This post presents site data for 2022. The activity graph tells the story of the year (the units are unique pageviews per week). Click on the site review tab for previous years.
In 2022 I released 94 articles (+25 from 2021) including this one. Predictably the main themes were the federal election (26), the Victorian state election (13), Tasmanian Legislative Council (6), Tasmanian local council elections (5) and South Australia (5).
Not many b-sides from this album
Usually each year I list exotic titles of pieces that were left on the cutting room floor. This year there weren't many - pretty much everything I found in the drafts section made it into public view in some form. One Poll Roundup intended for May 5 didn't get finished til May 11; its original title was "The Narrowing Falls Asleep Edition". Some material from a unpublished rant entitled "Accept Labor's Mandate, Embrace PR Or Go Home" found its way into the published piece Two-Party Swing Decided This Election (Plus Pendulum) (PR=proportional representation).
Top of the pops
As measured by unique pageviews, the following were the most visited pages:
1. 2022 House of Reps Summary Page And Vanilla Postcounts
The most visited article on this site ever, finally beating an over-stuffed 2014 Tasmanian election guide that should have been split into multiple pages. This covered eight close classic-2PP contests on the way to a narrow Labor majority. The article included graphs where I detected counting errors (later fixed of course) in both Lyons and Gilmore, the latter a very significant one in the context of a very close count.
2. 2022 House of Reps Postcount: Macnamara
The third most visited article in site history, this followed an insanely close three-candidate cutoff point involving Labor, Liberals and Greens in the division of Macnamara. Labor's Josh Burns had to avoid being last at the cutoff to win; if he was last the Greens would win. It was very, very close but Burns survived.
3. Victoria 2022 Legislative Council Live
The fourth most visited article in site history, this followed and projected the unresolved Victorian upper house contests under the insanely complex (nah scrub the "complex" and just put "insane") Group Ticket Voting system. There was a lot of interest in the contest between Reason's Fiona Patten and Labour DLP's Adem Somyurek, which Somyurek won easily, but there were also some much closer races that went to the button in doubt.
4. 2022 House of Reps Postcount: Brisbane
The sixth most visited article in site history. This followed the post-count in Brisbane, which had a similar script to Macnamara except that in this case the Greens surged in late counting to such a point that it was clear well before the end that Labor's lead on primary votes was insufficient. There was a fair amount of misunderstanding of what was going on in this one, especially from people who couldn't compute how the Greens would do better on right micro preferences than Labor in a three-way split (even though the same thing happened in 2019.)
5. 2022 Senate Postcounts: Main Thread
The seventh most visited article in site history. This followed the post-counting for the Senate contests where there was a close race in Victoria (won by the United Australia Party) and interest in ACT (Pocock easily ousting Zed Seselja) and Queensland (Pauline Hanson surviving at the expense of Amanda Stoker), among others.
The tenth most visited article in site history (yes six of the top ten were from this year). This followed the Hobart Council election count where the existing left leadership of Anna Reynolds and Helen Burnet were returned though Reynolds came under strong challenge from John Kelly. At councillor level the election was a bloodbath with three right or right-ish and one left councillors losing and five new councillors elected. There was also an elector poll but I brushed that one aside off a mere 210 vote sample.
7. Hobart City Council Elections Candidate Guide And Preview 2022
Guide for the above, covering the biggest-scale and most contentious election in Hobart's history, and also the first with compulsory voting. Way too many candidates.
8. Victorian 2022 Postcount: Northcote and Preston
Followed two Labor vs Greens seats in the Victorian state election. The Greens on paper should have won Northcote easily but somehow didn't, and also delighted the crowd by conceding the seat then making what appeared to be unconcede-y noises.
In Preston the interest was in local independent Gaetano Greco who seemed a chance to make the 2CP, but in the end he didn't (and would have lost by lots of he had.)
Live coverage thread for Victoria as the Andrews government belied the hung parliament hype by absorbing a modest swing against it without net seat losses
10. 2022 House of Reps Postcount: Richmond
Federal post-count thread for a seat that didn't get much attention from other sources, where the Greens were again a three-cornered threat of sorts based on chances of closing in on a mess of minor party preferences. While Richmond didn't fall this time, it's getting closer and an extra 1.27% Labor to Greens 3CP swing would have done it.
Some other stats
The ten biggest days of the year for site visits were May 22, 25, 24, 23, 30, 26, 27 (Federal election), Nov 27 (Victoria), May 29 (federal) and Oct 26 (Tasmanian councils). The first five all beat any previous day in site history.
The most popular pieces started or written in any previous year were Party Registration Crackdown Tracker (a 2021-started article that saw much of its action this year), the even more increasingly outdated bio page, the 2021 Tasmanian state guide (which had a big bounce around the federal election presumably from Google searching for overlapping candidates), A Record Begging To Be Broken: Labor's Low Winning 1990 Primary (Oh poor primary vote pundits, I told them and they would not listen ...) and the Field Guide to opinion pollsters.
The ten most clicked tags were pseph, silly greens, 2022 federal, Hare-Clark, Legislative Council, debunkings, Victoria, Victoria 2022, Grand Gerry and wonk factor.
The top ten visiting countries were Australia, USA, UK, Canada (+1), New Zealand (-1), Netherlands (+3), Ireland (new), France (re-entry), Singapore (-2) and Germany (-4). 155 "Google countries" visited in 2021 and 173 have visited in total. There is some tendency for records to drop out that have been made before. This year saw first-time visits from Antarctica (!), Burkina Faso, Congo - Kinshasa, Cuba, Montenegro, and Namibia, so the most populous countries never to visit are now North Korea, Niger, Chad and Guinea.
The top ten cities this year were Melbourne, Sydney, Hobart, Brisbane, Canberra (+1), Perth (-1), Adelaide (+1), Launceston (-1), Gold Coast (+1) and Central Coast (new).
The top ten hit sources were: Twitter (by lots), Google, Facebook, Poll Bludger, Reddit (+2), duckduckgo (-1), Bing (-1), Tally Room (re-entry), The Conversation (+1) and Blogger (-1). Ignoring search engines the next three were The New Daily, Mark the Ballot and Crikey.
Orders of the year
2023 looks like the quietest year on here for some time and I suspect that in the second half especially I will be keeping this site ticking over but focusing much more on other work.
The biggest known event for 2023 is the New South Wales election in March. In this contest Labor seems entitled to some kind of favouritism for now, off a big polling lead and up against a third-term government onto its fourth Premier. But federal drag may help the Coalition, and it's NSW where the stain of past corruption is never too far away. See my preview article here.
Tasmania will get Legislative Council elections in May. Historically left but lately centrish independent Ruth Forrest will be seeking a fourth term in Murchison against anyone brave (or foolish?) enough to try their luck, Labor's Sarah Lovell has her first defence of Rumney against the Liberals and presumably others, and I don't know yet whether centre-right independent Rosemary Armitage will seek a third term in Launceston (where she fairly narrowly retained in 2017).
There will also be the Voice referendum.
I feel that the nation would benefit greatly from by-elections in the divisions of Cook and Fadden, but we will see if the incumbents agree.
Happy New Year to all readers and thankyou all for your interest and support! An extra special thanks to those of you who've donated to support my efforts. Some time during 2023 I hope to recover from the spare time deficit disaster that was 2022 and thank you all individually.
Read that Brisbane Labor Councillor Kara Cook is resigning, presumably triggering a by-election. Normally Qld local elections not at the forefront of anyone's mind, but her ward covers territory newly won by the Greens in Griffith. So might give some indication of whether their Federal success was a one off or something that might make a big splash at the 2024 state election
ReplyDeleteAhh looks like I'm wrong. This far out from the election a new councillor can just be appointed, meaning no excitement for poll watchers like me.
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