False Declaration: Minor Right Nonsense About Senate Reform

Huge if true, but ...

Recently my attention was drawn to an article on the Canberra Declaration website by one Dave Pellowe.  Pellowe is better known for being on the receiving end of a later dropped 2024 Queensland anti-discrimination complaint over comments he made about Indigenous religious beliefs while explaining why he would not include a Welcome to Country in a Christian religious event.  (I'm vaguely curious about what exactly he said, as my home state has a long history of potentially interesting complaints like this being made then almost always dropped - but not curious enough yet to find it.)  The Canberra/Daily Declaration site was better known to me through the involvement of one Julie Sladden, an anti-COVID-vaccine retired doctor and right-wing culture warrior who was bizarrely endorsed by the Tasmanian Liberals for not one but two state elections.  

I'm not sure I'd come across Pellowe talking nonsense about Senate voting before but this is not the first time he's done it.  His Twitter bio reads "Solomon prayed: Give me an understanding heart so that I can (steward democracy) well & know the difference between right and wrong. 1 Kings 3:9".  I hope that he will see this article and realise that having an "understanding heart" to "steward democracy" requires understanding the facts and consulting reliable sources rather than just former UAP and One Nation figure Lex Stewart.  Stewart and Pellowe have been making very similar complaints about Senate reform and the 2016 election, and they're both wrong.

Is Seat Polling Utterly Useless?

Advance Summary

1. Seat polls have received bad publicity because of poor results at the 2013 and 2016 federal elections, and in some other recent elections such as the WA Darling Range state by-election.

2. Because it is clear that seat polls are not very accurate, it is common for posters on social media to dismiss them out of hand as useless or so misleading as to be worse than useless.

3. Indeed, seat polls at the 2016 federal election shows they were so inaccurate that they had greater average 2PP errors than simple models based on uniform swing and national polling.

4. However, in 2016 hybrid models combining seat polling and uniform swing would have been more accurate than either seat polling or a uniform swing model alone.

5. The correct use of publicly available seat polling seems to be not to ignore it entirely, but rather to aggregate it with other sources of information including national modelling.

6. Seat polling should be most useful for races that are difficult to predict by normal means, but seat polls may be unusually inaccurate in those races too.

7. The biggest problem with seat polling is the reporting that treats unreliable seat polls as definitive verdicts that one side or the other is "winning".  In fact they are weak indicators and need to be reported in the context of other evidence.

The UK And Australian Elections Weren't That Similar

Last week the UK had its second straight surprising election result.  In 2015 an expected cliffhanger turned into an easy win for the Conservatives while in 2017 an expected landslide turned into a cliffhanger.  The government went to the polls three years early (that's a whole term over here), supposedly in search of a strong mandate for its position on Brexit, yet came away with fewer seats than it went in with.  The real motive seemed to be to turn a big lead in the polls into a bigger majority, and if that was the aim then it backfired spectacularly.

In the wake of this result the Australian commentariat have put out several articles that seek to stress parallels with Australian politics.  The primary themes of these articles are as follows: that Malcolm Turnbull is Theresa May and that Anthony Albanese is Jeremy Corbyn.

Let's start with the Turnbull-May comparison.  Turnbull has no hope of winning the battle of perceptions on this one, because it's the kind of analogy many of those who consume political chatter will congratulate themselves on having thought of first.  But on a factual basis, the comparison is twaddle.

Unicameral By Stealth: Tony Abbott's Senate Referendum Call

The Australian (Tony Abbott calls for Senate referendum, warns 'we are turning into Italy') reports that relevance-deprived ex-PM Tony Abbott has called for a referendum to reduce the power of the Senate to obstruct government legislation.

As outlined, the plan would allow for a deadlock between the Houses to be broken by a joint sitting of both Houses without the need for a prior double-dissolution election.  It appears that this follows one of two options outlined in this 2003 discussion paper on resolving deadlocks.  These options were:

1. A joint sitting can be convened after a bill has been rejected twice with three months between rejections
2. A joint sitting can be convened after every election for the full House and half the Senate, rather than requiring a double dissolution

It appears Abbott favours the first option, but this is not yet totally clear.  The 2003 proposals were killed off based on a finding that they would not pass a referendum.

2016 Ehrlich Awards For Wrong Predictions

It's time for the fifth annual giving of the Ehrlich Awards, which round the start of each year go to the most amusingly or staggeringly wrong predictions I observe in any field of interest relating to the previous twelve months.  The Ehrlichs are named for Paul Ehrlich, the evangelist of ecological end-times who put me on a path to a lifetime of health scepticism of dark green gloomery when he not just lost a famous bet with economist Julian Simon but also gave poor excuses for the defeat. For the past editions click the Ehrlich Awards tab at the bottom, and for the ground rules see the 2012 edition.

As usual I should note my own predictive efforts are hardly perfect, but I had a pretty good year in 2016, missing by only two on the Coalition's national Reps seat tally (for example).  I did wrongly predict two Reps seats in my own home state, which was embarrassing, though I did indicate those were quite uncertain.

Two areas of widespread predictive failure that will dominate these Awards were the US election and Senate reform.  They weren't the only ones I noticed.  For instance the late Bob Ellis made a bold bid for posthumous glory with "It is likely, though not certain, that Malcolm Turnbull will lose his seat" - Turnbull won his seat 68:32 with a trivial 1.2% swing against him.  But I think the two I've mentioned are the most interesting ones and I've decided to make the US election case the dishonourable mentions, saving Senate reform for the medals.

Bob Day Chaos Thrills The Crowd

It's so crazy it's beyond even poetic.  Firstly now ex-Senator Bob Day takes the government to court using money that may not even exist to argue that the new Senate system has prevented his re-election.  Then he proves his own case multiply wrong by winning.  Then it turns out he might not be eligible to keep his seat and he says he'll resign, then he flags that he'll hang around a bit.  Then he resigns, and then it turns out that he might never have won in the first place - for a different reason to the one he first flagged resigning over.  And it has been cited as a factor in the blowup between George Brandis and the former Solicitor-General, Justin Gleeson (though it's now emerging that that was erroneous and advice involving a different Senator, Rod Culleton, was the issue there.)

What happens now?  Firstly, while Day's seat remains vacant until we find out whether it is a recount or a casual vacancy appointment that will fill it, the Coalition benefits.  The Senate is reduced from 76 seats to 75, meaning that a majority is now 38 not 39, which is effectively the same as having Bob Day automatically voting with them on everything, with the added bonus of him not even being there to do it.  They're probably hoping the court has some really long adjournments.

(Update: The paragraph above was written before Culleton threw a spanner in the works by flagging his intention to abstain on contentious legislation while his own eligibility is sorted.  If Culleton abstains then the combined absence of Day and Culleton is very harmful to the Coalition,  meaning they need 8/9 non-Green crossbench votes instead of 9/11.)

Federal 2PP Aggregate Methods (45th Parliament)

This is the methods post for the 45th Parliament edition of the aggregate (sometimes nicknamed "Aggedor") that I post in the sidebar of this site, and which will form the basis for Poll Roundup posts and, later, my attempts to forecast the next election.

The current version is essentially the same as the version running at the end of the 44th parliament, with some minor changes to the weightings and the interpretation of Newspoll.  One substantial methods change was made half-way through the 44th parliament, which was to switch from just using the 2PP figure supplied by pollsters using previous-election preferences, to using a hybrid of the supplied figure and a figure calculated from their primaries.

A simpler version ran before the 2013 election and fluked getting the 2PP exactly right as a result of a preference shift cancelling out a possible late swing to the Coalition.  The 2013-6 version had a final error of 0.4 points, almost half of which resulted from slight shifts in preference flow patterns.

The aggregate is mostly a weighted average of two-party preferred polling derived from all recent polls of sufficient standard.  The 2PP figure assigned to each poll is multiplied by various weightings based on the poll's recency, accuracy and other issues, and the sum of the multiplied poll scores is divided by the sum of the weightings.

The aggregate is designed to be transparently checkable in theory and to use basic mathematics only.  However, it is not entirely codified in advance.  Decisions will be made on issues of pollster weighting and house effects, and possibly other matters, and will be updated to this page at the bottom when made.

Federal Election 2016: Best And Worst Pollsters

It's been a long time coming but the recent finalisation of the 2016 House of Reps election results means it's time to present my in-depth review of how the various pollsters did.  At the 2013 election there was a widespread belief that the polls might be totally wrong, but it turned out they were accurate.  Since that election there has been a massive turnover in Australian polling methods and companies (such that only two pollsters went to this election doing the same thing as last time) and there were more reasons for concern, but the miracle has continued.  Australian national opinion polls have again proved highly accurate.  However, the picture in individual seat polling was not such a pretty story.

As usual I will present my awards in three categories.  This article is quite numbery of course, and is rated 3/5 on the Wonk Factor scale.

2016 House Of Reps Figures Finalised

I'm not sure exactly when this happened, but sometime in the last two weeks while I have been away overseas, the AEC has released the final detailed set of federal election results.  Although all House of Representatives seat results were already known, the release of final information on two-party preference flows and preference distributions is very useful for many things, including assessing the performance of polls.  Final results are here.  This article is a general roundup of various details, and soon I will be using the figures to conduct an in-depth review of polling accuracy at the election, and after that to start a new polling aggregate model.  There is quite a backlog of other articles that I want to write, so I hope I can get through as many of these as possible in the next three weeks before another round of fieldwork.

The final two-party preferred result is 50.36% to the Coalition to 49.64% to the ALP.  This represented a clear success for the last-election method of preference prediction, which would have predicted a 2PP of 50.53% for the Coalition based on the primaries actually cast.  The respondent-preferences method (on average across polls using it) expected a shift in preferencing large enough to shift the 2PP result by at least 0.6 points (ie Labor would have won the 2PP).  This continues the superior track record of last-election preferences, and I will continue to treat respondent preferences with caution. 

Majors Stitch Up Senate Term Lengths, Film At 11

When the Senate resumes at the end of the month, one of its first items of business will be to allocate the Senators to six-year and three-year terms.  Today both major parties indicated that they will use the order-of-election method, under which the first six Senators who were elected in each state's cutup will receive six-year terms and the remainder three-year terms.  Special Minister of State Mathias Cormann has stated:

 "The important point is obviously this is a function of how many votes and how many preferences you are able to attract. If you are elected in the first six out of 12 then it stands to reason that you were elected earlier and as such you qualify for the longer period."

Labor's Penny Wong has issued a statement saying Labor will support the order-of-election method and saying that it "reflects the will of the voters".

The Electoral Act requires the AEC to conduct a "Section 282 recount" to simulate which Senators would have filled the first six places at a half-Senate election based on the same votes, as an alternative to using the order-of-election method.  However there is no requirement that the Senate use the recount to decide the order.  While the Senate affirmed in both 1998 and 2010 that the recount should be used, those decisions were not binding on the current Senate, and were under the old system anyway.

Senate Reform Performance Review Part 1

The results of the Senate election are all in and so it is timely to review how the new Senate system performed in full detail.  No system should be expected to perform flawlessly on its first attempt.  However, the new system has generally exceeded the expectations of its most ardent supporters (save any who supported it for the wrong reasons) and made its opponents' pre-election arguments look very silly indeed.

Two major models of reform were canvassed in the Senate reform debate that ran through the last term of parliament.  The original JSCEM model released in 2014 allowed for fully optional preferencing above the line with semi-optional preferencing (six squares for a half-Senate election, twelve for a double dissolution) below the line.  The revised model released in 2016 initially allowed for semi-optional preferencing (1-6) above the line, but essentially maintained compulsory full preferencing if voting below the line.  After many complaints from the psephosphere (and I especially give credit to Michael Maley and Antony Green here) the final version as amended allowed semi-optional preferencing (1-12) below the line as well.  This change, in the end, allowed Tasmanian voters to overturn the contentious demotion of a sitting high-profile Senator.

Gaynor's Clueless Call For Senate Recount

A reader today drew my attention to this piece by Bernard Gaynor claiming apparent irregularities in the Tasmanian Senate count, and calling for a recount, even including a petition to the AEC to that effect.  Gaynor's concern is that as a result of this outcome Australia will have one less Pauline Hanson and one more Sarah Hanson-Young.  Luckily for those who think one of either or both in the Senate is one too many, both these Senators are actually unique. Neither is affected by the outcome in Tasmania.

In this piece I'll examine the basis for Gaynor's call in some detail, but firstly I should point out that the call for a recount is in itself misconceived.  The reason for this is that it comes too late.  The time for calling for a recount in a seat is before the declaration of the poll (S278 Commonwealth Electoral Act).  In 2013, requests for a recount in Western Australia were granted (on appeal) because of a much closer apparent margin (14 votes) at a tipping point during the preference distribution and the declaration of the poll was delayed while the recount was conducted.  I followed the progress of that recount in an article at the time.

The Senate: Button Press Week

This week if all goes according to plan, the buttons will be pressed on the remaining Senate races in ACT, WA, SA (Tuesday), Victoria (Wednesday), Queensland and finally NSW, and the makeup of the Senate should be known.  I'll be posting some comments about these races and the results as time permits, but I'm rather busy this week, so feel free to add thoughts about any of the races in comments.

I haven't had the time I would have liked to analyse these races in detail, and really you have to sample preferences in scrutineering to have a really confident handle on what's going on in a given state under the new Senate system.  You also can't do it on the night, as you have to know what the main races are to know what you need to look for.  I used scrutineering-based modelling to successfully predict the result in Tasmania (though there was very nearly an upset for the final seat) and it surprises me that I have not seen any detailed public attempt at a scrutineering-based model for any other state.

Eric Abetz And The 2016 Tasmanian Liberal Result

Advance Summary

1. The Tasmanian Liberal result at the 2016 federal election was very poor.

2. Not only was the Liberal primary low, but in the Senate race the Liberals failed to obtain preferences even from "right-wing" parties.

3. Liberal ticket leader Eric Abetz has offered a number of reasons for the party's poor results, some of which are clearly false.

4. In fact the Liberal ticket would have had more chance of winning five seats had a below-the-line campaign for Richard Colbeck been more successful, not less.

5. Although Senator Abetz polarises opinion and was the candidate most frequently placed last on Senate ballots, no conclusions about his popularity can be drawn directly from this result.

6. Historically, there is evidence that the Liberal Party performs worse in Tasmania (relative to the nation) when Senator Abetz is on top of the Senate ballot, but the difference is not quite statistically significant and could be caused by other factors.

7. There is no evidence in historic results that having Abetz on top of the ticket is an asset to the party's fortunes.

8. Tasmania is a historically Labor-leaning state, but this does not alone explain the poor result at this election.

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Tasmania Senate 2016 Button Press And Analysis

Result

Order 1 Abetz (Lib) 2 Urquhart (ALP) 3 Whish-Wilson (Green) 4 Lambie (JLN) 5 Parry (Lib) 6 Polley (ALP) 7 Duniam (Lib) 8 Brown (ALP) 9 Bushby (Lib) 10 Singh (ALP) 11 Bilyk (ALP) 12 McKim (Green) 
Colbeck (Lib) was passed by McKim and McCulloch and excluded
5 Labor 4 Liberal 2 Green 1 Lambie

I would like to thank all the AEC staff in Hobart for all their help with information on the count and congratulate them on their efficient and punctual delivery of the Tasmanian outcomes.

Seat Betting Improves, But Still No Miracle, At The 2016 Federal Election

Advance Summary

1. Seat betting markets, sometimes considered to be highly predictive, returned another modest result at the 2016 federal election, predicting thirteen seats incorrectly.

2. Seat betting markets did however improve as a predictor of total seat wins compared to the 2013 election, at which they greatly overestimated the Coalition's winning seat margin.

3. Seat betting markets also performed impressively in their predictions of "non-classic" seats, getting only one (Cowper) wrong.

4. Overall the predictions of seat betting markets were extremely similar to those of poll-based projections.

5. Large swings to Labor in outer suburban and low-income seats, generally missed in public seat polling, gave seat betting markets an opportunity to show superior insight.

6. That chance was, however, generally missed, showing that seat betting displays no superior insights.

7. In terms of seat totals, individual seat markets again showed no notable insights, and were again outperformed by betting markets dealing specifically with the number of seats won.

2016 Late Postcount And Expected Recount: Herbert

Yeah OK this is kinda closeish, this one ...

Herbert (LNP 6.2%, Qld)
Cathy O'Toole (ALP) ahead by 8 votes at end (?) of indicative 2PP count
O'Toole provisionally won recount by 35 votes.  
Following distribution of preferences O'Toole has won by 37 votes.
O'Toole will be seated and result can be challenged in court, but will retain seat until court (or by-election called by court) determines otherwise.
At least three incidents in which voters were unable to vote have been alleged.

2016 Senate Postcount: A Very Long Way Still To Go

This thread contains some general comments about the overall state of the Senate race and the campaign.  There is one thing I want to make clear about the Senate race right now before I get any further:

We still have an extremely long way to go!

What we have at the moment are primary vote counts that are often little more than halfway complete and may still move around a lot based on votes still to be added.  We have a new Senate voting system and no past-data experience of how voters use it.  People are trying to pick from this which micro-parties might win seats when we don't know what the final votes are let alone what they mean.

I understand the media's desire to communicate information to readers, but this stuff is hugely complex and I just want people to accept that it is going to take a long time to know who will be winning particular seats, and in some cases we won't know what is going to happen until the pressing of The Button when all the votes have been entered.

2016 House of Reps Postcount: Cowper

This is just a brief explainer re a seat that is not in significant doubt but that is going to cause confusion. Please post comments on other seats to the thread below.

In the seat of Cowper (NSW), Rob Oakeshott took on the Nationals' Luke Hartsuyker in a last-minute raid that caused the Nationals a lot of panic especially with polls showing a very tight race.  In 2013 this was a classic Coalition-vs-Labor seat.  Because Oakeshott has made the final two in 2016, the AEC is conducting a realignment of the Cowper count by booth.

Because different booths have very different leanings, the sample of booths included in the realignment will cause the two-candidate preferred count between Hartsuyker and Oakeshott to move around a lot in the early stages before eventually settling down.  After six booths Oakeshott is in the lead on that count, which may give an appearance he is winning.

2016 House of Reps Postcount: Vanilla Reps Seats

Expected final outcome Coalition 76 Labor 68 Others 5 Undecided 1

Herbert: Labor leading, much too close to call, recount very likely (moved to new thread)

Coalition assumed to win: Grey, Dunkley, Chisholm, Gilmore, Flynn, Forde, Capricornia
Labor assumed to win: Batman, Cowan, Hindmarsh, Melbourne Ports (see separate thread)

Note: You can now vote in the sidebar Not-A-Poll on what will be the closest seat!

Introduction

This thread deals with the standard (hence the "vanilla" in title) two-party preferred seats at the 2016 federal election, as distinct from more exotic offerings like Grey and Melbourne Ports which have their own threads.  Usually the Coalition performs slightly better on post-counting than Labor and for this reason I have (for now) not included Robertson, Petrie, Dickson or La Trobe, in all of which the Coalition leads by more than 1000 votes.  Should any of these close up I may cover them. In 2010 and 2013 Labor never won any seat in which the Coalition had more than 50.53% at the end of the ordinary votes.  However with the different mix of postal votes (see below) perhaps Labor might make such a gain somewhere.