The Poll Bludger

Today’s South Australian Roy Morgan poll has Labor support at the organisation’s usual absurdly high levels – 50.5 per cent on the primary vote and a 60.5-39.5 lead on two-party preferred. An 11.5 per cent swing, as predicted by the poll, would just about send Rob Kerin off to Centrelink (he holds Frome by precisely that margin) and leave the Liberals with fewer seats than Labor won at the 1993 wipeout. Bless Morgan’s heart, but they do some funny things – like including the Nationals in the "Independent/Others" column, an indignity they do not even visit upon One Nation. This should be borne in mind when assessing the even more frightening primary vote result of 33 per cent for the Liberals, which is actually up 1 per cent on the previous poll. If anyone was wondering, the graph of Morgan results in this earlier post features Coalition primary vote figures that were arrived at by adding 1.5 per cent to the Liberals’ results, that being the statewide Nationals vote at the 2002 election.

In other poll news, the indefatigable Oompa-Loompas in the basement of the Advertiser building have produced their third survey in as many days. This time it’s a statewide poll of 657 voters conducted on Wednesday, which shows the Liberals improving on their position at the previous poll by a fairly meaningless 1 per cent at Labor’s expense, on both primary and two-party. Labor now leads 42 per cent to 33 per cent on the former measure and 56-44 on the latter.

Nominations for the South Australian election have closed and the ballot paper rankings have been set in place. The Poll Bludger’s election guide tables have been amended accordingly – tip of the hat to Antony Green, who has made the information available more promptly than the South Australian Electoral Office. Some of the information in the electorate summaries is now out of date, but this will be set to rights in reasonably short order.

In the marginal seats, the donkey vote will favour Labor in Norwood, Hartley, Morialta and Bright (UPDATE: Gus notes in comments that every one of these is a double whammy for the Liberals, who drew a higher position than Labor in each case in 2002), while the Liberals have drawn the higher position in Adelaide, Stuart, Light, Mawson and Newland. In the seats that this site has identified as roughies, the draw has favoured Tom Playford of Family First in Kavel and Nationals candidate Kym McHugh in Finniss, while Liberal candidate David Pisoni will head the ballot in Unley.

With all cards now on the table, the following can be revealed:

Hammond (Independent 2.3% versus Liberal): Independent MP Peter Lewis, who appeared headed for certain defeat, will not even attempt to hold the seat and will instead run for the upper house. Lewis ran under the banner of the Community Leadership Independence Coalition in 2002, and this time he has adopted the even more cumbersome handle of Principles People Reform Before Parties. Nothing has come of reported moves to disendorse Liberal candidate Adrian Pederick following last week’s revelation that his mother took out a restraining order against him 15 years ago.

Mitchell (Labor 4.8%): Voters of an environmentalist persuasion have a smorgasbord of options available to them – sitting member Kris Hanna, who became South Australia’s first Greens MP after defecting from Labor in 2003, only to quit his new party in January; Travis Gilbert, a party member who is running as a "True Green for Mitchell"; and Jeffrey Williams, the official Greens candidate. Not bad for a seat the Greens didn’t even bother to contest in 2002.

Unley (Liberal 9.1%): Outgoing Liberal MP Mark Brindal, who was effectively defeated for preselection by David Pisoni, has decided against running as an independent, which he was threatening to do as recently as yesterday.

Little Para (Labor 7.1%) and Taylor (Labor 17.9%): Nothing has come of talk that respective members Lea Stevens and Trish White might step aside for Salisbury mayor Tony Zappia.

Noteworthy entrants for the Legislative Council include Ralph Clarke, the former Labor member for Enfield, who is running under the "Buy Back ETSA" banner. The Poll Bludger understands he will be feeding preferences to popular No Pokies MP Nick Xenophon, who is likely to be frozen out of preferences by both major parties. Former Labor MP Terry Cameron, who quit the party and formed the now-defunct SA First which fielded candidates in 2002, will attempt to hold his seat as an independent.

The Advertiser’s opinion pollsters don’t muck around – I hope for the sake of News Corporation’s fragile budgetary position that they’re outsourcing this stuff to India. Anyway, today the paper has run a poll of 516 voters from a seat identified in Tuesday’s post as a potential upset Labor win, the inner city electorate of Unley which the Liberals hold with a margin of 9.1 per cent. The poll indeed suggests that the Liberals are in big trouble – their controversial candidate David Pisoni leads Unley mayor and Labor candidate Michael Keenan 45 per cent to 40 per cent on the decided primary vote, but trails 51-49 on two-party preferred. If that sounds like a big primary vote gap for Labor to narrow, it should be noted that the Greens dominate the minor party vote with Family First barely registering. The Advertiser also reports that the sitting Liberal member Pisoni effectively ousted for preselection, Mark Brindal, was still not ruling out standing as an independent. Nominations closed at noon, so we shall find out soon.

A poll in today’s Advertiser shows Labor maintaining its clear lead in the inner-city electorate of Norwood, one of the key seats for the Liberals if they are to win government (okay, stop laughing). After distribution of the undecided, Labor member Vini Ciccarello leads Liberal candidate and former Adelaide Crows star Nigel Smart 44 per cent to 40 per cent, showing little change on the three previous polls conducted by The Advertiser. However, the Liberals might take some encouragement from an apparent rise in the number of undecided voters, from 11 per cent to 15 per cent.

Also out today are Newspoll results showing a slight easing in Labor’s lead. Their primary vote of 44 per cent is the lowest since the last quarter of 2004 and 2 per cent down on the previous survey. This has been of direct benefit to the Liberals who are up from 35 per cent to 37 per cent, although Labor’s two-party lead of 54-46 suggests they are still heading towards a big win. Although the margin of error for minor party ratings means the figures are essentially meaningless, it is still interesting to note that the Democrats have risen to 2 per cent after being stuck on 1 per cent since the last poll of 2004, which has come at the expense of the Greens who are down to 3 per cent.

One week into the official campaign period for the South Australian election, no indications have emerged to discourage the conventional wisdom that Mike Rann’s Labor government will easily secure a second term. Labor has had a clear two-party preferred lead in all published polling since it came to office (barring one aberrant Newspoll result from late 2004), and if anything this has widened as the election has approached.

How very different things might have been if independent Hammond MP Peter Lewis had done as he said he would during the 2002 election campaign and backed the Liberals to remain in government. Liberal leader Rob Kerin’s affable and non-confrontational style proved such a hit in his short period as Premier that he nearly salvaged victory for an accident-prone eight-year government, but these very same qualities have proved disastrous in opposition. Kerin’s colleagues grew increasingly exasperated by his lack of killer instinct as Labor cemented the opinion poll lead it opened up during its honeymoon period, and he suffered further self-inflicted damage through his hands-off approach to factional wars surrounding the Unley preselection and Stephen Baker’s removal as the party’s state treasurer. A successful leadership challenge would have been inevitable under normal circumstances, but such was the certainty of an impending election defeat that none of the credible alternatives wanted the job.

The comical coup attempt in November from Waite MP Martin Hamilton-Smith (which he was compelled to withdraw after failing to attract the eight supporters needed to call a spill) remains hard to explain. It was reported that figures in the state party’s Right faction (including federal heavies Alexander Downer and Nick Minchin) goaded him on in the hope that he would "open the way" for their favoured candidate, Iain Evans. It’s hard to see how this would have come off given that Evans is clearly intent on keeping his powder dry until after the election. The best theory I can come up with is that the party powerbrokers were rattled by the scale of the defeat that Kerin seemed to be leading them towards, encouraging the line of political logic exquisitely articulated by Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes, Minister – "something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it". Writing in the Sunday Mail on the weekend, Channel Seven political reporter Mike Smithson noted that Evans has been "virtually nowhere to be seen" in the first week of the campaign, with most of the weight being carried by upper house leader and Shadow Treasurer Rob Lucas.

The Prime Minister’s first and apparently final campaign visit last week proved of little help, as he proved understandably unwilling to endorse the opposition’s line that talk of a strong economy is Rann government hype – a point refuted last week by Richard Blandy, a former economics adviser to Dean Brown’s Liberal government and current Flinders University economics professor. Even more puzzling is the party’s promise to cut 4000 public service jobs and its ready admission that this will boost the unemployment rate in the short term. This might be interpreted as a defeatist gesture pitched not at swinging voters in marginal seats, but rather at traditional Liberal voters who might be persuaded to stay on board through a pitch towards small government and low taxes. It might also add credibility to their capacity to fund coming election promises. By contrast, Labor has the luxury of being able to stand on its outwardly impressive economic record and the highest leadership approval ratings in the land, prompting the campaign slogan "Rann gets results". While this appears to have a fair weight of evidence behind it, few have been persuaded by their claim to credit for the $6 billion Air Warfare Destroyer project bestowed upon the state by the federal government. All the same, Labor clearly has a saleable message and is putting it across through an impressively slick presidential-style campaign.

In view of all this, the seats to watch at this stage are all on the Liberal side of the pendulum. The Liberals hold seven seats by margins of less than 6 per cent – Hartley (2.1 per cent), Stuart (2.3 per cent), Light (2.6 per cent), Mawson (3.5 per cent), Morialta (3.6 per cent), Bright (4.6 per cent) and Newland (5.5 per cent). The last two are in as much danger as the first four due to the retirement of sitting members Wayne Matthew and Dorothy Kotz. Changing demographics mean that Labor cannot rest on its laurels in either of its two most marginal seats, Norwood (0.5 per cent) and Adelaide (1.1 per cent), but both appear to be off the radar at this stage. Putting the bottom end of the Mackerras pendulum to one side, and leaving aside seats currently held by independents (a subject for another time), local factors mark the following as roughies:

Kavel (Liberal 12.8%): Outside of the Poll Bludger’s election guide and Flinders University academic Haydon Manning’s summary in the Sunday Mail, there has been surprisingly little talk of what could potentially be the most sensational single result to emerge from the election: a lower house seat for Family First. There seems every reason to believe this might happen, because their candidate in Kavel came within 2.9 per cent of winning the seat as an independent in 2002. That candidate is Tom Playford, Baptist pastor and son of the legendary Liberal Premier of the same name, who held the office from 1938 to 1965. Playford the Younger polled 18.7 per cent of the primary vote in 2002, ahead of Labor (18.0 per cent) and the Democrats (9.1 per cent). At the penultimate count, Playford led Labor 28.1 per cent to 24.5 per cent, with the Liberals’ Mark Goldsworthy on 47.4 per cent. Enough preferences leaked to Goldsworthy after Labor’s exclusion to put him over the line, although Playford was reportedly in the lead at the close of counting on election night. There are two reasons to advise caution over his prospects of going one better this time around. Firstly, Goldsworthy was making his debut at the 2002 election, at which he replaced recently ousted Premier John Olsen. This time he will enjoy the benefits of incumbency, although it remains to be seen if this will cancel out what is likely to be a statewide drop in the Liberal vote. Secondly, the likelihood of an overall higher vote for Labor means he faces a bigger hurdle to win second place.

Finniss (Liberal 15.9%): Held by retiring former Premier Dean Brown, Finniss is well beyond Labor’s reach but it offers the National Party its best chance of extending an empire that is currently limited to Karlene Maywald’s seat of Chaffey. Their candidate is Alexandrina mayor Kym McHugh, who considered standing for the Liberal preselection that went to Kangaroo Island mayor Michael Pengilly. McHugh was ultimately persuaded to stand for the Nationals by Maywald, who along with Queensland Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce has been energetically campaigning on behalf of McHugh and other party candidates in Flinders and MacKillop.

Unley (Liberal 9.1%): Although well outside the range of a reasonable uniform swing, Unley bears watching due to a combination of factors: a new Liberal candidate without the advantages of incumbency, the messy circumstances surrounding the downfall of his predecessor Mark Brindal, and the appeal of Labor’s candidate, Unley mayor Michael Keenan, who was head-hunted by Mike Rann and installed without a preselection vote.

After a few more days of consideration, the Poll Bludger will append his election guide with predicted outcomes for all 47 seats.

Welcome to the first in the Poll Bludger’s series of electorate-level fact bites from the South Australian campaign. Hopefully I will also find time over the weekend to step back and assess the bigger picture three weeks out from polling day – Tasmanian campaign coverage will probably have to wait until next week.

Hammond (Independent 2.3% versus Liberal): A day after an Advertiser poll showed him heading towards an easy victory over independent incumbent Peter Lewis, Liberal candidate Adrian Pederick’s campaign has been rocked by allegations that his mother took out a restraining order against him 15 years ago. The Australian reports that the order, which it received from an anonymous source (Lewis denies it was him), includes a claim from police that Pederick "caused personal injury to (his mother) and is, unless restrained, likely again to cause personal injury". It also says the existence of the order was "widely known within the farming district of Coomandook". Today the paper reports that the party’s Right faction is hoping to dump Pederick in favour of Chris Kenny, a former journalist and press secretary to Alexander Downer who unsuccessfully contested preselection for Unley last year. Interestingly, there hasn’t been a word about this in The Australian’s South Australian stablemate, The Advertiser.

Bright (Liberal 4.6%): Liberal candidate Angus Redford, an upper house MP who hopes to fill the vacancy created by the retirement of Wayne Matthew, has created a stir with some hyperbolic rhetoric about law and order. According to last weekend’s Sunday Mail, Redford has issued a pamphlet in which a photo of a burnt-out car bears the caption: "West Bank, Beirut or Baghdad? No – It’s Adelaide 2006! How can we feel safe with Mr Rann in charge?". The article quotes Iraqi Kurdish community spokesman Sherko Kirmanj declaring the analogy "offensive for both communities", while the Mail’s leading article decried Redford’s "scare tactics". It may also have been a bit rough on Beirut, which I understand to be fairly placid these days.

Little Para (Labor 7.1%) and Taylor (Labor 17.9%): These safe Labor seats are both occupied by members who have quit the front bench in the past year (Lea Stevens and Trish White respectively), and yesterday’s Advertiser reported speculation that one or the other may be about to stand aside for Tony Zappia, Salisbury mayor and unsuccessful candidate for Makin at the 2004 federal election. They will be cutting it fine if so, with nominations to close at noon on Thursday, although it is not unknown for members to delay resignation to prevent factional opponents from marshaling their forces for preselection.