The Poll Bludger

Peter Debnam has been offered a glimmer of hope by today’s Newspoll, which finds a considerable narrowing in Labor’s primary vote. Labor support is down from 45 per cent to 42 per cent, while the Coalition is up from 33 per cent to 37 per cent; on two-party preferred, the gap has closed from 59-41 to 56-44. Unfortunately, Debnam’s early morning equilibrium will be upset when his attention turns to the local papers, which both lead their election coverage with reports on the abnormally low profile Debnam has assumed in the Liberals’ election material. The Sydney Morning Herald rates this as "a sign that the Liberals’ poor showing in the polls is starting to give campaign organisers the jitters", while the Daily Telegraph calls it "a bizarre break with tradition", "confirming that poor polling and Labor’s negative campaign have all but destroyed his chances of becoming premier".

Another unorthodox tactic has been the pitch by Debnam that voters should at least "send Labor a message" at the election, a tacit admission that he does not expect to win. Given my Perth-centric perspective on things, such talk sent my mind scurrying back to Labor’s two defeats in the Western Australian elections of 1993 and 1996. Two days before the former election, then-Premier Carmen Lawrence told the West Australian: "I am smart enough to know I have done everything I could possibly have done. I don’t feel as if victory rides on my shoulders. People do like me but that’s not going to be enough to change their votes". Sure enough, Labor’s tumultous 10 years in power come to an end the following Saturday, though in less bruising terms than might have been expected under the circumstances.

Labor’s surrender in 1996 was even more explicit. The party had lost its main electoral asset with Lawrence’s entry into federal politics in 1994, and subsequently went through two leaders in quick succession. Three days out from the poll, leader Geoff Gallop made a deliberate bid for the sympathy vote when he told reporters: "Information I have seen in the polls throughout this campaign indicates the Court Government will be returned comfortably on Saturday". According to that day’s West Australian, "Labor sources said the party’s final television advertisement – urging voters not to give the Court Government a blank cheque – broke with the strategy laid out at the start of the campaign. The new tactic was devised by (state party secretary Mark) Nolan and Perth MHR Stephen Smith". Court meanwhile was making the eerily familiar claim that "our polling shows that in our marginal seats it is a 50-50 situation".

Opinion on the effectiveness of Gallop’s pre-emptive concession was dramatically divided. It was believed to have gone down badly in traditional Labor mining areas, and was widely blamed for unexpectedly poor performances in the north-western seats of Burrup and Ningaloo. Defeated Ningaloo MP Kevin Leahy complained that the party hierarchy had "destroyed us with the decision to say they did not think they could win", which had "poleaxed the campaign team". Fred Riebeling, who narrowly held on in Burrup (and is now member for the successor seat of North-West Coastal), thought it a "stupid act" that "cost me dearly": "I had half my people working in the booths ring me asking why should they bother turning up".

However, it appeared to be a different story in the metropolitan area, where a number of feared defeats failed to materialise. Most significantly, star candidate Alan Carpenter defied concerns that he might fail to carry his seat of Willagee, where he picked up a 6.5 per cent swing. Miserable as Labor’s statewide primary vote of 35.8 per cent might have been, it was still higher than the support recorded in four previous Newspoll surveys, including a final week poll that had their vote at 33 per cent. Two years on, Anne Burns of the West Australian was able to report that the move was "credited in Labor folklore with minimising the carnage". Another two years, and Gallop had led Labor back to power with the first of his two election victories. Few would consider Peter Debnam likely to be as lucky.

With New South Wales election nominations closed and ballot paper positions drawn, I have now added full candidate lists to my election guide – always one of my favourite things to do. A couple of noteworthy details:

• Antony Green has tallied up 537 candidates for the lower house, down from 661 in 2003, and a record 333 for the upper house. However, this will not lead to a repeat of the notorious 1999 "tablecloth" ballot paper, which featured 81 different groups with above-the-line voting options. The implementation of optional preferential above-the-line voting at the 2003 election removed the incentive for establishing dummy parties to harvest preferences, and also required that parties with group voting tickets have 15 candidates. The first change reduced the size of the ballot paper, while the second resulted in a smaller number of parties running a greater number of candidates.

• Independent candidates whose nominations were news to me include Debra Wales in Gosford and Ron Page in Murray-Darling. Wales was the Liberal candidate in 1999 and 2003 but was defeated for preselection this time; Page was mayor of Broken Hill until the government dismissed the council in January. Candidates in Keira include the persistent Marcus Aussie-Stone, whose electoral adventures go back to his run against then-Prime Minister Billy McMahon in Lowe in 1972.

• Swimming legend Dawn Fraser, who held the seat of Balmain from 1988 to 1991, is a surprise late entry in the upper house. However, she will be running as an ungrouped candidate, so that anyone wishing to vote for her will be required to number 15 boxes below the line. Of the seven ungrouped candidates in 2003, none polled so much as 1000 votes.

• One Nation is not contesting the election. There is however a remarkably large field of 56 Australians Against Further Immigration candidates for the lower house. The party fielded 62 candidates in 1999 and did not contest in 2003 (UPDATE: Turns out I’m wrong on the latter count – thanks to Charles Richardson for pointing this out). By Upperhouse.info‘s count, there are 57 lower house candidates for the Christian Democratic Party (Fred Nile Group). The Greens are contesting every seat.

Those who were hoping yesterday’s national accounts figures might breathe some life into a moribund New South Wales election campaign have again been disappointed. This had been looming as a red-letter event because the previous quarter’s state final demand figure had been in the negative, which if repeated would have left New South Wales in a technical state of recession. The government has dodged this bullet in fine style with a growth rate of 1.4 per cent, enough for Westpac’s Matthew Hassan to tell the Sydney Morning Herald that the state "finally looks to be shaking off its malaise". Such interest as the election has to offer thus remains at the local electorate level:

Maitland (Labor 10.3%): A poll of 300 Maitland voters in Monday’s Newcastle Herald suggests Labor is in danger of losing the seat to independent candidate Peter Blackmore. After distribution of the 11.3 per cent undecided, Blackmore was in second place with 26.7 per cent to Liberal candidate Bob Geoghegan’s 22.2 per cent, with Labor’s Frank Terenzini on 37.2 per cent. Under full preferential voting, such figures could be expected to see Blackmore overrun Labor on Liberal preferences; New South Wales’ optional preferential system makes it a closer call, because many Liberal votes will exhaust. Blackmore was the seat’s Liberal member from 1991 until 1999, when a punishing redistribution combined with a small swing to deliver it to Labor’s John Price, who is now retiring. Damien Murphy of the Sydney Morning Herald reported on Tuesday that voters were being "bombarded with testimonies", "not the least by the Liberal stalwart Milton Morris, Maitland’s longest-serving state member, who has risked party expulsion by publicly declaring support for Blackmore".

Manly (Independent 0.6% versus Liberal): Manly’s "goat lady", Penelope Wynne, has announced she will run as an independent. Damien Murphy of the Sydney Morning Herald informs us she is so called because "two goats starred in a stunt she used to draw attention to a development fight with Manly Council last year". Wynne’s disputes with council have been the subject of considerable coverage in the Manly Daily; the Herald’s Anne Davies tells us this is "often the only newspaper people read" in an area "sometimes disparaged as the insular peninsula" (a distinction it shares with Pittwater, and probably every other outcrop of land in the English-speaking world). She could thereby muddy the waters for sitting independent David Barr, who faces a stiff challenge from a strong Liberal candidate in Michael Baird.

Newcastle (Labor 15.4%): Forty members of the ALP’s Carrington branch resigned en masse on Monday, announcing their support for Bryce Gaudry’s campaign to hold the seat as an independent. The media delighted in noting that those resigning included Arthur Wade, a member of 72 years. Gaudry was turfed aside for preselection last year in favour of former newsreader Jodi McKay, at the behest of Morris Iemma and the party’s head office. Also running as an independent is the highly fancied lord mayor of Newcastle, John Tate.

Monaro (Labor 4.4%): Steven Scott of the Australian Financial Review yesterday reported that Labor strategists were "confident of retaining Monaro, particularly after the scuttling of the planned Snowy Hydro sale, which was unpopular with local communities" – and also with Labor member Steve Whan, who had been a vociferous critic. Iemma visited the electorate’s main centre of Queanbeyan on Monday for the so-called "Country Labor election campaign launch".

Yesterday, the Daily Telegraph reported that Labor’s marginal seat polling indicated it was only one seat away from losing its grip on its parliamentary majority. Today’s follow-up article serves up the extra seat: Newcastle, where Labor has "all but written off its star candidate Jodi McKay". Dumped Labor member Bryce Gaudry is credited with "cutting into the Labor vote", leaving "the way open for popular independent and Lord Mayor John Tate to snatch victory". Skepticism about Labor’s figures has spilled over from Crikey, Tim Dunlop and this site and into the news pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, which reports suggestions from a "senior Liberal source" that ALP state secretary Mark Arbib was "making it up". The surveys reportedly had samples of 150 (which the Telegraph has thus far neglected to reveal), so the margin for error wouldn’t have been much different if he had been. Nonetheless, the Liberals went to some effort to debunk the alleged Labor findings, providing the Herald with a progress report of their own.

Curiously, this mostly backed up what Labor was saying: the Liberals were "leading" in Menai, Miranda, Port Stephens and Camden ("set to fall" in the Telegraph article), with "a chance of winning Penrith and Tweed" (which the Tele said were "line-ball"). The only specific point of contention was that the Liberals had "ridiculed" suggestions they were ahead 53-47 in John Aquilina’s seat of Riverstone. The SMH also reports that Arbib has since said the Labor vote was 50 per cent in Wollondilly and 52 per cent in Londonderry (apparently on the primary vote), and suggests the Greens were found to be posing little threat in Balmain and Marrickville. However, the Wollondilly figure is directly contradicted in the Telegraph, which says the seat is "on a knife edge, leaning just 51 to 49 per cent the Government’s way".

Those who followed the Queensland election last September will find this morning’s lead election story in the Daily Telegraph oddly familiar. As has been the case in New South Wales, the Queensland campaign began with a barrage of horrible polling for the Coalition, including a 58-42 Newspoll result. Then came a Courier-Mail report of "secret Labor research", which showed "the Coalition may win some safe Labor seats while a host of marginal seats are too close to call". Today, the Telegraph brings us the headline "Iemma isn’t safe", atop a report which begins: "Premier Morris Iemma is looking down the barrel of a marginal seat blitzkrieg with secret polling revealing the state election is neck and neck in at least 10 key seats".

The Courier-Mail’s thesis that the election was up for grabs was easier to debunk, as it was not actually supported by the hard facts contained in the article. It only went so far as to say there were two particular seats where Labor was in trouble, and that a "host of marginal seats are too close to call". Given the size of Labor’s majority, the prospect of the Coalition being merely competitive in marginal seats did not suggest the Beattie government was in real trouble. The Daily Telegraph report is somewhat different, as it offers detail about what a Labor defeat might look like. If both papers can be faulted for playing along with Labor’s expectations management, the Telegraph has done so after a much harder sell.

The Labor-held seats of Camden, Riverstone, Menai, Miranda and Port Stephens are all set to fall. And the contest is line-ball in two other ALP seats – Penrith and Tweed. The loss of just one more seat would see Labor lose its majority and force it to form government with support from independents … The electoral landscape is so tumultuous that Riverstone – held by former senior minister and now Lower House speaker John Aquilina by a whopping 13.1 per cent – could now comfortably fall to the Liberals 53 to 47, on a two-party preferred basis.

However, it is also noted that "the Government would hold on to the volatile seats of Monaro, Gosford and The Entrance". The latter runs contrary to last week’s assertion by Imre Salusinszky of The Australian that polling by both parties had Labor in "a virtually hopeless position", with "one senior local Labor Party figure" declaring the seat to be "gone".

"Number’s up and Labor is worried", declared the headline in Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph. Their cause for concern: Newspoll and ACNielsen figures which respectively showed them leading 59-41 and 57-43. As the paper’s Simon Benson noted, this is not as "counter-intuitive" as it might sound. For a government carrying so much baggage, support at this level must inevitably be extremely soft. Should the polls generate a perception of inevitable Labor victory, the prospect emerges of an unpleasantly surprising protest vote on polling day.

That said, it’s a much happier problem to be facing than those that have lately confronted Morris Iemma’s Liberal counterpart. For Peter Debnam, the current week has panned out as follows.

Monday. The week starts optimistically in the wake of Sunday’s sort-of-campaign launch in Cronulla, not far from the proposed site of the government’s contentious Kurnell desalination plant. Some good press is forthcoming: Joe Hilderbrand of the Daily Telegraph writes of green groups’ applause for Coalition water policies, which unlike Labor’s feature the politically dicey prospect of recycled drinking water. Elsewhere, the paper reports that the launch has found Debnam "finally hitting his stride". Then in the afternoon, the Sydney Morning Herald unveils those ACNielsen poll results.

Tuesday. Assuming he got to bed at a sensible hour, Debnam would have woken to the even worse figures from Newspoll. He would then have steeled himself for the day’s big media event, in which he fronted the media with the Banning family in the key seat of Penrith. The Bannings are presented as a typical "mum and dad" couple speaking of the opposition’s "exciting" plan to lift the land tax threshold from $368,000 to $415,000. Come the evening, the Sydney Morning Herald reveals the Bannings run a real estate business and own eight rather than four investment properties, if those managed by an independent superannuation fund are included.

Wednesday. Debnam’s accusation that the government is "hiding" the rising cost of its Rail Clearways project comes at least partially unstuck when the government points to a press release from November identifying some of the increase cited by Debnam cited as missing.

Thursday. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Anne Davies reports that Liberals are expressing "open concern about Peter Debnam’s leadership style for the first time since he took the reins" – specifically that he "behaves as a one-man band despite talking about the team, is too aloof and relies too much on stunts that distract from policy messages". In The Australian, Ean Higgins and Brad Norington bring news that "party insiders" are describing Debnam as "privately depressed at his prospects", and showing signs of "desperation".

Friday. Andrew Clennell of the Sydney Morning Herald reports that Debnam is "still unable to confirm when the Liberals will start their television advertisements". His report also says the Liberals’ financial struggles mean candidates in "key marginal seats" are "mostly having to raise money without help from head office", with party state director Graham Jaeschke conceding key seat funding will be restricted to 15 target seats. Similarly, The Australian notes Debnam’s failure to gain support from business, "as firms fear Labor would ‘crucify’ them for advocating a change of government". It is also reported that "senior business figures" feel Debnam "lacks personal appeal and his front bench is weak". Wary as one should be of anecdotal evidence, there is plenty of it in this comments thread to support the idea that the Coalition is failing to make its present felt in important seats.

Still, it’s not all bad news: the Daily Telegraph’s "virtual voting" feature has "Liberal" (meaning the Coalition) on track for a 12-seat absolute majority, with "Labour" (meaning Labor) reduced to 25 seats after losing a further five to the Greens. Back on planet Earth, Labor’s campaign has not gone entirely without incident. On Tuesday, Michael Costa was told by Morris Iemma to go sit in the corner after claiming that he, Joe Tripodi and Frank Sartor had been victims of a "racist" opposition campaign against members with "Italian-sounding names" (Costa did not suggest that this extended to Iemma himself). The government has also been fending off accusations it influenced Connector Motorways’ decision to schedule the opening of the Lane Cove Tunnel – which it is feared will cause a repeat of the chaos that accompanied the August 2005 opening of the Cross City Tunnel – for the day after the election. The government has been keen to point out that Connector’s chairman is former Liberal Premier John Fahey.

When I eventually get round to updating the election guide, the following Campaign Updates will note electorate-level developments from the past week or so:

Lakemba (Labor 28.8%): Six weeks after the prospect was floated of radical Islamic cleric Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly running against Morris Iemma, there was a brief flurry of talk on Wednesday that the boxer Anthony Mundine would run at his behest. By Thursday, Mundine was declaring that he still hoped to enter politics "maybe some time in the near future". Last August, it was reported that Mundine was planning on running against Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt in Marrickville. An earlier foray into politics came with the following declaration on Channel Nine’s Today program in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks: "if you understand the religion and our way of life it’s not about terrorism, it’s about fighting for God’s laws, and America’s brought it upon themselves (for) what they’ve done in history and so on". Channel Nine’s line to Mundine was then cut by an unfortunately timed technical glitch.

Tweed (Labor 4.0%): On Monday, Morris Iemma scored some good photo ops in Labor’s most marginal seat by meeting with Peter Beattie at the Queensland border, where measures to make life easier for cross-border taxi operators were unveiled. There was also talk of integration of rail and health services. However, Financial Review reporter Steven Scott thought Beattie a "curious choice of campaign partner, because many Tweed residents are jealous of the lower taxes, cheaper cost of living and better infrastructure north of the border". According to Cosima Marriner of the Sydney Morning Herald, Labor incumbent Neville Newell has "the air of a man who suspects he is already beaten", as he suffers a "perceived inability to get things done (which) has earned him some unflattering nicknames – Nodding Nevvie, Last Sleeper on the Tweed, and Chauncey Gardener (after the accidental politician played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 movie Being There)".

Bathurst (Labor 13.1%), Londonderry (Labor 10.9%) and Riverstone (Labor 13.4%): The opposition has pledged to begin construction of the Bells Line Expressway M2 Extension, to run from Quakers Hill in north-western Sydney to just north of Lithgow. This puts it at odds with the federal government, which according to a spokesperson for Roads Minister Jim Lloyd (quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald) believes the project to be "not viable, economically or socially". Such a road would provide a safer route through the Blue Mountains than the existing Great Western Highway and Bells Line of Road, allowing B-double trucks a direct route west of Sydney.

Wyong (Labor 12.3%): Brenton Pavier, the Liberal candidate dumped for forwarding a naughty joke text message to his fellow Wyong councillors, has abandoned plans to run as an independent. According to the Daily Telegraph, Pavier "said he had thrown his support behind new Liberal candidate for Wyong and personal friend Ben Morton". Still in the field as an independent is Greg Best, one of the recipients of the aforementioned text message. Best continues to deny Pavier’s claim that it was he who alerted the media to Pavier’s unstatesmanlike sense of humour.

Shellharbour (Labor 26.8%): Planning Minister Frank Sartor announced on Wednesday that tenders would be called for a long-delayed road link establishing flood-free access between Dapto and Horsley. Mario Christodoulou of the Illawarra Mercury reports that the road will cater both for existing residents and "more than 19,000 new residents expected to move into West Dapto". Lord mayor Alex Darling, who is mounting a strong independent challenge in the seat, told the Mercury he expected the project to "just disappear after the election, and they will not put any money in it".

Willoughby (Liberal 0.2% versus Independent): The North Side Courier reports that local mayor Pat Reilly will again run as an independent, after coming within 144 votes of winning the seat at the 2003 election. The seat was then being vacated by former Liberal leader Peter Collins; his successor was Gladys Berejiklian, who has since emerged as one of the opposition’s few political assets.

Maitland (Labor 10.3%): Last Friday, the Newcastle Herald reported that a Liberal Party poll conducted "late last year" showed Peter Blackmore, local mayor, former Liberal member and current independent candidate, was polling 36 per cent to Labor’s 30 per cent and the Liberals’ 20 per cent.