SA campaign updates: episode one

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.

Polls: this, that and the other

Today’s Advertiser carries two interesting electorate level polls with impressive samples of around 550 voters, which provide support for two items of conventional wisdom about the coming South Australian election – that the Rann government will win a handsome majority, and that quirky independent MP Peter Lewis is gone for all money in Hammond. The first proposition is backed by a poll of voters in Stuart (top), a vast electorate covering the eastern part of the state in which Labor are competitive thanks to their strength in Port Augusta. It has Labor’s Justin Jarvis on 47 per cent of the decided primary vote against 42 per cent for Liberal veteran Graham Gunn (veteran seems almost an understatement for a man who entered parliament in 1970) for a lead of 52-48 on two-party preferred.

The Hammond poll (bottom) backs up Malcolm Mackerras’s assertion in Saturday’s Australian (where he predicted that Labor would pick up six seats overall) that Peter Lewis would "get done like a dinner". It shows Lewis in distant third place on 13 per cent of the decided vote compared with 48 per cent for Liberal candidate Adrian Pederick and 25 per cent for Labor (who unveiled James Peikert as their candidate earlier this week). If these figures are accurate, the best preference flow in the world would not be enough to boost Lewis to second place ahead of Labor, and even if it did the Liberal vote is close enough to 50 per cent to assure Pederick of victory. It also suggests that a majority of the voters abandoning Lewis are heading for Labor rather than Liberal – together with the Stuart results and Saturday’s Advertiser poll, this undercuts the notion that the Labor swing will be confined to Adelaide.

Bass Braddon Denison Franklin Lyons Total
Labor 39 41 35 37 48 42
Liberal 38 42 28 29 30 32
Greens 20 10 36 24 18 22

Also just to hand is a detailed breakdown of the EMRS poll for the Tasmanian election (above) which was published in the Mercury on Saturday. There are a number of reasons why these results should be treated with caution. While the total sample of 1002 is substantial, the margin of error blows out significantly when it comes to the seat-by-seat breakdowns. Even more troubling is the extremely high undecided rating (23 per cent in Saturday’s poll) that is a consistent feature of EMRS polling, which suggests they are making no effort to twist the arms of voters reluctant to declare a preference (larger polling agencies ask undecided voters who they are "leaning towards", and they usually get an answer). The following table, showing the course of aggregate EMRS polling over the past year, is probably more useful.

Puttin’ on the writs

Mike Rann formally initiated the South Australian election campaign yesterday when he advised Governor Marjorie Jackson-Nelson to issue the writs, which he had delayed until the second last day possible. This is not greatly remarkable given that the election was fixed for March 18 in any case, but it nonetheless attracted censure from The Advertiser which extravagantly claimed that "the public service has been frozen in the headlights of the approaching poll since before Christmas". Notwithstanding the nameless terrors confronted by public servants, it seems the only practical effect was that candidates wishing to festoon lamp posts and stobie poles with election paraphernalia had to hold back until the formal beginning of the campaign – or rather, until 24 hours beforehand, owing to a loophole requiring councils to give a day’s notice when ordering that posters be removed.

Of far greater importance to the campaign and world history in general was the Poll Bludger’s arrival in town, where I will be spending the next week soaking up the electoral ambience. My arrival brought me face-to-face with a much-touted vote loser for the Rann government, namely the new Adelaide Airport which opened on Friday after long and expensive delays. It appears that a few teething problems were overlooked in the rush to commence operations in time for the election – those of us who exited the plane from the rear were required to access the terminal by crossing the tarmac and using a service entry, where a sign warned of $5000 fines for "trespassers".

A walk in the Park

As if two state elections on one day wasn’t enough, the by-election for Geoff Gallop’s old seat of Victoria Park in Western Australia will be held one week earlier, on March 11. The poll has attracted a cricket team of 11 candidates, not all of whose reputations precede them. Further detail may be added to this entry at a later date, time permitting. The candidates in ballot paper order:

Andrew Owens (Independent). An independent with the good sense to link to the Poll Bludger on his well-designed website, Owens’ statement of principles suggests him to be broadly left of centre. An informed local tells the Poll Bludger he is a fan of Peter Andren, the independent federal member for Calare in New South Wales.

John Tattersall. Tattersall is the candidate of the Socialist Alliance, which does not have formal party registration.

Dee Margetts (Greens). Margetts provides the Greens with a recognisable face at the by-election, having been a Senator from 1993 to 1999 and a Member of the Legislative Council from 2001 to 2005.

Teresa van Lieshout (Independent). Also ran as a One Nation upper house candidate for South Metropolitan at last year’s state election and as an independent for the corresponding federal electorate of Swan at the 2004 election. Her personal page on the One Nation website was updated as recently as December.

Mike Ward (Independent). As the head of men’s rights group Men’s Confraternity, Ward is well known in Perth as a scourge of the feminist movement and a prolific writer of letters to the editor.

Sue Bateman (One Nation). Bateman is among the more high-profile members of One Nation’s band of WA die-hards, if only by virtue of her run-in last year with The West Australian’s Inside Cover. Columnist Gary Adshead said Bateman had been stood down as a party branch president due to her apparent contributions to a website that might politely be described as to the right of One Nation.

James Dunn (Daylight Saving Party). A self-explanatory single-issue candidate, who presumably hopes voters have changed their minds about a proposal that has been defeated at three referendums going back to the early 1970s.

Ben Wyatt (Labor) (right). More on Wyatt’s Labor preselection here, here and here.

Peter Greaves (Family First). Greaves is the party’s state director and was the candidate for Swan at the federal election.

Bill Heggers (Christian Democratic Party). Heggers was the party’s candidate for Cockburn at last year’s state election.

Bruce Stevenson (Liberal) (left). Stevenson is a real estate agent and deputy mayor of Victoria Park. The party’s decision to field a candidate has copped stern criticism from factional chieftain Noel Crichton-Browne.

Why stop at one

Regular readers will be aware that the Poll Bludger was hoping Tasmanian Premier Paul Lennon would hold off on an early election, in contrast to widely held expectations, so the campaign would not clash with that for South Australia (which will formally begin when Premier Mike Rann instructs the Governor to issue the writs, which he must do no later than Tuesday). As we now know, Lennon has gone one better than that and the Tasmanian election will be held on March 18, the same day as South Australia’s.

Comments on the previous post suggest there are only two historical precedents for this – on June 2, 1970, when elections were held simultaneously in South Australia (when the Dunstan Labor government defeated the one-term Liberal government of Steele Hall, which had signed its own death warrant by abolishing the state’s indefensible rural vote weighting) and Victoria (Sir Henry Bolte’s last win before retiring); and on February 8, 1986, when voters in Western Australia and Tasmania respectively re-elected Brian Burke’s Labor and Robin Gray’s Liberal governments. UPDATE (22/2/06): I thought this couldn’t be right, and so it has proved – yesterday’s Australian reports that this will be "the 12th time two states have held concurrent elections".

Unfortunately the Poll Bludger has not been keeping a spare Tasmanian election guide handy to deploy at the appropriate moment. I plan to devote thorough posts to each of the state’s five multi-member electorates over the coming weeks and then to assemble them on to a single page, which will hopefully be in business a good fortnight out from polling day. One small consolation is that there will no concurrent upper house election in Tasmania – an upper house guide for South Australia is on the increasingly daunting "to do" list.

In the absence of my own efforts, you could obviously do a lot worse than to peruse Antony Green’s guides for Tasmania and the South Australian Legislative Council. Also worth noting on the latter count is a newcomer to the online psephological community, Upperhouse.info, which will in due course feature an election calculator by Graham Allen similar to those he kindly developed last year for the Poll Bludger’s Western Australian Legislative Council guide.

With both campaigns under way early predictions of the likely outcome are rolling in thick and fast, not least in the comments thread accompanying the previous post. The early consensus is that the Liberals have no chance of winning government in Tasmania but that the Labor government is more than likely to lose its majority. In South Australia, polling over the last few months has contributed to a growing expectation that the Liberal opposition faces a complete rout. However, most locals who have expressed an opinion have sounded a note of caution, not least due to the recent tone of reporting in The Advertiser. The paper has recently excoriated the Rann government for allowing parliament to remain idle over summer, and has rated Rob Kerin’s early Liberal campaign launch as "an unusually refreshing display of backbone, courage and innovation". Be that as it may, a poll taken by The Advertiser on Wednesday and published yesterday (above) gave the Liberals no cause for comfort – Labor maintained its 11 per cent lead from the previous poll and widened its two-party lead from 55-45 to 57-43.

An EMRS poll published in today’s Mercury suggests the Tasmanian election is likely to be more interesting. The total sample of 1002 voters is extremely impressive – the aforementioned Advertiser poll covered only 722 voters, and was itself the most comprehensive poll the paper had ever conducted. It has Labor’s statewide vote falling to 32 per cent, compared with 25 per cent for the Liberals and 17 per cent for the Greens (it can be presumed that the undecided have not been redistributed, so these figures cannot be directly compared with the previous election – Labor 51.9 per cent, Liberal 27.4 per cent, Greens 18.1 per cent). Most remarkably of all, electorate-level results had the Greens leading Labor in the inner Hobart electorate of Denison by 36 per cent to 35 per cent, although a small sample size of 200 means this should be treated with caution. The Mercury rates the likely outcome based on these figures as 11 seats for Labor, seven for Liberal and five for the Greens.

The crow flies

Thirty-one days out from polling day, and a month later than promised, the Poll Bludger’s guide to the March 18 South Australian election is finally in business. All 47 lower house seats have been gone through with a fine-tooth comb, with a separate upper house guide hopefully to follow later in the campaign.

This guide is a Poll Bludger first in that each electorate is dealt with on a separate page, a virtue born of necessity – ever since the site moved to WordPress and changed hosts (I believe the latter to be the more likely culprit), it has become impossible to fully download my longer election guides on most computers. Anyone who can work out why this might be is welcome to offer their insights. Interestingly, the problem does not extend to the Google cached pages (compare with this).

The Poll Bludger is off on a well-earned three-day holiday and will tackle South Australian campaign blogging in earnest on his return.

Mackerras versus McGauran

The earlier post on Senator Julian McGauran’s defection from the Nationals to the Liberals generated a productive discussion in comments, in sad contrast to subsequent efforts fingering the entrails of the WA Labor Party. Professor Malcolm Mackerras, recent recipient of the Office of the Order of Australia for services to psephology, offers an erudite contribution in today’s Crikey email replete with a number of choice words for the Senator.

Now that Julian the Apostate has completed his journey of treachery it is time to consider this in historical terms. Before I do, however, it is worthwhile to ask this question: why, oh why, would the Victorian Liberals actually want to poach this scumbag? I believe the explanation goes back to the Victorian Coalition agreement of 1989. The Liberals have been looking for an excuse to tear it up, hoping to ensure the Nationals never have a Victorian senator again.

Let me begin at the beginning. In July 1987 there was a double dissolution election. In the Senate election for Victoria Julian McGauran was elected on a separate National Party ticket. He was elected as one of the 12 senators. He was also elected as one of the six senators in the re-count under section 282 of the Electoral Act. These senators should have been given the six-years terms. However the Senate itself (under section 13 of the Constitution, with Labor and Democrat senators combining to outnumber Liberal and National senators) decided to relegate McGauran to a three-year term …

A note of attempted clarification. Since an entire Senate is elected after a double dissolution, the 12 Senators in each state must then be divided into two halves – six who will face election again at the end of the normal three-year election cycle, and six who will serve six-year terms and contest the subsequent election, thus setting in place the normal Senate cycle. The constitution leaves resolution of the matter up to the Senate, but the rules have been codified in the Electoral Act so that the order of election after a "recount" determines which is which. I do not claim much authority on this matter, but it appears that the result of the "recount" at the 1987 election pleased Labor and the Democrats less than the original order, and their collective Senate majority gave them the power to do something about it. McGauran was reduced to a three-year term and ended up with the unwinnable fourth place on the Coalition ticket at the 1990 half-Senate election, before returning from the number two position in 1993. Back to Mackerras:

In 1989 the Liberals and Nationals drew up an agreement for a joint ticket in Victoria whereby the Nationals would take the fourth place in 1990 and the second place in 1993. And so on. It is clear what the Liberals are determined to do in the future. In 2007 they will offer the Nationals the fourth place on the joint ticket because that is what the agreement provides. However, at the following election, presumably in 2010, they will tell the Nationals that they are being unreasonable in asking the Liberals to give one of their senators up to the National Party …

As hard as it is to see McGauran winning a significant spot on the Liberal ticket in 2010, he evidently considered it a better chance than the existing agreement being renewed beyond the next election. Mackerras says this will be the end of the Victorian Nationals in the Senate unless one of four hypothetical scenarios plays out:

First, Labor may win the 2007 general election. If so then a double dissolution of the parliament would be highly probable. The National Party would have no trouble in winning one of 12 places on a separate ticket at a double dissolution election. Second, the Liberal Party might relent from its present bloody-mindedness and agree to keep the joint ticket agreement going into the future. Third, McGauran might be run under the proverbial bus. In that event the Nationals would be entitled under section 15 of the Constitution to choose his successor. Fourth, McGauran might be shamed into doing the right thing, resign from the Senate, and give his seat back to its rightful owner.

This last possibility is what Cheryl Kernot did in October 1997. However, McGauran and the Liberal Party are so shameless I rate the chance of that at about one in a thousand.

UPDATE (13/2/06): Antony Green has much, much more on the future or otherwise of the Nationals.

Blokes on top

Wednesday night’s ALP preselection for Geoff Gallop’s seat of Victoria Park did not pan out as predicted in the previous item, with Ben Wyatt taking the prize after a vote of the party’s 14-member Administrative Committee. Wyatt is a Director of Public Prosecutions lawyer and director of Indigenous Business Australia, and his father Cedric Wyatt was a one-time Liberal candidate for the federal seat of Kalgoorlie (at the 1996 election, when Graeme Campbell won as an independent after quitting the ALP). Peter Kennedy reported on ABC radio this morning that the intial ballot gave Wyatt and Helen Creed five votes each, with Simon Ward on four. All four of Ward’s votes went to Wyatt in the next round, giving him a clear-cut win of nine votes to five. This capped off a bad week for the Emily’s List cause in WA, with two cabinet vacancies going to men (Peel MP Norm Marlborough and Mandurah MP David Templeman) and senior female MPs Michelle Roberts and Sheila McHale suffering demotion in the ensuing reshuffle. The date for the by-election has been set for March 11.

Page 519 of 557
1 … 518 519 520 … 557