2019 Site Review

This post presents site data for 2019.  The activity graph tells the story of the year (the units are unique pageviews per week):

Hmm, also looks a fair bit like my income pattern for the year.  There were three big events within two months early in the year - the NSW state election, the Tasmanian Legislative Council elections and the 2019 federal election, but the back half of the year has been extremely quiet, bar a small flutter of interest in September that was partly caused by an unusually exciting Tasmanian recount.  It is not just that the second half of the year was such a quiet one, but also the 2019 federal election aftermath was considerably less interesting than either 2013 or 2016, with only one remotely close Senate race and no House of Reps recounts (among other things).  As a result of all this, site traffic was down 22.5% on 2018 (which was the busiest year here to date) and also down 5.1% on the previous federal election year, 2016, making this year the third best for site traffic so far.  

Field Guide To Opinion Pollsters: 46th Parliament Edition

It's a tradition on this site to nearly always release something on Christmas Day, but for those who are done with polls after this year's failure, I realise this gift might fall under the heading of "worst present ever".

Just before the 2013 election I posted a Field Guide to Opinion Pollsters, which has become one of the more enduringly accessed pieces on this site.  However, over time parts of its content have become dated or specific to that election, and with more and more pollsters emerging as others disappear, the thing has got too long. So now I post a new edition early in the life of each parliament, editing it through that parliament as the need arises.  Pollsters not expected to be active in the life of the current parliament will be removed, but the old edition text will remain on the previous page.  For the 2016-2019 parliament see 45th Parliament Edition.

There are a lot of polls about in Australia these days.  But how do they all work, which ones have runs on the board and do any of them deserve our trust at all? This article describes what is known about each pollster and its strengths and weaknesses and includes extensive coverage of general polling issues.

UK 2019: Win For Polls And Tories, A Shocker For The Left And Centre

After spending yesterday commenting on the UK election on Twitter, I think it's time to put some longer-form comments down about the result in light of the sorts of themes that get covered here.

The result was of course a resounding win for Boris Johnson's Conservatives, with 365 of the 650 seats.  The major seat movements were in England, where the Tories took nearly 50 seats from Labour.  There were also movements in Scotland (where the Scottish Nationalist Party took seats from both major parties), Wales (where Labour lost more seats to the Tories) and Northern Ireland (where the Democratic Unionist Party lost two seats to nationalist parties).  The Tory vote didn't increase greatly, but the Labour vote collapsed.  

There will be plenty of detailed accounts available of the characters of areas that broke to one party or another.  As with Australian analysis, when reading these always beware of the "ecological fallacy" - an electorate with a lot of voters of type X swinging to party Y does not always mean that voters of type X themselves swung to party Y.  The obvious hook (and one not so subject to this problem as some) is Brexit, and unsurprisingly strong Leave areas swung to Conservatives and strongly against Labour, while strong Remain areas swung more modestly against Labour and weakly against the Conservatives.  However the relationship between Brexit position and swing was messier in Labour's case.  Correlation-hunting has unearthed this remarkably strong link between swing and blue collar jobs, so it will be interesting to see where that debate goes.  

In Search Of Australia's Most Ratioed Political Tweets

(This article is updated regularly - original introductory text below.  To save people the effort of scrolling through to see if a very recent tweet has been added, I will be noting the most recent addition at the top, when I remember that is.  The most recent addition was by ABC Insiders added 5 Mar 24)

Note new rule added 1 Dec 2020 to address tweets with replies disabled.

Revised new rule added 28 Sep 2023 to address tweets with replies disabled partway and regarding quote-tweet changes to above rule.

RULE CHANGES: Effective 1 Jan 2022 new tweets will need to have a ratio over 10:1 to qualify.  They can qualify by either the Replies/Likes method or the Quote Tweet/Retweet method, whichever is higher, subject to at least 100 Replies or Quote Tweets respectively.  However I will only track the latter if (i) replies have been disabled or (ii) I have been notified or otherwise become aware that a given tweet is scoring highly on this score.   Selected tweets with ratios between 5 and 10 will still be added if they are of unusual interest to me - which includes tweets by the left of politics or relating to opinion polling or elections.  )

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Following the 2019 federal election defeat, Labor is having a hard time reappraising its relationship with coal.  The party was smacked senseless in mining towns in Queensland and copped a 9.5% swing against it in Hunter (NSW), where Labor voters deserted to One Nation in droves.  At the same time, mixed messages on Adani probably saw it lose votes in the other direction to the Greens in the Queensland Senate race.  Labor MHR for Hunter, Joel Fitzgibbon, has been particularly keen to reconnect with the coal industry following his own somewhere-near-death experience, but when he tried this on Twitter this week, it mostly did not go down well with the natives:

Fitzgibbon's tweet attracted far more replies than likes.  On Twitter this (with varying definitions, eg including or not including retweets as well as or instead of likes, where to set the cutoff etc) is known as being ratioed. The formula I use is simply (number of replies)/(number of likes), counting anything over 1 as an instance.  While there are cases where tweets attract more replies than likes because they provoke a genuinely long discussion or outpourings of sympathy, these exceptions are very rare indeed (especially in politics).  As a general rule, a tweet that is ratioed is so because it has been piled onto by opponents.  Frequently there is a very good reason for that, but in politics the response can be affected by partisan bias.

Voting Patterns In The Tasmanian House Of Assembly (2014-2019)

Advance Summary

1. In the previous Tasmanian Lower House term, the most common voting pattern was Labor and the Greens voting together against the Liberal government. Cases of the Liberals and Greens voting together against Labor were very rare.

2. Between the last state election and September, the Government had significant defeats caused by renegade Liberal Speaker Sue Hickey sometimes voting against it, but Sue Hickey still voted with the Government more than 80% of the time.

3. Since ex-Labor Independent Madeleine Ogilvie rejoined the parliament, the government has not lost any votes, with Ogilvie almost always voting alongside it, and only voting against it so far on symbolic motions.

4. Since Ogilvie rejoined the parliament, Hickey's voting behaviour has become still more independent, to the point that she no longer strongly votes for or against any of the parties or Ogilvie.

5. Votes with the Liberals and Greens voting together against Labor have been significantly more common in this parliament than the previous two.  

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The New Newspoll And The 2019 Polling Failure

This week has seen an important development in the Australian polling industry's response to the polling failure with the release of the new-format Newspoll.  Two months ago YouGov Australia announced that it would soon abandon the mixed robocall/online format that it (including under its former name Galaxy) has used to conduct Newspoll since mid-2015, and switch to exclusively online polling.  Not only that, but the new online polling methods were to use additional weighting methods and "the synthetic sampling procedures we use globally so that our samples are as representative as possible before analysis."

Following that announcement, a further three Newspolls were released using the same method mix that succeeded spectacularly in 2016 but failed badly in 2019. This appeared to be an exercise in going through the motions while the new poll was set up and there was no reason to take those polls all that seriously.  Now the new version is out, together with some new comments about the poll's direction.

Commissioned uComms Tasmanian State Poll

uComms (commissioned by Australia Institute): Liberal 39.0 Labor 29.4 Green 16.8 Ind 11.7 Other 3.1. 
Tasmanian state polling overstates votes for Greens and this poll is likely to overstate "independent" vote
After adjusting for likely skews, poll would be borderline in majority/minority terms for government in an election "held now" (seats c. 13-9-3 or 12-9-4)
Poll is difficult to interpret because of high "independent" vote, inadequate transparency and lack of uComms track record
Poll taken on October 22
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“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
- Douglas Adams

I often feel like Arthur Dent when it comes to finding the most very basic details of Australian commissioned polling.  The Australia Institute Tasmania's uComms poll from nearly a month ago first surfaced in the form of a uselessly skewed result about support for a Tarkine National Park.  Voting intention results were withheld from publication at the time, apparently because releasing them would have diverted media attention away from the supposed Tarkine findings, and it is only this week, 27 days after the poll was conducted, that they have finally been released.  Not prominently though - after seeing more uncritical media reporting of another issues question (regarding the proposed repeal of medevac legislation), I was finally able to find the voting intention results lurking unheralded in a PDF linked off a release of the medevac findings on the TAI website.

TAI claim to be in the business of research, but depriving the audience of the data needed to analyse polls closer to the time they are released suggests they are more interested in using polling to make political points than in allowing their data to be critically examined at the time at which it is current.   For an organisation that claims transparency as one of its interest areas, and makes over 100 references to transparency on its website this is, to put it mildly, hardly a consistent way to operate.

One might ask why look at Tasmanian polling at all in the wake of the national polling failure.  But the national polling failure was in a marketplace with a history of exceptional performance, and the error was one that involved having one major party a few points too high and the other a few too low.  In Tasmania, such errors have always been common, and the nature of Hare-Clark is such that they're not the difference between one side winning outright and the other doing so.

Braddon And Bass 2019: Another Rec Fishers Preferences Beatup

One of the eternal tropes of Australian media electoral reporting is the breathless expose of how the preferencing behaviour of some obscure party or candidate could swing or did swing an important contest or in cases an entire election.  And, on a day when there was quite enough going on for election buffs to look at in the Chisholm and Kooyong signs challenge (see my updated coverage of that on the link) it has unfortunately broken out again with the sensational headline "CFMMEU-funded independents helped Liberals steal two key seats".  (CFMMEU = Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union).  The article goes on:

"The CFMMEU helped the Coalition win two key seats back from Labor at the May election by funding the campaigns of two independents who sent 1757 votes between them to the Liberal Party."  It then refers to independent recreational fishers Todd Lambert (Bass) and Brett Smith (Braddon).

The piece has been widely criticised on the Twitter psephosphere, but not everyone uses Twitter, and especially as the seats in question are Tasmanian I think it's worth posting a detailed explanation here of why this piece is incorrect.  I note that no psephologist was interviewed for the article.

Not-A-Poll: Best State Premiers Of The Last 40-ish Years - Final Stage 3

Over a year ago I started a new series of Not-A-Poll voting for this site's choice of Best State Premier in every state and, eventually, the whole country.  It's been going so long that some of the original contestants, including the current leader, are no longer in the original 40 year window, but just retitled it and ignored that.

For the last round in an attempt to cull the field faster in what looks like an inexorable run to the crowning of Don Dunstan, I set a threshhold of 15%.  It turned out that for this round the threshhold was 17 votes, and the also-rans were very tightly packed around it, with Neville Wran and the last surviving current Premier Daniel Andrews just falling short.

Having been miraculously saved from elimination in the previous round, Jim Bacon came second in this one and goes through to the next stage, together with Dunstan and the Coalition run-off winner Greiner.  Voting on this stage (possibly the final stage) is open in the sidebar and goes to 6 pm New Year's Eve.  If one candidate gets an absolute majority this round that's the end, otherwise there will be a final between the top two (after any necessary tiebreaks).

Result 31 Dec: Don Dunstan has won with an outright majority in this round.  Results were:

Don Dunstan  54.55%  (60 votes) 

 

Jim Bacon  24.55%  (27 votes) 

 

Nick Greiner  20.9%  (23 votes) 

 

Total Votes: 110

Migrants Voting For One Nation and UAP? (Plus Some Polling Comments)

A Few Pointed Words About Polling

Before I start this article, a quick four paragraphs regarding polls, in lieu of a formal roundup.  Firstly and mainly for Tasmanian readers, there has been some (disappointingly uncritical in some cases) media coverage of a poll commissioned by The Australia Institute (Tas) concerning proposals for a Tarkine National Park.  Unfortunately the poll is simply totally unsound.  It uses a loaded preamble that gives arguments for one side of the debate, quantifying a claimed total clearance area while not quantifying how much of the area included is really old growth or rainforest, and further leading the respondent with a comment about claimed community and business support for a National Park.

Having been presented with just one side of the argument, respondents may well be led to give the answer that suits the sponsor, or may well be driven to just hang up if they don't agree with the statements made.  The poll report also provides no data whatsoever on other questions asked, disconnection rates or on the methods and extent of any weighting used to obtain the final results.  The question design also fails to establish whether any support for a National Park would be in addition to some logging activity or as an alternative to it.  Maybe voters really do support a Tarkine National Park of some kind, maybe they don't (the risible voter support for the Greens in Braddon in recent years is not the most promising sign)

I have been trying to write about polling more generally but it is very difficult to get the job done with any motivation when leading pollsters, with the sole exception of YouGov's Queensland polling, have thus far done virtually nothing about the pressing need for a major improvement in polling transparency following the 2019 Australian polling failure.  As such there is no basis for confidence that Newspoll's current picture of a close federal race is in any way accurate (the Coalition's 51-49 leads might really be 54-46 or more, or alternatively Labor might be in front, though that is much less likely.)  And since Essential keeps suppressing its voting intention figures although its unsatisfactory reason for doing so long ago expired, there is no way to benchmark any of its leadership polling, and its issues polls are often problematic.  

Media coverage of commissioned polling also continues to be as awful as before.  Some recent amusing nadirs were rival YouGov poll results being cited and uncritically reported by friendly media on both sides of the NSW abortion debate, and also the Your Right To Know campaign claiming to have Colmar Brunton polling supporting their position, but failing to publish the details of the polling.  If you want to scrutinise it, you can't - you just don't have the right to know.  Media are rightly, if in some cases hypocritically, concerned about laws that can unduly limit what public interest information they are allowed to report. But the claim of media outlets to be servants of the public in reporting public interest information is undermined when they so frequently fail to report relevant information or cautions about their stories when they could and should, largely for reasons of laziness and the back-patting of sources who have fed them material for easy articles.

On to the main course ...

There has been quite an amount of interest in an ABC article by Stephanie Dalzell that claims that migrant voters are increasingly voting for populist right outfits like One Nation and the United Australia Party. Of course, some migrants will vote for these parties, but the article is not a useful contribution to establishing how many.  

MPs Who Do Not Have Citizesnhip Of New Zeland

Now would I misspell a title twice?  Read on and all will be revealed ...

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Scott Morrison (Liberal, Cook)

Today there was a curious development in the long-running Section 44 citizenship farce.  Margaret Simons in the Guardian reported that Prime Minister Scott Morrison appears to have given incomplete/incorrect citizenship declarations that fail to address a manner in which he could in theory have become a citizen of New Zealand.  That is not to say he is a citizen of New Zealand, but that his explanation of why he is not is apparently wrong, or as Dr Anna Hood puts it in Simons' article, "problematic".

Simons has published that fine print in a change in New Zealand law, passed in 1948 and effective 1/1/1949, conferred full citizenship on then-living females (but not males) who were the offspring of British subject fathers born in New Zealand.  That full citizenship then allowed the offspring of those females to be potentially registered as New Zealand citizens by virtue of being "the minor child of a New Zealand citizen".  If so registered, they would now be ineligible to sit in the Australian parliament under Section 44, unless they had subsequently renounced.  (The British Nationality and New Zealand Citizenship Act 1948 was repealed effective 1 Jan 1978 by the Citizenship Act 1977, but those who were citizens under the former Act at that stage remained so. For this reason as well as Morrison no longer being a "minor child", there is no issue of an existing entitlement to become a citizen.)

The Chisholm and Kooyong Signs Challenges

Update Feb 20: The Federal Court has decided not to report anything to the High Court regarding alleged violations of the Electoral Act.  It has decided that it did not have before it such material as would allow it to decide that "the relevant fault element" was satisfied to be sure that an offence had been committed.  At [28], the Court holds: "We think the better view is that the Court is obliged to comply with s 363 when it is persuaded that there is material from which it can be concluded that a person not only was responsible for the physical elements of a contravention of s 329(1), but also that the relevant fault element was satisfied."

The function of a Disputed Returns hearing is to decide whether a seat needs to be vacated and it is not surprising that the Court did not turn over all the rocks that might have been needed to fully explore the question of whether an offence was committed.  That question was ultimately irrelevant to the outcome of the challenges.  This does however raise the question of what recourse there is over the misleading signs, if any.  Normally these matters would be pursued through the AEC (not necessarily to prosecution, perhaps a warning), but the AEC initially submitted that there was no offence anyway.  It might not be all that interested in trying to now establish whether there was a fault element involved in the production of an illegal sign that it did not consider illegal in the first place.  Especially, it is unclear who would be in a position to demonstrate that fault element in a complaint.   I am not sure therefore whether the matter will go any further.

Again, it is my view that these sorts of signs should be banned.  The above outcome of the case only further highlights why the existing law does not adequately address misleading and deceptive signs that pretend to be official electoral signs.

The only other action of interest today was the costs order.  The AEC is to bear its own costs.  The Court is considering ordering that the Commonwealth bear the costs of the successful defendants Liu and Frydenberg, the unsuccessful challenger (Garbett) in Chisholm (because of public interest) but not the unsuccessful challenger (Yates) in Kooyong (because of a it being a duplicate case that was obviously unrealistic given Frydenberg's margin.) The Court will determine these matters later on further papers from the parties.

Update Dec 24: As expected both petitions have been dismissed. However the Court has asked Simon Frost to show cause why an apparent violation of the Electoral Act by him and possibly others should not be reported, suggesting that it has provisionally found the signs were illegal but has found that the outcome should not be altered as there is insufficient evidence that they changed the results in those seats.  The judgement is available here.

The Guardian has an excerpt:

"“In our view, the corflutes are properly read, not as encouragement to vote 1 Liberal, but as a statement first, that to vote correctly (that is validly), one must vote 1 Liberal and, secondly, that there was an official instruction of the AEC that electors must cast their votes as indicated,” the court said."

The court has found that the signs did have the capacity to mislead electors (albeit naive, gullible or uninformed ones) in relation to the casting of their votes but that at most a handful of voters could have been so misled, nowhere near sufficient to overturn the result.  The court has found the signs only had capacity to mislead where they were placed next to an AEC sign.  Simon Frost has been given a chance to argue that he should not be the subject of a declaration of illegality because he was not represented while giving evidence in court.

Update Dec 21: Judgement in these cases will be handed down at 2:15 pm December 24.

Updates Nov 6-8

The case, before three judges, is now on, and expected to run for three days, after which the court may well reserve its judgement.  Tweeted coverage is being provided by Josh Taylor of the Guardian and I will link here to other reports of interest that I see.  If anything of special interest comes up I may discuss it at length here.

Nov 6 12:30: Of some interest today is discussion about the signs having said something different to what was intended (as touched on below) - Frost says that he provided an intended meaning but the actual signs when translated said something different.  According to Taylor "Frost said he made no inquiries on election day to make sure the corflutes said what he authorised them to say. Frydenberg and Liu didn't contact him to ask about them on election day" and "Frost says he doesn't know if anyone who proof-read the corflutes before election day speak/read Chinese." (It may be significant here that Liu could read the signs for herself.) However later in his evidence Frost said that the Hotham Liberal candidate, George Hua, checked the signs.  According to Taylor, Frost has also admitted that the corflute was intended to convey the impression that it was an AEC sign.

Under Section 329 (5) "it is a defence if the person proves that he or she did not know, and could not reasonably be expected to have known, that the matter or thing was likely to mislead an elector in relation to the casting of a vote." however "Note: A defendant bears a legal burden in relation to the defence in subsection (5) (see section 13.4 of the Criminal Code )." It should be kept in mind that Simon Frost is not on trial for breaching Section 329 at present.

Psephology And "Total Control"

Episode One

I don't watch a lot of TV drama really (too much else to do).  However, yesterday some tweets regarding electoral situations in the ABC's new political drama "Total Control" attracted my attention and I decided to watch an episode to see what its representation of Australian politics is like.  I may do this for future episodes too, either as updates to this article, or if there is enough material as separate articles.  Warning: spoilers will be posted without restraint and commenters are welcome to post spoilers likewise.

This article and any that may follow it are not intended as reviews as such, though like the reviewers I have noticed that these are tough times for political drama generally as it struggles to keep pace with the outlandishness of the real thing.   Rather, what I'm doing here is purely commentary on whether the series' representations of Australian politics, and especially electoral politics, are accurate.  Some people think such commentaries about fiction are pointless because "it's fiction", but others enjoy political fiction more when they are able to suspend disbelief and think they are watching something that could really happen, and that as such is an insight into our actual political condition.  I don't personally care at all about the plot holes and contradictions already evident in this series, because I wouldn't have watched it except to write about it, but others may find them irritating.

Also in a world where many people take their political cues from dispersed, self-selected and frequently non-credible/biased sources, it's not that unlikely that someone out there who sees something in an ABC drama production will assume that that is how things actually work.  So far as Episode One is concerned, it isn't ...

Australia's Closest Federal Elections (2019 Wasn't One Of Them)

This article is brought to you by the following quote from Brendan O'Connor, as Labor continues to grapple with its unexpected 2019 federal election loss and continues trying to work out whether what it did wrong this year was hardly anything or almost everything (or something in between):

"Some of the critiques to date, especially from outside the party, remind me of those absurd footy match reviews where despite the margins being very close, extol only the excellence of the winners and denigrate the virtues of the vanquished, even when there was just a kick in it."

He's right, for the most part, of course.  Analysis which praises everything the winner did (because they won) and pans everything the loser did (because they lost) is a massive problem in electoral commentary.  I refer to it as "annotation by result", a chess term for the same thing.

But there are a couple of big caveats here.  Firstly if you're up against Richmond or GWS, you might think a loss by a few points was a decent effort and that with only a little fine-tuning, if you catch them on a bad day next time round, you'll beat them.  But if you think you're a good team and you lose by a goal to the Gold Coast Suns, you might be sacking more than the captain.  One of the hard things with elections is that you can say how much one side won by, but that doesn't tell you if both sides campaigned well or if they were both hopeless.  Before the election the Morrison Government hardly looked like Grand Final material!

Wonk Central: The Hare-Clark Recount Bug and the Wangaratta Case

Welcome back to Wonk Central, this site's sporadic series of articles that have been deemed too mathsy, too quirky or too niche for remotely normal human consumption.  In this case, it's clearly all three.

In this episode we take a very close look at the Hare-Clark Recount Bug (which could also be called the Hare-Clark Countback Bug, but "recount" is the term confusingly used for countbacks in Tasmanian law). What is it, why don't we kill it, and is the minister aware of any alternative approaches?  The impetus for this article is a recent court case in Victoria, in which a candidate disadvantaged by the bug in a Wangaratta Council countback in 2017 took legal action but lost.  Among other tries, the plaintiff (a local doctor, former soldier and Australian Country Party candidate in last year's state election) claimed that the use of a countback method that disadvantaged him deprived him of the human right to take part in public life.  

For various reasons, the judgement didn't get into the weeds of whether the countback system in use was fair or whether there was any better alternative.  Therefore, let's go there here.

Did A Late Switch-Off From Shorten Cause Labor To Lose?

(Note for Tas readers and anyone else interested: Scott Bacon recount thread is here)

Nearly four months after the election, Labor and its supporters are still having great trouble working out what happened.  Ahead in the (faulty) polls for an entire term, well ahead in them for much of it, Labor managed to lose to a government that had seemingly imploded nine months earlier.  There are basically three possible explanations.  The first is that Labor should have won the election, but that at least some central parts of its policy platform were wrong.  The second is that Labor should have won the election and that its policies were sound, but it was let down largely by tactical issues.  The third, about which little has been said, is that Labor could not have won anyway.  (The idea here is that voters no longer care about governance scandals or internal party turmoil so long as they like the PM and the basic way that he is leading.)

A version of the second theory - and by the way, I don't subscribe to any version of the second theory - says that Labor's policy mix was OK but Labor was undone by spurious "death tax" scare campaigns and a massive advertising spend by Clive Palmer against Bill Shorten.  (Those arguing this tend to oversimplify things as if the United Australia Party did little in the campaign but attack Shorten.)  Adherents of this theory seem to have taken succour from findings of a recent ANU study that has been reported as finding that Labor lost because the Coalition made net primary vote gains in a volatile environment during the campaign, and also that a big part of Labor's failure to do likewise was voters switching from Labor to other parties because they became more negative towards Bill Shorten.

Not-A-Poll: Best State Premiers Of The Last 40-ish Years - Final Stage 2

A very long year ago today I started a new series of Not-A-Poll voting for this site's choice of Best State Premier in every state and, eventually, the whole country.  It's been going so long that some of the original contestants, including the current leader, are no longer in the original 40 year window, but I'm going to just retitle it and ignore that.

The votes are in for part 1 of the final for the state winners and the Coalition winner (the latter being an open-primary consolation prize on account of the roughly 80-20 left-right bias in readers on psephology websites).  And here they are:

Don Dunstan 34.83%  (70 votes) 

Nick Greiner 18.41%  (37 votes) 

Daniel Andrews 11.94%  (24 votes) 

Neville Wran 11.44%  (23 votes) 

Jim Bacon 8.96%  (18 votes) 

Wayne Goss 7.96%  (16 votes) 

Katy Gallagher 3.98%  (8 votes) 

Clare Martin 1.49%  (3 votes) 

Geoff Gallop 0.99%  (2 votes) 

Total Votes: 201

Why I Don't Prefer Abolishing Above The Line Voting

This week I sent a submission (not yet posted) to the Victorian Electoral Matters committee, concerning the 2018 Victorian election.  Primarily, my submission called for the abolition of Group Ticket Voting in the Victorian Legislative Council and its replacement with a Senate-style system or similar.  This follows a farcical, gamed-to-death 2018 election in which ten micro-party MLCs were elected from primary vote shares eight of them would not have won from under any other system, including two from less than 1% of the vote.

In the event that Victoria won't abolish Group Ticket Voting completely, I suggested the state at least clip its wings a little by:

* allowing an above-the-line preferencing option, so that votes that were just-1 above the line would still be distributed by Group Ticket, but voters could choose to distribute their own party preferences as in the Senate.

* banning preference trading and a range of related consultant activities

* bulk-excluding all parties that fail to clear a primary vote threshold of 4% at the start of the count

Expected Scott Bacon Recount

Resigning MP: Scott Bacon (ALP, Clark)

Recount from 2018 state election for remainder of 2018-22 term 

Contest between Madeleine Ogilvie and Tim Cox

Ogilvie likely, but not certain, to win [UPDATE: Ogilvie has narrowly won.]

Ogilvie may sit as independent and share effective balance of power with Sue Hickey, or may rejoin Labor. [UPDATE: Ogilvie has said she will sit as an independent.]

Recount updates will now be added at the top

Previous Party-Hopping Cases:

As noted below Ogilvie's (under unique circumstances for Tasmania) is the first case of a Lower House MP deserting their party mid-term and sitting with a different party status in 38 years.  However prior to that, this was a more common event.  Here is a not necessarily perfect list since World War II:

* Carrol Bramich (1956) Labor to Liberal (policy tensions and internal issues).  Re-elected as a Liberal.
* Reg Turnbull (1959) Labor to IND (kicked out after refusing to resign as Minister). Re-elected with massive support, later Senator.
* Bill Hodgman (1960) Liberal to IND. Defeated.
* Tim Jackson (1960) Liberal to IND (leadership change fallout). Defeated.
* Charley Aylett (1963) Labor to IND (quit after being disendorsed). Defeated.
* Kevin Lyons (1966) Liberal to IND (preselection issues). Later formed Centre Party and was re-elected.
* Nigel Abbott (1972) Liberal to IND (policy dispute). Defeated.
* Doug Lowe (1981) Labor to IND (leadership change fallout). Re-elected.
* Mary Willey (1981) Labor to IND (leadership change fallout).  Defeated.
* Madeleine Ogilvie (on recount 2019) Labor to IND (multiple factors)

All of the Bramich, Turnbull and Lowe/Willey cases precipitated state elections.

There is also the case of Gabriel Haros (Liberal) who lost preselection for the 1986 election and ran as an Independent, and probably other similar cases.

It is interesting to note the weak performance of some of these independents at elections.  In the 1964 election Bill Hodgman (Will's grandfather) managed only 475 votes and Charley Aylett only 102.  This didn't stop Bill Hodgman going on to become a two-term MLC for Queenborough (1971-83).

2019 Federal Election: Pollster Performance Review

Welcome (belatedly) to another of my regular pieces that I do after all the election results are finalised and, um, we can't really give this one its usual title this year.  Normally it's called "Best and Worst Pollsters" (see the comparable articles for 2013 and 2016) but this year that title isn't really appropriate.  This year was the year of the great Poll Fail, and when it came to final voting intention polls at least, they all went down together.  The story for seat polling turns out to be a little less clearcut, but not that much.

For all the complaints about "too many polls", the frequency and diversity of Australian polls had been declining at state and federal level in the four years leading up to this election.  At this election there were only five poll series conducting national polls, and of these two were conducted by the same pollster (YouGov-Galaxy conducts both Galaxy and Newspoll polls).

I usually include three categories but this time I'm not going to take tracking too seriously.  As usual the first cab off the rank is ...

Least Worst Final Poll

I usually say the final poll should be the easiest one for the less accurate pollsters to get right, because pollsters can look over each others' shoulders and consider corrections if everybody else is getting something vastly different.  Thus there have been some prior cases where polls that differed from Newspoll for some time have jumped into line with it in their final poll.  This year unfortunately it seems that some pollsters may have taken this concept a little too far - either that or multiple pollsters got to around the same 2PP coincidentally and then decided to self-herd from that point.

EMRS: Labor Down, But Will The Others Voters Please Stand Up?

EMRS July raw figures: Liberal 38 Labor 30 Greens 16 Others 16
Also retro-released EMRS May: Liberal 38 Labor 34 Greens 13 Others 15
Also retro-released EMRS March: Liberal 38 Labor 34 Greens 14 Others 14

Possible "interpretation" figure for July poll: Liberal 41 Labor 32 Green 13 Others 14 (maybe)

Liberals could retain majority in an election "held now" (13-9-3 or 13-10-2), but this would probably depend on what happened with Sue Hickey.

Tasmanian pollster EMRS has released a poll of Tasmanian state voting intention, and has also released the two previous polls in the series (which were not released at the time they were taken; the last released poll was in December).  The polls show a general pattern of a slim lead to the Liberal Government, support for which in the series crashed not long after the March 2018 election, but this particular poll has that gap widening to eight points, with Labor dropping four to 30%.  Labor also polled 30% just after its election loss, and prior to that we have to go back to March 2017 to find it polling worse.  The main beneficiaries are the Greens, who EMRS has long tended to have too high compared to their actual support at elections, but there is also a trend of "Others" continuing to rise, although less than 7% voted for "Others" at the last election.  Who are all these people saying they would vote for someone else, and what are they thinking?

The Labor slump would raise some concerns - as at federal level the party is currently struggling to work out what it stands for, and much of its oxygen on issues is being taken by Sue Hickey.  However, at this stage it is just one reading and we need to see the next one to see if it's a blip or a lasting loss of enthusiasm.

2019 House of Reps Figures Finalised

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The 2019 House of Representatives results have been finalised, a joyous event that tends to arrive unheralded two to three months after every federal election.  Although all the preference throws had been completed and uploaded some time ago, the final figures importantly include the two-party preference flows by party.  Normally I say that this is very useful for assessing the performance of polls.  At this election the polls failed dismally, mainly because of failures on the Coalition and Labor primaries (except for Ipsos which failed on the Greens primary instead of Labor); nonetheless there will be a final review of them here fairly soon.  This article is a general roundup of other matters regarding the House of Reps figures.

Preference Shifting

The final 2PP result is 51.53% to the Coalition and 48.47% to Labor, a 1.16% swing to the Coalition.

There was a very large shift in the preferences of Pauline Hanson's One Nation.  One Nation preferences flowed only 50.47% to Coalition in 2016 but 65.22% to Coalition in 2019 (even more than the 60-40 split believed to have been assumed by Newspoll after considering state election results).  Overall, preferences from parties other than the Greens and One Nation also flowed more strongly to the Coalition by a few points (53.93% compared to 50.79%) but this was caused by the United Australia Party flowing 65.14% to the Coalition.  Excluding the Greens, One Nation and UAP, Others preferences (50.7% to ALP) were 1.5 points stronger for Labor than in 2016.  It is also interesting that Katters Australian Party preferences flowed 14 points more strongly to the Coalition, very similar to the shift for One Nation.

Poll Roundup: Newspoll's Back, But Should Anyone Actually Care?

This week finally saw the long-awaited return of voting intention polling to the field following the great 2019 election opinion polling failure.  Newspoll returned ten weeks after the election, its longest break between in-field dates ever, and its longest break between releases except for two eleven-week summer recess breaks very early in its history.  The poll, which had the Coalition ahead 53-47 two-party preferred, was the first voting intention poll by anyone since the election.  The ten-week gap without any published attempt to measure voting intention by any pollster was the longest such gap since at least the early 1970s.

The first poll to poke its head over the parapet was of course pelted with eggs on social media.  The strong prior accuracy records of the Newspoll brand, Galaxy Research and Australian federal polling generally were suddenly no protection against charges that polling was no better than astrology.  Much of the pelting came from hopelessly biased Twitter entities who have always hated and distrusted Newspoll because of its Murdoch connections, who used to insist the poll was Coalition-skewed, and now hate it because it got their hopes up for an election their side lost.  So that aspect is a moveable feast of complaint.  But is there any reason for confidence yet that YouGov-Galaxy has identified and fixed whatever went wrong with its polling earlier this year?  Given that it underestimated the Coalition by three points at the election, is there any evidence for confidence that it isn't still doing so?

Well no, there isn't really (though that doesn't mean we should read this poll as really 56-44). At this stage, alas, YouGov-Galaxy and the Australian have done very little that should restore public trust or to even convince us that they care whether their poll will be trusted or not.

Hobart Building Heights Elector Poll

On Monday the Tasmanian Electoral Commission released the results of a voluntary postal elector poll about building heights in the Hobart City portion of Greater Hobart.  This non-binding elector poll has been something of an oddity with a lot of commentary making various claims about it so I thought I'd say a few things about it too.

The turnout

The elector poll attracted a response rate of 42.39%.  This compares to the response rate of 61.94% at the 2018 Hobart City Council election, however that was a record high turnout for Hobart, which had never been above 55.5% before.

I have found data for fourteen previous elector polls going back to the mid-1990s, of which six were held concurrently with council elections and eight were held separately.  Of the eight held separately, I have comparable data for six, and of these turnouts ranged from 83% to 109% of the previous election's turnout for that council (in many cases I have had to use raw turnout figures as I cannot find enrolment data at the time of the poll).  So this elector poll at 68% of the municipality's previous turnout has the lowest comparative turnout rate - and this would be so even without Hobart's 2018 turnout spike.  Issues in comparable elector polls included amalgamation, a proposed major pulp mill, whether to move a council's administration, whether to change a council's name, the location of a waste disposal site and options for a lawn cemetery.  To complete the set, other issues that have been canvassed in elector polls have included water supply and pricing options (including whether fluoride should be added), and the boundaries of a municipality.  It's notable that one of the three pulp mill polls occurred in Hobart, about 200 km away from the pulp mill site.

Tasmanian Local Government Reform Proposals (2019)

The Tasmanian Government has been conducting a detailed review of local government legislation in the state, including electoral rules.  This week this took a major step forward with the release of the Reform Directions Paper.  This outlines a series of possible changes that, based on further feedback, may then appear in the government's draft legislation.  Many of the suggested changes are excellent, in particular reducing the number of boxes a voter must number on the councillor ballot for a valid vote.

My main reason for writing this article is to raise major concerns about some of the proposed options for electing mayors.  The paper gives four possible options for mayors, one of these being the status quo (the mayor is elected directly, anyone enrolled in the council area can run for mayor, the mayor must be elected as a councillor to serve as mayor).  While the status quo has some issues, I don't like any of the three alternatives much, and two of them are especially unsound.  I am writing this article mainly to provide detailed reasons as to why these options are bad, and I encourage anyone who wants to to use these arguments in their submissions, or add others.  While I'm doing this I may as well comment quickly on other aspects of the paper.

There's plenty of time to send a submission with submissions not due until 30 September.  For some reason the official closing time for submissions is 5 pm.  

Not-A-Poll: Best State Premier/Chief Minister Of The Last 40 Years: Final Round 1

A loooong time ago when the world was young and innocent I started a runoff series to select this site's choice as best state Premier or Chief Minister of every state and territory in the last 40 years.  The plan was to then run a final with all the state and territory winners together.  Ultimately and unsurprisingly with the left-wing skew of readers on this and other psephology sites, Labor leaders won every round convincingly, so I also ran a runoff to get a token Liberal into the final as well.  Earlier this year I got too busy with all the elections going on to run new rounds when each month started, so I have waited until the elections were over before starting the final.

Our contestants and their histories in this contest are:

NSW - Neville Wran, Premier 1976-1986.  Topped the NSW group first round with 37.8% and thrashed Bob Carr 152-50 in the runoff.

Victoria - Daniel Andrews, Premier 2014-present.  The only current Premier to win a state, Andrews polled second in the Victorian group first round with 25.3%, but with a landslide election victory under his belt, defeated Steve Bracks 158-102 in the runoff (which was postponed in an attempt to reduce contamination from the state election.)

Queensland - Wayne Goss, Premier 1989-1996.  Tied with Peter Beattie on 29.3% in the Queensland group first round then cleaned up Beattie 122-73 in the runoff

Western Australia - Geoff Gallop, Premier 2001-2006.  Gallop won the WA first round narrowly with 32.5%.  The first runoff against Carmen Lawrence was tied 97-97 and I hadn't made a rule for ties so there was a second runoff, which Gallop won 75-71.

South Australia - Don Dunstan, Premier 1967-1968, 1970-1979. Smacked it out of the park with 57.4% in the SA group first round.

Tasmania - Jim Bacon, Premier 1998-2004. Polled 37.3% in the Tasmanian group first round and defeated Lara Giddings 105-84 in the runoff.

ACT - Katy Gallagher, Chief Minister 2011-2014. Polled 40.3% in the ACT group first round and defeated Jon Stanhope 119-52 in the runoff.

NT - Clare Martin, Chief Minister 2001-2007.  The only other leader to win in the first round, with 57.6% in the NT first round (none of the others even managed double figures!)

And the Coalition wildcard is Nick Greiner, NSW Premier 1988-1992, who eventually won a long series of Coalition eliminations, defeating Kate Carnell (ACT), who I had been suspecting would win the Coalition series when I started it, 58-38 in the final.

I've decided not to add any more wildcards.

The rules for the final runoffs are:

* The last candidate in each round is eliminated.
* Any candidate failing to poll 8% in a round is eliminated.
* Ties are resolved in favour of the last leader on primaries at a previous stage at which there wasn't a tie, and failing that in favour of the candidate least recently in office.
* Any candidate who could not mathematically win or tie from their position in a preferential election is eliminated.

Spruiking is, as always, welcome in comments.  Voting for round 1 is open til the end of August.

What Might 2PP Voting Intention Have Really Looked Like In The Last Federal Term?

(An update was added to this article on 2 July 2020 - scroll down.  The original text has not been revised.)

The 2016-2019 parliament saw Australia's worst failure of national opinion polling since the early 1980s, a failure that was not just a combination of normal errors and a reasonably close election.  Aggregated polling had the Coalition behind for the entire term, at no stage better than 49% two-party preferred, and yet the Coalition won with 51.53% of the two-party preferred vote.

The view that the polls were in fact right all along but voters changed their minds at the last moment (either on election day, or on whatever day each elector voted) fails every test of evidence that it can be put to.  The difference between voting intention for voters voting before election day and on election day is similar to past elections, and if anything slightly stronger for the Coalition.  There was no evidence in polling of change in voting intention through the final weeks, as would have been expected as voters who had already voted reported back their behaviour if the polls were at all times accurately capturing the intentions of the person being polled.  Also if those who had already voted had shifted towards the Coalition as they made their final decisions while those who had yet to vote were yet to do so, there would have been polling gaps of several points between those who had already voted and those yet to do so; this was not the case in the released evidence either.  

Most Tasmanian Senate Votes Were Unique

Over the last week or so I've been looking at some statistics relating to the uniqueness (or not) of Senate votes in Tasmania, and some other aspects of Tasmanian Senate voting.  At the moment I'm only doing this for Tasmania, but it can be extended to other states if anyone else wants to do so.  This article has been rated 4/5 on the Wonk Factor scale - it is obviously out and out wonkcore but the maths is not as tricky as in some of the stuff on this site.

All Senate votes are scanned by optical character recognition and the scans are verified by human data operators.  The AEC publishes files of all formal Senate preference votes that can be used by outside observers to verify that the AEC is getting the right results and computing the count correctly.  This year's formatting of these files is a lot more user-friendly than in 2016.  On downloading the files one can find all the numbers recorded as entered in the system for any vote recorded as formal.  Sometimes this includes both above the line preferences and below the line preferences (if both are formal, below the line takes precedence, an issue I will come to later on.)
One minor change is that ticks and crosses are no longer indicated by special characters, an aspect that was the source of some confusion among the easily confused at the last election.

Senate Reform Performance Review 2019

The results of this year's half-Senate election are all in so it is time to observe how our new Senate system performed at its first half-Senate test.  Australian Senate voting was reformed in the leadup to the 2016 election to abolish Group Ticket voting and the preference-harvesting exploits it had become prone to, and give voters more flexibility in directing their own preferences either above or below the line.  In the leadup to that election, many false predictions about Senate reform were made and were then discredited by the results.  I reviewed how the new system went back then: Part 1, Part 2.  Some of the predictions that were made by opponents of Senate reform concerned the results of half-Senate elections specifically, so now we've had one, it's a good time to check in on those, as well as on how this election compared to 2019.  One unexpected issue with the new system has surfaced, concerning above the line boxes for non-party groups, but it is one that should be easily fixed.

Seat Betting As Bad As Anything Else At Predicting The 2019 Federal Election

Advance Summary

1. Seat betting markets, sometimes believed to be highly predictive, did not escape the general failure of poll and betting based predictions at the 2019 federal election.

2. Indeed, seat betting markets were significantly worse predictors of the result than the national polls through the election leadup, and only converged with polling-based models to reach a prediction that was as inaccurate as the national polls at the end.

3. Seat betting predicted fourteen seats incorrectly, but all of its errors in Labor vs Coalition contests, in common with most other predictive methods, were in the same direction.

4. Seat betting markets did vary from a national poll-based outlook in several seats, but their forecasts in such cases were about as often misses as hits.

5. This is the third federal election in a row at which seat betting has failed to show that it is a useful predictor of classic (Labor vs Coalition) seat-by-seat results in comparison with simpler methods.  

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With all House of Representatives seats now declared, it's time for a regular post-election feature on this site, a review of how seat-by-seat betting fared as a predictive method.  I have been interested in this subject over the years mainly to see whether seat betting contained any superior insight that might be useful in predicting elections.  In 2013 the answer was a resounding no, in 2016 it was a resounding meh, and surely if seat betting could show that it knew something that other sources of information didn't, 2019 would be the year! Even if seat betting wasn't a very good predictor, if it was not as bad as polling or headline betting this year, that would be something in its favour.

2019 saw the first failure in the headline betting markets since 1993, but it was a much bigger failure than that.  In 1993 Labor were at least given some sort of realistic chance by the bookies, and ended up somewhere in the $2-$3 range (I don't have the exact numbers).  This year the Coalition were $7.00 to Labor's $1.10 half an hour before polls closed - just an implied 14% chance -  and Sportsbet had already besmirched itself in more ways than one by paying out early (which I think should be banned when it comes to election betting, but that's another story).  The view that "the money never lies" has been remarkably immune to evidence over the years, but surely this will be the end of it for a while.

Senate 2019: Button Press Thread

Intro 

Just starting a thread that will cover the button presses in the remaining Senate races including any interesting information from the distributions of preferences as they come to hand.  I haven't been putting myself in the loop concerning when exactly the button presses will occur, save that Tasmania's will be tomorrow at 10:30 am (open to scrutineers, of which I'm not one this year) with the declaration of the poll on Friday at the same time.  The ACT count is also ready to go (to be delcared on Friday afternoon) and the remaining counts are getting close to completion with relatively few unapportioned or uncounted votes still showing.  The NT button has already been pressed, which did nothing because both major party #1 candidates had a quota.  William Bowe has some comments on NT preferences.

Jim Molan's Senate Result In Historic Context

There is a lot of discussion surrounding Senator Jim Molan's below the line vote in the NSW Senate race.  Misleading arguments about it are being weaponised by some of those who would like to see Molan appointed to the Sinodinos casual vacancy, but there is also a risk that amid all this appreciation of the scale of Molan's result could be lost.

To start with, Molan absolutely is not going to win and has never even looked remotely like being in contention during counting.   But his result is still very significant - in the state in which getting a high below-the-line vote is most difficult (because of historically low below the line rates and also the sheer scale required for an individual campaign), Molan has so far polled just over 130,000 votes (2.8%).  His share should rise slightly based on remaining unapportioned votes but won't be significantly above 3%, if it even reaches that.  

How Can Australian Polling Disclosure And Reporting Be Improved?

Australian national opinion polling has just suffered its worst failure in result terms since 1980 and its worst failure in margin terms since 1984.  This was not just an "average polling error", at least not by the standards of the last 30+ years.  The questions remain: what caused it and what can be done (if anything) to stop it happening again.

A major problem with answering these questions is that Australian pollsters have not been telling us nearly enough about what they do.  As Murray Goot has noted, this has been a very long-standing problem.

In general, Australian pollsters have taken an approach that is secretive, poorly documented, and contrary to scientific method.   One notable example of this was Galaxy (it looks like correctly) changing the preference allocation for One Nation in late 2017, and not revealing they had done this for five months (in which time The Australian kept wrongly telling its readers Newspoll preferences were based on the 2016 election.)  But more generally, even very basic details about how pollsters do their work are elusive unless you are on very good terms with the right people.  Some polls also have statistically unlikely properties (such as not bouncing around as much as their sample size suggests they should, either in poll to poll swing terms or in seat-polling swing terms) that they have never explained. 

Oh No, This Wasn't Just An "Average Polling Error"

As previously noted, Australian opinion polling has just experienced its first clear predictive failure, in pick-the-winner terms, in a federal election since 1980.  Every campaign poll by four different pollsters (one of them polling under two different brands) had the Labor Opposition ahead of the Liberal-National Coalition (as it had been for the entire term), and yet the Coalition has won an outright majority.  Moreover, polls in the final weeks were extremely clustered, with 17 consecutive polls (plus an exit poll) landing in the 51% to 52% two-party preferred range after rounding, a result that is vanishingly unlikely by chance.  No pollster has yet made any remotely useful contribution to explaining this clustering - those who have even commented have generally said they didn't do it and it must have been somebody else.

The general reaction has been dismay at this unusual level of pollster error in a nation where national polls have a proud record of accuracy.  The Ninefax press, as I call them (SMH/The Age), have even announced that they now have no contract with their pollster, Ipsos, or with any other pollster.  (This may just be for show, since in the past Fairfax often took long breaks in polling after elections.)  News Corp is, for now, standing by Newspoll.  The Association of Market and Social Research Associations has announced a review, although this may be of little value as its only member who is involved is Ipsos. 

2019 Queensland Senate: Who Will Be Last When The Music Stops?

2019 Queensland Senate

Outgoing Senators: 2 LNP 2 ALP 1 Green, Fraser Anning

Seats won: 2 LNP (Paul Scarr, Susan Macdonald), 1 Labor (Nina Green)

Four-way fight for three seats with one to lose: Gerard Rennick (LNP), Chris Ketter (Labor), Malcolm Roberts (One Nation), Larissa Waters (Green)

Rennick and Roberts are overwhelmingly likely to win; Waters is most likely to win final seat
Final result won't be known for certain until the button is pressed

Warning - Senate races are complex! This article has been rated Wonk Factor 4/5.

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Gladstone Rises Up: An Error In The 2013 Tasmanian Senate Count

There's apparently not all that much going on in the 2019 election postcount, where the only major dramas left at present appear to be which (probably) left party loses in the Queensland Senate and whether anyone can possibly avoid a recount in Macquarie.  When I compare it to 2016, I'm quite surprised at how busy I'm not.

This means I have time to post something curious I've been meaning to post for some time.  As is well known, the 2013 Senate count was not the Australian Electoral Commission's finest hour.  In Western Australia, the original count had a tipping point between two candidates, neither of whom could win, but the resolution of which determined the final two seats. The loss of 1370 ballot papers meant that it could not be determined who had won, and as a result the entire 2013 WA Senate election had to be voided and rerun in 2014.  This resulted in the resignations of the Electoral Commissioner and the Electoral Officer for Western Australia and major changes to the way ballot papers are handled.  The farce also contributed to the death of Group Ticket Voting at federal level. Under the system we have now the tipping point would have been irrelevant and the lost ballots may well not have affected the outcome.  Many other issues with the AEC's culture were identified in a review and many positive changes have been made.

2019 Federal Election Postcount: Mallee

MALLEE (Nat vs ALP - 19.8%)

Webster (Nat) has won after the seat remained a Nats vs ALP seat by 386 votes.  It is unknown and will perhaps never be known what would have been the Nat-Lib result had Labor been eliminated in third.  (I expect Webster would still have won, but am awaiting the preference distribution.)
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In the election leadup I had my eyes on the Victorian seat of Mallee as the most likely to deliver an absolute mess in the postcount.  On election night it seemed to be a bit of a fizzer because none of the independents made 10% in their own right, making it clear that the Coalition was headed for victory.  However the Mallee count has thrown up some interesting complications, and there is a theory doing the rounds that the Liberal candidate Serge Petrovich might be able to defeat Webster if he can make the final two.  I am unconvinced about this theory, firstly because I'm doubting he will make the final two, and secondly because even if he does a rather strong preference flow is needed to get him over the line. I don't think that will happen, Labor HTV card notwithstanding, but in the meantime there's a possibility Mallee will create electoral history.  Never (thanks to Malcolm Baalman for this) has a candidate who finished fourth or worse on primaries in a federal seat reached the final two, and it is possible that this could yet happen.

The Miracle Is Over: The 2019 Australian Federal Election Poll Fail

Nice 2PP.  Shame it's for the other side ...

"I have always believed in miracles" said re-elected Prime Minister Scott Morrison very late on Saturday night.  But many (not all) of us who study national Australian polls and use them to try to forecast elections have believed in a miracle for one election too many.  The reason we believed in this miracle was that it kept delivering.  While polls failed to forecast Brexit, Trump and two UK elections in a row (among other high profile failures) Australian national polls continued to churn out highly accurate final results.  The two-party preferred results in final Newspolls from 2007 to 2016 are an example of this: 52 (result 52.7), 50.2 (result 50.1), 54 (result 53.5), 50.5 (result 50.4).  

Predicting federal elections pretty accurately has long been as simple as aggregating the polls, adjusting for obvious house effects and personal votes, applying probability models (not just the simple pendulum) and off you go; you generally won't be more than 5-6 seats wrong on the totals.  While overseas observers like Nate Silver pour scorn on our little polling failure as a modest example of the genre and blast our media for failing to anticipate it, they do so apparently unfamiliar with just how good our national polling has been since the mid-1980s compared to polling overseas.  As a predictor of final results, the aggregation of at least the final polls has survived the decline of landlines, volatile campaigns following leadership changes or major events, suspected preferencing shifts that frequently barely appeared, herding with the finish line in sight, and come up trumps many elections in a row.  This has been put down to many things, not least that compulsory voting makes polling easier by removing the problem of trying to work out who will actually vote (another possibility is the quality of our public demographic data).  But perhaps it was just lucky.

2019 Senate Postcount: Main Thread

Carry-Over from 2016 Senate: Coalition 16 Labor 13 Green 3 CA 2 AC 1 PHON 1

Expected 2019: Coalition 19 Labor 13-14 Green 5-6 PHON 1 Lambie 1

Currently Coalition is likely to hold 35 seats and need two of Centre Alliance, One Nation and (Bernardi+Lambie) to pass bills.

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Welcome to my main 2019 Senate postcount thread.  This will contain outlooks for each state which I will update.  I may move any state that I do any very complex modelling on to a different thread.  In the case of Tasmania, this is only likely to happen if Lisa Singh's below the line vote starts projecting to such a level as to create a serious contest between her and Catryna Bilyk.

Some states will receive much higher detail level than others on account of the competitiveness of races.  Where races appear uncompetitive I won't be posting frequent updates.

2019 House of Reps Postcount

Coalition has won the election, almost certainly with a small majority

Apparently won Coalition 77 Labor 68 Green 1 CA 1 KAP 1 IND 3. 

Seats Assumed Won By Coalition From Labor: Longman, Herbert, Bass, Braddon, Lindsay
Seats Assumed Won By Labor From Coalition: Gilmore, Corangamite, Dunkley
Seat Assumed Won By IND From Coalition: Warringah
Seat Assumed Won By Coalition From IND: Wentworth 

Seats that were being covered but now assumed won: Boothby and Chisholm (Coalition retains), Lilley, Cowan  (Labor retains), Bass (Liberal gain), Macquarie (ALP retain)

This is the main thread for the 2019 House of Reps postcount.  A few days ago I expected I would be unrolling separate threads to unravel three-cornered contests in Melbourne, a complete mess in Mallee and so on, but at this stage none of that has happened.  I have done a quick thread for Mallee though as there's some interest in it.  There is a weird situation in Hunter, where One Nation are currently two points short of beating the Nationals into second, but I don't see any reason to think they can get into second, let alone win if they do.  Indeed the Nationals' margin in second should increase.