DemosAU: Liberals Increase Lead Ahead Of Budget

DemosAU: Lib 41 Labor 24 Green 15 IND 14 SFF 2 others 4
Liberals would be re-elected in minority, probably gaining one seat

A surprise DemosAU Tasmanian state poll has appeared.  The government will be grinning with a 17 point primary vote lead.  If there is a hostile reception to the coming interim Budget then the grin might not last too long.  That said, there have been some advance signs that the medicine won't be too harsh.  

This poll was self-initiated (not commissioned by anyone) and taken from Oct 16-27 with a sample size of 1021.  DemosAU scrubbed up pretty well in the state election, though not as well as EMRS.  They did significantly underestimate the Liberal primary and, like all pollsters, overestimate Independents, but their overall read of Labor's poor prospects in particular was on the money and their individual candidate breakdowns were very handy (for more detail on that see here). 

The Independent reading in this poll is noticeably lower than the c.19% readings seen before the election.  It's possible the use of both 2025 state and federal election voting as weightings will have toned down any impact of an overengaged sample on the previously over-polled independent vote, but I don't think that's the main reason why independent votes get overestimated in Tasmania anyway.  Rather I think some voters are looking for an independent but at state level never find the right one.  If that's so, this poll might be taken as pointing to some softening in independent support.  The August EMRS had found no such softening; the November EMRS will be interesting in this regard.

Off the primary votes in this poll, by uniform swing the Liberals would gain a 15th seat by recovering their third seat in Franklin at Labor's expense, reducing Labor to nine seats.  If I assume the Independent vote is overestimated in this poll then George Razay would probably not retain in Bass, but if I assume it isn't then he might well hold on as his main rivals in the seat are also down on their state election result.  If (shudder) another election were to be fought right now, the Liberals would on these numbers be even closer to a majority, but not quite there yet.  I don't think there's much point in attempting a detailed projection of the Bass result at this very early stage of the term, especially when the seats should all be redistributed by the next state election anyway.

The other thing to look at here is the personal polling for several MHAs, some of whom don't have much of a polling history.  The format of positive/neutral/negative possibly conceals a number of satisfied responses under "neutral" so to get a net plus score in this format is good going.  And the Premier, alone in this list, has done exactly that.  New Opposition Leader Josh Willie's ratings are a bit meh at this early stage but far from hostile, while Dean Winter cops it for the 2025 election and its aftermath.  The poll also shows that some people who have negative views of the Greens (or at least the current leader but I suspect Greens generally) will nonetheless give green-ish independents a pass mark.  

Jeremy Rockliff leads Josh Willie 46-34 as Preferred Premier; this is noticeably closer than EMRS's 50-24 but new leaders tend to perform poorly on preferred leader scores and Willie was very new to the job at the time of the EMRS poll.  

False Declaration: Minor Right Nonsense About Senate Reform

Huge if true, but ...

Recently my attention was drawn to an article on the Canberra Declaration website by one Dave Pellowe.  Pellowe is better known for being on the receiving end of a later dropped 2024 Queensland anti-discrimination complaint over comments he made about Indigenous religious beliefs while explaining why he would not include a Welcome to Country in a Christian religious event.  (I'm vaguely curious about what exactly he said, as my home state has a long history of potentially interesting complaints like this being made then almost always dropped - but not curious enough yet to find it.)  The Canberra/Daily Declaration site was better known to me through the involvement of one Julie Sladden, an anti-COVID-vaccine retired doctor and right-wing culture warrior who was bizarrely endorsed by the Tasmanian Liberals for not one but two state elections.  

I'm not sure I'd come across Pellowe talking nonsense about Senate voting before but this is not the first time he's done it.  His Twitter bio reads "Solomon prayed: Give me an understanding heart so that I can (steward democracy) well & know the difference between right and wrong. 1 Kings 3:9".  I hope that he will see this article and realise that having an "understanding heart" to "steward democracy" requires understanding the facts and consulting reliable sources rather than just former UAP and One Nation figure Lex Stewart.  Stewart and Pellowe have been making very similar complaints about Senate reform and the 2016 election, and they're both wrong.

Australia's Worst Oppositions: How Many Will Win?

Recently I started a Not-A-Poll to determine who readers consider to be Australia's worst opposition in what I have dubbed a "golden age of dreadful Oppositions".  During the polling period the contenders continued to audition for the gong:

* The Victorian Liberals continued with their usual infighting over legal cases related to the Deeming/Pesutto mess but there was also a Brad Battin reshuffle that was none too well received and led to leadership rumblings including speculation that a first termer might become leader.

* Tasmanian Labor had three different positions on the Tasmanian Planning Commission's response to the Macquarie Point stadium proposal in seven days, a record even for them, and none of those positons were worth wasting a press release on.

* The SA Liberals had another ridiculously bad poll, a 34-66 drubbing in a DemosAU poll with a primary vote of just 21%.  Given SA's fondness for independents and lack of extremely safe seats this could conceivably even translate to zero seats (though they will improve by the election just five months away surely? probably? maybe?)  

* The Canberra Liberals floated restrictive conditions for federal candidates in which the candidate would have to hit fundraising targets, apparently a reaction to their 2025 Senate candidate being invisible on the campaign trail.  Why anyone would want to raise that much money to run for the ACT Reps seats though is beyond me.  There was also a review into their 2024 election result which for some reason thought regimented how to vote cards in Hare-Clark was a good idea.

* The federal Coalition saw instability with Jacinta Price kicked off the frontbench, Andrew Hastie quitting the frontbench and Barnaby Joyce finally announcing his retirement as Member for New England at the next election while taking potshots at David Littleproud and not exactly hosing down speculation he would join One Nation.  Their polling continues to suck.

* The NSW Liberals were pantsed 60.2-39.8 in the Kiama by-election.  

Tasmanian Redistribution: Clark Must Expand, But Where?

I don't usually get involved in redistribution speculation and lobbying (I don't even have the time and skill to draw nice maps) but this one is particularly interesting to me and local.  A federal redistribution for Tasmania has commenced, with the initial suggestions stage closing on 7 November.  

Tasmania currently uses the federal electorate boundaries for its Hare-Clark system state elections, and if this continues (and no one has convinced me that it shouldn't) then the changes will flow on to the next Tasmanian state election, which could well be held before the next federal poll.  The purpose of this article isn't to support any particular option, or to dive into the finer details of which lines to put exactly where (rather beyond my computing skills for the level of time I have right now); it's to raise awareness of what some of the broad options are and some advantages and disadvantages of them.  

Unlike in the other states that may be affected by planned redistributions (SA and Queensland), entitlement changes or possibly expansion, Tasmania's number of divisions clearly won't be changing in this term.  So this Tasmanian redistribution is for keeps.  

The issue is that as populations outside the inner cities of Tasmania have increased while the inner cities have stagnated, Clark has drifted to a lower population than the other four electorates.  Clark is projected to be 10.5% below quota by 2030, Lyons 9.98% above, Bass 4.42% below,  Franklin 3.20% above and Braddon 1.73% above.  At the least the first three need to be brought inside the 3.5% variation from quota (or at least "as far as practicable") and this means that Clark should gain at least 7%, Lyons should lose at least about 6.5%, Bass should gain 1%, and changes could occur in the others.  

Yes Federal Parliament Should Be Expanded And No It Isn't A Partisan Fix

Federal JSCEM season is upon us and who knows I might manage to write a submission soon.  But for now on this site I want to comment on one issue that has been generating a fair amount of commentary, too little of it accurate.  The fact that JSCEM is again inquiring into the size of parliament has resulted in speculation that Labor is pursuing it for partisan benefit; some have even absurdly alleged the potential expansion is a form of gerrymander.  Nonsense from an already unhinged online right that fails to understand what even happened at the election has been fuelled by a Seven interview with pollster and strategist Kos Samaras that claims that because Labor is doing so well in the cities, an expansion will greatly benefit Labor and put the Coalition to the sword for good.

The fact is that while there is an internal harmony advantage for Labor in expanding the parliament now, it is not likely there will be any advantage for Labor proportionally. Indeed, if anything, there are very good reasons to suspect Labor will be getting a slightly lower House of Reps seat share for a given vote share with an expansion than without.  There are many good reasons for expanding the House of Representatives and I strongly support passing legislation to expand the Parliament in this term.  As with Senate reform in 2016 (an excellent and necessary change that Labor to its shame opposed with embarrassingly bad arguments) we again see nonsense arguments being made by the Opposition against something that is actually a good idea.  James McGrath has claimed that an expansion doesn't pass any sort of test let alone the "pub test".  Well it easily passes mine, and I am not known as an easy marker.  

There are not such strong reasons for expanding the Senate, but nor is there anything in particular wrong with doing so (but see below re Territory Senators), and that will come with any substantial increase in the House via the nexus provision, which I don't think is going away anytime soon.  

For the purposes of this article I am assuming the Coalition survives til the next election as a largely intact Opposition and electoral politics in this country carries on as normal.  I cannot at this time be completely sure this will be so. 

2025-2028 2PP Aggregate Methods Page

Because I have way too many things to do right now I decided in my usual fashion to do one more that isn't any of them!  Introducing my 2025-2028 federal 2PP polling aggregate, which at this very early stage sits at 56.3 to Labor, with an overall pattern of basically no 2PP movement since it had enough data to wake up on 29 June.  The above is a 7-day smoothed aggregate though it has been as high as 57.2 on individual daily readings, and as low (a 0.8 point outlier lasting one day only!) as 55.5.  By the end of the term who knows if 2PP will even still exist the way the Australian right are going after this year's drubbing, but for the meantime, here we are.  Differences will be detected with aggregates that use pollster-released 2PPs (these tend to have Labor losing support more quickly) and also my estimate is currently running about a point below Bludger Track but with a similarly flat trajectory.  

The aim of the aggregate is to present a frequently updated figure for what the current polls should be taken as saying collectively about the state of the two-party preferred contest.  This is never a prediction or a statement that the polls are right, it is just putting a number on where they're at. 

This aggregate works quite differently from previous aggregates that had a simple 5-3-2-1 week of release formula, and does so mainly because of the increasing frequency of polls with long in field periods or late releases.  The mathematics are kept simple enough that I should be able to understand if something is going wrong (edit: indeed I fixed one glitch overnight after two August polls were found to have been entered as July; it made very little difference), but are no longer readily hand calculable to make my treatment of data less chunky and arbitrary.  The working of this year's aggregate is below:

Poll Roundup: Liberal Crisis As Honeymoon 2.0 Rumbles On

 Cross-poll estimate 56.3 to Labor (+1.0 since election)

I'm some way off putting out a 2025-8 term polling aggregate, partly because I am hoping that when the dust settles from the Bradfield court challenge in coming months we might get revised 2PP flow figures for Bradfield to enable more exact 2025 election preference flow estimates.  And partly just for sheer lack of time.  But this week's federal polls have been notable and there are a number of themes I think are worth covering off on quickly to put what is going on in historic context.

Newspoll

This week's Newspoll came in at 58-42 to Labor off primaries of ALP 36 L-NP 27 Green 13 One Nation 10 others 14.  The Coalition primary is the worst in Newspoll history by two points.  The previous worst was two polls ago in July and it was then the worst in Newspoll history by two points.  The Coalition primary is now four points lower than it had been in any previous term.   

No Government has led 58-42 since Kevin Rudd's led 59-41 in October 2009, and the last Newspoll this lopsided was Julia Gillard's Labor trailing 42-58 shortly before Gillard was removed in June 2013.  No Government beyond its first term has ever led 58-42 in a released Newspoll 2PP.  I convert one poll in June 1987 as 58-42 to the Hawke Government, one in Sep 1994 as 57-43 to Keating and there was a published 57-43 to the Howard government in September 2001.  One of these was a rally round the flag for the government after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the other two were the opposition disasters that were the Joh for Canberra Coalition split and Alexander Downer.  

How Labor Won 94 Seats Off A Modest Primary Vote. It Mostly Wasn't Preferences

Example of a 2025 election whinge meme seen on social media

In the unhinging that has followed Labor's massive victory in the 2025 federal election, there has been a lot of scapegoating of preferential voting.  Some of this may be because the landslide seat result was unexpected.  In polls this mostly looked like a close election in terms of whether Labor could get a majority or not.  Many voices in the media made it worse by claiming Labor definitely or very probably would not get a majority, and continuing to claim it after the polls (such as they were) no longer supported that view.

Labor won 94/150 (62.67%) of seats with a primary vote of 34.56%.  Many people are saying this was caused by preferential voting.  In fact, it mostly wasn't.  This article explains how this 28.11% gap between Labor's seat share and their vote share was mostly caused by other factors.   I find it deeply unfortunate and concerning that many people are in response attacking our very fair voting system and supporting instead the pointless abomination that is first past the post without bothering to understand the arguments in favour of preferences and the extent to which the result was caused by other things.  If they really care about parties getting vote shares that match their seat shares, they should support multi-member electorates.  

Hare-Clark! Why Do We Have It? Are There Any Alternative Approaches?

It had to happen and was always going to happen sooner or later after the 2025 election; in fact I'm surprised it has taken so long.  The Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, or at least its chief executive Michael Bailey, has seen fit to call for the abolition or modification of Tasmania's Hare-Clark system.  I could just as easily see fit to bluntly suggest that they stay in their own lane.  I wouldn't expect to be taken seriously if I declared myself an expert in business regulation so I'm not sure why they expect to be so on this subject.

In the article in question, which is paywalled, the call is made to either replace Hare-Clark with single-member preferential voting or to switch from five seats of seven to seven seats of five.  

7x5, a zombie bad electoral take

Seven seats of five is an old chestnut that was roundly disposed of during the process of restoring the House from 25 to 35 members.  As the concept of restoring the House to 35 seats gained traction in the 2021-4 term there was some support for doing it by going to seven five-member electorates instead of going back to five seven-member electorates.  There was at the time only one Independent elected as such in the parliament, so the main motivation was to make things hard for the Greens.  Anyone who is remotely familiar with that debate would be aware of the TEC's discussion paper that showed significant problems with the 7x5 model.  One thing wrong with it is that it would require Tasmania to uncouple from the federal electoral boundaries and have its own state electoral boundaries process at an expense estimated at $2.5 million plus $300,000 per election.  Being almost as large as the federal divisions and overlapping with them extensively the state boundaries would then cause a lot of voter enrolment confusion; the TEC also suggests it would be difficult to avoid severely splitting up communities of interest by drawing a line through Hobart City.  (This said, it would get rid of the across-river divide in Franklin for state but not federal purposes, and drawing the boundaries of Clark in a completely sensible manner is getting more tricky anyway; more on this down the track).