Queensland 2024: The Polls Aren't Getting Much Better For Labor

Recent polling LNP leads approx 55.5-44.5

Possible seat result of this 2PP LNP 56 ALP 29 Green 4 KAP 3 IND 1 

I last wrote about the Queensland polling leadup back five months ago - was it really that long? - in The Tide Is Going Out For Queensland Labor.  At that time, there had been a few polls out showing Labor trailing about 45-55 two-party preferred, which as I explained in the article is historically not surprising in the slightest.  Five months on and less than one to go til the election, they're still there.  

However it's not as if nothing at all has happened in the meantime.  Since my last article (which mentioned the 44-56 April YouGov and the 46-54 March Newspoll), things may have got worse and then got better for the Government.  There's no need for me to repeat all the details of polls that are recorded and linked to on Wikipedia but there was a string of shockers for the government through to early September.  On 2PP they had only 44.5% (est) in Resolve February to May, 43% (converted estimate) in Redbridge February+May (two waves, not a continuous sample), 43% in YouGov July 8-15, 45.5% in Redbridge May+August, 43% in Wolf + Smith 6-29 Aug (Wolf + Smith is a sort of Resolve spinoff), and 42% (est and possibly generous) in Resolve July through September.  

While the Resolve type polls in this mix have the Labor primary lower than others because of their handling of the independent vote, none of these six polls had the Labor primary with a 3 in front of it, and Redbridge's first sample had the LNP as high as 47.  The average major party primary gap across these polls was 17.5 points.

The latest Newspoll (12-18 Sep) and Freshwater (26-29 Sep) in contrast, aren't that bad.  They're also very nearly identical.  Newspoll has 45-55 off primaries of 30-42 to the majors, Greens 12, One Nation 8 and others 8.  Freshwater has 44-56 off 30-43, 12, 8 and 7.  So both polls have a 3 in front of the Labor primary, albeit barely, and the major party gap is down to 12 or 13.  It isn't clear what preferencing method Freshwater is using but an implied 51.9% of all preferences seems stingy if it is last-election preferences (Labor got 55.3% with a lower Green vote in 2020), so it may be respondent, or Labor might have done badly on rounding.  

Leadership polls continue to bear the hallmarks of a decisive handover.  David Crisafulli has beaten Steven Miles as preferred Premier nine times out of nine, by 7 and 8 points in Newspoll and Freshwater, despite these polls usually favouring incumbents.  He also beat Annastacia Palaszczuk six times in the second half of 2023.  Miles' net satisfaction/approval ratings are by no means terrible, usually in the negative teens, while Crisafulli scores in the net positive teens - since April they're averaging about net -14 and net +15 respectively.

No public seat polling and not much by way of reliable regional breakdown polling has been seen.  There was some attention for a Redbridge finding of a 14% snap back to Labor in inner city seats, attributable to 50c bus fares and the like, but the subsample size would have been tiny and the effect too large for me to take at anything like face value.  That said, the 50c bus fare policy does seem to have proved more popular than cynics were accepting, with the LNP forced to (to some degree at least) match it.

Some internal polling rumours have been seen, including one about an expensive internal poll of Shannon Fentiman's very safe (or is it) seat of Waterford (ALP 16%).  This is supposed to show a 13% 2PP swing to the LNP.  The fate of Fentiman is of interest as a potential leader to pick up the pieces from some distance from the current regime, though she may not have earned too many team player points by dumping on Palaszczuk's anointment of Miles as successor.

If anyone predicts a Labor victory in this election and is correct, I've seen odds as long as $30 on that from some bookies; it's been a while since a change of government anywhere in the country was seen as so locked in this far out.  (It's currently as of Oct 1 come in to about $11).  

Seat model

There have been some suggestions Labor might get belted to as low as 18-20 seats here, one of them in a puzzling AFR analysis of the Freshwater poll that referred to "The survey’s two-party-preferred swing of up to 12 points, which is unlikely to be replicated across the board" when the swing was actually only just over 9 points.  Perhaps Labor will lose that badly but it is not what the latest polls are implying on a state basis.  Here's my usual conditional seat probability 2PP model for a Labor 2PP of 44.5%.  I have just shown the Labor seats side since on a 2PP in the mid-50s, the LNP is unlikely to lose any seat to Labor that it won in 2020.  In the "proj" column the table shows the projected ALP margin (negative = loss) after considering current margin and personal vote effects, and the "prob" column shows what the model thinks is the chance Labor retains the seat if the 2PP is 44.5.  Note that I ignore by-elections where the incumbent retains, aside from making personal vote adjustments.  Where there is a change of ownership in a by-election (a "disrupted seat") I average the last-election and by-election margins for the new baseline.  (Ipswich West is a rare case of a disrupted seat where the by-election winner isn't recontesting, which might make things a little better for Labor than I have it here.)

In total, the model has Labor on for about 31 2PP wins in seats it currently holds off this 2PP, a net loss of 21 seats.  It could plausibly lose a few more to the Greens (see below).   The swing could always and almost certainly will break unevenly - for instance a bigger swing in the outer suburbs and regions is generally expected than in the inner cities - so some of the individual probabilities above will be nonsense.  But should that happen a number of wobbly Labor seats in the inner city will be saved, some regional or outer suburban seats will fall well above the swing line, but some of the LNP margin could well be wasted overkilling Labor's many non-Brisbane seats on 7% and below (especially the coastal retirement belt wins from 2020).  All else being equal it shouldn't make a lot of difference to the 2PP-to-seats conversion.  So for some of the scenarios doing the rounds to fly, I think LNP needs a bigger gun.  60-40, for instance, would be very likely to put Labor below 20 seats.   It is harder for the LNP to match the scale of the 2012 "Tarago election" where Labor were reduced to seven seats because compulsory preferencing means Labor will get a better 2PP off a given set of very bad primaries at this election than otherwise, even if the preference flow to them is weak.  Exhausting votes in optional preferential voting tend to magnify the primary vote leader's lead on 2PP.  

(A note re Murrumba - I have given Steven Miles a leader bonus, but I suspect his hold is shakier than the odds above imply, given outer suburban issues and the fact that he has been Premier for only a short time.)

ALP vs Green - And Associated Nonsense

Taking the Newspoll and Freshwater polls at their word, there is currently a 9.6% primary vote swing against Labor, 2.5% to the Greens and about 6.6 to the LNP.  If that is anything near uniform then the Greens easily knock Labor into third in Cooper and McConnel and therefore should win both (though the LNP might not be completely disinterested in either).  The next two targets a long way up the tree are Greenslopes and Miller, but Labor beat the Greens at the 3CP stage by 17.7% and 20.8% in those respectively last time, so the Greens would need to do three or four points better than the state Labor-to-Green swing in these seats to pick them up.  There is some history of the Greens outdoing their state swings in heavily targeted inner city seats and so these two in particular are worth keeping an eye on.  

The Greens' usual game of talking up their chances before the election whether they are competitive in the seats mentioned or not (they've been doing it for decades) has been met with disinformation from some ALP supporters.  Retiring Attorney-General Yvette D'Ath made the ludicrous claim that the Greens' thought they might pick up a few seats meant they had a backdoor preference deal with the LNP.   In fact, in none of the Greens' target pickups would they be relying on LNP preferences to win; in all of them the method would be pushing Labor into third and winning on Labor's preferences.  On uniform swing this would even happen in South Brisbane, which the Greens hold, rendering LNP preferences irrelevant to the Greens' prospects.  

D'Ath threw in the completely baseless claim that "I’m not quite sure why the Greens are celebrating the fact that a vote for them will put David Crisafulli into government,", which had overtones of the sort of a vote-for-X-is-a-vote-for-Y disinformation that Attorneys-General everywhere should be banning not promoting.  To the extent that there was any attempt at an argument behind it it was supposedly that Labor would need these particular seats to form the government Premier Miles has already by political standards conceded that they won't be forming anyway.  In any case no evidence was presented that the Greens would back the LNP in any hung parliament scenario even if it did somehow occur. 

Weeks later this nonsense resurfaced on Twitter in the form of several gossipping pro-Labor accounts who had "heard" (from unstated sources with zero evidence) that the Greens had done a preference deal with the LNP - as if it would be worth the embarrassment factor to the LNP of accepting said "deal" or as if any significant number of Greens voters would follow a card directing them to the LNP anyway.  

It is supposed to be the case that educated voters are realigning towards parties of the broad left.  It is a mystery to me, given that, that some ALP supporters continue to make these desperate and dishonest claims that seem calculated to repel any voter with a brain.

Others

There isn't a lot of useful intelligence about the likely fate of the now four Katters Australian Party MPs, after One Nation's sole MP Stephen Andrew was disendorsed and switched to KAP.  Four of the last five polls had KAP on 1% statewide with Wolf + Smith the sole holdout for them on 3%; uComms early in the year had 3.9% so I suspect the statewide polling for KAP just isn't all that useful. The disorder in Mirani looks like an opening for the LNP to get this one back in a "change" election.  They need very large swings to dislodge any of the other three, but Hinchinbrook will be worth keeping an eye on at least early on election night to see if there is any chance of that.  

There doesn't seem to be any buzz about independents at all with the exception of whether Sandy Bolton can retain Noosa, currently on a large margin.   [UPDATE: We should however pay attention to Margaret Strelow, IND for Rockhampton and long-time local Mayor, who nearly won in 2017 but was a victim of exclusion order with LNP prefs putting One Nation ahead of her and stopping her from beating Labor.]

Crisafulli Misleading Claims re OPV

False claims about the voting system are also coming (again) from Opposition Leader Crisafulli.  Asked about LNP preference recommendations between Labor and the Greens (the LNP are recommending preferences to Labor), Crisafulli said "Queenslanders shouldn't have to be forced to vote for anyone they don't want to.  It's undemocratic."

But compulsory preferential voting doesn't force anyone to vote for anyone they don't want to (it doesn't even force them to vote formally at all).  If a voter puts, say, Labor second last and the Greens last, they have hardly "voted for" those parties - they have voted against them, except that in the hypothetical case of those being the last two standing they have ranked one above the other.  And in 2020 that choice, as made by someone voting 1 LNP, became an active choice in just one out of 93 seats - this year it could be zero.  

I am personally sick of this snowflake argument for optional preferential.  Just get over it - if you dislike one party less than the other rank them accordingly, or if you don't care or want to make some kind of protest then you can randomise your preference.  The argument is self-indulgent and ignores the extent to which OPV can suppress real preferences that voters would have if asked, but that the voter will not exercise under OPV because of satisficing or misunderstanding the voting system.  I would be happy in principle if those who had an ideological objection to giving full preferences - and only those people - could declare their objection in advance and cast an exhausting section vote that would be counted - but such a system would carry privacy risks and the risk that other voters might think they could do it too. 

There is a real debate about the suitability of compulsory preferential as it currently exists, but that is about formality, not about voters who whinge about not being allowed to exhaust their ballot.

Crisafulli has also claimed that the reintroduction of compulsory preferences by Labor was "an electoral gerrymander that they have rigged", thereby comparing a choice of a different and widely used election system - albeit motivated by a belief it would bring an advantage - to gerrymandering, malapportionment and rigging.  (The term "gerrymander" is widely used in Queensland for the malapportionment Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen thrived on, though he did not start it.)  And he has said " We know the Greens and Labor are one, and the Labor Party know that there is a real prospect of a larger contingent of Greens giving them preferences and giving them supply and enabling a fourth term in 14 years"  This makes no sense whatsoever since any elected Green, by definition, is not giving anyone else any preferences.  

Some other LNP operative has said "an LNP government would restore Queensland’s ‘just vote 1’ system and do away with Labor’s dealmaking system".  But OPV is only a "just vote 1" system if the voters and parties want it to be, and preference recommendation deals can occur under it just as they can under CPV.  

ACT Election 2024 Preview

2020 BASELINE: ALP 10 Lib 9 Green 6 (ALP-Green coalition government)

At election ALP 10 Lib 8 Green 6 FF1 (1 Liberal incumbent disendorsed and joined FF)

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This is my preview page for the 2024 ACT election.  In the absence of any reputable polling whatsoever for the entire term (seriously!) there is not too much of use I can say about outcomes, beyond pointing to some possibilities.  What I can do is look at the nature of the contests based on the 2020 result and the history of ACT elections.  The ACT is of special interest to me because it uses a variant of Hare-Clark, the system also used in Tasmania.  I may get around to writing a special effective voting article but in case I don't here's one I prepared earlier.  Firstly, I've revised my view on something about the theory of ACT elections.

Well Yes There May Be A Bit Of Federal Drag In The ACT

Federal drag is the theory and fact that it is harder for state and territory governments to do well at elections when the same party is also in power federally, especially if the federal government is not that popular.  We saw this effect in spades in the recent NT election when the first of Labor's mainland dominos fell back with a drubbing that reduced Labor to 4 seats out of 25.  One could hardly blame the feds for all of that - though one could also blame them for more than some might like to.  (There was a lot of talk about how the Voice helped Labor hold up in the majority First Nations seat, the corollary of that is that it helped them get smashed everywhere else).  

Previously when I have looked at the federal drag effect in the very left-wing ACT I have not found anything to see - there just isn't a corellation between federal drag and government seat share change.  However, on a careful look at the history of ACT elections there seems to be something - you just need to ignore the swing from 1989 and 1992, and also looking at the balance of seats between the majors shows the effect up more strongly than whether a government gains or loses seat share, because the proportional size of the crossbench fluctuates a lot more than elsewhere.  The reason for ignoring 1989-1992 is that the 1989 ACT election saw a massive and largely once-off protest vote against self-government with the major parties managing only 37.7% of the vote between them.  Labor increased from 5 of 17 seats to 8 of 17 in 1992 in the face of federal drag, but this was mostly really about a protest vote in the 1989 election disappearing.  

From 1992 onwards, a kind of normality returned in terms of the majors getting most of the votes. In the early elections independents and ACT-specific parties were common crossbenchers, while lately the crossbenchers have been Greens.  In 1995, Labor were federally dragged near the end of the Keating government and lost two seats and government (they also lost a federal by-election in the ACT that year).  In 1998, the Carnell Liberal government was in its first term but was now federally dragged by the Howard government (also in its first term for what that's worth); the Carnell government broke even in seat terms and retained office.  In 2001, the now Humphries Liberal government was still federally dragged and lost office because Labor under Jon Stanhope gained two seats.  

In 2004 Labor, now in government opposite the feds, gained another seat and won the Territory's only ever majority.  In 2008 Labor was now in office federally and dropped two seats to the Liberals' one (all to the Greens).  In 2012 Labor, still in office federally and unpopular there, gained one seat but the Liberals gained two.  In 2016 the Coalition was back in government federally and Labor again became the largest party in the new 25-seat parliament.   In 2020, both major parties lost two seats to the Greens, the Liberals failing to make any inroads against a 19-year old government.  Overall, most ACT elections (2020 an exception) may show some seat-level pattern of federal drag, just not a very strong one.  

What the ACT doesn't seem to show (Labor dropping seats to the Greens in 2020 perhaps excepted) is a clear age of government effect.  Antony Green here notes the "forever government" effect and how rare this is these days.  In the ACT's case it helps that the ACT is so left-wing that it is very hard these days for the Liberals to win.

The Post-2020 Landscape And What It Means For 2024

I covered some of the anatomy of the 2020 result where the Greens won six seats in a previous article.  Since then there has been a redistribution with a substantial impact on two seats and a minimal impact on a third.  In brackets I note who the effective last-seat contest was in 2020, with the winner(s) before the "vs" and the losers afterwards).

Brindabella:  (Green 1 vs ALP 3) In 2020 Labor won 2.44 quotas, Liberals 2.31, Greens 0.65.  This may look like an easy win of the fifth seat for the Greens but it wasn't, because of what I call the "Ginninderra Effect" (old and slightly silly explainer piece here).  When a party with multiple quotas spreads its vote across a few candidates, it may defeat a single candidate who appears to be ahead on party total.  At a certain point of the distribution Labor had closed the gap to 2.59 quotas vs 0.71 quotas, but in candidate terms Johnathan Davis (Grn) was just 82 votes ahead of Taimus Werner-Gibbings. 

It's in general a reliable aspect of ACT elections that major parties will keep spreading their votes like this.  The redistribution was worse for Labor than for the Greens, but in a case like this the in-theory loss from the primary vote splits between three candidates.  As a result the Greens' notional lead over Labor comes out at about 0.011 quotas.  The Greens are especially vulnerable here to losing votes to minor parties, because any vote the Greens lose counts fully while any vote lost by Labor, all else equal, splits three ways.  So on paper the Greens' seat is precarious to say the least.  On the other hand, both majors have a long-term MP retiring, which doesn't do wonders for one's primary vote and preference flows in Hare-Clark.  

This is also the seat where the Greens, after very narrowly winning the seat last time, had a mid-term disaster which leaves them very vulnerable to fourth party competition.   On the other hand instead of having no incumbent they at least now have a part-term incumbent in the seat.

Ginninderra: (Green 1 and Lib 2 vs ALP 3) In 2020 Labor won 2.40 quotas, Liberals 1.60. Greens 0.75 and the Belco Party a very leaky 0.56 Q.  The Belco Party leaded Liberal preferences to be any shot but had fallen to 0.14 quotas behind the Liberals by the time they were excluded.  Overall Labor did best on preferences here, plus a small benefit from vote-spreading within their ticket, but it wasn't quite enough; at the key exclusion point Gordon Ramsay (ALP) on .789 quotas was excluded trailing Peter Cain (Lib) .807 Q and Jo Clay (GRN) .868 Q.  So Labor could gain the seat with a small swing off the Liberals or a relatively small one off the Greens (0.1 of a quota is 1.67%).  However, for the first 0.02 quotas Labor notionally gains, those votes are splitting two ways at candidate level.  

New entrants aside, this seat has become more complicated by the Liberals disendorsing their previous ticket-topper Elizabeth Kikkert, who is running for Family First.  They are also running only four candidates, which if they are excluded frees their fifth vote among those voters voting 1-5 and stopping to flow to Bill Stefaniak of Belco Party, Kikkert or anyone else perhaps still in the race (if indeed any of those are by that stage). Belco Party itself is only running three candidates, freeing its voters' preferences to flow to the Liberals (they ran five last time, which did not assist the Liberals who nearly lost the seat).  The seat has not been redistributed.

Kurrajong:  (Green 2 vs Lib 2) This was a major focus of my 2020 post-article.  Labor started with 2.28 quotas, Liberals 1.66, Greens 1.38 but the Greens overcame a 2324 primary vote gap to win their second seat by 470 (.056 quotas), the only time the Greens ever won two seats in a five-seat Hare-Clark division in either Tasmania or the ACT.  The win came primarily off Labor preferences and preferences from micro-parties, especially the 0.30 quotas polled by Canberra Progressives.  The Liberal campaign in this seat in 2020 was a disaster and they should be helped by the fact that their sole incumbent is now the party leader, which tends to provide a small boost.  On the other hand, the redistribution in this seat has been highly adverse to the Liberals, docking them 0.075 quotas and adding 0.05 to the Greens per Ben Raue's estimates.  (The draft redistribution was adopted with no changes.)  Notionally a small amount of the Liberal loss splits two ways but still they are starting something like 0.17Q behind (2.8%). 

Murrumbidgee: (Green 1 vs IND) Not much excitement here in 2020 with Labor 2.16 quotas Liberal 2.13 Green 0.7 with such challenge as there was to the 2-2-1 outcome coming from Fiona Carrick (IND) on 0.42 quotas.  After preferences the final margin was hefty, 0.345 quotas (5.75%) to the Greens.  The redistribution moves just over 0.02 Q from Labor to the Liberals but has little impact on the Greens.  The Liberals lose the leader bonus in this seat as Jeremy Hanson is no longer leader.  

Yerrabi: (Greens 1 vs Lib 3) Liberals 2.44 quotas Labor 2.05 Greens 0.61.  A seat of very little interest in the 2020 count, this eventually finished with the Greens' Andrew Braddock crossing the line 0.26 quotas clear of the second of two Liberals below quota.  But because there were two Liberals below quota, that figure underestimates how much Braddock won by, a Green to Liberal swing more like 0.17 Q (about 2.8%) rather than 0.13 Q would be needed to switch the seat, so about twice as "safe" as Kurrajong.  The seat was not redistributed.  

The Liberals lose their leader bonus in this seat, as Alastair Coe was leader in 2020 but is not anymore (indeed he quit the parliament mid-term).    

One thing that is notable about 2020 is that Labor achieved two quotas clean in every electorate, but were unlucky in not turning an excess of .34 quotas per seat average into any more seats.  This means that knocking Labor below ten seats requires significant damage.  In their weakest seat, Murrumbidgee, a swing of .16 quotas (2.7%) is needed to knock Labor below two quotas.  But even then, quota totals like 1.8 and 1.9 are almost invariably enough to win two seats in the ACT given all the ballot paper clutter parties polling fractions of a quota.  So there needs to be a pretty heavy swing against Labor from the 2020 result for Labor to fall below ten.  

This suggests that if the ACT's nearest equivalent of "federal drag" works in this election, the most likely way it works is the Liberals improving on their 2020 disaster and making slight gains, with Yerrabi and Kurrajong their nearest misses last time.  However this is complicated by ...

Fourth Parties and Independents (Or Not)

I'll start with this: the self-styled "Independents for Canberra" are not independents.  They are a registered political party that screens candidates for alignment with a set of principles and that has extensive party policies.  In the event of any members of this party getting elected and wanting to run again under the same banner they will be dependent on the party apparatus for re-endorsement and that will be influenced by what the party makes of whether they have adhereed to party principles.  In theory, elected I4C MLAs will be free to vote however they like and this is supposed to be the differentiation point with party politics. However, formalised parties that have claimed this have collapsed over differences in direction once elected before (eg Jacqui Lambie Network Tasmania, though JLN was much flakier about its expectations of candidates).  Also the free vote is subject to being assessed to have voted in line with party principles; anything else could lead to disendorsement for a future election, so how free is it really?  It's really Labor, with its understanding that crossing the floor even once can be career death (but isn't always) that is the odd one out here; it's quite common for minor parties to have some kind of theoretically free vote.     

The ACT's unfair electoral architecture encourages indies to form registered parties in order to have access to a column other than ungrouped, but Independents for Canberra are not a token party as a vehicle for ballot column access in the way "Fiona Carrick Independent" is such a token party vehicle for Carrick, who effectively is an independent.  They have the "independent" brand while also having the safety in numbers aspect of running group branding and shared policies to connect multiple candidates across electorates.  To me, this is trying to have your cake and eat it too.  

There are, in total, nine party groups besides Labor, Liberal and Greens contesting the election.  These are:

* Independents for Canberra, "Family First" (I cannot stand this party name so it can have scare quotes at its first mention too) and Animal Justice everywhere, though AJP are in the ungrouped column in Yerrabi because they only have one candidate there.

* First Nation Party in Brindabella, Kurrajong and Yerrabi

* Belco Party in Ginninderra and Yerrabi

* Labour DLP (seriously, this is still a thing? In the ACT? In 2024?) in Ginninderra and Kurrajong

* Libertarians in Ginninderra

* Strong Independents (vehicle for Peter Strong) in Kurrajong and Fiona Carrick Independents (vehicle for Carrick) in Murrumbidgee

* There are also ungrouped independent or unaligned candidates in every seat, none likely to be a seat threat this time around, and some of them serial candidates. (An unaligned candidate is a shy independent who declines to have "independent" on the ballot paper.)  

With the number of parties registering I was much fearing a ballot paper design disaster here but it could have been worse, with no seat having more than ten ballot columns.  All the same I think that next election the number of members required to register a party in the ACT should be increased.

Unusually, the ACT publishes candidate statements but the Greens and Canberra Liberals among others have declined to provide them.  

Independents for Canberra have impressively managed to field 20 candidates, including full slates in Murrumbidgee and Kurrajong.  Their lead candidate in the latter Thomas Emerson describes himself as the leader of Independents for Canberra (having a leader being another sign that I4C is a party) and was until May a staffer for David Pocock.  Emerson's name was easily the most mentioned in dispatches as a likely fourth party winner when I asked informed followers for their impressions on Twitter last night, several predicting he would win and many of those suggesting he would be the only one, or at least the only one from his ticket.  I have also however seen some commenters suggesting they will not win anything at all, one describing them as a "hot mess".  

One winning method here is obvious: a teal-style candidate who polls even as little as 0.4 quotas (6.7%) in Kurrajong rips votes from Labor and the Greens, tips out the second Green and beats the Liberals easily on Green preferences - unless, that is, the Greens are very good at spreading their votes between two candidates.  (Which is hard as this is their leader Shane Rattenbury's seat and he's very popular.)  That sort of vote is a fraction of what Pocock polled. Even though the strategic logic of voting for Pocock clearly doesn't apply in the ACT election, the candidate's close links to Pocock cannot hurt.  A Pocock-backed independent even won a single seat race in the Northern Territory, after all!

I4C appear to have vetted well thus far, with relatively few signs of the candidate implosions that often blight fourth parties.  The nearest thing so far has been Brindabella candidate Vanessa Picker saying that she would not support retaining Andrew Barr personally as Chief Minister.  This was in contrast to the party line that "We will follow our shared principles in seeking agreement on whom to support as chief minister".

In looking at I4C chances elsewhere it is worth being a little cautious about how strongly their vote will flow within the ticket; high primaries on the night will not necessarily convert to seats if the vote is not well concentrated with lead candidates (a problem that has ailed the Belco Party in the past, and also fourth parties in Tasmania).  But anywhere one looks at the 2020 results there are juicy partial quotas floating around to suggest that if I4C is even a modest success there will be seats it can win.  Absent of polling I have no robust idea how strong its chances are or which I4C candidates should be taken especially seriously.  However they are running the biggest fourth party campaign and I would not discount that they could win multiple seats.  But neither do I take it for granted that they will get anything at all.

Carrick is probably the next most talked about fourth party chance, though she has a pretty serious run as a 2020 baseline and has to improve on that or have the Greens go backwards quite a lot to win.  The Ginninderra situation with the departure of Kikkert potentially opening the door to the Belco Party's Bill Stefaniak or even Kikkert as an FF candidate (especially with the Liberals running only four candidates) is also interesting.  There isn't much buzz about the other minor parties.  

I have however had some reports that Belco are not that visible on the ground in Ginninderra and just seem to be going through the motions, while others think Stefaniak is a serious contender.  An interesting I4C lead candidate here is Mark Richardson, a serving police officer who is very high profile, eg after calling car hoons a "sub-species of the human race".  That pits him against Belco which historically is the pro-Summernats party.  

A common comment (a good indictment of it all by Jasper Lindell here) has been that the Canberra Liberals are still messy - they never seem able to reconcile fights between conservatives and moderates or to avoid having candidate disasters during the election.  In Ginninderra not only did they disendorse Kikkert - citing alleged disclosure irregularities and workplace culture problems - but also Darren Roberts, who is still on the ballot, ran into Facebook trouble.  A reader has also reminded me that the federal Liberals have a curious approach to making federal drag work for their team-mates, and in this term have continued (from opposition) to move a range of motions seeking to exploit the ACT's status as a non-state by overriding its legislation.

The Greens may have bitten off more than they could chew with their spectacular six-seat result in 2020, and now they have to chew like hell to keep them all or nearly so.  On paper three of their seats are highly marginal even ignoring the fourth-party threat; two of the others are somewhat loseable despite the substantial margins they were won by in 2020.   It should be noted that the Greens run corflute-free campaigns in the ACT, which obviously did them no harm whatsoever last time.  It is worth bearing in mind that in Kurrajong especially one party that would have deflated the Greens' primary last time (Canberra Progressives) is not running, and this could boost the Green vote in any competition with I4C or others.  

There has been a lot of attention on ballot order.  My experience is that ballot position in Hare-Clark is not very important; the places that use Hare-Clark are electorally literate and donkey voting tends to be low (it's not as much fun across the page.)  There is a case in Bass, Tasmania 2014 where it is known that the donkey vote in Bass (1-2-3 etc across the page in all forms combined) was at most 0.24% but probably below 0.2%, and the Australian Christians candidate polled 1.05% despite drawing pole position.  I just don't think that it matters.  

It is very hard, even with no polling, to see the Liberals getting anywhere near a majority, or even a combined majority for candidates who are clearly of the right.  It seems unlikely Labor would get one either especially given federal drag- there is in theory a path but they would need some swing to them and the Greens and I4C to poll poorly.  The big question here is how dissatisfied with the big three are voters really.  We have seen claims in at least the last few elections that voters were ready to pull the pin on them, but those claims came up short as fourth-party votes scattered among the ACT's riffraff of backyard parties such that none of those could win as votes exhausted.  This time seems a much more serious attack.  Assuming there is no majority, which of the following will we see:

* another Labor/Liberal/Greens shutout as has occurred every election from 2004?

* one or more non-big-three candidates elected, but the Greens retain sole balance of power?

* a Tasmania-style rainbow result where no party holds the sole balance of power and the largest major party has multiple paths to government?

* something even messier?

I should note that in Tasmania, the result was fuelled by the return to 35 seats (7 per division), but it would to some extent have happened under the 25-seat system anyway.  Having 5 seats per division makes life harder for fourth party challengers, but not impossible.  

Anyway I hope we get some actual polling in the next few weeks; going a whole election cycle without it isn't good enough.  I may add some notes to this article later, failing which I will be here for live and postcount coverage (but this year split into two threads); here's the 2020 thread as a taster for what you will get.  

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Why I've Quit Doing Paid Election Coverage For The Mercury

Between 2013 and 2024 I covered four state and four federal elections via live blogging for The Mercury on contract on election night, as well as writing several commissioned articles in the leadup to various elections.  I enjoyed providing this coverage and working with The Mercury's reporters and staff on election nights tremendously.  I think The Mercury in general serves the population of Hobart well, as a rare example of a Murdoch tabloid that is not particularly slanted, and that the paper provides a lot of good coverage of local political matters.  I have high regard for several journalists who work there.  In general my relationship with The Mercury in this time has been excellent, albeit slightly strained at some state election times by some polling coverage issues (lack of transparency and detail around secretive local industry polls and passing off reader surveys as polls, for example).  One doesn't expect to have everything.  

However I have decided to end this association because the Mercury's online subscription system, and customer relations in the event of failure of that system, are so dreadful that I will not work for a company that continues to rip off its customers in this way.   I will think about options for future Tasmanian state and federal election night coverage, but probably not now, as I am very busy for the next few weeks.  It's sad to have had to move on from work I and many readers enjoyed in such disappointing circumstances, but it's time to do something else with my Tasmanian and federal election nights, whatever that may be.  

Crying Wolf: More Embarrassingly Bad Tabloid Poll Reporting

 "Anthony Albanese could be on track to being a one-term Prime Minister, with a new poll showing Labor's primary vote crashing in three major states.  The federal government is in serious trouble in the eastern states - where most of the seats are - with Labor down to 24 per cent in Queensland, 28 in Victoria and 32 in NSW."

"Labor’s primary vote has crashed to just 24 per cent in Queensland, 28 per cent in Victoria and 32 per cent in New South Wales, the wolf + smith shows.  But Labor is dominant in South Australia, where its primary vote is 41 per cent, and 60 per cent on a two-party-preferred basis.  The poll – which measured both state and federal voting intention – suggests the government is in dire trouble in the eastern states, with just 43 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote in Queensland and 48 per cent in Victoria."

This is how the Daily Mail and the Murdoch tabloids (Courier Mail/Daily Telegraph etc) respectively wrote up a massive new poll by an initially mysterious outlet wolf + smith.  But this was in fact another example of laughably incompetent poll reporting from these outlets, one that again happened to be in service of the narrative their right-wing readers would want to see.  What the poll in fact found is very different.  The state-level figures these outlets were commenting were state voting intention not federal.  This was made so abundantly clear in the poll report that, among other subtle hints, the whole of page 10 of the poll report is devoted to making it clear that the rest of the report is state not federal.

Poll Roundup: 50.5 Is The New 51

2PP Aggregate 50.6 to ALP (-0.1 since end of last week)
Aggregate has changed little since loss of about half a point in mid-July
Election "held now" would probably produce minority Labor government

I haven't done a federal poll roundup for a while and today is a randomly opportune time to do one following the second straight 50-50 Newspoll and mention some general themes in recent 2PP polling.  In the last week we have had:

* Newspoll at 50-50 (ALP 32 L-NP 38 Green 12 ON 7 others 11)

* Redbridge at 50.5-49.5 to ALP (ALP 32 L-NP 38 and the rest not published yet, but I'm expecting Greens either 10 or 11)

* YouGov at 50-50 (ALP 32 L-NP 37 Green 13 ON 8 others 10) (Note: normally the 2PP for these primaries would be 51-49 to Labor, though it is possible to get 50 from these primaries sometimes because of rounding and perhaps also the makeup of others.).  

* Essential at 48-46 to ALP, equivalent to 51.1-48.9 (raw primaries ALP 29 Coalition 33 Greens 13 ON 7 UAP 1 others 11 undecided 6 - meaning the major party primaries are effectively more like 31-35)

* Morgan at 50.5-49.5 to Coalition by respondent preferences (50-50 last election) (ALP 29.5 L-NP 39.5 Green 13 ON 4 IND 9 others 5 - Morgan has a standalone IND option on the ballot everywhere, which is likely to be overstated)

Supporting First Past The Post For Australia Is Pointless

Lately I've been seeing a lot of social media griping about the current government and/or the Greens and teals, mostly from alternative right-wing accounts, in which the writer attacks the Government and says it was only elected because of preferential voting, and we should get rid of preferences by switching to first past the post.   I don't think there is much significant advocacy for first-past-the-post in Australia though Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner has unfortunately supported it (what, optional preferences is not enough for him?), as has Resolve pollster Jim Reed in 2022, and a steady flow of petitions to the Commonwealth Parliament generally with tiny signature numbers.  

The following alone is sufficient reason to dismiss all such calls: First past the post is a discriminatory system that violates the Australian value of a fair go.  Under first past the post, a voter whose most preferred party or candidate is unpopular must make a strategic decision between voting for someone who is not in fact their first preference and effectively throwing away their vote.  However a voter who is pretty sure their most preferred candidate will finish first or second does not have to face that strategic dilemma.  On this basis, having first past the post, in a country able to afford and count a fairer system, is not treating all electors fairly.   I do not think there is actually any valid excuse for keeping single-member first past the post anywhere (though the transition out of it needs to be carefully managed in those places that do have it) but this article is confined to the argument re Australia.  

Australia has a proud tradition of fair voting that started over 100 years ago when preferences were introduced to stop conservative parties from losing conservative electorates when voters were split between two different conservative candidates.  The famous case is the 1918 Swan by-election, but in fact the Hughes Government was working to introduced preferential voting months before it occurred but the legislation had not yet passed the parliament.   When I see supposed patriots with Australian flags in their social media profiles propose that we junk this fine tradition and replace it with unfair and primitive crud voting systems used overseas, I can only shake my head at their claims that they really love this country.   I am not going to let these people get away with it; to paraphrase a slightly different Doctor, this voting system is defended.  

Similar to my polling disinformation register, I've written this article mainly as a labor-saving device so that I don't have to keep making the same long replies on the same points but can simply say "see point 3 here" with a link.  I hope others find it interesting and useful, and more points may be added.

I should note that this article also applies to many criticisms of compulsory preferences made by supporters of optional preferencing - especially part 7.

EMRS: Surprise Boost For Rockliff In Pre-Lamblowup Poll

EMRS Lib 36 (+1) ALP 27 (-1) Greens 14 (-1) JLN 8 (+1) IND 12 (=) others 3 (=)
IND likely overstated, others likely understated
No significant difference from previous poll or election
Significant lead increase for Rockliff as Preferred Premier

A quick post about a poll I don't at this stage have a lot to say about.  The August quarterly EMRS poll is out, but it's showing its age as its in-field period (14-21 Aug) ended a few days before the dramatic events of the weekend, with two of the three Jacqui Lambie Network MPs kicked out of the party before they could leave, and Michael Ferguson resigning as Infrastructure Minister.   We may never know if even these events had had any impact on the government's standing with voters, as by the time the next poll rolls around, any impact may have washed out.

Labor would have us believe that the hung parliament is killing investor confidence, which would presumably flow through to voting intention somewhere, but this poll is indistinguishable statistically from the previous one and also from the March election.  If EMRS is correct, between the election and August nothing lasting happened at all.  An election held in mid-August would, based on this poll, have returned more of the same.  When the survey dashboard goes live I will check for anything notable in the seat-by-seat patterns but on such statewide numbers the Liberals would always be the largest party and would not be near majority.  

The surprise in this poll is that Jeremy Rockliff has jumped to a 45-30 lead as Preferred Premier over Dean Winter, up from 40-32 last time.  Better leader scores skew to incumbents and tend to disadvantage new leaders so to be only eight points behind in the first one was a solid debut for Winter, but now he is 15 behind, which is the biggest gap since Peter Gutwein led by 19 in March 2022.  (At the time Gutwein's COVID bounce in popularity was deflating following reopening of the state's borders).  Only two of the five points Rockliff has gained here come from Winter, with one from don't know and two from the fact that the previous poll, somehow, only summed to 98 (which I don't think even rounding can explain).  The most obviously controversial thing Winter has done in the last three months is announce support for the UTAS city move, which the Hobart City part of Clark voted three to one against in 2022 and nobody else seems to really care that much about.  The dashboard will be worth a look to see where the blowout in Rockliff's lead has occurred.

Once again though I would find it more useful to see approval scores for the leaders individually; better leader scores are always a mess where you don't know if what's happening is that the voters like the leader who has gained more, that they are displeased with the one who has lost ground, or both or even neither. 

Overall this is yet another poll where Labor doesn't break out of the high 20s/low 30s band it has been stuck in seemingly forever.  It's still in theory an extremely long time until the next election, but every time something happens that prompts the question "is this the thing that get's Labor's support moving towards government?" the answer continues to be "no".  

More comments later once the dashboard goes up. 

Not-A-Poll Reset 1 of 2024: Lawler Defeated

The Northern Territory election is over bar the odd seat in doubt with the CLP winning a crushing victory, the first loss by an incumbent Labor government since they won the 2022 federal election.  Lia Finocchiaro is the new Chief Minister and Eva Lawler has become the third NT Chief Minister to lose her seat (following Goff Letts who managed to still win the election and Adam Giles whose CLP was reduced to two seats - one of them Finocchiaro).  Finocchiaro follows Labor's Clare Martin (2001) as only the second female state or territory leader to win a majority from opposition in one go.  

Lawler was Labor's hospital-pass leader after Natasha Fyles succumbed to repeatedly having no idea what a conflict of interest was.  Historically the fate of third leaders in a term is grim, as was covered off in the poll launch article when Fyles resigned.  Lawler probably deserved better for her efforts to clean up the mess than being dumped from her seat with a 21% swing but Palmerston had had a gutful, as had north-east Darwin, and the NT's history of turbulent electoral swings continued.  Can Finocchiaro put a lasting end to the chaos?  

How did the sidebar Not-A-Poll go at predicting that Lawler would be next to get the boot?  This was one where the historic federal drag based argument that she would lose was pretty strong, but there were more votes overall for Steven Miles, who is up in a couple of months.  There were also more for Jeremy Rockliff, who had to deal with two hostile crossbench defectors then called an election that many people probably thought he was going to lose.  Because this site has a lot of Tasmanian readers, if some portion of the Tasmanian readers think the Tasmanian Premier is doomed then the Tasmanian Premier is likely to dominate the voting.  But Rockliff survived.

Looking at votes cast solely after the March 23 Tasmanian state election, Miles led with 91 votes to 70 for Lawler and just 40 for Rockliff and 15 for Dutton.  However late in this Not-A-Poll run awareness grew that Labor was at high risk of losing in the NT first, and from mid-June onwards Lawler received a plurality of votes, getting 44% of votes cast in August.   Not-A-Poll might have done better had the middle of this year not been a pretty quiet time for the site in terms of events that attract high interest levels.  

(A note that in theory Not-A-Poll should be closed during elections but I often forget.  So votes cast after the polls close for an election where the incumbent loses are deleted.)

Not-A-Poll did not do brilliantly re the NT election result either with a narrow plurality only tipping a CLP majority.

The way ahead

It's only two months before the ACT (on Oct 19) and Queensland (Oct 26) have their elections. The Miles government is generally expected to fall (and probably even more likely to do so off the NT's reassertion that federal drag is a theory and a fact).  There is no polling for the ACT where it is historically very difficult for anyone but Labor to win, so it would be brave for anyone to vote for Andrew Barr to be gone before Queensland, but maybe it could happen.  None of the others appear likely to succumb in the next two months though Rockliff has encountered some instability with two crossbenchers who were supporting him kicked out of their party, and the probably forced resignation of the Infrastructure Minister (who is also the Treasurer) from that portfolio.  

2024 NT Election Postcount

RESULT CLP 17 ALP 4 IND 3 GRN 1

Fannie Bay: CLP has narrowly defeated Greens with Labor failing to make final two.

Nightcliff Greens have defeated Labor.

This post will follow the post-counting in remaining seats of interest in the NT election, though at the time of writing only one or two seats are really in doubt.  I've started the thread anyway because a couple of the remaining seats are interesting. The general rule in NT elections is that once the margin goes over 100 that's the end of it, but that's all subject to rechecking, and wins from just outside 100 do happen sometimes (eg Barkly 2020).  If any more seats come into play I will include them in the list below.  

I'm confident that Justine Davis (IND) has won Johnston as she leads Labor by 4.4% and will presumably go further ahead on Greens preferences; I cannot see even the famous tendency of INDs to go badly on absents changing that even in a seat where absents were 12.4% of votes last time around; she would have to get almost no absents at all. I have also had info from scrutineers that the flow to her from Greens is strong enough that she will win.