Secret Harbour By-Election: Prospects And Live

Secret Harbour (ALP 11.54%)
George Tree (ALP) vs Luke Herdegen (ON), Ryan Robertson (Lib) and way too many others
Cause of by-election: resignation of Paul Papalia (ALP)

CALLED (9:34) One Nation gain from Labor

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Commentary (Comments scrolling up with latest first - refresh for latest comments)

Sunday 10:50 am I am not sure we'll ever see a Labor vs Liberal 2PP for this seat but I estimate that the Liberals would have won it, around 52-48 (by normal preference flows it would be around 53 but I have reduced that on account of it being a normally weak seat).  This suggests Labor would have lost this seat even without the One Nation surge.  Given that the average swing in government by-elections is around 5% an implied swing of 13.5% is high, but also Labor are coming off a still high baseline from the last election, which would account for some of it.  

With results like this there is always a lot of talk about high swings, but the 2CP swing is not meaningful as it is not the same combatants.  The swing against the Labor 2CP is what I call a pseudo-swing; both the pseudo-swing and my estimate of the 2PP swing are lower than in Rockingham 2023.

Sunday 6:00 am What has happened in the prepolls is that Herdegen has actually got a preference flow more like I was expecting for the by-election as a whole, 52.8% (which is not surprising given how strong the prepolls were on primaries for One Nation), and so the result has gone back to the high 50s, 57-43 at present, that was expected before the bad preference flows came in.  Overall now One Nation has 49% of preferences.  From the primaries I would have expected them to get about 52.7% without considering the ballot order, which would close at least a little of the gap.  

EMRS: Thirty Or Turkey By Christmas?

EMRS Lib 26 (+1) ALP 23 (-1) ON 21 (+2) Grn 16 (+2) IND 14 (-2) others 1 (-1)

Seat estimate (new boundaries) Lib 10 ALP 9 ON 8 Green 5 IND 3

The latest EMRS poll is out as released on the Poll Position pod and the changes on state voting intentions are all within the in-theory margin of error from the previous edition.  There would be mild relief for the government that the dramatic slide in its numbers in the past few polls has stopped.  But political tragics could only have eyes for the ALP figure after leader Josh Willie was reported to have set a target of polling a 30% primary by Christmas.  (Something I somehow, in a feat tantamount to winning the Last Man contest for not knowing the Superbowl winner, managed to not find out about for a month!)  

This figure has led to predictable jibes from opponents that not only will Labor not attain this heroic goal (oh for the days when they were forever stuck around 30) but that Willie will instead be gone as leader by Christmas. Although Labor's primary has actually held up better to the One Nation surge than might have been expected, there seems to be an unusual level of Labor leadership chatter about.  It's hard to tell if it is serious or if a lot of people are just and quite rightly bored.  Some of it is connected to the issue that continues to dog (pun intended) the Opposition, with a Thick Of It style nadir when Willie was photographed defending Labor's unfashionable support for greyhound racing in front of a Dogs Prohibited sign. 

Four Year Terms? Fixed Terms? Fixed Four Year Terms? Part One - Polling

This week there was an article regarding a report released by a lobby group called 4 Year Terms Australia, which supports "fixed" four year terms for federal parliament.  The SMH report contained this very brief comment regarding polling:

"Polling commissioned from JWS Research found just one in five Australians supported the current system of three-year terms and the prime minister choosing the election date."

Well, from that it may sound like Australians would strongly support "fixed" four year terms, right?  In fact the polling cited tells a rather different story.

I've decided to write one article on this subject dealing mainly with the polling, to be probably (subject to time) followed by another in the near future dealing with the (de)merits of the issue.  That said there will be few surprises on the latter front to anyone who's seen my article re fixed terms in Tasmania or my 2025 JSCEM submission.   To summarise my views, I'm totally against "fixed" federal terms, whether by legislation or referendum.  I think that fixed term laws either fail to genuinely secure fixed dates or else prevent Prime Ministers from calling elections in circumstances where they should be able to.  I'm also against four year federal terms if it means eight year Senators.  

Group Ticket Voting In Victoria Is Finally Gone!

Today is Victoria's first day since the mid-2000s without Group Ticket Voting in state elections.  Legislation to abolish the system received Royal Assent yesterday.  It could still in theory be challenged in court but I doubt that would go too well for the challenger after the failed Bob Day federal challenge.

There's a saying that success has many fathers while failure is an orphan.  Meaning that when something good happens a lot of people suddenly want to claim the credit.  

Since group ticket voting was abolished in Victoria we've seen, for instance, GetUp! claiming partial credit for their petition which highlighted the recent attempt by Avi Yemini and others to register fake parties.  Yemini's defenders (including Topher Field in a ridiculous video where he abusively misunderstands comments to the Guardian by yours truly) have been out saying GetUp! and others who reacted were just "useful idiots" and their tactic with the fake parties was to generate exactly such outrage against group ticket voting to increase the chance of it being scrapped.  Well, to be useful idiots you firstly have to be useful so this suggests that GetUp! actually did do something after all.  I will say here that at least GetUp! only claimed partial credit while Yemini and co have had no compunction about claiming the lot.  But I'm not sure GetUp!'s petition with 22000+ "signatures" was ever even presented to anybody! I am nonetheless glad that they raised awareness of the issue.