Why Did One Nation Win 11 Seats In Queensland 1998 But None In 1998 Federal?

The One Nation party (which I am on the verge of restyling Wuss Nation after its sobbing about its poor supporters being traumatised by filling out ballot papers) has been attacking compulsory preferential voting in the leadup to the South Australian election.

Linked into this I came across a narrative from Pauline Hanson which I thought deserved detailed examination.  Interviewed on Sky (and yet again, where else) Hanson told the tale of how in 1998 her party won eleven seats from scratch in the 1998 Queensland election and noted that it was optional preferential voting.  Then she moved on to the 1998 federal election where although her party won over a million votes, all the other parties recommended preferences against One Nation and they didn't win any seats.  Famously she lost Blair where the major parties cross-recommended against her.  

She doesn't in this excerpt mention what became of those eleven Queensland seats.  Every single one of those MPs quit the party or the parliament by the end of the 1998-2001 term, though One Nation did retain two of those seats and win a third with different candidates.    But my interest here is, is there really any causal link between the current OPV/CPV debate and what happened in those two elections?  Or are the explanations different?  A warning that this article is very numbery and has been graded Wonk Factor 4/5.

Making Seats "Marginal" At By-Elections Is Meaningless

Last night saw the Labor government get the good end of the stick in the Dunkley by-election, easily retaining a seat that was precariously above the long-term average swing for government vacancy by-elections.  It's no disaster for the Liberals who have got a modest swing with some mitigating factors but they (especially Jane Hume) were out in force last night spinning the outcome as a triumph.  Together with the usual nonsense about first-term governments not in recent decades losing seats and governments not losing by-elections caused by deaths (both based on trivially small sample sizes) I heard a lot about how they had turned Dunkley marginal and they were coming for the seat.

Marginal seat status where a seat is retained is determined by general election results not by-elections (so Dunkley is no more a marginal seat than it was before), but this made me wonder, does getting a seat inside the marginal range at a by-election predict anything at all?  I've found that such seats have historically almost always been retained by the government at the next election, although on average the election-to-election swing has been worse than the national average in such cases.  The idea that the Liberals have put Dunkley in serious danger next time with a swing that is not even bog-average for a government vacancy by-election has no basis.  

Not-A-Poll Reset Time: Marshall Defeated

Following the emphatic defeat of the Marshall Liberal government in South Australia it is time to again reset the Next Leader To Go Not-A-Poll.

These were the previous round's results.

Steven Marshall was a distant but substantial second in the round in which he was eliminated, so the Not-A-Poll is now batting 0/2 in terms of the plurality picking the next to depart.    

Scott Morrison led very strongly out of the blocks in this round.  Through much of February Marshall was getting around 40% of votes, which jumped to over 80% immediately following the release of the late February SA Newspoll.  This continued through the campaign but Morrison had too many votes in the can already to be caught.  Whatever the result of the next round, it will suprise me greatly if Morrison does not top the next round as well; indeed I expect he will get an outright majority.  (Weirdly on SA election day there were still five votes for Morrison and one for McGowan.)

Steven Marshall's defeat has resulted in an unusual piece of political trivia.  His is the first Australian state, territory or federal government to leave office since the previous South Australian election that brought him to office in 2018.  For one jurisdiction to see two changes in government without any other jurisdiction seeing one in between is actually very unusual.  There was a case of sorts in the ACT with the relatively short-lived Kaine Liberal Government in 1989-1991.  However even that is debatable because Trevor Kaine came to office after the fall of the Follett Labor Government on the floor of the house on 5 Dec 1989.  The Russell Cooper led dregs of the Joh era had lost the Queensland election on 2 Dec 1989, but the new government under Wayne Goss did not take office until 7 Dec.  For cases before that debatable one, we have to go back to instability in Victoria 1950-1952, Victoria 1943-1945 and NSW 1920-1922.  (In all those cases the government of one state changed multiple times without any intervening changes federally or in other states.)  

Marshall's demise also ends the fifth longest spell in the last 100 years without a change of government anywhere in the country. There were longer gaps in 1935-41, 1959-65, 1983-8 and 2002-7.  (For the records at leadership level see the previous post.)

At the time of writing it is not clear Marshall will even retain his seat in the parliament; he is a shaky favourite to overhaul Labor's present lead once prepolls and postals are added.  However if he does, and if he then resigns and causes a by-election, there would have to be a serious chance of Labor winning it.  

After implementing a Whitlam Clause for the previous edition (ie a defeated PM staying on as Opposition Leader doesn't count) I've decided this was too counter-intuitive and to take a more populist road in future.  So now if a PM loses then the poll pays out at that point, and even if they become Opposition Leader, they still count as having been the leader to go.  However if an Opposition Leader ceases to be such by becoming Prime Minister, that doesn't count.  

Not-A-Poll Reset Time: Berejiklian Quits

With Gladys Berejiklian resigning as NSW Premier to be replaced by Dominic Perrottet, the sidebar Next Leader To Go Not-A-Poll has been reset.  These were the previous results:

The Not-A-Poll was started in November 2020, at which time Berejiklian had just appeared before ICAC and testified about her former relationship with Daryl Maguire.  As a result Berejiklian was the early leader but as time went on readers may have believed she would survive the crisis at least long enough for one of the federal leaders to lose the election and depart.  She was overtaken by Albanese on 15 April 2021 and he was overtaken by Morrison on 10 Aug 2021. 

Tasmania Doesn't Swing With The Nation Like It Used To

Advance Summary

1. Tasmania is routinely omitted from national state-by-state federal polling breakdowns because of small sample size.

2. In theory Tasmanian seats could be projected by just assuming Tasmania would get the national swing, but in practice this isn't very accurate.

3. In elections in recent decades, Tasmanian two-party preferred federal swings have been less similar to the national swing than was the case before the 1970s.

4. One cause of this is that while national swings at federal elections have tended to be much lower in recent decades, 2PP swings in Tasmania are not much lower.

5. Another cause is the tendency of groups of Tasmanian seats to swing together.

6. As a result of this, the national swing that has actually occurred has only correctly predicted the Tasmanian seat result once at the past ten elections.

7. While the swing in current national polling (if accurate) implies the Coalition would not win any Tasmanian seats in an election "held now", a more accurate read based on the history of projected shutouts is that the Coalition would probably retain one Tasmanian seat at the moment.

A Record Begging To Be Broken: Labor's Low Winning 1990 Primary

One of the most tedious aspects of Australian polling commentary from time to time is obsessive focus on Labor's primary vote.  Somehow the Labor primary vote gets more attention than the Coalition's when the Coalition is more dependent on its primary vote than Labor is.  In current aggregated polling, Labor has a primary vote in the high 30s (BludgerTrack has it at 37.7%) but there will always be people who say this isn't high enough and that the party needs very near 40% or it can't win a majority. 

There may well be truth in this in terms of projecting from the present day to an election (because oppositions tend to fade and therefore have usually needed big leads at some stage of the term to win) but in that case the primary vote is not telling us anything we couldn't have determined from 2PP polling and its history alone.  The idea that Labor needs a primary vote with a 4 in front of it to win a majority on election day, premised on it only once having won a majority with slightly less, is incorrect.  The fact is we haven't seen a lot about what primary votes Labor wins a majority with these days, because it has only once done so since the rise of the Greens.  This article shows that at recent elections, Labor has missed four in-theory chances to win a majority with a lower primary vote than its record low 1990 majority-winning score of 39.4%.  While total minor party votes remain relatively high, it is very likely that if Labor ever wins federal elections again, it will someday break that record.  The primary-vote-to-win history - based overwhelmingly on elections either run in different minor party environments, or else lost heavily - is meaningless. What matters is whether Labor can assemble a decent enough 2PP result and a good enough vote distribution to win a majority of seats.  

Could A Major Party Soon Take Control Of The Tasmanian Legislative Council?

The recent Tasmanian state election featured the holding of Legislative Council elections on the same day as the House of Assembly election for the first time ever.  This was controversial in fairness terms, and there were suggestions that parties might be breaching the Electoral Act, in particular by their candidates benefiting from generic party advertising that fell outside the strict Council spending requirements.  All has gone quiet on the challenge front following the election so far, but the Tasmanian Electoral Act allows a snoozy 90 days (!) for would-be challengers to get their act together, so it's too early to be certain that we've heard the last of it.  The strikingly different voting patterns in the overlapping booths could make it difficult to satisfy the court that Lower House generic advertising affected the upper house results, if that was something that the court considered relevant.  

One of the three seats contested saw a change in party status, with Liberal Nick Duigan picking up Windermere on the retirement of three-term conservative independent Ivan Dean.  This took the Liberals up to four seats out of 15, with Labor on five and six remaining independents.  

How Much Does A Home State Federal Leader Matter In That State?

This piece came about, indirectly, because the Courier-Mail was printing silly sentences again.  A piece commenced with the following lines:

"Kevin Rudd has refused to reveal whether under-pressure Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese can win Queensland despite the former Prime Minister joining him for day one of a whirlwind ‘jobs tour’ across the state. 

[..] 

Mr Albanese was joined by Mr Rudd on the pre-campaign hustings at Southbank – however the former Prime Minister declined to comment when asked by The Sunday-Mail about how or whether Labor could win the state."

Rudd claims he declined to comment because it was the Courier-Mail rather than because of the question.  Whatever the facts in that regard, two things stood out to me in the opening line. Firstly there's the idea that the former Prime Minister is a divine revelator who can exclusively "reveal" facts  about the prospects of Opposition Leaders in his state.  Secondly, the idea that winning Queensland is a realistic or relevant goal for an Albanese-led ALP.  After all, Labor currently needs an enormous 8.44% swing to win the 2PP in Queensland, and has only won the Queensland 2PP three times since the Second World War - 1961, 1990 and 2007, all of them by a whisker

Not Again: Oppositions That Went Backwards Twice In A Row

 A rare form of failure that normally happens about once a decade has happened on the conservative side of Australian politics at two elections in the space of two weeks.  In both the Queensland and the ACT elections, the official Opposition went backwards in seat share for the second election contested as such in a row.  (To be clear about what counts here, Victoria 2018 is not the same thing, since in 2014 the Liberals had contested the Victorian election as the incumbent government - both elections must be contested from opposition to qualify.)  Such a rare event happening to two Oppositions right now might be considered as a sign of how hard life is for Oppositions during the COVID-19 pandemic, or it might also be argued that the two Oppositions in question were unusually hopeless.  In one case (Queensland) there are also some special factors at play.  Anyway, such an event is so unusual that I thought it would be interesting to list all the cases I have found since 1900 of it happening, whether at federal, state or territory level.  I have not found any case of an Opposition going backwards at three elections as the Opposition in a row.  

Age And Canberra Are Still Killing State Governments

 Advance Summary

1. One of the most important factors in state election outcomes is the influence of whether the governing party at state level is in Government or Opposition federally.  To be the same party as the federal Government is a disadvantage.

2. Another important factor is the age of the state government, with governments tending to do worse the longer they have been in office.  

3. In the last six years, all same-party state governments that have faced elections have lost seats in significant numbers.

4. In the meantime, two of the three opposite-party governments gained seats (though one very old opposite-party government was defeated, but with a 2PP swing to it.)

4. It might seem logical that if the federal government at one state election was the same as at the previous election for that state, then this factor would not generate further swings against an incumbent state government of the same party, or further protection for one of the opposite party.

5. However, the evidence suggests otherwise.  It appears that more voters continue turning against state governments that are of the same party as the federal government, over successive elections, even when the same federal government had been in office at the state election before.

Australia's Closest Federal Elections (2019 Wasn't One Of Them)

This article is brought to you by the following quote from Brendan O'Connor, as Labor continues to grapple with its unexpected 2019 federal election loss and continues trying to work out whether what it did wrong this year was hardly anything or almost everything (or something in between):

"Some of the critiques to date, especially from outside the party, remind me of those absurd footy match reviews where despite the margins being very close, extol only the excellence of the winners and denigrate the virtues of the vanquished, even when there was just a kick in it."

He's right, for the most part, of course.  Analysis which praises everything the winner did (because they won) and pans everything the loser did (because they lost) is a massive problem in electoral commentary.  I refer to it as "annotation by result", a chess term for the same thing.

But there are a couple of big caveats here.  Firstly if you're up against Richmond or GWS, you might think a loss by a few points was a decent effort and that with only a little fine-tuning, if you catch them on a bad day next time round, you'll beat them.  But if you think you're a good team and you lose by a goal to the Gold Coast Suns, you might be sacking more than the captain.  One of the hard things with elections is that you can say how much one side won by, but that doesn't tell you if both sides campaigned well or if they were both hopeless.  Before the election the Morrison Government hardly looked like Grand Final material!

How Federal Crossbenchers Gain Seats

I expect to release another Poll Roundup later this week, but have decided to put out something else I have been working on for a while first.

This is another post about general historical trends in federal elections concerning crossbench wins (see also Independents Seldom Replace Other Independents). Recently on Twitter, Peter Brent noted that the crossbenchers who had gained seats at the last few federal elections had all done so either by winning vacant seats or by defeating unpopular incumbents.

I looked at this theme more broadly and thought it was worth posting some expanded results going further back.  In federal elections, House of Representatives seats are won and lost between Labor and the Coalition frequently, and if a seat is close and the swing is on, then a personal vote only goes so far.  Incumbents who have had trouble-free terms are quite often victims of a national swing to the other side. However, they are rarely defeated by anyone else.

Fisher, State By-Elections and Federal Drag

Nat Cook (ALP) provisionally won, defeating Dan Woodyatt (Ind) by 226 votes at the critical exclusion point then Heidi Harris (Lib) by 23 votes.  This is currently being recounted, with Cook defeating Woodyatt by 219 in the recount and defeating Harris by nine votes. Cook will now take her seat and Labor will have an outright majority.

The win may well be challenged in the Court of Disputed Returns.  In this case Labor will hold the seat until such time as the court decides the case.  The court could confirm the win, order a by-election or declare the Liberals to have won the seat.  

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Postcount Introduction

This article follows late counting in the South Australian Fisher by-election.  As at the close of counting on the night this seemed like a very likely win for the ALP who had a 52.1% two-party preferred lead against the Liberals.  Even with a very large percentage of prepolls such leads are very rarely caught.  Although there was still some threat from the independent Dan Woodyatt, I thought I should place the at that stage apparently likely ALP win in its historic context.  That was the theme of the original article. 

What Kills State Governments: Age Or Canberra?

Note (2020): An updated sequel to this article has been published, see Age And Canberra Are Still Killing State Governments

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Advance Summary:

1. This article examines the influence of two factors on the fates of state governments at elections: the age of the state government and whether the same party is in office federally.

2. Results since 1969 show a moderately strong influence of which party is in office federally, but only a very weak impact of age of government.  A state government that is of the same party as the federal government is generally strongly disadvantaged.

3. In the 1970s and 1980s two very old state governments were repeatedly re-elected.

4. Since 1989, both the age of a state government and whether or not the same party is in office federally have been strongly connected to state results.  

5. It is rare, perhaps increasingly rare, for a state government that is the opposite party to the federal government at the time to lose.  When this happens there are very strong reasons for it, with leadership instability a common factor.

6. The strength of the impact of federal politics on state politics can predict otherwise surprise results like the 2014 South Australian election win by Labor.

7.  Furthermore, if the federal government is of the same party as the state government then there is a strong relationship between the popularity of the federal government and the fate of the state government.

8. Even without any knowledge of events or polling in this parliamentary term, models based on the history of these two issues still imply that a change of government in Victoria is likely.