The Poll Bludger

Not entirely sure what to make of this, but I have received a media release giving results from a Burson-Marsteller survey of 1156 voters conducted on Friday. Respondents were asked if they had firmly decided who they will vote for, to which 77 per cent answered yes. Of that 77 per cent, 56 per cent said they would vote Labor and only 34 per cent would vote Coalition. For the purposes of tying up loose ends, I also note reports on the weekend that an IPSOS Mackay poll indicated that Labor had taken a lead on the question of who would better manage the economy, by 39 per cent to 36 per cent.

The News Limited stable today brings us a poll from Galaxy, an outfit that has traditionally given the Coalition more cause for optimism than its rivals. Not this time though: after rising into the 40s in June and July, the Coalition primary vote is back down to 39 per cent, while Labor is up from 44 per cent to 47 per cent on last month. Labor’s 57-43 two-party lead likewise returns to the situation in May, and compares with 54-46 last month. Attitudinal questions find respondents more likely to attribute the budget surplus to high taxes than good management, and overwhelmingly inclined to think Rudd a “normal bloke” on account of the strip club incident. However, it appears that not all of the 1,004 interviews were conducted over the past weekend (note the bottom of the press release: “These surveys were conducted by Galaxy Research. The most recent survey was administered on the weekend of 24-26 August”). It therefore cannot be stated with confidence how timely these figures are, or whether the entire sample was in a position to pass judgment on the strip club affair or the budget surplus.

Today’s lesson in electoral history takes us all the way to the top: to Darwin, focal point of the electorate of Solomon, held by David Tollner of the Country Liberal Party on a margin of 2.8 per cent. The top end’s history of federal parliamentary representation goes back to the creation of the Northern Territory electorate in 1922, but the seat did not come with full voting rights in parliament until 1968. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was granted shortly after it fell to Sam Calder of the Country Party after a long period of Labor control. Calder was involved with the foundation of the Country Liberal Party in 1974, a local alliance of Liberal and Country Party members formed to contest elections for the newly established Northern Territory parliament. Grant Tambling succeeded Calder as CLP member in 1980, going on to lose the seat to Labor when the Hawke government was elected in 1983 (he would return as a Senator four years later). Northern Territory subsequently changed hands with great frequency: former Chief Minister Paul Everingham recovered it for the CLP in 1984, Warren Snowdon won it back for Labor in 1987, Nick Dondas held it for the CLP for one term from 1996, and Snowdon returned in 1998.

The territory was divided into two electorates at the 2001 election, Darwin and Palmerston forming Solomon and Lingiari taking up the vast remainder. This looked set to be reversed at the 2004 election, when the Northern Territory was found to be 295 residents short of the number required to maintain its second seat. Since both major parties felt they could win them both (a more sound judgment in Labor’s case), the second seat was essentially legislated back into existence. This was done through the expedient of adding “two standard errors” to the official calculation of the territory’s population, which is known to be underestimated in census counts, thereby boosting its quota determination from 1.498 to 1.517. The raw figures ahead of the current election had the population still further below the decisive 1.5 mark, but the second seat was again preserved when the standard error adjustment lifted it from 1.471 to 1.505. This has left the two Northern Territory electorates with by far the lowest enrolments in the country: at the time of the 2004 election, Solomon had 54,725 voters and Lingiari 58,205, compared with a little under 70,000 for Tasmanian seats and a national average of around 87,000.

Solomon’s distinguishing demographic characteristics are a high proportion of indigenous persons (10.3 per cent compared to a national figure of 2.3 per cent) and a low number of persons aged over 65 (5.3 per cent against 13.3 per cent). Darwin is divided between Labor-leaning post-war suburbs in the north, including Nightcliff, Jingili and Sanderson, and the town centre and its surrounds south of the airport, an area marked by higher incomes, fewer families and greater support for the CLP. Even stronger for the CLP is Palmerston, a satellite town established 20 kilometres south-east of Darwin in the 1980s. This area is somewhat less multicultural than Darwin and has a high proportion of mortgage-paying young families, and the booths here take votes from the nearby Robertson barracks (for a clearer view of the lie of the land, see my 2004 booth result maps at Crikey). At the time of the 2001 election, Solomon had a notional CLP margin of 2.3 per cent while Lingiari had a notional Labor margin of 3.7 per cent. Warren Snowdon naturally opted for Lingiari, and Solomon emerged as an extremely tight contest between Labor’s Laurene Hull and David Tollner (right) of the CLP. Tollner suffered a 2.2 per cent swing against the national trend, but was able to hang on by just 88 votes. He had a slightly more comfortable time of it at the 2004 election, picking up 6.9 per cent on the primary vote and 2.7 per cent on two-party preferred. The swing was especially strong in Palmerston, which accounts for just over a quarter of Solomon’s voters.

Close margins are not the only reason Tollner is lucky to be in parliament. Party colleagues had been gunning for his disendorsement in 2001, and failed to secure it only because party rules would not allow it so close to an election. At issue was a drink driving charge and an earlier cannabis conviction, which exacerbated ongoing hostility over his attempt to win the territory seat of Nelson as an independent in 1997. Running on opposition to gun control, Tollner had come within 41 votes of defeating the CLP’s Chris Lugg. Two significant figures in the CLP cited Tollner’s preselection as a factor contributing to their decision to quit the party – Nick Dondas, the member for the Northern Territory electorate from 1996 to 1998, and Maisie Austin, who went so far as to run against Tollner as an independent, but managed only 5 per cent of the vote. Austin later returned to the party and ran as its candidate for Lingiari in 2004. Tollner has continued to cut a colourful figure since entering parliament. In early 2004 he was forced to apologise for misbehaviour on a Qantas flight: he had reportedly “annoyed” Liberal colleague Christopher Pyne by “ruffling his hair”, and had to be told to sit down three times as the plane came in to land. In August, just weeks after the government announced its intervention in remote communities, Tollner was one of a number of party functionaries seen on a boat on which alcohol was consumed very near a dry Tiwi Islands community. As police investigated the discovery of empty beer bottles at the community’s airport, Warren Snowdon used parliamentary privilege to accuse Tollner and Senator Nigel Scullion of illegally taking alcohol on to the land.

Labor has nominated Damian Hale (left), who coached the Northern Territory Football League club St Marys to three successive premierships from 2003 to 2005. Hale made national news in June after an incident in a Darwin nightclub involving wayward AFL star Chris Tarrant. Hale says he expressed his “disappointment” with Tarrant after he “pulled down his trousers and bared his backside” at a female companion, to which Tarrant responded by punching Hale in the face. Tarrant copped a three-match suspension for his efforts, but Hale declined to press charges. Hale was preselected in February ahead of Darwin lawyer and rugby coach Wayne Connop, marine scientist Stuart Fitch, and two candidates associated with the territory branch of the Australian Nursing Federation: former president Denis Blackford, and organiser Matthew Gardiner. Darwin sports broadcaster Charlie King had earlier been named as the front-runner, having also contested preselection for the 2001 election (hats off to the Northern Territory News sub who came up with the headline “King: Solomon’s mine”). However, he withdrew from the race after what the Northern Territory News described as “pressure from ABC management”.

Tasmanian market research company EMRS has today published one of its surveys of 1000 voters covering about 200 in each of the state’s five electorates, showing Labor on course for a clean sweep. This would mark a return to the state of play from 1998 to 2004, when Bass and Braddon fell to the Liberals. Coalition supporters wishing to find solace in the possibility of a dud sample should observe that the same outfit has produced a poll of state voting intention, conducted at the same time and presumably from the same sample, with disastrous results for Labor. Paul Lennon’s disapproval rating is at a terminal 66 per cent, with 64 per cent expressing disapproval for his government’s contentious fast-tracking of the Tamar Valley pulp mill. Those of a suspicious mindset will no doubt point to the fact that the poll was commissioned by Tasmanians Against the Pulp Mill.

It’s always advisable to read these polls in totality rather than as five separate electorate-level results; nonetheless, I do not begrudge EMRS its attempt to read significance into its figures for Braddon, site of the federal government’s Mersey Hospital intervention, where Labor’s two-party lead has narrowed to 54-46 from 64-36 at the previous poll in June. After weeding out the undecided and non-voters (11 per cent of the total), seat-by-seat results are as follows:

That most intensely scrutinised of federal electorates, Wentworth, is again the subject of an internal party polling “leak”. Many argue that all internal polls that make it to the public view are self-serving fabrications, but I personally am naive enough to think they might sometimes be authentic. This time we have The Australian reporting results from a very thorough survey of 400 voters conducted for Labor in June by UMP Research. The key finding is that Labor has a decisive lead on the primary vote, of 44 per cent to 42 per cent. The report also informs us that the Liberal Party has “doubled the number of seats it was treating as ‘marginal’ in the face of Labor’s consistent lead in the polls”.

Roy Morgan has caused a disturbance in the force by releasing its weekly poll a day early, perhaps hoping to strike while the Strippergate iron is lukewarm. Conducted over the last two evenings, the phone poll of 633 voters shows an intriguingly strong result for Labor, whose lead has widened to 60-40 from 58.5-41.5 at the last comparable poll a fortnight ago. Separately published leadership approval figures are remarkable enough to raise suspicions about the sample: the Prime Minister’s approval rating is at its lowest level since he was elected, his disapproval rating (up nine to 51 per cent) shooting past his approval rating (down nine to 44 per cent), while Kevin Rudd’s approval rating has reached a Bob Hawkeian 74 per cent (up 2 per cent). Rudd’s lead as preferred prime minister has widened from 51-44 to 52-38, and 87 per cent of respondents profess them unconcerned about the incident in New York.

Yesterday’s news by now, but let the record note that Roy Morgan has published a poll of Queensland Senate voting intentions derived from its surveys over the past three months. This has been prompted by last week’s flurry of publicity surrounding Pauline Hanson, whose support is put at 5 per cent. However, this is 0.5 per cent lower than the vote recorded for the Australian Democrats, who always do implausibly well in these Morgan Senate polls. For what it’s worth, the Morgan figures suggest that Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett would be re-elected, with the remaining seats going three Labor and two Coalition.

UPDATE: Bartlett joins the scrum in comments (see below).

Commenters at the business end of the country inform me, via Lateline, that tomorrow’s Newspoll will be as you see in the headline (after a 56-44 result a fortnight ago). It is against my religion to read anything into one poll in isolation. Nonetheless, I am tempted to interpret this as the interest rate hike being cancelled out by what Matt Price describes as the government’s “potentially quite good bad news”, namely last week’s stock market dive.

UPDATE: Kevin Rudd’s lead on preferred prime minister has widened from 44-39 to 46-39.

UPDATE 2: The Australian reports Labor’s primary vote is down from 48 per cent to 46 per cent (equal lowest since February), with the Coalition steady on 39 per cent.

UPDATE 3: Graphic here, Shanahan here.