Purported Pittwater party polling

Reports of "leaked" internal Liberal polling for next Saturday’s Pittwater by-election have provoked a frisson of excitement among those with an interest in talking up the contest. The poll reportedly has Liberal candidate Paul Nicolaou trailing his most fancied independent rival, local mayor Alex McTaggart, with a 46.5-53.5 split on two-candidate preferred. The results were a gift from "a senior Liberal who did not want to be named" to Lisa Muxworthy of the Manly Times, who smartly cultivated her source by reporting it exactly the way he or she would have wanted – a close race with the outcome to be determined by the undecided, and no luxury of a protest vote for those who normally support the Liberals. Anne Davies of the Sydney Morning Herald spruiked the contest by telling us "the parochial peninsula electorate has shown in the past that it can record large swings when a new candidate is endorsed, particularly if they are not a local". This was presumably a reference to surfer Nat Young’s strong performance against Jim Longley at a by-election way back in 1986, when sewage pollution on local beaches was a national news story. Christian Kerr of Crikey has also invoked the spectre of Nat Young while making plenty of space available for those predicting a Liberal humiliation, citing word-of-mouth evidence to suggest a swing not far shy of 20 per cent.

The Poll Bludger is not persuaded. It is axiomatic that leaked party polls are to be taken with a grain of salt, for reasons which hardly need explaining. Most of those reporting the Liberal figures seem to be conscious of this, with the Sydney Morning Herald providing a nice quote from Alex McTaggart about "a plot to scare the little old ladies into voting Liberal". I have a very particular theory on this occasion, which rests on two pillars – firstly, that the best lies are based on a foundation of truth; secondly, that political parties know this (and much else about the art of deception) better than anyone. On this basis, I suggest that the Liberals have indeed conducted polling that has them on 46.5 per cent, but that this is on the primary rather than the two-party preferred vote. This sounds about right – a sobering 12.9 per cent primary vote slump that would give the Liberals no cause for optimism about the 2007 election, but not enough to threaten their hold on so safe a seat. It would not be too hard to persuade an inquisitive journalist that all minor candidate votes should indeed be added to McTaggart’s two-candidate preferred score, since they will all "give" him their preferences. But in reality, 46.5 per cent would be enough for Nicolaou to win quite easily.

This brings us back to the Nat Young precedent. Leaving aside the fact that some who will vote next Saturday were not even born in 1986, it is worth noting that Young actually fell some way short with 46.9 per cent of the two-candidate vote – an excellent result, but still a clear victory for the Liberals. More importantly, this was in the days when the opportunities of optional preferential voting had yet to catch on. Young gathered 72 per cent of preferences from the 33 per cent who voted for other candidates, with an exhaustion rate of just 4.1 per cent. These days, a third of that vote can be expected to disappear courtesy of those who "just vote one". Even assuming the Liberal poll results are not completely fictitious, it would be quite astonishing if they honestly accounted for this.

Back in the JSCEM

More bedtime reading on the contentious electoral reform proposals from the Liberal-dominated Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. The inestimably estimable Dr Graeme Orr of Griffith University (who, as well as being big on electoral minutiae, also looks a bit like me) goes through the debate with a fine-tooth comb, and in doing so adds a rare note of sobriety to Margo Kingston’s Webdiary. And in case you missed it, committee chair Tony Smith mounted a less than persuasive rebuttal of criticisms from Brian Costar and Colin Hughes in The Age last week.

Pittwater form guide

The campaign for Saturday week’s Pittwater by-election limps on uneventfully, although some observers remain excited at the prospect of John Brogden’s demise causing a backlash sufficient to endanger the Liberal candidate, former party fund raiser Paul Nicolaou. Local ratepayers association types have been penning letters to the editor and badgering suburban newspaper journalists to vent their outrage that Nicolaou was until recently a resident of Lane Cove, scoring particularly well with last week’s revelation that he moved into his new Mona Vale address too late to get on the roll for the by-election. However, history suggests suburban voters don’t get terribly excited about this kind of thing and that a messy preselection outcome was the real prerequisite for a Liberal defeat, and this the party has managed to avoid. They are also boosted by a field of rival contenders that includes the mayor, two former mayors and another councillor besides. Since New South Wales has optional preferential voting, preference exhaustion from the scattered anti-Liberal vote will make it very difficult for any of the independents to cause Nicolaou real trouble.

The candidates in ballot paper order:

Alex McTaggart (Independent). Widely perceived as the main threat to the Liberal Party due to his current status as Pittwater Mayor. Despite his forceful denials, McTaggart has been subject to repeated suggestions that he is receiving help from the Labor Party. The most interesting was a small item in the Sun-Herald noting that postal vote applications sent out by McTaggart suggested access to the electronic electoral rolls, which are apparently available "only to the major parties". For what it’s worth, Piers Akerman reckons Pittwater Council is "significantly on the nose with ratepayers and is perceived as arrogant and uncaring", and that McTaggart is "seen as a councillor elected on a single NIMBY (not in my back yard) issue – a ban on television crews at his local beach, Avalon".

Paul Nicolaou (Liberal). The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Nicolaou would shed as little as 5 per cent of the Liberal vote, according to "Labor polling" – though why they would bother to conduct any was not made clear.

Patricia Giles (Christian Democratic). The former Pittwater mayor’s electoral record is better than incumbent Alex McTaggart’s, but she would surely be better off without the Fred Nile brand.

Robert Dunn (Independent). A former mayor and Liberal Party member, Dunn told Lisa Muxworthy of the Manly Daily that he was running because he was "appalled" by the "contempt" the Liberal Party had shown Pittwater by nominating a Lane Cove resident. He is apparently no more pleased with the member for the corresponding Federal seat of Mackellar, Bronwyn Bishop, having scored a reasonable 7.7 per cent in his run against her at last year’s Federal election.

Natalie Stevens (Greens). Stevens became the first Greens member on Pittwater Council at last year’s election, winning a seat in the five-member Northern Ward with 18.6 per cent of the vote.

Mario Nicotra (Democrats). Nicotra was also the Democrats candidate for Mackellar at the Federal election. He tells the Manly Daily that Mona Vale Hospital "should be rebuilt as a showcase healing centre" incorporating, among other things, "complementary medicines, natural healing, homoeopathy, acupuncture and other services".

First they came for the late enrollers

Two opinion pieces in today’s papers give the thumbs down to major recommendations of the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. In The Age, Colin Hughes and Brian Costar concede that the report "contains much useful information about the electoral system and makes sensible recommendations about how to improve it", but argue that moves to eliminate the seven-day period between the issue of the writs and the closure of the electoral roll threaten "Australia’s well-earned reputation as a world leader in democratic practice":

The committee advanced two major justifications for abolishing the statutory period of grace. One was that by not keeping their enrolment up to date 284,110 souls were guilty of offences under the Electoral Act and should not be allowed any leeway. This excessive legalism runs counter to the sensible, long-established practice whereby the Australian Electoral Commission does not pursue prosecution for non-enrolment if the neglect is remedied.

The committee also claims that the current arrangements "present an opportunity for those who seek to manipulate the roll to do so at a time where little opportunity exists for the AEC to undertake the thorough checking required ensuring (sic) roll integrity". This argument fails on at least two counts. First, the AEC, in its submission to the inquiry, stated categorically that it applies its established procedures during the seven-day period after the writs are issued “with the same degree of rigour as it does in a non-election period”. Second, the committee itself admits that there is minimal evidence of actual roll fraud, but insists that it must take measures to prevent it occurring in the future.

This second assertion ignores the thorough review of the electoral roll conducted in 2002 by the Australian National Audit Office, which concluded "that, overall, the Australian electoral roll is one of high integrity, and can be relied on for electoral purposes". There are adequate safeguards in the current electoral laws and procedures to deal with any future attempts at fraud without stripping the vote from hundreds of thousands of citizens.

Before we all start stocking up on firearms and tins of baked beans, Hughes and Costar note that a potential constitutional loophole promises salvation for our cherished democratic freedoms, should state governments choose to make use of it:

This arises from the fact that the governor-general, on the advice of the prime minister, issues the writs for the House of Representatives and the four territory senators, but the state governors, acting on the advice of their premiers, issue the writs for Senate elections. The constitutional power clearly exists for one or more of the state premiers to advise their governors not to issue Senate writs for, say, seven days after the prime minister announces the election date, thereby keeping the rolls open in those states.

Writing in the Australian Financial Review (not available online), Malcolm Mackerras differs from Hughes and Costar in that his "overall reaction is hostile", because the recommendations are "relentless in their pursuit of the electoral interests of the Liberal Party". Restrictions of space compel him to limit his criticisms to the familiar matter of full preferential above-the-line voting for the Senate:

Such a change would massively drive up the informal vote. Why do we have this Faustian pact between the Liberal Party, the Democrats and the Greens? The Liberal Party wants to drive up the informal vote because that advances its electoral interests. The Democrats and the Greens are in the business of punishing Family First because, in their view, Steve Fielding won a seat in Victoria that they believe he should not have won. These politicians will vehemently deny my assessment …

Lack of space prevents me from a full explanation of why I call chapter nine a disgrace. I content myself with three points. First, the chapter (page 230) grotesquely mis-describes the system of "first past the post" in an attempt to justify the prejudices of many of our politicians. Second, the chapter (pages 208, 210, 214 and 226) commits a real howler in using the term single transferable vote in a way that is not only internally inconsistent but flies in the face of the international literature on electoral systems. Third, the chapter gives some objections to the current (reasonably sensible) system of group voting tickets and then (page 216) says: "The decision of the Family First party in some states to favour a preference distribution to other minor parties that advocated policies radically at variance with Family First’s declared core values, may be an example of this type of strategic behaviour, and its consequences."

No evidence is given. However, the main value of this sentence (not intended, of course) is that the politicians have given themselves away as to their target.

Mackerras seems unusually relaxed about Family First’s success in winning a seat with neglible support thanks to huge volumes of preferences from oblivious voters. I would be interested to know if this is because space prohibited him from advocating what seems to me the obvious solution, namely optional preferential voting. For much, much more on this topic, see the comments thread for this earlier post.

Nine reasons you never cared about compulsory voting

The fruitful Australian Parliamentary Library has come good with a beginner’s guide to compulsory voting issues, which comes equipped with the following panoply of amazing facts.

  • The Federal Government has enjoyed a minor revenue windfall from the introduction of BPAY for payment of fines, which many non-voters evidently find less tiresome than thinking up an excuse. As a result, total payments following last year’s election topped $1 million for the first time.

  • A University of Western Australia study (published in 1981, but never mind) found that variables indicating a high likelihood of turnout included "being born in Australia or the United Kingdom, being a professional worker, being employed by government, being over 65 years of age, being a long-term resident of a ‘high-status’ suburb, having a high income, and being in possession of tertiary qualifications". With the conspicuous exception of "being employed by government", all variables are commonly associated with support for the Coalition.

  • About three-quarters of informal votes appear to be sincere attempts to indicate a preference.

  • There was a burst of enthusiasm for optional preferential voting when a self-proclaimed Nazi nominated for the Federal seat of Australian Capital Territory at the 1970 by-election, won by future Whitlam Government Attorney-General Kep Enderby. A check of Adam Carr’s Psephos does not turn up an NSDAP candidate at said poll, while Google is silent on the two under-performing independents, Edwin Bellchambers and Edward Cawthorn.

  • Compulsory voting exists, after a fashion, in more countries than you might think. They include Brazil, Argentina, Thailand, Greece and Singapore as well as the more frequently cited Belgium. Many don’t enforce it, but in Cyprus the fine for not voting is "200 pounds", which I gather to be as serious as it sounds. Greek voters who fail to perform their civic duty can find themselves unable to obtain a passport or drivers’ licence.

  • Even without compulsory voting, the 1964 Johnson-Goldwater presidential election saw the United States outperform the Australian norm with a turnout of 96 per cent. What followed was a steady decline to the nadir of Clinton’s re-election in 1996 (63 per cent), followed by a quite impressive recovery to 73 per cent last year. (UPDATE: See below).

  • A 1991 MORI poll found 49 per cent of British voters supported the introduction of compulsory voting, compared with 41 per cent against.

  • The turnouts for Tony Blair’s two re-elections (59 per cent and 62 per cent) have been far and away the lowest for any British election since World War II. There was a noticeable dip at the 1970 election that delivered an unexpected defeat to Harold Wilson’s Labour Government – folklore has it that working class voters stayed at home as they were shattered by England’s World Cup semi-final loss the day before.

  • After the abolition of compulsory voting in the Netherlands in 1971, turnout fell from levels comparable with Australia (95 per cent) to between 73 per cent and 88 per cent.

    • UPDATE (1/11/05): The figure quoted above regarding turnout at the 1964 United States presidential election, which the Australian Parliamentary Library sourced from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, raised a few eyebrows among commenters. David Walsh points to more detailed figures that suggest the 95.8 per cent figure was arrived at by dividing the number of votes by a sum of the states’ registration figures – even though the latter figure was zero for 11 states, and Ohio somehow had more voters than registrations (on this measure, its turnout was 105.7 per cent). IDEA’s page on methodology used says:

    The user of this data base will notice that in some instances the registration rate (REG) for a country actually exceeds the estimated number of registered voters (VAP). The explanation for this apparent anomaly usually lies either in the inaccuracy of the electoral roll, or in the estimated number of eligible voters (VAP). In some countries, the roll is extremely difficult to keep up to date, and deaths or movements of elections from one district to another are not reflected in the roll, something which is a common problem facing electoral administrators around the world. On the other hand it is important to emphasise that the registration figures are, in most cases, more recently updated than population figures. The VAP is based on the most recent population census figure available, although not an exact figure, it is a reflection of the demographic trend and estimated population growth of a country.

    Pittwater preselection puts Paul in pole position

    The New South Wales Liberal Party has followed the Poll Bludger’s orders and chosen Paul Nicolaou as its candidate for the November 26 Pittwater by-election. Former state and federal MP Stephen Mutch withdrew from the race late last week, presumably after concluding that he didn’t have the numbers, and Nicolaou prevailed over John Brogden staffer Rob Stokes with a healthy margin of 49 votes to 28. Nicolaou goes into the by-election with a 20.1 per cent Liberal margin and no challenge from Labor, although much is being made of Pittwater Mayor Alex McTaggart’s decision to run as an independent. McTaggart enjoys the happy circumstance of effectively identical electorate and municipal boundaries, but he has only been Mayor for a year and his council electoral record suggests he would have limited voter recognition. The group he led in Northern Ward last year won 25.7 per cent of the vote, a good deal less than the 49.2 per cent vote for Patricia Giles’s group in Central Ward. Giles’s claim that she was approached by Labor with an offer of assistance if she ran as an independent has a ring of truth about it, although Labor has vehemently denied it. She has instead entered the field as the candidate of Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party, effectively denying herself broad-based support. The other confirmed candidate is another Pittwater Councillor, Natalie Stevens, who will run for the Greens.

    No more years

    The Poll Bludger’s position on four-year terms is simple: elections are good, so longer terms are bad. The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has taken a different view and recommended their introduction, with consideration given to both a simple extension of the time-frame in which an election may be called, and to the Victorian/South Australian model where the first three years are fixed and an election may be called at any time in the final year. The proposal was predictably well received by politicians, who having gone to the trouble of being elected would like to remain that way for as long as possible, and by business groups, who find entrenched governments easier to influence than public opinion. In fairness, the cause has no shortage of more objective supporters. Glenn Milne typified the view of editorialists and the commentariat when he complained that "under the three-year system, apart from year one, governments are essentially on a constant campaign footing, and the national interest be buggered"; while Marion Sawer and Norm Kelly of Democratic Audit articulated the academic consensus in saying "four-year terms are generally seen as more appropriate for effective government".

    All the pillars of the establishment are in line, but this is one issue where they must contend with an unfamiliar player – the electorate, whose consent is required for the necessary constitutional amendment. A poll conducted by Ipsos Mackay for Channel Ten suggests it won’t be forthcoming. Of the thousand voters surveyed, only 40 per cent said they would back it in a referendum, with 54 per cent opposed. Even more persuasive is the precedent of the 1988 referendum when four-year terms were among a package of four proposals that conspicuously failed to capture the public’s imagination, faring second worst out of the four with 32.9 per cent of the national vote. Scott Bennett of the Australian Parliamentary Library suggests that this failure was largely the fault of the Hawke Government, which "confused the issue by including in the proposed change a reduction of Senate terms to four years as well as a provision for simultaneous elections". This seems a little unfair since it fails to acknowledge that longer House terms inevitably raise problems for the Senate which have no obvious answer.

    At present, Senators serve fixed six-year terms (provided there is no double dissolution) which are staggered so that half the Senate faces the electorate every three years, which must happen at some point in the final year of their term. In most circumstances this acts as a restraint on governments wishing to call early elections for the House, since voters are not like psephologists and do not see the charm of separate mid-term half-Senate elections. To maintain this system, four-year terms for the House would mean eight-year terms for Senators (JSCEM’s "Senate Option 1"), which voters will never wear. The alternatives are abandoning the assumption of synchronised House and Senate elections, which they will like even less; tying Senate terms to the variable terms for the House, so they will be between six and eight years ("Senate Option 2"); or the 1988 option, which actually looks pretty good when stacked up against the alternatives.

    The real flaw of the 1988 referendum was not that it was tied to unavoidably contentious Senate proposals, but that it offered no concession to fixed terms. The spectacle of a race in which one of the contestants fires the starting gun at a time of their own convenience bothers voters far more than does relatively frequent elections. Scott Bennett’s paper quotes a paper written in 1980 by a trio of University of New South Wales academics (Donald Horne, Elaine Thompson and Sol Encel) which correctly diagnosed a simple extension of terms by one year as:

    The worst of all possible worlds. It gives an extra year to a government without accountability to the people and yet the opportunity for a prime minister to call an early election at will still remains.

    It is interesting that this was written when it was and where it was, because one year later voters in New South Wales agreed to do exactly what they warned against, backing four-year terms at a referendum with 69.0 per cent support. Thus began a dark age that continued until 1995 when another referendum introduced fixed quadrennial elections for the last Saturday in March, receiving 75.5 per cent of the vote. Queensland dodged the bullet in 1991 when the Goss Government’s attempt to deliver yet more power to every future Joh Bjelke-Petersen fell narrowly short of succeeding, with 49.1 per cent support. It is widely felt that it would have got up if Goss had the sense to conduct it concurrently with the state election the following year. Nevertheless, New South Wales is the only exception to the rule that there are three-year terms in jurisdictions where voters have had a say in the matter, and four-year terms where they haven’t.

    To conclude, a perfect summation of my own views courtesy of Laurie Oakes:

    The argument politicians put is that a three-year term is too short to allow governments to operate in the national interest. A government, they say, implements the hard decisions in the first year, beds them down in the second, and spends the third year trying to win re-election. But what is wrong with that? It sounds pretty efficient, in fact. How would four years be any better? Presumably it would enable a government to implement the hard decisions in year one, bed them down in year two, then have 12 months resting on its laurels and enjoying the comforts of incumbency before having to worry about the next election. It is easy to see how that would benefit parliamentarians, especially those in the governing party, but less easy to see how it would benefit voters.

    Green with envy

    For the sake of completeness, a post on the finalisation of coalition negotiations by Helen Clark’s Labour Government in New Zealand is in order. Last month’s election saw a National Party resurgence at the expense of the minor parties, all but one of whom (the Maori Party) emerged with substantially fewer seats. This gravely complicated Clark’s task of stitching together a majority, since she faced a disparate assortment of minor parties including several who refused to work with each other. Most expected that Labour would reach an accommodation with the Green Party, so that the strengthened position of the National Party would have had the paradoxical effect of shifting the Government to the left. So there was widespread surprise, much of it unpleasant, when Clark unveiled a deal with right-of-centre parties Winston Peters’ New Zealand First and United Future New Zealand which gave the job of Foreign Minister to Peters – a man sometimes described by his harsher critics as “racist and xenophobic”.

    All of which has proved very confusing for Australian observers familiar with the certainties of single-member electorates and majority government. The Poll Bludger’s local rag, The West Australian, managed three errors in 18 words this morning when it reported that this “bizarre deal” was “the only way Ms Clarke (sic) could form a minority government after a poor result in last month’s election”. There is little excuse for such befuddlement over the horse-trading that inevitably follows elections held under proportional representation, which is a major feature of democracy throughout mainland Europe. Charles Richardson had some acute observations on the process in today’s Crikey email:

    New Zealand has finally got itself a new government, and it’s already clear to see who are the big losers. The Greens, despite strongly supporting Helen Clark’s Labour Party during the campaign, have been left out in the cold, and now say they will abstain on votes of confidence.

    This is a real lesson in power politics. Being too close to Labour was the Greens’ undoing: it meant they could be taken for granted. The other minor parties could threaten to support the National Party, and therefore had to be bought off. But the Greens stuck in the Labour camp until it was too late – until Clark had stitched together enough other deals to no longer need them.

    In Germany, remember, the Greens at least contemplated going into coalition with the right (the “Jamaican option” – black, green and yellow), although it didn’t work out that way. In New Zealand, they tried to show responsibility by portraying themselves as a reliable partner for Labour. But reliability isn’t always an advantage in politics.

    On the other side, ACT, the NZ libertarian party, has the same problem. They succeeded against the odds in retaining a foothold in parliament, but their influence will be negligible. They were unable to influence the new coalition because they were too close to National to join in the bidding war.

    Instead, New Zealand risks becoming an international laughing-stock with the protectionist Winston Peters as foreign minister – but outside the cabinet, and reserving the right to ignore collective responsibility. According to The New Zealand Herald, Greens co-leader Rod Donald “predicted it would be a ‘reactionary’ Government and said many of the demands Labour had accepted from NZ First and United Future were ‘socially, economically or environmentally destructive’.”

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