Legislative Council 2020: Huon

This election will be held on August 1.

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If you find my coverage useful please consider donating to support the large amount of time I spend working on this site.  Donations can be made by the Paypal button in the sidebar or email me via the address in my profile for my account details.  Especially important in these difficult times: please only donate if you are sure you can afford to do so.
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Welcome to my page for the 2020 Legislative Council elections for the seat of Huon.  My Rosevears page is already up and an article on Legislative Council voting patterns is probably not far away, and will be linked here when it is written.

The election was originally slated for Saturday May 2, but was postponed to Saturday May 30 to allow more time for the TEC to prepare for a campaign with a high rate of postal and early voting. However the government then announced an indefinite deferral with an intention to hold the elections by August 25, pursuant to section 13(1) of the COVID-19 Disease Emergency (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2020 (see http://www.parliament.tas.gov.au/bills/pdf/14_of_2020.pdf) and section 5 of the Public Health Act.  As the COVID situation eased, August 1 was announced as the date.


This piece will be edited through the campaign from time to time for updates, campaign information, added candidates and changed assessments.   Other relevant pieces will be linked here.

Queensland: Bundamba and Currumbin By-Election Counts

Updates

BUNDAMBA: McCallum (ALP) retain
CURRUMBIN: Gerber (LNP) retain
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Friday: With both seats decided I am paying little attention to the counts but note that the error mentioned below is now corrected.

Tuesday night: As Antony has noted, the preference figures that have gone up for Bundamba appear to have transposed the flow of Greens preferences making them flow 2:1 to One Nation instead of a more logical 2:1 to Labor, so McCallum will get more like 59% than the 54.9% he's currently credited with.

Tuesday 4:50:  Antony Green has reported that the LNP are around 500 votes ahead with not enough left to overturn.  These numbers are still not showing on the ECQ website.  Labor has conceded and the LNP has claimed Currumbin.  There will be a swing against it which may be close to 2% but is to be determined.

King Of Nothing For A Day: Did Terry Mills Return As NT Opposition Leader?

Brief answer: Perhaps!

Of all the things going on in the world at present probably the least important of all is the position of NT Opposition Leader (unless, perhaps, a new conservative force starts winning NT elections and then winning federal seats).  But we all need some laughs, and so long as one doesn't think at all about whether NT politicians could have found something more constructive to do with their time right now than this, this is a rather funny story.  Not as funny as the time Willem Westra van Holthe held a late night presser to announce he was "Chief Minister apparent" only for it to turn out that he wasn't (Adam Giles who he thought he had deposed as leader threatened to bring down the government and as a result Giles was restored to the CLP leadership.)  But still, not bad.

The remains of Giles' government were slaughtered at the 2016 Territory election leaving the CLP with only two seats compared to 18 for Labor and five for a range of independents (some of them ex-CLP).  One of the independents was former Chief Minister Terry Mills, who had earlier been rolled by Giles while Mills was out of the country, just seven months after Mills had led the CLP to majority government.

Coronavirus And Australian Politicians And Elections

Just a post to comment on some aspects of interest regarding the current COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak and its impacts on Australian politicians and elections.  (Note added April: this article is being updated continually but no further politicians have been diagnosed for a while.)

Politicians

In the last week three federal Coalition MPs (Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, Senator Susan McDonald and Senator Andrew Bragg) have tested positive to COVID-19.  Dutton is believed to have caught the disease in the USA, Bragg at a wedding in Australia and McDonald via unknown community transmission.  No state politicians have been reported as testing positive, but that's surely just a matter of time.

Politicians represent a tiny percentage of the world population, yet there have been many cases of them testing positive, a fact already attracting much attention.

A rough and doubtless incomplete tally of politicians who have tested positive, culled mostly from this Wikipedia page, accepting their description of "politician" status blindly but excluding those who I could quickly and clearly see were only former politicians, is as follows:

The table shows that countries that have politicians who have tested positive usually have more than one.  Of the 13 countries with more than one known infected politician, Australia has the fourth lowest ratio of total cases to political cases, currently above only Brazil, Romania and Iran.  Some countries with high coronavirus counts have none so far (such as South Korea and Switzerland) while China has relatively few.

EMRS: Liberals Still Ahead Under Gutwein

EMRS March 2020: Liberal 43 Labor 34 Greens 12 Others 11
Interpretation scores not used because of change in EMRS methods
Result "if election held last week" on these raw numbers 13-10-2 (no change), next most likely 13-9-3
Better Premier White 41 leads Gutwein 39 - similar situation to White vs Hodgman

A new EMRS poll of Tasmanian voting intention has been released via the unusual avenue of a FontPR podcast.  (Recommended listening for a lot of new insights into how EMRS operates). This is the first EMRS poll to be publicly released since the July 2019 poll, but in the meantime there were two other polls that were not previously released, in November (very early November - pollster was reported in the field on 31 Oct) and unusually December.  These have now also been released (full report of last three polls here.)  It is unfortunate the earlier polls were not released at the time as they would have usefully informed discussion about the retirement of Premier Hodgman.

The podcast reveals that EMRS have made significant methods changes in recent months, including ensuring at least 35% mobile coverage in their phone polls and making changes to weighting (though this does include the rather risky inclusion of past vote - a partial cause of the 2019 polling failure, but perhaps more justified in Tasmania where it is harder to be confident a sample is even close to representative.)  Based on the late-2019 polls together with this one it looks like this has fixed the pollster's long-standing problem of severely overestimating the Green vote, and at times the Others vote as well.

Legislative Council 2020: Rosevears

This election will now be held on August 1.  

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Donations welcome!

If you find my coverage useful please consider donating to support the large amount of time I spend working on this site.  Donations can be made by the Paypal button in the sidebar or email me via the address in my profile for my account details.  Especially important in these difficult times: please only donate if you are sure you can afford to do so.
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I've decided to release my Rosevears page for the 2020 Legislative Council elections a little early.  As with Nelson last year, the incumbent is retiring, so I don't have to wait for the March sittings to analyse his voting patterns.  (An article on Legislative Council voting patterns will follow after the March sittings are over, and a Huon guide is now up.)

The election was originally slated for Saturday May 2 but has been postponed indefinitely under powers that I didn't realise existed under the Public Health Act.  Initially it was postponed to Saturday May 30 to allow more time for the TEC to prepare for a campaign with a high rate of postal and early voting.  Now the elections are intended to be held by August 25 pursuant to section 13(1) of the COVID-19 Disease Emergency (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2020 (see http://www.parliament.tas.gov.au/bills/pdf/14_of_2020.pdf) and section 5 of the Public Health Act.  As the COVID situation has eased, August 1 has been announced as the date.

This piece will be edited through the campaign from time to time for updates, campaign information, added candidates and changed assessments.   Other relevant pieces will be linked here.