A few election notes (especially re Tasmania)

Just a few quick notes on a number of things, mainly to bring links to various articles to the top.

Election night coverage

On election night I am very pleased to say I will again be live blogging for The Mercury, starting from 6 pm and probably going til about 11 or maybe later, except for any time when I may or may not need to stop blogging and write a quick article for them.  The link will be posted here when known.  It is possible the coverage will be paywalled; if so there are various subscription offers starting from $12, or it may be there will be a paywall-free link.  Once that has been finished, after a brief break I will relocate to home and then continue on here for a while.

Links

Some links to recent items on my site that may be useful:

How To Make Best Use Of Your 2019 Senate Vote

Tasmanian House of Reps Seats

Tasmanian Senate Guide


Jessica Whelan Situation

I want to re-raise some concerns about the Jessica Whelan situation in Lyons.  Whelan is still on the ballot as a Liberal but is running as an independent after disendorsement (see my Reps guide for a detailed account of the history). There has been a lot of confusion and tardiness about issues such as sign removal and preferencing in the wake of her disendorsement.  Whelan has been spruiking some mostly left-wing policies that may sound appealing while claiming to have moved on from her past history of anti-Islamic and otherwise dodgy social media posting.  (Note that she still strongly denies one post that has been attributed to her, but has produced no evidence that the alleged post was faked.)

My concern is that Whelan claims to have learned and become more informed on these issues, but continues to hang around with Fraser Anning supporters online while still saying that she has strong views on immigration and border protection.  So has she really changed or not?  Not only did Whelan like a post calling for votes for Fraser Anning on the Facebook page of an obscure and obvious Fraser Anning supporter, but she also made a post about foreign aid on her own website that used the same image and icons as one from "Respect Australia Rally", a nasty far-right Facebook site that is supporting Anning and considers One Nation to be sellouts.  (I decline to link directly to that page.)  This sort of usage of skull symbols is a hallmark of Agenda 21 conspiracy theories.

Supporters of far right parties including Fraser Anning's Conservative Nationals and Australian Conservatives have been cheering Whelan on on Facebook and we should be very concerned about who might influence Whelan if she is elected.   I suggest those sharing my concerns about this, or even concerned about having an MP who is very politically confused and not ready for the difficult task of life as a federal Independent, ignore whatever how-to-vote card they are given and put Whelan last or nearly so.

Although Whelan is a bad candidate, it's not clear how widely awareness of this has yet spread, and this situation is highly unusual, especially for Tasmania.  I still expect that Labor will retain the seat, but I don't know that, and you know the old saying ... the trouble with political jokes ...

Tasmania Senate

Details of some bad analysis of the Senate race by the Australia Institute of the Tasmanian Senate race have been released today.  As a general rule I advise readers not to trust any analysis by the Australia Institute on any electoral matters until they have seen me endorse it.  The analysis claims the "Coalition" (in fact the Coalition parties have distinct tickets in Tasmania), the Jacqui Lambie Network, the Greens and One Nation are set to fight out the final two Senate spots, and that One Nation could poll 9.5% in Tasmania.

The Australia Institute's Senate polling has repeatedly had high One Nation votes for Australia generally (recently over 8%) and this is somewhat unlikely given that One Nation's Reps polling is generally around 5-6% and One Nation tends to do slightly worse in the Senate compared to the Reps in seats where it runs in both.  It's possible TAI has the size of their Senate vote right, especially if everyone else has the size of the Reps vote wrong, but:

* If anything, other pollsters (eg Essential which had One Nation on 6.6% for the Reps) are more likely to be overestimating the One Nation vote by not taking account of One Nation not running in every seat.
* There is no history of pollsters underestimating the One Nation vote at recent elections.
* Even if One Nation got 8% nationwide in the Senate (which seems unlikely given competition from the UAP) it would not get 9.5% in Tasmania.  Tasmania is a historically poor state for the party and it got only 2.6% here last time.
* Senate polling tends to inflate the vote of named minor parties, and underestimate those not named.  Pollsters need to make a more serious effort to simulate making a choice between 15-20 parties.
* If One Nation were to sharply increase their vote it would probably be at the expense of Jacqui Lambie, so it's very hard to see how Lambie would be competitive against One Nation if One Nation had 9.5%.

The TAI report (I haven't seen the current edition) warned that the Tasmanian figures should be “treated with extreme caution, as they may have inflated the minor party vote”, so the question is why is TAI releasing this stuff through the media when their own report says it's probably unfit for purpose.

My view remains that the Greens are likely but not certain to win one of the last two seats.  The final seat is hard to predict given the chance of Jacqui Lambie's vote going down, and those in the mix for it would appear to include Labor (either John Short or Lisa Singh), Liberal and Lambie.  Those who could also poll well enough to get into the mix for this seat or who might not get much at all include the Nationals, the United Australia Party and independent Craig Garland.  I don't entirely rule out One Nation but if they do get up I expect it would be off a much lower base than TAI suggests, and it would require a situation in which there is a very even spray of minor party votes and nobody in the mix for the last seat has more than about 4-5%.  This would also require the Labor vote and the Labor preference flow to go down.

Impact of death of Bob Hawke

I expect many people to be asking what impact the death yesterday of Australia's 23rd Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, could have on the result. Some people think that it will increase Labor's on the day vote, perhaps by a large amount.  Others think the idea that it will have any influence (beyond shutting down the rest of the news cycle perhaps) is absurd.

I really can't say anything reliable on this.  Most events expected by the commentariat to move votes actually don't, but there's not been any previous case of such an event just days before election day, and nostalgia is often a force in Australian political discussion.  If Labor now win decisively, it will be necessary to comb through prepoll and on-the-day vote patterns to try to establish whether it was a factor or whether the swings in prepoll and booth voting were similar (which would suggest the polls were overconservative).  However because of the vast changes in the rate of prepoll voting, any such analysis could well be inconclusive.  On this subject, beware of hot takes before all the numbers (including the next two weeks of postcounting) are in.

Messy Reps Seats

I post here a brief list of Reps seats in which it may be unclear who the final two candidates are based on election night totals.   These are seats that may give rise to complex post-counting scenarios and in which two-candidate choices by the AEC on election night might prove incorrect:

Mallee - this could be the messiest; it is two Coalition candidates (though the Liberal is apparently a fly-in) versus multiple independents
Lyons - disendorsed Liberal still on the ballot and campaigning while her party tries (somewhat halfheartedly) to shovel her votes to a little-known National instead
Macnamara - likely race between Labor and Greens to get into the top two.  Note that if the Greens are marginally behind on primaries in such races they can sometimes sneak into second using micro-party preferences.  They narrowly failed to do this last time.
Higgins and Kooyong - ditto to above (though limited and unreliable polling suggests the Greens might be clear in second in both cases)
Gilmore - three-cornered and unclear on recent polling which Coalition party might make the final two

Feel free to suggest others.

Senate Count Will Be Slow

Please be aware that the Senate count will be slow and it will probably only be possible to get some rough ideas about the last few seats late on election night.  In particular in Tasmania and NSW with significant below-the-line uprisings we may have to wait several days to judge the impacts of below the line votes on the contest.

Contrary to popular myth, in the initial primary count all votes (above the line and below the line) are counted, but they are initially counted just as unapportioned and later sorted into above and below the lines for particular candidates.  So there is no big rush upwards in the Green vote (for instance) as below the lines are added - they are already in the mix from the start, and any tendency for the Green vote to rise slightly late in the count (if it does) will be caused by other reasons - later postals, absents etc.

As a result the vote tally for below-the-line candidates like Lisa Singh and Jim Molan will take some time to be clear, and will be very low when we first start seeing figures for them, and will then grow over a period of many days.  Fortunately in the case of Singh we should be able to project her final below the line vote quickly by using her 2016 below the line vote in booths, but for Molan this will be more difficult because of the greater scale of his BTL campaign compared to in 2016.

I may add other notes later today.