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| This is what Jacqui Lambie's Facebook page looked like before she joined PUP (image: @AutumnalMonk) |
Thursday, November 20, 2014
Comments On The Lambie/PUP Split
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Poll Roundup: G20 No Help To Government
2PP Aggregate: 53.1 to ALP (+0.8 since last week, +2.1 in five weeks, highest in four months)
ALP would easily win election "held right now"
A fairly quick update as I have a lot of other work to do, which may sometime over the weekend or so include putting this piece of pseudo-scientific garbage in its place. This week the federal government hosted the G20 meeting in Brisbane. This would have been expected to at least allow the government to dominate the media cycle and demonstrate its international credibility. However, things haven't been that simple. Climate change was seen to dominate the agenda (probably to a greater extent than it actually did), and the isolation of Vladimir Putin by various Anglosphere leaders was still an anticlimax compared to the threatened "shirtfronting". Even when Australia signed a generally well-received (if probably not well understood) free trade agreement with China, the Prime Minister still ran into Parrot problems.
But doubtless the worst moment of the conference for the Coalition was the PM's widely slammed address in which he was seen as not only rabbiting on to world leaders about irrelevant domestic issues, but also doing so in a way that whinged about the known unpopularity of government measures such as GP co-payments. It was a free hit for the Opposition and it was duly and effectively taken.
ALP would easily win election "held right now"
A fairly quick update as I have a lot of other work to do, which may sometime over the weekend or so include putting this piece of pseudo-scientific garbage in its place. This week the federal government hosted the G20 meeting in Brisbane. This would have been expected to at least allow the government to dominate the media cycle and demonstrate its international credibility. However, things haven't been that simple. Climate change was seen to dominate the agenda (probably to a greater extent than it actually did), and the isolation of Vladimir Putin by various Anglosphere leaders was still an anticlimax compared to the threatened "shirtfronting". Even when Australia signed a generally well-received (if probably not well understood) free trade agreement with China, the Prime Minister still ran into Parrot problems.
But doubtless the worst moment of the conference for the Coalition was the PM's widely slammed address in which he was seen as not only rabbiting on to world leaders about irrelevant domestic issues, but also doing so in a way that whinged about the known unpopularity of government measures such as GP co-payments. It was a free hit for the Opposition and it was duly and effectively taken.
Saturday, November 15, 2014
Victorian Poll Roundup And Seat Betting Watch: Sandbelt Edition
2PP aggregate of recent Victorian state polling: ALP leads 53.2-46.8
"Nowcast" seat estimate based on this 2PP: ALP 49 Coalition 39
It's taken a while for enough polling to build up to justify another Victorian pre-election roundup to follow last fortnight's, but that point has been reached with the belated release of results for the Fairfax-Ipsos poll taken last weekend. Why it has taken the Age until Friday to get this data out there is anyone's guess, but at least we have it now.
If you followed the media comments about the unreliable mutterings of both parties about internal polling and the like, you'd have seen claims from both sides that things have tightened up through this week. These claims always need to be treated with caution, since the side in the lead has an incentive to make them to discourage complacency, while the side trailing has an incentive to make them to discourage despair. They might turn out to be true, but with no data fresher than Monday, we'll need to wait for more polling to be sure.
Based on where things stood early this week, there would have to be a lot of improvement to make a serious difference to the picture of a very likely change of government. At that stage the gap was, if anything, widening slightly, but the broader picture is a lack of any major change for quite a while.
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Poll Roundup: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
2PP Aggregate: 52.2 to ALP (+0.2 since last week, +1.2 in three weeks, highest in twelve weeks)
ALP would probably narrowly win election "held now" outright
Four weeks ago I declared the Abbott government's budget blowout "over", their aggregate position having come back to 49% 2PP, which was about where it had been back in April. It had taken almost half a year to get back to that point, but assuming that the Coalition was now going to poll competitively for a while, it was easy to believe that they were on the track to re-election.
What's happened since may bring just a little smile to ALP supporters, since no sooner did the government finally get back to effective parity than its ratings turned around and started heading down again. As the Abbott government approaches the first anniversary of losing the lead, this small shift back adds a little more interest to the question of when and under what circumstances they might actually get it back.
ALP would probably narrowly win election "held now" outright
Four weeks ago I declared the Abbott government's budget blowout "over", their aggregate position having come back to 49% 2PP, which was about where it had been back in April. It had taken almost half a year to get back to that point, but assuming that the Coalition was now going to poll competitively for a while, it was easy to believe that they were on the track to re-election.
What's happened since may bring just a little smile to ALP supporters, since no sooner did the government finally get back to effective parity than its ratings turned around and started heading down again. As the Abbott government approaches the first anniversary of losing the lead, this small shift back adds a little more interest to the question of when and under what circumstances they might actually get it back.
Monday, November 3, 2014
Victorian State Election: Late October Polls And Seat Model
2PP aggregate of recent Victorian state polling: ALP leads 52.6-47.4
"Nowcast" seat estimate based on this 2PP: ALP 48 Coalition 40
The new polls
Six polls have been released in the last week or so, by a range of methods. Two of them have had suspiciously high Green votes. For the Morgan SMS poll it also had a suspiciously high Green vote in late September, so I'll assume this is systematic. The Ipsos poll is the first of its kind, and their federal poll published today hasn't shown any skew to the Greens, so I'm assuming for now that their methods are no more prone to green skew than the four more established pollsters. Anyway in aggregating these six polls at the bottom I've pinged the Greens 0.9 of a point in every poll except Morgan SMS, for which I've applied a very lenient deduction of four. For more information on this decision see my new blog header.
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Hobart City Council Count (Includes Some Coverage Of Other Councils)
Wrapup (Saturday Nov 1):
With the pressing of the final button in Launceston a few hours ago it's pretty much time to bring a close to my coverage of the Hobart and other Tasmanian local government elections and turn my attention to the deluge of Victorian and other state polls that I've neglected while this has been on. If there are any post-count resignations then I will put up separate threads for the recounts to fill them.
Interest levels have been tremendous with both this page and the Hobart guide logging nearly 8,000 pageviews so far, each from nearly 3,000 unique visitors. Unique pageviews on Tuesday and Wednesday were at levels comparable to the busiest days of the federal election campaign. I think this all says something against the idea that people are not interested in local government. I'd like to thank readers for their interest, especially those who threw in a few hundred dollars in donations between them, which I definitely felt like I'd earned after 13 hours working more or less flat out on Tuesday. It would be great to provide this level of coverage for more councils in 2018, but to do that there need to be more of me!
So what have we found out, especially from Hobart but also from the other results?
With the pressing of the final button in Launceston a few hours ago it's pretty much time to bring a close to my coverage of the Hobart and other Tasmanian local government elections and turn my attention to the deluge of Victorian and other state polls that I've neglected while this has been on. If there are any post-count resignations then I will put up separate threads for the recounts to fill them.
Interest levels have been tremendous with both this page and the Hobart guide logging nearly 8,000 pageviews so far, each from nearly 3,000 unique visitors. Unique pageviews on Tuesday and Wednesday were at levels comparable to the busiest days of the federal election campaign. I think this all says something against the idea that people are not interested in local government. I'd like to thank readers for their interest, especially those who threw in a few hundred dollars in donations between them, which I definitely felt like I'd earned after 13 hours working more or less flat out on Tuesday. It would be great to provide this level of coverage for more councils in 2018, but to do that there need to be more of me!
So what have we found out, especially from Hobart but also from the other results?
Monday, October 27, 2014
What Would Happen If Jacqui Lambie Resigned From The Senate?
This piece is brought to you by the Department of Absurd Hypotheticals, but there are a couple of reasons for it.
Firstly, as the Palmer United Party Senator for Tasmania now seems to be embarrassing her country, her state and (to the limited extent possible) herself and her party on a more or less weekly basis, quite a few voters wish she would quit. Lambie has recently called for the resignation of Defence Minister David Johnston, and a natural response for many was to call for Lambie to get out of politics instead.
It's no more at this stage than wishful thinking. Lambie comes from a difficult financial background and a likely six years as a Senator will set her up nicely for the rest of her life. There are also some issues she seems to care about (for better or worse, varying by case) and she probably thinks she can make a difference to them in her role. So I definitely don't think she's going anywhere - though whether she stays under the PUP umbrella remains to be seen.
However, those who are thinking of calling for Lambie to quit the office to which she is so unsuited may want to know: if she did resign from the Senate, what would happen?
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Poll Roundup: Three Polls Have Small Swing Back To Labor
2PP Aggregate: 51.6 to ALP (+0.6 in a week, reversing chances two weeks ago)
ALP would probably just win election "held now"
Somewhat against the recent run of play, this week's new polls have all seen modest improvements in federal Labor's position. It did seem as results crept ever closer to 50:50 that soon we might see a crossover into slim Coalition leads, but it hasn't happened this week - another reminder that in polling, "momentum" is an elusive quantity.
This fortnight's polls
This week's new crop started with Morgan which turned in almost identical figures to last fortnight. A half-point primary shift from the Coalition to Labor was mirrored in the last-election 2PP result, with Labor's position improving from 51.5 to 52. (The respondent-allocated 2PP, which I largely ignore, came down from 53 to 52 causing the company to describe the gap as the "narrowest in six months"). As Morgan's current methods have skewed to Labor by about 1.5 points during this term on average, this was equivalent to about a 50.5 from anyone else.
The first Newspoll in four weeks (thanks to a public holiday weekend in several states and a desire to release at the start of a new parliamentary sitting week) surprised with a headline result of 53:47 to Labor. The primaries (Coalition 38 Labor 36 Green 14 Others 14) would normally imply a 2PP of about 52.3 to Labor so it's likely the actual 2PP was something not much above 52.5 and has been rounded up for Labor (yet again!). As per the standards announced in the smash hit post Wonk Central: What Do We Do With The Poll Rounding Problem? I've treated this result as 52.6 to Labor for aggregation purposes.
ALP would probably just win election "held now"
Somewhat against the recent run of play, this week's new polls have all seen modest improvements in federal Labor's position. It did seem as results crept ever closer to 50:50 that soon we might see a crossover into slim Coalition leads, but it hasn't happened this week - another reminder that in polling, "momentum" is an elusive quantity.
This fortnight's polls
This week's new crop started with Morgan which turned in almost identical figures to last fortnight. A half-point primary shift from the Coalition to Labor was mirrored in the last-election 2PP result, with Labor's position improving from 51.5 to 52. (The respondent-allocated 2PP, which I largely ignore, came down from 53 to 52 causing the company to describe the gap as the "narrowest in six months"). As Morgan's current methods have skewed to Labor by about 1.5 points during this term on average, this was equivalent to about a 50.5 from anyone else.
The first Newspoll in four weeks (thanks to a public holiday weekend in several states and a desire to release at the start of a new parliamentary sitting week) surprised with a headline result of 53:47 to Labor. The primaries (Coalition 38 Labor 36 Green 14 Others 14) would normally imply a 2PP of about 52.3 to Labor so it's likely the actual 2PP was something not much above 52.5 and has been rounded up for Labor (yet again!). As per the standards announced in the smash hit post Wonk Central: What Do We Do With The Poll Rounding Problem? I've treated this result as 52.6 to Labor for aggregation purposes.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
State Liberal Conference Attacks Hare-Clark System
Advance Summary:
1. Recently the Tasmanian state Liberal conference passed a motion calling for investigation into alternatives to the Hare-Clark system.
2. The limited evidence available suggests that the arguments advanced for change were based on false attacks on the accuracy of the system and inapplicable analogies with the grossly defective Senate system.
3. In fact the problem some Liberals have with Hare-Clark is that as a converter of vote share to seats it is too accurate for their liking, and by being so increases the chance of minority government.
4. Minority parliaments in Tasmania are often unstable because of the inverted nature of Tasmania's two-house system, compared to other states in which the proportional system tends to be used in the upper house.
5. Claims that the government needs to strike in this term on this issue are far-fetched given both the size of the government's buffer and the fact that the last major electoral system change was bipartisan and happened in a hung parliament.
6. Indeed a switch to single-member seats in the current environment would not improve the government's chances of retaining its majority in 2018, and would actually increase the chance of it losing outright.
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1. Recently the Tasmanian state Liberal conference passed a motion calling for investigation into alternatives to the Hare-Clark system.
2. The limited evidence available suggests that the arguments advanced for change were based on false attacks on the accuracy of the system and inapplicable analogies with the grossly defective Senate system.
3. In fact the problem some Liberals have with Hare-Clark is that as a converter of vote share to seats it is too accurate for their liking, and by being so increases the chance of minority government.
4. Minority parliaments in Tasmania are often unstable because of the inverted nature of Tasmania's two-house system, compared to other states in which the proportional system tends to be used in the upper house.
5. Claims that the government needs to strike in this term on this issue are far-fetched given both the size of the government's buffer and the fact that the last major electoral system change was bipartisan and happened in a hung parliament.
6. Indeed a switch to single-member seats in the current environment would not improve the government's chances of retaining its majority in 2018, and would actually increase the chance of it losing outright.
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