party preferred, which boil the issue down to Labor-versus-Coalition without regard to whether Greens or independents may have been in the mix, and two-candidate preferred, which tackles the sometimes knotty issue of estimating new margins between the parties and independents who actually made the final count at the last election.
The AEC’s report repeatedly observes that its numbers “may differ to the calculations of people external to the AEC”, by which they principally mean Antony Green but also me and Ben Raue at The Tally Room. Links to an extensive accounting of my own estimated margins were provided in an earlier post, which also offered a broad overview of the principles involved in making the calculations. I’m pleased to say my two-party margins are similar to the AEC’s: within 0.2% in 80 seats out of 100, and out by more than 0.5% only in the cases of Hume and Hasluck.
Now more than ever though, two-candidate preferred is a vexed question particularly where independents are involved, as they will not have been on the ballot paper in the parts of the electorate that have been added in the redistribution. Antony, Ben and I are all free to exercise common sense in treating the teals as a collective unit, which at least solves the problem in the cases of Warringah and Mackellar. Not only does the AEC feel it does not have the liberty to make such judgements, but Ben Raue also relates that its system is not designed to combine Labor-versus-Greens results from different electorates, which can readily be used to calculate fresh margins for Wills and Cooper — though not for Melbourne, which absorbs territory from Higgins and Macnamara, both of which had Labor-versus-Liberal two-candidate counts.
Ben Raue identifies the following electorates as ones in which mismatched two-candidate preferred counts must be combined from different parts of the electorate as redrawn by the redistributions (not counting those where the problem can be solved by falling back on two-party preferred, as can always be done where the seat is a “classic” Labor-versus-Coalition contest). These are Bradfield, Fowler, Grayndler, Mackellar, Sydney, Warringah and Wentworth in New South Wales, and Cooper, Goldstein, Kooyong, Melbourne, Nicholls, Wannon and Wills in Victoria. For reasons just explained, people external to the AEC are painlessly able to finesse the issue in Mackellar, Warringah, Bradfield, Cooper and Wills, which undoubtedly makes the non-AEC calculations more instructive in these cases. That leaves nine seats where varying degrees of creativity are required. In Labor-versus-Greens contests, this is a simple matter of estimating preference flows. But estimating support levels for independents in areas where they didn’t run last time is a very considerable challenge.
The differences in the various approaches taken are outlined at length in Antony Green’s post on the subject:
I base my estimates on a comparison of of House and Senate votes. Ben Raue uses an estimate based on the difference between two-party and two-candidate preferred results. William Bowe has not tried to adjust primary votes but rather allocates zero votes to the Independent and applies preference flows on accumulated primaries.
The chief virtue of my own method is the elegance involved in not requiring any data external to how people actually voted for the lower house of 2022, but it comes at the very substantial cost of crediting independents with very small vote shares in the newly added parts of their seats. However, the AEC’s approach is in this respect worse, as it apparently credits the independents with no votes in these areas at all (though I don’t see how that can be the case in Kooyong, where my own estimate for Monique Ryan is lower than the AEC’s). Antony Green’s and Ben Raue’s methods are of more practical value in addressing the task at hand, which is estimating how big the swing will need to be for the seat to change hands. Whether or not this is happening can be determined on election night by comparing the booths that have reported their results with the equivalent results from the previous election.
A few other bits and pieces from the last week or so:
• A second Victorian state by-election looms to go with the one to be held on February 8 in Prahran after Tim Pallas announced his resignation as Treasurer and member for Werribee, which he held in 2022 on a margin of 10.5%. The Age reports the Labor preselection front-runner is John Lister, a local teacher and Country Fire Authority volunteer.
• DemosAU has a poll on the ban on social media use for under-16s, which finds 64% supportive and only 24% opposed, but 53% expecting the law will be ineffective compared with only 34% for effective. The poll was conducted December 5 to 16 from a sample of 809.
• Keith Pitt, who has held the Bundaberg region seat of Hinkler for the Nationals since 2013, has announced he will retire at the election, taking the opportunity to call for the party to abandon net zero emissions targets and support coal-fired power. There has been no indication that I can see of who might succeed him in Hinkler.
• The Nationals have preselected Alison Penfold, senior adviser to party leader David Littleproud and former chief executive of the Australian Livestock Exporters Council, to succeed the retiring David Gillespie in the Mid North Coast New South Wales seat of Lyne. Penfold won preselection ahead of Melinda Pavey, former state member for the upper house and the corresponding lower house seat of Oxley, and Forster accountant Terry Murphy.
• Left-aligned Ashvini Ambihaipahar, St Vincent de Paul Society regional director, Georges River councillor and unsuccessful candidate for Oatley at last year’s state election, has been confirmed by Labor’s national executive as candidate for the southern Sydney seat of Barton, to be vacated at the election with the retirement of Linda Burney. One of those overlooked, former state upper house member Shaoquett Moselmane, resigned from a party position in protest, Elizabeth Pike of the St George Shire Standard reporting rumours he may run as an independent.
• James O’Doherty of the Daily Telegraph reports that Warren Mundine will seek Liberal preselection for the northern Sydney seat of Bradfield, to be vacated at the election with the retirement of David Fletcher and contested again by teal independent Nicolette Boele, who came within 4.2% after preferences in 2022. Mundine is a former Labor national president turned conservative who ran unsuccessfully for the Liberals in Gilmore in 2022, and was the public face of the campaign against the Indigenous Voice together with Northern Territory Senator Jacinta Price.
• Slightly old news now, but it had hitherto escaped my notice that Michelle Ananda-Rajah, Labor member for the abolished Melbourne seat of Higgins, will be making do with third position on the party’s Victorian Senate ticket.