The Poll Bludger

The Poll Bludger is feeling rather pleased with his prediction of two days ago in which readers were told to expect "a series of (opinion poll) results that confound pundits by showing a shift to the Coalition". Even so, the scale of the bad news confronting Labor in today’s Newspoll survey of Queensland marginals comes as a surprise. The poll covered 1008 respondents from Herbert, Hinkler, Moreton, Longman, Bowman, Petrie and Dickson – the exact same seven seats nominated as Labor’s Queensland gains in the federal election guide. Support for the Coalition across the seven seats was recorded at 46 per cent against 38 for Labor, the Coalition leading 52-48 on two-party preferred. That represents a 1 per cent swing from 2001, which would not be enough to win Labor any of the aforementioned seats.

Newspoll also issued a geographic and demographic analysis survey yesterday covering its polls in July and August, departing from the usual procedure of releasing such results at the end of each quarter. The survey showed that the Coalition’s performance had improved in the past two months in Victoria and Western Australia, but slipped in New South Wales and Queensland (until recently, it appears). Collectively the results require the questioning of some existing wisdom, while fortifying the Poll Bludger in his long-held conviction that the Coalition will most likely get over the line. With a review of electorate assessments pending, Mark Latham should enjoy his Election Projection lead while it lasts.

Member for Wentworth Peter King will today announce if he intends to run for re-election as an independent against the man who defeated him for Liberal preselection, Malcolm Turnbull. The word is that he will indeed take the plunge, with Channel Seven News sounding particularly confident. King yesterday provided the Wentworth Courier (click here and jump through the hoops to page eight) with results from a survey of 350 voters commissioned from "a well-regarded pollster whom he would not reveal". Unfortunately, all the report would say was that "Peter King would take 56.5 per cent of the vote, with the ALP’s David Patch behind him at 43.5 per cent". It’s very hard to say exactly what this is supposed to mean. A two-candidate preferred result comparing King with Patch can only be based on the unlikely assumption that Turnbull will only manage third place, when the real issue is whether King can surpass Patch to take second and then ride over Turnbull on Patch’s preferences. If King had real reason to believe this would happen, he would have given primary vote figures showing himself ahead of Patch. For a more plausible guide to the state of play, Taverner conducted a poll for the Sun Herald in May that had Turnbull on 35 per cent, Patch on 29 per cent and King on 18 per cent. It could be that this is roughly what King’s own figures show and that he is essentially combining his own vote with Turnbull’s to generate a spurious two-candidate preferred figure to rebut "scaremongering" that his candidacy might deliver the seat to Labor. In reality, this is all King can seriously hope to achieve if the best he can manage is third place. With a 7.9 per cent margin, Wentworth is less safe for the Liberals than is commonly supposed and if a substantial proportion of the existing Liberal primary votes were drained away by an independent, leakage of preferences to Labor could well cost them the seat.

The Advertiser today carries a poll of 558 South Australian voters showing the Coalition leading Labor 45 to 35 per cent on the primary vote and 53 to 47 per cent on two-party preferred. A similar poll a month ago had Labor ahead 51 to 49. Assuming it’s accurate it still marks a 1 per cent swing to Labor on the 2001 election and leaves them at least in the hunt to win Adelaide, Hindmarsh and Makin, though they would be trailing slightly in each case if the swing were uniform. The Poll Bludger will not be surprised if this survey, along with yesterday’s Newspoll, marks the start of a series of results that confound pundits by showing a shift to the Coalition as the public reacts against the media frenzy regarding an incident that means little to anyone who hadn’t made their mind up three years ago. Mark Latham would do well to cease feeding into this by accommodating reporters seeking soundbites to accompany their children overboard stories, thereby associating himself with what an important section of the electorate perceives to be the journalists’ agenda rather than its own. The next time he is served up one of these easy volleys, he would be best served with a statesmanlike pronouncement that the election campaign is of finite duration and it is time to move on.

Malcolm Mackerras emerged on Monday, as he always does at times like these, to deliver his curmudgeonly assessments of the state of play in The Australian and the Financial Review (subscriber only, but there’s no telling what might happen if you click here). Typically he has no more than this to say on the House of Representatives: "I have no idea how the Australian people will divide their votes and nor does anyone else. However, this ignorance does not lead me to predict a close result. In truth, a close result is merely one of the possibilities. It is just as likely to be a landslide one way or the other". On the subject of the Senate he is rather more forthcoming, predicting that only a bad turn for the Coalition will prevent them achieving their "magic 38" blocking majority in the Senate.

This seems a reasonable assessment. Usually the six seats up for grabs in each state will split evenly between the right and left, and while one of the left seats will usually go to the Greens or Democrats, the Coalition have few natural predators on their side. Therefore, the Coalition need only turn in two reasonably good performances in succession, which they have not achieved during the current government due to a very modest performance in 1998 when they were lucky to win their House majority. In the Senate they won only two seats in New South Wales, where the result was Labor three, Democrats one and Liberal two; in Tasmania, where one went to independent Brian Harradine; and in Queensland, where One Nation edged out National Party Senator Bill O’Chee.

Fred Nile, Hetty Johnston and Family First arguably represent threats to third place-holders on Coalition tickets in New South Wales, Queensland and elsewhere, but by and large Harradines and Hansons are thinner on the ground this time. If the Coalition is to be denied its 38 seats, it will more likely be the 1998 New South Wales scenario where it is they rather than Labor that drops a seat to the Greens or Democrats. For that to occur the Coalition vote in the relevant state would need to fall substantially below 40 per cent, in which case the Government will be in trouble.

Various happenings around the place have prompted the first set of campaign updates for the House of Representatives election guide. To save you the effort:

Kalgoorlie (WA, Liberal 4.4%): State Labor MP Tom Stephens accused the Liberals of working to have transients and Aboriginals removed from the electoral roll by lodging objections against the enrolments of voters when campaign material failed to reach the addressee. If that is indeed their aim it appears it may not be successful, an AEC spokesman telling The West Australian it was "difficult" to remove people from the roll as the Commission had to "send three letters and have them returned with information that the elector was no longer at that address before they could be struck off". It is certainly to be hoped so, because a narrow defeat for Labor in Kalgoorlie could mean a narrow defeat for Labor in the election, in which case the controversy would put the popular Bush-stole-Florida theory in the shade.

Adelaide (SA, Liberal 0.6%): Liberal member Trish Worth, who at times had presented herself as sympathetic to asylum seekers, made headlines yesterday when audio emerged of her telling a Justice for Refugees debate that detention could not be ended "like that" because when "you bring a dog into this country, or a cat from some countries … there are certain tests to be carried out". This would probably not have hurt her if her seat was in the suburbs or the regions, but in central Adelaide, her traditionally more sympathetic image would have been the better bet electorally.

Lyne (NSW, National 11.3%): Rob Oakeshott, the independent member for the state seat of Port Macquarie, announced yesterday that he would not run against deputy National Party leader Mark Vaile, as he had been threatening. Given that Oakeshott scored 70 per cent of the primary vote at the 2003 state election against a Nationals candidate who received strong backing from Vaile, this would be a great relief to him and his party. This deprives the election of its best chance for a new independent to join Katter, Andren and Windsor.

Kennedy (Qld, Independent 8.3%): Bob Katter’s step-mother Joy Katter publicly endorsed his National Party opponent, James Doyle. The second wife of Bob Katter Sr, who held the seat from 1966 to 1990, Joy Katter said yesterday that she did not approve of his performance since leaving the National Party and that his late father wouldn’t have either.

Swan (WA, Labor 2.1%): Kim Wilkie has kept his Liberal opponent Andrew Murfin squirming over the letters scandal as the campaign begins, lodging a complaint with the Police Commissioner over the matter.

Election watchers with access to Sky News are advised to make a date at 9:30pm next Monday for The Gallery, a campaign chat show with a panel consisting of press gallery denizens Malcolm Farr, Glenn Milne, David Speers and Helen McCabe. Among the guests on last night’s debut was Sol Lebovic of Newspoll, who discussed the results of the weekend’s survey three hours before they became available through The Australian. In light of the Poll Bludger’s expressed doubts over the accuracy of last fortnight’s poll, his analysis included a number of well-made points:

I think that the poll two weeks earlier was actually a reflection of the previous fortnight of that particular poll which was all about the FTA … I think the whole Scrafton thing suggests that people who worry about that kind of thing and accept those comments about John Howard have already parked themselves on the other side … I think there’s a lot of voters out there who are sort of swaying in the breeze and the FTA got a lot of good media publicity for Mark Latham for those two weeks, we did a poll on that particular weekened and they said, "yeah, Mark Latham’s okay", two weeks later they’ve tended to forget about the FTA and we’re back to where we were all through June and July … the onus is very much on Labor to prove that they’re going to be better (than the Coalition). I don’t think we’ve seen enough out of Labor and Mark Latham in terms of the policies, they say they’re going to release it during the campaign, their tax policy for example, that’s a pretty big ask because that’s assuming they get clean air time during the campaign, and I suspect that voters in the early part of the campaign aren’t paying that much attention, they’re just picking up generalities. We know from polls we’ve done after the last three federal elections that a quarter of voters say they didn’t make up their minds until the final week of the campaign, so I think Labor’s got a long way to go.

In an election campaign in which both sides have nominated trust and honesty as the major themes, the Poll Bludger got off to a poor start yesterday with his assertion that he had "meticulously sifted through his House of Representatives election guide" in producing his Election Projection outcome (see left). In fact this was done in such haste that the Victorian seat of La Trobe was lazily marked down as "Liberal retain" despite a long-harboured expectation to the contrary, owing to the loss of retiring Liberal incumbent Bob Charles’ personal vote and the high profile of Labor candidate Susan Davies, who held the state seat of Gippsland West as an independent from 1997 to 2002 (many thanks to reader Barney Langford for pointing this out). Thus does the Election Projection now record Labor at the all-important 76-seat mark at which they can form a majority government, however narrowly. Hopefully this stunning breakthrough will give the Opposition Leader the shot in the arm he needs following this morning’s disappointing Newspoll result.

Another dubious aspect of yesterday’s entry was an implicit assumption that all three existing independents would line up with the Coalition if push came to shove. In fact the most likely outcome in the event that Labor wins 75 seats would be that Peter Andren, the independent member for Calare, would accept a Labor offer of the Speaker’s position, thereby giving them a majority on the floor. Andren’s seat was held by Labor before he won it in 1996 and unlike his cross-bench colleagues he has no history of involvement with the National Party.

The Coalition has bounced back from a horror result a fortnight ago in today’s Newspoll, taken over the weekend. Their primary vote is up from 39 to 43 per cent with Labor down from 42 to 40, though Labor maintain a 52-48 lead on two-party preferred (down from 54-46). Dennis Shanahan does a much better job than most journalists of talking up the poll’s significance without descending into hyperbole, saying the result "appears to bear out the Prime Minister’s view that the public is ‘fed up’ with the children overboard affair", which is perfectly true as far as it goes. However it is also true that the last poll probably inflated Labor’s lead.

The latest low-sample Taverner poll was published on Sunday, but the only information that may be gleaned from it comes from this article in Sunday’s Sun-Herald. Labor are on 53 per cent two-party preferred, showing no change on the poll from a fortnight ago, while the Greens are on a slightly implausible 11 per cent – also unchanged from last fortnight.