Will The Future See An Even Bigger Senate Crossbench?

It's a long way from the next Senate election to be talking about the future of the Senate, and also a strange time to be doing it with most observers far more fixated on the goings-on downstairs.  But someone is talking about it, so I thought I'd have a detailed look at what they are finding.  The Australia Institute has released a report that attempts to use polling to predict what the Senate might look like in 2019 and 2022.  (There's also a report in AFR, which was originally paywalled but at the moment I can access it OK.)

That another double dissolution "held now" would so flood the Senate with new crossbench Senators as to make the 2016 result look tame is really not worth contesting, and I'm not going to bother with double-dissolution projections off the current numbers.   What is of interest is that the report claims that even if the next two elections were half-Senate elections, on current polling the size of the non-Green portion of the crossbench would increase.  The report's headline projection for 2019 is an extra two non-Green crossbench Senators, and for 2022 after two half-Senate elections, an extra four.  Based on the averageing of two poll results, the report suggests that after two half-Senate elections, there could be a non-Greens crossbench of fourteen Senators, dominated by One Nation with six.

Poll Roundup: Few Signs Of Life For Turnbull Government

2PP Aggregate: 52.8 to Labor (+0.1 since last week)
Labor would comfortably win election "held now"

Firstly, my congratulations to Antony Green, AO!

In our last exciting episode, the Coalition government had launched a Budget widely seen as a blatant attempt to get a polling bounce, and received no immediate return.  So the theory that the Budget would restore the government's standing retreated to the idea that it would take a little while.  Another five weeks down the track the Budget hasn't changed a thing, and nor, in fact, has anything else.

After the rush of polls around Budget time we have since been back to our usual watery diet of weekly Essentials and a Newspoll every two or three weeks.  The last two Newspolls came in at 53:47 to Labor, while Essential's recent run has gone 54-53-52-52-52.  After taking into account the primary votes, I aggregated the recent Newspolls at 53.1 followed by 53.2 to Labor, and the three most recent Essentials as two 52.2s followed by a 51.8.   Overall with all the other pollsters now out of the aggregate again, I get a reading of 52.8 to Labor.  Here's the smoothed tracking graph:

The UK And Australian Elections Weren't That Similar

Last week the UK had its second straight surprising election result.  In 2015 an expected cliffhanger turned into an easy win for the Conservatives while in 2017 an expected landslide turned into a cliffhanger.  The government went to the polls three years early (that's a whole term over here), supposedly in search of a strong mandate for its position on Brexit, yet came away with fewer seats than it went in with.  The real motive seemed to be to turn a big lead in the polls into a bigger majority, and if that was the aim then it backfired spectacularly.

In the wake of this result the Australian commentariat have put out several articles that seek to stress parallels with Australian politics.  The primary themes of these articles are as follows: that Malcolm Turnbull is Theresa May and that Anthony Albanese is Jeremy Corbyn.

Let's start with the Turnbull-May comparison.  Turnbull has no hope of winning the battle of perceptions on this one, because it's the kind of analogy many of those who consume political chatter will congratulate themselves on having thought of first.  But on a factual basis, the comparison is twaddle.

Modelling The Queensland Election Off The Senate Election And Polling

For most aspects of the Queensland state election, we can use the usual modelling tools: the pendulum, two-party preferred polling, seat win probabilities based on expected margins and so on.  Whoever wins the two-party preferred vote by a substantial margin should win the election, while if the 2PP vote is very close there might be a hung parliament, but won't necessarily be.

The difficult modelling task is to try to work out what seat share the high One Nation vote in recent state polling converts to.  If the One Nation vote share keeps falling, this will soon be a non-issue.  But for the time being, let's assume it doesn't.  It's also worth having a look at whether the Greens have any chance of winning seats in a state where they have yet to win a state seat in their own right.

In the previous instalment, I reckoned that Pauline Hanson's One Nation's current level of polled state-election support in Queensland (17%) probably wouldn't be good for all that many seats.  I suggested that if the current primary vote levels were applied to the seats as they stood in 2001 (ie as swings from the 1998 election, One Nation's last big success), 17% would only have been good for about three or four seats.