Monday, September 2, 2024

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)

I could have written this article any time in the last two and a half months and it would have looked a lot like that.  I could have written it any time since March and it would have been not very different.  Even before that not a great deal happened since November.  This has been one of the most becalmed periods in federal 2PP polling you would ever see - but still what has happened isn't quite nothing.  Here are my tracking graphs:






From about late March my aggregate sat at around 51 to ALP with remarkably little week to week variation.  In the first week of July it made it up to 51.4 (a three-month high), but then it dropped in the next two weeks.  The next week had only a single poll (Morgan) and it fell to 51.1, then the next week it fell to 50.6.  The most obvious event preceding this slump was the departure of WA Senator Fatima Payman from the party on 4 July, but I am not saying this was necessarily the cause.  

Whatever the cause the half point or so lost at that time has stayed off.  And while it may seem like half a point dropped in a polling aggregate is no big deal (certainly less than the margin of error of the aggregate at any given time), nonetheless the shift from 51-ish readings to 50.5-ish readings was very statistically significant, even after only three weeks of it.  The reason for this is the stability of polling on both sides of the shift.  

The incredible shrinking government act of the first-term incumbents has certainly attracted some very jaded media and social media reviews.  And yet, for everything they've had to deal with (this week including a farcical self-inflicted census stuffup and semi-reversal that I doubt moved any real number of votes), the government still clings (on last-election preferences) to the aggregated last-election preferences lead it has held since the election.  It is now into its 28th month in the lead.  In about four weeks if it stays there it will pass the Howard Government in 2001-4 (essentially, Tampa to Latham). In eight weeks it will pass the Rudd Government (2007-10) and have the longest polling lead that any government has held since there was only one infrequent and unreliable poll to aggregate (Menzies/Holt/Gorton in mid-late 1960s).  If, that is, it can actually stay in front for that long.

I should note again that some aggregates that use pollster-issued preferences have already crossed over.  The reason for this is that Morgan and Essential both use respondent preferences as a headline figure and Essential's have this year run 1.8% lower for Labor than my estimate of last-election preferences for their poll.  (As stated before, I don't think this is likely to be real.)  Morgan's have run 0.8% lower.  Respondent preferences are less reliable than previous-election preferences, but as the size of the third party vote grows, shifts in preferencing patterns are having more impact on the 2PP.  If the respondent-preference polls are half-right, Labor's current situation is even more lackluster than my aggregate suggests.

Does the 2PP lead really matter?  Probably not.  I estimate the government needs low 51s for a 50-50 chance of a majority, and 50 point not much or just below are likely to be different shades of probably bearable minority.  Things could get much uglier if the government loses the 2PP 49.0-51.0, especially if that comes with high Green and Coalition primaries.  I have looked at this in modelling some of the polls that have come out with that 2PP, especially the two recent Freshwaters.  I concluded that the AFR's reading of those polls was actually optimistic for the Labor side.  49-51 is a loss of only seven seats by the pendulum, but that is treating Aston at its by-election margin whereas something between its last-election and by-election margins works better for a "disrupted seat".  Also, in the draft redistribution pendulum, the 3-4% swing zone has four seats on 3.3% or 3.4% that would be about even chances to fall all else being equal, so my probabilty-based seat model puts Labor on only 68.5 seats if the 2PP is 49.  Throw in the couple of losses to the Greens that would be likely to occur off a low Labor primary, add in some Coalition recaptures from the teals and 49-51 looks on average like a serious mess, and possibly even loss of office.  This is even without mentioning the Muslim independent push on in western Sydney and north-west Melbourne, though I think it will be difficult for the Coalition to justify recommending preferences to anyone remotely concerned about Gaza while trying to tell Labor that it shouldn't preference the Greens.

49-51 seems like quite a different landscape to the current polling.  On present numbers (50.4) my model has Labor on about 73 seats, and while it might drop one or two more to the Greens that would still be a reasonably manageable minority government.  Ideally if Labor is to lose its majority, it would like to have paths to passing legislation through the Reps that do not go through the Greens, even if the Greens can still block in the Senate.  

Leaderships

There is not too much to say about leaderships at the moment.  Both leaders are modestly but not very unpopular (both at net -13 in this weeks Newspoll, an equal lowest so far for Anthony Albanese.)  Albanese continues to lead in most preferred leader polling, but by margins that are below historic averages as preferred leader polling skews to incumbents.  (For instance his current eight-point lead in Newspoll is below the long-term average lead of 14.7 points for an incumbent PM).  

Simon Benson wrote that Albanese's and Dutton's "combined poor standing among voters is virtually unrivalled at this level" but that is hype and nonsense.  In the history of Newspoll nearly one-sixth of federal Newspolls have had both leaders at net -13 or worse.  This recently included nearly every Turnbull vs Shorten poll between the 2016 election and May 2018, and also the last Newspoll before Turnbull was removed.  Five leader pairs have at some stage both together been worse than -13, and all of those were much worse; the following was as bad as it got for those combos:

-30 Keating/Hewson
-27 Keating/Downer
-31 Gillard/Abbott
-28 Abbott/Shorten
-27 Turnbull/Shorten

Heck, I was writing about this sort of stuff in the Gillard days before I even had this site!

Your Unlucky Word Today Is ... Underdispersal!

Recently the last-election preferences I have calculated for Essential have been favourable to Labor compared to the average of all polls, though their mostly respondent-preference "2PP+" has been anything but.  The difference is worth about a point, and I'm still not completely sure it's a thing rather than a random streak (it's at around the 1/100 chance level). But in aggregation you don't need to be completely sure to make changes - especially as this is something Essential has done before - and I've made a small adjustement for it for the time being. 

As polling has moved away from the last election, Essential's primaries are looking more like the last election than other polls are.  This effect was very obvious in the previous term, when it was attributed to Essential's use of party identification in weighting.  They since switched to using 2022 election vote, but I can see why that would be prone to the same thing - at least if it is asked freshly of the respondent (which it appears Essential does) rather than held on file from just after the election as YouGov do.  At times when a party is on the nose, voters who voted for that party without much conviction last time are more likely to not only switch their vote but also misremember how they voted in the first place.  Hence, those who identify themselves as voters for that party are more likely to be committed to it and less likely to switch.  Likewise when a party is doing fantastically, voters are more likely to over-remember voting for it.  

That's one thing - another is the general lack of difference between results from different polls at the moment.  A month or two ago it was common to see people complaining that the polls were all over the place, how to know what to believe when one poll has Labor at 52-48 and another has them at 49.5-50.5, and so on.  In fact, the truth at the time was that the polls were not very variable and the variation just looks greater to unwary observers when it's close to 50-50 than it does when one poll says 55 and another says 58 (for example).  

Even if there are not big differences in what the different polls are getting on average - as has been the case since Resolve suddenly ceased being way better for Labor than other polls at the start of the year - one normally expects to see a few outliers; if Labor is on about 50 you'd expect to every now and then see a random 53 or 47.  Most of the polls have claimed margins of error of around 3%; that implies a standard deviation of about 1.5%.  So if absolutely nothing is happening with underlying voting intention and there are absolutely no house effects between polls (the latter being not quite true but close) then the average poll will vary from the mean by about that standard deviation.

The 29 polls with pollster-released 2PPs since mid-June have been remarkably clustered with an average for Labor of 50.06 and a standard deviation of just 0.88.  There hasn't been a single reading in this time below 48 or above 51.5.  Even if I go back to mid-March the standard deviation is just 1.19, and all that in a sample which includes a lot of Morgan, which is often quite a bouncy poll.   If I use not the pollster-released rounded 2PPs but my own estimates from their rounded primaries, the standard deviation is 1.01 since mid-June and 1.08 since mid-March,  What's going on here?

There are actually some reasons why polls can vary less than their published margins of error imply, especially where the 2PP is concerned.  Firstly a last-election 2PP is a derived calculation; if there is a random undersampling of a major party and over-sampling of Others, then that has less impact on the 2PP because the Others are still counted about half to that major party on the 2PP.  So headline previous-election preference polls (which is at least Newspoll, YouGov and Redbridge) should all else being equal be less volatile than respondent preference polls (and historically are).

Secondly Newspoll and YouGov in particular use targeting to try to make their sample representative from the start instead of relying on heavy reweighting. If you're constraining your sample to have, hypothetically, about the right number of 65+ year old blokes from rural Queensland and about the right number of uni graduates aged under 35, then the former are going to heavily lean to Coalition and the latter to the left parties, and that's going to make your overall results less variable than if you were just randomly sampling a bunch of voters who have a 50% chance of preferring Labor and the same of preferring the Coalition.  

While I'm aware of all that, I am surprised by the low level of variation in polling results lately (not mainly the nearly flat trend since late March but more the scarcity of outliers).  And I think I should mention the less attractive alternatives while stressing that I have absolutely no evidence that any particular pollster is doing it. Some pollsters could in theory be herding (making methods decisions that are influenced by other polls or aggregates of polling), self-herding (using unpublished adjustments that reduce poll-to-poll volatility), or what I call zeitgeist-herding (being influenced by an expectation of what the polls should be saying that isn't necessarily based on other polls).  However, there's no sane reason for any pollster to be doing the first or the third this far from an election.  

The Australian polling industry had a disaster in 2019 when multiple pollsters produced ridiculously similar polls in the final weeks that then all turned out to be wrong in the same direction.  Although the formation of the Australian Polling Council has gone some way to trying to discourage a repeat performance and to at least ensure we know more about how polls work, only four of the seven regular pollsters are members, and some of those four are more enthusiastic about disclosure in a detailed and organised fashion than others.  Even in those cases the disclosure is still much less than often seen overseas.  We still do not know enough about Australian polling to be sure that everything is under control when something looks odd.   

(I am massively tempting fate here of course.  By writing these words I am bound to cause tonight's Morgan to be a monster rogue).  

Update Monday night: not a rogue as such but a fairly good poll from Morgan for Labor: 50.5 by respondent preferences, 52 by last-election.  ALP 30.5 L-NP 36 Greens 13 ON 6 IND 9.5 other 5.  My aggregate just made it to 50.6 off that.

Saturday, August 31, 2024

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.

Tuesday, August 27, 2024

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. 

Monday, August 26, 2024

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.  

Sunday, August 25, 2024

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. 

Lambie Network Blows Up After Only Five Months

In the beginning there was the Deal, and the Deal was stupid.

Nobody seems to know for sure who actually "negotiated" the JLN side of the confidence and supply arrangement with the Rockliff Government but, for whatever reason, the three elected JLN MPs signed it.  The Deal so needlessly limited the JLN MPs in terms of their ability to vote against the Government that when they broke the Deal by voting for a doomed Greens motion to compel the Government regarding its coastal policy, the Government either didn't notice or ignored the breach and it took the Labor Opposition to point it out.  (Edit: The Government then claimed the Deal hadn't been broken when it had, which soon resulted in the JLN MPs breaking it again on a motion re Forest Reserves.)

Tensions were apparent within the JLN from early on with Rebekah Pentland and Miriam Beswick having one approach and Andrew Jenner another.  Staffing was one issue where this came to a head.  There were further problems in early July when it emerged that the three state MPs had sent Jacqui Lambie a letter in June insisting she keep out of Jacqui Lambie Network state business, and alleging that she was directing state MPs on how to vote.

The catalyst for yesterday's events was the recent news that upgrades to the Devonport ferry terminal, needed for the overdue replacement for the Spirit of Tasmania ferries, had been bungled.  Lambie issued a release on August 15 demanding that Treasurer and Minister for Infrastructure Michael Ferguson resign.  On 19 August JLN MP Andrew Jenner made comments that Ferguson's position was "untenable".  

On 20 August Lambie seems to have issued a press release - the verbatim text of which I have not seen because the Jacqui Lambie Network is beyond hopeless at publishing its output - saying that if Premier Rockliff did not sack Ferguson she would rip up the government's confidence and supply arrangement with the JLN.  This was bizarre to say the least since Lambie herself was not a signatory to the deal which, whoever drafted it, is between the government and the individual JLN MPs.

Saturday, August 24, 2024

2024 Northern Territory Election Live

Postcount tracking is continuing here. 


-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

START POSITION ALP 14 CLP 7 IND 4 (1 IND retiring)

POLLS HAVE CLOSED.  Massive swings to CLP, CLP has won a majority

EXPECTED WINS (some may not be absolutely certain) CLP 14 ALP 4 IND 2

Expected seats changing

Expected CLP gain vs IND (vacancy): Goyder, Blain

Expected CLP gain vs ALP : Karama, Fong Lim, Drysdale, Wanguri, Port Darwin, Sanderson

Seats in doubt:

Barkly: CLP likely to hold vs ALP

Casuarina: CLP likely to gain from ALP

Johnston: IND appears very likely to gain from ALP

.Nightcliff: Likely ALP hold

Fannie Bay: ALP vs Greens (outside chance CLP), Greens ahead.

If all current leaders/favourites hold, CLP 16 ALP 5 IND 3 Green 1

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Updates scrolling to the top  - refresh every 10 mins from 6:30 on for new comments

Thursday, August 22, 2024

"Unrepresentative Swill" - A Keating Line Way Past Its Use-By Date

"But one Treasurer borrows and turns a short term borrowing into a medium term borrowing—no more money is borrowed; a short term borrowing just becomes a medium term borrowing—without telling our Treasurer and our Treasurer immediately responds and tells him he has to regularise it and you, who let 75 per cent of borrowings run everywhere, have the gall to get up and talk about the Loan Council and to set up a Senate committee. Then you want a Minister from the House of Representatives chamber to wander over to the unrepresentative chamber and account for himself. You have got to be joking. Whether the Treasurer wished to go there or not, I would forbid him going to the Senate to account to this unrepresentative swill over there—"

With these words, spoken on 4 November 1992, then Prime Minister Paul Keating created a colourful insulting description of the Senate that has endured to this day, and is commonly seen when anyone wants to attack a Senator they do not like.  In the last month alone, Twitter users have used Keating's line at least 76 times, mostly but not exclusively to attack Senators or the Senate itself.  In the last month for instance it has been used especially to attack UAP Senator Ralph Babet, but also to attack Coalition Senators Linda Reynolds, Michaelia Cash, Gerard Rennick and Bridget McKenzie, JLN Senator Jacqui Lambie, Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, ex-Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe and ex-Labor Senator Fatima Payman.  But no Labor Senators, funny that.  

Saturday, August 3, 2024

"Safe Seats" Falling Is Nothing New

The Australia Institute and its director have been putting out a lot of its usual Hung Parliament Club type stuff about how "power sharing parliaments" are the new normal, how there are no safe seats anymore and so on.  They've been trying to claim that the rise of teals and the decline of major parties means the traditional 2PP swing-based model is more or less dead, although I actually nipped that view in the bud days after the election.  If major party vote shares keep declining we may sooner or later get to a point where 2PP swing-based models cease to be of much use, but 2022 wasn't even close.  See also here, where I point out that the Coalition didn't actually get a raw deal in the "non-classic" seats and what actually caused it to lose so heavily in 2022 was that Labor beat it on 2PP and thumped it on 2PP distribution in the classic Labor vs Coalition seats.

The "power sharing parliaments" analysis misleadingly lumps stable Coalition majority governments and non-majority upper houses in with the sort of thing we saw in 2010.  They're totally different: a true minority parliament involves a government that must make a fresh negotiation for supply and confidence and that continually depends on the crossbench for those things.  (Yes the Coalition has its own internal arrangement but it's a long time since there's been the slightest doubt that the Nationals or their precursors would continue to support a Coalition government).  When there is a "hung Senate" the passing of legislation is often at stake, but except in the most extreme cases supply is not, confidence is not, the composition of the Executive is not.  Hung Senates aren't generally perceived as causing potential stability issues, and the ability of governments to send them to double dissolutions if they keep blocking things can make it easier to browbeat them than it is to browbeat minority Reps crossbenchers.  The most successful governments use Senate obstruction, where it happens, to extend their own lifespans, by being able to signal to their base without having to put up with the consequences of policy their base likes being passed unamended.  A government majority in both houses can easily go to a government's head - cf Howard 2005-7 and Workchoices.