The Poll Bludger

Today has brought a fascinating development in the battle for control of the Senate, with South Australian Legislative Council “No Pokies” member Nick Xenophon throwing his hat into the ring. Xenophon pulled off one of the most sensational achievements in Australia’s recent electoral history at the election last March, when his ticket polled 20.5 per cent of the statewide vote – only 5.5 per cent less than the Liberal Party. As well as getting himself re-elected (he first snuck in with 2.9 per cent at the 1997 election), this also secured election for running mate Ann Bressington, who believed she was only there for moral support, and came within a hair’s breadth of putting into parliament John Darley, the number three candidate who had assured his wife he had no chance of winning. Given the Greens’ historical weakness in South Australia and the probable demise of the Democrats, the most likely outcome in South Australia had been a three-all split between Labor and Liberal. The smart money would now be on the Liberals losing their third seat to Xenophon, meaning an end to the long and not terribly eventful parliamentary career of Grant Chapman. In other words, the Coalition now appears all but certain to lose its absolute majority. PortlandBet has smartly removed South Australia from its newly launched Senate betting market.

• The Courier-Mail talks of “a growing belief in Canberra” that the election will be called between tomorrow and Sunday – although there is of course “another school of thought” that parliament will resume on Monday for one more sitting.

• Writing in Monday’s subscriber-only Crikey email, Professor David Flint fired back after this site’s recent name-calling regarding his claims of mass-scale electoral fraud. This time he backed his argument by bringing up the big guns – a union election that happened in 1951:

Mention fraud as a possible factor in elections and you’re said to be in need of psychiatric assistance. Well, tell that to retired judge Frank McGrath, who as a young articled clerk provided crucial evidence of long denied but massive ballot rigging which freed the first of many unions from communist control … (journalist) Bob Bottom says that when the Queensland election was held on 2 December, 1989, there were 28,380 more electors than those on the then separate Federal roll the day before – enough to swing the election … Did this degree of fraud end with Shepherdson? After the last Federal election the H.S. Chapman Society did a spot sample in Parramatta. Curiously, they found it extremely difficult to obtain a copy of the electoral roll. Why? The government legislation requiring enhanced proof of identity on registration only passed the Senate by their agreement to an amendment to deny access to the roll ostensibly to commercial interests. Not wishing to be sent to a psychiatrist, I am led to the conclusion that it was only through an unintended drafting error that this exclusion extended to independent non aligned bodies such as the Society, as well as investigative journalists. In any event, the Society found a number of those enrolled were either unknown or had moved long ago. If these figures were extrapolated to the whole electorate, 5700 names should not have been on the roll. Paramatta, it may be noted, was won by only 1157 votes.

• Kevin Rudd has taken advantage of election date discontent to endorse the increasingly popular concept of fixed terms. However, he has tied this to a proposed extension of terms to four years, presumably secure in the knowledge that this would see it defeated at the required referendum. Rudd is proposing that the referendum not be held until a hypothetical election in 2010, although many are tipping an earlier double dissolution in the event of trouble from the Senate.

• Patricia Karvelas of The Australian reports on a split in the Australian Democrats over Senate preferences. Party leader and Victorian Senator Lyn Allison is reportedly seeking a national deal with Labor in the hope that their preferences might get her ahead of the Greens, but this is meeting fierce resistance from branches in other states, where entirely different tactical considerations are in play.

• Some number-crunching from The Australian’s George Megalogenis which I don’t have time to read at this point, but you can take for granted that it’s good stuff.

• Liberal concerns about the south-west WA seat of Forrest were given another airing on Tuesday’s edition of The World Today. One Liberal quoted in the report went so far as to compare the party’s candidate Nola Marino to Nicole Cornes, Labor’s maligned candidate for Boothby. The threat to Marino comes not from Labor but from independent candidate Noel Brunning, television newsreader on WA’s regional Golden West Network.

• PortlandBet is now taking bets on the Senate, specifically whether minor party candidates will get up in any given state.

• Cath Hart and Samantha Maiden of The Australian outline the geographic distribution of Australia’s Sudanese population, which for all the recent hype is so small it doesn’t turn up on the Bureau of Statistics’ quick-view census tables. Sudanese account for 0.5 per cent of the population in the Brisbane seat of Moreton, which according to its Liberal member Gary Hardgrave is “exhausted” by the influx. Other important electorates in the Sudanese top 15 are Moreton’s neighbour Bonner and the Perth seat of Stirling, the remainder being mostly safe Labor seats in Melbourne and Sydney.

• Saturday’s Fairfax broadsheets brought us six month cumulative ACNielsen polling figures, featuring state-level samples big enough to take seriously.

• Ian McAllister from the Australian National University and Juliet Clark have published a self-explanatory monograph entitled Trends in Australian Political Opinion: Results from the Australian Election Study, 1987-2004. Consisting mostly of charts and tables drawn from Australian Election Study data, findings that caught the attention of the media included the growing number of swing voters and late deciders.

• More bedtime reading from the Parliamentary Library, which has published its socio-demographic electorate rankings from 2006 census figures.

• Robert Taylor of The West Australian reported on Tuesday that WA Premier Alan Carpenter might call an election in the wake of the federal poll, a full year ahead of schedule. This would take advantage of the Coalition’s present state of disarray, as well as the looming confirmation of one-vote one-value electoral boundaries that are likely to swell Labor’s parliamentary ranks. The West also brought us a Westpoll survey of state voting intention which had Labor leading 56.4-43.4, down slightly from 58.4-41.6 a month ago. This was from the same sample that gave federal Labor a lead of 53-47 in the poll published on Saturday.

The past few days have seen a lot of discussion in the media about the state of play in all-important Queensland. On Monday, Michael McKenna of The Australian reported that the Liberals’ internal polling was worse in blue-ribbon Ryan than in any other Coalition-held Queensland seat, apart from Bonner. Liberal member Michael Johnson reportedly blames this on the government’s determination to solve western Brisbane’s traffic problems by building the Goodna bypass rather than upgrading the Ipswich Motorway, a decision made with a view to shoring up the Ipswich-based seat of Blair. As Graham Young puts it at Online Opinion: “People in Ipswich refer to the current motorway, which serves as their major link to Brisbane, as a carpark, and people in the western suburbs of Brisbane are happy to live in a quiet cul-de-sac and don’t want another link road with connections to them put through their area”. The Australian report also brings us the surprising news that Liberal polling has Gary Hardgrave leading in Moreton, held on a margin of 2.8 per cent.

Elsewhere, Labor strategists quoted by Dennis Atkins of the Courier-Mail say polling in regional Queensland points to “two party preferred votes north of 55 per cent”. Presumably this refers to the target marginals of Blair (5.7 per cent), Herbert (6.2 per cent), Flynn (7.7 per cent) and Hinkler (8.3 per cent). Also in the Courier-Mail, Madonna King says Liberal insiders “struggle to dispute” Labor talk that Bonner, Moreton, Blair, Herbert, Flynn and even Leichhardt (margin 10.3 per cent) are “in the bag”, although Labor is apparently less confident about Longman and Petrie. King says three-cornered contests in Leichhardt and Flynn are an “electoral gift to Labor”, while Lisa Allen of the Financial Review quotes a Liberal source lamenting the departure of Leichhardt MP Warren Entsch and his “98 per cent name recognition in that electorate”.

Reuters’ twice-monthly poll trend, a weighted average of Newspoll, Morgan and ACNielsen, shows a slight easing of Labor’s two-party lead since September 16, down from 57.7-42.3 to 56.8-43.2. Labor’s primary vote is down from 49.5 per cent to 49.0 per cent and the Coalition’s is up from 38.2 per cent to 39.1 per cent. Both leaders are down slightly on the preferred prime minister rating, Kevin Rudd from 49.5 per cent to 48.5 per cent and John Howard from 38.5 per cent to 38.3 per cent.

The Adelaide Advertiser keeps cranking out those opinion polls, as it did in the lead-up to the state election last March. This time it’s a survey of 662 voters in the north-eastern Adelaide seat of Makin, retained by the Liberals in 2004 by just 0.9 per cent after a backlash against the sitting member, the now-retiring Trish Draper. Despite Liberal candidate Bob Day’s massive self-funded campaign, the poll shows a 54-46 lead for Labor’s Tony Zappia, who holds a primary vote lead of 45 per cent to 38 per cent. Further questions asked in the survey suggest that the loss of Draper’s personal vote has very little to do with the swing, despite recent reports the Liberals were begging her to reverse her decision to retire. The mystery of who actually conducts these Advertiser polls remains, to the best of my knowledge, unsolved.

Possibly presaging a future pattern of early-week phone polls to tie us over until the Friday face-to-face, Roy Morgan brings us a phone survey of 611 respondents showing Labor leading the Coalition 59-41 on two-party preferred, and by 50 per cent to 36 per cent on the primary vote. Morgan alternated between phone surveys and larger-sample face-to-face polls until the end of August, after which it moved exclusively to face-to-face.

• The Liberal candidate for the central Tasmanian seat of Lyons, Ben Quin, has quit the party in protest over the government’s green light for the Tamar Valley pulp mill, and will run as an independent. Matthew Denholm of The Australian reports concurrence among the major parties that he will “attract only a handful of votes”. Quin was once a member of the Greens, which he later explained as a principled reaction to the joint Labor and Liberal effort in 1998 to shaft the party through changes to the state electoral system. The Liberal Party has acted quickly to install a new candidate, “transport company businessman” Geoff Page, whose father Graeme was a state MP of 20 years.

• Quin’s announcement comes off the back of Glenn Milne‘s assessment he had “badly misjudged the mood of Tasmanians” in opposing the mill. Milne quotes Liberal internal polling of 300 voters in Lyons, conducted on September 14 and 15, showing the Liberal primary vote slumping to 30 per cent from 42 per cent in 2004. By contrast, “the polling showed the vote of Liberal candidates in all other seats in Tasmania improving”. Milne observes that the August poll by EMRS also showed an improvement for the Coalition in all seats except Lyons (although this outfit’s 200-sample surveys need to be treated with caution).

• Sue Neales of The Mercury (article apparently unavailable online) sees things very differently, saying there is “little doubt” the announcement has cooked the goose of Michael Ferguson, Liberal member for Bass. This assessment is largely based on a poll conducted by Melbourne company MarketMetrics on behalf of the Wilderness Society, which showed 27 per cent of Bass voters would be more likely to vote Liberal if Malcolm Turnbull rejected the mill, while only 6 per cent said they would be more likely to do so if he approved it. Neales also quotes University of Tasmania academic Richard Herr suggesting the Greens might receive enough of a surge to deliver a seat to their second Senate candidate, Andrew Wilkie.

• Tamar Valley vigneron and anti-mill campaigner Peter Whish-Wilson is reportedly considering running as an independent in Bass, having been approached by mill opponents seeking a candidate who could garner protest votes from those unwilling to back the Greens. Whish-Wilson is described by Matthew Denholm of The Australian as “an economist, entrepreneur and Surfrider activist from a well-known family”.

• Despite its likely negligible impact, there was much reporting on the Tasmanian Greens’ announcement preferences would not be directed to Labor. What is not clear, at least to me, is whether they also plan to lodge two tickets for the Senate, so that above-the-line voters’ preferences divide evenly between Labor and Liberal.

• Former Sydney deputy lord mayor Dixie Coulton will run in Wentworth as the candidate of the Climate Change Coalition, which was founded by Patrice Newell, organic farmer and partner of Phillip Adams. Coulton was once a colleague of Lucy Turnbull, former lord mayor and wife of Malcolm, in the council’s Living Sydney party. She left the group in 2003, saying it had become “tainted” by association with Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberal Party, and announced she would run against Lucy Turnbull at the following year’s lord mayoral election. Turnbull ultimately declined to run and the election was won by Clover Moore, state independent member for Bligh (now Sydney).

Tasmanian reader Blackbird informs us that according to the ABC news (which goes to air earlier in Tasmania because daylight saving has already begun there), tomorrow’s ACNielsen poll will show Labor with a two-party lead of 56-44, down from 57-43 last month. More details to follow.

UPDATE: Labor’s primary vote is down two points from last month to 47 per cent, while the Coalition is up one to 40 per cent. There were further attitudinal questions which you can read all about at The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.