Not-A-Poll: Best State Premiers Of The Last 40-ish Years - Final Stage 2

A very long year ago today I started a new series of Not-A-Poll voting for this site's choice of Best State Premier in every state and, eventually, the whole country.  It's been going so long that some of the original contestants, including the current leader, are no longer in the original 40 year window, but I'm going to just retitle it and ignore that.

The votes are in for part 1 of the final for the state winners and the Coalition winner (the latter being an open-primary consolation prize on account of the roughly 80-20 left-right bias in readers on psephology websites).  And here they are:

Don Dunstan 34.83%  (70 votes) 

Nick Greiner 18.41%  (37 votes) 

Daniel Andrews 11.94%  (24 votes) 

Neville Wran 11.44%  (23 votes) 

Jim Bacon 8.96%  (18 votes) 

Wayne Goss 7.96%  (16 votes) 

Katy Gallagher 3.98%  (8 votes) 

Clare Martin 1.49%  (3 votes) 

Geoff Gallop 0.99%  (2 votes) 

Total Votes: 201

Why I Don't Prefer Abolishing Above The Line Voting

This week I sent a submission (not yet posted) to the Victorian Electoral Matters committee, concerning the 2018 Victorian election.  Primarily, my submission called for the abolition of Group Ticket Voting in the Victorian Legislative Council and its replacement with a Senate-style system or similar.  This follows a farcical, gamed-to-death 2018 election in which ten micro-party MLCs were elected from primary vote shares eight of them would not have won from under any other system, including two from less than 1% of the vote.

In the event that Victoria won't abolish Group Ticket Voting completely, I suggested the state at least clip its wings a little by:

* allowing an above-the-line preferencing option, so that votes that were just-1 above the line would still be distributed by Group Ticket, but voters could choose to distribute their own party preferences as in the Senate.

* banning preference trading and a range of related consultant activities

* bulk-excluding all parties that fail to clear a primary vote threshold of 4% at the start of the count

Expected Scott Bacon Recount

Resigning MP: Scott Bacon (ALP, Clark)

Recount from 2018 state election for remainder of 2018-22 term 

Contest between Madeleine Ogilvie and Tim Cox

Ogilvie likely, but not certain, to win [UPDATE: Ogilvie has narrowly won.]

Ogilvie may sit as independent and share effective balance of power with Sue Hickey, or may rejoin Labor. [UPDATE: Ogilvie has said she will sit as an independent.]

Recount updates will now be added at the top

Previous Party-Hopping Cases:

As noted below Ogilvie's (under unique circumstances for Tasmania) is the first case of a Lower House MP deserting their party mid-term and sitting with a different party status in 38 years.  However prior to that, this was a more common event.  Here is a not necessarily perfect list since World War II:

* Carrol Bramich (1956) Labor to Liberal (policy tensions and internal issues).  Re-elected as a Liberal.
* Reg Turnbull (1959) Labor to IND (kicked out after refusing to resign as Minister). Re-elected with massive support, later Senator.
* Bill Hodgman (1960) Liberal to IND. Defeated.
* Tim Jackson (1960) Liberal to IND (leadership change fallout). Defeated.
* Charley Aylett (1963) Labor to IND (quit after being disendorsed). Defeated.
* Kevin Lyons (1966) Liberal to IND (preselection issues). Later formed Centre Party and was re-elected.
* Nigel Abbott (1972) Liberal to IND (policy dispute). Defeated.
* Doug Lowe (1981) Labor to IND (leadership change fallout). Re-elected.
* Mary Willey (1981) Labor to IND (leadership change fallout).  Defeated.
* Madeleine Ogilvie (on recount 2019) Labor to IND (multiple factors)

All of the Bramich, Turnbull and Lowe/Willey cases precipitated state elections.

There is also the case of Gabriel Haros (Liberal) who lost preselection for the 1986 election and ran as an Independent, and probably other similar cases.

It is interesting to note the weak performance of some of these independents at elections.  In the 1964 election Bill Hodgman (Will's grandfather) managed only 475 votes and Charley Aylett only 102.  This didn't stop Bill Hodgman going on to become a two-term MLC for Queenborough (1971-83).

2019 Federal Election: Pollster Performance Review

Welcome (belatedly) to another of my regular pieces that I do after all the election results are finalised and, um, we can't really give this one its usual title this year.  Normally it's called "Best and Worst Pollsters" (see the comparable articles for 2013 and 2016) but this year that title isn't really appropriate.  This year was the year of the great Poll Fail, and when it came to final voting intention polls at least, they all went down together.  The story for seat polling turns out to be a little less clearcut, but not that much.

For all the complaints about "too many polls", the frequency and diversity of Australian polls had been declining at state and federal level in the four years leading up to this election.  At this election there were only five poll series conducting national polls, and of these two were conducted by the same pollster (YouGov-Galaxy conducts both Galaxy and Newspoll polls).

I usually include three categories but this time I'm not going to take tracking too seriously.  As usual the first cab off the rank is ...

Least Worst Final Poll

I usually say the final poll should be the easiest one for the less accurate pollsters to get right, because pollsters can look over each others' shoulders and consider corrections if everybody else is getting something vastly different.  Thus there have been some prior cases where polls that differed from Newspoll for some time have jumped into line with it in their final poll.  This year unfortunately it seems that some pollsters may have taken this concept a little too far - either that or multiple pollsters got to around the same 2PP coincidentally and then decided to self-herd from that point.

EMRS: Labor Down, But Will The Others Voters Please Stand Up?

EMRS July raw figures: Liberal 38 Labor 30 Greens 16 Others 16
Also retro-released EMRS May: Liberal 38 Labor 34 Greens 13 Others 15
Also retro-released EMRS March: Liberal 38 Labor 34 Greens 14 Others 14

Possible "interpretation" figure for July poll: Liberal 41 Labor 32 Green 13 Others 14 (maybe)

Liberals could retain majority in an election "held now" (13-9-3 or 13-10-2), but this would probably depend on what happened with Sue Hickey.

Tasmanian pollster EMRS has released a poll of Tasmanian state voting intention, and has also released the two previous polls in the series (which were not released at the time they were taken; the last released poll was in December).  The polls show a general pattern of a slim lead to the Liberal Government, support for which in the series crashed not long after the March 2018 election, but this particular poll has that gap widening to eight points, with Labor dropping four to 30%.  Labor also polled 30% just after its election loss, and prior to that we have to go back to March 2017 to find it polling worse.  The main beneficiaries are the Greens, who EMRS has long tended to have too high compared to their actual support at elections, but there is also a trend of "Others" continuing to rise, although less than 7% voted for "Others" at the last election.  Who are all these people saying they would vote for someone else, and what are they thinking?

The Labor slump would raise some concerns - as at federal level the party is currently struggling to work out what it stands for, and much of its oxygen on issues is being taken by Sue Hickey.  However, at this stage it is just one reading and we need to see the next one to see if it's a blip or a lasting loss of enthusiasm.

2019 House of Reps Figures Finalised

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The 2019 House of Representatives results have been finalised, a joyous event that tends to arrive unheralded two to three months after every federal election.  Although all the preference throws had been completed and uploaded some time ago, the final figures importantly include the two-party preference flows by party.  Normally I say that this is very useful for assessing the performance of polls.  At this election the polls failed dismally, mainly because of failures on the Coalition and Labor primaries (except for Ipsos which failed on the Greens primary instead of Labor); nonetheless there will be a final review of them here fairly soon.  This article is a general roundup of other matters regarding the House of Reps figures.

Preference Shifting

The final 2PP result is 51.53% to the Coalition and 48.47% to Labor, a 1.16% swing to the Coalition.

There was a very large shift in the preferences of Pauline Hanson's One Nation.  One Nation preferences flowed only 50.47% to Coalition in 2016 but 65.22% to Coalition in 2019 (even more than the 60-40 split believed to have been assumed by Newspoll after considering state election results).  Overall, preferences from parties other than the Greens and One Nation also flowed more strongly to the Coalition by a few points (53.93% compared to 50.79%) but this was caused by the United Australia Party flowing 65.14% to the Coalition.  Excluding the Greens, One Nation and UAP, Others preferences (50.7% to ALP) were 1.5 points stronger for Labor than in 2016.  It is also interesting that Katters Australian Party preferences flowed 14 points more strongly to the Coalition, very similar to the shift for One Nation.

Poll Roundup: Newspoll's Back, But Should Anyone Actually Care?

This week finally saw the long-awaited return of voting intention polling to the field following the great 2019 election opinion polling failure.  Newspoll returned ten weeks after the election, its longest break between in-field dates ever, and its longest break between releases except for two eleven-week summer recess breaks very early in its history.  The poll, which had the Coalition ahead 53-47 two-party preferred, was the first voting intention poll by anyone since the election.  The ten-week gap without any published attempt to measure voting intention by any pollster was the longest such gap since at least the early 1970s.

The first poll to poke its head over the parapet was of course pelted with eggs on social media.  The strong prior accuracy records of the Newspoll brand, Galaxy Research and Australian federal polling generally were suddenly no protection against charges that polling was no better than astrology.  Much of the pelting came from hopelessly biased Twitter entities who have always hated and distrusted Newspoll because of its Murdoch connections, who used to insist the poll was Coalition-skewed, and now hate it because it got their hopes up for an election their side lost.  So that aspect is a moveable feast of complaint.  But is there any reason for confidence yet that YouGov-Galaxy has identified and fixed whatever went wrong with its polling earlier this year?  Given that it underestimated the Coalition by three points at the election, is there any evidence for confidence that it isn't still doing so?

Well no, there isn't really (though that doesn't mean we should read this poll as really 56-44). At this stage, alas, YouGov-Galaxy and the Australian have done very little that should restore public trust or to even convince us that they care whether their poll will be trusted or not.

Hobart Building Heights Elector Poll

On Monday the Tasmanian Electoral Commission released the results of a voluntary postal elector poll about building heights in the Hobart City portion of Greater Hobart.  This non-binding elector poll has been something of an oddity with a lot of commentary making various claims about it so I thought I'd say a few things about it too.

The turnout

The elector poll attracted a response rate of 42.39%.  This compares to the response rate of 61.94% at the 2018 Hobart City Council election, however that was a record high turnout for Hobart, which had never been above 55.5% before.

I have found data for fourteen previous elector polls going back to the mid-1990s, of which six were held concurrently with council elections and eight were held separately.  Of the eight held separately, I have comparable data for six, and of these turnouts ranged from 83% to 109% of the previous election's turnout for that council (in many cases I have had to use raw turnout figures as I cannot find enrolment data at the time of the poll).  So this elector poll at 68% of the municipality's previous turnout has the lowest comparative turnout rate - and this would be so even without Hobart's 2018 turnout spike.  Issues in comparable elector polls included amalgamation, a proposed major pulp mill, whether to move a council's administration, whether to change a council's name, the location of a waste disposal site and options for a lawn cemetery.  To complete the set, other issues that have been canvassed in elector polls have included water supply and pricing options (including whether fluoride should be added), and the boundaries of a municipality.  It's notable that one of the three pulp mill polls occurred in Hobart, about 200 km away from the pulp mill site.

Tasmanian Local Government Reform Proposals (2019)

The Tasmanian Government has been conducting a detailed review of local government legislation in the state, including electoral rules.  This week this took a major step forward with the release of the Reform Directions Paper.  This outlines a series of possible changes that, based on further feedback, may then appear in the government's draft legislation.  Many of the suggested changes are excellent, in particular reducing the number of boxes a voter must number on the councillor ballot for a valid vote.

My main reason for writing this article is to raise major concerns about some of the proposed options for electing mayors.  The paper gives four possible options for mayors, one of these being the status quo (the mayor is elected directly, anyone enrolled in the council area can run for mayor, the mayor must be elected as a councillor to serve as mayor).  While the status quo has some issues, I don't like any of the three alternatives much, and two of them are especially unsound.  I am writing this article mainly to provide detailed reasons as to why these options are bad, and I encourage anyone who wants to to use these arguments in their submissions, or add others.  While I'm doing this I may as well comment quickly on other aspects of the paper.

There's plenty of time to send a submission with submissions not due until 30 September.  For some reason the official closing time for submissions is 5 pm.