Cable car catch-up

Not everyone notices when I post links to updates on the sidebar, so for those who read from the top, just a very quick note that I have updated my old article on polling on the proposed kunanyi/Mt Wellington Cable Car following the release of two new polls by groups opposed to the project.

I thought I'd highlight this with a note at the top because I'm actually mildly annoyed about it.  Up til now it has only been the prospective developers of the cable car through time who have engaged in the usual silly commissioned-poll games involving misleading polls with biased preambles.

Now it's both sides.

If you respect the mountain, you should also respect the facts.

Disassociation From Tasmanian Times

Update (March 2020): Tasmanian Times has a new owner and at this stage the moderation problems I encountered with the site have not returned.  The current situation is that I am still not going to post on TT, but will now link to the site as appropriate.

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Until yesterday there was an image link to this website in the sidebar of Tasmanian Times (which I ceased writing for in 2012).  Such as it was (I'm no graphic designer!), it looked like this:

However I have now decided to disassociate this site from Tasmanian Times to the maximum extent possible.

The nature of this decision is as follows:

1. It is no longer possible to reach this site via the sidebar on TT as the link has been removed at my request.

2. I have asked the TT editor to cease promoting and linking to my site on TT.

3. Barring a major improvement in TT moderation or other satisfactory solution, I will not post any more comments to TT in the future at all.  (Since leaving the site as a writer in 2012 I have only commented there rarely anyway.)

4. All future links to TT that I may post here in the course of my coverage or debate will be to a Wayback Machine version of the content only.

Batman Bits And Pieces

There are a few points of interest I thought were worth commenting on quickly following Labor's drubbing of the Greens in the Batman by-election.

The 34% swing that wasn't

It has been widely reported that the Northcote West booth swung to Labor by 34 points.  This is incorrect; the actual two-party swing in that booth was 9%, which was still one of the largest in the electorate.  It was quite obvious based on the primary votes that the AEC had accidentally transposed the Labor and Green 2PP figures during data entry.  This kind of thing happens now and then and it is best to check cases where one booth says something off the scale before commenting further.

Tasmania 2018: But What Does It All Mean?

LIBERAL 13 LABOR 9 GREEN 1 UNDECIDED 2
Undecided: Franklin - Liberal vs Green - tossup
Undecided: Bass - Labor vs Green vs Liberal - Labor slightly favoured, Liberal chance remote

After the last Tasmanian election, I saw no need to unpack possible meanings of the result, as I thought it was all obvious to anyone who had followed the state's politics through that time.  This one, however, is different, though I certainly won't claim to have all the answers.  A government that seemed to be sleepwalking to a loss of majority has rebounded to the point of suffering just a trivial swing against it.  The Labor opposition did rebound to a degree, but mostly at the cost of the Greens.

Some facts and stats

A few facts about the election first.  For the first time since the 1970s, and the first time for a conservative party since 1912-3, the Liberal Party has topped 50% of the primary vote for a second election in a row.  The charge was led by Premier Hodgman, whose 38.3% is the highest candidate vote since Robin Gray in 1986.  (Hodgman will also break Doug Lowe's 1979 record for the largest number of votes recorded by a candidate, though this record is somewhat meaningless because of population growth. Lowe's record for the highest candidate percentage, 51.2%, may very well never be beaten - and I don't think the fact it was achieved before Robson Rotation really makes much of a difference.)

Scott Ludlam Mess Scores Four Bob Days Out Of Five

Well here we go again.  After the departures of Senators-who-sort-of-never-were Rod Culleton and Bob Day we've lost another one.  After nine years in the Senate, one of the sharper minds in the place, Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, has suddenly realised he has been a dual New Zealand citizen all along and was never validly elected in the first place.  That sound you heard all afternoon was at least 200,000 Greens supporters banging their heads on the nearest available tree in disbelief.  As for me, I was so distracted by this situation that I needlessly got off a bus in the middle of Hobart city, forgetting it continued past a common stopping point to much closer to home.  No problem though, since I then managed to beat the bus to its next stop on foot and catch the same bus again.  Ludlam's path to getting his seat back, should he want to, would be rather less straightforward.

For the most part this one is a familiar situation.  Although Ludlam has resigned, the fact that he has raised eligibility issues as his reason for doing so should prompt an immediate referral to the Court of Disputed Returns (the High Court in theory though it may well get kicked downstairs to the Federal Court if there are no new legal issues) to determine whether Ludlam was validly elected in the first place (to which the answer is evidently no) and to supervise the filling of the vacancy.  The vacancy will be filled by a recount (called a "special count") as with the vacancies for Day and Culleton.  The Greens won two seats in the original election and in the Culleton recount, beating the WA Nationals' Kado Muir by 25175 votes in both cases.  The recount could shave a few thousand off this (about 2800 personal votes for Ludlam leak out of the Greens ticket based on the original counts) but there's no doubt the Greens would keep two seats.  One of these will be their other existing Senator, Rachel Siewert, and the other will be the third candidate on the original ticket, Jordon Steele-John.

However this recount does raise some new ground. Firstly it's the first time a state will have had to be recounted for two disqualifications from the same election, meaning that the new count will be without both Culleton and Ludlam. Secondly and more interestingly, it creates previously unseen complications with the original allocation of three and six year terms. Scott Ludlam was elected third in 2016 with Rachel Siewert elected 12th.  In the special count to replace Ludlam, Siewert will be elected third and Steele-John will be elected 12th.  So if Steele-John replaces Ludlam and serves out Ludlam's term, then this will create a bizarre situation of the candidate second on the Greens ticket being a Senator for three years while the third candidate on the ticket is a Senator for the balance of six, clearly not the preference of the party's voters.

Lapoinya Scrapes The Barrel Of Tasmania's Forests Conflict

Tasmania has seen some big environmental contests down the years.  Lake Pedder, the Franklin dam, Farmhouse Creek, Wesley Vale, the Bell Bay pulp mirage, Ralphs Bay.  The latest flashpoint, Lapoinya, isn't one of them.  To many veterans on either side it must be astonishing that we now have a barney over the logging of forty-nine hectares of regrowth - that anyone would bother protesting it, let alone getting arrested over it, or on the other hand that anyone would bother with the logging or arresting.  To put it into perspective, bushfires in Tasmania have burnt almost 900 Lapoinya-coupes worth of native vegetation in the past fortnight alone.

The Lapoinya argument seems like nothing more than a vintage example of Sayre's Law (the contest is so bitter precisely because the stakes are so small).  Behind what has become a comically petty contest in the context of the battles of the past, however, are some players with a bigger game to play.  But before I get onto specifics of Lapoinya (then all that), I'd like to look at how we got here.

Poll Roundup: Silly Lefties Oppose Senate Reform

2PP Aggregate: 52.9 to ALP (+0.2 since last week, +0.5 in three weeks)

Labor would comfortably win an election "held now"

With the release of a new ReachTEL plus regular offerings from Morgan and Essential, and also a rather striking Morgan leadership phone poll, there's enough new content for another roundup of federal polling.

The Morgan phone poll didn't include a released 2PP figure (they sometimes include them and sometimes don't) so there are three new polls to add.  The ReachTEL taken on Thursday had a rounded 2PP of 54:46 and Essential's was 53:47.  However in both cases the released primaries pointed to the rounding having been in Labor's favour, and I aggregated them at 53.6% and 52.8% respectively.  

Last week's Morgan was 54:46 by last-election preferences; after adjusting for the primaries and the lean to Labor in Morgan's multi-mode series that one went in at 52.3.   The Morgan was unusual in that respondent-allocated preferences only gave an outcome of 53:47 to Coalition.  This was the first time in this whole term that respondent preferences have been a point worse for Labor than the published 2PP; they have been half a point worse four times with the last of those just over a year ago.

In all my aggregate shows a slight, but not yet statistically meaningful, drift back to Labor over the past three weeks.  This is best shown this week on the spiky (non-smoothed) graph of aggregate readings, noting that the ReachTEL has been back-inserted into last week's reading.

Nil-All On Anti-Protesting

Last night the new Tasmanian state Liberal government fulfilled one of its election promises by passing the Workplaces (Protection From Protestors) Bill 2014.  This bill was mainly inspired by a desire to crack down on anti-forestry protestors who obstruct lawful businesses.  We haven't seen that much of that sort of thing lately in Tasmania, but based on the new government's attempts to rip up what it can of the forestry "peace deal" passed during the last government's rule, we may be seeing more of it quite soon. Anti-forestry protests are considered a problem not just because of the obstruction to workers they create, but also because the ease of conducting illegal anti-forestry protests greatly assists activists to gain media coverage that helps in their attempts to damage the industry's brand.

Polling And The Proposed Pulp Mill

What's big, doesn't exist and eats Tasmanian Premiers?

The release of Mercury-commissioned ReachTEL polling about the proposed Tamar Valley pulp mill and its impact on state election voting seems a good time to write something I've been meaning to put up here for some time.  There's a view doing the rounds, among some of the green and gullible, that the last time this proposal was about, a huge body of credible polling showed very strong opposition to it.  As well as discussing the current poll, this article takes a little trip down memory lane and points out why we never knew as much about public views of the pulp mill as some of its more ardent opponents told us that we did.  It also includes a few of my own thoughts on the "issue" of the proposed pulp mill.

Anyway, here is the new pulp mill poll result:

2013 Ehrlich Award For Wrong Predictions

Not much going on in the world of pseph with all the polls still asleep (though Morgan is showing some signs of waking up soon) so not much to report lately.  I am hoping to soon publish a review of Cory Bernardi's oxymoronically-titled "The Conservative Revolution" but this depends on me being able to obtain a copy without paying for it. (If any readers can help out with this, that would be great.  I promise to take appropriate medical precautions prior to opening its pages.)

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This article unveils the second annual Ehrlich Award, which at or about the start of each year will be given to the "wrongest" published prediction I observe relating to (or made in) the previous calendar year. 

There are a few groundrules - for instance the predictions need to be meaningful (in terms of being able to assess objectively whether they have happened), and secondly predictions that carry a stated assessment of chance of falsehood are not included unless that assessed chance is ludicrously low.  After all, even odds-on favourites do get beaten sometimes.

Labor And The Greens Shall Not Complain About Family First

(Update 1 Oct: Bob Day has been elected as expected.)

You'll see a lot of this sort of thing in the next six years if, as expected, Family First's Bob Day gets up in South Australia:

For those who don't know, Helen Polley is a Labor Senator for Tasmania, albeit a very "socially conservative" one.   Now, I have no problem with the proposition that there may be some real nutters in the seemingly soft and fuzzy Family First fold.  My open question then to Senator Polley is this:

If Day and Fielding are indeed so bad, why did your party preference both of them?

If You Care About Gay Rights, Vote Below The Line In The Tas Senate

And no, I don't just mean same-sex marriage.  This goes way beyond just that.

If you care about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights even to the smallest degree, and are considering your vote in the Tasmanian Senate, then I have the following strong advice:

Vote below the line and direct your own preferences

If you absolutely must vote above the line, consider doing so for the Pirate Party or the Sex Party, but only if you broadly support their policies and are happy with their preference allocations (which you may or may not be, depending on your politics). I should caution here that the Sex Party direct their preferences first to the Country Alliance, who are an unknown quantity (to me) on sexual rights issues. [Update: you can see their vague and socially-conservative comments on same-sex marriage here.] The Pirate Party is only a suitable choice for an above-the-line vote if you do not mind your preferences going directly to the Greens. Many people, of course, do mind this, but quite a few readers won't.

If you want help voting below the line, see the bottom of this article.  (If you're short of time and don't need me to explain the reasons for my advice, feel free to skip to that bit right away.)

Why am I suggesting voting below the line, even though this means numbering 54 boxes instead of one?  Because a vote above the line for any party except the two mentioned above could potentially help elect anti-gay-rights extremist Peter Madden of the Family First Party - who has a very strong above-the-line ticket flow - ahead of at least one of Labor, Liberal, or the Greens.  Yes, even if you vote Labor or Green above the line in the Tasmanian Senate, it is possible for your vote to elect Peter Madden.  If you vote below the line you can put him 51, 52, 53 or 54, and still support your chosen party.  Let's forget all the silly sparring between the big three about how a vote for Labor is a vote for the Greens or whatever - the bigger problem is that a vote for any of them above the line is potentially a vote, or part of a vote, for Peter Madden.  A vote for almost anyone above the line in Tasmania is potentially a vote for him.

Poll Roundup and Seat Betting Watch July 16

2PP Aggregate (Tuesday 16 July): 50.0 TIED (+0.2 for ALP since last week)
Individual Seat Betting: Labor favourites in 63 seats (+2 this week - Lingiari, Brisbane)
Seat Total Market: Labor 68 seats (+2)

This is instalment three in what seems to be becoming a regular weekly series in the leadup to the election.  The first Seat Betting Watch is here and last week's Poll Roundup and Seat Betting Watch is here.  As stated before, the aim of this exercise is not to claim that seat betting markets have predictive value, but to test whether they do, and to see which of the markets and the aggregated polls see the ultimate outcome of the election first.


This Week's Polls

As well as the 51-49 to Labor from AMR late last week, we've now had a 50-50 from Nielsen, a 52-48 to the Coalition from Essential and a 51.5-48.5 to Labor by last-election preferences from Morgan Multi-Mode.  (I did cop an "AGGGGHHH!!!!" and a "stupid" on Twitter for continuing to prefer last-election preferences to respondent-allocated but I'll believe KAP voters have turned into lefties only when data show they have.)

The net impact of these on my aggregate has been small and I currently have the two parties dead level on two-party-preferred vote share.  Essential and Morgan don't seem to be behaving the same way compared to other pollsters as they did before Rudd was reinstalled, and Mark the Ballot has a nice wrap of what a pain in the neck this all is for modellers here. (Also see the comment by Julian King on that article.)  Fortunately, the probably false assumption that neither has a significant house effect results in them largely cancelling each other out in my very simple model, but it's a bigger problem for those who take Morgan's large sample size into account.  It may turn out that either of these pollsters has struck it lucky and all the rest are too high or too low, but I'll keep assuming that that isn't the case.  Something to keep an eye on here is that Rudd is doing very well with young voters, and young voters are the most difficult to sample accurately for conventional polls, even with scaling.

Liberty, Abortion and the "Salamanca Declaration"

Warning: this article may offend some readers. 
(Not much pseph in it either; a little bit in the Emily's Voice section mainly.)

It has been, for the most part, an unedifying fortnight in Tasmanian public debate, and I am not about to make it better.  I generally dislike writing about abortion-related issues at all, because there are too many people who appear to believe that being emotional on behalf of "unborn babies" trumps not only every opposing philosophical argument, but also the most basic responsibility of understanding the existing legislative situation and understanding what changes are actually being proposed.  Admittedly, understanding the existing legislative situation has been too much for not just ranting objectors, but for many doctors as well, and that is exactly one of the reasons why the Lower House has attempted to change it.

Abortion Law Reform: The Vote

Finally late last night, abortion law reform was passed 13-11 by the House of Assembly and is off to the Legislative Council.  The bill that was passed has the following key features:

Tasmanian Devils Not On The "Verge of Extinction"

This extinction talk is all a bit of a yawn really.  (Image credit: www.waynemaclean.com)

Late last year, fifteen Tasmanian devils were released on Maria Island, an action that had been in the pipeline for many years.  You can watch cute footage of their cautious emergence into their new environment here.
Devil populations statewide are being ravaged by Devil Facial Tumour Disease (warning: link contains some remarkably ugly and potentially distressing images), a very unusual contagious cancer spread when animals bite each other during fights, that was first photographed in the north-east of Tasmania in 1996.   The Save the Tasmanian Devil website noted:

"As at February 2011, there has been an 84% decline in average sightings of devils across Tasmania during the annual spotlight surveys. In the north-east region, where signs of DFTD were first reported, there has been a 96% decline of average sightings."

A figure of 91% reduction in spotlighting results has been given in some recent media reports.

2012 Ehrlich Award For Wrong Predictions Goes To ...

Introducing the annual Ehrlich Award, which at the start of each year will be given to the "wrongest" published prediction I observe of or relating to the previous calendar year. (Of course, if I make a really stupid prediction of my own pertaining to this or any other year, I will happily self-nominate, and even if necessary self-award. )

There are a few groundrules - for instance the predictions need to be vaguely meaningful (in terms of being able to assess whether they have happened - this year's winner stretches that one sometimes), and secondly predictions that carry a stated assessment of chance of falsehood are not included unless that assessed chance is ludicrously low.  After all, even odds-on favourites do get beaten sometimes. 

The Ehrlich Award is named in (dis)honour of Paul Ehrlich whose lifetime achievements in the field of publishing wrong enviro-scare predictions (oh no, you're an "idiot" if you say they were "predictions"; they were actually only "scenarios") are almost as staggering as the excuses trotted out on behalf of all his false apocalypses.  Apparently, not only is it a hit predictively for Ehrlich fans if something vaguely like the prediction happened, or if it could still happen later, but even if nothing like it happened, that's a hit too, because it means people must have listened to the prophet's warnings and, for that reason alone, averted their ways from their sins.

LegCo Ices Forestry Peace/Surrender Deal - Updated

UPDATE:  This is an old article with a now dated title that has been updated.  For the updates scroll to the bottom.

(Admin notes: 1. Thanks to readers who voted in the jump breaks poll; poll has closed and preferences have been distributed!  2.  On or about 1 January 2013 this site will award the inaugural Ehrlich to the maker of the most wrong prediction in or relating to the year 2012 in any field that interests me.  The winner has been decided already, but nominations are welcome!  3. This article concerns (i) my views of the Tasmanian forest "peace deal" (ii) my comments about the voting behaviour that occurred during the LegCo vote on it and the (iii) possible future electoral and reform impacts.  As there are some out there who may not be interested in (i) and only wish to read (ii) and (iii), I advise them to scroll down to the point marked "It is safe to come out now".)

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In the beginning, there was the Acronym, and the Acronym was HCV.

And HCV stood for "High Conservation Value", and was a term employed to imply that certain forests were objectively so important that it would be unconscionable to log them.

In fact, HCV is a term with no objective scientific standing, since there are many different conservation-related properties that different people think are important, and valuation is a subjective process.  One person might think the forests that are most important are those that are the most scenic, another might most prefer those that shelter rare animals, and still another might prefer those that they believe best capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  Any forest might be found very valuable by someone who in some sense cares about "conservation", and of little value by someone else who meets the same description.

The term, however, formally derives from its use by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an international forest certification agency.  At the time of writing Wikipedia has what appears to be a sound coverage of this term and if you fancy a detailed look at implementation possibilities the High Conservation Value Forest Toolkit is also worth a look.

Negotiations between environmental groups known collectively as the ENGOs (Wilderness Society, the umbrella group Environment Tasmania and the Australian Conservation Foundation) and industry bodies began in 2010, against a backdrop of the desire by the now under-administration Gunns Limited to get out of native forest logging in order to obtain a social licence for its proposed Bell Bay Pulp Mill, one of an endless series of pie in the sky development proposals for the state, most of which never eventuate.

The LegCo's Claimed Reasons For Rejecting Same-Sex Marriage

(See also Legislative Council Voting Patterns since the last state election.)

Advance Summary:

1. Analysis of the speeches of the eight Legislative Councillors who recently opposed the Tasmanian Same-Sex Marriage Bill 2012 shows that at most five spoke against the concept of allowing same-sex marriage at this time in general.  These five were Tania Rattray, Dr Vanessa Goodwin, Adriana Taylor, Ivan Dean and Rosemary Armitage.  (Of these, in Rattray's case the evidence is arguable and limited.)

2. The remaining Legislative Councillors to vote against (Paul Harriss, Jim Wilkinson and Greg Hall) did not indicate an explicit view for or against federal marriage equality, but expressed reservations about the concept of state-based legislation and/or its delivery.

3. The defeat of the bill cannot therefore be interpreted as a rejection of the concept of marriage equality by the Upper House, and represents only the rejection of a given state-based proposal.

4. Every MLC arguing against the bill argued that it was a federal issue, and every MLC arguing against the concept generally supported the idea of marriage as being only between a man and a woman.  

5. Other common arguments against the bill included the risks, success chances and costs of a High Court challenge, the bill being a second-rate version of the concept, that the bill would not end discrimination, and that the State Government lacked a mandate.

6. Some MLCs voting against the bill made extremely unsound arguments about public opinion.  This suggests a need for politicians to be better briefed on how to (and especially how not to) understand and measure public opinion.

The Compliant Coalitionists: Voting Patterns in the Tasmanian Lower House

Advance summary:

1. In Tasmania's current Labor-Green coalition-governed Parliament, votes on the floor of the Parliament in which the Greens vote with the Liberals are rare.

2. The most common voting pattern by far is that Labor and the Greens vote on one side and the Liberals on the other.

3. Yet this was the least common voting pattern by far under Labor majority rule between 2002 and 2010.

4. The pattern in the current parliament is also very different to the previous minority government situation in the state. 

5. The formation of a formal coalition between Labor and the Greens appears to have assisted in reducing the proportion of times that the parties disagree with each other, and especially the chance of Labor-introduced legislation being voted down.  This has apparently increased the stability of the minority parliament.

6.  However this has come at the cost of both the transparency lauded by advocates of minority government and its genuine "Laborness" as understood in the Tasmanian context.

7. The view that the major parties are "Laborials" and agree on nearly everything with the Greens as the real "opposition" is not consistent with any data about voting on the floor of parliament.

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A strange thing happened this week during debate on the many proposed changes to the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Act.  A proposal by Labor to grant "faith-based" schools the right to preferentially enrol religious students in cases of competition for enrolments or waiting lists was shot down on both sides: by the Greens, who did not support the policy at all, and by the Liberals, who wanted it to go much further.  (For the record, where a school receives even one cent per annum in state funding or financial support at either state or federal level, I am strongly with the Greens on this.  If a school wants to run entirely using private money, with no government assistance of any sort at all, then and only then will I support its right to enrol whoever it likes.)

This was an example of what was supposed to happen in the Tasmanian hung parliament, according to defenders of minority government: a transparent display of the party positions of all three parties on the floor of the House, with the outcome determined by agreement of two of the parties.  (Though in this case, it was a strange variant even of that, with the Liberals effectively supporting the Greens' policy so they could continue pushing for more than Labor's).   But in the current Tasmanian parliament, which features a Labor-Green coalition, it has been one of very few examples of exceptions that prove the rule.

About

This is just a belated self-indulgent intro post that provides info about my experience in psephology and politics, and my general political views, and a picture of me when I had much more hair.  I'm putting it up so that I can link to it on the sidebar to encourage accuracy-in-pigeonholing, along the lines of Possum's piece here.  That's my excuse, anyway.

In summary, I'm an economic centrist on average, a social libertarian mostly, an environmental contrarian on some issues, and someone who's in no danger of telling you all who to vote for, since I have enough trouble working that out for myself.  (But I may, from time to time, recommend someone to vote against.)

A disclosure statement has been added to the bottom of this page.