Slow Crawl On The Senate Reform Front

Advance Summary

1. This article discusses various aspects of the Senate reform debate, which currently appears to be progressing slowly and badly.

2. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's claim that Ricky Muir is as democratically elected as he is is false, because had enough voters wanted to ensure Senator Muir was not elected, it would have been unreasonably hard for them to do so.

3. Micro-party threats to run candidates against the Coalition and Greens in key seats are toothless.

4. Claims that the performance of the current crossbench in blocking Coalition policies vindicates the current system are wrong, because the crossbench elected under any alternative system would also have done so.

5. Senator Sam Dastyari continues to claim the proposed reforms are a recipe for Coalition control of the Senate but has presented no detailed evidence for this claim. 

6. Attempts by Senator Bob Day to claim that left and right parties preferencing each other is not a problem are disproven, among other things, by the preferences that flowed to him.

7. While many crossbenchers support the current system because it elected them, that does not mean they would have a high chance of re-election under it; indeed, crossbenchers who develop a stronger primary vote following should support reform.

8. This article suggests a minimum acceptable model for Senate reform (which is not the author's preferred option).  At minimum, even if group ticket preferencing is retained, below-the-line voting must be liberalised so that voters have a reasonable alternative to following party preferences.

Poll Roundup: Turnbull Shift Puts Coalition Back In Front

2PP Aggregate: 51.3 to Coalition (+4.9 in a week)
Coalition would easily win election "held now"

It's one of those weeks where we start things off with the graph (and especially notice the far right side of it):

So far we've had five voting intention polls since former Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull neatly disposed of Tony Abbott and became Australia's 29th Prime Minister.  ReachTEL came out with a 50:50 2PP immediately after the change.  Galaxy last week and the Galaxy-run Newspoll this week came out with 51:49 to Coalition.  Morgan in its usual fashion when something happens, threw an outlier, 53.5:46.5 by last-election preferences (though given the primaries, that was generous to Labor), and Essential put out a one-week sample at 50-50.

Canning: The Anticlimax Live (Plus Post-Count)

CANNING (Lib 11.8%) - called, Hastie (Lib) retain.

Status

On-the-day votes and most prepolls counted.  Current 2PP 55.3% (-6.5% swing) to Liberal. Unlikely to change greatly after remaining postals and other votes.

Postcount

Thursday 1st Oct: There has been very little movement in the 2PP as remaining votes are added (I believe there are now only a few hundred left).  The major interest now is in the internal polling claims mentioned below.

We finally have more detail of these in a report from The West Australian, that says not only that the Liberal Party had Hastie on 57% the weekend before Tony Abbott was rolled, but also that Liberal tracking throughout never dipped below "about 53-47".  However, if the internal poll series really included both a 53 and a 57 then the most likely explanation is random noise, rather than voting intention actually changing that much.  Usually internal polling is less reliable than public polling, but public seatpolling has been so bad in recent years that it's hard to dismiss competing internal poll reports entirely.

Thursday: There hasn't been a lot to add here, but 755 prepolls split 58.4% to Liberal (a 7.5% swing). Although this is a point larger than the overall swing, it's not especially meaningful as the number of non-PPVC prepolls is much smaller than at the general election.

Tuesday:  Not much extra progress to report in the postcount.  However an article in The Guardian incorrectly reports that postal votes are showing only a 2.3% swing to Labor.  This figure is derived by calculating the swing on postals from the 2013 overall result for the electorate, and ignores the well-known trend that postals favour the conservatives.  The correct baseline for calculating the swing on postals is the result on postals last time, ie 65.1%.

The other thing to bear in mind is that the postals added so far will mostly include the early postals, and while these are more likely to have been cast in the Abbott era, they are also more likely to have been cast by slightly more conservative voters. All the same by whatever measure the impact of the leadership change on the by-election was small: my reading of the polls is that they were pointing to it being only a couple of points overall, and such an impact (if it happened) can easily be lost in the noise of shifting voting method patterns or strengths of postal campaigns in an actual election.

Turnbull Challenges Abbott

This post should have a very short shelf-life indeed, so I'll try to make it short!  Communications Minister and former party leader Malcolm Turnbull has today resigned and challenged Prime Minister Tony Abbott for the party leadership, and by implication his position as PM.  Many reports are suggesting the Turnbull camp believes they easily have the numbers although I have seen one contrary report that they are less confident than a few hours ago.  There may be a fair amount of foxing going on.  Julie Bishop is believed to be running with Turnbull, and Scott Morrison to be supporting Abbott and doing his numbers (but not running for deputy).

Wonk Central: The Track Record Of Last-Election Preferences

NOTE: Updates for elections from 2016 on appear at the bottom of this article

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Advance Summary

1. This article uses historic data to examine how good preference flows from the previous election are at predicting preference flows at any given federal election.

2. Last-election preferences have been an industry standard following various failures by and problems with the respondent-preference method, especially its total failure at the 2004 election.

3. Using a model of minor-party breakdowns similar to that used by most pollsters, this article looks at expected versus actual preference flows at all federal elections since 1955.

4. The quality of data available on preference flows is better for elections from 1983 onwards.

5.  Since 1983, last-election preferences have predicted preference flows remarkably well at most elections.

6. However, last-election preferences substantially understated the flow to Labor at two elections in this time: 1990 and 2013.

7. The historical record of last-election federal preferences is so strong that claims that last-election preferences in polling are wrong should generally be treated with great caution (including now).

Poll Roundup: The Dog Ate My Recovery

2PP Aggregate: 53.4 to ALP (+0.3 since last week)
ALP would easily win election "held now"

It's over a month now since Bronwyn Bishop resigned as Speaker, more or less ending an entitlements scandal that had provoked a polling blowout of about one and a half points against the Abbott Government.  It might have been expected (and indeed I rather did expect) that this was a blip and that once all the shouting had died down the government's polling would improve.  However this week's results show that it hasn't improved at all, and again we see bad, but not quite panic-station, results for the government continue to hang around. Ahead of the Canning by-election (which is covered on a separate rolling thread) this is not what the government wants to see.

A significant debacle for the government in the last fortnight was the Border Force press release which stated that Border Force intended to stop people more or less randomly for visa checks.  This was apparently never the actual intention but social media outcry resulted in the intended joint operation with Victoria Police having to be cancelled.  This epic stuffup can't have helped the government's latest attempts to repair its image.
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Poll Roundup: Behind Longer Than Howard

2PP Aggregate: 53.1 to ALP (-0.3 in a week) 
Labor would comfortably win election held "right now"

Time for another federal polling roundup, with three polls out this week.  This week Morgan (which leans to Labor) moved from 54.5% 2PP in Labor's favour by last-election preferences to 53.5, Newspoll stayed at 54 and Essential curiously moved to 51.

This was the first time Essential has had a reading other than 52 or 53 since a cluster of 54s in January through March.  It's the first time it's made it down to 51 in one year and two weeks.  The reason is that last week's half of the sample was very poor for Labor, most likely as a result of random sample noise.  As a result of this, it's possible my aggregate is behind a few tenths of a point unkind to Labor at the moment; the picture should be clearer after next week's data.

After considering the primary votes and house effects I aggregated the Morgan at 52.7 to Labor, the Newspoll at 54.3 and Essential at 51.1.  With two polls saying things are getting better for the Coalition versus one influential one saying they are getting slightly worse, the net impact of all this is a 0.3 point recovery for the government, but one that I would not read anything into yet.  Here's the smoothed tracking graph:

Strange Times In Queensland Polling

Galaxy Queensland: 52:48 to ALP based on composite preferences
Based on last election preferences 54:46 to ALP
Result based on this poll if election "held now": Easy Labor win (approx 54 ALP, 32 LNP, 2 KAP, 1 Ind)
However, most other polling so far has suggested little change since 2015 election

Update added for Aug-Sep Newspoll (53:47/55:45)

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A new state government has won a remarkable victory, ousting the regime that had thrashed it three years earlier after just one term despite having been almost wiped off the political map.  Six months into its term, and despite a significant scandal that has endangered its already fragile hold on power, its primary vote has been polled at two and a half points above its election result, the Opposition is down a similar amount and the most supportive minor party's share of the third-party vote has improved.  Not the greatest honeymoon in polling history but still, all things considered, pretty good?

Well, supposedly not.  According to reporting (?) of a newly released Galaxy of Queensland state voting intention, the Palaszczuk Government has "stalled", "stagnated", "received no bounce from handing down last month's state budget".  Apparently it "hasn't been much of a honeymoon period [..] in stark contrast to the burgeoning support being enjoyed by governments in southern states".  The Premier's popularity has "failed to prompt any new love for Labor".  Her government "could scrape over the line" but "would rely heavily on votes flowing strongly from preferences".  The government apparently should be concerned that it's been "unable to convince more Queenslanders they're a competent administration" and unless it can prove it is doing something then "the patience voters have shown will run out".

What is going on here?  What's going on is what happens when you take the Courier-Mail's oft-noted love of curious poll-spinning and combine it with an understandable, but nonetheless unusual, preferencing practice.  This article looks at how the Palaszczuk government is really going in terms of known public polling.

Canning By-Election: Prospects and Polls

Seat: Canning (WA, Lib, 11.8%)
By-Election 19 Sep 2015
2PP Contest: Andrew Hastie (Lib) vs Matt Keogh (ALP)
Current outlook (15 Sep): Liberal retain expected with modest swing against.

Note: Turnbull-era updates appear at the top of the article; the rest is archived below the break.

As of 19 Sep, Coverage has switched to Canning: The Anticlimax Live.

Turnbull PM: What Does This Mean For Canning?

Most of this article was written while Tony Abbott was still Prime Minister, and the surprise removal of Abbott prior to the by-election has made quite a mess of the analysis.  Abbott's Prime Ministership was the major risk factor to an expected Coalition victory because the bad polling endemic to it was likely to cause the swing to be larger than normal for a by-election caused by the death of a government MP.