Tasmanian Lower House: 25 or 35 Seats?

This article has been updated for elections from 2014 to 2025. Scroll down to the bottom for these updates.

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Advance summary (pre-2014 version):

1.  The possibility of restoring the old 35-seat system in the Tasmanian House of Assembly is currently being discussed ahead of a motion to be moved by the Greens.

2. Looking at past election results and current polling, the 35-seat system is slightly more proportionally accurate, while the 25-seat system is slightly more prone to "over-represent" the major parties in comparison to vote share.

3. However, precise proportional representation in the Tasmanian context can easily be argued to be overrated anyway.

4. Of the elections considered (and a 2014 projection based on current polling), only in the case of 1998 did the choice of systems determine the election result.

5. Majority government is slightly more likely on average with 25 seats than with 35 seats, but in many scenarios the number of seats makes no real difference to its chances.

6. Strategic considerations favour the Greens supporting an increase in the number of seats and the Liberals opposing it, while for the Labor Party there are arguments on both sides.

7. The view that the Greens could plausibly win more seats than Labor at the next election if the 25-seat system is retained is not consistent with current polling.

8. It is not correct to blame too many problems in Tasmanian politics on the 25-seat system since politics under the 35-seat system was also very turbulent and crisis-prone during its last two decades.

Yet Another Western Sydney Article

Advance Summary

1. The Western Sydney area has received great attention in commentary on the 2013 election although the widespread view that it will decide the election result is almost certainly wrong.

2. Recent ReachTEL polling of some Western Sydney confirms suspicions that very large seat swings are possible in the area.

3. The polling is also notable for returning much better results for Tony Abbott than national polls, and very bad results for Julia Gillard, including in comparison with Kevin Rudd.

4. The polling is not a post-event verdict on the Gillard Western Sydney visit as it was taken just before it.

5. Although voters voting for candidates/parties other than Labor, Liberal, Green in 2010 were Coalition-leaning, there is some reason to suspect (even from very small sample sizes) that self-styled Others voters in ReachTEL polling are less Coalition-leaning than Others voters from 2010.

6. In a quiet week of federal polling, an interesting if messy new development is a Morgan "multi-mode" poll with over 9000 respondents.  However, as this poll is impossible to benchmark for possible house effects because it is a new poll form from that pollster, it is difficult to make use of it yet.

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Whoops!

Email subscribers and some quick site readers may have seen a post that briefly appeared yesterday headed "My view of Labor" and consisting of nothing but blank space (and not very much of that either).  While this may appear to be some kind of deliberate surrealist commentary on the dire status of the modern (?) ALP, it was in fact an accident caused by me pressing a large number of the wrong keys at once while drafting an article and then failing to notice the impact of that until sometime later.

Abnormal service will be resumed shortly - in the meantime, today's Essential came in at 56:44 for the second week in a row, meaning that all of Essential, Nielsen, Newspoll and Morgan, when adjusted for house effects, have produced 55 or 56 in their most recent poll in the last two and a little bit weeks.

Not-A-Poll: Best Tasmanian Premier of the Last 30 Years: The Verdict

Federal note: I've updated my piece on Lilley following a new poll; see Silly Lilleys: Is Wayne Swan Losing His Seat?

 Note on WA election: I don't expect to be covering the WA state election on the night because of other commitments on the same weekend, and I don't have much to say about it except that I concur with the general judgement that the incumbent government is extremely likely to be re-elected, probably easily.  I recommend those interested head directly to The Poll Bludger.  I may have follow-up analysis of Upper House seats however, and sporadic comments on Twitter (@kevinbonham).

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 The opt-in "Not-A-Poll" of reader opinions on the best Tasmanian Premier of the last 30 years has just finished after running through February with 150 votes received.  Huge thanks to all who voted; it has been a fun and I hope worthwhile exercise. 

Origin of the concept

I was inspired provoked to run this Not-A-Poll and write up the outcomes by the mainstream "reporting" of the Galaxy "best prime minister in Australia in the last 25 years" poll released in late January.  That was a credible formal opinion poll based on the views of 1000 respondents, but many of the writeups were abysmal.  The figures for that poll, as originally published in The Mercury, can be seen here.  John Howard topped the poll with 35% of votes, or 44% once uncommitted voters are excluded, but that was no call for nonsense such as:

"Australians overwhelmingly rate John Howard as the country's best prime minister of the past quarter century - and Julia Gillard the worst - in a new poll." (Gemma Jones, The Mercury, Jan 25).

In fact the poll suggests that most Australians do not rate John Howard as the country's best PM of this time (there is not even a non-overwhelming majority of decided voters doing so) and all the poll found was that Howard is the favourite of more voters than each of the other four.  Furthermore the poll did not even ask for opinions on who was the worst PM of this time, so to conclude that Gillard was the worst just because the least people thought she was the best is quite unwarranted.  Indeed, had the same sample been asked which of the five PMs had been the worst, Gillard probably would have topped it, but Howard would have scored highly on that question too.

The reason for Howard's large lead in the Galaxy poll is extremely obvious - he was the only Liberal.  While some voters picked a PM from the other major party, most stuck to party lines, resulting in the four Labor PMs racking up 45% of the vote between them compared to Howard's 35%.  Furthermore, the high undecided rate among Labor supporters (14% compared to 6% for Coalition supporters) most likely resulted from some of the Labor supporters being undecided which Labor PM they preferred the most, not from them being undecided between a Labor PM and Mr Howard.

It is not even clear from the Galaxy results whether Howard is Australia's favorite PM of the last quarter-century at all.  Those preferring Rudd, Keating and Gillard, plus the undecided Labor supporters, might very well prefer Hawke over Howard heavily enough to more than cancel out the 20-point primary gap between Howard and Hawke.

I decided it would be fun to run a similar exercise just among readers of this site for Tasmania, and then give an example of how to interpret such results. 

The weaknesses of opt-ins

Opt-ins, including this Not-A-Poll, and most so-called newspaper website polls, have four common weaknesses that make them a useless indicator of the general views of the public.

Firstly, the readership of any given site is typically not politically representative.  If an opt-in survey is conducted of readers of a right-wing newspaper, then you're likely to get a right-wing response.

Secondly, opt-ins are prone to "motivated response".  This applies more to opt-ins that require some effort to vote in (such as those dreadful "elector surveys" circulated by politicians, sometimes as a form of push-polling), but in general those with strong opinions about the subject of the poll are more likely to bother to vote upon seeing it.

Thirdly, online opt-ins are very prone to organised stacking.  An activist with an interest in a Tasmanian opt-in poll can easily use social networks to get people from outside Tasmania or even Australia to vote on an opt-in question on a website/

Fourthly, and most significantly, it is often possible for a voter to vote multiple times.  Some websites take precautions to discourage this, but there is probably no completely failsafe and practical method.  Many opt-in polls are being deliberately stacked not only by activists of both sides, but also by people with an interest in exposing their unreliable nature.

Media Watch recently featured the adventures of Ubermotive, aka Melbourne software engineer Russell Phillips, who has systematically gamed many dozen online polls to create deadlocked results, favour an unlikely response, or reverse the existing result.  The results of these gamed opt-in polls have then been unsuspiciously reported by their host sites as news.

Luke McIlveen of News.com.au has responded: "I have not published a story about the hacker’s activities because I believe this individual should not be afforded any publicity."  But Phillips is not "hacking" as such, and deserves considerable and favourable publicity for exposing ugly truths about opt-ins and encouraging mainstream media websites to lift their game. It is really the original results of "polls" of such kinds that did not deserve publicity of the sort that they were given (and yet got it). Obviously, if Phillips can do what he did, then political parties can do it too.

The relatively small vote number in my own little exercise suggests that if there was any stacking or multiple voting it was on a very low scale, and watching the votes come in I didn't detect anything all that suspicious.  That said, it would have been very easy to do if anyone had wanted to, and I was curious to see if anyone would.  The main reason my results are not representative of Tasmanian voters as a whole is the first reason above - an unrepresentative audience.

The Labor lean in the results

The five Labor Premiers scored a combined 100 votes, exactly twice as many as the three Liberal Premiers.  To a degree I believe this represents a political leaning to Labor over Liberal of people voting on this site.  This arises from hits on this site in the last month coming from three main sources:

* Pollbludger, which for whatever reason tends to attract an audience of mainly Labor supporters with relatively few Greens and Liberals.

* Twitter, which is generally considered to be somewhat left-wing on the whole (although #politas, the main source of hits other than my follower base, sometimes feels like a bit of an exception to this.)

* Tasmanian Times, posters on which have Green, left-independent or greener-than-Green tendencies. I think the reader base on TT and the poster base are somewhat different but would still expect the reader base to lean left.

However, a lean in the preferences of readers is not the only possible explanation for the two-to-one Labor-to-Liberal margin.  Tasmania last had a Liberal Premier in 1998.  Readers in their early 30s and younger have never voted in an election at which a Liberal was Premier, and voters would have to be in at least their early 40s to have voted in the Robin Gray days.  So, some  readers would be making a choice between the more recent Premiers, all of them Labor, without being that familiar with Gray, Field, Groom or Rundle.

Also, the three Liberal Premiers in the survey all have tainted legacies - Gray as the subject of an adverse finding in a corruption inquiry, Groom as the one who lost his majority after just a single term, and Rundle as the one who co-operated with Labor to reduce the size of parliament, thus sending his party into Opposition for what turned out to be a very long time.

Some other comments on the results

One result that may surprise some is the strong performance of incumbent Premier Lara Giddings, given that she leads one of Tasmania's least popular governments.  Possible explanations for this result include:

* This site would be visited by several readers who have a personal interest in Giddings' political fortunes and who would therefore be inclined to vote for her whether they actually considered her the best of the list or not. 

* It's possible that Green voters would consider Giddings to be the best Premier of those listed on account of her being very socially "progressive" and also having given the most ground to their agenda.  Non-Green voters concerned with gay rights may also rate her the best on policy grounds.

* While the Government is extremely unpopular, there is no evidence that Giddings herself is unpopular.  Approval ratings have not yet been polled in Giddings' term as Premier, but her preferred-premier scores have been about what would be expected given her government's dire polling position.  

I'm inclined to reject the idea that being the only female gave Giddings a big advantage.  This certainly wasn't the case for Gillard in the Galaxy poll.  I noticed Giddings polled especially strongly at two times - when the poll had just started, and when I released analysis of the EMRS poll.

Paul Lennon's distant last place with just four votes (2.7%) - one of them a probable sympathy vote -  may well produce an "ouch!" response, and be seen to give further credit to the view that he was spectacularly unpopular while in office.  In fact, the final-poll 17% result for Lennon often claimed to have been his "approval rating" was actually his preferred-premier score, and it was very likely deflated by Labor voters who preferred David Bartlett to be Premier picking "none of the above".  A true approval rating for Lennon at the time would have been poor, but not that poor.  I reckon it would have been about 30.

I also suspect that the kinds of voters who would be least unlikely to think that Lennon was the best Premier of the last 30 years - most likely elderly, somewhat socially conservative, traditional ALP voters - would not be likely to read websites such as this one.  It's also possible that a lot of the Bacon voters would rank Lennon second. 

(The least popular Premier in Tasmanian polling history, by the way, was Harry Holgate, who in one old Morgan poll polled an approval of 11 and a disapproval of 66, and then followed that with an approval of 15 and a disapproval of 74.  I am not aware of worse figures than this being recorded by any incumbent Premier or PM, although Keating at one stage came close.)

And the winner is ...

And finally, here are the results, together with a quick electoral form guide for each of the eight Premiers in question:

1. Jim Bacon (ALP, 1998-2004) 41 votes
Elections as party leader: 1998 (Won outright from opposition), 2002 (Won, retaining majority)
Elections as candidate: 1996, 1998, 2002 (won all)
Highest personal vote: 35.5% in 2002, as Premier.

2. Lara Giddings (ALP, 2011-) 23 votes
Elections as party leader: None yet
Elections as candidate: 1996 (won), 1998 (lost seat), 1999 (Pembroke LegCo - lost), 2002 (won), 2006 (won), 2010 (won)
Highest personal vote: 15.1% in 2010, as Deputy Premier.

3. Ray Groom (Lib, 1992-6) 21 votes
Elections as party leader: 1992 (Won outright from opposition), 1996 (Lost majority and resigned, but party remained in office)
Elections as candidate: 1986, 1989, 1992, 1996, 1998 (won all)
Highest personal vote: 26.8% in 1992, as Opposition Leader.

4. Robin Gray (Lib, 1983-9) 20 votes
Elections as party leader: 1982 (Won outright from opposition), 1986 (Retained majority), 1989 (Lost majority and government)
Elections as candidate: 1976, 1979, 1982, 1986, 1989, 1992 (won all)
Highest personal vote: 42.2% in 1986, as Premier.

5. Michael Field (ALP, 1989-92) 19 votes
Elections as party leader: 1989 (Won minority government from opposition), 1992 (Lost outright), 1996 (Lost, but Liberal government lost majority)
Elections as candidate: 1976, 1979, 1982, 1986, 1989, 1992, 1996 (won all)

Highest personal vote: 15.6% in 1989, as Opposition Leader.

6. David Bartlett (ALP, 2008-11) 13 votes
Elections as party leader: 2010 (Lost majority but remained Premier)
Elections as candidate: 2002 (lost, but later elected on countback), 2006 (won), 2010 (won)
Highest personal vote: 15.9% in 2010, as Premier.

7. Tony Rundle (Lib, 1996-8) 9 votes
Elections as party leader: 1998 (Lost outright)
Elections as candidate: 1982 (lost), 1986 (won), 1989 (won), 1992 (won), 1996 (won), 1998 (won)
Highest personal vote: 23.0% in 1998, as Premier.

8. Paul Lennon (ALP, 2004-8) 4 votes
Elections as party leader: 2006 (Won, retaining majority)
Elections as candidate: 1992 (lost, but later elected on countback), 1996 (won), 1998 (won), 2002 (won), 2006 (won)
Highest personal vote: 26.1% in 2006, as Premier.

UPDATE (10 March): Vote theft scandal!  Oddly, the poll as displayed on the site now shows Bacon on 40 votes.  

2001: The Final Frontier

Advance summary:

1.  Combined results of all current polling suggest that the Gillard Labor government is now in a worse position than any past winning government - in terms of the amount by which it trails for the time remaining to the election - except for Howard's in 2001.

2.  If Labor does not have a 2PP position better than 46% by late March, it will fall behind Howard's 2001 recovery curve.

3.  It is also possible that very bad polling in the next few weeks would cause Labor to reach a position worse than that Howard recovered from in 2001.

4.  Being in a position from which recovery is without precedent or has few precedents does not mean a party cannot win an election.  However, it suggests they are unlikely to do so.

5.  This article also includes subjective waffle about Labor's current leadership and direction problems and the difficulty finding a clear and competitive way out of the mess the government has got itself into.

Update (25 Feb): It is now debatable whether even Howard's 2001 recovery is a valid precedent for recovery from the Gillard Government's current situation.

EMRS - Liberals locking in support

 Note to Tas or other interested readers: if you haven't already done so please vote in my not-a-poll for Best Tasmanian Premier of the last 30 years on the sidebar.  Looks like the only poll Tasmanian Labor can still be confident of winning!

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EMRS: Liberal 55 Labor 23 (-4) Green 18 (+3) Ind 4 (+1)
Interpretation: Liberal 56 Labor 25 Green 15 Ind 4 (Ind figure depending on candidates)
Outcome "if election was held now": Liberal majority win (14-16 seats)

The new EMRS poll is out with a headline rate of Liberal 55 Labor 23 Greens 18 Ind 4.  This is very similar to results polled in late 2011. The Greens have recovered some of the seven points lost last time (a loss which I suspected at the time was caused partly by sample anomalies) but it is still their equal second-worst result in this term of government.  The EMRS headline figure habitually overestimates Green support and the figure from the table with undecideds included (Table 2) tends to provide a much better reading of Green support. 

The very helpful trend tracking on the EMRS website shows that this is the Liberals' equal highest headline reading in this term, matching the 55 in August 2011 and the same in November 2012.  But it is actually better than that for the party because their figure including undecided votes (46 - Table 2) is now at its highest level in EMRS history, compared to the 44 in Aug 2011 and the 43 in Nov 2012.  This suggests the party is increasingly "locking in" the votes it needs to win majority government.  Labor, on the other hand, is if anything shedding votes from the firmer end of its support base, with its Table 2 figure back to a miserable 17%, one point above its all-time low.  The gap of 29 points at the firm end of the parties' support bases is the highest it has been and about twice the size needed for majority government.  While I have assumed in my "interpretation" figure above that the voters who are undecided even after being asked what party they are leaning to will split evenly between the major parties, it is possible it could be even worse than this for Labor.  If the remaining undecided voters break to the Liberals as well then a Liberal vote in the high 50s becomes possible.

Federal 2PP estimate feature added

 (Note: This article documents the experimental phase of the aggregate, which ran from February to September 2013.  For transitional arrangements post the election see here.)

I've just added a subjective two-party-preferred vote (2PP) estimate feature on the sidebar.  The reason I have added this feature is that I commonly get involved in discussions on various sites in which someone is making claims about the likely state of the national 2PP that aren't even remotely credible, or just getting confused about all the different polls and the strange range of values they spit out.  I think a fair few people will from time to time be interested in my view of where things are at, especially when having those kinds of debates while I'm not around.  There are some handy formal aggregators about, but they often take a few days to update and I often find my view a little out from theirs (and usually somewhere in the middle of them all), typically because everyone has slightly different views on the best underlying assumptions.  When I can, I'll be aiming to update this estimate quickly.

The 2PP estimate is not a fully formalised aggregator and is not a scientific test. I'm not at the point of being ready to attempt something like that yet, and while I have a long-running Newspoll rolling-average of sorts for historical comparison purposes, I've only recently developed an interest in trying to gauge the picture across all federal pollsters.  It's just my hopefully informed opinion on the basis of an informal and at this stage loosely defined aggregation process.  The rough assumptions I make in thinking about the national 2PP are as follows.  (Note: Article has been edited to give the current version.  Legacy text appears at the bottom so people can see how this model has developed.)

Rogues, Recoveries and Irrelevant Portents

Admin note for Tas readers especially: this month I am running Not-A-Poll: Best Tasmanian Premier of the last 30 years.  Please vote (on right) if you have an opinion!  Readers may be surprised to see the Premier of one of Tasmania's least popular governments ever (ie the current one) challenging for the lead, as well as the big lead for the Labor premiers over the Liberal ones, but there are actually quite a few reasons why this might occur.  When the not-a-poll is finished I'll post some comments about the exercise and what it means. Of course, the results are not representative of the general population - and that's even assuming nobody stacks the thing!

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Advance Summary

1. Following a very turbulent week in federal politics, this week's polls on average show a small move to the Coalition.

2. The Newspoll showing a result of 56:44 to the Coalition is unrepresentative and probably exceeds the real figure by at least 2 points.

3. The Newspoll reading is probably not, however, a "rogue poll".

4. Over-calling of supposed "rogue polls" is a very common problem in the online poll-watching community.  This article provides many cautionary notes about use of the term "rogue" to describe a poll result.

5. The Government's polling position is now worse than that of the Keating Government in 1992-3 was at the equivalent or any later stage.

6. There are possibly still as many as six cases of governments recovering from worse polling positions than Labor's current position (with the time to go until the election factored in), however in three of those cases the data are very limited and at least one of the others is probably an invalid comparison.

7. Claimed evidence that either the declaration of the election date well in advance, or the chosen election date itself, are bad portents for Labor is not valid.

8. This article concludes with some discussion of contradictory voter attitudes to the economy, which may be posing a major problem for Labor at the moment.  

What's Green, Tasmanian And Probably Isn't Endangered?

The Miena Jewel Beetle! (Castiarina insculpta)

The MJB: Giving extinction rumours the finger since 2004!

It's only tenuously related to politics, as a classic case of threatened species being considered firstly extinct and then endangered when in practice hardly anything is known about it - a problem which pads threatened species lists (especially Tasmania's) with unjustified or exaggerated listings, creates "green tape" and distorts conservation priorities.  The problem is, of course, that many of these species do not even become the focus of serious research attention until they are listed.  And even so, much of the research is done on an amateur basis, as it was in the recent first known find of the species in numbers, in which I was involved.  In fact, I found the first one of several found by our group faster than I could spot an 11% swing to Andrew Wilkie in the Sandfly Polling Booth!   You can see a rather low quality camera-video shot by me and read some more text about it here.  More pictures (by people who know how to use a camera!) on the Tasmanian Field Naturalists Club Flickr page here.

This post represents my own opinions  facts only.

Update (1 Mar):  See the ABC TV news item here.  Further searches through February have continued to reveal good numbers.  I can add that there was one other live sighting in recent times - by a very experienced entomologist who seems to have never drawn any public attention to the sighting or logged it, but fortunately, he did one day casually mention it to me.  It was at that site where we first found the species, but we've found it to be quite widespread in the area.