Election "held now" would be some kind of hung parliament, but further improvement for the government would put it in contention for winning outright
Jeremy Rockliff increases slim Better Premier lead
ELECTORAL, POLLING AND POLITICAL ANALYSIS, COMMENT AND NEWS FROM THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CLARK. IF YOU CHANGE THE VOTING SYSTEM YOU CHANGE VOTER BEHAVIOUR AND ANYONE WHO DOESN'T UNDERSTAND THAT SHOULDN'T BE IN PARLIAMENT.
Yesterday saw the release of the final version of the Joint Standing Committee into Electoral Matters report into the 2022 election. Following the somewhat lightweight and culture-war afflicted 2019 report it was good to see a return to substance, but that is not to say that everything is wonderful. There are various welcome aspects of JSCEM's findings and proposals that I may comment on later but for now I wanted to deal with JSCEM's recommendation to increase the number of Senators for the ACT and Northern Territory from two to four apiece. (I'm also considering a longer article about the current push for "truth in electoral advertising" laws, and the extent to which that movement is being fanned by naive support arising from the Voice failure and the rise of Donald Trump style candidates.)
Increasing the number of Territory Senators can be done by legislation and could in theory very well happen before the next election, while an increase in the House of Representatives is likely to be a second-term project for the Albanese Government, assuming that it gets a second term. As the support of Labor, the Greens and David Pocock for expansion appears highly likely, the Government would only, for instance, need the support of either Lidia Thorpe or the Lambie Network (or even someone to abstain or be away) to pass the change. In theory an expansion could be challenged in the High Court but the prospects for any challenge would seem dim. The Constitution allows the Parliament to create Territory representation on whatever terms it likes and so long as there's some reasonable argument rather than it just being an out-and-out stack, it's hard to see on what basis the Court could say no.
2PP Aggregated Estimate: 52.9 To ALP (-1.4 since mid-August)
ALP would still win election "held now", probably with increased majority
Time for another federal voting intention poll roundup as there have been several noteable results in recent weeks. In a previous edition I reported that while the end of the Albanese Government's polling honeymoon had been declared by many hasty false prophets, we weren't quite there yet ... but we could be soon. My standard for the honeymoon phase still existing had been a 54-46 estimated aggregated polling lead for the government, but in the event of the government falling slightly below that level I would want to see at least a month of evidence that that was the case. (It is somewhat like how a single quarter of negative growth does not count as a recession).
Anyway I can now report that on my estimates the rear-vision window shows that it's been two months. The Albanese Government's polling honeymoon ended not with a bang but with a gradual slip into the twilight zone of not-quite-enough-ahead in early September. There were several individual poll results better than 54-46 since then but on a weekly rolling basis I have had Labor in the 53s ever since. Furthermore following this week's Newspoll the Government dipped just below an aggregated (and Newspoll!) 53% for the first time.
I haven't seen any other articles on these subjects so some coverage of turnout and informal votes in the Voice referendum.
The most important thing to know about Voice turnout is that it was a lot higher than many people said it was going to be. It indeed managed to just beat the 2022 House of Representatives turnout, but this is no great miracle alone given that the 2022 election was COVID-blighted. What makes it more impressive was that it was acheived against the backdrop of an enrolment drive that made the roll more complete than ever before, putting more voters on the roll who had a relatively low chance of voting. Another factor that makes the near-90% turnout commendable is that six years ago there was a mass voting type exercise that was voluntary, and there was some potential for confusion about whether voting in the referendum was required.
Just a disclaimer before I get much further: when I post graphs with low r-squared values (percentage of variation explained) I come across a few readers for whom a little knowledge of statistics is a dangerous thing and who will, sometimes irately, insist that anything below r-squared equals 0.3 or so is worthless. In fact electoral statistics are very messy and even r-squared values of a few percent can be statistically significant if there are enough data points. The important thing with such values is to be especially cautious about assuming causation since the causes of such patterns are often to be found elsewhere. For instance, in the 1999 Republic referendum, seats with high Yes votes had low turnout, but that isn't because high support for Yes in an area caused people to not vote, it is mainly because inner city seats that tended naturally to vote Yes also have high numbers of transient young voters (who themselves would be likely to vote Yes if they voted at all).