The Poll Bludger

The Fairfax papers today carry their monthly ACNielsen poll, which shows a narrowing of Labor’s two-party lead from 58-42 to 55-45. Labor’s primary vote is down from 49 per cent to 46 per cent, while the Coalition is up from 39 per cent to 41 per cent. The movement most likely represents a correction from a somewhat excessive result last time. Now please, for the love of Christ, no more polls until next Tuesday …

The government is not about to face any respite from those bad poll headlines: News Limited papers are today carrying a Galaxy poll which shows the Prime Minister heading for defeat in Bennelong, where he trails Labor’s Maxine McKew 53-47 on two-candidate preferred (a similar poll three months ago had it at 52-48). The Labor primary vote is at 47 per cent, compared with 28 per cent at the previous election (when much of the anti-Howard vote was harvested by Greens candidate Andrew Wilkie), while the Liberal vote is down from 50 per cent to 44 per cent. No quibbling with the sample size this time, either – there were 800 respondents, double the amount Westpoll used to gauge an entire state.

There was a time there when this site sought to stay on top of federal preselection developments, but I became too busy to keep this up just as things got interesting – in Cook, where provisional Liberal nominee Michael Towke was rolled by the party’s state executive, and in Franklin, where Labor’s Kevin Harkins was being dogged by the controversies that led him to pull the plug on Thursday. The shortcoming will now be made good as I pad my election guide entries with detail on preselection stoushes, Franklin being the obvious place to start.

Belying its current margin of 7.6 per cent, Franklin was held for the Liberals by Bruce Goodluck from 1975 to 1993, when Harry Quick won it for Labor it upon Goodluck’s retirement. Just as Goodluck’s maverick ways were seen to have helped keep the seat in Liberal hands, so has Quick’s proclivity for independent behaviour (which saw him turn his guns against consecutive Labor leaders in Mark Latham and Kim Beazley) been recognised as a major factor in Labor’s success here at five successive elections. Quick maintained his Labor endorsement throughout this period despite being factionally unaligned, apart from what Sue Neales of the Mercury calls “a dalliance with the minor Centre Left faction”. Moves were afoot ahead of the 2004 election to have him replaced by the Left’s Nicole Wells, who more recently emerged as one of Harkins’ key backers. He was able to see off the threat partly by threatening to run as an independent if defeated.

Having decided that the current term would be his last, Quick hoped to keep the seat out of factional hands by promoting his staffer Roger Joseph at the preselection vote held last August. This was thwarted when the Left and Right struck a deal in which a candidate of the former would take Franklin, while Bass would go to the Right-backed Steve Reissig. Quick declared he would run as an independent if the nomination went as expected to Harkins, whom he described as a “right thuggish bastard”, “some dropkick who’s going to lose the seat”, “shifty, intimidatory, totally unreliable and untrustworthy”, and – worst of all – “a Victorian interloper”. He also voiced support for a potential Left faction rival to Harkins, state upper house member Allison Ritchie, and claimed she had been intimidated when she announced she was not going to run. This received no support from Ritchie, who said she did not wish to go to Canberra while she had a young child. Labor sources quoted in the Mercury claimed Quick’s boosting of Ritchie was a ploy to split the Left vote to get Joseph up. The factional deal ultimately delivered Harkins a solid bloc of votes from state conference delegates, overcoming the support Quick and Joseph were able to muster in local branches. Reissig was similarly able to win the day in Bass despite local opposition, and he too has since fallen by the wayside.

Quick well and truly maintained the rage following Harkins’ win, first declaring he would vote for the Greens and, last week, attending a community group meeting with Liberal candidate Vanessa Goodwin (also attended by Joe Hockey). This fairly straightforward breach of party rules, along with various other alleged misdeeds, is currently being run through the party’s disputes process. Nonetheless, Quick’s attacks on Harkins began to draw blood as new leader Kevin Rudd sought to distance the party from unsavoury union associations. Harkins was already carrying baggage from the 2003 report of the Cole royal commission into the building and construction industry, which concluded he broke the law by attempting to stop an electrician from entering a building site because he didn’t have a union-endorsed work agreement. It did not help when his colleague from the Victorian branch of the Electrical Trades Union, Dean Mighell, was kicked out of the party in May for undue frankness in addressing workers on a building site. The government expanded its attack on Labor’s ETU ties to encompass its endorsement of Harkins and Mike Symon, candidate for the Melbourne seat of Deakin.

Harkins’ position ultimately became untenable a fortnight ago when civil charges were brought against him by the Australian Building and Construction Commission, relating to an allegedly unlawful strike by Hobart electrical contractors in 2005. Reports that Harkins was being leaned on to stand aside emerged early this week, culminating in his decision to stand aside on Thursday. His selfless sacrifice was greeted with admiration in some circles and suspicion in others. The government has seized on Labor sources quoted in Wednesday’s Mercury who said Harkins was offered “an elevated union position, increased salary and a future Senate seat”, asking the Australian Electoral Commission to investigate whether he was offered inducements amounting to bribery.

With Harkins’ departure, the party’s state executive referred the selection of a new candidate to the national executive, thereby avoiding another untimely preselection spat in the lead-up to an election. It evidently remained agreed that the candidate would come from the Left, with a number of reports naming human rights lawyer Gwynn MacCarrick as the likely nominee. It was instead decided yesterday that the gig would go to party state secretary Julie Collins (right), who polled a respectable 6.0 per cent as a candidate for Denison at the March 2006 state election. Quick is yet to declare that Collins has his support; according to the Mercury, he says he will only do so if plans to expel him are shelved, whereas Harkins was promised the expulsion would proceed when he agreed to go quietly.

The Liberal preselection, while not quite as fraught as Labor’s, was still remarkably eventful for a seat they need a 7.6 per cent swing to win. Interest was piqued when Harry Quick’s reaction to Kevin Harkins’ endorsement prompted talk of a by-election, leading to some fanciful speculation that cricket legend David Boon might be enlisted to win the seat for the Liberals. Another cricketer, former state captain Jamie Cox, said he had been involved in “extremely informal” talks with the party, but he instead took up a job with the Australian Institute of Sport. Also mentioned were Paul Harriss, independent member for the state upper house seat of Huon; Brendan Blomeley, Clarence councillor and Federal Hotels corporate manager with connections to Senator Eric Abetz and the Right faction; Vince Taskunas, staffer to retiring Senator Paul Calvert; and policeman Tony Mulder. In the event, only two candidates nominated: lawyer and criminologist Vanessa Goodwin (left), who narrowly failed to win a Franklin seat at the state election, and 32-year-old technology consultant Daniel Muggeridge. Muggeridge and his supporters in the Right, including the aforementioned Blomeley, raised eyebrows with statements spruiking his more “traditional family values”, apparently calculated to play against Goodwin’s single status and lack of children. Goodwin was also the subject of rumours about “personal liaisons” which were circulated to the media through anonymous phone calls and unsigned letters. She nonetheless defeated Muggeridge in the preselection vote, and went on to national fame last month when the Prime Minister woefully attempted to bluff his way through after forgetting her name in an interview.

The ABC reportedly reports that tomorrow’s Westpoll will show federal Labor has shot to a 54-46 lead in Western Australia, the one state believed to have been holding out against the tide. It should be noted that Westpoll is widely criticised for its small samples, usually 400 respondents. How The West Australian managed to get scooped by the ABC on its own poll results is yet to be explained.

UPDATE: News reports that Westpoll has the Labor primary vote at 43 per cent, up from 36 per cent last month, with the Coalition down from 46 per cent to 38 per cent.

UPDATE 2: Westpoll also conducted a state poll from the same sample, which gives us a chance to assess how roguish this poll is. Answer: very. While it is clear that the Carpenter government has the measure of the opposition under its current leadership, it’s hard to credit the spasm shown in the table below. It would thus be wise to add a 5 per cent discount to the vote recorded for Labor in the federal poll.

Note: The Coalition vote shown for today’s poll assumes a 3 per cent vote for the Nationals, which is an educated guess that might be out by 1 per cent either way. The West Australian has mischievously declined to include this information so it can show a “Liberal” primary vote with a 2 in front of it.

A Roy Morgan phone poll of 589 respondents, conducted over the previous two days, has Labor on 58.5 per cent of the two-party vote, down 0.5 per cent from the previous such poll a fortnight ago. Both major parties are up 1.5 per cent on the primary vote, with the Greens down 2.5 per cent and others down 0.5 per cent. Also featured is yet more polling on whether the country is “headed in the right direction”.

Other news: sadly, independent Calare MP Peter Andren has been diagnosed with cancer, and has abandoned his plans to run for a seat in the Senate.

• Two comments on this site regarding the government’s Queensland council amalgamations gambit deserve wider exposure. Electoral law authority Associate Professor Graeme Orr anticipates legal hurdles for the proposal that the AEC conduct plebiscites over the head of the state government (UPDATE: Graeme clarifies this point in comments):

The Feds can appropriate money for broad purposes, so I assume they will try to package any legislation to enable this as purely a matter of bespoke expenditure (like the Hospital ‘intervention’). But legislate they must: the AEC currently has several functions under the Electoral Act, but none of them involves holding plebiscites, let alone on state issues. How the Feds will be able to override the clear State legislative prerogative to determine Council activities is unclear. Councils are created by State law, and can only act within that law. It may be Howard is just goading Beattie to go further and appear undemocratic, by restricting Councils abilities to co-operate with the AEC. Or it may be Howard will just pay the AEC to run some half-baked plebiscite across Qld on election day, that says ‘do you approve of council amalgamations’.

Anthony Llewellyn detects the influence of recent practice in the United States, where ballot initiatives have been used as a ploy to mobilise voters on polling day (also noted earlier by Optimist). The most famous example was a 2004 initiative providing for a constitutional ban on gay marriage, which was seen to have given the President a boost in the crucial swing state of Ohio.

• PortlandBet is running a blog noting developments in its comprehensive federal electorate betting market. Of particular interest is a shortening of odds on Labor’s Sid Sidebottom in Braddon after the government announced its Mersey Hospital intervention, famously described by indiscreet Tasmanian Liberal Senator Stephen Parry as “a disaster&#148. Taken in aggregate, the agency’s electorate-level odds point to a result of 75 Coalition, 73 Labor and two independents.

• Sydney residents of a particular political persuasion might like to note a free presentation from 6pm on Monday from US poll maven Vic Fingerhut, who boasts “four decades’ experience in polling for progressive political parties and unions”. Fingerhut will discuss “the anti-WorkChoices campaign in the context of other international campaigns, including the campaign against Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America” (not a successful campaign so far as the 1994 congressional elections were concerned, but you can’t win ’em all). Presented by the Walkley Foundation and the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (whose card-carrying members include me), those wishing to attend must RSVP by Friday. More info here.

Due to a little stuff-up on my part, most comments made so far today went into moderation. The error has been rectified, and the comment build-up unblocked. As you’re all no doubt aware, the Reserve Bank has lifted official interest rates. In other news: giant Lego man washed up on Dutch beach.

Via Andrew Leigh comes news that SportingBet is taking bets on the date of the federal election. Opening odds have November 24 as favourite, paying $4. Speculation on why readers think various dates likely or unlikely is invited in comments.