Until 2011, any mention of a “carbon tax” invariably meant a consumption tax on specific goods. John Howard swore off a “carbon tax” before he lost government in 2007 but promised an “emissions trading scheme,” as did Labor. Like “carbon pollution reduction scheme,” it sounded like a cure for insomnia. But shorten it and add the “t” word, and you’ve got a potentially powerful stress inducer. Ferociously attacked by Tony Abbott’s opposition, Gillard’s scheme was indeed widely loathed and feared — until it came into operation in mid-2012 and not much changed for most people.

In 2014 the Labor opposition attempted to return the favour by labelling the Abbott government’s proposed-but-never-legislated general practitioner co-payment a “GP tax.” It didn’t catch on. The trick to getting the media to adopt these terms is to make them shorter and snappier than the official name. Abbott’s 2010 “great big new tax on everything!” (Rudd’s CPRS) didn’t become media shorthand; and four years later, “GP co-payment” was already short enough.

Bill Shorten learnt to appreciate the power of tax slogans: most powerfully when his 2019 franking credits policy was labelled the “retiree tax.” (There was also his “death tax,” which was as fictional as Labor’s “the Turnbull government will privatise Medicare!” messaging in 2016.) The “retiree tax” phrasing was parroted not just by the usual suspects at News Corp and 2GB radio but also, with little apparent thought, by the ABC and other straight news outlets.

These short, sharp labels just “work” for the news practitioners, and then can be devastatingly effective because many, perhaps most, Australians really don’t understand the policy but retain the shorthand — especially when it contains the “t” word. What sort of party wants to levy a tax on people simply because they are old and no longer able to work!

So it’s no surprise the Coalition has rolled out a couple of “taxes” since the May budget. First the “death tax” was resurrected, but this time rooted somewhat in reality: the planned changes to trusts would indeed affect some inheritances. The government wisely dropped the idea last month, and while most commentators correctly noted the potential toxicity of the opposition’s framing, they missed another crucial element: the timing of the plan’s introduction.

The headline changes — to the capital gains tax and negative gearing — come into effect this time next year. But the ones affecting trusts begin on 1 July 2028 — that is, after the next federal election. So the government would effectively have been taking the “death tax” to the election.

Labor’s capital gains and negative gearing changes, by contrast, will be in operation by the time we vote and (at least on their current stated intentions) the Coalition (and perhaps One Nation) will be one under scrutiny for their promises to reverse them and to index income-tax thresholds. All of which would cost the budget a lot of money.

It’s one thing for an opposition to promise to kill a government proposal before it’s enacted; it’s another to promise to unscramble a policy already in operation.

The other, more recent post-budget label is the “widows tax!” — in reality, the plan to end the “grandfathering” of joint ownership of property in cases of death or divorce, which would deprive people who co-owned investment properties before 12 May this year of the right to continue negative gearing after 1 July 2027. A splendid bit of creative communication, “widow’s tax” rapidly did the rounds of the media.

The government backflipped pretty quickly on this one as well, either to avoid being seen as picking on widows or because they decided it was undesirable, or a bit of both. They’ve acknowledged quite a few errors and unintended consequences in their bill and hopefully will change some more.

Reports suggest that Anthony Albanese believes the government’s vulnerability to fear and loathing will die down now the main budget bill has been passed (with more amending legislation to come later in the year). I don’t agree. The crucial date will be 1 July 2027, when the changes become reality and the sky doesn’t fall.

Still, there’s a remote chance of animal spirits raining on the parade. While experts say the capital gains and negative gearing changes, in themselves, should have only a modest impact on house prices, the reaction of would-be buyers so far has been to sit on their hands in case prices drop, which has naturally caused just that to happen. It’s a kind of “nothing to fear but fear itself” spiral the government must at least be a tiny bit worried about. A housing crash would be terrible in many ways, including for the government’s standing.

But the most substantial criticism of the budget measures, as opposed to point-scoring, goes to what they will mean for non-housing investments. Applying the capital gains changes to all investments does go against the government’s purported aim of making housing less attractive than other investments. The negative gearing changes at least do that.

What will all this mean when the next election is held in a little under two years? All our crystal balls are too foggy to anticipate the pleasures Australian politics will be inflicting on us (or perhaps voters will be inflicting on Australian politics). This time last year no one dreamed One Nation would be riding so high.

But one thing is close to certain: Angus Taylor won’t be Liberal leader. Andrew Hastie, whose policy preferences and even rhetoric very much resemble One Nation’s, would trigger a leap in the Coalition’s polled numbers, mostly the expense of the far-right party. But eventually, as the date with the ballot box approaches, his intentions could induce stress in the more progressive end of the Liberal Party, its (remaining) supporters and even the politically uninterested middle. Opposition leaders who set themselves up as “conviction politicians” tend to worry voters.

Still, if most of the electorate reviles an incumbent enough they’ll kick them out regardless.

Times are hard across the developed world, at least by past standards, with Australia among the lagging countries in per-capita performance.

The opposition parties will blame bad economic times on the 2026 budget — along with reliable old Labor economic incompetence — while trying not to explain how they will pay for their promises to undo it all and index income tax thresholds (if those promises are still Coalition policy). They’ll warn of the future, that deep down Labor still wants to levy a tax on death — and perhaps even “widows.”

But the government’s capital gains tax and negative gearing changes as big issues as the next election? Nah, they’ll be in place and part of the furniture. •

The post Great big tax scares appeared first on Inside Story.

So many big targets, so many uncosted “policies.” A lot of Hanson’s sentiments could appeal to many or most voters, but others, particularly when she was answering questions (workers are “lazy,” childcare workers don’t need qualifications, her slippery views about abortion), not so much. Left unmentioned were her strong anti-vaccination views, her adoration of Donald Trump, her fellow One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts’s conspiracy theories, her backing from posh squillionaire Gina Rinehart, her attitudes to guns.

She and her team would be happy with her performance: she was confident, strong, not for turning and avoided those tricky topics. The grievance theatre — everyone’s picking on her but she keeps soldiering on — was on full show.

Hanson is the leader of an insurgent party, so the rules that apply to the Libs and the Nats don’t apply to her. But this insurgent party is suddenly leading the pollsters’ primary vote figures in a three-way contest with Labor and the Coalition.

That doesn’t mean One Nation is “ahead in the polls” any more than when, in the old days, the Coalition led in primary votes but lagged after preferences. If recent survey results were replicated at the ballot box, Labor would likely have the most seats — maybe a majority — followed by One Nation, daylight, and then the Coalition.

If One Nation’s primary support gets into the high thirties, though, a majority of seats might (depending on other parties’ support) be on the cards. Somewhere between its current thirty-ish and that scenario, a One Nation–led alliance with the Coalition becomes likely.

Comparisons with Trump are limited: he took control of the major centre-right party, and hence its place in the country, its infrastructure, its finance and its rusted-on supporters. The United States has not seen the electoral splintering that’s happened in other advanced democracies (if America still sits in that category).

In Western Europe, where most countries use proportional representation to elect their lower houses, some far-right parties have topped the vote with very low numbers. Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy got 26 per cent in 2022, but along with her party’s junior centre-right partners won a majority of the Chamber of Deputies seats. (That’s the short version; the longer one includes first-past-the-post single-member districts, which members of her coalition divided between them so as not to split the vote — similar to Liberal frontbencher Tony Pasin’s recent thought bubble.)

At the other end of the range of outcomes, Austria’s Freedom Party won the most votes, 28.8 per cent, and the most seats in 2024 but remained totally out of government. In between, a few far-right parties won similarly modest vote pluralities and then entered government in some form, although not supplying the head of government.

France’s lower house’s electoral system is similar to ours: single-member districts, with its second round of voting rendering it all somewhat “preferential.” Two years ago, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally group topped the first round (like our primary vote) with 33 per cent, winning pluralities in a majority of districts. Other parties then selectively sat out the second round out to deny it victory.

In our compulsory preferential voting system, strategic non-contesting of seats (as advocated by Pasin) makes little sense, but recommending preferences to or away from other parties does. Labor always puts One Nation last on its how-to-vote cards, but at recent elections the Coalition has “preferenced” One Nation ahead of Labor everywhere, largely because most of the very conservative Liberal and Nationals memberships would strongly object, and possibly defect, if they preferenced Labor.

Hanson’s Wednesday speech devoted many words to lambasting Anthony “the Liar” Albanese and Jim Chalmers, but no Coalition members were mentioned. While One Nation casts itself as an alternative to the two-party seesaw, its strongest criticism is always directed at Labor (often with a swipe at the Greens). And yet it inflicts a lot more damage to the Coalition parties.

How much more damage?

There’s a question most pollsters ask without publishing the results. When a respondent says they’d put “1” next to a small party or an independent, the pollster asks which of the major parties they’d give their preference to on the ballot paper.

The question usually starts something like: “As you may know, you must rank either Labor ahead of the Coalition or the Coalition ahead of Labor on the ballot paper…” These words provide information people don’t get when voting, and this artificiality is one reason why these respondent-derived preferences don’t tend to stand up well against the eventual flows at elections.

But the question is brilliant for getting some idea of the (major) partisan leanings of these voters. One outfit that publishes these numbers is Redbridge/Accent, and in their last three (non-MRP) reports the results for One Nation voters averaged to 77 per cent for the Coalition and 23 for Labor. That’s a good proxy for the relative proportions the insurgent party takes from the majors.

Of course, the major parties began shedding primary votes years and decades before One Nation staged its recent revival; indeed, the revival itself is a symptom of the ongoing collapse of the two-party system. The support has to go somewhere, and at the moment it’s coalescing around this person.

As the election approaches, the prospect of a government comprising One Nation and the Coalition has the potential to push more voters, however reluctantly, to support Labor.

It’s barely a year since Peter Dutton led the Coalition to disaster, largely because he was seen as too Trumpy. But he was the epitome of sensible centrism compared with Hanson. That’s the big question about the 2028 election: will the old rules — that voters crave stability and reassurance and are risk averse — still apply? A lot will depend on how the economy is going, and whether the cost of living still feels alarming. People can take desperate measures in desperate times. •

The post One Nation’s preference problem appeared first on Inside Story.

The bit about the budget is old news and entirely true. But it’s important to note that One Nation’s poll lead was in primary votes only, and we all know that’s not the full story under our electoral system. The concept of national two-party-preferred support might be outliving its usefulness, but that doesn’t mean primary votes now rule. Preferences are no less important than they ever were. And in fact the pollster, Redbridge/Accent, estimated Labor’s two-party-preferred support was 51 per cent regardless of whether its main opponent was One Nation or the Coalition.

The poll has 31 per cent for One Nation, 28 for Labor, 20 for the Coalition and the Greens on 12 (with 9 per cent for the rest). Since then another outfit, YouGov, has replicated the order if not the exact numbers, and Roy Morgan Research has Labor and One Nation tied. (An earlier Morgan poll put One Nation ahead, but as psephologist Kevin Bonham pointed out it was one of its less reliable SMS polls.)

How would these numbers, replicated at the ballot box, translate into House of Representatives seats? That’s awfully difficult to say, but it’s very likely no party would enjoy a majority. Labor would probably have a plurality (more than anyone else), with One Nation second and the Coalition third. Perhaps the ALP would retain government with support from the Greens and independents. Or One Nation plus the Coalition might be in a majority.

Could One Nation, during this parliamentary term, be in a polled position that translates into a likely majority all by itself? It’s possible; another five points at Labor’s expense, with all the others kept constant, would probably do it, assuming the Coalition continues to treat Pauline Hanson’s party favourably on their how-to-vote cards.

Late last century, prime minister John Howard was dragged kicking and screaming to “preferencing” Labor ahead of One Nation across the country, but that was a different time, a different electorate landscape — and a different Liberal Party. Preferencing Labor today would cause serious anger in the party membership and push more of them into the arms of the insurgent.

South Australia’s vote in March, the country’s first general election since the One Nation surge, showed us a few things. One was the durability of the party’s polled support all the way through to — and then on — election day. It happened in a particular context: a popular Labor premier and government widely viewed as certain to win (which it did very handsomely). This might have freed some people up to use their vote to send a message to the established parties, particularly the Liberals.

And it was a state — not federal — election, which probably means less at stake than a federal vote. Running a country is about the big items, particularly pulling and pushing those economic levers. Yes, many, perhaps most, people believe business as usual is no longer working, but when push comes to shove we know voters can be scared of changes that might affect their economic security. And Hanson has now discussed moving to the House of Representatives with a view to taking those levers. The other information South Australia provided was how seat-by-seat distributions of preferences play out with a large One Nation vote.

At the 2025 federal contest, when it received just 6.4 per cent nationally, One Nation picked up a quite strong flow of preferences from the Coalition. The Coalition dropped out of the three-candidate-preferred count against the ALP and One Nation in just one federal electorate, Hunter in New South Wales. When its primary vote (plus the preferences it had picked up from minor parties and independents) was distributed according to voters’ instructions between Labor and One Nation, it flowed a whoppingly one-sided 80.1 per cent to One Nation.

A year later in South Australia, the flows were noticeably weaker. Across the eleven electoral divisions in which the contest came down to Labor versus One Nation, the Coalition’s distributed preferences in the final round of counting favoured the latter by a much more modest 66.6 per cent.

More evidence came from electorates where Labor’s accumulated vote was distributed to the Coalition and One Nation. In the one 2025 federal where that happened, those votes went 58.9 per cent to the Coalition and 41.1 to One Nation. In South Australia in March, the percentages in the two such contests were favoured the Coalition much more, 71.5 to 21.5 per cent. This makes intuitive sense: if most “right-wing” supporters have shifted their first preference to One Nation, the rest will generally be relatively unenthused by the party.

These numbers matter when we’re trying to make sense of national polls — and even more so when we look at seat-by-seat ones such as Redbridge/Accent’s most recent MRP, a much larger, slightly earlier survey that still has Labor leading the primary vote. Pollsters and others must make assumptions when they simulate full seat-by-seat counts, eliminating parties one by one and distributing their preferences.

Redbridge/Accent’s estimates from that poll put Labor on 76, One Nation on 53 and the Coalition on 12. My estimates, mostly relying on South Australia’s flows, are quite different: 86, 43 and 12 seats respectively. For what they’re worth, that is. With lots of caveats. And with two years to go until the election. (Estimating preference flows to and from independents is the hardest part of the exercise.)

Victoria’s election in November will provide another big information dump, and will probably be more relevant to the federal sphere, given the absence of a popular Labor incumbent.

For the government in Canberra, two years is a long time, particularly from a budget as detested as this. The key date is 1 July 2027, when most changes come into operation and the fear of them starts to subside. But even before the budget, One Nation didn’t look like it was going away. •

The post One Nation’s sticky surge appeared first on Inside Story.

Many of the criticisms, of course, are beat-ups and bad faith speculation. The polls embolden the critics, whose overblown predictions in turn affect public attitudes. Welcome to policy-reform debates Australian-style. And now there’s the extra, ever-changing input from social media.

But to this not-very-finance-literate observer many of the criticisms are valid, an obvious one being the incongruity of applying the capital gains changes to forms of investment other than (established) housing when the government’s chief stated purpose is to steer investment away from property. Both Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers have offered nonsensical explanations for this contradiction.

Still, it’s facile and self-serving to assume, as many of the anti-government combatants seem to, that the public reaction shows how right they are and how truly dreadful the package is. Many of today’s complainers quite liked the Abbott government’s first budget, with its smorgasbord of spending cuts and broken promises. (Or they would have liked it if they’d been old enough to follow such things twelve years ago.) Voters loathed that one too.

Similarly, squeals about overturned election pledges tend to be selective. Governments pressing ahead with unpopular decisions can be cast as hopeless and out of touch with the common sense of the electorate or, alternatively, as possessing political courage, leadership and even, yes, “conviction!”

Voters’ attitudes to a budget will be influenced by many things, including general feelings about whoever’s in power. Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey no doubt believed they were replicating the Howard government’s politically successful first effort in 1996, which was similarly littered with reversed assurances (people of a certain age will remember core and non-core promises) and bitter medicine.

The spiel in 2014 was the same: our profligate predecessors left us no choice, we don’t like this any more than you do. (Bob Hawke and Paul Keating read the same script in 1983.) But it didn’t work that time, perhaps because they were inferior politicians, or perhaps because voters were getting more cynical. Those faux-Churchillian cigar-smoking snapshots didn’t help.

Or maybe Hockey’s budget was so reviled because the Abbott government and its prime minister were never well-regarded; in fact, barely two months after being elected they were consistently behind in the two-party-preferred polls, which is almost certainly unprecedented. John Howard, by contrast, was still in his election honeymoon when his government’s first budget came out in August 1996, on top of which sat the Port Arthur massacre gun buyback boost.

A chief reason we remember 2014 is that Hockey’s budget all (or mostly) came to nought, with the big, unpopular bits never getting through the Senate. Instead they were debated for months, even years, becoming more and more reviled, until they were quietly abandoned (or maybe until Abbott was deposed the following year). And Senate crossbenchers’ refusal to let the changes through must have been influenced by the public reaction.

Anthony Albanese did enjoy very high standing in his first year, but as with the uncourageous Kevin Rudd in 2008 he declined to perform the tough first-budget ritual. Now, in Labor’s second term, it’s difficult to blame painful decisions on predecessors. And these days Albanese and his government are very unloved. Their consistent (but declining) two-party-preferred leads in the polls bely their low primary-vote support, very poor approval ratings and high dissatisfaction. It’s just that the other side, or sides, seems even worse.

(It needs to be acknowledged that One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s approval rating is higher than either Albanese’s or Liberal leader Angus Taylor’s. But the majority of voters would probably still view the prospect of her party in government with horror.)

Note that Newspoll’s most-well-regarded budget, in 1987, was another in the “this will hurt, but there’s no other option” category. In that case the Hawke government successfully laid the blame on all previous administrations, right back to 1949. And the Howard government’s second-best-received instalment came just months before it lost office.

Perhaps the closest template will turn out to not be a budget but the Gillard government’s “carbon tax broken promise.” Unveiled in February 2011, six months after the hung parliament re-election, it was immediately an object of fears that would not only hit the hip pocket ($100 roasts!) but also clobber the economy. Then, after it was introduced and no extra tax deductions appeared on payslips and nothing much else seemed to change, it subsided as an issue.

With former Jacquie Lambie Network/independent senator Tammy Tyrrell joining Labor’s caucus this month, the government plus the Greens easily have the numbers to get the budget through the upper house. Many Labor and Greens supporters celebrate this “progressive majority” and it’s certainly easier for the government than, say, the chamber the Rudd faced. But it’s still terribly stifling for them all the same. Oh, for last century’s self-consciously centrist Democrats.

Greens in formal alliance with centre-left parties in, say, New Zealand and Germany, have their policy discussions with their big-party allies mostly behind closed doors, and it’s in their interests not to make life unnecessarily difficult for the government. In Australia, by contrast, the smaller party has its own distinct political imperatives that mostly involve wresting support from Labor.

Yet the government will need to make concessions to various stakeholders, and indeed for the national economic interest, and most of that is not likely to be to the minor party’s liking. Albanese has said he wants the legislation passed in July this year and pushed off the government’s plate. But if he thinks that will end the hullabaloo, he’s mistaken.

The truly important date is 1 July 2027, when the capital gains and negative gearing changes are slated to take effect. After that, when the sky hasn’t fallen, they will be part of the furniture. By the next election the onus will be on politicians campaigning to undo them to explain where the money will come from. The Coalition and/or One Nation will find themselves taking tax policy to an election.

Those adjustments to discretionary trusts, on the other hand, aren’t planned to start until 1 July 2028. In effect, that means that even if they’re legislated this year they will be treated as a Labor campaign promise during the 2028 campaign.

It’s understandable if Labor’s brains trust expected the vast majority of Australians’ to eyes glaze over at mention of trusts, which are seen mostly as a tax minimisation tool of the wealthy. But thanks largely to lazy mainstream media picking up the Coalition’s catchy slogan (similar to the 2019 “retiree tax”) it’s already become the “death tax”: a dastardly attack (again!) on old people (or, less politely, their offspring) and possibly the thin edge of the wedge of a universal inheritance tax.

There must be reasons for its delayed implementation, but politically it would make sense to bring it forward to 2027. If that’s not possible, it would be in Labor’s interests to drop it altogether. •

The post Pundits and polls versus the budget appeared first on Inside Story.

For this reason, candidates tend to matter more in by-elections, although in this case an objectively poor one romped home anyway. The party name, synonymous with its leader Pauline Hanson, was more than enough. David Farley’s roughly 39 per cent primary vote (on latest counting) doesn’t reflect much of anything outside Farrer in May 2026 — certainly not the party’s likely national support at the next election, or even “if an election were held today.” The national opinion polls, which have One Nation averaging around 25 per cent, are the tools for that. But a general election that saw One Nation get 25 per cent overall would certainly include electorates where the minor party received 39 per cent or more. And they’d mostly be rural, as Riverina is.

Labor didn’t contest Farrer. The big parties tend not to run these days in by-elections they have no chance of winning (although the Albanese government made an exception in Fadden in its first term). Would it have made a difference if they had? Actually, it might have. We’ll come back to that.

This will not be the first time One Nation has sat in the House of Reps. After winning the Queensland seat of Oxley as a Liberal in 1996 (despite having been deselected just weeks earlier), Pauline Hanson formed the first iteration of the far-right party in 1997–98 and unsuccessfully contested the 1998 federal election in Queensland’s Blair. Although she topped the primary vote with 36 per cent, she lost after buckets of preferences flowed to the Liberal candidate, thanks mainly to Labor how-to-vote cards.

In Farrer, a whole lot of preferences sat ready and willing ready to flow to the Liberal candidate Raissa Butkowski against Farley, but they didn’t matter because Butkowski didn’t get to the two-candidate-preferred count. Instead it was Farley who was deluged by preferences in the final count. His roughly eleven-point primary lead over independent Michelle Milthorpe increased after preferences to fourteen or fifteen points. That was the work of Liberal and National how-to-vote cards, which favoured One Nation over the independent, and of course the natural resistance of many Coalition supporters to any independent candidate with a highly publicised Climate 200 connection.

It’ll be several weeks before the Australian Electoral Commission publishes individual candidate’s preference flows, but the back of my napkin suggests that Liberal and Nationals voters’ preferences, combined, went very approximately 65 per cent to Farley and 35 to Milthorpe. Could the Coalition, via its how-to-vote cards, have delivered victory to Milthorpe? It’s unlikely. She would have needed to receive more than 70 per cent of total Liberal and Nationals flows (perhaps more than 75 per cent), and it stretches credulity to believe the two parties exercise such influence over their supporters.

Anyway, it’s now a given: the Coalition preferences One Nation over virtually everyone else — certainly Labor, the Greens, and Climate 300–funded independents — and that’s not going to change before the next federal election, if for no other reason than the Coalition parties’ memberships would go ballistic, sending even more of them to the far-right alternative. (On the other side, imagine the outrage from Labor’s true believers if the party preferenced the Coalition over the Greens.)

Given Saturday’s results, the only way Farley could have conceivably lost would have been if, like Hanson in 1998, he had faced-off with the Liberals’ Butkowski in the two-candidate-preferred count. The current tally of first-preference votes suggests the Liberal didn’t come close to reaching the top two. (The AEC had correctly picked the identity of the final two candidates who all other preferences needed to distributed to, and is currently concerning itself mostly with that count.)

But what if Labor had contested Farrer? It would have done embarrassingly poorly, struggling to hit double digits. But most of its votes would have come at Milthorpe’s expense, pulling her down closer to Butkowski. To meaningfully assist the Liberal (and admittedly the thought of party strategists doing this is a stretch) Labor could have preferenced her ahead of Milthorpe (while still putting One Nation last of course).

On the current counting, that probably still wouldn’t have been enough to elevate the Liberal to the final count. It’s not certain, though, and we’ll know more when final figures are available. But if Labor wants to minimise One Nation’s House of Representatives wins in 2028, this is the sort of preference action it would take, selectively, in seats where One Nation has a good chance. It might also mean installing the odd Coalition MP at the expense of a teal one, disadvantaging Labor in parliament. Look, they probably won’t do it. But they could.

In the meantime, the Liberals and Nationals can take some consolation from the fact that Farrer was unusual in having such a strong Climate 200–backed candidate, strong enough to have come second at last year’s general election. She came second this time too, which tolled the end for the Liberal candidate.

In a two-candidate-preferred count Butkowski would have easily defeated Milthorpe, while Butkowski versus Farley could’ve gone either way. But the Liberal and National parties’ combined primary support was just too low to reach that contest — thanks partly to Climate 200.•

The post Farrer’s national implications? It’s more complicated than you might think appeared first on Inside Story.

Me being a political science student, the talk had inevitably turned to the federal election campaign, which was nearing its end. He confided that while he was going to vote Liberal — he always did; “I’m a Liberal voter” — he hoped Labor would be re-elected. In these challenging economic times prime minister Bob Hawke and treasurer Paul Keating knew what they were doing, he said. Opposition leader John Howard and his erratic, untried team worried him.

It was a strange mindset, but then those were strange times, with the Labor government not greatly loved but widely seen as by far the better economic manager than the Coalition, a reputation subsequent Labor administrations have only fleetingly and modestly regained. Australia was well into the “current account crisis,” when it seemed everyone in the country knew we were living beyond our means. One of the few levers the government possessed to tackle the problem, at least in the short term, was (thanks to something called the twin deficits theory) big spending cuts.

During that gloomy time the government, and particularly the treasurer, successfully laid the blame at the feet of three decades worth of indolent predecessors, and if that meant throwing Gough Whitlam’s Labor government (1972–75) under the bus that was fine. Hawke and Keating had never thought much of that lot anyway.

This successful framing, and the force-feeding of greens down voters’ throats, had generated a huge incumbency benefit. Of course, the likelihood of more pain in their third term was not something they liked to talk about, but there was so much to say about the diabolical damage the Coalition would do to the country if it took office.

There’s a popular view that Howard would have won that election if not for the “Joh for PM” adventure — the attempt by Coalition conservatives to replace Howard with Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen — and of course we’ll never know. But the opposition’s manifesto was ambitious, and Keating in particular delighted in picking it apart. John Hewson’s Fightback! policy has gone down in history as “big target,” but Howard’s 1987 platform was no slouch: he would get rid of the capital gains tax, the fringe benefits tax and the assets test for pensioners and slash other taxes — and all would be funded by mostly unspecified spending cuts. It earned the ire of most mainstream economists and, it turned out, the electorate.

As with the other three elections at which Hawke was leader, opinion polls had greatly overstated the size of Labor’s win. But the government’s relatively slim 50.8 per cent after preferences did manage to produce a phenomenal eighty-six seats out of 148. (Eleven years later, for comparison, 50.9 per cent yielded Kim Beazley just sixty-seven.)

July 1987 happens to have also been the halfway mark of Hawke’s nine years and nine months as prime minister — the years under scrutiny in a new book, Gold Standard? Remembering the Hawke Government. Edited by Frank Bongiorno, Carolyn Holbrook and Joshua Black, it features chapters by sixteen authors, including one from each editor.

The question in the title is answered here in the affirmative — unsurprisingly, given every contributor is sympathetic, and quite a few were involved with that government in some way. Which chapters one likes will depend on taste: I particularly enjoyed Carolyn Holbrook’s one on Medicare, where I learnt of its tenuous beginnings in the face of a decidedly indifferent public. (That helps explains why the Coalition promised to demolish it at several elections before finally getting the hint. But it attained its national treasure status by the end of the decade, and retains it today despite increasingly obvious gaps and flaws.)

Hawke was an unusual character, extremely confident but thin-skinned (including about his height; hence the bouffant), a common combination among the greatly egotistical. Meghan Hopper is a good read on the prime minister’s overt masculinity intersecting with feminine strands such as public crying (the much-remembered 1984 campaign instalment perhaps deserves more interrogation in light of troubling revelations several years ago) and, perhaps less convincingly, reconciliation.

Reconciliation was one of Hawke’s three big Rs (along with recovery and reconstruction) in 1983; the Indigenous version is well-known as a disappointment to even Hawke himself. In his chapter, Peter Yu doesn’t disagree, though he believes Hawke’s genuine desire to make progress was held back by pollsters and general political timidity. In fact, a reliance on polling, and that widely used descriptor, at least in the early years, “pragmatism” (translation: “Don’t be like Whitlam”) tends to be missing from the most tales of their boldness.

Bruce Chapman filled in my knowledge of gaps in the Accord that Labor struck with the ACTU. Stronger unions sacrificed large wage increases, weaker unions got bigger ones than they could otherwise achieve, and there was moderation all round in exchange for the “social wage” — Medicare, tax cuts and government assistance. Much of those measures came in the name of combating inflation, although as every pet shop galah now reminds us (to mangle a Keatingism), anything a government does to assist Australians financially, particularly if it’s untargeted, is itself inflationary. That’s probably part of the reason Australia wasn’t as successful as comparable countries in containing 1980s inflation.

The Accord sits within the general consensus, in this book and elsewhere, that economically the Hawke government was Thatcher and Reagan (and New Zealand Labour) with a heart. Still, as Meredith Edwards’s contemporaneous 1986–87 notes show, a lot of the policy decisions were to her mind regressive.

We called it “economic rationalism” back then, which more or less equates with the twenty-first century’s “neoliberalism” but was generally expressed with less venom and glibness. (Or maybe that’s just the internet.) I must admit Chapman’s chapter got too technical for this non-economist (I skipped through the last few pages to the conclusion); Liam Byrne complements nicely on the same topic.

Gareth Evans’s retrospective, unlike his cabinet diary, Inside the Hawke–Keating Government, which was written in the mid-1980s and published in 2014, is perhaps infected by received wisdom; he identifies that government’s “narrative”, for example, but that is mostly an attribute applied in hindsight. Like everyone else in the book, Evans thinks the Hawke–Keating government was pretty terrific compared with those before and those that followed. But he really prefers Keating to Hawke, as was evident in his 1980s jottings (where he surprised himself with his admiration of and fondness for the treasurer).

Evans’s details include Hawke’s occasional petulance in cabinet when he wasn’t getting his way — a “quick to resort to school ground abuse (of the ‘You are just wanking yourself’ variety) and extremely crude misrepresentations of opposing arguments” — which nicely balances other accounts of the prime minister’s maturity and magnanimity. Evans is convincing when he contrasts the consultation and compromise that went into getting the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax up with the amateurish efforts of Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan to impose a super-profits tax on miners in 2010.

Andrew Podger reminds us of Hawke’s skilled and intelligent chairing of meetings and approach to policy in general, and Troy Bramston his extensive and broad curriculum vitae, including decades in the labour movement and a breadth of other life experience.

Michelle Grattan, who has been contributing to books like this one for decades, is one of the more self-aware press gallery journalists. Her chapter ends with the admission that “a lot got done that benefited Australia — and the media, for their part, helped get it done.” Keating in particular was famous for charming the press gallery into joining his crusades.

The Albanese government can boast a majority of its MPs are female (partly because of the unexpected 2025 landslide win, just as Howard’s 1996 victory also brought in a lot of Liberal women). But Labor wasn’t always the more women-friendly of the two sides. The Whitlam government was the first to legislate extensively in this area, but as Marian Sawer reminds us, Susan Ryan in 1983 was “the first woman to hold [a cabinet] position in a federal Labor government” (my italics). Later, Ros Kelly was the sole cabinet representative of her sex.

It was all, of course, very blokey. The 1980s were a different time. A lot of the stories told today about those political giants are overblown, but one thing they didn’t lack was self-belief. They never harked back fondly to predecessors, and they really believed they were better than all that had come before them.

There were a lot of smart, hard-working people in the Hawke governments. They seemed politically timid at the time, relying on the guidance of Rod Cameron’s pollsters at ANOP, but it turned out they were more courageous than every government that followed Keating’s 1996 defeat. The fact that they faced a much easier Senate (a one-stop shop with the consciously centrist Australian Democrats) than any government post-Howard explains a lot, but not everything.

There’s plenty of interest to be found also in the chapters not mentioned above, but it must be said that the transcript of Barrie Cassidy and Craig Emerson chatting about their times in the prime minister’s office needed serious editing: specifically the many pages dealing with Hawke’s love of a flutter on the horses, and his roping in of staff to place bets for him. One par would’ve done for this reader.

The Hawke government never did fix the current account problem, and neither did its successors. In fact, the Howard government presided over the largest deficit (as a percentage of GDP) in history. The solution turned out deceptively simple: stop worrying about it. (American president Donald Trump never got this memo.)

Today, a popular genre of economic commentary simultaneously castigates the Albanese government for a level of spending higher than any (outside Covid) since the mid-1980s, while urging it to be more like Hawke and Keating. Left implied but not stated in those spending comparisons is that it was higher in Keating’s early years as treasurer than it is today. In fact, Keating presided over the highest federal spending, outside Covid, since the second world war. Then, to avoid becoming a banana republic, he and the government cut it to its lowest level (22.9 per cent of GDP in 1989–90) since Whitlam. No government has got it that low since.

Maybe that’s a neat microcosm of judgements about those heady days of 1983 to 1991: you can pick and choose which part you look at. •

Gold Standard? Remembering the Hawke Government
Edited by Frank Bongiorno, Carolyn Holbrook and Joshua Black | NewSouth | $39.99 | 352 pages

The post Strange days appeared first on Inside Story.

But his policies and rhetoric on immigration, climate change and government intervention in the economy would also have created problems on the party’s moderate flank. And, in the end, with the electorate: namely because, as the 2025 federal election suggested, most Australians really don’t like anything that reeks of Donald Trump and chaos. The fire-breathing Hastie, with his ostentatious religiosity, would have made Peter Dutton look like a mild-mannered accountant. So the party has gone for Angus Taylor — Rhodes scholar, scion of landed gentry, but also very right wing — to replace Sussan Ley.

Ley’s tenure began ten days after the 3 May 2025 landslide loss, and from the beginning she was under pressure. The defeated right-wing forces supporting Taylor didn’t even bother mouthing standard niceties about how, oh certainly, she would be leading them in 2028. Rather, they told journalists off the record that she’d get a fair run for a few months, and they probably wouldn’t bring her down until, well, the following year (which is where we are).

From the outset she faced a balancing act, trying to appeal to metropolitan Australians who had run so far and hard from Dutton while not upsetting the Liberal partyroom, which on average is much more conservative than the general electorate. And there’s also the Coalition partner, more right-wing again.

The pressure on Ley has been exacerbated over the past six to eight months by a gradual but dramatic surge in One Nation support, which by the time of the spill hadn’t peaked, and was almost certainly mostly at the expense of the centre-right parties. One Nation now routinely comes second in polled primary-voting intentions, and in the recent YouGov survey was just two points behind Labor.

All this means Taylor is a better fit than Ley for federal Coalition MPs, which means he’s a worse one for Australian voters. Still, elections are not simply about occupying the middle ground. History (Tony Abbott in 2013 is a fine example, Anthony Albanese in 2022 a less dramatic one) shows voters will tolerate many flaws if they’re determined to boot out a government they’ve come to revile.

Ever since entering parliament in 2013 Taylor has cut a slightly comical figure prone to fumbles. Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s description of him on ABC TV on Friday as “the best-credentialled idiot you’ll ever meet” might be unfair, but it’s hard to see him lasting until the 2028 election.

Senator Jane Hume, who after a dreadful election campaign was dropped by Ley from the frontbench, is now deputy, the first senator of either major party to occupy that position since Western Australia’s Fred Chaney in 1989–90. Hume has an opportunity to shine as the cheerfully stoic understudy who cleans up after the boss’s mess.

What has driven One Nation’s rise? The easy answer is immigration, but is it that simple, given the government’s huge win less than a year ago?

The unravelling of centre-right support is this and last year’s story, but the longer-standing context is the decline of the two-party system, and while the two-party-preferred seesaw currently favours Labor, that will change at some point. One day people will tire of the Albanese government, it will lose its majority, and something else will take its place. In the meantime, the prospect of a Coalition–One Nation government must mean an extra point or two for Labor from the electoral middle.

At his first press conference Taylor prioritised immigration and the cost of living. Compared to Hastie he is the cautious choice, but as an establishment figure is not likely to satisfy voters who crave drastic rightward change.

Ley has announced she’s leaving parliament. The by-election in her electorate of Farrer, and particularly One Nation’s performance, will fun to watch, but it won’t really tell us much about an actual election. By-elections rarely do that, because the fates of governments are not at stake.

Much more useful will be the South Australian election next month. It won’t be a pointer to the next federal outcome (state contests never are) but it will give some clues about how well pollsters are measuring One Nation support, both in terms of the minor party’s polled trajectory between now and then, and the final pre-election polls versus actual results.

But first, there are federal polls to come. Will Angus as leader stop the One Nation rot? He just might, somewhat. But not as much as Captain Hastie would have. •

The post Will Angus Taylor stop the One Nation rot? appeared first on Inside Story.

From just 6.4 per cent support at last year’s election, One Nation hit double digits in September and has since kept climbing. In December its measured primary vote was in the late teens, and so far in January it’s hovered around 20 per cent, with Newspoll even showing it, at 22, one point ahead of the Coalition. Liberal and National MPs would be all have been watching their slide and One Nation’s rise with horror, but Nationals in particular are most at threat.

And that’s just in the House of Representatives. Senate numbers would also suffer.

We don’t know when it will peak, but if the published data in any of January’s surveys were replicated at an election, One Nation would certainly take House seats. How many depends on which poll you use and what assumptions you make about seat-by-seat swings and preference flows.

Newspoll’s 22 per cent would appear as single digits for One Nation in some (urban) seats, but exceed 40 per cent in parts of the bush and particularly in Queensland. And the bigger the variance the better for the party’s chances.

Why? Labor always “preferences” the Coalition ahead of One Nation. Only a minority of voters follow these suggestions, but they can still make a difference. In David Littleproud’s Queensland electorate of Maranoa last year (the only head-to-head Coalition–One Nation count) it washed through to 59 per cent for him and 41 for One Nation.

The Coalition preferenced One Nation over Labor everywhere. In Hunter (NSW), the one electorate where we can observe the flows, One Nation received 83 per cent of the preferences of people who put a “1” next to the Nationals candidate, with just 17 per cent going to Labor’s Dan Repacholi.

But that’s not a representative sample, and the national numbers were probably around 72 to 28 per cent in One Nation’s favour.

Newspoll’s figures, with a big 55–45 two-party-preferred lead for the government, are the most dire for the opposition(s) vis-à-vis Labor, and also against One Nation. The twin contests are related: the higher Labor’s overall two-party-preferred vote the bigger One Nation’s likely seat haul. The reason is simple: One Nation would meet Labor (rather than the Coalition, if I can use that word) in a greater number of seats in the two-candidate-preferred count and benefit from Coalition preferences.

The Newspoll numbers would see One Nation’s seat haul in the twenties, at least. It would take some seats Labor would otherwise have won, but that damage would be nothing like what it would inflict on the Nationals and the odd Liberal.

In the Mother Country, a Labo(u)r government is also facing a grotesquely shrivelled centre-right opposition. Over there, One Nation’s counterpart, Reform, has been polling ahead of all other parties for quite a while, with most recent MRP polls projecting a parliamentary majority for the far-right party. Several Tory MPs have already defected. Give or take a Barnaby or two, we’re not at that stage yet in Australia, although late last year One Nation was hyping up dramatic announcements in the new year.

For a Nationals MP prioritising personal survival in the House in 2028, there’s a potential matter of timing. It makes sense to wait and see what future polls produce before jumping, but defectors will have to make the leap well before One Nation’s candidates are preselected. They’ve still got a year or so.

But help might be on the way from their erstwhile partner. Even before this week’s disintegration, Liberal leader Sussan Ley looked all but certain to be toppled in 2026. Of the two chief aspirants, Angus Taylor would promise a snoozefest punctuated by the odd bungle and Andrew Hastie is the red-pilled, high-octane-ideology option, promising a bit more excitement.

Despite being on the right of the party, Taylor would be the conventional choice; Hastie would be a throw of the dice. The raw materials he possesses — SAS backstory and visual attributes — as well as a likely big shift in rhetoric and policy, particularly on immigration, would be manna for the media and almost guarantee a honeymoon. He’s young, a breath of fresh air, he tells it like it is.

Then the contradictions would see it all unravel. Even more than Peter Dutton, Hastie is Trumpian, and Donald Trump scares the bejeezus out of most Australian voters. He’s likely to go on about God a lot, which Australians find a bit weird. And while high immigration has doubtless helped fuel the One Nation revival, none of it is as uncontrolled as in America and much of Europe.

Across the aisle, there used to be a pattern of mid-term Labor leadership changes (specifically in 2003, 2006 and 2010) producing an immediate rise in the party’s polled primary support mostly at the expense of the Greens. If Hastie became opposition leader then a big jump in Liberal and perhaps Nationals support would likely follow, with a corresponding drop for One Nation. In his early months at least, the opposition would probably also take votes from Labor.

The Nationals could return to the Coalition (freedom of speech disagreements, a symptom of the current opinion polls, would be forgotten) and the fall in One Nation support might even prove enduring. But the rightward shift would guarantee devastation for the Liberals in the capital cities.

As Liberal leader, Hastie can make the Coalition whole again. But if he takes it to the election, the cost would be a big loss. •

The post Labor’s splintering opponents appeared first on Inside Story.

Many in attendance accused Lammy and his Labour colleagues of culpability: by allowing antisemitism to flourish since 7 October 2023; for their criticisms of Israel’s war in Gaza; and, most importantly, for recognising Palestine less than two weeks earlier. (Lammy was foreign secretary when the intention to recognise was announced.) A lot of media punditry agreed.

The toll in our Bondi mass murder on Sunday is many times higher, the evil more profound, but the dynamic of the relationship between our Labor government and the Jewish community is similar. The majority of Australian Jews seem to have viewed the government’s statements and actions on Israel over the last two and a bit years as betrayals.

Much of the criticism over that time, most of it inevitably via News Corp, has at least mentioned the foreign policy decisions, with some seeming to share the Israeli prime minister’s belief that any criticism of the country is antisemitic, or at least “rewards Hamas” and encourages antisemitism at home. This, at core, seems to be the government’s major crime in the eyes of most accusers.

Glibly talking about “eradicating antisemitism,” as many including Anthony Albanese have done this week, doesn’t make it an easier goal. But governments can always do something, and that includes setting an example.

As many have pointed out, when Albanese and his ministers have been asked about antisemitism over the past two years they have trotted out a rote reply: yes, it must be condemned — as should other forms of discrimination including Islamophobia. This coupling has diluted the nature and importance of antisemitism and the Holocaust’s sheer number of victims.

The context is complicated by the fact that the federal opposition, particularly under Peter Dutton, has seen political advantage in the issue, as the number of exchanges in question time shows.

The government would claim it’s just been trying to lower the temperature, especially as some of its electorates include large Muslim majorities. The extent to which this concern morphed into crude electoral considerations before May’s expected close election — specifically the fear of losing seats to single issue pro-Palestinian candidates, as its British counterpart did last year — might be in the eye of the beholder.

Still, even this week, Albanese’s sloganeering seems a bit off. “Terrorists want to divide us, we must not let them” is a clunky response appropriate to urging people not to take out their anger on the Muslim community after an act of Islamist terror. Sunday was certainly in that broad category, but the specificity of the targets — one of the killers was shooing bystanders away — makes it different. The fiercest anger Albanese is trying to contain is directed at himself.

Some political leaders appear able to draw on a deep moral well, at least in public. Kim Beazley, who never became prime minister, was one. Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull as well. Not so Anthony Albanese: displaying sincerity, real or faked, is not his forte. It’s not clear where this deficit comes from — decades of internal party skulduggery, perhaps — but when he’s being interviewed he’s always just managing the situation, resorting to talking points, staying out of trouble.

That habit of extending sentences with an unnecessary phrase — “at this time,” “in this place,” “going forward” — presumably to give himself space to prepare for the next line, doesn’t make for great oratory. By keeping attention on the other side, the small-target persona obviously worked at both elections he has contested as leader. But it makes for a poor ethicist-in-chief and, after Sunday, mourner-in-chief.

(There was a time when our head of state’s representative might have taken up some slack. Should governor-general Sam Mostyn be more active, or is she tainted by association with the Labor government?)

So Sunday’s mass murders have been followed by a lot of criticism of Albanese, what he’s failed to do and is still failing to do. Much commentary is light-on in pinpointing exactly what he’s done wrong, apart from his handling of Israel, or what he should do now. One on Thursday, headlined “Albanese Has a Moment in History to Do Something Big. He’s Wasting It,” ends up barking just two orders: “confront antisemitism wherever it ferments” (yes, this week apparently) and accept all the recommendations in special antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s contentious “Plan to Combat Antisemitism” right now.

Among the assorted litter elsewhere are some meaningful contributions. ASIO should be funded to upgrade its technology: it beggars belief that no automated red light went on when the older shooter’s gun licence was approved, given his son had come to ASIO’s attention. Call out Labor people like Bob Carr, who seems to take mischievous delight in deliberately using “Jewish” rather than “Israel” when describing its “lobbies.” Get serious about preachers of hate in mosques: an old chestnut that’s obviously easier said than done without draconian laws but still worth pursuing. Screen immigrants more thoroughly. Action on most of these fronts was announced last Thursday.

The government can also talk about antisemitism with less equivocation. But any outreach to the Jewish community will be difficult, of course, given the animosity.

Why, in the last four days, is NSW premier Chris Minns spared the sort of opprobrium poured on Albanese when the atrocity, and the constant threat for Sydney’s Jews over two years, took place on his watch and in spite of his government’s law enforcement apparatus? Partly because he has been more forceful in condemning antisemitism without caveats. He also possesses a larger dollop of those public-speaking attributes mentioned above.

And generally he’s been relatively pro-Israel. Most importantly, of course, state governments don’t have foreign affairs responsibilities.

Israel’s prime minister has meanwhile been doing what he can to keep Australian divisions rife. This being Benjamin Netanyahu, we can assume he believes it is in his personal, as opposed to his country’s, interest. •

The post When lowering the temperature isn’t enough appeared first on Inside Story.

From a disappointing election result of 6.4 per cent (disappointing thanks to the pollsters who routinely overstate the party’s numbers by a point or two in their final campaign polls) its support has more than doubled, and almost tripled.

The popular explanation is a perceived move to the left in the Liberal leadership — if not in actual policy, then in the presentation — since Sussan Ley took the charge. For one thing, she’s a woman, and in the past has taken some rather moderate policy positions. Instability sure doesn’t help, either, with Barnaby Joyce’s One Nation flirtation, finally consummated this week, surely beneficial for the minor party, in the short term at least.

The defection delivers leader Pauline Hanson a huge pay rise and perhaps more staff. It might even open a floodgate. (One Nation is spinning it that way, but we should believe that only when we see it.) Being rid of Barnaby will disappoint many Nationals supporters, but its impact at elite level is yet to play out. Most Liberal MPs, on the other hand, will be happy to see the back of him — particularly aspiring candidates in former blue-ribbon city electorates, where Joyce’s unpopularity peaks.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The track record of One Nation’s MPs is not one of picking and sticking. The supposed plan is for Barnaby to get elected to the Senate in 2028 and take over as leader, but that’s almost three years away. There’s plenty of time for a party implosion before then.

The decision to contest the Senate rather than New England presumably reflects an assessment of likelihoods. Voting evidence suggests Joyce is extremely popular in his electorate, and even if the odds of re-election under the One Nation banner in New England are better than even, the chances of succeeding in election to the Senate are even better — and might boost the vote to bring another senator with him.

Is Barnaby the articulate leader that can take the far-right party to the next level? There’s no doubting his communication skills, his word-picture creating, even if it’s getting a bit old and was never everyone’s cup of tea. His former Nationals colleague Bridget McKenzie said recently that “he’s not a racist,” and it’s true his repertoire over two decades in parliament hasn’t included “dog-whistling” of the kind favoured by John Howard in his time and enthusiastically embraced by Peter Dutton.

Watchers of an ABC 7.30 interview on Monday were treated to quite a lot of squirming and dissembling when Joyce was quizzed about some of Hanson’s utterances, including recent ones. He just couldn’t bring himself to agree with some of her nastier comments. Yet the leaders of successful far-right parties around the democratic world — the parties he claims are, like One Nation, the future of politics — aren’t so bashful. Immigrant bashing is a crucial part of the formula; it’s not enough simply to say immigration is too high. Will a hardening be forced on Barnaby’s rhetoric in the new year?

Australia also lacks the plentiful uncontrolled immigration that causes friction in the US and Europe. By comparison with other countries, though, we have long had a very high level of controlled immigration. And there’s also the abundant rorting of bridging visas.

Recent polls have the far-right party on between 14 and 18 per cent. Such support would see its numbers mushroom in the Senate, but what about the House, where government is formed? How would those figures translate into seats? That would depend on two factors.

Pollster Demos recently released a national voting intentions survey of a little under 7000 respondents. It used “multilevel regression with post stratification,” or MRP, which tightens the seat-by-seat margin of error. Demos’s national primary votes gave One Nation 17 per cent with Labor on 33, the Coalition on 24 and Greens 13. Its estimated national two-party-preferred vote is 56 for Labor and 44 for the Coalition. Seat by seat One Nation swings were somewhat proportional to 2025 support: the bigger the One Nation vote in May, the larger the swing its way in this poll.

That’s splendid for the minor party. And, as might be expected, most of the support is coming directly from the Coalition. Demos has the 18 per cent translating into twelve seats. That would make One Nation happy. But this is where the caveats come in.

Demos uses 2025 election preference flows to arrive at each electorate’s two-candidate-preferred results. That’s fine — so they should — but it assumes the Coalition’s how-to-vote cards will again recommend One Nation ahead of Labor everywhere. Is that a certainty in 2028? It seems likely, but it will largely depend on who the Liberal leader is, how much authority they enjoy and whatever in-vogue ideas decree to be the best way forward.

Under Dutton, the pro–One Nation preference strategy was justified by his prioritisation of the outer suburbs and regions. But a Liberal Party that wished to regain territory from the teals and protect itself from  further losses in the inner city might put as much distance as possible between itself and One Nation.

Andrew Hastie and very likely Angus Taylor would happily do deals with the minor party. But Sussan Ley or some other “moderate,” trying to reclaim capital city support, might not.

I’m not suggesting Ley will last until the next election — she won’t — but her right-wing replacement next year might not either; and if that person crashes it would likely be interpreted as showing the hard-right experiment was a dud. Then, in typical Liberal leadership fashion, the pendulum would swing back to a “moderate” or at least “compromise” individual. That could even be Ley.

The second condition for maximum One Nation seat success is not just a rock-bottom Coalition primary vote but also a reasonably healthy Labor one. Of Demos’s twelve projected One Nation wins, the strongest seven come from two-candidate-preferred counts against the ALP. This is where its best chances are, because Labor “preferences” the Coalition over One Nation everywhere, which makes the former difficult to beat in a final count.

If we hold Demos’s One Nation, Greens and “Others” primary votes constant and move three percentage points from Labor to the Coalition in all electorates, four or five seats shift from One Nation to the Coalition. Make it a six-point movement (which would mean a 50–50 national two-party-preferred result) and One Nation is left with just one electorate.

So Labor doing well is also good for One Nation. The 2028 election might see a repeat of 2025, but to assume it will is to succumb to the tyranny of the present. In fact, across federal election history, big wins are nearly always followed by notable corrections.

The other, most important variable, of course, is the One Nation vote itself. Who knows, this time next year it might even, à la Reform UK, be leading the pack with support of around 30 per cent.

There is no reason to believe One Nation’s surge has peaked. •

The post Exit, stage right appeared first on Inside Story.

Prime minister John Howard’s metooism on an emissions-trading scheme at the end of the previous term hadn’t triggered a party-room rebellion. He possessed the authority that comes from being prime minister, and more: he was a successful one who (it seemed) knew how to win elections. Perhaps some suspected or hoped the scheme would turn out to be “non-core.”

Yet by 2010 it was the Labor government, sinking in the surveys, that was playing Twister over global warming. With a new Liberal leader, Tony Abbott, going in hard, Labor “hard heads,” armed with opinion polls, pressured Rudd to dump his policy. When Rudd’s public esteem suddenly and dramatically collapsed, those same machine men pressured caucus to dump him as leader. They didn’t know much about actual voters but they did know their polling numbers, and the numbers told them Julia Gillard would cruise to victory as leader.

And so, from mid-2010 all the way until the May 2022 election, climate change was seen as a terrible problem for Labor, ripping off the plaster that held together their twin constituencies: blue-collar workers (including miners) and inner-city trendies. It was, yes, an existential problem.

Then, when Labor surmounted the seemingly insurmountable and took office again, it once again became the Coalition’s albatross. The very right-wing Peter Dutton managed to hold the outfit together by sticking with the Morrison government’s net-zero-by-2050 pledge but proposing to achieve it via nuclear energy. The beauty of this scheme was that it meant Australia would be let off the hook for the decade or so until the nuclear plants were up and running.

Labor is now in office with a majority that dwarfs its 2007–10 term, and the Coalition is again squabbling over climate. Liberal MPs have now struck a compromise whereby they dump all targets while not denying the science. Affordable energy for Australians is the priority, not international agreements. Our tiny contribution doesn’t make much difference anyway.

Leader Sussan Ley obviously wasn’t staking her leadership on net zero, but she is likely to lose it anyway — because, again, of the opinion polls. Angus Taylor or Andrew Hastie will be leading the opposition, perhaps this year, perhaps next, and prosecuting the cost-of-living case, which is the government’s biggest political problem, with global warming policies front and centre via energy prices. If it’s Hastie, it’ll be accompanied protectionism, slashed immigration and fortress Australia.

How much difference will dropping the pledge make? It’ll mean the Coalition won’t have to come up with a climate policy, leaving it free to propose more coal-fired power and bang on about Labor’s responsibility for Australians’ financial difficulties. Every cent increase in energy costs in living memory will be sheeted home to Labor’s climate obsessions.

But Dutton’s nuclear plan more or less facilitated all that.

Is the world moving away from net zero? Some of the claims it is are dodgy. But it’s possible the Coalition will eventually be vindicated by international developments and the Labor government, with all its tub-thumping about the irresponsibility, will look a bit silly. That won’t mean global warming isn’t real or that that the gradual shift to renewable energy was a bad idea all along. And it’s hardly the stuff that destroys governments.

One other thing: unlike Rudd’s 2010 capitulation, there is zero chance of Albanese throwing up his hands and declaring the renewable transition too hard.

What brings down governments? Perceptions of incompetence, particularly on economic management. Economic problems in general. Perhaps most importantly, longevity. But an opposition that obliges with a big target can extend that longevity.

Opposition leaders come and go, sometimes enjoying honeymoons (Hastie in particular would probably get one). The prospect of not having to worry about doing our bit to combat climate change might entice many voters. But the Coalition will still be left with the hurdle of an election where they are promising to unscramble the government’s renewable energy egg. A change of policy isn’t going to undo past cost of living pressures. And there will be so many questions, so many unknowns. We’ve seen that episode before – and not too long ago.

Unloading the net zero promise, and reopening the climate wars, presents opportunities for the Coalition. But it also offers substantial downsides. •

The post Zero-sum game appeared first on Inside Story.

The Joint Select Committee on Electoral Matters is to “inquire into and report on all aspects of the conduct of the 2025 federal election and related matters, including consideration of the following,” with the last being:

the composition of the Parliament as a whole, including: the length of the parliamentary term; the potential for fixed terms; and the number of elected representatives relative to the growth in population and the electorate.

Parliament was last expanded in 1984, and since then we’ve had seventy-six senators and (it varies) between 147 and 151 House of Representatives members. In 1984 the Australian population was around sixteen million; by the time of the next election, as Farrell notes, “the population will almost have doubled [to] about twenty-nine million people.”

Much further back, at the first federal election in 1901, some 111 MPs (seventy-five in the House and thirty-six senators) served around 3.8 million inhabitants. That’s one federal politician for roughly every 34,000 people. Now, with 226 parliamentarians, the ratio is one per 122,000.

How does that figure stack up internationally? India comes top of the charts, with each national politician representing an average of around 1.8 million people. But Australia tends to rank reasonably high; in this Wikipedia table, for example, we have the forty-fifth highest number of voters per politicians in a field of 238. (The Australian calculation in the right-hand column is actually wrong; inserting the correct one lifts us to about thirty-third.) With 238 entries, the list obviously includes a lot of non-democracies.

Given Australia’s ranking, and given that our seats are sometimes georgraphically huge (you can fit several European countries into some of them) the argument for more MPs seems persuasive. The political class seems to think it’s a good idea, but also something that voters can easily be encouraged to rail against. So it’s no surprise the federal opposition is waiting and seeing.

And yet…

Australia, as a federation, has another 465 lower house and 116 upper house MPs across the country; including them would move us down the international rankings. Communication and travel in the 2020s is vastly easier than in the 1980s, let the early 1900s.

True, federal electorate offices are doing a lot of work for constituents, particularly those in low-income areas. But if those staff are overburdened, a more obvious answer is to increase their numbers, and perhaps deal with the problems in government departments driving people to seek help in MPs’ offices.

The Constitution and the early Commonwealth electoral legislation were composed in the absence of political parties as we know them. In those days MPs represented their geographical areas. Since about 1911, though, they’ve represented their parties — in parliament at least. In this way, single-member-districts can be seen as an anachronism from a pre-party era. Why lump us with more of them?

And then there’s the Senate. The Constitution stipulates that House numbers must, “as nearly as practicable,” be twice the Senate ones. In 1967 the Holt government, with Labor support, attempted to eradicate this “nexus” but the referendum was lost badly. (Its lower-profile companion, an amendment to strike out all references to “aboriginal natives” in the constitution, succeeded with 91 per cent support.) The nexus, and the enormous malapportionment that sees each state send the same number of senators (currently twelve) to Canberra, were part and parcel of the federal system, designed to prevent the more populous states from throwing their weight around. But for more than a century senators too have voted along party lines.

Each senator has a single electorate office in their state, far away from the vast majority of their constituents. What do major-party backbench senators do with their time when parliament isn’t sitting? Engage in intra-party skulduggery, write opinion pieces, surf the internet trolling their opponents? It’s the chamber of party defections, occasional drunkenness and often just weird behaviour. And with more and more senators retiring mid-term, an increasingly appointed one. The idea of making the Senate even bigger is, frankly, a bit depressing.

Former Liberal cabinet minister George Brandis recently penned a rather disastrous opinion piece in the Nine papers about the alleged benefits for Labor of a bigger parliament. (Election analyst Ben Raue has picked it apart here.) In truth, it’s impossible to predict who would benefit from an increase in numbers. But Brandis’s point that the government wouldn’t be attempting this if they didn’t perceive advantages is obviously correct. It’s not zero-sum: a few dozen extra spots with salaries and perks for deserving party hacks would be a plus for all sides.

In addition, reports have floated around for years that some in Labor wish to add a Senate seat to each of the ACT and the Northern Territory (each currently has two). A larger Senate would facilitate that (or even, perhaps, an extra two). Extra seats for Canberra would make political sense for Labor, as it always votes much more left than the rest of the country. So has the Northern Territory this century, but not by nearly as much (and it could revert to its old conservative ways).

Proponents claim the territories are underrepresented in the upper house, but that’s totally untrue. The ACT is actually now better represented, per head of population, than New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. And the Northern Territory, with its tiny population, has the second-smallest number of people per senator after Tasmania.

Of the other elements of Farrell’s final term of reference, four-year terms is one of those proposals that pops up every few years and usually dies a quick death, if for no other reason than it would require a referendum. This time the death throes will last longer. But it won’t go to a national vote under a Labor government.

Like the size of parliament, fixed terms can be achieved by legislation. They’re a better idea anyway because they would mean one less advantage for incumbents, which means that over the long term they would facilitate more changes of government. Parties in office for too long can start to believe they own the place and become vulnerable to opportunities for corruption; see for example the tail ends of NSW Labor, 1995 to 2011, and before that the Queensland Country Party’s thirty-one and a half years to 1989.

And an end to frantic election-date speculation would be an added blessing for all of us. •

The post Sizing up a bigger parliament appeared first on Inside Story.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has long been a favourite. Tony Abbott, who one senses has been dreaming of a comeback for the past decade, is enjoying a revival. And for several months Andrew Hastie has been trailing his long coat.

Ever since he entered parliament in September 2015, Hastie has been spoken of as a future Liberal leader. His employment history and from-central-casting appearance — I mean that literally, he looks like an actor in an action movie — combine powerfully.

He has overtly inserted himself into the leadership stakes while denying to journalists he is doing any such thing. Journos love a leadership stoush, and quite a few, reporting with a soft brush, have cited the at-first-glance-impressive statistic that at this year’s election, which saw a national 3.1 per cent swing to Labor, Hastie picked up 5.4 percentage points in Canning. Which is true: but in fact all sitting Liberals in Western Australia (a small group to be sure, just four of them) achieved positive swings, and Hastie’s was the smallest.

Western Australia was easily the Coalition’s best state swing-wise — shifting to the government by a mere 0.8 per cent — and if you exclude the four Labor MPs freshly elected in 2022 (beneficiaries of the sophomore surge) the state swung a bit to the Coalition.

But Hastie does seem to have a decent personal vote in Canning — candidates and MPs who once wore uniforms tend to attract that — although nothing like the following built up by his voluble predecessor, the late Don Randall. And anyway, performance in an electorate has little to do with leadership prowess.

Explicitly or not, Price, Abbott and Hastie all advocate dramatically lower immigration, but Hastie promises another, complementary defence against an unpredictable world: economic protectionism, so we can make things again. And the three of them would abandon net zero.

It’s all very Donald Trump, of course, but in our case, unlike America and Europe, the evidence of immigration that voters observe on the street is 100 per cent “legal,” although very high relative to other countries. Protectionism, on the other hand, is even more Australian than American, having been with us until quite recently, in the early 1990s. And Anthony Albanese has himself attempted to tap into such yearnings, most obviously when he named the government’s net zero policy the Future Made in Australia.

Slashing immigration and protecting Australian industry would instinctively appeal to many Australians. But if politics was just about mouthing things most people reflexively agree with, well, Dutton would now be prime minister. The very act of energetically promoting such plans can have unintended consequences.

A standalone plebiscite to dramatically lower immigration would possibly or even probably pass, but in the polling booths at election time the issue slides down the list of voters’ priorities. It’s not that important, so why is that politician going on about it so much? Protectionism, which is more about putting food on the table, would probably be attractive to more electors at gut level, but it would constitute a big economic target. We know many Australians are easily frightened at elections.

Abandoning net zero would obviously damage the Coalition in current or potential “teal” electorates, but elsewhere is probably in itself not a great game-changer either way. Except for one thing: right now, investors and businesses are making decisions based on current government policy and a widespread assumption that the Labor Party will be in office for at least six more years. Taking a platform to the 2028 election that proposes to unscramble all that would conjure up disruption and stress, and perhaps see business donations dry up. This is not 2010–13, when most expected the Coalition to take office and made plans accordingly.

These right-wing aspirants for the Liberal leadership would all take inspiration from Trump’s reputation for having tapped into his country’s mood, even if they’re now wise enough to not advertise it. But Trump lost the 2016 national vote by 2.1 per cent and won in 2024 by 1.5 per cent. Neither election could be called a landslide. He has a particular persona and, in his way, eloquence and communication skills. He’s a very American phenomenon, and Australians are not like Americans. Apart from anything else, we lack the evangelical base that was vital to both his wins.

I am one of the minority who doesn’t assume the 2028 election is a lay-down misère for Labor. I mean, they’ll probably win it, but it’s reasonably open within the parameters of those declining primary votes for both major parties. A lot depends on what the world throws at us.

Meanwhile, Sussan Ley is trying to refashion her diminished parliamentary party. She got the booby prize of post-election opposition leadership, and not even six months out the sharks are already circling. The best thing that could happen to her would be to lose the leadership this year, hang around the backbench watching the debacle of her right-wing replacement, and then allow herself to be enlisted again for 2028.

Six months out from the next poll would be perfect. She is much more electable than those other pretenders to the throne. •

The post Less Hastie, more speed appeared first on Inside Story.

Still, it’s easy to forget that Australian governments tend to change not because the opposition has set voters’ pulses racing but because the incumbent has worn out its welcome and the alternative seems at least endurable. We’re talking about voters who elected Tony Abbott as prime minister in 2013 with a seriously big majority. Yes, Abbott enjoyed a united team, but they were united because he had delivered huge voting-intention leads in the polls throughout the preceding term.

What is on life support is the two-party system. If we include the support for that 1930s breakaway, Lang Labor, in the national figure, Labor’s primary vote of 34.6 per cent in May this year was its fourth-lowest since 1910 — and the three lower ones all came in the last twelve years.

So, one day the electorate will turf this government out, and something will have to take its place.

What does our best-known calculator, the Mackerras electoral pendulum, tell us about the likely prospects? A 5.2 point swing to the Coalition, taking the national vote to a two-party-preferred 50–50, would reduce Labor’s haul by a net fourteen seats. The government would end up with eighty seats and the Coalition fifty-seven. (The redistributions taking place in three states will probably change these numbers a little.)

But the pendulum’s design means it keeps the thirteen-strong crossbench constant. How realistic is that? Not very. Apart from anything else, changes in major-party votes will have flow-on effects in those “other” electorates.

Let’s stay with that uniform 5.2 point swing but assume it all comes from a uniform first-preference swing from Labor to the Coalition in all 150 electorates. All the other candidates’ primary votes stay the same. Would that mean the crossbench doesn’t change? No, the Labor-to-Coalition shift alone would have repercussions for non-major-party candidates.

First of all, the Greens would regain Griffith in Queensland. The 5.2 point Labor drop would mean that, as in 2022, the two-candidate count comes down to the Coalition versus Greens and the latter, thanks to piles of Labor preferences, easily prevails.

In the same way, Labor would lose Richmond in New South Wales, probably to the Greens, but maybe to the National Party. It would depend on how those preferences from Labor voters flowed. But the party would certainly lose.

The Coalition would take Ryan in Queensland from the Greens purely because of its improved primary vote. And the Liberals would snatch Curtin in Western Australia, Kooying in Victoria and Bradfield in New South Wales for the same reason: increased Liberal support.

Labor’s lower vote would see it lose two seats to independents, Bean in the ACT and Fremantle, Western Australia.

We’re getting to something closer to a contest. The tally now is Labor on seventy-six, the Coalition on sixty-one, nine independents, two Greens, and Rebekha Sharkie and Bob Katter (who are both, strictly speaking, minor-party members). But Labor still comfortably forms government with a 50 per cent national two-party-preferred vote.

What if we bump the swing up to 6.2? Four more seats would shift directly, on the pendulum, from Labor to the Coalition. And the Greens would take Victoria’s Wills and Queensland’s Brisbane from Labor. Now Labor is on seventy, the Coalition on sixty-five and Greens on four, with nine independents plus Sharkie and Katter.

The resulting minority government could be of either persuasion. It would depend on the teal independents, and the identity of the Liberal leader would play a big part. (I’m not assuming the teals would behave as a bloc.)

Add another percentage point, and a 7.2 point swing would give the Coalition seventy-one and Labor sixty-four, with the crossbench as described above. That’s a likely Coalition government, with 52 per cent of the two-party-preferred.

Of course, it won’t be the case that only the major party votes swing. Swings are never uniform, and we’re forgetting our old friend, the sophomore surge, among the twenty-five new Labor MPs, which will assist the government on the pendulum. But the main point here is that when a party does well against the other major party it can also expect to improve its performance in some contests against minor parties and independents.

Is a swing of around seven points attainable? Of course it is. Elections are discrete events, each in different circumstances, and electoral gravity tends towards 50–50. Big wins are usually followed by corrections.

If the size of Labor’s win this year was heavily influenced by the craziness in the United States, with opposition leader Peter Dutton realising too late that his Trumpiness was a serious negative, then the 2028 Australian contest will be played out in utterly unknown parameters. Yes, either Donald Trump or J.D. Vance will be American president and their country will be further along its march to authoritarianism. The repercussions for international events, and especially involving China, are unpredictable.

By then Australia might have blotted our copybook with America over matters such as Israel and Palestine.

But either way the Liberal leader, to be competitive, will need quite clearly not be a Trump or a Vance. In short, the circumstances of the 2028 election, domestic and international, are Rumsfeldian unknowns.

In the meantime, I’ll be working on a pendulum-plus computer routine that spits out seat numbers for a given set of polled primary votes, along the lines of those hypotheticals above, but inputting numbers for all parties. The Mackerras pendulum is still useful, but it needs an additional dimension. •

The post Who’ll swing the next election? appeared first on Inside Story.

This month’s numbers, averaging around 11 or 12 per cent, are also nothing like some far-right parties in Europe, the highest-profile from this distance being Reform in Britain and France’s National Rally bloc, both on around 30 per cent and comfortably in the lead, and Germany’s AfD, in the mid-to-high 20s, sometimes leading the pack, sometimes behind the governing CDU.

In Italy, meanwhile, the far-right Georgia Meloni is actually prime minister, and in other countries similar parties sit in governing coalitions.

One Nation is not remotely within distance of those parties. But a couple of recent polls have them slightly ahead of the Greens (Resolve has 12 per cent, Essential 13) and hence in third place. (Essential stubbornly persists with its slightly insane post-2019 policy of not publishing data net of undecideds; there’s a better than even chance that the 13 is really a 14.)

Pollsters are probably overstating the party’s support. When taking their mid-term voting-intention surveys they must decide whether to include a minor party in the same breath as the major ones, or leave it to a secondary list along with the ones you might not have heard of. The first strategy tends to overstate support for the small party, the second tends to understate it. These days the Greens and One Nation always feature in the first list, which is why both go on to underperform at the ballot box. (The Greens less in recent years.)

At this year’s federal election, for example, One Nation received 6.4 per cent in the lower house, a couple of points below what most of the final surveys had suggested.

One reason for the party’s apparent doubling in support since the election might be that the Liberal Party is now led by a “centrist,” even if she’s obliged not to behave like one. Perhaps Peter Dutton, with his regular forays into immigration, racially tinged rhetoric and fierce opposition to the Voice, kept a few potential Hansonites in his tent. Last month’s March for Australia might also have galvanised some people to prioritise immigration when participating in surveys.

But why hasn’t One Nation reached the heights of similar parties in Europe? And more generally, why doesn’t Australia exhibit similar levels of “populism” to Europe and America? Total support for far-right minor parties at this year’s election barely cracked 10 per cent.

I reckon uncontrolled immigration is a major factor in our outlier status: we have virtually zero. Even when “the boats” peaked under the Rudd and Gillard governments, the numbers as a proportion of our population were minuscule compared with what other advanced democracies experience today. In Europe and the United States the huge numbers of “illegals” can be evidenced in many camps, streets and, infamously, hotels, while over here they only appeared on television news.

Electoral systems are a factor, too. With some exceptions, chief among them France and Britain, European countries tend to elect their lower (or sole) chambers via a form of proportional representation. Under such a system down under, Hanson’s party would probably have got a foothold in the House of Representatives in both 1998 and 2016 — as they did in the PR-elected Senate at those elections — and might have played a role in deciding who formed government. From little things big things have been known to grow, although One Nation’s record of losing senators needs to be taken account of. On the other hand, both Britain’s Reform and France’s National Rally managed to overcome the single-member-district hurdle.

There’s the persona of Hanson herself. It’s very likely that in the late 1990s and early noughties her unpolished inarticulateness played a big role in her rise, contrasting with the slickness of those “elites” and the “establishment” who — in her supporters’ view — ridiculed and looked down on her, and hence on them. But perhaps that shtick can only get you so far.

The successful European far-right leaders, according to reports, tend to have the gift of the gab. (I’m monolingual so can only judge Farage, who certainly does.) Many have university degrees and some were born into privilege. In America of course, where the far right has hijacked the major centre-right party, Donald Trump’s undoubted communication skills and outsized personality have been key.

Also in the United States the highly decentralised, partisan-infused, ramshackle election apparatus provided fertile soil for Trump to succeed in persuading some people of his false claims about the 2020 election. In Europe, trust in elections seems to vary. Norway, where it seems to remain high (I couldn’t find any surveys) has nonetheless taken preemptive measures to increase transparency and guard against potential future disinformation campaigns. Australia should do the same.

Our Australian Electoral Commission and its state and territory counterparts deservedly enjoy wide support. Not only do they have legislated statutory independence, but the AEC is most unusual in conducting all aspects of elections. (In most countries, local government plays a major role.)

But our Achilles heel is our voting system, which is widely misunderstood. The intricacies of electing senators are unfathomable for nearly all Australians, though the identity of the government is not decided in that chamber, and the roughly proportional votes-to-seats results do make sense.

It’s the “alternative vote” in the lower house — the thing we call preferential voting — that provides scope for mischief now that major party support is so low. Most Australians probably don’t understand how it works. No data exists for this, but anecdotally many people believe parties “give” each other preferences (as actually was the case for the Senate from 1984 to 2014); journalists’ jargon, which often implies this, is largely to blame. Others assume a second preference has less value than a first, or don’t understand why it doesn’t. Many questioned how Labor could form government in 2022 despite easily losing the primary vote.

France actually has a very similar system to ours, but it’s conducted on two separate occasions. When, between the first and second rounds of last year’s legislative election, some parties made agreements to selectively withdraw from some electorates so as to not split the anti-National Rally vote — which meant that Le Pen’s party won just a quarter of seats despite topping the first-round vote — most French would have understood what had transpired, not least because they (or at least the two-thirds of registered voters) participated in that second round. Not so with preferential voting.

The fate of National Rally in 2024 is analogous to Hanson’s in the Queensland federal electorate of Blair in 1998. She topped the primary vote but failed to win because Labor voters overwhelming preferenced the Liberal candidate thanks to Labor’s how-to-vote cards and general advocacy. Not surprisingly, the result fuelled conspiracy theories among her supporters that can still be heard today; Hanson herself, in her 2016 comeback speech, falsely claimed that “the introduction of full preferential voting… cost me the seat.” Full preferential voting has been with us federally since 1918.

One day a wilier, more articulate far-right politician might emerge who is also a dab hand at spreading dangerous porkies. They might even, as in the United States, come through a major party; Dutton showed he was at least willing to try to spread untruths about electoral shenanigans during the Voice referendum campaign. Our much-misunderstood method of electing members to the House of Representatives (and its counterpart lower houses across the mainland) is a big juicy target.

Some will say the answer is education, but that’s been tried forever. Journalists can’t change their spots. The answer instead is to change the electoral system, preferably to proportional representation (for other reasons as well, and despite any uncomfortable European experiences) or, failing that, to an actual two-round vote.

We do not know what delights America and the rest of the world will throw at us in coming years. But like Norway’s, our legislators and electoral commissions should try to anticipate possible future enablers of widely believed disinformation about how MPs are elected, and build appropriate safeguards. •

The post One Nation’s warning appeared first on Inside Story.

Under Labor’s policy, around $7.7 billion a year had been collected via a price on carbon emissions and returned to Australians through various channels but mostly direct tax cuts. The Abbott government, by contrast, paid companies to reduce their emissions. It was budgeted to cost around $2.5 billion over four years.

Wielding a nifty pea and thimble, Hunt used the emissions cut under the carbon price, the total money churned, the emissions cuts promised by businesses and the dollars paid to them to pronounce that “Labor’s $15.4 billion carbon tax reduced emissions at over $1300 per tonne” while his government’s scheme “averages $13.95 per tonne.” Labor’s “failed carbon tax was more than ninety-three times more expensive.”

This was a false comparison in many ways, the main one being the dollars: one figure (the ERF’s) was a cost to the budget and the other (Gillard’s) wasn’t.

That’s political spin for you — nice work if you can get away with it — and if you’re very lucky journalists will pick it up and run. In this case no journo obliged with more vigour than the Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan who, in a celebratory column, wrote that Hunt (yes, Hunt personally) was “going to cut Australia’s carbon emissions four times more than Labor did with its carbon tax at 1 per cent price per tonne of emissions…”

Sheridan evidently liked the cut of Hunt’s jib, for his columns in those years were littered with glowing mentions of the frontbencher — too many to list, in fact, but here’s a sample and a final farewell.

Hunt is long gone, and these days the object of Sheridan’s besottedness seems to be Matt Canavan, the coal-revering Queensland LNP senator. Canavan was a minister in the Turnbull and Morrison governments, and Sheridan is very much of the opinion he should be back on the frontbench. In particular, Greg shares his conviction that the Coalition should abandon the net-zero-by-2050 target.

In May this year, Canavan shared on social media a screenshot of a London Daily Telegraph headline “New Zealand Abandons Jacinta Arden’s Net Zero Push” and added his own words: “New Zealand just dropped net zero. Why do we remain committed to this madness?”

The Tele’s headline, repeated in the article’s introduction, was fake news: New Zealand hasn’t dropped net zero. (But if you google the words you’ll find them gleefully repeated many times.) The piece instead referred to that country’s National government’s plans to “invest NZ$200m (£90m) in new offshore gas fields,” overturning Labour’s fossil fuel policy. If expanding gas exploitation is abandoning net zero, then the Albanese government has also dropped the target.

Within days, Sheridan was writing that the “Nationals in New Zealand… are abandoning the inherently fraudulent concept of net zero” and Australia’s federal opposition should do the same. And, of course, “By far the most policy-competent and intellectually substantial National is Queensland senator Matt Canavan.”

Sheridan articles railing against net zero — both in itself and as Coalition policy — and advocating Canavan’s return to the frontbench have been many. One, in early August, began by asserting that “there’s not a centre-right party in the English-speaking world, Nationals senator Matt Canavan points out, that remains committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050,” though he equivocated further down that “New Zealand’s government has kept the notional commitment but reversed Labour’s main policy actions.”

There was more. The Economist magazine, that “high-gloss rendition of every globalist piety,” has “crossed a Rubicon by declaring the world should abandon net zero by 2050 as a hard target and conceive of it as a “more of a guideline strategy.’” Sheridan has repeated this interpretation of the Economist’s view several times since, including last Sunday on ABC’s Insiders.

Is it true? Well, it’s nuanced. The magazine’s editorial stated that the “scientific rationale for net zero is strong” and an “end to warming requires the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to stop increasing… The logic is inescapable.” But the politics being fraught, and politics being the art of the possible, leaders need to make sure the perfect doesn’t get in the way of the good.

The magazine distinguished between wealthy countries (like Australia) and the majority that aren’t but are trying to be. The latter’s carbon ambitions, starting off such low bases, are “[in] many cases… barely physically imaginable, let alone politically feasible.” But wealthy countries, rather than “abandon stringent net-zero targets outright” should “find ways to ease [such targets] into the ‘more of a guideline’ category,” even if it means sacrificing economic purity.

So the Economist lauded, for example, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s decision to “rescind the aspects of Canada’s carbon-pricing scheme that affect [voters] directly.” That was the largest component of that country’s scheme, a tax on fuel, applied at the level of consumption. (Australia has never had such a tax. And Canada’s federal government still has a carbon price rather like our 2012–14 one but involving much smaller dollar amounts, as well various state abatement schemes.)

It’s a huge exaggeration, at best, to say the Economist takes the view that we should “forget about net zero as a guiding principle because it’s just not going to happen,” as Sheridan did on Insiders on Sunday. Greg’s most recent net zero piece, on Wednesday this week, had something for everyone: advice for Ley, more Matt, another dubious reference to the Economist, even Greg Hunt.

As far as I can tell (cheat sheet: AI) no country has followed Sheridan’s advice and dropped net zero, not even Argentina (yet) under Javier Milei. But some parliamentary oppositions have, including the British Tories — and Nigel Farage’s Reform party, which is leading that country’s voting-intentions opinion polls.

Australia might or might not get to net zero, but it’s hard to be optimistic about the planet’s ability to hit the goal by 2050. If global warming was restricted to the geographic area in which the carbon was let loose into the atmosphere, the incentives would be different. As it is, every country is encouraged to freeload.

But is the Economist’s realpolitik actually realistic? Can a government proclaim a goal that’s only an aspiration? Maybe the Albanese government is conforming to that prescription by having a net zero target, albeit one that many experts believe won’t be met, while not moving ahead of the international pack. And another actual carbon price for this country — forget about it.

And what of the domestic politics down under? I’m never one to project the most recent election result and/or current surveys into the future and forecast government victories as far as the eye can see. Parties in opposition tend to flaunt their flaws, and these are particularly discernible through the prism of disastrous polling numbers. The same defects are also present during their stints in office, though, and they are a driver of the ever-falling major-party support. But the total major-party election share after preferences still has to add to 100 per cent.

The electoral cycle goes on, voters will one day well and truly tire of this Labor government, as they tired of the Coalition three years ago, and a change of government will be in the offing, albeit in the context of that expanding crossbench.

With the evidently red-pilled Andrew Hastie promising to quit the frontbench if net zero is not discarded, other Liberals rumoured to intend the same, and the Nationals deeply anti-zero, Sussan Ley’s five-month-old leadership appears fragile.

Mr Sheridan will probably get his wish on Coalition climate policy, if not necessarily the full Canavan-as-shadow-minister quinella. Abandoning net zero in opposition probably doesn’t make much difference to how voters see them. The median Coalition MP has never seemed to believe global warming is real, let alone that Australia should do anything about it. It didn’t stop them winning three elections on the trot.

The danger for the opposition lies in the prospect of people like Canavan having an influence on energy policy in general. He is, for example, very keen on building new coal power stations — a fringe position. If undoing moves towards renewable energy actually became opposition policy it wouldn’t only be a “signal” to the electorate that they’re a bunch of out-of-touch blokey troglodytes. It would also mean taking big policy targets to future elections.

Back when the “carbon tax” was legislated in 2011 and implemented the following year, it was against the backdrop that most people expected the next election would result in the policy being undone. Today, by contrast, virtually everyone assumes that 2028 will be a shoo-in for Labor and the earliest the Coalition can conceivably take office is 2031.

So, twelve to fourteen years ago, big business made plans for the demise of the carbon price and then agitated like hell and poured cash into the Liberal coffers to make sure that happened. That won’t be the case in 2028 if the opposition is promising to upend a more deeply embedded climate policy.

Through my prism, one election result never tells us much about the next one. But that general expectation about the 2028 election is probably correct, and the chief reason is that America’s White House will contain either Donald Trump or J.D. Vance and will hence still be a madhouse.

If the Coalition campaigns then, or in 2031, to unscramble the renewables egg, regardless of how on the nose the government is, and even if voters are blaming it for high power prices… well we know from experience that even an electorate ready to toss out an incumbent can be driven back into its arms if the alternative is too stress-inducing.

The big danger for Coalition MPs is that they put their climate change policy money where most of their mouths are. •

The post Toxic emissions appeared first on Inside Story.

Samaras: “85 per cent of the Indian diaspora voted for the Labor Party at the last election. Thereabouts, it varies across the country.”

Pavlou: “What was the number sorry Kos?”

Samaras: “85 per cent. Whenever we poll, in our polling, they’re about that, two-party-preferred.”

The first I saw of this number was in an article by the Institute of Public Affairs’s Adam Creighton in the Australian on Friday, a typically tendentious cherry-data-picking effort that I used as brain exercise here.

But the 85 per cent figure had apparently been making the rounds of the internet, or certain corners thereof, for a couple of week before that. According to Nine papers, it has been “quoted by far-right social media accounts and in posts by March for Australia, the group that organised last month’s anti-immigration rallies and targeted Indian Australians in their promotion flyers.”

It slots in very nicely with a far-right meme that has the Labor government carefully selecting the type of migrant who will vote for them. Hence all the Indians! It collapses immediately when faced with the fact that immigrants can’t become citizens and vote for at a minimum of four years after arrival, which would mean the Morrison government was in on the act. But no matter, it’s out there.

It was Wednesday last week when one obviously very-online federal MP, Coalition frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, made her now infamous assertions about Indian migrants on the ABC. The following day, in a partial backtrack, she explained that “a recent Redbridge poll told us that 85 per cent of those who have Indian ancestry… voted for Labor… So, these were the facts that I was pointing out.”

Now, facts shouldn’t be suppressed simply because bad faith actors might misuse them. None of this would be Samaras’s problem if that 85 per cent number accurately reflected what his research had found. (It might cause us to question his methodology, although Redbridge has a good record for voting intentions at elections.)

But it’s not accurate. To anyone who has thought about these things, it’s obviously way too high. Kos at first doubled down, but was reported yesterday in Nine Papers as downgrading the figure to “mid-60s” two-party-preferred, which is believable, given the overall 55 per cent vote for Labor in May.

(When Samaras also described Indian people voting Labor “for sectarian reasons,” Pavlou responded that he’s “really concerned for the future of the country if we get these sectarian voting blocs.” This sent me to Google search in case there was some variation of that word’s meaning that I wasn’t aware of. I found none. It’s a bizarre, more inflammatory assertion.)

There’s a question hiding in all this about how people of Indian ancestry really did vote in May, or at any election. No one knows. They probably comprise around 3 per cent of the electoral roll, and any polled numbers are just too small to come to a robust conclusion. As far as I know, Accent’s Shaun Ratcliffe has the best data on federal election 2025, within which, as he says, voters born in India are a tiny subsample. The primary vote support from Australians of South Asian ancestry (about 70 per cent of them are from India) implies a Labor two-party-preferred vote in the low 60s. So maybe it’s that, give or take 5–10 per cent.

This might invite another question: how then would I or anyone else know that 85 is too high? The answer is that it’s way too high for any ethnic group in this country, apart perhaps from Indigenous Australians. In the United States (for which large datasets exist) African Americans regularly register that figure or more for Democrats; Indian Americans voted about 60 per cent Democrat last year, around the same advantage as Labor’s here.

If Price really was motivated by the 85 per cent misinformation, it has now led to her departure from the opposition frontbench after she publicly declined to affirm support for leader Sussan Ley.

We’ve seen all this before, an MP adored by the Coalition’s self-proclaimed base and far-right media outlet Sky After Dark destabilising the Coalition. It ended Malcolm Turnbull’s premiership in 2018. With such a right-wing Liberal party room it just makes life more difficult for Ley. As one wag on X put it, “Some people are trying very hard to make it 85pc next time.”

Indeed. By all accounts another big name among the “base,” Tony Abbott, was a key holder of the shoehorn that brought Price into the Liberal party room this year. This weekend it’ll be ten years since Liberal MPs unceremoniously voted him out the highest office. This is one very cold dish. •

The post What was that number? appeared first on Inside Story.

Since 2014 (but not every year) the Lowy Institute has posed a similar survey question with an almost identical trio of available responses. Its first instalment painted a reasonably rosy picture, with just 37 per cent saying immigration is too high. But since then attitudes seem to have soured, with 2018 the recording the lowest support, and the latest, 2025, the second-lowest, noticeably less favourable than in 1951.

But what is meant, and understood, by “immigration”? “Coming to Australia” (in the 1951 framing), of course, but from where?

The first post–second world war “populate or perish” boatload arrived in 1947 from, according to the National Museum, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. “They were all young and single and quickly became known as the ‘beautiful Balts.’ As [Labor immigration minister Arthur] Calwell later admitted, ‘It was not hard to sell immigration to the Australian people once the press published photographs of that group.’  ”

Most interesting about that 1951 survey is that APOP asked respondents whether they supported immigration from each of seven European countries. Approval ranged from 77 per cent for the Netherlands to 26 for Italy. The latter’s wooden spoon was no doubt influenced by its membership of the Axis only several years earlier, though Germans managed 51 per cent against Allied Greeks’ 41.

The fairer the better, it seemed. Or, put more politely, we prefer those who look and behave more like us.

Britain was not listed, presumably because their welcome mat was simply assumed. Over the following decades, the United Kingdom and Ireland accounted for easily the biggest numbers, followed by Italy and Greece. There were quite a few Dutch, but not many of those beautiful Balts.

These days, of course, the intake makeup is very different. After an influx in the 1970s and 1980s, Australia currently has the largest cohort of Vietnamese (as a percentage of population) outside Indochina. This century, people from India have been the largest component, followed by China.

After Sunday’s rallies against immigration, former immigration minister Philip Ruddock penned a piece for the Australian Financial Review that blamed it all on the Morrison and Albanese governments’ failure to communicate population policy to the electorate. He assures us that he himself was exemplary in this respect. Ruddock might have a point, but we need to note that his “communicating” in the lead-up to the 2001 election included spreading misinformation about children thrown overboard and mugging and chewing the scenery about how despicable it was.

Most risible was Ruddock’s assertion in the AFR that Australians “remain strongly supportive of a skilled program that drives prosperity, of a multicultural society that reflects our modern identity, of a humanitarian program that offers safety to the persecuted and close family reunions.”

“Australians” are familiar with these details of immigration policy? They’re “strongly supportive”?

As George Megalogenis wrote in the Australian fifteen years ago, “The impulse to close the door cuts across party and cultural lines, and draws on a gut call voters make that Australia can’t carry too many more people without breaking. Local born and established immigrants think alike, as do Labor, Liberal and Green voters.”

Yet, as George also noted, “no government since World War II has allowed the political cycle to dictate policy.” Which is a nice way of saying majority opinion was largely ignored.

That is a critical point. Large-scale immigration, particularly from other than northern Europe, has for eighty years been one of several technocratic projects that, thanks to bipartisan agreement, voters haven’t had a say in. Ending White Australia in the late 1960s and early 1970s in particular sits in that category, as do most of the you-beaut economic reforms — privatisation, deregulation, tariff elimination, etc — the political class celebrates today from the Hawke–Keating and Howard–Costello years. The fruits of this political model can, in part, be seen today in the slow collapse of the two-party system, and not just in Australia.

Australians tend to adjust, move on, even concede that the difficult change was for the best after all. In any case, younger generations usually prefer the present to old fuddy duddies’ reminiscences of a glorious past. Earlier waves of migrants become largely accepted; newer ones thought by some to be problematic.

This time last year I wrote on these pages that “if Kamala Harris fails against the easybeat Donald Trump in November it will be largely due to [immigration across] the southern border.” If that sounds too reductionist, perhaps we can agree with a more modest formulation: that illegal immigration was a necessary ingredient in Trump’s narrow (1.5 per cent in the national vote, 2.5 per cent in the electoral college) victory.

A crucial component is missing in a lot of commentary of Sunday’s demos, particularly those that link it with movements overseas. It’s a factor that matters for our general politics, and particularly Peter Dutton’s failure to capitalise on fear of foreigners in May’s election. It is the virtual absence of uncontrolled border-crossing into this country. Again quoting myself from August last year, “per-capita ‘illegal immigration’ numbers in America (in 2023) are roughly ten times what ours were at their peak (in 2013); and ours are close to zero today. Comparisons with Europe are similarly one-sided.”

Australia has long had a large immigration program relative to comparable countries. The Albanese government’s actions — limiting overseas students, for example — suggest an acknowledgment that earlier settings were too lax. Importantly, immigration, for all the benefits in the medium term, cannot help but negatively impact housing. And there are and always have been racist attitudes towards people of colour.

But in the United States and much of (the former Western) Europe, evidence of years of accumulated unauthorised arrivals is glaringly apparent in many citizens’ everyday lives, in towns and cities, in for example buildings and hotels used for housing them. Over here, people who arrived by boat are as rare as hen’s teeth, and of course impossible to pick out on the street. There is quite a bit of dodgy visa manipulation and overstaying, which adds to numbers and is evident in our capital cities. And, yes, conflating “legal” and “illegal” is almost de rigueur in anti-immigration rhetoric. The internet and Covid have fuelled radicalisation.

But we have nothing like the challenges that face the United States and Europe — and that, in many ways, including at the political level, is a good thing. •

The post Selling immigration appeared first on Inside Story.

Articles and talk programs pondering whether the youth vote “might decide the outcome this time” have been staple pre-election fillers for decades. Along with other demographic ruminations, they usually disappear on election night as their meaninglessness becomes evident: once again, the election is decided by all voters.

A related meme followed the demise of the Howard government in 2007 and Scott Morrison’s in 2022: support for the centre-right among young Australians was now so diabolically low that it was hard to see how the Coalition could win office ever again. In both cases the yarn worked a treat while the Rudd and Albanese governments were soaring in the polls but dissolved as voting intentions narrowed. From late 2023 until May 2025 not a peep was heard from anyone about this existential threat to the Libs and the Nats.

A particular version of the “youth vote” narrative did, however, step up. The “era of Baby Boomers as the dominant voting force in Australian politics is at an end,” it said. “Power and numbers have shifted to younger people” because “for the first time in Australian history, Generation Z and Millennials will outnumber Baby Boomers at the ballot box in the upcoming federal election.”

“Disillusioned” and “resentful,” these two groups’ impact on the election was impossible to predict, but “their grievances could deliver unexpected results in marginal seats” and they “may well,” yes, “decide the election.”

Today, three months after the Albanese government’s massive return, the “Coalition may never govern again” narrative is well and truly revived, with those Millennials and GenZs enjoying a central position, having morphed from unpredictable to reliably left-of-centre, not just now, but forever. Just in the last fortnight you could read about “younger voters whose electoral heft now rivals the traditionally powerful baby boomer bloc” and how “Gen Z and Millennial voters, spanning the age range from thirteen to forty-four, [have been] gradually overtaking the electorate as Baby Boomers fade away.”

Now, your takeout from all this hullabaloo might be that this is the first time voters under forty-five have outnumbered the sixty-pluses. This is not the case. That younger group has always outstripped the sixty-plus cohort, and in fact the extent to which it does shrinks with every election (perhaps excluding 1974 when the voting age dropped from twenty-one to eighteen). In June 2008 (the earliest AEC age data I could find) eighteen- to forty-four-year-olds comprised 45.8 per cent of the roll and sixty-pluses 26.6 per cent, a gap of 19.8. At the close of rolls in 2025 the numbers were 43.1 and 32.7, a difference of 10.4.

It almost halved in seventeen years: our population is ageing, after all.

No, the claim here is specific to those particular demographics, Gen Zs and Millennials, and its alleged significance rests on an assumption about their future voting behaviour: they will remain left-wing. Nearly all these yarns are sourced to polling outfit Redbridge, and usually include quotes from director Kos Samaras. Redbridge has a very fine quantitative polling record, topping Kevin Bonham’s 2025 election pollsters analysis. Along with his colleague Tony Barry, Samaras has been a staple of the ABC TV’s election night coverage in recent years.

To understand what they’re on about, we need definitions of these rather arbitrary “generations.” By most accounts, Boomers are people born from 1946 to 1964, Millennials from 1981 to 1996 and Generation Z from 1997 to 2012.

For enrolment we go to the Australian Electoral Commission’s electoral roll, provided on their splendid website, where ages are grouped mostly in five-year bunches. Mil-Gen Zs fit neatly into the forty to forty-four category plus all the younger ones. Boomers at first glance look trickier, but luckily it turns out that when Samaras et al talk about them, they actually mean Boomers and older, so the AEC’s sixty to sixty-four group is also convenient: just add it to the more aged. (Poor old Gen Xers, alone, are left out of this equation.)

Now, the reason, stated or implied, that the new outnumbering is tectonic is that Mil–GenZs are not like earlier eighteen to forty-four years olds: their political inclinations will not change much over time. Yes, they were seen as up for grabs before 3 May, but the result, or maybe the size of it, changed that. (In truth we have no data on who voted how age-wise this year, apart from pre-election polling which, remember, apparently showed volatility among young voters.) The crux of it, why this constitutes an earthquake, is that they will not follow earlier generations in becoming more politically conservative as they age.

That last bit requires a bit of fleshing out.

It’s obviously not the case that historically all Australians’ voting habits adhered to the socialist–capitalist, heart-and-head formulation. But, in net terms, a substantial minority have. Our meagre exit polling data means that any guesstimate can only be rough, and the picture is complicated by the erosion of major-party support over the decades, particularly among the young. The meaning of left and right, and the positions of the major parties, are not fixed in time. The parties evolve over the years in response to changes in popular attitudes, or for other reasons. But preferential voting does allow us to observe two-party-preferred trends, while acknowledging the decreasing applicability of that construct.

It’s also important to view any observed shift in a particular demographic’s vote in the context of the electorate as a whole. At the 2025 election, for example, the overall swing to Labor was 3.1 per cent. If you identified a cohort that had swung to Labor by 3 per cent, it would not be of great interest. But a 6 per cent swing, or no swing at all, might well be.

I have to report with some sadness that many breathless accounts of changes in voting habits over time among particular groups don’t take account of those overall shifts. Not adjusting in this way produces more drama just makes better copy.

So, with plenty of provisos, how has the ageing process affected the net shift from left to right in the wider electorate?

The best available evidence, with decent sample sizes, comes in Newspoll’s quarterly numbers, which stretch back to 1996. Twenty-nine years ago, the eighteen to thirty-four age group — not quite a perfect match for today’s fifty to sixty-four group, but not-too-bad — supported Labor at about 3 per cent above the national figure. (These are my two-party-preferred estimates from Newspoll’s primary support.)

Across last year and early this, though, Newspoll’s fifty to sixty-four group registered two-party-preferred support for Labor at around 4–5 per cent below the corresponding national number.

So, with plenty of caveats — midterm surveys are not as meaningful as exit polls because people can change their minds as election day approaches; immigration, emigration and death have changed the roll over the last thirty years; support shifts in both directions; and polls, of course, can be wrong — we seem to be talking about perhaps 7 (rounding down to account for the current group being slightly older than a perfect match would be) per cent of those voters have shifted right, or around double that, 14 per cent, of Labor ones, in two-party-preferred terms. That’s across a period of less than thirty years; today’s fifty-year-olds still have a lot of ageing to do.

So, is there really a reason to believe Mill–GenZs will buck the long-term trend and go to their graves the left-of-centre voters they are today? This is, after all, the basis on which all the drama rests.

The answer is no.

For one thing (as Zou Enlai didn’t really opine about the impact of the French Revolution) it’s just too early to tell. Even if current data suggested they haven’t shifted allegiance so far, they’re still young. But the evidence, despite some claims, doesn’t show that anyway.

The source for the assertion that their politics won’t change is usually the Australian Election Study’s 2022 report. I gave the AES a going-over a couple of years ago for various sins, including ignoring aggregate voter shifts, which is relevant here. The AES claimed that Millennials had shifted left over the decades, that they “entered the electorate in the early 2000s with about 35 per cent of this generation supporting the Coalition [in primary votes], a level which has now fallen to 25 per cent in 2022].”

The two big flaws in this finding were that the electorate as a whole recorded a 2022 Coalition primary vote 7.2 per cent lower than in 2001, and that Millennials were still turning eighteen, adding presumably relatively left-wing voters to the roll, right up until 2014. So it wasn’t a fixed group.

The AES made no similar assertions about the newly-arrived Gen Z electors, in fact had them swinging to the Coalition in 2022, albeit from an unusably tiny sample. But Redbridge has lumped them with Millennials, presumably to facilitate the “now outnumber Boomers” tagline. It makes for a very large group indeed, containing many parents and their offspring. Note that young Gen Zs will continue joining the electoral roll until around 2030.

As far as I know there has been no attempt by the AES to track the votes of subsets of Millennials, say those who are forty to forty-four in 2025 and were nineteen to twenty-three at the 2004 election (adjusting for overall electorate votes, of course). The samples would be tiny, but the results could still be of interest. In theory we outsiders should be able to do that with the public AES data, but in practice their older datasets are rather messy. I had a go a couple of years ago but hit a dead end. It was the case though, using minuscule samples, that older Mil-GenZs voted more right-wing than younger ones in 2022.

What is undoubtedly true, however, is the increased divergence between young and old voters. That roughly three-point 1996 Labor advantage among eighteen to thirty-four year olds has exploded to at least ten per cent among today’s eighteen to thirty-four year olds. This is in line with worldwide trends, though complicated by recent accounts of many young men turning to the centre-right and far-right parties.

Now, you could argue that even if today’s overwhelmingly left-of-centre young people move to the right by the same amount as their predecessors, it will still result in a very leftwing overall electorate. But it’s easy to imagine them shifting by more as they become more well-off than younger Australians. Because all the bounty held by oldies today has got to go somewhere.

Explanations for this predicted electoral seachange routinely link it to the housing crisis and increasing intergenerational wealth disparity. These are real issues: real estate ownership is increasingly skewed to older people, and skyrocketing prices, particularly over the last two decades, continue locking younger people out. It is no doubt part of the reason for the big divergence in votes by age.

But what happens to all that property and wealth when old people die? It doesn’t accompany them off this mortal coil, but is inherited by others, eventually nearly all younger Australians.

According to one 2025 account, the median age at which people get an inheritance is fifty-five and the average amount $707,000. Many, of course, will receive a lot more than that, and many a lot less. If the current age–wealth disparity is historically large, then so will be the sudden (average) increase in wealth they experience. And, of course, many young people will also, as they age, achieve the Great Australian Dream before their parents die.

So would we really expect all or nearly all Mill–Gen Zs to remain loyal to the parties that claim to promise a more egalitarian spread of home ownership and/or cheaper rents when it’s no longer in their material interests?

Or might they become more like today’s selfish, property-hogging Boomers?

When it comes to age and the electoral roll, the most important fact to remember is that the median is always increasing (it’s currently around forty-nine). And regarding electoral behaviour more generally, one of the worst things an observer can do is project the present — the last election result, the current opinion polls, today’s impression — onto the future. That usually ends in tears. •

The post The trouble with Coalition’s young-voter problem appeared first on Inside Story.

In truth, as at all our earlier forty-four constitutional referendums, the question of who would govern the country for the next three years was not on the ballot. And as with most of the others, the Voice question was a tenth-order issue for probably 90 per cent–plus of electors. It joined the thirty-six previous defeats, and its size was also unexceptional in the context of Labor governments’ midterm attempts at constitutional change. (As it happens, governments have nearly always won the election following a referendum loss.)

It’s not clear whether Liberal hardheads saw 14 October 2023 as an indicator, like a large opinion poll, or as a process that would shape voter behaviour, so that the campaign and act of rejecting the government’s proposal made Australians more pro-Coalition.

For whatever reason, throughout the 2025 election campaign Peter Dutton repeatedly brought up either the Voice or the broader topic of Indigenous Australians, with a particular focus on violence in Alice Springs and “Welcome to Country” ceremonies. Of the latter, the opposition leader opined repeatedly that there were too many, and under his government there would be far fewer. In one televised debate Dutton demanded that Anthony Albanese provide similar clarity; the prime minister expressed support for the ritual with his characteristic bland ineloquence. (Most “Welcome to Country” ceremonies actually have nothing to do with the federal government.)

As with the Voice (in the end), it’s likely that most voters agreed with Dutton — but so what? Election campaigns routinely showcase fluff and trivia, but deep down voters are mostly motivated by livelihoods, security, putting food on the table, particularly in a cost-of-living crisis. Still, in the campaign’s dying days the News Corp–Coalition tag team, citing words from Penny Wong, ran hard on a re-elected Albanese holding another Voice referendum. It was perhaps the feeblest “scare campaign” the nation has ever seen.

(The foreign minister’s formulation — “We’ll look back on [the Voice] in ten years’ time and it’ll be a bit like marriage equality” — made little sense anyway. Same-sex marriage was a global trend whose time most Australians finally believed had come, and the voluntary, indicative quasi-plebiscite had nothing to do with the Constitution. A Voice, by contrast, could simply have been legislated but its designers wanted it constitutionally enshrined, which all but doomed it. The chances of the Constitution ever containing an Indigenous Voice to Parliament are now approximately zero.)

The Liberals’ pollsters, Freshwater, went even further, using their respondents’ recalled Voice vote to second-guess their stated 2025 voting intentions. Or so it seems.

The day after the election, Freshwater’s boss laid out in the Australian Financial Review (for which the pollster had also provided survey outcomes for several years) three reasons why their final voting-intention numbers, whether published in the AFR (Labor ahead 51.5–48.5 per cent, way off the actual 55.2–44.8 result) or provided privately to the Libs, got it so wrong.

“Polling appears to have overestimated Labor ‘defectors’ to the Coalition,” ran his first justification. “Particularly, those who voted No at the Voice referendum. Early indications suggest that ‘Labor-No’ voters just didn’t switch over to the Coalition in the big numbers estimated.” (Italics added.)

“Estimated” is doing lots of heavy lifting here. How did they do it? Did they presuppose a proportion of those who said they’d voted No in 2023 and would be voting Labor in 2025 (or had already voted early) would actually vote for the Coalition instead? Or some variation of this? It makes no sense, and the appropriate word would have been something like “assumed” or “hoped for.”

The October 2023 vote was of course not about some arcane, dry piece of law, but about Indigenous Australians. Had it been instead about recognising local government (a chestnut attempted in referendums in 1974 and 1988 and planned for one in 2013 until bipartisanship collapsed) and had it been similarly walloped (pretty much a certainty — all midterm Labor referendums have suffered that fate) would the Coalition have invested it with so much meaning?

Probably not. Topics involving minorities hold a special place in our country’s electoral narratives. Ever since the 2001 “Tampa election,” the conviction that what are politely called “values” can rescue the Coalition at the ballot box has taken a firm grip despite all the contrary evidence. John Howard himself attempted unsuccessfully to resurrect that 2001 dynamic in his final 2007 hurrah as prime minister, first with the Northern Territory intervention and then with African immigrants.

Dutton rose to the peak of the Liberal Party by embodying this particular element of the Howard legacy. The socially conservative Liberal leader who connects with blue-collar voters by sympathising with their resentment at elites, multiculturalism and supposed special rights for racial minorities remains an alluring tale. There was no great demand from the electorate for Dutts to be leader, but he had long been a big hit in the conservative “base” and among the blathering heads at Sky After Dark. Throughout the 2022–25 term he repeatedly, often with grating gratuitousness, reached for the immigration lever, perhaps as red meat for the base, perhaps to connect with less-engaged voters, perhaps to make himself feel good, or perhaps all three.

That was presumably what drove him to fleetingly ruminate in March this year on a constitutional referendum (!) to enable the government to deport criminals who had dual citizenship.

Once again, most Australians would doubtless instinctively support the idea, but it is tangential at best to what they look for in a prospective government. That legendary 1992 Bill Clinton war room Post-it note, “It’s the economy, stupid,” could do with elaboration: “It’s economic security, and security generally, for people and families.” As we’ve seen recently in other advanced democracies, fears about out-of-control immigration, especially by people who look and act differently, can slot into the “security” framework, but Australia simply lacks anything like the required numbers. Similarly, not-so-subtle hints about special rights for Aboriginal Australians can get traction in a standalone vote on a particular topic but are barely of interest at a general election.

Dutton’s repeated forays into “values” were out of place for voters looking for solutions for Australia’s years-long per capita recession. Much worse, they provided another reason to be wary of his Trump-like tendencies.

And what possessed his party’s pollster to apparently overlay their results with “estimates” of large numbers of “Labor-No voters” switching to the Coalition? •

The post How to misread a referendum appeared first on Inside Story.

Although Erickson’s remarks were naturally self-serving, some were still interesting and informative. But there was a glaring omission: the role of Donald Trump in Labor’s win. In fact the American president got not one mention in the transcript.

The party boss did make a quick reference to “Liberation Day” (when Trump’s tariff announcement sent the global financial market and news cycles into a tizz), but only as part of a list of events about which Peter Dutton apparently “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” (The opposition made some clearly identifiable blunders during the campaign, but I can’t recall his reaction to this being one of them.)

Erickson also confided that internal polling had Labor comfortably ahead at the end of the first week of the campaign, and that it remained ahead after that. America’s “Liberation Day,” as it happens, fell in week one.

It’s no surprise that the conquerors would wish to downplay luck as an ingredient in their heroic achievement. But starting on the night of 3 May, commentators, journalists, party insiders and outsiders — virtually everyone with an opinion on politics — seemed to forget what they knew until a few hours before: that Trump was a major part of the Labor government’s revival. This mass forgetting extends across all the media, from the Guardian and Crikey to News Corp. The story of the Liberal Party’s woes is just too compelling.

We are all used to the dynamic: after a clear election outcome, everything the victor did is seen as awesome while the losing campaign was an endless fiasco of missteps and misjudgements. The media demands stories and so everything — good analysis, poor analysis, score-settling, thought bubbles and unbelievable nonsense — is welcomed into the mix. Let a thousand post-mortems bloom, and if it means totally upending what was written or uttered by the same observer only weeks or months ago, so be it.

And so it is now clear that Anthony Albanese always knew what he was doing and Labor as an institution possesses an unsurpassed understanding of Australians. The sexier story is, of course, the Coalition, whose flaws are now glaringly, embarrassingly on show: disorganised, burdened by poor candidates, philosophically estranged from the electoral mainstream, riven by irreconcilable conflicts between urban and rural voter bases.

Liberal MPs, trapped in the Sky After Dark ecosphere, feel obliged to placate a rabidly ideological party membership on matters of “culture.” The Nationals, meanwhile, pull the party even further to the right — and then in a neat twist get to gloat about their own relatively good electoral performance among the small subsection they represent.

Dutton in particular, with his longstanding tendency to get sidetracked by niche ideological crusades and his conviction that punching down on minorities delivers electoral nirvana, was precisely the wrong leader for the times.

All of these criticisms of the Coalition parties are valid. But they’ve been valid for many years. It didn’t stop the Coalition winning three elections on the trot not too long ago.

And only a few years have passed since it was the diametrically opposed interests of Labor’s twin bases — inner-city progressives and outer suburban/regional blue-collar “battlers” — that appeared insurmountable. Then they won office anyway, and no one talks about those problems anymore.

Still, the 2025 win was one out of the box in several ways. First of all was the sheer size of Labor’s national two-party-preferred vote and its highest proportion of House seats since 1943 — although the win is several rungs lower on the list of postwar landslides for either side, easily eclipsed by Malcolm Fraser’s 1975 and 1977 demolitions of Gough Whitlam and Labor. But today’s losing side has only one postwar straw to clutch: Labor emerged in 1975 with a slightly lower proportion of House seats.

Labor won the primary vote for the first time since 2007, and by a margin not seen since Bob Hawke took office in 1983. But the total major-party primary vote continued its sputtering decades-long slide — although the crossbench shrank this time, thanks mostly (or solely, depending on the Bradfield result) to the fall of three Greens seats to the government.

But where 2025 really stands out is the unprecedented level of revisionism. We all remember the effect “Liberation Day” had on the polls, and on Australians’ attitudes to the products on offer in the upcoming contest. Don’t we?

Yes, green shoots for the government were spotted in public polling before that, throughout March. It’s hard to knock off a first-term government because it’s usually difficult to blame them successfully for all the country’s woes. And the Coalition was as never as far ahead in earlier polling as some commentators seem to recall. (It peaked at around 51 per cent after preferences.)

But Labor’s measured support jumped after 2 April, and some surveys specifically pointed to Trump as a major driver. Dutton’s ideologically charged public persona and his recent praise for the American president, and the behaviour of high-profile colleagues including Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and, less famously, Michaelia Cash, simply came at the wrong time and place. Even at the time, Dutton’s January promise of an Australian DOGE, with Price as its head, was obviously bonkers.

It was a perfect storm.

The long-term dynamic is not that Labor is the natural party of government or that the Coalition is unelectable, but that the two-party system continues its decline. That fact will outlast the swings and roundabouts, off lower and lower primary support, between the pair. Labor will be out of office one day, and what will its primary vote look like then?

It is difficult to see the Coalition being anything other than the very right-wing outfit they are today at the 2028 election. The party-room numbers simply dictate it, and when current leader Sussan Ley hits turbulence she will feel the need to mollify her internal enemies and showcase her Sky After Dark credentials.

Still, one of the worst takes from this month’s result is that it all but guarantees Labor will be re-elected next time. Elections are discrete events. Three years is a long time. On 3 May, international developments turned a likely run-of-the-mill Labor victory into a huge one as voters flocked, directly or via preferences, to the safety of the centre-left incumbent. The global roiling looks set to continue for at least the next three years; America’s presidential election (if there is one) will take place after our next one.

Who knows what the world will throw at us over the next three years? •

The post Labor’s Trump card goes missing appeared first on Inside Story.

Pollbludger’s William Bowe estimates the national two-party-preferred number from all votes across all votes will eventually be 54.1 per cent. And yet the current swing across just those 111 seats is about 3 per cent, which from the national starting point of 52.1 would produce 55.1. Yes, election day voters have historically tended to swing more, but I’m inclined to split the difference and go for an eventual national number of about 54.5. It ends up being either Labor’s biggest win since 1946 (54.4) or even 1943 (59.3). And in terms of national vote wins for either side we must go back to either 1977 (54.4) or 1975 (55.6). (All pre-1980s figures are estimates.)

And the primary vote? Labor is currently on 34.8 per cent to the Coalition’s 32.0. Labor last won the primary vote in 2007, and before that in 1998, 1993 and 1984.

With the government currently ahead in ninety-three seats to the Coalition’s forty-one, Bendigo at 50–50 and fifteen others uncertain (these will all change) it is certainly a landslide.

Labor has won back Griffith and Brisbane from the Greens after increases in its primary votes elevated it into the two-candidate-preferred count. If it manages the same in Ryan it’ll take that too. The Greens are still in with at least a chance in Richmond and Wills.

My ruminations on Queensland overperforming for Labor sort of came to pass, but it was really a Brisbane thing — as Liberal leader Peter Dutton knows firsthand. The average swing (where two-party-preferred figures exist) across the eleven Brisbane electorates classified by the AEC as inner or outer metropolitan is currently 5.8 per cent; across the fifteen rural or provincial it’s 1.7 per cent.

The nation as a whole produced a similar divide, although not so dramatic. And this is after similar trends in 2022.

Statewise, Tasmania saw easily the biggest shift. For some reason the AEC has the swing at 4.6 per cent but the three available two-party-preferred seats average about 12 per cent. South Australia came second, to the current tune of 5.5 per cent, and that’s from 2022’s 54.0, which was already its biggest statewide federal Labor vote since 1969. These two lowest per capita-income states recorded the biggest Labor votes. It’s a scary world out there.

With the possible exception of Zoe Daniel in Goldstein, all the teals survived, and they will probably be joined by Nicolette Boele in Bradfield. Labor’s Josh Wilson is in trouble  against a teal in Fremantle, and former Nationals Andrew Gee, who quit his party over its No advocacy in the Voice campaign, was easily re-elected in Calare. (Calare, as it happens, recorded a monumental 71.2 per cent No vote.)

As usual, and even more so given the size of the result, everything the winner did is being judged brilliant and the losing side’s performance is characterised as an endless stream of fiascos. It’s grossly exaggerated, but not totally wrong. The Coalition campaign contained some incompetence — including chops and changes in policy — but some of that must have been an attempt to adjust, to do something, in the face of poor polls. Many of the mistakes would already be forgotten if they’d won.

We all recognised the underlying dynamics before Saturday night and should continue to. It was silly of Dutton to interpret Donald Trump’s 1.5-point win as indicative of a right-ward “shift” across the world, but he was not alone; witness the betting markets’ rapid turnaround in early November. Dutton has long seemed too online, susceptible to getting carried away with far-right memes.

Yes, he exercised some discipline, resisting temptation on abortion and trans issues, but there was way too much Kool Aid in the elevation of the also-online Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to prospective head of a high-profile DOGE down under. That signal, and her inevitable campaign gaffes, was surely noted by millions of voters. And later came a proposed referendum on expelling dual citizens. Very Trumpy (and Duttony); he just couldn’t help himself.

Yet all federal Liberal leaders these days feel the need to play to their noisy, self-proclaimed base, so perhaps a more “moderate” one would have suffered a similar fate. That’s a legacy of John Howard’s long tenure, 1996–2007, which was overwhelmingly a product of favourable international economic conditions but was, and remains, too often seen as evidence of his unique genius at interacting with Australians on matters of “culture.”

Albanese was the devil electors knew. Incumbency helped most of all, but also being centre-left. He’s still timid and rhetorically challenged, but being slow and steady meant the times (to borrow a 1980s Howardism) suited him.

Last and certainly not least: what the hell went on with the polls? None of the final campaign instalments picked this. Some did better than others, but every one of them understated Labor support and overstated the Coalition’s.

Having been bitten by pollsters’ serious overestimation of Labor support at both of the last two federal elections, some election watchers (well, this one anyway) discounted the polls’ government lead this time. But it seems possible we didn’t need to because the pollsters were already doing it, in their final editions at least.

My guess at why the pollsters’ final numbers got it wrong? Not believing what they were measuring, they perhaps gave a tweak to the weighting of this or that cohort to make it look more realistic. Labor winning the primary vote by at least 2 per cent and more than 54 per cent after preferences? Preposterous. •

The post Notes on a landslide appeared first on Inside Story.

The Coalition–News Corp tag team is mounting a last-minute scare campaign about a re-elected Labor government holding another Voice referendum. Not one remotely swayable vote in the country would be affected by this. Have they lost their minds?

So, what’s going to happen today? The first point to make is that a majority of the eventual vote has already been cast. Pre-poll votes are up from 2022 as a percentage of the roll (and of likely turnout) and postal votes are down a little on that year’s 14.3 per cent of turnout. The latter will probably come in at around 13 per cent of turnout (about 12 per cent of enrolment), which will still be a huge leap from the last pre-Covid election’s 8.3 per cent. Higher postal voting means longer delays in counting and has repercussions for the secrecy of the ballot and, potentially, for perceptions of election cleanliness.

At time of writing the Australian Electoral Commission hasn’t published yesterday’s pre-poll numbers, but it’s reasonable to project the total coming in at about 36 per cent of enrolment, which added to postals’ 12 per cent gets us to 48 per cent of registered voters. Allow for around 10 per cent non-turnout and we easily have a majority, and that’s without trying to guesstimate early absent votes.

Peter Dutton could lose his seat if there’s a decent two-party-preferred swing to Labor, say 2.5 per cent or more, in Queensland, although no reliable poll has so far pointed to such a thing. If neither side reaches a majority, his absence could actually make it more likely the Coalition can gather the required support. Sussan Ley as leader could make more concessions to the crossbench than Dutton could. Yes, Ley has greatly underwhelmed as deputy Liberal leader, but even bumblers can be rehabilitated by a serious position in government (hullo Alexander Downer).

Apart from the very strong likelihood of a Labor government, so much is unpredictable. Where swings will be; which way; what the crossbench will look like, and whether it will shrink or grow.

This time last year I had a belated rummage through pollsters’ 2022 performance and decided that Resolve’s effort for the Nine papers did the best on primary votes, though their final after-preferences figure of 51 per cent per cent for Labor was too low (the result was 52.1) because they relied on respondents’ allocation of preferences. I concluded by anticipating that in the final week of the 2025 campaign I’d be hanging out for Resolve’s poll.

Resolve did drop early in the week, and its primary-vote figures are almost identical to its 2022 effort (you can compare the two here). And while it has the Coalition a little further ahead in first preferences, its two-party-preferred number this time is 53 per cent for the government. According to Nine’s David Crowe the number (rounded) is the same whether it’s calculated by last election’s flows or by what respondents told them.

The reason for this apparent incongruity must lie in the “OTH” group, and particularly the absence of Clive Palmer’s UAP (which won 4.1 per cent in 2022) and the fact that its replacement, Trumpet of Patriots, is barely registering.

But Resolve’s survey was conducted 23–28 April — up till Monday, that is. (The 2022 version was similarly early.) If the Albanese government’s Trump boost is a depleting asset that peaked just after his tariff announcements produced global mayhem, timing could be particularly important this time.

Newspoll, taken from Monday to Thursday, has Labor on 52.5 two-party-preferred from a primary vote of 33 per cent against the Coalition’s 34 (adding up to a combined two-party vote even lower than 2022’s postwar low of 68.3). The final-week polls (see Wikipedia) range from 51.5 to 53 for Labor with, as is usually the case, more variety in the primary vote numbers.

JWS boss John Scales is still fantasising to anyone who’ll listen about 80 to 90 per cent far-right party flows to the Coalition. He’s also anticipating higher support for the far right in total than for the Greens, which is not as outlandish as it sounds because One Nation, UAP, LDP, KAP, the Great Australian Party and Australian Federation Party totalled 11.8 per cent in 2022, a little lower than the Greens’ 12.2.

And yet, as the Resolve numbers allude to, apart from One Nation these right-wing parties are not registering much surveyed support. Trumpet of Patriots is no household name, and while posters of Big Clive himself at polling stations might lead his party to overperform against the surveys, at least some of that will be at One Nation’s expense.

Meanwhile, Pollbludger reports that Resolve boss Jim Reeves told him in an email he’s getting 78 per cent of One Nation preferences flowing to the Coalition, which is more realistic than JSW’s claim. Anthony Green calculated the 2024 Queensland state election figure at about 74 per cent, and I believe it will probably be roughly that. (We won’t have these preference flow figures for weeks.)

Erring on the side of caution, I’m anticipating roughly 52 per cent two-party-preferred for Labor. At the last election, a 52.1 per cent national vote translated to eighty-four two-party-preferred wins for Labor out of 151. That’s two-party-preferred: seven of those went to third parties or independents. In 2025, allowing for some sophomore surges in the marginals, I reckon a roughly 52 per cent aggregate will produce about eighty-six two-party-preferred wins for the government, with who knows how many slipping out of their hands onto the crossbench.

Of those, Adam Bandt and Andrew Wilkie are definites, and Dai Le likely. The Brisbane Greens’ fates are impossible to predict; as with Dickson, success for Labor will require a meaningful improvement in statewide support.

On the other side — the Coalition two-party-preferred majority seats — only Bob Katter is certain to remain, but Rebekha Sharkie is very likely. (Sharkie’s Mayo was a Labor two-party-preferred win in 2022, but that’s unlikely to be repeated.) As for the teals — like the Greens, who knows? It is not inconceivable that an increase in the national non-major-party primary vote coincides with a smaller crossbench. Or that the crossbench could blow out.

In 2022, despite a (relatively modest) Victorian move to the ALP, some safe Labor seats in Melbourne swung savagely to the outgoing Morrison government. With the country’s oldest mainland government now officially very-on-the-nose, that state will again showcase some big shifts —but where?

Victoria might over-perform against expectations for the Coalition, while Tasmania and Queensland might for Labor.

Yes, I’ve included many equivocations here, and you would too. But what a night this will be. •

The post Day of reckoning appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s an increasingly important topic because combined the major-party primary vote continue to decline, with most pollsters suggesting it will be even lower this time than 2022’s postwar record of 68.3 per cent. At that election, recall, a better-than-expected flow of preferences by supporters of minor parties to Labor partially rescued those pollsters after they nearly all overstated Labor’s primary support and understated the Coalition’s.

But the longer-term trend also renders national two-party-preferred figures less informative than they were in the old days when the big two could be expected to haul nearly all the electorates. (National primary-vote figures, without reference to preferences, are even more useless when it comes to anticipating total seat numbers — but they can, as today, suggest a strong possibility of many third-party victories.)

Any discussion of preference flows should also mention how-to-vote cards; they go together like a horse and carriage. How influential are One Nation cards, for example, which in 2025 and 2022 recommend the Coalition ahead of Labor? That’s hard to answer. To begin with, voters have to actually see them, which means you need lots of volunteers (or, as in the case of Clive Palmer’s Palmer United Party in 2013, paid backpackers, preferably female and Swedish) to get them into voters’ hands.

In this final week there’s chatter from Coalition insiders to the effect that the polls showing them headed for a flogging are wrong; their own polling shows they’re competitive, and one reason is that preferences from minor-party voters will flow to them much more than pollsters assume.

How much more? In this Financial Review piece one of them predicts the Coalition will receive “between 80 per cent and 90 per cent of right-of-centre preferences.” (In 2022 the overall figure — One Nation, Palmer etc — was 65 per cent.) By this the party insiders mostly mean One Nation, which is running in 147 out of 150 electorates and polling a few points higher than its 5 per cent result three years ago. But they’re also including the much lower-rating Trumpet of Patriots (Palmer’s current iteration, contesting one hundred) and Libertarians (formerly Liberal Democrats, forty seven candidates).

The Financial Review piece features some supporting evidence from JWS Research, whose boss John Scales also features in a Nightly article that sets out largely to demolish a straw man: the claim that the “vast majority of current polls… determine preference flows based on 2022.” This was might have been roughly true a couple of years ago, but as Kevin Bonham points out it certainly isn’t anymore.

The Nightly piece does, however, posit a much more realistic 75 per cent flow from far-right parties. But while it rightly points out that One Nation’s polling numbers have greatly improved, it neglects to note that the opposite is the case with Palmer’s new, clumsily named acquisition, which is barely registering.

In 2022 One Nation received 5.0 per cent, United Australia 4.1 and LDP 1.7, with preference flows to the Coalition over Labor of 64.3, 61.9 and 71.8 respectively: 65 overall. (Why was LDP/Libertarian’s figure noticeably higher? The most likely answer is that their voters were simply more pro-Coalition on average.)

The Nightly article quotes Scales declaring there are “three golden rules in polling: you must have a robust sample north of 800 voters, you have to name the exact candidates on the ballot, not just the parties [only doable, of course, after nominations are published], and you have to ask who they’ll preference this time”.

Most pollsters do try to extract two-party-preferred numbers from respondents, and have done for decades. Sometimes they keep it to themselves, or mix it along with historical flows in their special sauce, or simply publish two sets of numbers.

But getting reliable figures isn’t easy. You can remind third-party or independent respondents that they’ll need to rank one major party above the other on the ballot paper, so which will it be? The big problem is that that nowhere in the actual voting process is this information related. Many or even most voters don’t really understand preferential voting; in particular, once they’ve put a “1” next to their chosen candidate, a lot of them don’t place much importance on who else they number, as long as all boxes are filled (consecutively!) so their vote counts.

How else could pollsters collect this information? In the olden days of door-to-door surveys (Roy Morgan Research in particular continued this well into the current century) a dummy ballot paper with pencil was given to respondents. That, intuitively, is much better. In these days of online polling the ballot paper can roughly be replicated on a web page form.

Nine’s Resolve does this, and while its final primary-vote figures for the major parties were pretty awesome in 2022 (just a point low for each, so pretty much nailing the Coalition’s 3.1 percent lead) it understated preference flows to Labor so much that its published headline two-party-preferred figure had the gap narrowing by a point (51 to 49) when it actuality it increased by around one (52.1 to 47.9).

The replicated ballot paper approach has its problems too. An obvious one is that survey respondents don’t have how-to-vote cards, so any influence the cards do have is missing. I have a theory, untestable until the day pollsters publish their party-by-party flows, that Greens cards, which preference Labor everywhere, have a meaningful impact on preferences for two reasons: because of the party’s plentiful supply of volunteers at polling places and because it gets easily the largest vote of any minor party (12.2 per cent in 2022), which can lead to underestimation of Labor’s two-party support.

One Nation and the smaller right-wing parties generally don’t have the same-sized army of volunteers, especially if they contest many seats, and the aforementioned lackadaisical approach among some of their supporters to numbering every square pulls the overall flow down to a bit closer to 50–50.

Both of these factors would help Labor do better, and the Coalition worse, than pollsters’ flows suggest they would. But it’s possible One Nation has more volunteers this time. There’s been a report of Liberal supporters helping independent MP Dai Le in Fowler; might they be doing the same for One Nation?

The preference flow from far-right voters to the Coalition will probably increase on Saturday, if for no other reason than it hit a low point last time; and Peter Dutton, in his political rhetoric, has always been more their kind of guy than Scott Morrison was. We know the Coalition is paying close attention to them, and has been rather cosy with the largest. Substantial shifts from 2022 will be evident on election night, but the actual numbers won’t be published for more than a month. It will be very surprising if One Nation’s flow to the Coalition exceeds 80 per cent. Ninety per cent? Forget it.

And if the election is much closer than current polls say it will be, the chief culprit will be the usual one: pollsters overstating Labor primary support.

See you on Saturday morning for the final round-up. •

The post Against the flow appeared first on Inside Story.

Early voting is a wonderful convenience, but the downside in this big land of ours is that the smaller the number of election-day voters, the greater the pressure on the Australian Electoral Commission to cut the number of polling places. This, particularly in rural areas, will encourage more postal voting, with all the downsides that involves, namely the potential loss of secrecy (voters could be filling out their ballots in the visual presence of family, friends or anyone else) and late arrivals dragging out the count. Covid-19 caused postal voting to jump from 8.3 per cent of turnout in 2019 to 14.3 per cent in 2022. We await the 2025 figure with interest.

Out in the field, meanwhile — in a move that could have been designed to sink the hearts of Liberal MPs and candidates in teal-ish electorates — the Coalition has struck a how-to-vote-card deal with One Nation. The logic of this move doesn’t immediately jump out: the minor party was already preferencing Libs and Nats ahead of Labor everywhere.

And dramatic reports of One Nation operators tearing up cards that and reprinting them showing Coalition candidates with a “2” in front of them in “key electorates” seems much ado about very little. The old and new cards both had the Coalition ahead of Labor, which barring some other third-party or independent challenge produces the same outcome. It perhaps makes an almost subliminal difference for a One Nation supporter who only glances at it and gets positive vibes about that candidate at number two.

Evidence-wise, the strength of One Nation’s cards too is open to debate: the 2016 federal election, when the party largely preferenced against sitting MPs, provided data in favour of their effectiveness in close contests, but Queensland in 2017 seemed to show much less influence.

It largely depends on how many foot soldiers are available to push the cards into voters’ hands. In 2016 One Nation only ran in fifteen seats; this time (like last) it’s 147. Might we see Coalition volunteers helping out?

There are election results, and then there are the voting-intention opinion polls. Often, big jumps in surveyed support for a major party end up being illusory, dissolving as election day approaches and citizens’ minds concentrate on the more concrete issues that actually decide votes.

The Tampa, children overboard and 11 September 2001 sit in that category: at its peak in October of that year the Howard government had double-digit two-party-preferred leads in the polls but ended up with a modest 51–49 victory. Kevin07 as well: he was massively ahead — sometimes by more than 20 per cent — through the year but support declined during the campaign to a modest 52.7–47.3 win. And the glorious honeymoon for Julia “good day for redheads, Kerry” Gillard in 2010… well, you know how that ended.

The 2020 and 2021 Covid bounces for incumbents, on the other hand, turned out to be the real thing, as Australian state oppositions found to their dismay. In particular, Western Australians and our cousins across the Tasman produced recording-setting re-elections.

Which will the government’s Trump bounce be — fully sustainable or on the soft side? A portion of Labor’s poll lead is generated by the unhinged behaviour of the president of the mightiest, most consequential country on the planet. But our government’s boost is nothing like the one recorded by another centre-left party, the Canadian Liberals, in a country economically intertwined with its huge southern neighbour and literally at risk of invasion. Just a few months ago Canada appeared headed for its routine, roughly once-a-decade change of government election; now a new prime minister and the Trump factor have produced a phenomenal polling turnaround.

Election day in Canada is before ours, on 28 April (their election management body, like ours, has taken lots of early votes). The polls have already tightened somewhat.

I wrote last month that the pollsters’ less-than-stellar recent performances at recent Australian federal elections mean I’m knocking about a point off Labor’s measured primary vote and giving it to the Coalition. If Canada’s Liberals substantially underperform against (poll-driven) expectations on Monday this will be further reason to be a bit sceptical of our own pollsters’ numbers.

Every federal election produces articles and news segments dedicated to the question of whether young voters decide the result? The fact that no one has ever seriously claimed after an election that this actually happened gives a hint of how nonsensical the formulation — applied to any demographic group — really is. Elections come down to everyone, certainly in the contestable seats.

In 2025 the yarn’s silliness has been ramped up by lumping together Millennials and Generation Z (putting an eighteen-year-old first-time voter in the same category as their parents in their early forties) and noting how they now outnumber Boomers! When a panellist during Tuesday’s leaders’ debate said (words from memory) “young voters now outnumber older ones,” it illustrated just how preposterous the narrative is.

The hard fact is that the median age of registered voters increases by about a year every decade. At the close of rolls this year it seems to be about 48.5, give or take.

And while today’s younger voters are clearly less attracted to the major parties, there is no serious evidence to support the notion that they are resisting the pull of political conservatism as they age. This theme mostly comes from the Australian Election Study, whose misuse of data I went into a couple of years ago. And, as we know, young people are less likely to turn out to vote.

Speaking of the debate, I thought Anthony Albanese had a pretty awful time of it on Tuesday evening. The camera set up, which shrank him to appear about two-thirds the size of his opponent (for the record it’s 5’11” versus 6’1”) did him no favours, but he also spent quite a lot of time squirming and shifting in contrast to Peter Dutton’s solid stillness.

Watching the PM reminded me of John Howard’s demeanour in all his debating efforts as incumbent, 1998 to 2007: timid and, well, a little shrivelled. As the record shows, there’s no reason to believe these debates make more than a negligible difference to election results. Nor have I prioritised the actual content of what was uttered, because people don’t really do that either, and in my opinion the impressions formed by visuals and sounds are more important to the unattached voter. If any were watching.

For his part Dutton had evidently taken notice of urgings along the lines of “You’re funny in private Pete, show your personality.” But the “couldn’t lie straight in bed” jibe, obviously planned, fell rather flat for all but the true believers. Commentators didn’t find it as electrifying as when Mark Latham wielded it against Howard in 2004. That was game on! That same prime minister went on to develop a catchphrase that was really just saying out loud incumbents’ quiet message at all elections: okay, there are things you don’t like about me, but at least I’m a known quantity, you’ve seen me operate the levers of power, and who do you distrust least to do so after election day?

A lesson Dutton could have taken on board from 2004 is that it’s fine for an incumbent to be seen as a “conviction” politician, but a “conviction” opposition leader can be discomforting to the voter.

There was a time when all prime ministers routinely accrued that tough persona. They came in, broke promises and implemented policies that turned out to be not so painful after all, at least for the vast majority, and voters gave them points for doing what was right for the country. Thank you for making me eat my greens.

This is not a dynamic the current prime minister enjoys, but then neither did his recent predecessors. Rudd was probably the first post-conviction prime minster, and while Tony Abbott gave it a red hot go, he illustrated that this politics business isn’t as easy as it looks. But we also shouldn’t forget that the post 2005–08 Senate numbers have been difficult for all governments. This fact, unappreciated by commentators who loudly gnash their teeth about the lack of reform, renders it all but impossible to get anything bold through parliament — so why would a politically astute prime minister even try?

Whoever forms government next month will face another difficult upper house. People might want to stop complaining and look at reforming our electoral system. •

The post Who do you trust? appeared first on Inside Story.

Why the Labor recovery?

First of all, the record shows it’s hard to defeat a first-term federal government. There’s simply more willingness in voterland to give them another go; the “clean up the mess” theme doesn’t resonate quite as much after three years as it can after six or more. (The Whitlam government 1972–75 was tossed out after three, but being sacked by the governor-general can be rather authority-depleting.) And while living standards have declined since Labor came to office, there’s nothing like the GFC-induced contrast between memories of the golden, bountiful years of the Howard government, defeated in November 2007, and Rudd–Gillard’s first re-election attempt in 2010, with the loudly announced shift from surplus to deficits, all within living memory.

What about that swing against incumbents in 2024 we suddenly heard about after Donald Trump’s 5 November triumph? The data backs it up — and obviously the cost-of-living crisis has been a government killer — but the other shoe, the uncontrolled immigration experienced by most advanced democracies, never dropped here.

Some of the opposition’s decline was unavoidable: Dutton’s success in avoiding scrutiny for almost three years was always going to end; the opposition is inevitably being questioned about where the cuts will come from; and Dutton’s own’s cultivation of a “conviction politician” persona was fine for a while, contrasting nicely with dithering Albo, until minds started contemplating its unpredictable effects on the other side of election day. (Labor’s Mark Latham in 2004 is another, even more splendid, example of the latter.)

But mostly (and I’m not alone in saying this) it’s because of Trump, and particularly the recently announced tariff rates that are producing mayhem around the world, not least in America. And more generally it’s due to the truly frightening nature of this American administration, with its upending of alliances, designs on other people’s territory and snuggling up to Vladimir Putin. Dutton is not totally blameless here. Some centre-right leaders abroad wisely kept their distance; ours evidently swallowed the PR that November’s narrow result indicated a worldwide shift to the right.

Yes, he was disciplined enough to avoid at all costs any inflammatory statements about abortion and what is to 99 per cent of voters a one-hundredth order issue, “trans” stuff, but an apparent rush of blood produced the announcement of culture warrior Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as head of an Antipodean DOGE. If anyone is less popular in Australia than Donald Trump it’s Elon Musk. This doozy has so far remained dormant, but if brought onto the front lines is guaranteed to generate headaches.

The veiled public-servant bashing policies were surely also emboldened by Trumpiness. And gushing over the US president in the context of the latter’s preposterous (not to say evil and criminal) Gaza real-estate thought bubble similarly seemed to be playing to a tiny, noisy base. Frontbencher Michaelia Cash also didn’t hold back in early February when she told Sky News that “the American people, they expect action, and that is what they’re getting, and they’ll get the exact same attitude under a Peter Dutton government.”

Still, we’ve always known the opposition leader’s emotional susceptibility to far-right causes, and he has succeeded in what was perhaps his most important goal when he assumed the leadership position: remaining there for three years.

But we do have to ask: how “accurate” are the polls anyway? In 2019 they grossly overstated Labor’s position; in 2022 they exaggerated it again but were saved by (a) picking the right winner and (b) unexpectedly strong preference flows to Labor. As I wrote last year, only one pollster can hold its head highish in terms of measuring primary support, Resolve, and that was only in its final survey, conducted using different methodology to their usual ones. If the pollsters’ (including Resolve’s) current primary vote numbers are as wrong in the same direction as they were at this stage of the 2022 and 2019 campaigns, Labor still has a mountain to climb to win a seat plurality.

In the United States last November the pollsters did not-too-bad overall. At national level, the reputable ones, on average, had Kamala Harris winning by about 1 per cent; Trump won it by 1.5 per cent. In Aussie two-party-preferred terms it’d be like final surveys showing Labor ahead about 50.5 to 49.5 and the result coming in at 49.2 to 50.8.

Unlike over there, we know nothing about how, if at all, our pollsters have rejigged their secret sauces in light of two poor performances on the trot. It might be wise to assume that they’re overstating Labor primary support by, say, a percentage point at the expense of the Coalition’s. There’s also still the conundrum of preference flows: is it realistic to expect those sky-high pro-Labor 2022 flows?

And let us not succumb to being captive to the present. Things can change; this time next week or fortnight we’ll probably be talking about something else.

There is not a person alive who knows what that will be. •

The post Notes on a resurgence appeared first on Inside Story.

With premier Roger Cook’s government now re-elected (massively, despite an unfriendly two-party-preferred swing of almost 13 per cent) some of the pressure is off, and Albanese has been dragged by caucus into promising — internally and then publicly — to create the agency in the next term. (This time he means it. Although he might hope voters in the west take it with a grain of salt.)

Then, last week, environment minister Tanya Plibersek again found herself under the proverbial bus when Albanese announced that he was taking advantage of the weeks of extra Cyclone Albert–induced parliament to turn an election commitment into law by ramming through legislation “specifically aimed,” according to the ABC, “to end the minister’s reconsideration of salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour” in Tasmania.

It’s about jobs, job, jobs — in Tasmania, and specifically in Strahan, in Liberal-held Braddon.

Not surprisingly, the Coalition has said it will support the bill, give or take a few amendments. Equally expected were the fierce and loud objections of the Greens, which is music to the ears of Labors MPs (and candidates) in the island state, though not to many of their mainland colleagues concerned about losing votes to the minor party.

A further complication is former Greens leader Bob Brown’s suggestion that his party hands out open how-to-vote cards across Tasmania, rather than recommending Labor ahead of the Liberals, which could, in a close contest, make a difference. (At the last election, such a strategy might have seen Lyons go to the Liberal candidate instead of Labor’s Brian Mitchell; this time, of course, we don’t know in advance which electorates will come down to the wire. Mitchell is retiring this year.)

Leaving aside the merits of the salmon-farming legislation — not to mention the government’s successful bypassing of meaningful parliamentary examination of its bill — the move does make sense politically.

A formulation that you’ll have heard or read countless times and are set to hear again in upcoming weeks is “this election will be won or lost in” such-and-such an area, demographic or state. It is always meaningless; the rest of the country doesn’t remain frozen in the status quo. Elections, including close ones, are decided everywhere, by all voters.

When it comes to federal contests, Tasmania is notable in several ways. One is that its voters are pro-Labor, and haven’t returned a statewide Liberal two-party-preferred majority since 1990. Yet a big chunk of the Labor vote is locked up in its “safest” seat (against the Liberals), Hobart-based Clark (formerly Denison), which since 2010 has been held by independent Andrew Wilkie. At least three of the other four electorates are contestable; even Liberal-held Braddon — current margin 8 per cent, which would normally be called safe — was won by Labor as recently as 2016. For Labor-held Franklin, with a 13.7 per cent margin, you have to go back to 1990 for a Liberal win; but even this, a cumulative 16 per cent shift away from the Libs during thirty-five years in one electorate, would be unusual on the mainland.

Partly because of its small population, Tasmania is also volatile. Between 2004 and 2022 it was the second-largest average swinger after Queensland. And because the Constitution mandates a minimum five electorates for every state, Tassie’s five contain significantly fewer voters than the mainland average. The latest enrolment figures show an average 82,000 enrolled per Tasmanian seat against 119,0000 in the rest of the country. That’s 34 per cent more bang for the voting buck.

(The two Northern Territory electorates have similar enrolment numbers to Tasmania thanks to a multiparty agreement that all but ensures it gets two seats in redistributions rather than one.)

Partly because of the scarcity of published polling across those five electorates (pollsters do include them in their national samples but deem the sub-samples too small to release) — the state can also be unpredictable. You might recall election night 2022, when the first reported results, from Tasmania, showed a swing to the Morrison government. Election-watchers around the country experienced palpitations of various kinds, but in the end every other state swung to Labor.

Tasmanians sometimes just move to their own beat. At the 2001 “Tampa” election, it was the lone state that swung to Labor. It was the one hold-out in the 1983 election that brought Bob’s Hawke Labor to office, although on that occasion the reason was obvious: Labor’s high-profile promise to stop the Gordon-below-Franklin dam from being built. Labor held zero House seats there anyway, so it didn’t need to fret over sitting members when formulating that element of its manifesto.

Because Labor emerged victorious that year, this part of the platform was filed under “everything the winner did was politically clever.” But we don’t really know if it was smart politics. A uniform 2.7 point swing to Labor in Tasmania (the national one was 3.4) would have hauled the party three seats. The election promise and subsequent drawn-out intervention probably also delayed Labor’s recovery in that state.

In 2004, Labor under Mark Latham went into the election holding five out of five Tasmanian seats, and lost two. The setback was blamed, with some validity, on the party’s forests policy, but as every other state also swung to the Howard government, there must have been more to it than that.

To sum up the last half-century: in 1972 and 1974 Labor won all five of Tasmania’s seats. Then from 1975 to 1984 the Liberals did. It was Labor again in 1998, 2001 and 2007. And in 2010 and 2016 Labor won four and Wilkie took the fifth. It’s a state that can be prone to extremes.

The brush wielded above will be too broad for some readers (particularly residents of the state). The five electorates aren’t all the same, and don’t always move in unity. But in no other state have voters ever delivered all their seats to one major party, let alone (at different times) to both. Parochialism, state identity and mixed feelings about the mainland and Canberra (“keep out of our affairs; please send more cash”) are not totally of the past.

A federal party doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of the Apple Isle in an expected close election. So, would we be justified in saying that if May’s election result is line-ball then the overall outcome will depend on Tasmania?

Put like that, with at least three seats up for grabs, we just might. •

The post State of exception appeared first on Inside Story.

Why? Polling boss Campbell White cites two sources suggesting higher flows to the Coalition: Queensland’s state election outcome last year and the results of the pollster’s prodding of federal respondents. The Australian only mentions One Nation, but it’s possible Newspoll is applying this fiddle to other minor parties.

The ABC’s Antony Green calculated that 73.8 per cent of One Nation’s preferences flowed to the Liberal National Party in Queensland last year, which was indeed significantly up on 66.2 at the 2020 state election and higher than the Queensland component of the 2022 federal election, at 66.9. But we don’t know anything more about the other part of Newspoll’s calculation: what federal respondents are telling them (and other pollsters) about their preferences.

Using the last election’s preference flows has been pretty much the standard for estimating two-party-preferred numbers. Some pollsters, such as Resolve and Morgan, usually go further, giving two sets of figures, one derived in that way, and the other from how respondents say they will allocate preferences.

But the last election’s flows are not sacrosanct, and adjusting them like Newspoll is doing can make sense. Labor received an exceptionally high proportion of flows from the larger minor parties and independents in 2022 compared to earlier elections. (You can see the 2004 to 2022 data here.) In fact, had preferences flowed in 2022 as they did in 2019, Labor’s national two-party-preferred vote would have been 51.2 instead of 52.1 per cent. That’s a big difference when pollsters’ estimates are hovering around 51 for the Coalition and 49 to Labor, as they are now. If you applied 2019 flows instead of 2022 to recent polled numbers, you’d nearly always turn that rounded 51–49 into 52–48 (both in the Coalition’s favour).

So it’s reasonable for pollsters to second-guess preference flows. And it does seem unlikely that, in total, they will favour Labor quite so much in 2025.

Newspoll’s One Nation adjustment might make a 0.2 to 0.3 per cent difference to the national two-party-preferred numbers, which is not to be sneezed at. But it’s the Greens who are the biggest source of potential impact, simply because they attract so many votes — generally around 12 per cent in the polls. (Unlike most other minor parties, not all Greens preferences end up being distributed: in some electorates they reach the two-candidate-preferred count. But that’s irrelevant to the object here: calculating national two-party-preferreds.)

There is some evidence, though inconsistent, that minor-party flows move in line with the overall two-party-preferred vote. So, for example, Queensland as a whole swung 7.0 per cent to the LNP in last October’s state election, and One Nation preferences swung 7.6. Another example, again in the northeast state: the massive 14.0 per cent swing against the LNP in 2015 included better flows to Labor than expected and largely accounted for virtually everyone incorrectly anticipating the outcome.

But that tendency doesn’t seem to apply as much to the Greens as it does to the minor right-wing parties. Greens supporters have long been seen as relatively “high information” voters, sure of which major party they prefer. They are not particularly swayable by how-to-vote cards, despite the fact that they routinely boast the highest numbers of volunteers thrusting the things into people’s hands.

The figure of 5 per cent was long ago calculated as the difference between the Greens “preferencing” Labor and preferencing neither side, but these days, with the party attracting more than twice the level of support, it’s possible a greater proportion of their voters are “lower information” and more susceptible to being influenced by cards. At the level of individual electorates at least, there does seem a positive correlation between Greens support and the flow of preferences to Labor.

But back to the pollsters. Counter-intuitively, asking supporters of non-major parties which big party they’ll preference doesn’t usually get results that stand up well on election day. One reason might be those how-to-vote cards.

I also have a theory (from anecdotal evidence; there is no good data on this) that most voters don’t really understand how preferences work and consequently many of them tend to not take much care with how they allocate them. If you ask a 2022 One Nation or UAP voter which major party they preferenced, there’s a good chance they won’t remember. So pollsters who instruct minor party supporters to choose one of the major parties aren’t successfully replicating that part of the ballot box experience.

If I’m right, then a randomness enters preference allocation when it comes to actually voting, and perhaps a spot of partial donkey voting, which pulls flows closer to 50–50 than pollsters had picked up.

Other polling outfits, like YouGov in its recent giant-sample MRP poll, don’t ask respondents to choose Labor or the Coalition but instead present a bunch of parties (plus “Independents”) and ask respondents to rank them. That should get better results, but still can’t account for how-to-vote cards.

Speaking of that MRP poll (short for multi-level regression with post-stratification), YouGov’s methodology page shows the preference flows it uses for each minor party. This is something no other pollster has published as far as I know, and is very, very welcome. YouGov says it derived these numbers from a “blend” of how its respondents ranked the parties and “historic flows between parties at previous Australian elections.” The Greens figure, 79 per cent to Labor, stands out because it’s smaller than at recent federal elections, which were in the low to mid 80s at the last four outings, peaking at 85.7 in 2022. As this comes from a “blend,” it’s reasonable to infer that YouGov’s respondents have been delivering a proportion lower than 79, perhaps something roughly around 75 per cent.

Maybe that’s about what Morgan and Resolve are getting too, which, along with One Nation–fancying respondents’ higher (than at the 2022 election) stated flow to the Coalition, would help to explain their regularly better respondent-allocated numbers for the Coalition.

Maybe the biggest preference problem lies with independent candidates, who hold all manner of political positions. In 2022 their preferences flowed to Labor in record proportions, to the tune of 63.8 per cent, partly because of strategic voting for teal candidates among Labor and Greens supporters. At 5.3 per cent, it was also a historically high independent vote. Can we assume that around 64 per cent of their preferences will flow to Labor again? This is something we might change our mind about during the campaign if we see a surge in one type of independent or another.

It has to be said that most polling misfires have been due to bad primary numbers, not bad preference assumptions. In 2022 most pollsters simply overstated Labor’s support (and were partly saved by more-than-expected preferences for Labor). (2019 was, of course, a much worse pollster performance.) But we outsiders have little idea how the pollsters got those primary numbers — what weighting and sampling and secret sauces they employ — and are left to pontificate on the wording of questions and the assumptions about preferences. And their track records; as written previously, I’ll be particularly waiting for Resolve’s final campaign poll — or at least its primary-vote data.

In relation to preferences, the difference between 75 (about what YouGov seems to get from respondents) and 85 (about the 2022 election figure) is 1.2 per cent of the national after-preferences vote, which is potentially crucial. (That’s assuming the Greens get roughly 12 per cent support again.) So how they flow in 2025 will be a major point of interest.

In the meantime, it would be nice if pollsters shared their respondent-allocated flows, party by party.

And there’s something else they could reveal that would add to everyone’s bundle of knowledge: demographic data — including age, income, education and gender — for minor-party voters who say they’ll preference Labor versus those who say they’ll preference the Coalition.

How, for example, does a Labor-leaning One Nation voter differ from a Coalition-leaning one? I’d love to see that, and so would you.

Come on pollsters, share more data. •

The post From whom the preferences flow appeared first on Inside Story.

Opinion polls months out from elections aren’t great predictors of results. The numbers can change for reasons we might think we can identify or for reasons we know we can’t — and they can also, as 2019 reminded us, turn out to have simply been wrong. But current and recent surveys strongly suggest the Coalition will make net gains across the other four mainland states (little-polled Tasmania is always unpredictable) and those losses will need to be at least partly offset by a Labor revival in Queensland.

So far none of the media have published “party insider” reports of a Labor resurgence. What could drive such a revival? Peter Dutton’s nuclear energy policy, with two of his seven proposed sites in Queensland, holds potential. So does Premier Crisafulli’s less-than-enthusiastic public reception. Stepping back, the change in state government at least creates conducive conditions. And opinion polls do have the Labor vote at least holding up there — against the very poor 2022 result.

There’s a well-recognised phenomenon in Australian elections that has come to be known as “federal drag.” It happens when the party in office federally negatively affects the electoral performance of its state/territory counterpart. It helps if that national government is on the nose at the time of the state/territory election, but it doesn’t need to be.

The effect can be estimated by averaging the swings at the first state/territory elections after a change of federal government. It is clearest if we cherry-pick a couple of clear examples from during Tony Abbott’s unloved regime: Queensland’s 14 per cent swing to state Labor in January 2015, and a 9.9 swing the same way in New South Wales two months later. Of course, those movements were off massive Coalition wins in the previous term, when it was the reviled Gillard Labor government in Canberra doing the “dragging.”

But lots of things affected those elections, most obviously events at state level. The presence of the Abbott government didn’t stop Tasmania’s Liberals taking office in 2014. Still, we’re talking about a tendency here. Election analyst Kevin Bonham has done some numbers with his usual rigour.

Does it work the other way — state governments pulling down federal votes for their party in their state? Kevin crunched that data, excluding second-tier governments less than one hundred days old, and found a negligible effect from 1990 onwards. I did sums for the same period too, but split the results by party and found a modest benefit (1.5 per cent) for Labor federal governments after their state counterparts had left office, but close to zero for the Coalition. That’s likely a function of the preponderance during that time of Labor state/territory governments that were widely reviled by the end (as evidenced by massive election losses) and Coalition governments that lost office modestly and didn’t hang around long enough to create much drag.

Obviously the sample sizes are way too small for any findings to be scientifically sound. And there is a circularity in positing that federal election outcomes influence state results which in turn influence federal ones. We restricted the timeframe to 1990 onwards because this seems to be a modern phenomenon. The hundred days–plus criterion is to exclude honeymooning state governments. As I said, I’m positing here a predisposition, not a hard and fast rule.

The 2022–25 federal term has seen three changes of government at second-tier level: New South Wales from Coalition to Labor in 2023, potentially beneficial for the federal Coalition; and the Northern Territory from Labor to CLP in 2024, which might be good for Labor.

(Victoria’s ageing Labor administration looks like it’s going to be a serious drag on the party’s federal vote. But help might be on the way: can we divine a hint of the beginnings of a Labor leadership destabilisation campaign? There is at least one precedent for an upcoming federal election partly driving the knifing of an unpopular premier: in Western Australia in 1990.)

And the third change of government during this period was of course Queensland in October last year. Federal Labor’s current haul there is a dismal five seats out of thirty, off 46 per cent of the statewide two-party-preferred vote.

Evidence the Queensland government was travelling particularly poorly in May 2022 is in short supply. (The only approximate poll on record is a YouGov, which had it on 52 per cent two-party-preferred three years ago this month.) But the most recent Newspoll federal quarterly, taken from early October to early December 2024, does show a negligible one-point swing to the Labor, contrasting with swings to the Coalition in the other four mainland state.

That’s just one poll (or actually an aggregate of Newspolls), and Resolve over a similar period had a poorer result for the federal Labor in that state. Pollbludger William Bowe’s state-by-state aggregate splits the difference, with Queensland the best state for the Albanese government swing-wise because the shift to the Coalition is smallest there.

Other factors naturally include local boy Dutton as Liberal leader, which should be a plus for the Coalition. On the other side, the more agreeably turned-out and articulate treasurer Jim Chalmers is also a Queenslander.

Which seats could Labor potentially take? Leichhardt, where local member Warren Entsch is retiring (again) is the most obvious. Forde, Bonner and Petrie are all within approximate reach, if individually unlikely. And of course Labor will throw everything at Greens-held Griffith and Brisbane and at least have a close look at traditionally Liberal Ryan.

On paper, Queensland’s most marginal electorate is actually Dutton’s. I pondered his fate before the 2022 election but he went on to overperform in Dickson (relative to surrounding electorates and the statewide vote) and comfortably survived with a 1.7 per cent buffer. His elevation to the leadership should assist him in Dickson as well as the state. Ali France, who did splendidly in 2019 but just so-so in 2022 (relative, again, to the rest) is running again.

On balance, Queensland will almost certainly be the government’s best mainland state, swingwise, at this year’s election. Which, off such a low base, is really not saying much.

But we will need to wait until election day, because an added complication is Queensland respondents’ longstanding tendency to overstate support for federal Labor in surveys before shifting back to the Coalition at the campaign’s end.

The possibility of Queensland drag is a reason for the Albanese government to delay the election until the latest possible date, 17 May.

It will be surprising if the state doesn’t swing at least a little to Labor. But will it be enough? •

The post Queensland to the rescue? appeared first on Inside Story.

Scott Morrison’s 2019 “miracle” is the most recent example clearly falling in the second category. Before that, federally, you have to go back to when Paul Keating defeated John Hewson in the first “GST election.”

In the final week of that 1993 campaign, Hewson opted out of the traditional National Press Club appearance. The next opposition leader to do this was none other than Bill Shorten in 2019. Am I asserting cause and effect? Yes, but not in the way you might think. It’s likely that a similar perception inside the opposition camp drove both decisions: internal polling suggested the government’s negative campaign was biting — that the opposition was still ahead but its lead was increasingly fragile. Better not to risk a bad performance.

Other election results are merely somewhat unexpected. Malcolm Turnbull’s narrow victory in 2016 was one of them. Very few observers thought Bill Shorten’s Labor had a chance of winning, so they weren’t inclined to spend much time contemplating its policies, which included an ambitious carbon target, an emissions trading scheme and changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax.

Labor’s “Mediscare” campaign — a dishonest assertion that the government was going to “privatise Medicare” (which, like much disinformation, rested on a kernel of truth: many Liberals have never embraced socialised medicine) — probably had an impact too.

Disastrously for Labor, the message it took from that near miss was that a winning formula would include even more big-ticket items in a fully financed package. This they took to the next election, in 2019, with franking credits added but emissions trading subtracted. Liberal strategists, having received flack for not going negative enough in 2016, didn’t make the same mistake this time. They must have been delighted when their characterisation of the franking credits policy as a “retiree tax” was picked up wholesale by much of the media, including parts of the ABC.

With Bill Shorten seemingly in pole position and Labor’s policy suite likely to be enacted, swinging voters’ minds were concentrated. A fictitious “death tax” (again, not totally without foundation: the idea of once again levying death duties had been brought up from time to time) was icing on the cake. The prospect of change can be stress-inducing, and a stressed voter is a dangerous thing.

So: expectations can matter, and scare campaigns, if done properly, can make a difference.

As we approach the 2025 campaign, the Albanese government is looking pretty shopsoiled. The cost-of-living crisis is the chief driver of dissatisfaction, but aspects of Anthony Albanese’s political personality have turned from strengths to failings. Slow and steady is now low energy, pragmatic risk-aversion now looks weak.

Like Kevin Rudd before him, Albanese has found that diligently keeping pre-election promises earns few brownie points while the flipside, forsaking the “does what’s right, not what’s popular” persona, loses many more. And is there anyone who can understand his decision to buy that multi-million-dollar coastal home last year?

Still, one thing the government has going for it is the general belief it will probably lose office. Most in the political bubble believe expectations of election victory are good for a party going into a campaign, for reasons involving momentum, oxygen and media “cut-through.” My humble template, while conceding it’s a mixed bag, sees the opposite: a net benefit in being viewed as the underdog.

Labor’s two-party-preferred support of around 49 per cent, estimated from measured primary votes, is on the face of it hardly irretrievable. But this government has no heroic returns from the dead (or re-elections of any kind) under its belt and in fact a recent record of underperforming at the ballot box vis-à-vis the polls. Recent surveys and betting markets show most voters expect a Peter Dutton prime ministership. Donald Trump’s re-election in November seemed to nudge this attitude along.

Dutton, meanwhile, has avoided much scrutiny over the past two and a half years, largely by staying away from less-than-friendly journalists and, when faced with one at a press conference, trying to shut them down. But that’s not as easy in the heat of an election campaign, when media swarms are competing for scoops and jumping onto every misstatement. The Liberal leader will be in the hot seat precisely because he is expected to win.

It’s true that the opposition’s manifesto, unlike Shorten’s six years ago, is not laden with big economic plans. Well, there is that nuclear one, but it’s so far on the horizon it offers little to immediately fret about and might not even come to fruition. That usually scareable cohort, elderly voters, can sleep soundly knowing they probably won’t even be around if and when a reactor pops up nearby.

If the nuclear policy is in shreds by election day, which is likely, that might damage perceptions of Dutton’s competence, and his team’s. It was always an internal political fix with the electoral bonus, Dutton hoped, of allowing the country to continue burning coal, unworried about climate change, in the medium term. The deep cynicism of this is likely to become widely appreciated as election day approaches, but by then it will have done its job of avoiding squabbles in the joint party room.

But Dutton still presents reasonable ammunition for opponents. Yes, he’s seen as strong and decisive, more so than the prime minister. But while these are fine attributes for an incumbent, they are potentially dangerous for an opposition leader. If Australia were on the brink of war, the Dutton package, with fresh memories of his jobs in government, could be very enticing. But in the domestic realm its impact is mixed.

Yes, voters appreciate a tough prime minister, someone who, after setting themselves on a course of action, is “not,” as Margaret Thatcher put it, “for turning.” (They appreciate such action in hindsight, that is, when they’ve decided it was on balance correct.) But Mark Latham (2004) can attest that “conviction” in an opposition leader can be troubling, especially when accompanied with even vaguely contentious policies.

Some of that ammo arrived for Labor this week when shadow finance minister Jane Hume told the Financial Review she’s up for big spending cuts if the Coalition wins office. Apparently divining in recent overseas election results a “global trend towards deregulation,” she pointed to, in the journo’s words,  “New Zealand’s conservative prime minister and former businessman Christopher Luxon and his efforts to cut red tape to stimulate investment as an approach to emulate.”

Hume is playing with fire here. While I didn’t follow our neighbour’s 2023 election and so am not aware how of much bitter medicine Luxon flagged during the campaign, the Kiwis are now in recession and opinion polls suggest a level of buyer’s remorse. The quotes from Hume’s interview will likely prove useful fodder for the government.

More generally, the Coalition has long said it will cut spending both to lower inflation and for general reasons of fiscal responsibility. For a government, though, “where will the cuts be?” is an age-old and effective line of defence; the opposition’s answer is either evasive or opens up a juicy battleground.

Dutton would love the election to be about values and anti-wokeness, but as nearly always it will be about the economy. And the hip-pocket nerve.

The spotlight will be on the opposition leader like never before. •

The post Expectations matter appeared first on Inside Story.

An assumed component is the continued presence of a very large crossbench, mostly representing electorates that return Coalition two-party-preferred majorities. (That’s according to the vote recounts the Australian Electoral Commission does for academic purposes.)

But the crossbench could dramatically grow in 2025, or it could shrink or remain about the same. The only certain survivors (assuming they contest) are Andrew Wilkie in Clark (Tasmania), Bob Katter in Kennedy (Queensland) and Adam Bandt in Melbourne. Rebekha Sharkie in Mayo (South Australia) is an almost certainty.

The fates of all the others are to varying degrees unknowable. The unpredictability is exacerbated not just by the absence of Scott Morrison as prime minister but also by the lack of a Coalition government per se. Instead it’s a Labor one, not widely loved, attempting re-election — something we haven’t had since 2013, in an older, gentler time. We’re in new terrain.

If current polls are replicated at the ballot box next year, the primary-vote swings to the Coalition and against Labor would likely see the Coalition regain territory from the crossbench.

An extremely rosy outcome for the Liberals and Nationals would see them taking back the six teal seats and Warringah and Indi, which would take them to sixty-six seats. Throw in Ryan (Queensland) from the Greens and you have sixty-seven. Then, according to the pendulum, the 3 per cent two-party-preferred national swing (from the Coalition’s 47.9 in 2022) would yield seven more. Not quite a majority, but pendulums aren’t perfect predictors. Of the remaining crossbenchers, Katter and Sharkie would be solid backers of the Coalition.

Another reason for the opposition to be cheerful: today’s pollsters’ two-party-preferred estimates use 2022 flows from minor parties and independents, which were surprisingly high. If they instead slotted in 2019 flows, our poll aggregate would be closer to 52–48 (in the Coalition’s favour). And last but certainly not least, most of the final 2022 campaign polls overestimated Labor support by around two points. Are they still doing that?

As I said, that’s the glass-very-full Coalition scenario. It’s also possible that more, not fewer, teals will emerge from election 2025.

What Labor has going for it is that this isn’t election eve and it’s not even the campaign. We are months away. To say they have time to make up ground would imply that future poll movements in their direction would come from conscious efforts on the government’s part, but sometimes polls just move back to the devil-you-know incumbent as election day approaches. And today’s poll numbers don’t really represent what would have happened “if an election had been held last weekend” because if there had been an election then, events leading up to it would have been very different and voters’ minds would have been more focused on who they wish to govern over the next three years.

Two years ago, when this Labor government was riding high, I thought they would probably be re-elected. Not because of the polls, but because first-term federal governments usually are. And I believed it would likely be with a majority of seats. Had their 2022 polling been in the doldrums that would still have been my expectation. Those early polls mean zilch. Who can forget Kevin08–09? Over in the Mother Country, new prime minister Sir Keir Starmer is having a very hard time of it. Never mind, Labour will probably be re-elected in 2029.

But now we’re getting close to the election, the surveys can’t be totally dismissed. Still, nor are they in any way predictions.

Back in 2022, I thought the main threat to the government’s re-election was an international recession. That didn’t transpire, but the cost of living crisis could be called the next best thing.

Anthony Albanese’s early months as prime minister were slow and steady, without the Morrison gimmicks. He avoided being captured by the news cycle — unlike most obviously (again) Kevin Rudd. But like Rudd, Albanese seemed to overestimate the importance of keeping faith with voters over election promises. And there was a Kevinesque reluctance to rock those high poll ratings (which in the end disappeared anyway).

I’m a believer in new governments doing unpopular stuff on the economic front and blaming it on their predecessors — a new PM making voters eat their greens, taking a hit to their personal ratings but emerging (as long as the changes are bedded down by the next election) as a “strong” leader prepared to do what’s right for the country. Perhaps, yes, even “a conviction politician!”

Still, it has to be acknowledged, not just regarding Albanese but all his predecessors this side of John Howard, that the gnashing of teeth about recent reform-shy governments ignores the composition of the Senate. With no one-stop “centrist” shop (the Democrats) on offer, governments now need to cobble majorities together with parties on the far left or far right.

In today’s parliament, when the Coalition opposes, Labor needs the Greens plus a couple of others. The Greens have their own political agenda — to maximise their support — which largely consists of being seen to drag Labor towards their policies. Albanese obviously tries, consciously and understandably, to avoid that. If a government has a vaguely contentious policy it would like to put in place but knows the legislation wouldn’t survive the Senate, it’s best not to even try.

In commentatorland the vibe is that Albanese is a ditherer and Dutton a wily operator. That view contains some truth but is mostly perceived through the prism of the opinion polls. Expectations of a change of government were boosted by Donald Trump’s victory in America, and we’ve since heard a lot since about swings against incumbents across the democratic world in 2024. The cost of living crisis is a big driver, but the other shoe, in the United States and much of Europe, of uncontrolled immigration, doesn’t drop here. Controlled immigration is an issue, and feeds into cost of living and housing in particular, but it lacks the potency.

Dutton has had an easy media run as opposition leader outside the ABC, which he rarely engages with. That might change during the campaign; recall the pressure Albanese suddenly found himself under in March–May 2022, when missteps were no longer ignored.

Anthony Albanese became Labor leader not through public demand but because, after decades in factional politics, it was his turn. He was lucky to miss out in 2013 and reach the peak six years later with a winnable election in sight. Most of the media criticism of him as prime minister (outside News Corp’s weekly beatups) goes to political agility rather than substance. On policy, many a mainstream economist chastises his government for fiscal laxness contributing to inflation (and hence higher interest rates than there would otherwise be) and generally bemoans the absence of “reform.” Oh for the days of… [you can fill in the rest].

What kind of a politician is he? He’s no great public orator, nor a details man. The 2019–22  “small target” strategy was politically sound, if smaller than necessary. The purchase of the multimillion-dollar coastal home this year was a jaw-dropping misjudgement. An election promise on superannuation broken early last year, but with the proviso that it wouldn’t come into operation until the next term — a strategic shocker praised to the heavens by the press gallery — seems to have come to nothing. It remains to be seen if the government takes it to the election.

And how is the prime minister seen in the softly committed or swingable segments of voterland? As a nice guy but not decisive or strong. A manager not a doer and powerless in the face of rising prices and high interest rates. Any dramatic attempt to alter that perception in the next few months would be too obvious and make things worse.

The tried and tested re-election strategy of a scare campaign against the opposition beckons. There’s quite a bit to play with there: nuclear policy; questions about where it will cut spending to get down inflation; the risk of suffering tariffs from other countries due to the lack of climate change action; abortion (done softly softly); being in the pocket of the mining industry; the leader’s addiction to racially-tinged politics. Whatever Trump is up to at that time might also present opportunities.

Dutton’s conscious political brand is the conviction politician, which can be a dangerous thing in an opposition leader. His refusal to admit error, ever, might prove his Achilles heel. Given the prime minister’s presentational limitations, much of the work will fall on others, particularly treasurer Jim Chalmers.

Albanese’s apparent obsession with retaining Labor’s four newly won West Australian electorates, which will look increasingly weird to the 90 per cent of voters who don’t live in that state, needs to be reined in. Across in Queensland, the demise of a rickety old state Labor government should open up federal opportunities. With a current Labor count of just five out of thirty in that state, the only way there is up.

Still, slicing the country into bits and pieces and trying to appeal to this or that demographic is a mug’s game. Political parties do best when setting their sights on that larger constituency called Australians. •

The post A long goodbye? appeared first on Inside Story.

Assuming a uniform swing (Aussie pendulum–style), an extra point for Harris at Trump’s expense would have flipped his three most marginal states and the overall result. In other words, Harris would have become president with a vote of 49.3 to Trump’s 48.8. The Electoral College architecture still favoured Trump, but only by 0.5 per cent compared with 3.8 in 2020 and 2.9 in 2016.

Trump easily won the college, 312 to 226. But that too was at the modest end of historical outcomes. So you could call the whole thing reasonably close, but not nail-bitingly so.

As is routine after a loss, every element of Harris’s campaign is being judged a disaster. The six-point turnaround from 2020 (a 4.5 per cent Democrat lead to a 1.5 per cent Republican one) is replicated to varying degrees across most cohorts, providing endless points of data to punctuate just how bad it all was for the Harris campaign.

But that’s just the way numbers work: the parts must add up to the whole. It’s really only the big divergences from the national movement that are worthy of note.

Six points is also roughly (with lots of caveats involving turnout and a changed electoral list over four years) the proportion of Joe Biden 2020 voters that shifted (net) to Trump in 2024. From exit polls, ethnicity was the site of serious action: White voters overall swung only a little or not at all but a big 10–15 per cent of non-White Biden supporters made the switch to Trump. And a subset of them, Latino males, did it in spectacular fashion: around a third moved to the Republican, so that most of them (about 55 per cent) voted for Trump.

There also seems to have been an outsized shift to the Republican among young males overall.

You would have heard that this is the first time since 2004 that a Republican presidential candidate won the national (aka “popular”) vote. This statistic is naturally being put on the “not only did Harris lose, but…” pile, but why that matters is not clear. It also facilitates lots of “worst result among cohort X in twenty years” sub-narratives.

Given the similar national results (George W. Bush won by 2.4 per cent), 2004 versus 2024 does do one thing: it provides a respectable framework for examining the demographics of electoral changes over that time.

This Roper Center 2004 data, where breakdowns are available, along with 2024 exit polls (such as NBC, CNN and ABC), do suggest meaningful, if not dramatic, movements among the abovementioned demographics.

For the first time — again from the exit polls — it does seem that the wealthier the elector the more likely they were to vote Democrat. Shifts in that direction have been detected for decades among centre-left major parties across the democratic world. Australia’s Labor is no different, although the relationship doesn’t yet seem to have actually inverted. But that does seem to have been the case for UK Labour this year.

The fact that parties whose roles and self-images are wrapped around protecting the less well-off are no longer the choice of low-income voters is certainly noteworthy. But then, these institutions are relics of earlier eras and, with their ever-declining overall support, seem to be on the way out. Labour versus capital is a creaking paradigm. Should UK Labour fret about the composition of its electoral success or should it get on with trying to govern for all Brits in an equitable and economically and environmentally sustainable way?

Across the Atlantic, the disaster for the Harris campaign was not in losing this or that voting “bloc” but in losing the contest overall. Had she got that extra percentage point the analyses would all be about the Republicans’ existential crisis, and how they are losing the White vote.

I’m not understating the importance of this result. Unlike 2016, it can’t be written off as a fluke. America is an exception to the long-term pattern of shrinking support for major parties, but those parties have been pulled to the extremes. Well, the Republicans certainly have, while the Democrats are caught between a “pragmatic” leadership and an increasingly radical support base. (Harris ran a middle-of-the-road campaign; most of her much-disseminated expressions of “wokeness” were from her 2019–20 attempt to win the primaries.)

Donald Trump is also a special case, with his norm-busting behaviour and unique personality, communication talents and at times utterly gross behaviour. And he is still a threat to American democracy. That slogan wasn’t fake news: his past behaviour, his consistent rhetoric, the eco-system inhabited by his apparent confidants and, most recently, his string of mooted appointments all attest to that fact. If he is still compos mentis in 2028 and wants to run again, it is not unimaginable that the Supreme Court would assist him overcome the pesky 22nd amendment. Or it might facilitate the elevation of a chosen successor.

Are there implications for next year’s Australian election? The majority of money going to online betting markets believes so, with the Coalition for the first time seen as more likely than not to form government. Nine papers’ Resolve poll has respondents saying the same. Of course, the wider context is several months of opinion polls (including the most-watched Newspoll) showing the Coalition just ahead in estimated two-party voting intentions. Mostly because of those polls, political commentators have been delivering non-stop damning critiques of Anthony Albanese’s performance.

Internationally, governments have done badly in elections this year. The cost of living bites savagely in this country as everywhere. But that other overriding element of Trump’s win, “illegal immigration,” doesn’t exist here. It was also a proxy for immigration per se, which over here always plays into community grievance, especially in the current housing crisis.

Peter Dutton is unlikely to attempt to emulate Trump’s overt, outrageous behaviour any more than his own instincts have already led him to. Australia is not America. Dutton has nothing like the showmanship or persona of his American counterpart. No one apart from Trump has.

On the other hand, the American result is unlikely to encourage the Liberal leader to move towards the political centre. •

The post Not only did Harris lose… appeared first on Inside Story.

The fourth estate “missed the story” and “didn’t get it,” admitted one Washington Post columnist. “Groupthink,” “liberal media bias,” “wishful thinking” and a “failure of imagination” were at work, scolded a CNN host. It was an “echo chamber,” chipped in an academic. And, competing  strongly in the hyperbole stakes, a New York Times writer declared the whole dreadful affair “a failure of expertise on the order of the fall of the Soviet Union or the Vietnam War.”

The reality was much more mundane. All of the final opinion polls had pointed to a safe win for Hillary Clinton. The probability of her becoming forty-fifth president, as crunched by the high-profile aggregators, ranged from 71.6 per cent from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight to 93 per cent from rising star Sam Wang. With the surveys saying Clinton would win, that was what nearly everyone expected to happen.

The 2016 surprise was complicated by the fact that countrywide surveys performed reasonably well, putting Clinton about 3.5 points ahead. (In the end she won the popular vote by 2.1.) It was in the “battleground” states, and others assumed in the Democrat bag, that Trump’s support was disastrously underestimated.

Two and a half years later, down in Australia, we enacted a mini version of the same pantomime (with a tiny fraction of the number of polls): Scott Morrison’s “miracle” re-election. Our polling miss was also followed by a gloat-fest about an out-of-touch press gallery. As in America, the fact the finger pointers had themselves expected a different outcome didn’t seem to matter.

Back across the Pacific, pollsters had picked the fluff from their navels and got more serious about weighting their samples, particularly by education. Yet they fell short again, by even more, in November 2020. Mercifully, they got the right winner, Joe Biden, albeit elected by much closer margins, nationally and swing-state-wise, than they had anticipated.

Eighteen months later Australia again followed suit. This time our pollsters substantially overstated Labor’s primary vote support, but here too they ended up on the right side of the binary outcome. (Unlike America 2020, our 2022 misfire was not as big as its predecessor, and the stronger-than-expected preferences flows to Labor at the ballot box made pollsters’ two-party-preferred estimates look respectable.)

The point is that voting-intention polls in the lead-up to elections largely set our expectations of the result. Some pundits internalise the polls and come to believe they would “feel” or “sense” the upcoming result even if there were no surveys. Outside campaigns, polls push media narratives about how politicians are “travelling.”

Other elements join the mix, most importantly how individual politicians have performed relative to past expectations. A leader who has already managed to come back from the dead will have that factor priced in. In Australia we can think of Morrison (2022), John Howard (2007) and, for those with longer memories, Paul Keating (1996). Like Trump (2020), the feeling was that they might just pull off the impossible again. In the case of Keating and Morrison, the probabilities implied by betting markets — an imperfect distiller of general expectations but the best we have — were about the same at that second outing as at the first, despite the polls being more dire.

As the US election loomed in 2020, the polls had Biden much further ahead of Trump than Clinton had been four years before, but the implied probabilities were closer. Punters learn from experience. But sometimes they overlearn.

And now here we are, finally, on the eve of the 2024 presidential election. Hundreds of millions of Americans, and several billion earthlings across the globe, are obsessing about the polls. At the same time, thanks to those two misfires, trust in the polls is low. But they are all anyone has. (One suspects that even the self-proclaimed prophets consult the polls before venturing out on the limb.) Have the pollsters got their acts together in the last four years? Might they have overcorrected, and be understating support for Kamala Harris?

In punditland, many are intoning that “it’ll be close,” but what “close” means usually remains unexplained. They’re really saying it could go either way. Actual close electoral college results — cases where, say, neither candidate gets more than 300 electoral college votes out of 538 — are unusual. Both of George W. Bush’s wins (in 2000 and 2004) fit that category; before that we have to go back to Jimmy Carter (1976) and then way way back to 1916.

If the current neck-and-neck polls are as wrong, and in the same direction, as either 2016 or 2020, Trump will romp home. Silver’s probabilities (at time of writing; his final crunch is still to come) have gone from slightly favouring Trump to a toss-up. Betting markets give Trump around a 60 per cent chance of winning which, given the history of the polls, is understandable.

But those markets, unlike the aggregators, tend to be slow to digest new information, and the last few days have provided some good numbers for Harris. That surprise Iowa poll lead has implications not necessarily for little Iowa but for midwest states in general. It’s generated a stir because the pollster, Ann Selzer, has an excellent track record. (I mentioned her near the bottom of this long 2020 article, with a link to an interview.) And a YouGov poll has Harris slightly ahead in four of seven swing states, with Trump ahead in two and one tie.

We all know the gender gap, a long-time male preference for the Republicans, will be particularly large this time. But another demographic to watch (in exit polls) is race. No Democrat presidential candidate has won the white vote since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and that’s not going to change this year. But one theme from recent elections, and in polls for this one, is increasing support for Republicans from Black and Latino voters — off very low and low bases respectively. The flipside, with the Democrat slightly ahead in the national vote, is increasing support from white voters. That Iowa poll was partly to do with that; it found older white people unexpectedly pro-Harris.

A special mention of those recent ads urging women to, if necessary, deceive their husband about who they vote for. Let’s give a shout out to the Australian ballot system, invented in Victoria in 1855–56, which spread across America in the 1890s. Its genius lay in the state making sure voting was secret. These days, though, the wide availability of postal voting in advanced democracies largely negates all the good work: a person exercising power over another can insist they apply for a mail-in ballot and then make sure they vote as they’re told. So the timing of these advertisements, too late to apply for a postal vote, makes sense.

There’s also an irony in the fact that this wouldn’t work as well in Australia, because our booths, positioned as they are, are among the least secret in the democratic world. A person can in most instances simply vote in the booth next to their spouse and watch what they do. Electoral commission staff, if they see it, usually don’t bat an eyelid.

So, to sum up: the polls have it line ball. They might be wrong in either direction, but there’s an outside chance they’re about right.

Who is going to win? I was going to sit this one out, but I’ve been emboldened by the recent numbers, and earlier ones that strongly suggested the electoral-college equation won’t favour Trump as much as the last two elections (in 2020, Biden won the national vote by 4.5 per cent, but in uniform terms a lead of 3.8 per cent or less would have seen him lose the college). I think Harris will probably win. And, no, it’s not likely to be “close.” But, okay, it might be.

We know Trump would refuse to accept that result. It could get very ugly. (A Trump victory might activate violence from far-left Antifa, but it wouldn’t be fanned by senior Democrat figures.) The bigger the Harris win, the less likely it can be overturned by the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, back down under, we have a federal election in around six months. We still don’t know whether our polls are any good, or whether they’re still overstating Labor support. Their counterparts’ performance tomorrow might at least give us some clues. •

The post Testing time for America’s pollsters appeared first on Inside Story.

Each of the three Brisbane stunners in 2022 relied on the Greens candidate facing the Liberal Nats rather than Labor in the two-candidate-preferred count, which meant that LNP voters’ preferences weren’t distributed.

What was different about Bandt’s victory in Melbourne (the seat) fourteen years ago? Long-term local member Lindsay Tanner was retiring; the Greens’ national vote leapt to a new high of 11.8 per cent (only beaten by 2022’s 12.3); the Liberal Party was still routinely advising its voters, via how-to-vote cards, to rank Greens ahead of the real enemy, Labor.

But in a stroke of good fortune for the ALP, the Libs turned that strategy on its head in 2013, and they’ve preferenced Labor ahead of the Greens ever since. The strange decision to dump a practice that had just reaped magnificent dividends (imagine how much easier life would have been for the Gillard government without having to strike that deal with the Greens) was driven by a perception that Victorian Liberal leader Ted Ballieu’s decision to relegate the Greens (as a demonstration of political conviction) had got him over the line in that state’s November 2010 election.

Bandt, once in, built a phenomenal personal vote, easily big enough to withstand the Libs’ change of preference policy, and the primary vote has swung to him at every election since. He came second in primary votes in 2010, with 36.2 per cent, but he’s topped the primary vote every time since, and in 2022 received 49.6 per cent. (Fellow 2010 kingmaker Andrew Wilkie, down in Denison, now Clark, also rose from modest beginnings to enjoy massive margins.)

Today, if not for the changed Liberal strategy, the Greens would probably occupy two more House crossbench spots. It certainly made the difference in Batman (now Cooper) in Victoria in 2016, saving Labor’s David Feeney. And it probably rescued none other than Khalil when he first ran in the same year. His Greens opponent eight years ago, as it will be next year, was Samantha Ratnam.

As noted on these pages several months ago, the Victorian seats of Macnamara and Wills are the most likely Greens gains in 2025. Macnamara, like the Brisbane three, requires a good result from the Liberal candidate. Wills will be a straightforward Labor–Greens contest.

Wills is in contention because of an almost completed redistribution. Election analyst Ben Raue estimates that the 2022 results, applied to the new Wills boundaries, lift Greens primary support from 28.3 to 32.8 per cent and cuts Labor’s from 38.9 to 36.4, with Khalil’s two-candidate-preferred margin against the Greens shrinking from 8.6 to 4.6 per cent.

But there’s a “but.” Notional post-redistribution margins are estimated using booth votes at the previous election and allowing for declaration votes (for which booths can’t be identified), the large majority of which are postal. These estimates can’t take account of disappearing personal votes (when electors suddenly find their old MP is not on the ballot), which are recognised as a real issue when it comes to the major parties, an all-but insurmountable one for independents and probably something in between for the Greens.

The booths moved from Melbourne to Wills by the redistribution comprise deep Greensland, even by Bandt standards. In 2022, Brunswick South East voted 63.3 per cent Greens. Brunswick East took votes for both electorates: the Melbourne Greens vote was 57.6; the Wills Greens managed a less spectacular 48.7 per cent.

Are these new Wills voters Greens supporters or Bandt supporters? Complicating the picture is that Khalil also has his own presence around the city, certainly more than the succession of Labor unknowns the Greens leader has faced over the last decade.

Comparing the swings in old-versus-new Wills after the election will be illuminating. In the meantime, it’s fair to say that Khalil’s notional margin is probably understated by a couple of percentage points.

Working strongly in favour of the Greens is Ratnam, who enjoys a higher profile than in 2016 after a stint in state parliament, including as party leader. And the Greens’ performance across the board will once again affect all electorates. Will they match 2022’s national vote, or even beat it? Labor’s as well; the ageing state government will likely prove a drag.

Khalil’s appointment as the first “Special Envoy for Social Cohesion” should raise his profile (which was presumably part of the idea) but could carry risks as he attempts to reconcile his government’s Gaza position with the demands of constituents.

Might the Liberals’ preference policy revert to pre-2013, perhaps as retribution for Labor preferencing the teals? Unlikely, but not impossible, and it would significantly increase the basket of potential Greens gains.

(The reader tempted to doubt the power of these how-to-vote cards can compare Liberal voters’ 80–20 preference split between Greens and Labor in 2010 with 2013’s 33.7–66.3.)

If polling looks grim for Khalil during the campaign he might be tempted to take a leaf out of his predecessor’s book. Kelvin Thomson was dropped from the frontbench in 2007, just before Labor took office, and soon set himself up as a naysayer to party policy by advocating lower immigration. Voters do like mavericks, and the equation for MPs who publicly buck their party tends to be increased standing in their own electorate at the modest expense of that for their party across the country. It’s obviously not something all candidates can do. For an idea of Thomson’s appeal in Wills, see the collapse of the Labor vote when he retired in 2016.

So if things get desperate, publicly departing from the government on Gaza is an option for Khalil. It might mean leaving the “envoy” position and would blot his copybook with colleagues. But they’d get over it.

And federal preselections in traditional party electorates don’t grow on trees. •

The post There’s a Wills but is there a way? appeared first on Inside Story.

Casting further (and this one suggests he spends too much time in the far-right reaches of social media, where it’s a cause célèbre) he’s been down the rabbit hole where white South African farmers “need help from a civilised country like ours” and would be “the sorts of migrants that we want to bring into our country.” Julie Bishop had to clean up that mess.

This all happened when he was a government minister. Since becoming opposition leader in 2022 he’s made the threat of asylum seekers a regular component of his repertoire, regardless of any particular political logic. And the latest version, of course, is people fleeing Gaza, none of whom should be allowed into Australia.

This brand of politics goes down a treat in a section of the party room and the wider conservative movement, and Dutton might not have become Liberal leader without it. Scott Morrison also rode to the top employing inflammatory rhetoric in the immigration portfolio but, always a wilier individual, he shifted his presentation towards the centre once he got there. It’s worth noting that in both cases the path to the pinnacle was strictly an internal matter; there was little public desire for either man to become leader.

The inevitable, interminable “Dutton is racist!” “No, you’re out of touch!” back-and-forth misses the point. Most of us have elements of such prejudices lurking inside; if nothing else they’re the remnants of early socialisation. Human beings with a degree of self-awareness attempt to transcend harmful thought patterns. It’s part of the process of growing up.

Some politicians consciously try to capitalise on these sentiments and some consciously don’t, and Dutton resides firmly, more than any of his senior major-party contemporaries, in the former group.

For twenty-three years it’s been an article of faith among political participants and observers that this is powerful politics in Australia, capable of swaying election results. But I have long been sceptical. Of course, race-based messages have a visceral appeal for some people, and a subtle effect on many more. But like that other supposed Coalition trump card, opposition to action on climate change, it’s a two-edged sword. At some level voters know they’re being played. And they know it’s not dignified behaviour.

Ask John Howard. No, not the 2001 Tampa–“children overboard” version, but the 1988 one, whose proposal to limit Asian immigration was approved by 77 per cent in a Newspoll but didn’t improve his standing in the opinion polls, and indeed contributed to his removal as opposition leader the following year.

Five years later a rejigged Howard felt the need to half-heartedly apologise to the Asian community. It’s true that later again, in the second half of his prime ministership, he delighted in this politics of division, but you can get away with more as incumbent than aspirant. And if you’re in office for a long time — a roaring economy with historically low interest rates can do that for a government — everything you do comes to be seen as the secret to your success. Perceptions from that time pollute our politics to this day.

Over the last decade, “immigration” has grown as an election issue around the world. If Kamala Harris fails against the easybeat Donald Trump in November it will be largely due to the southern border. But the per-capita “illegal immigration” numbers in America (in 2023) are roughly ten times what ours were at their peak (in 2013); and ours are close to zero today. Comparisons with Europe are similarly one-sided.

The refugees from Gaza Dutton is talking about aren’t “illegal” anyway. But it’s really all about the vibe.

This first-term Labor government, with an election due within nine months, is already looking shopworn. Anthony Albanese’s pragmatic, slow-and-steady, erring-on-the-side-of-caution strategy was supposed to facilitate a long time in office, but it’s not looking so great. I’m a believer in investing political capital to do unpopular things which, after being bedded down, generate more capital when voters give you credit for making them eat their greens. This often involves breaking election promises. But it’s too late to do that now.

Dutton’s apeing of Trump excites the crazies in the Coalition base, and as with climate change they’ve convinced themselves it’s great politics. But to voters looking for solutions to their cost-of-living problems it’s just off-topic. And it obviously doesn’t help Dutton in “teal” seats.

So bring on the analyses of Dutton’s political craftiness, his crude but effective manoeuvres. Prepare also for the puff pieces quoting family and neighbours attesting that Peter is misunderstood, he doesn’t really enjoy inflicting distress on the powerless. But he has no one but himself to blame for perceptions that he carries a lot of hate.

Peter’s neurotic vice damages not just the nation but also himself. Electorally, it’s a road to nowhere. •

The post Peter Dutton’s road to nowhere appeared first on Inside Story.

The current one — sixteen members in the 151-strong chamber — is already the biggest since the two-party system developed in the second decade just over a century ago. The 2022 election produced an unprecedented twenty-seven electorates categorised as “non-classic” by the Australian Electoral Commission (in the sense that the two-candidate-preferred count included an independent or small-party candidate). And the major parties recorded their lowest-ever combined vote of 68.3 per cent.

Current polling has the total majors on about the same level as in 2022, with the Coalition up a couple of points from its 35.7 per cent and Labor down from its 32.6. But polls at the same point in the last term, around August 2021, gave little inkling of what would come, understating independent and minor-party support by around seven to eight points.

There’s one other complication. Since the last election, electoral boundary redistributions have begun in Northern Territory, Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. None of the new maps is finalised, but The Tallyroom’s Ben Raue has estimated new margins based on the AEC’s drafts.

I’ve used Ben’s margins (where applicable) in the table below, which lists all non-classics (reduced to twenty-six with the proposed abolition of North Sydney, held by teal Kylea Tink) in decreasing order of their 2022 two-candidate-preferred vote. All of the candidates above 50 per cent are now, of course, sitting MPs. The others were beaten by the party in the “margin” column. The bottom half dozen can’t really be considered possible wins for small parties or independents, but another two electorates that were very competitive aren’t shown in the table.

Sources: Australian Electoral Commission and Ben Raue. Click to enlarge

In Macnamara (Victoria) and Richmond (NSW), the Greens came rather close to entering the final count; had they done so, and had their opponents been Coalition candidates, they would have been comfortably elected. (Neither would have defeated the Labor candidate.) You can see those 2022 results at the AEC here and here; neither has changed much by draft redistributions.

These three-way dances have become more common since 2013, when the Coalition started putting Labor ahead of the Greens on their how-to-vote cards. The policy has made the minor party’s attempts to take ultra-strong Labor seats, as it did in Melbourne in 2010, much more difficult. (Wills, below, might prove an exception.)

While the table shows Max Chandler-Mather’s 10.5 per cent in Griffith as the Greens’ highest margin, his win was actually not as safe as party leader Adam Bandt’s 56.9 per cent share against Labor. Bandt, who entered parliament thanks to the Liberals’ old Greens-before-Labor how-to-vote cards, dug in to the extent that he could withstand the major party’s change in strategy.

Chandler-Mather, by contrast, would have lost to Labor’s Terri Butler in a two-candidate count. The same for Stephen Bates in Brisbane and probably Elizabeth Watson-Brown in Ryan. But only in Brisbane was the ALP sufficiently competitive in primary votes for that to be conceivable.

Wills (see table) deserves special mention. Its notional margin was significantly affected by the draft redistribution, with Labor’s Peter Khalil’s buffer shrinking from 8.6 points to an estimated 4.6. At the next federal poll, Victoria’s government will be more than ten years old, and it has already seriously slumped in state polls. A drop in federal Labor’s primary support in that state could be on the cards, and for this reason, Wills and Macnamara are probably the likeliest Greens gains in 2025.

But will the Greens’ national vote hold up? They clocked in a record 12.2 per cent last time, and recent opinion polls have them at around that. Those mid-to-late 2021 polls averaged roughly a point below their eventual result, so there is nothing in today’s polling numbers to suggest the Greens won’t do as well again in 2025. If anything, the surveys suggest (because they underestimated their support last time) they’ll do better.

Will those three Brisbane newbies survive? If Bandt’s record is anything to go by they’ll romp home, but that single data point is a small sample to project from. The now-leader enjoyed kingmaker status in his first term, extracting (with leader Bob Brown) that “carbon tax” promise from Julia Gillard that did so much to damage her and her government.

Chandler-Mather did best of the new Greens arrivals, and has since enjoyed easily the highest profile of the three. The expression “divides opinion” might have been invented for him. We’ll have to see how that plays out. Probably in his favour, but then he starts from a high 2022 base.

Somewhat mitigating the Greens’ three expected sophomore surges — the personal vote developed by new MPs — is the likelihood that Labor’s primary vote will improve in Queensland thanks to the upcoming defeat of its (also elderly) state government this October. (The inverse of Victoria.)

What about others in the table? Andrew Wilkie, Bob Katter and Rebekha Sharkie are in parliament for as long as they wish to be. Helen Haines also appears secure.

Does Dai Le have staying power, or will Fowler voters decide 2022 was sufficient punishment for Labor? (Presuming to install a wealthy North Shore-ite — albeit their former premier — was an amazing own goal.) But hardly anyone, certainly not me, saw that result coming. Le’s centre-right background adds spice to the mix.

And what about the teals? Their story goes like this: in leafy, wealthy blue-ribbon Liberal territory, long taken for granted, many voters are increasingly estranged from the party’s socially conservative drift, particularly its lack of action on climate change and accompanying rhetoric. Unlike Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison never publicly questioned the science, but his behaviour (the 2017 lump-of-coal-in-question-time springs to mind) suggested he saw little need for Australia to do much about it. And he could be squirm-inducing.

Denizens of these wealthy suburbs remain overall economically dry, and won’t vote Labor. But the high-achieving, articulate teal women — two with serious Liberal pedigrees and all of them cashed up by Climate 200 — proved electable.

This narrative is not without its wrinkles. The blue ribbons are in some cases faded, with eroding partisanship over the decades not only making safe Labor territories less safe against the Liberals (for example in the fabled western Sydney), but also vice versa. At one end of the teal spectrum, Mackellar remains unwinnable for Labor, with the AEC’s 2022 rethrown two-party-preferred count putting the Liberal candidate on 58.8 per cent. At the other, Warringah was pretty line-ball, Liberal 51.4 to Labor 48.6 (admittedly with a dud but high-profile Liberal candidate).

It’s true that large third-party results can distort these notional two-party-preferred numbers, but it’s worth remembering that the two other electorates which might have looked ripe for the teal plucking, but they didn’t contest, Higgins (Victoria) and Ryan, were snatched by Labor and the Greens respectively.

Teal candidates (I don’t include already-sitting MPs) received 2.4 per cent of the national primary vote in 2022 but a whopping 21.7 per cent across the sixteen electorates they contested — an impressive debut assisted by bountiful donations from both inside and outside their electorates. Evidence points to strategic voting by Labor and Greens supporters along with disaffected Liberals, and in ten seats all of this added up to a place in the two-candidate-preferred contest. In six of them, preferences swept teals to victory.

As with Le (and Wilkie and Bandt twelve years earlier) the successful six illustrated how excellent our compulsory preferential voting system can be for independent candidates provided a major party doesn’t “preference” them last (as Labor has always done with One Nation and the Coalition now does with Greens).

Were the teals simply a product of a particular time and place, namely an unpopular Coalition government run by a rather detested prime minister? Those electorates did vote for John Howard four times, and Tony Abbott as prime minister once, but a feature of eroding party loyalty seems to be that old voting habits can take a few terms to break.

The 2025 contest will feature neither Morrison nor a Coalition government. Any disappointment will be directed at Anthony Albanese and his party. Even if no more teals enter parliament, we will still be left with the question of whether the current ones will survive. As other independent and third-party MPs have shown, the slenderest of footholds can be turned into an impenetrable fortress.

Does Zali Steggall provide a glimpse of their future? In some ways she blazed the trail in Warringah in 2019, and in 2022 she picked up several more percentage points. To borrow from Kerry Packer, she could only expect to get one Tony Abbott in her life… except she then got the “captain’s pick” of Katherine Deves and a general anti-Morrison factor in that part of the country.

On paper, Kate Chaney is the most marginal, and she sits in a state, Western Australia, that contributed a huge 9.7 per cent first-preference swing against the Liberal Party. Any noticeable correction to 2022 could sweep her away. But it also comes down to what Curtin voters think of her performance.

We outsiders can form views about which teal MPs seem most impressive, but those deciding their fates might see things differently. And while the five (formerly six) electorates have similarities and can reasonably be categorised together, they of course have different demographics. Some will be inherently more teal-friendly than others. (The to-be-deleted North Sydney has form with independents, electing Ted Mack in 1990 and 1993.)

They don’t call themselves “teals”, of course. They call themselves independents. They differ on some economic issues, with the two Melbourne MPs seeming more “left-wing” than the Sydney three (or four including Steggall) and Chaney in Perth. They vote differently from each other from time to time, but never, to my knowledge, publicly criticise each other.

If the media tends to report on them as a group, does that mean their voters see them that way? If so, does that make them more of a party, where the performance of one member can impact electors’ attitudes the group as a whole, including their own MP?

And, of course, if the Liberals substantially improve their primary vote in 2025 — and opinion polls currently point that way — their chances of victory against the teals, as well as against Labor, will rise.

All of these factors and more are in the mix. But we can say with some certainty that a more socially liberal Liberal leader than Peter Dutton would make the teals’ re-election task more difficult. Thanks to their own successes, there are almost no progressive Libs left in the lower house. (Chaney was the only one of the six who didn’t unseat a card-carrying moderate.)

I haven’t mentioned other parties or semi-groupings, because they’re mostly known unknowns. But last month’s British election gave us one big hint. Those huge votes in Muslim-heavy electorates protesting at the major parties’ sanguine response to the Gaza slaughter put the fear of the almighty into some Labor MPs. Here, as there, any wins would be at the Labor’s expense.

Mathematically, low major-party primary votes don’t have to deliver more MPs to the “other” column. From 2010 to 2019 Labor managed to keep its losses to two (Denison/Clark and Melbourne), even its vote dipped to just 33.3 per cent in 2019. But it does make it more likely. Build the non-major-party vote and the MPs will (probably) come.

What will a table like the one above look like this time next year? The top three will still be there, not necessarily in that order. There will probably be at least the current amount of green, and at least some teal. And others, but exactly who remains to be seen. •

The post Crossbench 2025 appeared first on Inside Story.

Many pundits seem convinced that anticipation drives outcomes, and that “the vibe” is crucial. Hillary Clinton might beg to differ.

We’ve gone from months of Trump leading Joe Biden, consistently if modestly, in national voting-intention polls — and more importantly, and by greater amounts, in swing states. Then came that awful Joe Biden debate performance and now the attempted assassination of Trump.

Not a large proportion of people watch election debates, but the showcasing of Biden’s frailty last month, particularly that long freeze, received such wall-to-wall coverage that very few Americans of voting age would not have seen the highlights and digested the commentary. The contrast with the energetic, verbally dextrous Trump, only a few years younger, was stark. What was a nagging concern shifted from back of mind to front. Biden is toast, whether he contests or not.

The widespread assumption seems to be that the Trump shooting (which killed one attendee and seriously injured several others) has all but guaranteed the Republican’s win. The party’s national convention (still in progress as we press “publish”) is capitalising on and bringing it all together in an orgy of evangelicalism that, apparently, will last all the way to 5 November. Expect the word “momentum” to get a good workout over the next several weeks.

But to assume Trump’s victory is a fait accompli is to be hostage to the present. Public outpourings of grief, shock, sympathy and even elation tend to have short half-lives. Where will Americans be in a month’s time, or in two? And there are three and a half to go. Life will go on. The glow will mostly dissipate by the time people are casting their votes.

Even before last weekend, the polls seemed to have emboldened Trump. Four years ago he chose a running mate designed to placate the Republican establishment. This time he’s gone for someone a lot like himself, more articulate but also, it seems, more radical. J.D. Vance has even said that unlike Mike Pence he would not have certified Biden’s presidency on 6 January 2021.

Maybe there’s just not much of the Republican establishment left. Or perhaps Trump took seriously Tucker Carlson’s warning that with a “neocon” — a George W. Bush era Republican — as understudy “the U.S. intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr. Trump in order to get their preferred president.”

So Trump has doubled down. Great for the vibe, the momentum, the expectations game.

But reality should drive perceptions, not the other way around. The term “Trump voters” is often misused. Red-cap wearing MAGA voters were important in 2016, and again made the result close in 2020, but there are not nearly enough of them to produce victory. Not everyone who voted for Trump in the last two elections, and not everyone telling pollsters today that they will, is fanatically pro-Trump.

Some are just people who vote Republican. Others are suffering cost-of-living pains and having trouble paying mortgages and would like to see something new tried out. The crisis at the southern border is certainly biting. But does either group actually want to see the system torn down?

Exit polls at the last two elections strongly suggest several things (and I wield a very broad brush). There was, of course, the strong 2016 swing to the Republican candidate among low-income earners. At the same time, the polls showed a noticeable shift to Hillary Clinton among high-income voters, particularly the moderately high (households on $100,000–200,000 per annum).

Four years later, low-income earners stuck with Trump but that high income group swung to him as well. Perhaps many had feared his populist tendencies would disturb their comfortable existences but were placated when he generally pursued rather orthodox Republican economic policies, including tax cuts for the wealthy. It was in fact the suburban $50,000–$100,000 cohort that shifted big to the Democratic Biden four years ago.

In 2024, though, with an “economic populist” deputy and possibly heir apparent, and a wide expectation that a second administration will include no Republican gatekeepers to suppress his wilder inclinations, can the wealthy voters who supported Trump in 2020 be scared off, as they were to an extent in 2016?

What of the other side? If the Democrats are to win, Biden has to be convinced to drop out. I would replace him with someone bland and inoffensive, say like Senator Amy Klobuchar from the 2020 primary campaign. But in the realm of the possible, the easiest path is to vice-president Kamala Harris. Inside Story recently ran an article by the Washington Monthly’s political editor Bill Sher suggesting that Biden stand down from the presidency itself so that Harris can “show” American “how she would do the job… by doing the job.”

I second the motion. It has long been recognised that she is a drag on Biden (including, perhaps, in 2020) but if she became president her persona would, or should, quickly change. Taking charge, issuing orders. She would be the incumbent.

I go on about incumbency a lot on these pages. Do I succumb to the temptation of viewing American electoral politics through an Australian lens? Citizens of the two countries are different. Americans are more religious, less cynical, more susceptible to schmaltz. They’re also probably less fearful of trying new things. (A wise person once noted that Australians are world beaters at being scared of change but then adapt to it with exceptional ease.)

Primary contests over there facilitate extreme Congress members on both sides, but particularly among Republicans. Our electoral systems also push in different directions. Australia’s compulsory and (at federal level) full-preferential voting system encourages moderation or, put less kindly, punishes derring-do and imagination. There’s something like a zero-sum equation: an unpopular government or stress-inducing opposition pushes votes, directly or after preferences, to the other side. The two-candidate-preferred numbers have to add up to 100. Our 2022 election illustrated that (but also the continuing breakdown of the two-party system) in spades.

In America, with historically low turnout and what is effectively first-past-the-post voting in fifty electorates (variously weighted) for presidents, generating enthusiasm to get the vote out matters a lot. But it also clashes with the need to appeal to the middle ground. Biden’s 2020 campaign platform possibly erred on the turnout side, including in his choice of running mate. (On the other hand, the obsession over “swing states,” and the often wafer-thin characterisations of the people who live there, is extremely familiar to us; we call them “marginal electorates.”)

So I’m trying not to fall into the trap of carelessly applying our “lesser of two evils” template onto Americans.

But it seems that Trump is now, in his veep choice, preaching to the choir. At time of writing his nomination acceptance speech has not been delivered but is widely reported to have been rewritten. It will now be about him bringing the country together to heal the wounds and end the division. That’s a much-used and hackneyed political message, and it might go down well this week, but by November will be at the very least dog-eared and perhaps just plain preposterous — unless Trump can truly change his vitriolic ways. It’s also a radically different message from the retributive one that’s fuelled his success.

In a post-Biden world, immigration will return as the Democrats’ Achilles heel. But Biden’s departure will also make it easier to present a turning of that page. That’s one of those turnout-versus-the-middle-ground conundrums.

Hot off the presses is the news that the eighty-one-year-old has again tested positive to Covid. Those online markets now have Harris slightly favoured over him to be the Democrat nominee.

I reckon this race is far from over. If Biden doesn’t run. •

The post Beware “the vibe” appeared first on Inside Story.

Which is why Druery and his inevitable sobriquet “the preference whisperer” were on high rotation last week, letting it be known (as in “Druery has confirmed”) that he’d had discussions with newly independent WA senator Fatima Payman. Barring a double dissolution, though, Payman’s Senate spot is guaranteed until June 2028, so it’s hard to know what use she would have for Glenn’s skillset.

But there was more to the story, for Druery also relucantly admits to having been in talks with “Muslim community groups” amid scuttlebutt about the possibility of “Muslim teals” running against Labor in some electorates to capitalise on anger at the government’s approach to Gaza.

Does it matter that Glenn’s whispering days are over everywhere except in Victoria? At the federal level, the Turnbull government got rid of group-ticket voting just before the 2016 election — with the support of the Greens but in the face of hysterical opposition from Labor. No longer could voters unknowingly preference tiny parties they’d never heard of and wouldn’t like. The stated reasons for Labor’s opposition never made sense, but perhaps it saw the status quo as disadvantageous to the Greens.

And does it matter, when talk turned to “Muslim teals,” that Druery has never been able to do anything useful with preferences in lower house elections? Apparently not.

Once you take out the “whispering” there’s actually no story at all. But I couldn’t find this acknowledged, even once, in any of the mainstream accounts I’ve seen.

Druery has a history of making absurd claims about preferences in elections to the House of Representatives. Back in 2015, when the Liberal Party was taking legal action against the Liberal Democrats, or LDP, because their name could create confusion, the minor party’s sole senator, David Leyonhjelm, announced that the LDP would “preference” Labor over the Liberal candidate, Andrew Hastie in that September’s Canning by-election.

Earth shattering? Well, Druery certainly claimed to think so. The move could be “disastrous” for the government, he told the Australian. “We are going to potentially see something like (the 2013 NSW Senate election) happen again in Canning,” he opined. “The Liberal Democrats are number two on the ballot paper, they’re on the left hand side of the Liberal Party and many voters will be confused.” (The brackets in the quote are the Australian’s.)

There was more: “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say the results of this election could be in the hands of the Liberal Democrats if they’re clever and if they run a very smart strategy.”

Some of that made no sense whatsoever, though perhaps the newspaper was to blame. (I’m thinking of the reference to the NSW Senate ballot paper in 2013, when Leyonheljm was elected by voters who thought he was a Liberal, and the LDP’s spot on the Canning ballot, which has no effect on whether or not people follow their how-to-vote card.) And the rest was just wrong.

In the event, the LDP received — wait for it — 0.6 per cent of the primary vote in the Canning by-election. But it wouldn’t have mattered if it’d got 20.6, because despite its how-to-vote card “directing” preferences to Labor, the flow was 72.4 per cent to the Liberals. We don’t really know the exact effect those cards had, but it obviously wasn’t much.

The boys, unbowed, were at it again the following year, joined by Family First senator Bob Day, where during an ABC 7.30 interview they threatened vengeance against those who had voted for the abolition of group tickets. I wrote at the time about some of their fantastical claims.

One person who seems to have fallen for Druery’s pea and thimble is former Labor senator (1987–1990) John Black, who for at least two decades has been published on election matters in the Australian and, more recently, the Australian Financial Review. In last Saturday’s instalment he purported to apply to Australia the lessons of the big swings in last week’s UK election from Labour to independents in constituencies with a high Muslim population.

This is a legitimate topic, of course, and those numbers must have sent shivers up the spine among Labor MPs in electorates that share that characteristic, most of which are in western Sydney. Here, though, the treatment turned the question to farce, with this pièce de résistance revealing the grip of the Druery legend:

Looking ahead to 2025, it would presumably be the job of the preference whisperer, Glenn Druery, to try to round up a swap of preferences between One Nation, the United Australia Party, the Greens and an independent Muslim candidate before the combined 20-plus per cent of these votes leaked back to the ALP.

Slotting in a conservative estimate for the number of votes shifting from Labor to a Muslim “teal”/independent, Black finds one casualty, Peter Khalil in Wills. But under less conservative estimates, based on those British swings, Labor could lose “seats such as Werriwa, Macarthur, Holt, Barton and Lalor… to whichever party was left sitting on the preferential carousel when the music stopped.”

Leaving aside the improbability of the Greens signing up to a deal that would mean preferencing One Nation ahead of Labor, the “carousel” reference gives it away: Black is thinking of the pre-2016 Senate ticket system. How else could you imagine all those preferences aggregating to one “20-plus per cent” bloc?

As the Canning LDP example shows, parties and candidates can’t exercise much control over where their preferences go. Some have more success than others, with variables including how many volunteers they can bring out to thrust cards into voters’ hands, what kind of supporters they attract, and which parties they are attempting to send preferences to.

But a person voting for a “Muslim teal,” for example, is very unlikely to be persuaded to preference One Nation or even the Liberals ahead of Labor. For Black’s analysis to work, the proportion of obedient card followers has to be close to 100 per cent. In reality, it’s likely to be in the single digits.

So, do the dramatic swings in Britain’s high-Muslim population constituencies have implications for our Labor government? You bet they do.

Black got the electorates right: Blaxland (NSW), Watson (NSW) and Calwell (Victoria) are the Labor seats most vulnerable to the hypothetical Muslim candidate. (His suggestion that Wills could succumb to a random candidate from Druery’s gang is nonsense, but it is, after this year’s redistribution, rather vulnerable to the Greens.)

Two big differences between Britain and Australia, though, are demographics and the voting system.

Britain’s Muslim population, per capita, is roughly twice Australia’s (around 6 per cent versus 3 per cent) and that difference is roughly reflected in the proportions living in the larger “Muslim seats”: about 60 per cent Muslim there and 30 per cent here. All else being equal, this means less danger for Labor.

But the other variable — Britain’s first-past-the-post system versus Australia’s “number every square” — is, on balance, a negative for Labor. True, the chances that a split in the centre-left vote will lead to Coalition gains is close to zero, but the risk of some of those “Muslim teals” winning seats thanks to preferences from other candidates, particularly the Liberals, is significant. It happened against Labor in Fowler (and against Liberals for all six successful teals) in 2022.

Turnout and formality are also at play. The electorates in question tend to have low turnout, and the Sydney ones in particular have a high informal vote (partly because of confusion created by optional-preferential voting in state elections). Given the likelihood that voters from non-English-speaking backgrounds are particularly well represented in both groups, this would decrease the risk for Labor. But it also presents opportunities for community organisers to get the vote out and ensure people to make their vote formal by filling out every square.

This might be where someone like Druery would come in handy. As would help with filling out forms and liaising between candidates to try to optimise the flow of preferences.

Those how-to-vote cards won’t make much difference, but in a close contest every vote counts. •

The post The whisper in the west appeared first on Inside Story.

So it is with Peter Dutton’s vague sketch last Wednesday of a nuclear power policy — basically a list of proposed reactor sites, narrowing the field from 150 to seven. Will the opposition leader’s gamble pay off? Will Australians join him on this nuclear adventure? Or will it all fall in a heap?

Elections end up being about all sorts of things. And a win doesn’t mean everything the party proposed received majority support. But sometimes a particular issue can reasonably be identified as having made the difference between a win and a loss. Climate change policy, despite what you might have heard, hasn’t so far joined that list.

Dutton’s pitch has been, quite reasonably, compared with two famous opposition escapades: John Hewson’s book-length Fightback! at the 1993 poll and Bill Shorten’s franking credits plan in 2019.

When it was unveiled in November 1991, Fightback! was an absolute banger, producing a steep surge in voting intentions and ratings boosts for the Coalition and its leader. The package as a whole — which included, yes, the dreaded GST, but also goodies such as direct tax cuts and (who could resist?) a big drop in petrol prices — received majority support. It contributed to the demise of Bob Hawke’s prime ministership weeks later, and perhaps tipped Hawke over the edge.

By contrast, Labor leader Bill Shorten’s franking credits plan didn’t provoke a widespread response either way when it was announced in March 2018. Most voters were unfamiliar with the technicalities and although the money it would deliver for the budget was substantial, it didn’t set out to remake the nation.

But the plan did register, quickly and negatively, with the minority of voters who stood to be — or maybe/perhaps/might conceivably be — affected. Within days it was rejigged to exclude pensioners; not a great start. The opposition called it a “retiree tax” and much of the media, including at least a couple of ABC radio personalities, adopted the shorthand.

Over time, it became an amorphous, if background, cause for unease and a reason not to vote Labor. What does the ALP have against old people? As the election approached it was recognised as a bit of a problem for the Labor, but voting intention opinion polls led the party (and everyone else) to believe it wouldn’t be fatal. In the end it (probably) was.

Neither of those earlier blunders, each of them perilously complex, was necessary. Dutton’s 2024 throw of the dice, by contrast, contains defensible elements of hard political logic. One has to do with internal party tensions. Most Coalition MPs seem to have a problem accepting the reality of global warming, let alone the need for Australia to do anything about it. Yet the electorate expects at least something from a major party, even if it’s token (like Tony Abbott’s “Direct Action”). So the nuclear plan placates the party’s right wing while purporting to present a path to net zero.

A big policy such as this also further secures Dutton’s position as leader. He was looking pretty safe anyway, but you never know what the future brings. The Liberal party-room, having been co-opted onto the bandwagon, will find it very difficult to dump either it or him before the 2025 poll.

And contemplate the road not travelled. While it’s almost certain in Hewson’s case, and probable in Shorten’s, that a policy-lite opposition manifesto would have delivered victory, the same can’t be said today. This Labor government is in its first term and — despite some commentator chatter after recent polls — there is no real reason to believe a change of government is likely. If playing safe would probably have kept the Coalition in opposition then a big risk can be justified. The potential upside is a win, the potential downside just a larger loss. The extreme, an electoral walloping, could actually sweep away Dutton himself in Dickson, on a margin of 1.7 per cent; but perhaps, having taken his one shot, he wouldn’t mind that too much.

No guts, no glory.

Another difference between Dutton and Hewson/Shorten is that those earlier policies embodied mainstream technocratic thinking, having been suggested in some form by Treasury and kicked around for years. The former had also been publicly advocated by treasurer Paul Keating. True, the idea of nuclear power has also long been with us, and has been used by Coalition leaders as a piece of left-baiting, but serious advocacy has been restricted to the fringes, and scarcely anyone today claims it would stand up to a cost–benefit analysis.

And yet Australians tend to be fond of “nation building.” Did railways and telegraph poles need a tick from bean-counters in the nineteenth century? Did (or will) the NBN prove economically sound in the end? Might nuclear energy be the next high-speed rail — widely appealing at gut level even though the numbers don’t add up?

Also working for the opposition is the absence of an obviously raw hip-pocket nerve. The plan’s massive and ongoing hit to the federal budget would affect perceptions of economic credibility, but on that measure a Liberal opposition will tend to be given more leeway than a Labor one. (In 2007 Kevin Rudd’s strictly-fibre-to-the-node NBN plan had a price tag a tiny fraction of what ended up being built.)

One little-mentioned aspect of Dutton’s plan — the promise to drop the 2030 carbon target — would also set free up not only gas but potentially also coal. The intrinsic appeal of this outcome would be limited to the fossil-fuel worshipping joint party-room and the wider conservative movement, but an associated “promise” of lower power bills might prove much electorally important.

Working the other way is the wide uptake of and support for renewable energy. Nationals leader David Littleproud found his mouth running off last week about restricting renewables to make nuclear viable. How does such talk go down in the three million households (home at least six million voters) with solar panels?

More generally, while loathing of windmills is an article of faith among conservative culture warriors, it’s not a sentiment shared by the general population. For years Dutton has appeared susceptible to mistaking the obsessions of Sky after Dark for those of the wider community — recall his concern for the plight of White African farmers — and some of this nuclear push seems driven by that. As Monday’s Resolve poll in the Nine papers suggests, Australians overall have warm feelings towards renewables.

Once Dutton provides more detail, the pressure and attention will be on the opposition. Opponents will joyfully look for aspects, big or small, to pick apart. In the meantime, they will helpfully shovel truths and half-truths into the vacuum.

The mere word “nuclear” can quicken the pulse. The purpose of the early release of the sites was to stop hares running on the question of where these things will be located. In theory, that potential scare campaign has shrunk by 143 out of 150, but other Coalition MPs, and importantly people who aspire to join them after the election, will still be discomforted by the repeated question of whether they would welcome a reactor in their own electorate, and clips of them showing that discomfort will be energetically shared.

As the AEC reminded us the other day, we live in an online misinformation age. And, as Bill “death tax” Shorten will tell you, misinformation can be particularly powerful when big plans are released.

We’ve around ten months to go. My best guess is that in the short term the electorate will give Dutton and the Coalition points for boldness but eventually the plan itself will be little-loved and will to some extent damage the opposition leader. Australians are as much in love with the idea of oppositions being courageous as they are susceptible to being made terrified of change. We know which wins out at the ballot box.

But climate change policy won’t be the only, or even the main issue at the next election. The cost of living in the second half of the 2020s will weigh much more heavily on people’s minds. Power bills play a part in that, but so will perceptions of the opposition leader’s judgement and competence.

Right now there’s a lot of desperation around, on both sides, presumably based on the belief that voters’ first impressions stick. But we know from previous events, most spectacularly last year’s Voice referendum, that many millions of electors are quite able to change their minds over a few short months.

Still, no prime minister enjoys experiencing a knock, even temporary, to his government’s standing. Nasty polling can make MPs nervous; see the above reference to R.J.L. Hawke. Recall also that the simmering discomfort over Labor’s franking credits plan didn’t save Malcolm Turnbull in 2018.

It was Kevin Rudd who introduced new rules that shoved a plank into Labor’s revolving leadership door. Anthony Albanese might be thankful for them in the next few months. •

The post No guts, no glory? appeared first on Inside Story.

The received wisdom is that the polling industry redeemed itself in 2022 after the 2019 shocker, but that’s only half true. They picked the right winner this time, and none were too embarrassed by their published two-party-preferred numbers. But the primary-vote numbers they reported were — with one exception — nothing to brag about.

After the AEC’s count was finalised in July 2022, polling (and all-round electoral) expert Kevin Bonham conducted a post-mortem. On national polling performance, he ranked Newspoll, published in the Australian, just ahead of the Nine papers’ Resolve Political Monitor. His post, characteristically thorough, is recommended reading if you haven’t seen it already.

But I beg to differ about which outfit performed the best. I reckon Resolve did, and comfortably. It was the only pollster to have the Coalition easily ahead of Labor in primary votes. While it understated support for both major parties, it got the gap almost exactly right: three rounded percentage points against the actual 3.1. It didn’t too badly on the minor parties either (its biggest misfire was the Greens) and the independents. Every other pollster seriously overstated Labor’s primary support. Two even had the opposition slightly ahead.

This table, in rough chronological order of survey dates, tells the story. Essential is there twice, because since 2019 they’ve been leaving undecideds in. It’s common practice in American political polling but just annoying here. It means the observer has to infer numbers net of undecideds.

Click here to enlarge

Calculating numbers to one decimal place from rounded figures adds to the imprecision. My aversion to doing this means that, unlike the good Dr Bonham, I’ve rounded my calculations to the nearest whole number as well. It makes little difference for our purposes.

Newspoll, Morgan and Ipsos used flows from the previous elections to allocate preferences; the latter two also provided, for comparison, two-party-preferreds provided by their survey respondents. Essential and Resolve published respondent-allocated preferences, although Resolve also noted that 2019 preference flows gave a rounded 52–48 rather than 51–49. Had they headlined the former as their official result they would have looked very good indeed — and topped Kevin’s ranking. (See his sixth point for more on all this.)

Why use the previous election’s preference flows? Counterintuitively, the record shows that plugging them in for two-party-preferred calculations — from minor party by minor party, with the independents as a group — is superior to asking respondents which of the major parties they would preference. Twiddling those flows is acceptable if there’s a good reason — if a minor party changes its how-to-vote card strategy, for example, as One Nation did between 2016 and 2019.

(It’s not totally clear why survey respondents aren’t reliable predictors of their own preferences. How-to-vote cards would play a part. More generally, a large chunk of voters simply don’t take as much care with who they rank after their primary vote. After voting “1” they don’t think the rest matters very much. Ask a person who voted for, say, One Nation or an independent which major party they preferenced, and there’s a good chance they’ll have trouble recalling.)

On election day 2022 Labor’s final two-party-preferred vote was 52.1 per cent, and the pollsters’ published predictions ranged from 51 to 54. As noted above, no egg-scraping devices required. Apart from Resolve, though, they all got lucky with the 2022 preference flows.

Now, it’s true that pollsters’ final two-party-preferred figures have usually looked better after the election than their primary-vote figures. In most cases it’s because they over/understated Greens support mostly at the expense of Labor and/or did something similar for Coalition and minor right-wing party support, particularly One Nation’s. Eighty-plus per cent of Greens preferences go to Labor anyway, and two-thirds of One Nation’s to the Coalition, so the misfires largely wash out after preferences. But in 2022 only Essential seems to have benefited greatly from this tendency.

Newspoll, Ipsos and Morgan all had 53 per cent for Labor, and from their primary numbers it’s almost certain their unrounded estimates were higher (but below 53.5). Fortunately for them, the 2019 data substantially understated flows to Labor this time around.

This next table includes all the minor parties (with independents as a group) that received more than 1 per cent of the national vote, in decreasing order of support. The next two columns show their 2019 and 2022 preference flows to Labor. All, as can be seen, were more favourable to Labor in 2022. (If the table had extended down to Katter’s Australia Party on 0.4 per cent, the same would have applied.)

Click here to enlarge

The final column shows the difference each changed flow made to the two-party-preferred vote. They add up to 0.9 per cent (it looks like it should be 0.8 but it’s in the rounding.) Once you take account of the very long tail, minor party by minor party (where they contested in 2019), it remains at 0.9 per cent overall.

If preferences had flowed in 2022 as they did in 2019, Labor’s two-party-preferred vote would have been nearly a percentage point lower, at 51.2 per cent. (Doing it seat by seat, I get only one different outcome: Gilmore in New South Wales, won instead by the Liberal Andrew Constance.)

So pollsters who used 2019 preference flows understated Labor’s two-party-preferred vote by around 0.9 per cent. But with their primary votes much too kind to Labor, they’re very glad they did. Just to labour the point, had the pollsters (apart from Resolve and Essential) known how preferences would actually flow, they would have published figures one percentage point higher.

Now, I am not here to pump Resolve’s tyres. Its founder and owner, Jim Reed, used to work for the Liberal-aligned Crosby-Textor, and it sometimes shows in the wording of the company’s surveys on political issues. This tendency reached a possible nadir when in 2021 the Morrison government test-ran a slogan against the Labor opposition on climate change policy, claiming the Coalition would meet its targets using “technology, not taxes.” Resolve dutifully presented its respondents with the same false dichotomy: “which is your preferred method for Australia to reduce its carbon emissions?… Put a cost on emissions or use new technologies?” and unsurprisingly found a big majority favoured the pain-free option. As Murray Goot wrote in these pages, the question “could have been written in the prime minister’s office.”

There’s another thing: while every pollster pulls out all stops for their final-week polls, usually by using larger samples, Resolve changes its methodology, adding telephone interviews to its online ones. Its earlier 2022 campaign result — late April, online only — was bang in the centre of the polling pack: Labor one point ahead on the primary vote, 54 per cent after preferences. Apart from the final campaign poll, there is no reason to prioritise them over the other pollsters.

Nor am I one to claim that the national two-party-preferred figure no longer matters much. Proponents of this view invariably argue that aggregate two-party-preferred numbers can’t account for contests in seats where the two major parties aren’t head-to-head (of which we saw a record twenty-seven in 2022, sixteen of them won by a minor party or independent). This is true, but it applies equally to national primary votes. And if that’s the case, why bother with national polling at all?

With major party support continuing its bumpy road downwards, a time will come when national votes, primary and two-party-preferred, are virtually meaningless. But we sure ain’t there yet.

The final table is essentially the same as the first but plugs in the 2019 and 2022 preference flows for each pollster. Rather than just add them to the pollsters’ rounded numbers, I’ve also given a range for each from lowest possible to highest.

Click here to enlarge

In Morgan’s case, for example, the lowest possible Labor two-party-preferred figure comes from assuming the Coalition is actually on 34.49, Labor is on 33.5, Greens 12.5, One Nation 4.49, United Australia 1.49, independents 8.5 and others 4.5. You have permission to skip this table: its main purpose is to show that calculations from rounded primary support produce a range; you could call it another “margin of error” that needs to be acknowledged.

What does all this mean for the final week of the 2025 campaign?

After the 2019 polling disaster, most major firms performed public navel-gazing and at least implicitly promised to do better. Not so after 2022, but we must hope that all of them (Resolve aside) have quietly introspected about their too-high Labor primary support. In the past six months or so they have certainly produced a lot of low figures, lower and more numerous than in the whole previous term. (See Wikipedia in 2019–2022 and 2022–2025.) If they haven’t mended their ways, you can take a couple more points off Labor’s currently polled two-party-preferred.

And of course, the new gold standard is to use preference flows from the previous election, in this case 2022. But can we assume those record high preference flows (mostly from the Greens) will be repeated next year? If, for example, they revert back to 2019 levels, then we can knock a point off Labor’s published two-party-preferred support in about nine out of ten polls. On the other hand, maybe preferences will favour Labor even more next year.

Without a good reason not to, we must use 2022 flows… I suppose.

Anyway, in that final week I’ll be hanging out for Resolve’s poll — their primary numbers and, if they supply two-party-preferred estimates by past election vote, those as well. Then we’ll see if it was a fluke. •

The post Poll position appeared first on Inside Story.

They’re also asking about other stuff, of course, such as whether this budget is good for you, is it good for the economy/country, and would the opposition would have delivered a better one?

In terms of the 2025 election, though, it doesn’t much matter what people think now. As surveys for last year’s Voice referendum reminded us, people can drastically change their minds, en masse. And elections are about the future, rather than a reward or punishment for a government’s past actions — though those actions can influence expectations of future ones.

Newspoll has been asking questions, most of them repeated over time, about federal budgets for nearly forty years. On the key one — “Overall do you believe the budget will be good or bad for the Australian economy?” — the highest net score on record was for treasurer Paul Keating’s effort in 1987.

The second-highest was in May 2007, for Peter Costello’s last. That budget produced a small voting-intentions bounce (margin-of-error quibbles aside), taking the Howard government’s position from disastrous to slightly less so, and sent the betting markets back to almost 50–50. John Howard and Costello were baaack! Game on!

But the polls soon blew out again.

Still, while it didn’t save the government it might have contributed to the modest size of the loss. In the end, the result was 52.7–47.3, which was not too bad compared with the polls all year.

Right to the end, the Howard government was seen as an excellent economic manager. That, rather than all the “values” guff commentators obsessed over, was the main driver of its longevity. Thanks to the dramatically changed economic conditions since 2008, not just in Australia, Howard’s rule is still seen as a golden age. In perceptions of economic competence, no later government has come close.

In opposition, Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey understandably campaigned on a return to those bountiful years, including the budget surpluses. That helped get them into government, but in office they found the chickens coming home to roost.

All else being equal, the Coalition enjoys an advantage over Labor as “better economic managers.” And whoever is in government tends to be seen that way as well. This means a Coalition government is always regarded as superior to the opposition and a Labor one sometimes is. Hawke Labor often was, Rudd–Gillard never, and Albanese Labor was for a while, but that ended last year.

Peter Dutton’s budget reply on Thursday, which highlighted the cost-of-living crisis and the housing shortage, illustrated why first-term governments are usually re-elected. His solutions (slash immigration, ban foreigners from buying existing dwellings and end Labor’s supposed “renewables only” policy) would hold much more allure against an elderly government: it’s difficult to blame new incumbents for everything that’s wrong and claim you have new solutions when you’re only recently out of office. And promising a return to the Morrison era would not hold great appeal.

The opposition leader also joined the chorus castigating the Albanese government for its fiscal laxity in an inflationary environment, but he didn’t dwell on it lest journalists enquire where he would cut spending. That way lies piping-hot danger.

Not many Australians would have been watching Dutton on Thursday night, nor in fact Chalmers on Tuesday. The media coverage matters more, and of course, increasingly, social media. For those outlets, Dutton’s most salient message was the anti-foreigner stuff. Like the government’s “Future Made in Australia,” it’s designed to work at an emotional level. Voters react warmly to a spot of dressed-up protectionism even if mainstream economists hate it.

All public policy involves trade-offs. In this case, the government perhaps decided to assist people on lower incomes at the cost of slightly higher interest rates (one economist put it at 0.5 per cent). It would also have considered the political implications: a quick calculation via Google suggests the percentage of the electorate that has a variable home mortgage is around 20 per cent — a quarter the number of those who don’t.

Always hovering overhead, though, is the risk of fuelling the old message, “Labor can’t be trusted with the budget.”

Still, Thursday’s jobless numbers seem to lessen the likelihood of an interest rate rise this year and increase the chances of a drop early next.

Yes, we’re all looking forward to seeing what the polls say. “Boosts” driven by particular events are rarely sustainable. But no one pays more attention to them than major-party MPs, and no leader, in office or otherwise, wants demoralised and restless MPs. •

The post That fickle budget bounce appeared first on Inside Story.

Then, in the 1990s, came John Hewson, seen as right-wing in those days because of his very dry economic prescriptions. (Peter Costello was in that camp as well. By that point, the social conservatism that later became a fad under the Howard government was seen as a lost cause and the politics of anti-immigration a no-go area, thanks to Howard’s ill-fated 1988 attempt to tap into anti-Asian sentiment.)

Hewson was followed by Alexander Downer, cast as moderate, in temperament at least, inoffensive at first, before the party-room recycled Mr Bland himself, Howard. Once considered a politician of substance, he disowned virtually everything he once stood for in the cause of electability. It won him the 1996 election, and the “small target” label was born.

Fast forward over the millennium to Kevin Rudd’s time as PM, when the Liberals churned through Brendan Nelson (right-wing) and Malcolm Turnbull (left) before electing Tony Abbott (right). Then, in office, they went back to Turnbull.

And, finally, Scott Morrison. Previously a darling of the right thanks to his tough talk and action against asylum seekers, his decision to support Turnbull against Abbott blotted his copybook. But always a wily party-room operator, he successfully reinvented himself as the compromise replacement when Turnbull’s position was irretrievable. Sky after Dark and 2GB’s Ray Hadley were livid — they had demanded Dutton! — but quickly grew to love ScoMo.

That 2018 spill illustrates the left–right dynamic. In polling, Morrison and Dutton both registered single digits, and if it was up to the voters Turnbull’s replacement would have been his popular deputy Julie Bishop. But she was very much of Turnbull’s ideological ilk, and it was time for a conservative. (There’s a bit more to Liberal factions than that, of course; see this from the late Morrison era by James Massola in Nine papers.)

And so today, for almost two years now, the helmsman has been Peter Dutton. Very much of the right, like his predecessor he rose to the top via the immigration portfolio with the backing of News Corp.

Some insist Dutton is wily, not to be underestimated — that still waters run deep. Others suggest that what you see is what you get — that there’s really not much thinking going on. Let’s settle for in between: as leader he’s shown greater discipline than in government, with no frolics into the supposed plight of white South African farmers or Melburnians’ terror of leaving their homes lest they are set upon by African (again) gangs. He’s been choosing his words more carefully when he rails against asylum seekers, although he seems to cling to this political strand. The polls, meanwhile, have narrowed to a Labor two-party lead of around 51 per cent.

Dutton’s certainly not the leader you’d put in to win back teal voters. That’s okay, because he claims he doesn’t really want to; his trail to the Lodge will go through the outer suburbs and regions. But assuming today’s crossbench members are all re-elected, and assuming they don’t support him in a hung parliament, he’ll need a very big two-party-preferred national vote, more than 53 per cent, to do it.

But maybe he does assume either teal support or that his party will regain that territory anyway. Teal successes were predominately a reaction to Morrison personally, and it’s just possible they won’t outlast him. Dutton’s addiction to asylum-seeker/refugee politics is counterproductive on this front, though, and it’s never been the effective electoral tool its proponents are convinced it is.

It’s possible I may have written on these pages (okay, I did) that Dutts was unlikely to still be leader at the 2025 election. Recent history (see the 2008–09 turnstile, above) seemed a persuasive indicator, and it made cyclical sense.

Dutton’s demise would have seen the baton go to a moderate, and the obvious candidate would have been his deputy, Sussan Ley. Female, photogenic, centrist, just the sort of person who might win back teal seats or, failing that, successfully negotiate with teals themselves in a hung parliament.

Yet here we still are.

Perhaps, as with many rules of Australian politics, the see-saw no longer applies. For one thing, thanks to the 2022 election, there are very few “moderates” in the partyroom. With the exception of Curtin (Western Australia), each of the six teal victories came at the expense of a Liberal moderate, most of them well-credentialled future leadership material. A moderate woman also lost blue-ribbon Higgins to Labor, and the Greens took Brisbane from a moderate man. (Brisbane, unlike the others, was not traditional Liberal territory.)

There are still a few in the Senate, but overall it’s a tiny rump with little power.

Ley has also been middling to terrible as deputy. She was put there to take the rough edge off the leader, but it hasn’t worked out that way. In a sense she has been too loyal, reciting his scripts but without the carefully constructed deniability. Rather than presenting as the grown-up who cleans up the mess, explaining that “what Peter meant was such and such,” she goes further than him. That Twitter debacle days before the Dunkley by-election is the most memorable example. Her many unforced errors include her response to the government’s rejigged Stage 3 tax cuts.

So what I had anticipated — the emerging chit-chat from constituents to Liberal MPs, media reports of Ley’s charm with punters, a fresh wave of polling about who should be leading the party — has not come to be.

Are there any other contenders? Simon Birmingham is in the wrong chamber. Paul Fletcher might have bouts of fancying himself before yielding to reason.

Bridget Archer is the choice of left-leaning members of the political class, and it’s just conceivable that colleagues might overcome their resentment of her repeated disloyalty and elect her if it meant taking government. But she’s actually little-known in the electorate beyond Tasmania.

If you were Anthony Albanese, who would you prefer to face? If Ley did become leader, the inevitable honeymoon and poll boost would induce some terror in government ranks for a while. But the figures would eventually come closer to earth, assisted by likely misjudgements. (The Downer experience 1994–95 comes to mind.) Unless she was installed on election eve.

So are the Liberals stuck with Dutton as leader until the next election?

It looks like it, doesn’t it? •

The post For whom the pendulum swings appeared first on Inside Story.

If you live in Frankston and you’ve got a problem with Victorian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor.

If you do not want to see Australian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor.

Send Labor a message.

— Sussan Ley (@sussanley) February 29, 2024

Having happened to watch question time that day, I can attest that she (or her staffer) was fully on song with the opposition’s chief theme: that Melburnian women should be terrified of being assaulted by convicted sex offenders — foreign (ie. dark-skinned) ones to boot — released into the community by the Albanese government.

It’s a very Peter Duttonesque message, but he and his team usually deliver it with more subtlety — it sticks better if recipients have to join a few dots — and, crucially, with deniability. By blundering in with the quiet bits out loud, Ley made it more obvious, if not necessarily more objectionable.

It’s all part of the Dunkley frenzy, of course. As with all federal by-elections seen as contestable between the major parties, this one, caused by the death of Labor MP Peta Murphy, has gone from being cast as a useful indicator of how the parties are “travelling” to something incredibly important in its own right: massive tests for the prime minister and opposition leader.

Whenever I write about a by-election I devote some words to explaining why these events are useless predictors of anything and why they only matter because the political bubble believes they do. Readers familiar with these observations can skip the next few pars.

There are two main reasons. The first is that the sample, while huge, is neither random nor scientifically weighted. It’s just one electorate. At the 2022 general election a national 3.7 percentage point swing comprised a spread of 151 seat swings, from 14.2 points to Labor in Pearce (Western Australia) to 7.2 points to the Liberals in Calwell (Victoria). (The 8.3 points to the Lib in Fowler (New South Wales) was bigger, but that was an independent–Labor contest and the two-party-preferred figure comes from an Electoral Commission recount for purely academic purposes.)

So even at a general election, one seat’s swing will rarely approximate the national one.

But perhaps more importantly, by-elections (except in the rarest of cases) are not about who will form government. It’s true that a proportion of the electorate — probably still a majority, but a shrinking one — will always vote for a particular major party out of loyalty, but for the rest the triviality of the contest liberates them to act on other impulses. “Sending a message” is tried and tested (see tweet above).

Candidates also make more of a difference at by-elections. So might the weather. Low turnout is a feature of this genre, worth potentially a couple of percentage points one way or the other.

Still, by-elections do end up being important, precisely because the political class believes they are. They can influence the future, particularly leaders’ job security, but only because of how they’re interpreted. (Would we have ever seen a Bob Hawke prime ministership if Liberal Phillip Lynch had not resigned in Flinders in 1982?)

The magic number here is the margin: 6.27233 per cent to be precise. A swing to the opposition above that figure would shake parliament’s walls, generate shock and awe in the press gallery and even, perhaps, send Labor’s leadership hares out for a trot. After the Voice “debacle,” Anthony Albanese fails another electoral test!

A swing to the government would similarly damage Peter Dutton, rendering his chances of surviving until the next election worse than they are now. And anything in between will be energetically spun by both sides and their media cheersquads.

So what can we say about Dunkley? Antony Green’s page is up, and I’ve followed his lead when calculating average swings by restricting the time period to 1983 onwards. But I’ve also excluded by-elections caused by section 44 of the Constitution — of which we had a slew around six years ago — because in all of them (or at least those with identifiable with two-party-preferred swings) the disqualified MPs ran again. These deserve their own category given that the absence of the personal votes of sitting MPs is the big driver of the difference between swings in opposition-held seats and government-held seats.

That leaves twenty-three by-elections in the past forty-one years with two-party-preferred swings. In the ten opposition-held seats (including Aston and the low-profile Fadden last year) the average swing was an almost negligible 0.8 points to the opposition.

Those caused by resignations by government MPs (eleven in total, the most recent in Groom in 2020) average to a much bigger number, 7.6 points to the opposition. And when they’re brought on by the death of a government MP — it’s a tiny sample of two (Aston 2001 and Canning 2015) — the swing is 5.5 points to the opposition. If we include that pair with the resignations we get 7.2 points to the opposition from thirteen events.

(There were no opposition by-elections caused by death with two-party-preferred swings in that period.)

So you might want to use that 5.5, which would see Labor retain the seat, or 7.2, which wouldn’t. Or you could slot in any other number, because another feature of by-elections is that they’re unpredictable.

The graph below shows Labor two-party-preferred votes in Dunkley since 1984. To adjust for redistributions, notional swings are subtracted from results going backwards. The blue dots show the actual vote at each election; the fact that so many are below the orange line reflects a 2018 redistribution that favoured Labor by an estimated (by the AEC) 2.5 points after preferences.

The big gap between the orange and red lines from 1998 to 2013 (particularly from 2001) is largely because of the big personal vote built up by the energetic Liberal Bruce Billson, first elected in 1996. He ended up in Tony Abbott’s shadow cabinet and then in cabinet; he was subsequently dropped by new prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2015 and retired at the 2016 election. See the dramatic narrowing between red and orange at that election with the absence of his name on the ballot.

Dunkley was retained by the Liberals’ Chris Crewther, but the aforementioned redistribution saw the electorate going into the 2019 poll as notionally Labor. In that year Victoria was the only state to swing to the opposition, and Murphy (who had also contested in 2016) took Dunkley (or retained it vis-à-vis its notional position) with a swing slightly above the state average. If Crewther generated a sophomore surge in that single term, it was counteracted by other factors, perhaps including the Labor candidate and campaign. Murphy seems to have enjoyed a surge in 2022, registering a swing well above the state average. Which takes us to where we are now, and that margin of 6.3 points.

Note that the orange line is above 50 per cent in 1998, 2010 and 2016. All else being equal, this suggests Labor would have won on the current boundaries in those years. All else ain’t equal, and the assumption gets more questionable the further back we go because of demographic changes and compounding errors in those post-redistribution estimates of notional margins. (Notional margins are rather hit and miss. For one thing they can’t take into account postal votes; for another they ignore personal votes in booths from neighbouring electorates.)

But it is reasonable to believe that Dunkley, as it is defined today, would probably have been won by Labor in 2010 and 2016. So although Dunkley was long held by the Liberal Party it’s not really accurate to call it a natural Liberal seat.

Other factors?

Federal electorates tend to be pulled by state tides. One element is the standing of those second-tier governments, and while Victoria’s Labor government under new premier Jacinta Allan is still ahead in opinion polls, the leads are more modest than under Dan Andrews. Put less clinically, Andrews was an accomplished communicator, including on behalf his federal counterparts, and he is gone.

Working the other way, Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto still seems as pitiably bogged down by his party’s right wing as he was eleven months ago during Aston.

Then there’s the personal vote. On the evidence, which isn’t substantial, Murphy had a good one. (The bigger her personal vote, the worse for Labor’s chances on 2 March.)

The Liberal candidate is the Frankston mayor Nathan Conroy, who should bring a ready-made personal vote in parts of the electorate. Labor’s Jodie Belyea has long been involved in the local community but from reports lacks his profile. As noted above, attitudes to candidates can matter a lot at by-elections.

Conroy drew the top ballot spot and Belyea the bottom. That’s got to be worth a point or two for the Liberal overall.

Dutton is reported to be spinning “that a swing of between 3 per cent and 5 per cent would be a respectable outcome,” which suggests his party is expecting something bigger. YouGov, with a small sample, puts the Liberals on 51 per cent after preferences (about a 7 point swing). Polling before by-elections, including surveys conducted by the parties, is notoriously rubbery.

Anything can happen at by-elections, but if forced to choose I would tip a Liberal victory. If that does eventuate, the media frenzy about Labor’s leadership, including whispers from unnamed party sources, will not be for the faint-hearted.

December’s “one-term government” sightings will certainly make a comeback. •

Further reading, in alphabetical order

• ABC’s aforementioned Antony Green
• Kevin Bonham
• Pollbludger (William Bowe)
• Tallyroom (Ben Raue)

The post Dunkley’s Rorschach test appeared first on Inside Story.

January’s rejigged Stage 3 tax cuts announcement — warmly received in voterland, it seems, and made an ostentatious meal of by the opposition — has turned a new page. Now the political class has all but unanimously declared the return of the prime minister’s mojo. Albanese is in control again, looking and acting confident. But the Dunkley by-election on 2 March could change all that, of course, potentially dramatically.

So what’s the point of these incessant, whiplash-inducing analyses of how the parties and leaders are “travelling”? At core they must be about the next election; they can have no purpose otherwise. But once we’ve voted, this term of government will be viewed through the lens of the 2025 result and all today’s twists and turns will be forgotten. The caravan will move on to how the next election is shaping up.

One popular school of thought sees the media’s incessant horse-race adjudications as self-fulfilling. It is in a party’s interests to be described as being on track for electoral victory because the happy vibes will help it get there. With apologies to Sting, I don’t subscribe to this point of view. The narrative certainly influences reality, even around the edges of opinion poll results, but its effects on elections are usually minor and unpredictable.

The idea matters a lot to politicians and their staffers, though, partly because many of their jobs are dedicated to generating good reviews and partly because those reviews can ultimately affect their professional survival.

Peter Dutton, who was always facing a battle to remain Liberal leader for the full term, went into the summer break looking rather happy, but now he’s biting his nails about Dunkley. Albanese, who as prime minister enjoys more institutional fortification, would be harder to shift in the event of a bad result, but government MPs and staffers still imbibe the commentary. No leader enjoys forlorn troops and nervous backbenchers.

Judgements about how the participants are travelling are largely driven by opinion polls — and most of all, far ahead of the others, by Newspoll in the Australian. The tendency reached a nadir of sorts back in 2015 when Malcolm Turnbull talked about Tony Abbott “losing” all those Newspolls. (Albanese borrowed that formulation on the ABC’s 7.30 this month to point out his government has never “lost” one.)

The first Newspoll of 2024, in early February, found 62 per cent believed the government “did the right thing” by rejigging the tax cuts, with just 29 per cent saying they “should have kept their promise and implemented the tax cuts without changing them.”

Voting intentions and personal ratings were virtually identical to Newspoll’s final 2023 survey, which is widely seen as evidence the government didn’t “take a hit” for breaking that election promise. Along with the problems the decision caused (and will continue to cause) for the opposition right through to the next election, and along with the fact that the government was taking control of its destiny, the figures were enough to make it a “win.”

Just between us, though, Labor was a bit lucky with Newspoll’s phrasing. The fact that the changed policy represented the breaking of an ironclad, repeated promise was hidden in one of the responses, the one very few people nominated.

When another pollster, Redbridge, conducted a big survey at about the same time, it posed several questions about those Stage 3 tax cuts. The first (on page 21) simply asked if the government should stick to its repeated promise not to change them; it received a slight plurality in support of sticking with the cuts designed by the Coalition. The second (page 26) described the reported changes and asked about approval; this time the rejigged policy received large support, rather like that found by Newspoll.

All these pollsters’ questions are valid; the point here is that different wording can produce different headlines. A Newspoll question that resembled Redbridge’s first one would have generated very different perceptions about how the changed policy had been received by punters.

Redbridge also found a decrease in the government’s two-party-preferred support from 52.8 per cent in December to 51.2 per cent in February. Yet despite this “swing” the survey was reported very positively for the government in News Corp tabloids. Perhaps it can be difficult to break from the press gallery consensus.

Note that the prime minister is a bare relic of the figure, a year ago, who could do no wrong. How might voters have reacted if he’d announced these changes back then? He might well have taken that “hit” from those sky-high poll numbers. We’ll never know.

Broken election promises are as old as politics itself. From electors’ point of view Albanese is now just another politician; perhaps he had already become one last year. All prime ministers end up like that. “My word is my bond” is henceforth a punchline, like “Honest John” Howard in a previous era.

Like his predecessors, the prime minister is relying on the allure of incumbency: yes, I’m less than honest at times but I get the job done; I make the hard calls for the nation, and that’s what matters.

He even trotted out, also on 7.30, the sense of “trust” reclaimed by both Howard (in 2004) and Gillard (2012). “Australians,” he told Sarah Ferguson, “can trust me to be prepared to have the strength to take the right decisions that are needed.”

It was an overly long sentence, with spits, starts, lulls and twists, but he got there eventually. Rather like the government’s path to Stage 3 Mark II. •

The post How’s he travelling? appeared first on Inside Story.

The gold in Anthony Albanese’s Midas touch, meanwhile, has turned to something of a slightly different colour, and the flat, syllable-mangling delivery that was once the secret to his connection with unpretentious middle Australia is now dreary and uninspiring. It gets worse: apparently he’s “weak,” a “follower, not a leader” and a “beta male” (ouch), according to focus group quotes plastered over News Corp’s Sunday tabloids.

Last week I did a very challenging thing: I watched question time, or at least large chunks of it, over a couple of days. I wanted to see how both major parties are behaving within this new Labor-is-acutely-mortal paradigm.

I expected cost of living to be on high rotation among opposition speakers. After all, it’s the biggest and most intractable problem the government faces. To my surprise Dutton instead asked question after question of the prime minister about his supposed failure to “stand up to China,” as he and Scott Morrison dedicated so much time to doing, with little evident damage other than to themselves, in the dying days of the last government.

Other questions focused on the repercussions of the High Court decision that set free a refugee child sex offender and all the other “hardened criminals” now in the community. Exactly the sort of thing you’d expect this former home affairs minister to jump on, and something that is at least more likely to hit a short-term nerve in voterland.

And in the government too: if there’s one issue that produces a sinking feeling in the collective Labor gut it’s the whole asylum seeker, refugee and immigration tangle. Unlike with the questions about China, the government’s response — and not just under parliamentary privilege — was completely over the top: hysterical and desperate, with some frontbenchers even bellowing about Dutton being soft on paedophiles.

It’s one thing to chip away at the opposition leader’s self-proclaimed toughness on the issue by revealing home truths about incompetence on his watch. Digging up letters to the current immigration minister from WA Liberal senator Dean Smith requesting the release of a convicted child sex offender certainly highlights the opposition’s disingenuousness.

But “protecting paedophiles” sounds grubby and deranged. It tells voters the government is scared. And who would believe it of any opposition leader in living memory?

Unlike during the Rudd era, Albanese’s Labor has managed to keep the boats stopped. Assuming it remains that way up to the election, “boat people” won’t be an issue. The extent of this general topic’s impact on past election results is generally overstated anyway. And why play on Dutton’s preferred terrain?

There’s a strand of Labor that yearns for the pre-Whitlam days, before Kim Beazley Senior’s famous “dregs of the middle class” hijacked the party of workers and White Australia. We saw it when Julia Gillard replaced Rudd and immediately started channelling John Howard. Some thought it awfully clever politics, at least at first, but it ended up reinforcing Tony Abbott and Morrison’s messaging and normalising their gross behaviour.

I still believe Dutton is unlikely to be opposition leader at the next election, assuming it’s in 2025. Just today Nine papers carry a piece about his deputy’s plan to win back teal seats. Sussan Ley is everything Dutton is not, and the obvious replacement should one be needed.

As pathetic as it sounds, it’s likely both sides are desperate to do well in the final Newspoll of the year so they can relax over the summer. But a truly clever prime minister would try to keep Dutton in place, because when he goes the government will sorely miss him.

Which is, I suppose, what he’s doing, if inadvertently. But there are better ways than lowering your own stature to raise your opponent’s.

Perhaps that’s being too simplistic, though. Troops need to be kept happy. Bill Shorten still has a lean and hungry look, and while the chances of a comeback are not even minuscule, we have seen many times how unsuccessful challengers (on the Coalition’s side in 2018, for instance) can make an incumbent’s position unsustainable.

It was only in June this year (though it feels a lot longer ago) that I finished a piece with these words:

We are only one year in, which as past governments have shown tells us nothing about how things will pan out. And we’ve not seen how Albanese copes under pressure, in difficult times. They will come, sooner or later.

Those times have arrived. And the answer to how he’s coping? Not well. •

The post PM under pressure appeared first on Inside Story.

Might it continue dropping? (The rather jumpy Roy Morgan had Labor support dipping to 49.5 earlier in November before bouncing back to 52.5 per cent. Let’s see what December brings.)

Coming after the Voice result, the trajectory has led at least a couple of excited commentators to anticipate a one-term Albanese government. The Australian’s Peta Credlin has penned a rallying of the troops and a hoorah for Liberal leader Peter Dutton. In the Nine papers, Shaun Carney’s rather tendentious offering, aimed squarely at prime minister Anthony Albanese, even implies the PM might not last until the next election.

A fortunate by-product of the narrowing is that we no longer need to endure stories of the Coalition’s existential crisis because of low support among young voters.

But how much do surveys this far before an election tell us about the upcoming result? The answer: nothing at all. This was true when the Labor government was way ahead, and it’s true today. It’s only big, sustained leads for oppositions that should give us pause, and even then we’ve seen the last-minute government comebacks getting bigger over recent decades.

Can we treat this as routine midterm doldrums? Dutton “cutting through”? Damage inflicted by the Voice referendum and the perception that it was an expensive indulgence? Kudos for the opposition leader for backing the right horse?

Or is it the economy — with hip pockets screaming about high inflation, particularly among that not-insignificant minority of voters with variable mortgages?

Or was this always going to happen once the honeymoon ended?

Everyone with a keyboard can explain what the government’s been doing wrong, but that’s all post hoc rationalisation of the polls, much as we saw in the Voice campaign. The next election will be decided by voters’ perceptions of the alternatives on offer, not illusory poll-generated “momentum.”

Still, as the year comes to a close, Mr Albanese must be a rather gloomy prime minister. For election watchers and the political bubble, opinion polls tell us how parties are “travelling” — and who doesn’t want to be seen to be “travelling well”? It makes for an easier life in the media and keeps MPs, most importantly marginal seat holders, and the wider party content. Most would agree that the current polls don’t predict the next election result, but they do measure something approximating the electorate’s happiness with the government.

It’s all indisputably good news for Dutton. The polls, and the interpreting of them, buttress his leadership. And if more friendly ones arrive in December he’ll be able to relax over summer.

But is what’s good for Dutton’s position good for the Coalition — specifically, its chances of forming government after the next election?

The Liberal leader has explicitly repositioned his party away from big business, with its “woke” attitudes and “virtue signalling” — and implicitly away from voters in wealthy, urban, formerly blue-ribbon electorates too — towards the “outer suburbs and regions.” Such politicking, politely referred to as “values”-driven, involves encouraging a fear of the outside world and, at home, resentment towards ethnic minorities. This is Dutton’s political comfort zone and indeed his brand. It’s what drove his rise to the top of his party.

In olden days the Liberals had to tread carefully on this path lest they alienate voters in wealthy blue-ribbon electorates. Now they’ve lost most of those seats, the constraint has loosened. It’s easier to forgo potential gains than consciously sacrifice current sitting MPs.

The six teal 2022 wins were all at the expense of Liberal “moderates.” Each of those Liberals supported Malcolm Turnbull against Dutton in the 2018 leadership spill, for instance. Who in the current party room is vulnerable to teal-like incursions? Paul Fletcher (Bradfield) and Julian Leeser (Berowra) on Sydney’s north shore come to mind. They also supported Turnbull, so perhaps would be no great loss from Dutton’s point of view.

The strategy might work, but it would probably require a very big national vote for the Coalition. Anything around 51–49 either way would likely produce a hung parliament, and while the teals won’t necessarily vote as a bloc, it’s difficult to imagine the six, and independents Zali Steggall (Warringah) and Helen Haines (Indi), supporting a Dutton-led Coalition.

Put simply, Peter Dutton is not a Liberal leader the teals would be likely to elevate to the prime ministership.

And then there are voters in teal seats. We don’t know what the crossbench will look like in 2025. If Steggall’s 2022 re-election is any guide then the six will romp home. But that was against a poor Liberal candidate, and Scott Morrison as prime minister.

Detestation of Morrison was a core driver of the teals’ success. And many of the characteristics those voters couldn’t abide in Morrison are shared by the current Liberal leader.

We do live in unpredictable times, with low primary vote support on both sides leaving more to the vagaries of preferences and how-to-vote cards. With those teal seats in the way, the Coalition will very likely need a lot more than 50 per cent of the national two-party-preferred vote to form government at the next election. More like 52 or 53 per cent.

Or another leader. One the crossbenchers felt they could work with. •

The post Peter Dutton’s momentum appeared first on Inside Story.

This split, he believes, is “a threat to a cohesive and successful Australia as it tries to adapt to the globalised economy.”

Wait, apologies, I jumbled my notes. That was Kelly after the 1999 vote on the republic, a cause he was very much in favour of.

This time round his columns have run passionately against the proposed Voice, and his tea-leaf reading of very similar voting patterns — the Yes vote fading the further from CBDs — sits on a much more ideological plane.

Once again the big No vote points to a “divided nation,” but now the goodies and baddies are very clear. That “confident, educated, city-based middle class” cohort has become something malignant, purveyors of “progressive sophistry” and “progressive values” and “experiments… tampering with the once accepted but now eroding universal norms that defined the Australian nation.”

The fourteenth of October, to underline the point, was a “repudiation of elite morality and assumed moral superiority.” On and on Kelly goes, for more than 2300 words; quoting various “experts” to categorise this as our Trump/Brexit moment, the revenge of everyday, ordinary citizens tired of being scolded and looked down on.

The Professor has been castigating “elites” (with all the unacknowledged irony this encompasses from a person of his means and position) since at least the late Howard years, but whereas the group once largely consisted of inner-urban Labor and Greens supporters working in academia and the arts, big business — with its public pronouncements in favour of marriage equality and tackling climate change — seems also to now stand in Paul’s naughty corner. “Elite(s)” appears no less than seventeen times in last month’s tirade, along with thirteen mentions of “progressive(s).”

That pattern of higher support in the inner city ebbing lower as you approach the bush can actually be observed in every referendum this side of Robert Menzies’s attempt to ban communism in 1951. It was more pronounced in the 1999 vote (both for the republic and for a new constitutional preamble) and more pronounced again in 2023.

A Labor–Coalition city–rural split has also been growing at general elections, reaching its apogee in May last year. There is change afoot in the electoral arena, and it is also seen dramatically in the ever-plummeting support for major parties.

Kelly’s bitter deep dive is worth citing because it conveniently contains most elements of the gloating-dressed-as-analysis that has emerged from the No-supporting commentariat. Even more than most political journalists, he seems to be a hostage to the present, inhaling the current zeitgeist and reciting it with deep meaning and drama — and often at great length.

So what does the 40–60 Voice outcome tell us about the country? That Australia is racist? Or colour-blind? Or doesn’t like elites?

I don’t think this result should change or even reinforce anyone’s opinion about the nature of this country. Instead it verifies that Australians can be relied on to bury Labor government midterm referendums, regardless of the topic. Set your watch by it: early opinion polling shows overwhelming support; Liberal leader eventually opposes (because to do otherwise would be professionally fatal); the government, encouraged by the polling, still presses ahead. Then it all becomes an orgy of scarifying tales about the danger of messing with the Constitution — the blueprint of this country, the envy of the world. Former judges are exhumed to warn of the risk. Why are the government and its mates so desperate to do this? They’re spending how many millions on it? Such self-indulgence, such arrogance, who can resist reminding them who’s boss?

With counting over, the Voice slots in fourth out of Labor’s eleven midterm attempts to change the Constitution since federation. That’s not particularly bad.

What does set this vote apart is its makeup. Last century, decent statistical correlations could be observed between Labor two-party-preferred support at the previous election and Yes votes. Traditional high-income Liberal electorates reliably took their party’s cue and joined outer-suburban and regional Coalition supporters to deliver, overwhelmingly, above-average Nos.

This time around, that high-income territory is mostly in teal hands (but the locals still vote Liberal over Labor in two-party-preferred terms), and those electorates voted a higher-than-average Yes. It was much like the republic vote, when they could still be loyal Liberals by siding with treasurer Peter Costello rather than prime minister John Howard.

This change in behaviour in the former Liberal heartland was a major driver — perhaps the major driver — of the record city–bush divide.

That might have been because, as Kelly writes, the Voice was seen as a “moral” issue. How might a referendum on something mundane, like recognising local government, have gone? As a Labor midtermer it would have been thrashed, but would it have exhibited those heightened geographic differences or settled back to something more predictably partisan?

Kelly was just as strongly against marriage equality, and that 2017 survey also exhibited the city-to-bush pattern (overlaid by outsized No votes in some suburban electorates with high numbers of people from non-English-speaking backgrounds), but the overall outcome, a big win for Yes, precluded triumphalism. On that occasion, the elites were apparently vindicated.

There is one other tendency in the recent analysis, and not just on the No side. Some people see the referendum as an electoral test failed by the Albanese government. It was so out of touch on this issue, can it recover?

The vote has certainly brought Anthony Albanese, who evidently believed his special skill set would bring this home, thuddingly down to earth. It’s damaged him in the eyes of the political class — they will no longer marvel at his prowess — but does that matter in the long run? Probably not; he had to get real sometime. It was something people were forced to vote on, a tenth-order issue for the overwhelming majority, and won’t feature at all in the next campaign. There’s nothing in the historical record to suggest referendum losses portend the same at subsequent elections.

Kelly was at it again last week, presenting a strategy for Peter Dutton’s path to the Lodge — courtesy of the Voice vote. Acknowledging that it “is easy to exaggerate the meaning of the referendum,” he proceeded to do just that, finding in it a “strategic pathway” for the opposition and piling on advice for the Liberal leader’s “approach post-Voice.”

The old pro-business warrior now sounds decidedly blue Labo(u)r (or should that be “populist”?): companies get a serve for “defending their economic bottom line while doubling down on their promotion of social and environmental values.”

That tedious old chestnut, Menzies’s “forgotten people,” gets an awfully long workout in the context of an imaginary two-term strategy for Dutton, à la (without mentioning him by name) Tony Abbott. Back on terra firma, Dutton will be lucky to survive for just one term as opposition leader, let alone two. •

The post Getting the referendum wrong appeared first on Inside Story.

Early polling indicates overwhelming support. Liberal opposition leaders, regardless of their personal inclinations, lack the authority to support Labor’s proposals. If a Labor government is crazy enough to hold the referendum midterm, it suffers a particularly ghastly fate.

The Voice in 2023 was almost a carbon copy of Labor’s last referendums, in 1988, with overt racism added.

The table tells the story:

The content of the question matters a little, but only a little. It could’ve been purely symbolic recognition, or putting local government into the founding document, or taking out “race” or correcting a typo. If it’s a Labor proposal, and it isn’t held with an election, it gets walloped.

On current counting, the Voice is number 21 on this table, pretty much in the middle of Labor midterm results.

What else can we say?

Tasmania underperformed against general expectations; although, as electoral maestro Kevin Bonham points out, only Newspoll consistently had the smallest state’s support at a more modest relative position. On current counting it has slipped above New South Wales (all state numbers are at the AEC here) to reach second place after Victoria (third after the ACT if we’re including the two territories), which is itself worthy of a mini-headline. Tasmania hasn’t been in third place since, as it happens, that famous 1967 referendum that took out all references to “aboriginals” and “natives.” It hasn’t been in second place since an unsuccessful 1910 proposal.

South Australia’s relative support was always a bit of an unknown, and it came in very low.

In common with the 2017 marriage-equality survey and the 1999 republic referendum, and to varying degrees all referendums back to 1967, Yes was highest around the CBDs of the capital cities, and gradually got lower the further out you went. This routine fact is being turned over and over in the media, but they have to write and talk about something.

(This table on Twitter does show “outer metro” support for marriage equality lowest of all, which can probably be sheeted to its unpopularity in electorates with high numbers of people from non-English-speaking backgrounds. For the Voice, however, there is little evidence of this cohort deviating from the rest one way or the other.)

The figures strongly show big majority support for the Voice among Indigenous communities — if nothing like that 80 per cent January figure that the Yes case cited right up to and including polling day. Several late surveys had Yes support among First Nations people dropping by about the same proportion as the rest of the country, to about 60 per cent, and that looks about right from the polling booth numbers.

(Projecting remote community statistics onto First Nations people who live elsewhere, such as in the cities and towns, is fraught.)

During Saturday night’s ABC TV coverage, federal Liberal MP Keith Wolahan (a No supporter) warned against winners’ hubris, and so far the gloating anticipated on Friday has been restrained.

Late on Saturday evening Jacinta Nampijinpa Price did get defensive when asked about the strong support among Indigenous communities in her electorate of the Northern Territory. She implied an Australian Electoral Commission–Yes campaign conspiracy, and further questions made Warren Mundine so angry he shouted at journalists before they both walked out.

Another normal day for the No campaign. Despite its repeated disarray it wins bragging rights for an outcome that the proverbial drover’s dog could’ve presided over.

The Yes campaign by contrast has announced a week of silence, and who can blame them? The hot takes alone will be more than anyone can endure. While most of us get on with our lives, those who have been involved in this attempted change for a decade or more will obviously feel devastated, and not for a short time.

Anthony Albanese doesn’t seem to be taking it well either, at least twice in the past week describing himself at press conferences as a “conviction politician,” as if this will make voters see him as such.

(Note to Anthony: if you insist on these clunky phrases, it’s best to get someone else to utter them on your behalf. Also, you only get perceived that way by making unpopular decisions and then getting re-elected.)

The prime minister is getting a media pasting. It will be character-building.

On the other side, Peter Dutton is being feted as a winner. But as opinion polls fail to reveal any sustained improvement in his and his party’s standing, the backgrounding will begin in earnest.

How long until we read and hear the inevitable Liberal source’s lament that “we can’t win with Peter”? By June 2024 Dutton will probably be an ex–opposition leader. •

The post The unforgiving logic of Labor referendums appeared first on Inside Story.

You never see anything near that kind of variance in ordinary voting-intention polls, though that’s at least partly because the pollsters are posing quite different questions from each other this time. Whose is the best? Referendum polls are a more imprecise science than election ones, so let’s talk about it after the results are in.

But no pollster has Yes ahead, alas, or even approaching it.

At last year’s federal election, people who followed the count from 6pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time experienced an early burst of déjà vu: was this 2019 all over again? The first numbers came predominantly from Tasmania, which happened to be the only state or territory to swing to the Morrison government. By around 7.30 the direction and approximate size of the national swing was clear, and it was an altogether different direction.

There’s a good chance the Apple Isle will again be the renegade on Saturday night, registering the biggest Yes of all states and perhaps generating some excitement for a while. But with only two piles for the ballot paper to be sorted into (plus one for informals) the Australian Electoral Commission’s counting should be faster than at a general election. Even under the Morgan scenario the overall result should be clear by 7pm.

Yet the telecast is scheduled to last until 10pm. What on earth will they talk about?

A referendum passes if it receives a majority of national votes and a majority of votes in a majority (at least four) of states. House of Representatives electorates have nothing to do with it, though they will be of academic interest; according to Antony Green the ABC website will publish all electorate results live online and discuss ones of interest on TV.

Tasmania, that wildest card, has a proud anti-Canberra — or maybe just anti-mainland — tradition of returning relatively high No votes in referendums, but this time the polls, albeit with small sub-samples, pretty consistently show it as the most supportive.

Not coincidentally, Tassie has the only state Liberal government in the country, and that government is supporting the Voice. And the high-profile federal Liberal member for Bass, Bridget Archer, a long-time irritant to her party, is energetically advocating Yes. Voters love major-party mavericks, and not just in their own electorates. But might the Tasmanian government’s meltdown over the past fortnight dampen the effect?

Of the states and territories up on the mainland, the city-territory of the ACT will record the highest Yes and Victoria can be expected to come second — unless South Australia or New South Wales does. It would be very surprising if Queensland and Western Australia don’t bring up the rear. But the rest is rather unpredictable.

Counting in South Australia and the Northern Territory won’t start until 6:30pm AEDT and Western Australia 9pm.

As a broad rule, the “big” states of New South Wales and Victoria, plus South Australia — second-least populous but displaying less of an outlier mentality than Queensland and Western Australia — have been relatively supportive of referendums. We saw it, for example, with both questions at the last set in 1999.

(In 1988, in a very rare break from tradition, Queensland recorded the biggest Yes votes for all four because one of them, for “free and fair elections,” was expected to apply particularly to the electoral malapportionment engineered by the Bjelke-Petersen government.)

Pollsters are broadly predicting these state trends to continue tomorrow. And yet… New South Wales came stone-cold last of all states and territories in the 2017 marriage equality survey. In crude terms, this was due largely to socially conservative religious white people outside the capital and many socially conservative religious people of colour in Sydney, particularly in the west. While the former can be expected to vote heavily No to the Voice, some pollsters have found people from non-English-speaking backgrounds/immigrants more likely to support Yes nationally than the rest.

That last expected dynamic seems counterintuitive. So it will be worth tracking seats in Sydney’s west, and consequently New South Wales as a whole, on the night.

The “inner-urban” professionals–heavy, high-income electorates, including the ones with teal MPs, can be expected to lean Yes. Not so the middle- to high-income, low-NESB ones such as (in Sydney) Lindsay, Hughes and Cook.

Does it go without saying that young people will be much more supportive of the Voice than old ones? That can’t be determined by the voting results, only by surveys. For gender, too, we must rely on opinion polls. For some other cohorts, where census data indicates they constitute a big majority in certain polling places, analysis can provide clues. (Ideally such analysis would adjust for aggregate state or territory votes.)

This time the topic of the referendum adds another geographic dimension. Attention will focus heavily on Indigenous booths, particularly in the Northern Territory, which has more First Nations voters than any other jurisdiction.

The electorate of Lingiari, although only 40 per cent Indigenous (with a lower proportion among voters, given a relatively low median age and a lower, if recently improved, enrolment rate), will come in for outsized attention, but the seat’s aggregate vote won’t tell us much. Turnout in Lingiari is another matter, however, and is (at the risk of tempting the ecological fallacy gods) an okay indicator of, if not the exact level, then the seriousness of low turnout among First Nations voters. In June last year the new prime minister made a big fuss about its low 65.8 per cent.

“That was part of the former government’s design. It wasn’t by accident,” thundered Anthony Albanese, “and they should be held to account for it!” He had a point — the Coalition wasn’t much interested in raising Indigenous participation — but only a small one, because the low Indigenous turnout there reflected a range of factors.

The Australian Electoral Commission has in the last year pulled out many stops to bring estimated Indigenous enrolment up to near the national figure, presumably at least partly by selectively relaxing the rules of its direct enrolment and update program. That’s excellent, but it will — all else being equal — make the turnout worse; after all, the figure will show voting as a percentage of the roll, not of estimated eligible people.

But all else won’t be equal for this referendum. We can expect a higher degree of interest from those voters, and the AEC is pulling out many stops to get their ballots. No doubt others on the ground are also encouraging people to register their vote.

When the counting is done, Lingiari’s turnout will attract attention. It might or might not be higher than at the 2022 election. But the more comprehensive Indigenous electoral roll will come back to bite Anthony Albanese at the next general election.

Probably a dozen or two of our 151 electorates will vote Yes, and maybe, perhaps, one state, Tasmania. The expected thrashing is consistent with your correspondent’s long-expressed deterministic mindset. Midterm Labor government referendums get slaughtered, partly because Liberal opposition is all but inevitable. The content of the proposal only affects the size of the defeat. And this would also apply to merely “symbolic” recognition: the Liberals in opposition would have opposed that too, regardless of what they say (or believe) now.

So expect Saturday night to degenerate into indulgent hot takes as self-identified campaign “old hands” compete to tell the tallest tales, and how they would have run Yes instead. The endless analyses, the gloating dressed up as advice will not be for the faint-hearted. And it won’t stop then but will last for weeks, no doubt joined by intra-Yes sniping.

What does it say about Australia? To this observer, the result will tell us nothing we didn’t already know.

So, no, the No campaign wasn’t brilliant, and the Yes one wasn’t that awful. The devastation about to engulf people on the affirmative side, particularly those for whom this has been a decade-long project, might not be leavened by this knowledge, but this result was a fait accompli once the decision was made to hold the vote apart from an election.

Amid the celebrations, Peter Dutton might even believe this will save his leadership. Perhaps he should have a word with his mentor John Howard, who likely reckoned the same in September 1988 but was out of a job eight months later. •

The post The weight of history appeared first on Inside Story.

Never mind, it’ll win the vote hands down. That’s right, I refer to the official No case, which any visitor to this country with a mind unpolluted by survey results and media analysis would award very low marks indeed for its frequent drifts from covert to overt racism, its individual meltdowns, and its contradictions.

This, of course, is not how the political class sees it. They who adjudicate campaigns’ “performances” through the opinion polls — currently around 60 per cent for No — are in furious agreement that the Yes campaign has been atrocious.

This recent Nine article is a classic of the genre, with the inevitable Labor “senior figures with years of experience” proclaiming Yes “the worst [campaign] they have seen” while delivering glowing reviews to the No side, and particularly its — try not to laugh — “discipline.” (Meanwhile, in this week’s news, No leader Warren Mundine tweets of his desire to see one of the Yes identities bashed up.)

Now it’s true that the Yes side has made its share of mistakes and has its own inherent inconsistencies. We can all identify things that could have been done differently. But the No side wins the “undisciplined” crown hands down.

But the quality and professionalism of the campaigns isn’t the key issue, and it certainly isn’t responsible for the upcoming result. The scripts write themselves and the individuals are bit players, swept up by larger currents.

Why, in September 1988, some thirty-five years ago, did 62.4 per cent of Australian voters write “No” next to a constitutional referendum to “provide for fair and democratic parliamentary elections throughout Australia”? It surely wasn’t because they don’t believe elections should be fair and democratic. They would have had their purported reasons: it’s unnecessary, the government’s motives are suspect, the whole exercise is a waste of money.

And they would have had reasons for rejecting the other three questions posed at the same time, which all also got Yes support in the 30s.

The real reason was that it was a Labor referendum and it was being held midterm. That’s what always happens in these cases, and it’s happening now.

What did the huge 90.8 per cent Yes vote in 1967 tell us? It certainly wasn’t that racism was dead in Australia. That referendum’s most important consequence lay in activating the “race power” to enable the federal government to make special laws for First Nations people, but that detail was largely kept from the electors.

“Vote Yes for Aborigines” was the slogan, and the Yes campaign enjoyed the support of every member of federal parliament and every state government. Gough Whitlam’s Labor opposition campaigned energetically for it, as did Harold Holt’s government.

Today the 1967 result is steeped in mythology. The Uluru Statement was read out on its fiftieth anniversary. It was a motivator for next month’s vote.

And when the No case wins the only thing it tells us is that Labor governments shouldn’t hold midterm constitutional referendums. They go down, and badly, regardless of the topic.

Advocating for serious policy change in this country is never a fair contest. The proponents attempt to keep it simple and explain the modest benefits, trying to slide through journalists’ pesky questions without misspeaking into the evening news. They never promise nirvana, just modest improvement.

Opponents are not so constrained. Free to exaggerate and scream disaster, they fly a variety of kites, and if one crashes they simply send up another. All they have to do is sow doubt and confusion. They might cover themselves in mud in the process, but it doesn’t matter.

“If you don’t understand it, vote No.” It worked for Paul Keating against John Hewson and the GST in 1993 and it works today.

In reality, most change is never actually voted on. Instead, governments announce and implement changes (the Senate willing) within a term, and by the next election voters are largely used to them and the caravan moves on. When a party is unwise enough to take something substantial to an election, it influences some votes, sometimes enough to make a difference. Two stand-out cases are 1993 and 2019.

Constitutional referendums occupy a sub-category of their own. It’s not about who will form government. Australians, barely aware of the Constitution’s existence, are reminded that it is dangerous to tamper with the founding document of a country that, as we all know, is the “envy of the world.” The term “lawyers’ picnic” always gets trotted out.

We can all recite — let’s put it to music — that bipartisanship is a necessary but not sufficient condition for referendum success. The counterargument that bad proposals are unlikely to receive bipartisan support has some merit, but is let down by the fact that the non-Labor parties (the Liberals and Nationals and their earlier iterations) have sometimes opposed a change in opposition and then attempted to get the same thing passed in government.

The clearer pattern is that Labor government referendums are particularly prone to failure, and that’s largely because Liberal opposition leaders simply lack the authority to support them. Peter Dutton’s decision earlier this year was based solely on his desire to survive as leader; to grasp this we only have to try to imagine the opposite: Dutton ordering the party room to campaign for Yes. He’d probably be an ex-leader by now.

In the end, driven by the shocking Aston by-election result to seek comfort from the party base, Dutton opted for a particularly harsh No stance. Until then, total freedom for the rest of the party room — like the republic vote in 1999 — seemed an option.

Liberal prime ministers, on the other hand, usually possess the ability to ride roughshod over the party room — certainly that was true for Malcolm Fraser when he held referendums in 1977 and for Harold Holt ten years earlier. Both had massive election wins under their belts. Labor oppositions led (both times) by Gough Whitlam gave their full support, because Labor in its DNA believes in constitutional “reform” whereas the Coalition parties are innately suspicious of it. Out of the Coalition’s six proposed amendments in those two years, four passed, one received a majority of votes but not states, and one was badly beaten.

So if you want to know why the Liberals opposed a simultaneous elections referendum in 1974, proposed exactly that in government in 1977 and then ran against it again in 1984 (when it was more accurately referred to as “terms of senators”), that’s the reason.

And (I know I’m repeating myself) Labor mid-term referendums suffer a particularly harsh fate. This chart, colour-coded with mid-term elections in white and ones with concurrent elections in yellow, tells the story.

The dynamic holds true largely regardless of the actual proposed amendments. If a proposal is inherently ambitious (as the Voice could be characterised) it presents a juicy target; if it’s trivial, the apparent gratuitousness of the exercise becomes an issue. And there’s always some former judge or lawyer on hand, or at least someone with a law degree, to supply quotable words.

Recall also Tony Abbott in 2013, having agreed with the Gillard government to support recognition of local government, jumping ship at the last minute after a party-room revolt.

So any purported analysis that assumes agency on Dutton’s part — that he thought it would be good politics or was acting with sincerity — is just theatre. He did what he thought maximised his chances of being Liberal leader at the next election; his personal inclinations, whatever they were, barely mattered.

Like this year, 1988’s set of four questions started with very high support that whittled down (and eventually halved) by voting day. Yet two referendums run just four years earlier, with the 1984 election, did much better. Barely remembered today, and little thought about at the time because they were swamped by the election proper, they received Yes votes of 50.6 and 47.1 per cent.

A loss is a loss is a loss, but some losses come closer to succeeding than others. Labor government referendums held with elections have historically received much higher support, four of them managing national majorities and one actually passing (in 1946). The average Labor government midterm referendum Yes vote is 37.9 per cent; with elections it’s 49.3.

(Incidentally, with tiny Tasmania set to break with referendum tradition and deliver a higher Yes vote than the national average, the likely space for a sixth “double majority” loss shrinks substantially. Electoral maestro Kevin Bonham uses survey data to put it at 50 to 51 per cent. That is, anything more than 51 per cent nationally would probably pass. This is of less relevance to the 14 October vote, which will struggle to even get into the 40s, than to the road not travelled of a referendum held with the next election.)

The Voice proposal came not from the Albanese government but from the Uluru Dialogues. But it was the government’s decision to hold the vote midterm. It presumably believed bipartisanship would be difficult to achieve with a general election — that a midterm vote would facilitate an uncluttered national conversation — and it was encouraged by the early surveys into believing that this time bipartisanship mattered less.

Tick, tick and tick, all just like 1988. Labor, the party that obsesses over its own history, seems determined not to learn this particular lesson. •

The post Timing, and other referendum obstacles appeared first on Inside Story.

It was “completely outrageous,” the opposition leader thundered to Fordham. “Australians want a fair election, not a dodgy one.” That turned a storm in a teacup into mainstream news.

Soon enough, the Australian Electoral Commission felt obliged to point out that “the formal voting instructions for the referendum are to clearly write either ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ in full, in English.” In the 1999 republic referendum, said the AEC, a tiny 0.86 per cent of votes were informal (the accompanying constitutional preamble question got a slightly higher 0.95). Given that there are obviously many ways of voting informal, these numbers represent the very maximum number of ballot papers discarded because they were marked with a cross.

The current interpretation of ticks and crosses was adopted in the late 1980s. The Coalition has never expressed any concerns about it, and certainly didn’t this year when many of its MPs voted to pass the Voice referendum legislation in March. The interpretation isn’t in any legislation, but it’s in legal advice obtained by the AEC.

This sudden kerfuffle is of course part of the No side’s grievance campaign: the government and other elites, it says, are pulling a swifty on ordinary voters. One likely outcome of the beat-up will be more ticks and crosses on ballot papers than would otherwise have been the case.

An irony of all this is that when jurisdictions across the country count ticks and/or crosses as formal, they are deemed to mean the same thing: a vote for whatever party or candidate they are written next to. In the Senate, for example, a tick or cross is taken to mean a “1.” It’s the same in NSW elections: a cross or tick next to a candidate or party is interpreted as a “1.”

The last twenty constitutional referendums (there have been forty-four since Federation) have used the current ballot paper design. It might be reasonable to wonder, soberly, whether the legal advice should be overridden by legislation. It could be done: parliament sits this month. But sowing confusion — “If you don’t know vote No” — was the real purpose of the exercise.

The evolution of the referendum voting paper illustrates two features of Australian elections: that instructions for one ballot paper can have a negative impact on how voters mark another paper they must fill in on the same day; and how the AEC uses “savings provisions” to deal with some incorrectly filled-in papers.

A well-known case of the unintended crossover arose when the Senate ballot paper was redesigned in 1984. This was the first outing for two new features: group voting tickets and the above-the-line option of simply putting a tick (a cross was also accepted) next to a group. The chief purpose was to reverse the explosion in informal Senate votes, which had reached 9.9 per cent in 1983. The above-the-line option worked a treat, cutting Senate informality by more than half to 4.7 per cent.

Unfortunately, some voters applied the Senate instructions to the House of Representatives ballot paper as well, and informal votes for the lower house more than tripled, from 2.1 in 1983 to 6.8 per cent. Oops.

(Thanks partly to a voter-education campaign, lower house informality subsequently decreased, but it has never again been as low as 1983’s 2.1 per cent. The lowest in the past four decades was 3.0 per cent in 1993. These days the main causes of informal votes — not necessarily in this order — are increasing candidate numbers, more voters from non-English-speaking backgrounds, the confusion created by optional preferential voting at state or territory level, and a rise in the number of people deliberately voting informal. Group voting tickets were abolished in 2016.)

The savings provisions, meanwhile, allow the AEC to count a ballot paper filled in incorrectly — with ticks or crosses against candidates’ names, for example — so long as the voter’s intention is clear.

People of a certain age might recall what became known as the Langer vote, a savings provision introduced in the 1980s for House of Representatives elections. Despite the stated requirement that voters number all candidates, the AEC accepted ballot papers where a voter appeared to have inadvertently failed to fully comply with preferencing (by numbering 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, for example).

Like most savings provisions, the difference this made to the count was tiny, but it wasn’t long before interested parties cottoned on to the fact that a voter could use it, in effect, to make a full allocation of preferences optional. Most importantly — at least from the major parties’ point of view — you could cast a valid vote without your preferences ending up with either Labor or the Coalition. Parliament’s first response was to make it illegal to urge anyone to vote in this manner; after a series of court cases, and after an activist called Albert Langer did time in the slammer, parliament got rid of the Langer vote altogether.

Several Australian jurisdictions have laws against advising voters to avail themselves of savings provisions. During a NSW campaign, for example, it is illegal to “print, publish, distribute or publicly display any electoral material that encourages any elector to place a tick or a cross in a square on a ballot paper” even though, as described above, it would still in many cases be counted as formal.

The current referendum ballot paper, which has just one square and instructions to write Yes or No inside it, was first used for the 1967 referendums. Since the 1980s the AEC has acted on legal advice to accept ticks as “Yes” but throw crosses onto the informal pile. I haven’t been able to find out how the commission and its predecessor treated ticks and crosses at referendums from 1967 to 1984.

A sketch of the journey of referendum ballot papers goes like this. The first ones, created and used in 1906, contained two boxes, next to the words Yes and No, and voters were instructed to put a cross inside the box next to the option they wanted. Referendums in that first decade of federation were held with general elections; voting for both houses of parliament also required putting crosses in boxes (one cross for the lower house, three for the upper) and that left little potential for confusion.

(Those three referendums, in 1906 and 1910, still had rather high informal votes, much higher than the accompanying elections.)

In 1918 the federal government replaced first-past-the-post with full preferential voting, requiring the ranking of all House candidates with numbers, like today. (At the next election, in 1919, informality for the House increased only slightly, but this was masked by the fact that voters who persisted in writing a cross next to their desired candidate benefited from savings provisions that counted their vote as formal if only two candidates ran in their electorate, which was the case for 64 per cent of those votes.)

The two referendums held with the 1919 election used the 1906 ballot paper, and average informality was a very big 13.6 per cent. Two midterm referendums in 1926 averaged a low 4.5 per cent informality. So it seemed reasonable to surmise that running referendums with elections caused some confusion.

In 1928, two months before an election at which a referendum would also be held, the ballot paper was radically redesigned. Referendum voters were still presented with Yes and No with a square after each, but now they had to put a “1” next to their choice and “2” next to the other. No more mentions of crosses on any ballot instructions (although — hullo savings provision! — a ballot with a single cross was still counted as if it was a “1”). Relative to the pair of referendums held with the 1919 election, informality dropped dramatically to 6.6 per cent.

This referendum ballot design remained through to 1965, when the Menzies government changed it to what we have today: just one square, with instructions to write either Yes or No. Country Party MP (and future party leader) Doug Anthony told parliament it would be “a more positive and, I believe, a more correct form of voting at a referendum.”

Anthony also noted that the “present provisions which provide that a ballot paper marked only with a cross or marked only with the figure 1 constitutes a formal vote will no longer be appropriate.” Back then, of course, a cross was accepted as indicating support for either Yes or No. Did this influence the later legal advice to the AEC regarding crosses? I’m no lawyer.

In 2023, it’s not even clear that most people who put a cross inside the referendum box are expressing opposition. Many times — in banks, at hospitals — they will have been asked to mark their preference with a cross. A more responsible party leader would have politely declined the invitation to buy into this ridiculous circus, but we are where we are, with ticks and crosses in the news and the commission having to devote resources to answering questions about them, sincere and otherwise. •

Update: Kevin Bonham covers similar territory, in parts in greater detail.

The post No diversion unticked appeared first on Inside Story.

As I never tire of pointing out, by-election results tell us nothing about the next election. Because the stakes for electors are so small — nothing as important as who will govern for three years — they can vote on other things. Such as “sending a message.” Candidates can make much more difference at by-elections than at general elections.

So they are not dry runs for the main event, and any “momentum” generated by a result is illusory and short-lived, strictly limited to the reporting bubble.

But by-elections are invested with all sorts of magical properties by the political class, and so they can often matter, a lot, particularly when it comes to the fortunes of political leaders.

The Longman (Queensland, margin 0.8) by-election in July 2018 played a very large role in ending Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership. The result, a 3.7 per cent swing to the opposition, was routine and unexciting; not so Aston, Victoria (margin 2.8) in April this year, which delivered a 6.4 point swing to the government that opposition leader Peter Dutton is still feeling today.

Three years ago this month, at the Eden-Monaro (NSW, margin 0.9 per cent) by-election, Anthony Albanese faced his own first “electoral test” as Labor opposition leader, and it came very close to being a similar disaster.

Triggered by the resignation of the popular member Mike Kelly, it was held in the early months of the Covid pandemic when prime minister Scott Morrison, his summer troubles behind him, was recording the highest approval ratings of his career (in the high 60s). Those voters ended up giving only a small swing to the government, and Labor candidate Kristy McBain won with a 0.4 per cent margin.

Labor was very lucky to hold Eden-Monaro. The electoral commission’s ballot draw alone, with McBain above the Liberals’ Fiona Kotvojs, was probably worth more than 0.4 per cent. So was the decision of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party to advocate (on how-to-vote cards) preferences for McBain before Kotvojs.

McBain’s candidacy itself was a very fine pick; before nominating she was mayor of Bega Valley Shire, which comprises a large chunk of the electorate. Like many political identities, her profile had risen during those disastrous 2019–2020 fires. The booths in that part of Eden-Monaro swung to her, the rest swung against. And Kotvojs, who had run in 2019, was hardly an inspired choice. A much stronger candidate, NSW Liberal MP Andrew Constance — still a rock star because of his criticism of Morrison during the fires — was in the mix for a while but didn’t make the final cut.

Back to this Saturday, though, with the hullabaloo following Dutton’s presiding over the first opposition by-election loss to a government since 1920 still ringing in the ears. The defeat damaged his leadership, and it is a brave person who would predict Dutton will still be leading his party in 2025.

It’s the exact bullet Albanese dodged in Eden-Monaro July 2020.

But all is not lost for the opposition leader, for the Labor Party is offering him a chance at redemption.

Fadden’s margin is 10.6 per cent. No government has contested an opposition-held seat with a margin of that size since Bob Hawke’s Labor ran in Groom (Queensland) in 1988. Its candidate didn’t even make it to the two-candidate-preferred count.

That’s not saying much, because in recent decades governments have been reluctant to run in opposition seats. The Howard government sat on its hands for all six (where margins ranged from 6.4 to 15.1 points). The new Rudd government fielded a candidate in Gippsland (Victoria, margin 5.9) in 2008, copped a nasty 6.1 per cent swing, and ignored the next four (margins ranging from 7.1 to 13.5).

Tony Abbott’s Coalition government ran in Griffith, Queensland, in 2014 (margin 3.0), and got a pretty good 1.3 point swing, but not enough to win it. Under Turnbull the government ran in Braddon, Tasmania (2.2) and the aforementioned Longman.

And Labor thinks it has a chance of a 10.6 point swing this Saturday? Obviously not. Even if it did snatch the seat, it would be lost again at the next general election. (Aston is different: with the benefit of incumbency Labor stands a better-than-even chance in 2025.) Is Albanese high on his own supply, assuming there’ll at least be a decent swing to Labor and the media will coo and fawn again, make life even easier for him and destabilise his opponent?

Or is a longer game afoot? The chances of a second by-election win in a row are astronomically small. A Liberal National victory would revitalise the opposition leader somewhat, and there’s actually a decent chance Fadden will swing substantially his way. And that would stiffen Dutton’s faltering standing. Is that what the prime minister wants? Does he just like having Dutton around?

Albanese seems to take “narrative” nonsense less seriously than most political leaders. The least inspiring opposition leader in memory, he stuck to his guns and refused to placate the commentariat’s demands for shock and awe. Small and steady won the race.

He probably would prefer to face Dutton than any of the likely alternatives (deputy Sussan Ley is the most likely) at the next election. Still, politicians don’t usually take steps like this, no matter how much sense they make in theory. They prefer an easy life in the short term.

Labor is running heavily on robodebt, the Liberal Nats on the cost of living. How will the competing “send a message” messages pan out?

Fadden will be in the headlines on Sunday, though we don’t know the font size yet. Any repercussions for federal leaders will take longer to play out.•

The post Why is Labor contesting Fadden? appeared first on Inside Story.

All the better when the incoming government employs its new-found authority to trash the former outfit’s legacy, a task the current administration has been discharging with some vigour.

Pollsters, meanwhile, have the government way ahead in two-party-preferred terms and the prime minister trouncing the opposition leader on personal ratings. This too is par for the course.

Tony Abbott, the most recent of this government-from-opposition species, was an outlier. Like Albanese, he had never enjoyed high personal ratings, but unlike this incumbent his post-election boost was modest. Within months of the September 2013 election the Labor opposition was ahead, and it largely remained there until Abbott was replaced by Malcolm Turnbull in 2015.

But the three incoming PMs before Abbott, Kevin Rudd (elected in November 2007), John Howard (March 1996) and Bob Hawke (March 1983), all generated voting-intention numbers and personal ratings during their first twelve months that peaked above anything seen under Albanese.

At this point in Rudd’s tenure, the GFC stimulus payments were starting to arrive in voters’ bank accounts. That financial calamity gave much-needed purpose to his leadership, which had seemed trapped in a news spin-cycle, addicted to quickly devised policy announcements.

Howard in April 1997 was a long way from his Port Arthur–elevated honeymoon, had three embarrassing ministerial resignations under his belt — and four more to come, mostly victims of his strict code of ministerial conduct — but his first budget had been very well received (much more, from surveys, than this year’s) and had worked brilliantly as a political exercise in delivering bitter medicine and blaming it on thirteen years of Labor. Still, by the one-year mark his personal ratings and the government’s polled two-party-preferred leads had slid to slightly below Albanese’s and Labor’s today.

By the end of 1997 the opposition was ahead, assisted by the government’s embrace of a GST and Democrats leader Cheryl Kernot’s defection to Labor.

Further back, Hawke was still riding high in early 1984, even if he was disappointing the true believers who had expected more Whitlamesque cage-rattling. His personal and party ratings remained stratospheric — until he called an election for December and the gap gradually narrowed to a modest victory. Howard, of course, after a shaky first re-election in which he lost the national two-party vote, went on to have the last and longest laugh.

Ultimately the GFC-induced fiscal problems proved diabolical for the Rudd government, providing a jarring contrast to the boom and the surpluses under Howard. On top of that, treasurer Wayne Swan was about as woeful a chief economic communicator as could be imagined.

What about the current government? According to the polls — and unlike Rudd’s and Julia Gillard’s, but like Hawke’s a lot of the time — it is generally seen as a better economic manager than the opposition. All else being equal, two strands often make it hard for Labor to do well on this rather important measure: the Liberals are generally seen as more economically responsible; and a party in office will score better than it does in opposition. I can’t think of a time when a Coalition government was not viewed as superior on economics, but there have been plenty of times when Labor governments weren’t.

The before-and-after economic situation around the 2022 election has been very different. By pure luck, this government can boast the first surplus in fifteen years. Treasurer Jim Chalmers learned his politics at the feet of Swan, but from such dire beginnings has developed into an effective public politician. His “trillion dollars of debt” mantra — as unfair as the “debt and deficits” narrative Abbott used against Rudd and Gillard — undoubtedly has at least some persuasive power.

And the prime minister? What are we to make of him?

Albanese’s rise to the top of his party was driven not by popular demand — he was little-known outside the political bubble — but by wheeling and dealing. It was his turn. As a factional boss, and someone immersed in politics his whole working life, his timing was brilliant: he reached the peak when a highly winnable election was in the offing. Remaining opposition leader for three years was arguably the bigger challenge.

America’s longest-serving president, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945), was once characterised as possessing “a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament” (a description that might apply even more aptly to Joe Biden). Albanese’s intellect is better than that, but unlike most predecessors he doesn’t seem to be a policy wonk or a details man.

From closer to home comes a 1996 quip from political commentator Cate McGregor (sometimes wrongly attributed to the late Labor speechwriter Graham Freudenberg): that new Labor leader Kim Beazley was the first since Ben Chifley “who doesn’t have a major personality disorder.”

It’s a good line when you think of the parade of grandiosity, narcissism and exploding egos we’ve witnessed, especially if we extend McGregor’s words through to Rudd. Albanese would sit in the Beazley category. But does it make for a good national leader?

We saw from 2019 to 2022 that Albanese has a realistic if unexciting view of what drives changes of government. Not for him the wild tales of opposition leaders dazzling the electorate with feats of derring-do, engaging the enemy in hand-to-hand combat on values, winning the hearts of the middle Australians who hold up the scorecards on election day. (The most obvious of this variety was Mark Latham, 2003–04.)

In reality, federal changes of government tend to occur when voters wish to dispose of incumbents and don’t find the alternative too threatening. In both 1983 and 2007 that fact was camouflaged by the extraordinary personal popularity of Labor’s leader — Hawke and Rudd respectively — though it ultimately had a questionable impact on actual votes. (In both cases the massive polled leads narrowed dramatically by election day.)

Albanese in opposition set no one’s pulse racing and never enjoyed high personal ratings or huge voting-intentions leads. Which means, one imagines, that he commenced his prime ministership without Rudd-like delusions of electoral grandeur.

He had plenty to be modest about. The election of 21 May 2022 was the first in which a party took office from opposition despite suffering a primary vote swing against it. Both sides recorded lows not seen since the second world war, and the winner lost the primary vote by 3 per cent. Preferences from a record-high Greens vote flowed 86 per cent to Labor, and it took office with a two-party-preferred vote of 52.1 per cent, the smallest for a federal change-of-government election since 1949.

A vague, bland quantity, Albanese got out of the way of electors’ anger and allowed the votes, either directly or through preferences, to flow through to him and his party. The electorate’s “pox on both their houses” attitude was also reflected in the record-sized crossbench.

But now Albanese is prime minister — and a rather well-regarded one at that, at least for the time being.

“Small target,” coined in 1996, is not the only Howard comparison Albanese invites. Both are decidedly charisma-free and not particularly eloquent, and so our storytellers have settled on their very ordinariness as explainers of their success. But Howard had shown more policy ambition by this stage. His government broke promises and blamed it on the Keating government and its finance minister, who was now opposition leader.

Howard also enjoyed a much friendlier Senate. While the current one’s “progressive majority” excites some Labor true believers, it is highly problematic for the government. Legislation can only be passed with the cooperation of either the Coalition or the Greens plus someone else (most likely ACT independent David Pocock). That’s not as difficult as Rudd experienced during most of his first term, when (if the Coalition opposed) the government needed the Greens plus Nick Xenophon plus Family First’s Steve Fielding, but it’s still very restrictive.

Further back, Hawke had a one-stop option in the “centrist” Democrats. Howard (before his 2005–07 Senate majority) had it even easier, able to choose either the Democrats or someone else.

Unlike under Julia Gillard, the Greens currently have no incentive to make life easy for the government. In fact, product differentiation — being seen to drag Labor to its positions — is the chief string in the minor party’s electoral bow. We are currently seeing this play out with housing policy, but it will afflict other issues in the years to come.

Given the reality of the upper house, perhaps there’s little point in trying to do too much. The Abbott government’s first budget showed the disaster that can come from broken election promises jammed in the Senate: the odium of unpopular policies without the payoff of having those policies settled into law.

So maybe the Senate partly explains the government’s policy timidity.

There is one area in which Albanese does appear to differentiate himself from recent predecessors: his refusal to get trapped in the twenty-four-hour news cycle. This afflicted Rudd most obviously, but also most prime ministers since. The idea that the media beast can’t be ignored, that it must be fed or it will devour you, enjoyed much currency only a few years ago but is little-heard now.

Is this the product of a level-headed PM and his office, or has the nature of the beast changed? Is Albanese just getting an easy media run (outside News Corp) — and if so, will it turn eventually?

In the past, prime ministers’ longevity (and treasurers’) has been underpinned by economic booms, which are mostly dependent on the international climate. That precondition doesn’t seem likely in 2023 or the foreseeable future. The inflation, the declining real wages, the high interest rates and the housing shortage aren’t going away. The possible international recession will continue to hover threateningly.

Can we detect in this prime minister a Kevin-like aversion to jeopardising the strong polls? Rudd also began his term determined not to break campaign promises, but he eventually ended up doing so closer to the next election, when it was harder to sheet it home to the defeated government. Rudd, instead of developing the authority that comes from making voters eat their greens, ended up being seen as a prime minister afraid of making difficult decisions.

We are only one year in, which as past governments have shown tells us nothing about how things will pan out. And we’ve not seen how Albanese copes under pressure, in difficult times. They will come, sooner or later. •

The post How far will level-headedness take Anthony Albanese? appeared first on Inside Story.

This time last year that particular cookware-coating descriptor would have been the last to come to mind in describing the Labor leader. Halfway through the election campaign, “charisma bypass” might have been more appropriate for an uninspiring, somewhat blundering opposition leader whose demeanour contrasted with the incumbent’s energetic confidence. Whatever you thought of Scott Morrison, everyone agreed, he remained a formidable campaigner, while Albo, even within the famed “small target” paradigm, erred on the side of saying as little as possible. And his campaign, to put it mildly, was not blemish-free.

The published opinion polls from March 2022 to the election did put Labor comfortably ahead after preferences but found nothing to celebrate in Albanese’s approval ratings. Were they better than Bill Shorten’s had been three years earlier? Arguably, but you had to look closely to see it. They might have been similar to Tony Abbott’s during the last change-of-government campaign in 2013, but even the much-deflated Morrison usually bested him as preferred/better prime minister.

But when the election result became clear at approximately 8pm AEST on 21 May 2022, Albanese went from zero to hero. If observers had previously struggled to imagine him as prime minister, their perspective changed the moment he became one, or at least one-elect. Suddenly it all made sense.

Had he been a good opposition leader? He won, didn’t he, so he must have been.

Now we are used to Albanese as calm and capable PM. From the highest office in the land he pulls the levers of state with ease and aplomb, authority oozing from his pores, journalists hanging off his words. One day he is hobnobbing with the international great and good, the next munching a white-bread sausage sanger at the footy with the hoi polloi. Is there nothing this everyman can’t do?

And because, despite all the accoutrements of high office, he still decidedly lacks personal magnetism, some close politics watchers judge that — you guessed it — his very ordinariness, his unthreatening lack of eloquence, these are the secrets to his success. So he is more a John Howard than a Kevin Rudd.

On the other side, Scott Morrison quickly became an embarrassing, somewhat demented punchline. And the less said about the federal opposition, led by the faintly ridiculous figure of leader Peter Dutton, stripped of his powerful portfolios, the better. Did this clown show really run the country for eight and a half years?

Elections are routinely followed by shifts in public perceptions of leaders and parties, and the most dramatic come after a change of government and/or a result that has turned out to be different from what was widely anticipated. (Some Newspoll examples are here.) In Albanese’s case, this graph from Essential nicely illustrates his huge leap in stature.

The shape of the graph shows the total reinvention, in the public mind, of the persona of one Anthony Norman Albanese.

The moral of this long-winded introduction? If you want to measure public perceptions of Albanese as an opposition leader you should survey them when he is doing that job. Ideally, you do that as close as possible to when people vote, but certainly before 6pm Saturday eastern time, when votes start to be tallied and the how-and-why tales start to unfold.

And that’s exactly what the regular public polls — Newspoll, Essential, Resolve, Ipsos et al. — did during the campaign.

There is, however, one election survey, much used in academia and often cited in the media, that attempts to measure voters’ attitudes to leaders — along with a host of other factors that influence votes — but collects its data after the election. And not just a few days after, but weeks and in many cases months afterwards. That’s the Australian Election Study, or AES.

Run out of the Australian National University, the AES began at the 1987 election, in some ways as a successor to the Australian National Political Attitudes Surveys. Its counterparts overseas include British and American surveys.

These days the AES is mostly done online. It contains a large number of political questions and a veritable census of demographic ones, most of which are usefully repeated at each election, allowing for comparisons over time. Its sample sizes (2508 in 2023) are a bit on the low side for analysis of some of the cohorts, but its strength is in its breadth of content and repetition across the decades.

Late last year, as after every election, the AES team released a report, some datasets and various accessories. Its trends paper, in particular, has fascinating graphs showing (in some cases) dramatic changes in attitudes on immigration, abortion, the republic, attitudes towards democracy and other topics.

But its huge weakness, all but fatal, lies in the fact that, as its website puts it, the AES is conducted “post-election.” Respondents completed the 2022 survey, for example, between 24 May and 30 September, an average of thirty-two days after the election.

Among the findings given in the forty-page 2022 report is one that received substantial media coverage: “Anthony Albanese was evaluated more favourably than any political party leader since Kevin Rudd in 2007, scoring 5.3 on a zero to ten popularity scale.” This is the relevant graph:

But we know that’s not really how Australians saw the opposition leader at the time of the election, and nor is it what the publicly released polling said. The most popular leader on either side since 2007? You only have to go back to the surveys from the 2019 campaign to find a party leader more popular than Albanese: Scott Morrison. Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 was also rated more highly, even scoring a few net positive results (approval greater than disapproval) during the campaign (something Albanese never did). Julia Gillard in 2010 provides another counter-example.

And the AES’s report itself, in a summary of the Morrison government’s final term, describes the Labor leader entering the campaign in a “not exceptionally popular or inspiring” way.

Beneath the report’s headline, “popular” turns out to mean how much the leader is liked, as in “using a scale from zero to ten, please show how much you like or dislike the party leaders.” That’s a slightly different question from satisfaction and approval; so might that be true of Albanese? Contemporaneous data on this specific question are much scarcer, but what I could find also jarringly contradict the AES.

A Newspoll of “leaders’ character traits” published in March 2022, around ten weeks before the election, had 51 per cent finding Albanese “likeable.” According to Newspoll’s chart, which went back to 2015, that was a much lower proportion than the 68 per cent who said the same about Malcolm Turnbull six weeks before the 2016 poll. Even Bill Shorten managed a higher score in May 2016 of 57 per cent.

Yet in the AES graph above, Turnbull (2016) languishes five spots below Albanese (2022). Could Turnbull have become so much less liked between late May and 2 July? Could Albanese have dramatically grown in likeability during his campaign? Anything is theoretically possible, but the best evidence — satisfaction/approval ratings taken during the campaigns — didn’t show a dramatic rise or fall for either man.

The much more likely reason for Turnbull’s low spot on the AES’s graph is, again, the fact that the survey was conducted after — an average of thirty-eight days after — the last person voted. The 2016 election result, which was significantly worse for Turnbull’s government than was widely expected, provoked a rather bitter election-night speech about Labor’s “Mediscare” campaign. It also set the Liberal leadership hares running, generated universal adverse press coverage and had some in the wider Liberal movement (think Sky After Dark) calling for his head. From then until his demise a little over two years later Turnbull was under pressure — and behaved like it.

This was the prime minister respondents were scoring — just as Albanese’s relatively high “like” score can’t be disentangled from his election success and subsequent popularity in office.

The AES’s retrospectivity affects not just leaders’ ratings but also many other questions probing respondents’ attitudes to issues that might help explain the election outcome. It even includes a question about when respondents made up their minds whom to vote for.

I believe the timing pollutes the responses, rendering much of the AES’s data all but unusable. It’s such a shame given the expertise and expense and skill of the people involved, and the hours they put in. But as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, no one associated with the study believes the timing matters. And nor, presumably, do most of the dozens of academics who analyse the data and present these findings at conferences and in refereed papers in journals.

The sheer length of the questionnaire presents challenges. It skews the sample to people who are willing to go through the arduous process — namely, those who are particularly interested in politics. Attitudes to elite institutions (like the university whose name appears on the survey) might influence people’s decision to participate: only 2.1 per cent of 2022’s respondents said they voted for One Nation or the United Australia Party, for example, which is less than a quarter of the actual 9.1 per cent at the election.

This is probably unavoidable for a long-form survey like this, and in theory weighting (which they do, using actual election results as one of the ingredients, and provide in a separate field) should ameliorate much of it. But the regular pollsters, with a less demanding workload for respondents, probably obtain more representative raw data.

Then there are two long-term, corporate habits of presentation in the various AES reports that are at least in theory fixable.

One is the definitiveness with which the findings are presented. The very first in last year’s report provides a perfect illustration. It reads: “A majority of voters (53 per cent) cast their ballots based on policy issues, down from 66 per cent in 2019” and “just 11 per cent did so based on the party leaders.”

Now, call me difficult, call me pedantic, but deriving such firmly stated conclusions about voters’ intentions from their multiple-choice responses to the question “In deciding how you would vote in the election, which was most important to you?” (available answers: “The party leaders,” “The policy issues,” “The candidates in your electorate” or “The parties taken as a whole”) is absurd, even leaving aside the timing issue.

Many people like to think they’re rationally deciding their vote on policy matters but are actually driven by emotion, tribal loyalty, resentment or just the vibe. We can probably all agree that a healthy economy is, all things being equal, more conducive to re-election than an unhealthy one. On the other hand, longevity can prove an insurmountable obstacle for any incumbent. Neither of these dynamics can be captured in that question. We’ve all met people who always vote for a particular party but justify it by referencing something else. The campaigners, if they’re doing their jobs right, are influencing voters in fleeting, subliminal ways.

And what about those who just reckoned that after nearly nine years of this government it wouldn’t hurt to give the other side a go? Humans are deeply fallible when it comes to understanding, let alone elucidating, their own motivations. There’s a reason why many pollsters have psychology degrees.

So, the AES reckons that in 2022 most people’s votes were largely driven by the parties’ and candidates’ policies. The believability of that might depend on what we mean by “policies.” Does it, for example, include perceptions of the fruits of past policies, such as those of Labor’s last stint in office, 2007–13?

Now, asking the question itself is not without value. The relevant 1996–2022 graph in the trends paper is worth a look — the “policy” line is ridiculously high, but the interest is in the fluctuations. (The two peaks are at the 1998 “GST election” and 2019.)

Changing the wording to “a majority of voters… claimed…” and moving the finding down the list to deprioritise its significance would have been much less misleading. And in the second finding, in fact — “The most important issues in the election identified by voters included…” — the words I’ve italicised make the statement much more defensible.

My complaint here isn’t about a few missing words in one finding. This mode of presentation is a key feature of the AES across its thirty-five years, and comes from an ingrained inability to acknowledge human complexity, both individual and collective. It flows through all the AES reports and associated papers. (Political scientist Murray Goot covered a lot of this in a strongly worded review of a book based on AES findings a decade ago.)

It even turns out, according to the AES, that you can use its data to calculate the value of various drivers of the election outcome. An example from 2019 is that “[b]ased on… voter responses, it is estimated that the net effect of leadership [Morrison versus Shorten] on the vote was 4 per cent against Labor.” This is calculated by taking the proportion who nominated “The party leaders” as the key factor in the question mentioned above, splitting them up by whom they said they voted for, and applying them to the actual election results.

The arithmetic was not repeated in 2022, and giving it a go myself I could see why: it gives Labor an advantage that rounds to zero, which is surprising if you’re dealing with a face-off between the most and least popular leaders since 2007. The closest we get is “With Anthony Albanese as party leader, Labor attracted more votes based on leadership than in the 2016 and 2019 elections.”

I don’t believe it is possible to quantify leaders’ influence on votes. (Should we try, for example, to account for the fact that any other leader might not have made Shorten’s decision to take a big policy suite to the 2019 election?) But if there is a way, this ain’t it. And across the decades calculations of this nature abound.

The other bad habit of the AES is a tendency to write for media headlines.

Political journalists and commentators have an awful tendency to cast (a) the latest election result and (b) the latest opinion poll as representing the new normal, as how voters henceforth will behave. You can observe it today, fuelled by the Aston by-election; these voting snapshots are assumed to showcase patterns as they will always be, and the prognosis for whichever side lost the last (by-)election (and is trailing in the polls) is dire.

Last year’s general election, the first Labor has won in more than a decade (and since 2007 if we’re talking about majority wins), suddenly became evidence of the Coalition’s inability to ever again form government — and here, says the AES, are the reasons. That’s despite the fact that these supposedly fatal electoral drivers didn’t prevent the Coalition from winning the previous three contests.

This Sydney Morning Herald article, headlined “Young Coalition Voters an Endangered Species,” could’ve been published today but is in fact dated September 2009, when the Rudd government was still riding high. AES data back then showed that the Coalition faced intractable demographic hurdles, namely a lack of support among young voters. This was a popular theme at the time, but we know what happened soon after, beginning with 2010’s tied election. Those seemingly insurmountable demographic changes were somehow surmounted, and then it was Labor that faced an existential challenge, due to (other) demographic developments.

In 2023 we’re back with the Coalition at death’s door — because of young people again, and this time specifically “millennials” (voters born between 1981 and 1996). In some cases the individuals singing from this song sheet were only two years ago administering last rites for Labor.

We expect data nerds and academics to be constrained and sober in their analysis, not to be permanently trapped in the present and not to succumb to the hot take. But sadly it ain’t always so.

The 2022 AES report makes quite a big deal of the Coalition’s deteriorating support among young people. “Between 2016 and 2022, millennials record a large decline in Coalition support, falling from 38 per cent to 25 per cent in just two election cycles,” it reports. “Changes of this magnitude and this pace are rare in Australian electoral history.”

I’ve reproduced its graphs below, and you can see that the starting point of 2016 for millennials (middle bottom) wasn’t chosen at random. It was a year the AES found to be exceptionally good for the Coalition among this age group, better than at any time since 2004.

Now, these rather gimmicky age cohorts are no doubt used for popular digestibility. In particular, millennials’ membership has not been constant over the graph; those born in 1996, for example, didn’t join the electoral roll until 2014. And the sub-samples are rather small — just 251 people aged twenty-five to forty-one participated in last year’s survey, implying about a 6 per cent error margin. But let us accept that these figures truly reflect the relevant component of the full electorate.

That 2016 election did exhibit some unusual swings, with the Labor opposition doing very well in low- to middle-income urban electorates, even snatching the hitherto bellwether seat of Lindsay, while the Liberals shored up their wealthy safe electorates. The persona of the ultra-rich, urbane and progressive prime minister Turnbull must have played a part, and perhaps millennials disproportionately warmed to him. That’s interesting, for sure. But to present these figures as a neutral point in the data is simply cherrypicking.

Further down, less sensationally, the report notes that “millennials entered the electorate in the early 2000s with about 35 per cent of this generation supporting the Coalition, a level which has now fallen to 25 per cent.” Is that a big drop? The “Coalition’s historic low levels of support among younger voters” in 2022 can’t be interpreted meaningfully on its own. There are two crucial pieces of context that should be taken into account.

The first is the Coalition’s rock-bottom primary vote in 2022. That 35.7 per cent was the smallest since the formation of the Liberal Party in 1944. Record low support in the aggregate should be expected to translate to low support across most cohorts; there should really only be a sub-headline when one group of people deviates significantly from that shift. Does the AES show a bigger drop among millennials than among the rest of the electorate since 2001?

It does a bit. The ten-point decline since 2001 sits within an overall drop of 7.2 per cent in the Coalition primary vote, from 42.9. A 2.5 to 3 per cent difference (we are subtracting a rounded number from an unrounded one, and giving “2.8 per cent” as the outcome does go against my grain) is still worthy of note. (A trend line over those dots produces something a bit smaller, around 2 per cent.) So, on this evidence, the last two decades have seen an outsized drop in Coalition support among young people. But what happens if the Liberals choose another Turnbull-like leader?

The second missing piece in the gloom and woe about the Coalition’s irretrievably dire situation is that in 2022 Labor’s national primary vote was also historically tiny; at 32.6 per cent it was even smaller than the Coalition’s (it was this fact which made the “net effect of leadership” calculation unpublishable) and was Labor’s nadir since at least the 1930s. Surely if we insist on using primary votes as indicators of electability, this can’t be ignored.

Under our federal compulsory (full) preferential voting system, preferences from other candidates produced a two-party-preferred Labor win of 52.1 to 47.9. The Coalition’s 47.9 was not by past measures spectacularly bad; not as low as in the last three elections (2007, 1983 and 1972) that turfed them out of office. But its current lower-house presence is proportionally smaller than at any time since (again) the Liberal Party came into being, and that’s because nine of the electorates in which it defeated Labor in two-party-preferred terms were won by an independent or minor party instead. That’s a function of its low primary vote. But Labor also missed out on seats in this way — seven, in fact — and that’s because of its low primary vote.

That the AES deals only with primary votes is increasingly problematic, although it’s not clear how to fix the issue. But Labor’s historically small primary vote must, by definition, also translate to splash-friendly depths in some cohorts. On the AES age numbers one could craft a terrifying tale about “boomers” and the “greatest generation,” and to an extent generation X drifting away from Labor. (The more popular one until last year had to do with lack of support among a shrinking working class.) Except, of course, Labor formed government, and so analysis like this doesn’t fit the narrative.

The big story about Australian electoral behaviour is, or should be, the continuing decline of primary votes for both major parties. It’s the two-party system that is under existential pressure, not just whoever happens to be in opposition today, and the record-sized crossbench is the most obvious symptom.

Labor is currently in office. One day it won’t be. One day also Peter Dutton won’t be Liberal leader, and the opinion polls might start to look more competitive. Commentators, finding themselves on the other side of the fishbowl, will simply internalise and recite the current vibe. Academics, I hope, won’t.

Analysing election results is serious stuff. When we write and say things, we should really mean them.  It’s better to remain silent than announce a conclusion from a piece of work that ticks all the statistics boxes but rests on hopelessly flawed assumptions.

The individuals involved in the AES are smart, well-credentialled and statistically literate. Most of the data they collect, which don’t purport to deal with the hows and whys of the election results, make for excellent observation and, in their comprehensiveness and multi-decade extent, are unique. The problems lie in some institutional practices

The AES isn’t alone in the academic world in producing statistics-based work in this glib genre. But it does run a big, important poll, widely used, whose post-election aspect is a big flaw. If its personnel found a way to have their surveys completed before election night the value of their data would increase immensely. Not claiming to quantify the unquantifiable with simplistic calculations, and avoiding playing to the media zeitgeist, would improve their reports. •

The post Reading elections backwards appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s one thing for a prime minister with authority, such as Malcolm Fraser in 1977 or Harold Holt a decade earlier, to hold referendums and campaign in unison with the Labor opposition; it’s quite another for a Liberal opposition leader to support a Labor initiative. Some form of federal opposition naysaying was always a fait accompli (even if Dutton and shadow minister Julian Leeser didn’t realise it until early this year), though the form it took, of binding shadow cabinet, was at the severe end of the spectrum. Total freedom à la Republic 1999 would surely have made life easier for everyone, including the leadership.

Why did Dutton choose this path? The answer must be the Aston by-election, when those several hours of counting on April fool’s night gradually turned into a wrecking ball aimed at the Liberal leader’s already modest authority.

Now, it is my firm belief that by-election results don’t actually tell us much about anything — certainly not the next general election result.

(When I chatted with The Tally Room’s Ben Raue a couple of days after the vote, he made the excellent point that even if by-elections did portend the next general election result in a particular electorate — which they certainly don’t because who will govern isn’t up for grabs — seat swings themselves vary wildly at elections. In 2022, for example, the national 3.6 point shift to Labor translated on the ground to everything from 14.2 to Labor in Pearce, Western Australia, to 7.2 to the Liberals in Calwell, Victoria. What would a 7.2 per cent swing to the Liberals at a Calwell by-election in, say, 2021, have told us about the 2022 general election? Nothing.)

But by-elections enjoy divine status within the political class, and Dutton, suddenly insecure, did what such leaders often do: he embraced the party’s true believers, the self-proclaimed “base.” It’s the opposite of what rational analysis would suggest, which is to try to elevate one’s standing in the general community, but it is the path of least resistance.

In this case the “base” is the party’s right wing, for which the current party room isn’t actually a bad proxy. (According to some reports, Dutton piled extra humiliation on the phone-box-full of remaining “moderates” by excluding from his public announcement an agreed-on legislated Voice.)

The reaction has been condemnation in some quarters and exuberance in others. For the latter — in opinion pages and, one imagines, on Sky after Dark — the leader is finally standing for something. No guts, no glory.

And so the referendum is cast as Dutton’s big gamble, with a big payoff coming if the No case prevails. But politics doesn’t really work that way.

It might be true that a Yes victory would destroy him. But it’s not the case that the opposite would mean salvation. People of a certain age might recall Liberal leader John Howard celebrating in September 1988 after successfully opposing a set of four Labor-initiated referendums that recorded the biggest loss in history. Eight months later he was out of a job. Opposition leaders’ fates ultimately depend on their public standing, largely reflected in opinion polling, and there is no reason to believe a No win would endear Dutton to the electorate.

Would it damage prime minister Anthony Albanese, which in a zero-sum game might be an equally positive outcome for the Coalition? It would affect medium-term perceptions of the prime minister’s political nous and prowess, which would influence media coverage and probably shift the opinion polls a little. But it’s all rather transitory. The caravan moves on. In terms of the next election, and in the long run that’s what matters for Albanese, it will mean little.

Internal Labor skulduggery would be an outside risk, but Rudd’s Rules put an institutional plank under Labor prime ministers these days.

When a leader prioritises singing to the choir it is a symptom of leadership decline, and usually also ends up being a cause. That makes it difficult to see Peter Dutton lasting until 2025. Perhaps his best chance of contesting the next election as leader is if Albanese is foolish enough to, as some contemplate, call an early one off the back of a successful referendum.

Hot off the presses — in for a penny, in for a pound — he’s appointed the combative Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to replace Liberal Julian Leeser in the shadow Indigenous Australians portfolio. While Leeser’s other portfolio, attorney-general, has gone to Liberal Michaelia Cash, this represents an improvement in the Nationals’ front bench representation. Nats, whoever they are, don’t get a vote in the Liberal leadership.

And what of the referendum itself? The Yes case is lumbered with the reality that Albanese is not a details man. During a constitutional referendum the attorney-general is normally the go-to minister for curly questions; on this occasion it’s Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney, who is no lawyer. Both Albanese and Burney have made misstatements requiring backtracking, and are likely to make more.

The nitpicking, the “gotchas,” are only getting started. “If you don’t know, vote No” is the standard theme against any political change, even if it’s not always an official slogan. Mounting the case for change is challenging, even in government.

I’ve generally been pessimistic about the Voice’s chances, but am slightly less so after Aston. Referendums can be a chance for some voters to deliver a kicking to a government, so the apparent absence of such an anti-Labor dynamic in Aston can’t be ignored.

Nor can the incompetence of the No campaign. The proposal to hold another referendum to recognise immigrants as well as Indigenous Australians is a doozy, creating a target where none was needed. It also eliminates what has historically been a key substructure of No cases: that this whole exercise is a waste of money by a self-indulgent government. Warren Mundine himself was running the price-tag line only days before his second-referendum brainwave.

The public face of Recognise a Better Way is also very last century; did I actually hear former Nationals leader John Anderson recently intoning about “intelligent Aborigines” in a radio interview?

Every state premier and territory chief minister has announced in favour of Yes. The fact that Tasmania, whose vote has made the difference at three of the five “double majority” referendum failures, has a sympathetic Liberal government bodes well in the event of a close outcome. Ditto the fact that the high-profile Liberal member for Bass, Bridget Archer, will be campaigning Yes. (Is this combination of universal second-tier support and a lack of federal bipartisanship a first? Probably.)

The federal opposition leader doesn’t enjoy wide appeal. The campaigning on Alice Springs crime, like John Howard’s 2007 Northern Territory intervention, is at its heart designed to kindle fear of Aborigines “out of control.” It has a limited constituency, and voter cynicism about such tactics abounds.

One day Mundine will be interrogated about his “recognise immigrants” plan. (Like, what constitutes an immigrant?) Other prominent figures on the No side, Pauline Hanson and Tony Abbott, are niche products. (Of the No campaigners, John Howard is probably the only one the Yes camp would love to have onside.) Meanwhile the opinion polls continue to show majority support in every state. (Even the recent Newspoll, once you eliminate undecideds.)

But there’s still six months to go. And it’s a Labor government referendum held in the teeth of federal opposition. Historically, these are very, very difficult obstacles to overcome. •

The post Peter Dutton’s no-payoff gamble appeared first on Inside Story.

But yesterday’s result was a biggie, and it will end up being the third-, fourth- or fifth-largest swing since preferential voting was introduced in 1918. The other time a government took a seat from the opposition — one we’ve heard a lot about recently — was Kalgoorlie in 1920, with a more modest 3.5 per cent shift.

For political tea-leaf diviners the swing should probably be more important than the binary win–lose outcome. Had this been a safer seat it would have remained in Liberal hands. But the political class will interpret the result how it wants to.

As I noted on Friday, we can’t really know what motivated voters on Saturday. National opinion polls suggest a much more modest 2 or 3 per cent swing to the government. But the folks on Sky after Dark, taking up their usual theme, are convinced that Aston shows the Liberals aren’t right-wing enough. Peta Credlin even believes Liberal voters stayed at home.

The general theme elsewhere is the opposite: that the Liberals desperately need to move to the centre. This is obviously closer to the truth, but I prefer a more modest version: this and last year’s Victorian result show that conservative culture wars are not the secret to electoral success.

Being hung up about climate change was not the formula for the federal Coalition’s rule 2013 to 2022, and it’s not the formula now. Opposition leader Peter Dutton is a huge hit with a tiny proportion of the voting population, largely due to his forays into John Howard–inspired race-tinged divisiveness, but has never been a great fit for the general electorate. Voters are not repressed cultural warriors, agitating to break free and join the battle against wokeness.

On the other side, Aston voters were evidently not inclined to give the federal government a bloody nose. Anthony Albanese is not seen as “arrogant,” though whether that’s actually a good thing in the long run remains to be seen. A government not seen as arrogant is one that hasn’t yet made difficult decisions. You can’t put them off forever.

This result contrasts dramatically with Gippsland in June 2008, during Kevin Rudd’s first year as prime minister, which saw a 6 per cent swing to the opposition in similar circumstances (a sitting member, in that case for the Nationals, gratuitously retiring). Candidates are more important at by-elections than general elections — who will govern is not at stake, opening up space for other motivations — and Labor’s candidate in Gippsland wasn’t strong. In Aston, the Liberal candidate was a blow-in from the inner city and Labor’s a blow-in from closer-by.

Historically, by-elections haven’t given us any pointers to the likely result of the next general election result. The biggest pro-government by-election swing in history was 13.4 percentage points in the Australian Capital Territory in 1970, during the final term of the Coalition’s twenty-three-year rule. The second-biggest, 12.6 points in West Sydney in 1921, and a big 5.9 points in Maranoa in 1921, were followed by a national three-point swing to the Labor opposition at the next general election, although not a change of government.

A big swing to the opposition in Aston would have been seen as vindicating its general approach and inserted a spring into Dutton’s step. As it is, the very opposite applies. The Liberals’ whole strategy is wide open to question.

Might this even have repercussions for the Voice referendum? Dutton was already in the invidious position of manoeuvring a party room mostly strongly against it. Moves towards conciliation on this and other issues might be what the electorate would prefer, but Aston could also tighten the screws from within the party.

Political life just got a hell of a lot more difficult for the opposition leader. For some this might be a time to get out the popcorn. •

The post Battle lost, now for the war appeared first on Inside Story.

Some opinionistas believe by-elections don’t just measure the electoral temperature but also influence the future. So, for example, the Financial Review’s Philip Coorey writes that the July 2001 by-election in the same electorate — which the Liberals retained after a modest swing to the opposition — didn’t simply show that the Howard government was still competitive but also “created a momentum swing” all the way to the November general election.

It’s because the political class obsesses so much over these electoral events that they can actually influence the future — at the political level. Just ask Malcolm Turnbull, whose prime ministership was fatally damaged after a — wait for it — 3.8 per cent two-party-preferred swing to the opposition in Longman in July 2018. And it was the current Liberal leader who led the charge against him.

But even here the political bubble can’t get its story straight. It made a massive fuss about Longman but found little to see in the larger, 4.8 per cent swing in Bennelong seven months earlier. (Is there an irony in the fact that Labor won Bennelong but not Longman when it took office last year?)

By-elections are like massive surveys with non-random samples, except we don’t really know the question being asked. It’s certainly not “which party would you vote for at a general election?” And because nothing as important as who will govern is at stake, electors are liberated to cast their votes based on other matters. Candidates can make more of a difference in by-elections, as can mini-scandals. Voters can send a message to one side or the other. And a lot of other things we can’t identify also play their parts. For elaboration of the meaninglessness of by-election results, see my piece before Eden-Monaro in 2020.

Now, it’s true that very unpopular governments tend to suffer big by-election swings. But the intuitive extension — that well-regarded ones, as the Albanese government can reasonably be characterised, can expect to do well — is not borne out by the statistics. (Blogger Kevin Bonham has found “a reasonable correlation between federal government polling and by-election results” — see Twitter thread starting here — but his line derives all its power from the unpopular government sub-sample. The left side of his graph, containing data points with governments performing well in national opinion polls, has rather random by-election swing outcomes.)

One hundred and fifty-eight federal by-elections have been held since Federation, with another two vacancies uncontested. (These include supplementary elections and re-elections — in fact, any House of Representatives vote held apart from a general election.) It makes sense to identify a two-party-preferred swing in eighty-nine of those held since the introduction of preferential voting in 1918. (Only in those eighty-nine were Labor and the Coalition or its predecessors left in the final count for both the by-election and the previous general election.)

The swings in these seats range from 13.4 percentage points towards the government in the Australian Capital Territory in 1970 to 20.1 points in the other direction in Wakefield, South Australia, in 1938. Both were triggered by deaths, both were under Coalition governments and neither portended much about the next general election. (“Coalition” here means the various versions of the anti-Labor major parties. Pre-1983 two-party-preferred figures are often estimates.)

The average swing across all eighty-nine is 4.6 per cent to the federal opposition. But if we disaggregate between government-held and opposition-held, and between resignations and deaths, the subset in which Aston sits — resignation in an opposition-held seat — has an average swing of 2.3 percentage points to the opposition.

(My table is here. I categorise resignations due to section 44 of the Constitution separately: they shouldn’t produce the level of resentment a normal resignation does, nor the loss of the sitting MP’s personal vote, and including them only changes it to 2.2 points overall.)

In recent decades, governments have waxed and waned in their tendency to contest opposition-held electorates at by-elections. The Hawke–Keating governments (1983–96) ran in its first six, then from 1989 sat out the remaining six. The Howard government (1996–2007) ran in none out of six. Rudd Labor threw its hat into the Gippsland ring in 2008, got a hefty 6.1 point movement against it for its trouble, and stayed out of the next four. The Abbott government ran in Griffith after Rudd’s retirement and managed a decent 1.2 point swing, but not enough to take it. It declined to contest Batman, Perth and Fremantle, but weighed into Braddon and the aforementioned Longman.

Of course, some by-elections are just more winnable than others. It made sense for the Morrison government to contest Eden-Monaro near the height of its Covid-fuelled popularity in 2020. Once again it managed a small swing, though not quite enough. (Eden-Monaro was declared a “test” for opposition leader Anthony Albanese. Apparently he “passed” because the swing was less than the 0.86 points required to change hands.)

Labor’s decision to run this weekend in Aston is fair enough: it’s a possible, if unlikely, win. The seat has been redistributed by a notional 2.3 points towards Labor since the 2010, when Tudge replaced Chris Pearce, scraping home with just 0.5 points. But 2010 was a very strong year for Labor in that state, indeed its second-best Victorian two-party-preferred vote in the history of preferential voting. If Tudge had retired at the 2022 election it would’ve been up for grabs.

The evidence suggests that Tudge built up a very big personal vote, peaking in 2019, but deflating somewhat in 2022 for reasons anyone not living under a rock would be aware of. Had he not attracted that odium, the on-paper margin today would be bigger than 2.8 per cent, and perhaps Labor wouldn’t be tempted. (And, of course, Tudge might not be pulling up stumps.)

But it must also be said that neighbouring seats also swung quite solidly to Labor last time. Most have substantial Chinese-Australian populations, and in Sydney and Melbourne this cohort seems to have particularly swung to the Liberals in 2019 (turned off by Labor’s economic policies) and back to Labor in 2022 (absence of said policies, plus the Morrison government’s thunderous drum-beating on China.)

And/or: perhaps Labor ran a brilliant campaign in the seat in 2022. In 2023 it is running the same candidate, Mary Doyle.

This time, sightings of “Test for Peter Dutton!” claims have been much more prevalent than for the prime minister, but a big swing to the Liberals would transform the chatter. The Albanese government’s mooted superannuation changes aren’t particularly tailored to inflict pain on Aston (the wealthier Victorian seats these days are held by teals and, in the case of Higgins, Labor), but details aren’t always important. The “one in ten” (in thirty years’ time) statistic that the Coalition–News Corp tag team came up with a few weeks ago is potentially effective.

As well as dominating the coverage, New South Wales also seems to have soaked up media organisations’ polling budgets, and so far they have published no surveyed voting-intention figures whatsoever for Aston. In terms of the next general election, tomorrow’s result will only matter insofar as whoever is the sitting member in 2025 will enjoy an advantage. But interpretations of the swing can mean a lot for leaders’ fortunes, of course. And because, unlike in Longman in 2018, the opposition is behind in the national polls, it’s Dutton who will most be sweating on the result. •

The post We’re about to hear Aston’s answer, but what is the question? appeared first on Inside Story.

In the early 1980s John Howard — Liberal treasurer at the time — expressed interest in a consumption tax but was warned off by prime minister Malcolm Fraser. Howard’s successor at Treasury, Labor’s Paul Keating, energetically spruiked one in 1985, inside the party and in public, but he too was eventually rolled by his leader. Then, early in the next decade, Keating betrayed not a skerrick of embarrassment as prime minister as he employed his substantial rhetorical skills to help bury John Hewson’s Fightback! package, which had a GST at its centre.

A couple of years later, in 1995, opposition leader Howard was forced to promise “never ever” after some loose-lipped equivocations to a business audience. Then, in his first term as PM, he announced he’d changed his mind and would seek an electoral mandate for a GST at the next election.

Did he earn popular kudos for promising to run the plan past voters first? A bit, but not much: his personal ratings and party voting intentions immediately dropped. Claiming it wasn’t a broken promise didn’t wash.

The 1998 election vote outcome was not very different from that earlier “GST election” in 1993 — Labor won both — but this time the Coalition retained a comfortable majority of seats. When the GST started operating in July 2000 it was not without teething problems, but also not the cataclysm most voters had expected. (Read this tasty excerpt from an exchange between Labor’s Mark Latham and his party’s former pollster Rod Cameron on Lateline at the time.) At the next election the Kim Beazley–­led Labor opposition, rather than promising to unscramble that complex GST egg, offered something called “rollback” — a bit of tinkering around the edges. The Howard government was re-elected.

Since then the GST has sat securely in the policy infrastructure. Econocrats regularly urge a broadening and a lift in the rate (with compensation for people on low incomes) but that’s a no-go politically, something that each side of politics routinely forces the other to rule out.

How about the Gillard government’s “carbon tax”? Like the GST, it involved revenue gathered with one of the government’s hands and then returned through spending and direct tax cuts with the other — though, at around a fifth of the dollars, it was much smaller than the earlier tax. The “tax” was announced in March 2011, was immediately branded a broken promise (in reality it was a price rather than a tax, and not really a busted pledge), was legislated later that year and came into operation in July the next.

Folks with memories uncluttered by post-hoc projection will recall a stark difference between the sixteen months before its introduction — endless headlines, rallies, and fear and loathing of what this “big new tax” would do to people’s budgets and the economy — and the time after. With no new items on payslips, a few price rises and a bit of compensation, it largely subsided as a salient issue. In fact, polling for the unpopular Gillard government marginally improved. (Things turned south again the following year.)

Opposition leader Tony Abbott’s longstanding promise to repeal the carbon price got some mentions in the 2013 election campaign, but like all politicians he preferred to emphasise his opponents’ crimes rather than spell out his own plans. And when the Abbott government got rid of the price the next year, the enthusiasm in the electorate was underwhelming.

What is the point of these frolics down memory lane? Most importantly, to hammer home the big difference between the electorate’s fear of change before it happens, and the relative ease with which voters tend to adapt to the new reality.

Going even further back, most of the still-ballyhooed Hawke–Keating changes were sprung on voters midterm and — importantly, vitally — put in place well before the next appointment at the polling station. By then the bite had turned out to be infinitely less painful than the bark for the vast majority, and the opposition, having warned of Armageddon, had to decide whether to promise to repeal.

(In the 1980s and early 1990s the Coalition generally did put its money where its mouth was by promising to undo policies it had opposed. It remained in opposition until its successful 1996 campaign, at which “small target” entered our political lexicon.)

This week the Albanese government flagged a new twist on tax reform. Its superannuation changes are a small-ticket item, not remotely in the same league as the GST or the carbon price, and not even like opposition leader Bill Shorten’s franking credits; for one thing, the Coalition and News Corp will find it impossible to dig up lovable old codgers of meagre means who will affected by it.

But Anthony Albanese has broken a basic rule of the politics of reform: the changes, if legislated, won’t happen until after the next election. In that way, on a much smaller scale, it’s more like Howard’s GST, which nearly cost him the 1998 election.

A policy bedded down before voting day becomes part of the status quo, and if the opposition says they’ll undo it, it’s they who are proposing change. And that makes them susceptible to questions about how it will work, where the money will come from, whether the sums add up, and what the unforeseen consequences are.

Now it’s true that, all else being equal, if you’re taking a new policy to an election you’d rather be the government than the opposition. Governments are known quantities, and the risk factor doesn’t  attach so easily to their plans. But as Howard found in 1998, the policy itself, or imaginings of its repercussions, can still generate a great fear of the unknown.

Albanese evidently believes his strategy will enable him to claim he’s not breaking a promise — that there was always a subliminal “in the first term” asterisk when he talked about tax during the 2022 campaign. (From memory, this caveat was uttered during the campaign, but only once or twice. It’s a rather dangerous thing to say, because individual voters can’t be sure that if the new government proposes something obnoxious, other voters will deny them a second term.) So he’s running it past the electorate first. Yes, he’ll get a few points for holding off until after the election, but that won’t negate the “broken promise” charge.

I’m not saying first-term governments shouldn’t break campaign undertakings. Most of the time it’s inevitable.

Abbott’s prime ministership is the oft-cited cautionary tale about breaching trust in this way. But Abbott’s unpopularity had many causes, and the biggest problem with most of his 2014 budget nasties was that, thanks to the Senate, they never even became law, let alone begin operating. They just floated around, discussed ad nauseam, creating a greater and greater stench. He got the worst of both worlds.

Albanese is generating a similar interplanetary configuration. If the super changes were coming into effect this July or next, they would quickly more or less cease to be a topic of interest. As it is, he’s being seen as an election promise breaker but will go to the 2025 contest with no pay-off, no added authority from making us eat our greens.

Unlike Kevin Rudd and his rhetorically woeful treasurer Wayne Swan, the current government has not slouched in the important task of burying the legacy of its predecessor. Treasurer Jim Chalmers in particular never misses an opportunity to repeat the “trillion dollars in Coalition debt” line. The government even leads the opposition in surveyed perceptions of economic competence, something I don’t believe was ever achieved under Rudd (or Gillard).

(For various reasons Scott Morrison’s government is an inherently juicier punching bag than Howard’s.)

But if a first-term government is going to renege on a promise (as all of them, including — or especially — the successful ones, do) it should be done sooner rather than later, accompanied by heartfelt regret that its abominable predecessors, still fresh in voters’ minds, left no other option. And the new measure needs to be operating well before the next election.

It’s natural that a newish prime minister still enjoying sky-high ratings and an easy life with the media will be reluctant to rock the boat. But the good times will be over one day. As Kevin Rudd learned, a determination to postpone the inevitable can be fatal: the honeymoon has to end eventually, and when his ended in 2010 he had few difficult decisions to show for it.

True, this isn’t the GST, or anything like it. But if Albanese thought this week’s announcement would stop the hubbub then he already knows he was wrong. Sweet-talking journalists into describing something as a political masterstroke won’t make it one. One of them is already speculating that the government, having “found a way not to breach voters’ faith,” might attempt “an overhaul of negative gearing and capital gains tax” by the same method: legislation that doesn’t kick in until the next term.

Now that would make the next election very interesting indeed. We would truly be closer to GST territory.

Labor supporters should hope this tactic is a one-off. It is not a habit Albanese should get into. •

The post Not-so-super strategy appeared first on Inside Story.

We all know that polls taken years before an election are poor predictors of voting intentions. Unforeseen events will occur, of course, but it’s also unrealistic to expect all voters to know what they’d do under the suddenly posed hypothetical: “If an election were held today…”

As the actual vote approaches, polls get better, especially when the question becomes “How will you vote on Saturday the Xth?” (These days the question is tweaked to take account of what is increasingly a weeks-long voting period.)

Things are trickier when a referendum is being discussed. Nearly everyone knows what an election is. But what proportion could immediately describe what a referendum actually is? What about words like “enshrined,” “Indigenous Voice” and the “Constitution” itself?

Way back in 1987, a Newspoll found that only 54 per cent of respondents “knew that Australia has a written Constitution.” In 1992 a Saulwick poll put the figure at 67 per cent. More recently, in 2021, the Constitutional Values Survey found a much higher 83 per cent answering affirmative to the easier statement, “had heard of the Australian Constitution.” And the proportion who could describe how the document is amended? We have no idea.

Americans are more likely to know about their founding document, and it’s possible Australians are more aware of America’s too. Its clauses (particularly its amendments) feature regularly in international news, commentary and popular culture. (America’s, unlike ours, is amended by majorities of federal and state legislatures.)

Until this year the Voice to Parliament was largely a preoccupation of the political/academic/media class. A little over half the respondents to this 2021 survey, for example, had never heard of it.

Given all these uncertainties, springing a benignly described question on an unsuspecting citizen isn’t going to produce a reliable indicator of people’s eventual voting decision. So it’s little wonder early polls on referendums have a history of being wildly wrong — much more wrong than voting intentions ones. But they too become better predictors as the day approaches.

(The 2017 marriage equality survey would also have suffered from the evolution of the question’s meaning, but to a much lesser extent. It was not intended to change the Constitution, and the “vote” was just another survey, labelled as such, voluntary, filled in at home — and by three-quarters of respondents, it turned out, during the first week of the official campaign. Like the 1999 republic referendum, it dealt with a familiar, long-discussed topic, but without the earlier one’s constitutionally ordained, and fatal, requirement that a specific model be approved.)

The last time a Labor government held a referendum — a midterm set of four questions — was in September 1988. Shadow cabinet voted to support two and oppose two, but the party rooms overturned them and the Liberal and National parties campaigned energetically against all four.

Triumphantly as it turned out; what the Hawke government saw as a set of proposals so inoffensive it would slip through unharmed became the worst-performing in referendum history. The cause was not helped by a High Court finding that some of the government’s info-ads had broken the law.

In the final six months of that campaign, polled support halved, from the high 60s and low 70s to the 30s. Party-support surveys have been known to shift by several points over similar periods, but nothing approaching 30 per cent. The actual survey questions have disappeared into the ether, and they would have changed over the months, but the early ones (to take one of the four proposals) might have been along the lines of “Do you support recognising local government in the Constitution?” To which a reasonable answer might have been “Sure, why not, it makes sense.”

By referendum day, after an all-singing, all-dancing campaign, the act of voting had become more complicated for the one-in-three voters who ended up “changing their mind.” From their point of view, the question might have become “Exactly why does this government want to change the Constitution?”

From there, the questions would have multiplied: “We’ve survived this long without this change, why do it now? This important document should not be tinkered with lightly; I read somewhere it will create a lawyers’ picnic. And the taxpayer dollars to do all this” — $30 million–plus was bandied about then; for the Voice the popular estimate is $200 million — “would have been much better spent elsewhere. And it wouldn’t hurt to remind this rather arrogant and complacent government who’s in charge.”

During 2022 and 2023 the main Voice polls have measured expressed opinions about “support/in favour” rather than voting intentions for a referendum held either “today” or later in the year. The wording will change later in the year, but these are the reported questions for recently released surveys.

Essential asks: “As you may be aware, there will be a referendum held later this year on whether a Voice to Parliament for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be enshrined in the Constitution. Do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?”

Newspoll, in the Australian: “There is a proposal to alter the Australian Constitution to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament. Are you personally in favour or against this proposal?”

Resolve, in Nine papers: “The new federal government has committed to a referendum — a national vote — on whether to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the Constitution. You will be asked to vote on this change to the Constitution in the next year or two, and voting is compulsory. Given this, do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?”

Resolve’s reported “next year or two” and “new federal government” look like gremlin-induced remnants of 2022 polls. Apart from that, its wording seems best because, while rather long and laborious, it doesn’t assume people know that the Constitution can only be amended by popular vote, or what a “referendum” is. But still, like the others, it’s different from a standard political poll because it doesn’t ask about voting intention.

So there’s variety in pollsters’ questions, much more than is found, again, in party-support polls. Referendum polling seems an even less exact science than general election polling. Despite that, though, the polls are all recording similar levels at the moment: around 60 per cent support once you exclude undecideds and/or push them to choose.

(That Resolve survey was taken in two portions. The first in December found 62 per cent net support, while the second in late January, after opposition leader Peter Dutton had launched his quasi-No “confusion” campaign and the topic started featuring heavily in the news, had it lower, at 58 per cent.)

Obviously the surveys taken in the final week of the campaign will more resemble each other and be very different from those above. They’ll ask people how they voted if they’ve done so already, or how they intend to vote. They’ll all be pretty close to the final result. (Even a 2019-sized poll fail will appear respectable unless the “error” happens to account for the difference between success and failure.)

Afterwards, accounts of the Voice referendum will describe a trajectory of surveyed “support,” but in reality the question respondents answer, from January to referendum day, will gradually have changed.

How meaningful are opinion polls purporting to measure support for inserting an Indigenous Voice to Parliament into the Australian Constitution? At the moment, barely meaningful at all. •

The post Just remind me, what is the Constitution? appeared first on Inside Story.

Of course if he really, earnestly had questions about the upcoming referendum he could have picked up the phone to the prime minister, or quietly emailed him, rather than send the list to News Corp journalists and then the wider public. The Albanese government’s lack of preparation for the onslaught that followed was evident to all.

Some of Dutton’s fifteen questions deal with the proposed constitutional changes; most go to the subsequent legislation. One of them — “Is it purely advisory, or will it have decision-making capabilities?” — seems to have been answered ad nauseum, in the negative; it can only advise parliament. But the full answer might depend on what “decision-making capabilities” means — the decision to hold a meeting, perhaps?

Can’t give a simple response? Gotcha! Welcome to the politics of advocating change.

The chief problem these questions create for the government and perhaps all Voice advocates is that no one knows the exact answers to most of them. The Voice wasn’t the government’s idea; it came from the First Nations National Constitutional Convention, and the proposal was for a referendum to set up the mechanism, broadly, in the Constitution, after which parliament would thrash out the details via committees and public hearings including, particularly, input from Indigenous groups and individuals.

In the same mischief-making vein sits the demand for draft legislation — now! Of course, unilaterally pre-empting the consultation process would alienate Indigenous groups. It would be picked apart by opponents. It would just be wrong, and ultimately fraudulent, as the government could not promise it wouldn’t be changed, because of course it would be.

How many worlds can you have the worst of?

So Dutton’s “questions” have worked a treat — particularly among the Coalition’s favourite media outlet — with headlines about a campaign in disarray. (It’s not wall-to-wall disingenuity at News Corp; there’s a good summary of the issues by James Campbell in the tabloids.)

Still, the government’s best response would be to provide written, detailed, publicly available answers to the questions. Few will read them, of course, and journalists will still demand succinct three-sentence explanations and tut-tut about the referendum’s chances when they’re not delivered. But at least they will have something to point to.

Some are citing these recent developments as evidence that it was a blunder to propose a change that leaves the details to parliament. But the alternative, trying to define every nut and bolt beforehand, would have been even worse politically — a huge target for opponents to rummage through — and an inherently terrible idea, because like any public arrangements it will need ongoing tweaking.

And seriously, did anyone really think the federal opposition would offer bipartisan support? Expecting that would ignore the constraints within which Dutton is operating.

Right back when the two-party system developed in the second decade after Federation, Labor and non-Labor attitudes to constitutional amendments per se took hold at DNA level. I’ve written before, and again, that Liberal opposition leaders (as opposed to prime ministers) simply lack the authority to support Labor government referendums, even the most benign. A textbook case can be found in 2013, when a party-room revolt forced Tony Abbott to withdraw support for constitutional recognition of local government.

Sometimes the Liberals end up proposing the same (or similar) when they’re in power; see “Simultaneous Elections” under Labor in 1974 and the Coalition in 1977.

And the Voice is inherently more likely to provoke antagonism among Liberal parliamentarians, and more so among the membership. (And the Nationals, of course, have already nailed their colours to the mast.)

So expecting Dutton to go down in history as the Liberal leader who transcended partisan dynamics to reach across the aisle to support meaningful constitutional recognition, only to be later humiliatingly forced to backtrack by his fellow MPs, was always a fantasy.

The surprise is that he’s skipped to the chase so early, in the process catching the government off guard. On Saturday shadow Indigenous Australians minister Julian Leeser, a long-time advocate of the Voice, also castigated the government, criticising it at a Young Liberal convention for “not providing the detail” and preposterously adding that “they’re in danger of losing me.” He repeated the warning on ABC RN Breakfast on Monday, adding that he and Dutton were merely passing on questions people had asked them over summer.

It sounds bonkers, but again the realpolitik is unavoidable: Leeser’s leadership has embarked on a certain course and as part of shadow cabinet he must follow. What, again, is the alternative — generate headlines about division?

(By contrast, Senator Andrew Bragg, outside shadow cabinet and probably the loudest Coalition Voice supporter, wrote in the Australian that while he himself was “not confused,” he believes “a parliamentary inquiry should look at the referendum question, the amendment and the scope of the body or bodies to be legislated,” adding optimistically that it would “allow the legitimate legal issues to be investigated and the red herrings dismissed.”)

Actually, by showing his hand so early, Peter Dutton has done the government and Voice advocates a favour, dashing any illusions of an easy bipartisan path to voting day. It’s now obvious that the best that can be hoped for is the Liberals not adopting an official cohesive position.

(The Greens, it seems to me, barely matter. Their official stance will influence few of their supporters, and if they really do come out against the Voice it will probably be a net positive for its prospects in the wider electorate. And this discussion is about the campaign itself. I assume the legislation to enable the referendum will get through parliament one way or another.)

No one said this would be easy. Okay, some people might have been encouraged by opinion polls over recent years showing substantial majority support. But these involved pollsters contacting people, the vast majority of whom had never heard of the Voice, explaining it in benign terms and asking what they thought.

The past fortnight has reminded us that constitutional change is not remotely that easy. High support that crashes by polling day is a feature of, particularly, Labor government–initiated referendums. The Hawke 1988 government’s set of four went from 60s and 70s in May that year to September Yes votes in the 30s. As the No vote climbs, public figures jump on the bandwagon.

Okay, last year’s federal election showed that commentator pontifications about campaigns off the rails tend to be just so much bubble talk. But referendums are different from our lesser-of-two-evils two-party seesaw. It’s likely that the number of Australians who have actually turned their attention to the Voice increased several-fold over the last fortnight, and unlike the aforementioned opinion polling, their introduction to the topic was not favourable.

Indeed, a new poll in News Corp tabloids boasts “new polling showing more than two-thirds of Australians don’t understand the proposal.” The YouGov survey (actually of respondents only in New South Wales) found 46 per cent in favour, 30 per cent opposed and 24 per cent not sure.

The well-known referendum statistic is eight successes from forty-four attempts. The portion of Labor government attempts is starker: twenty-five attempts with just one success. Some of this history of failure is due to Labor’s propensity to be more ambitious, some to the electorate being more likely to be suspicious of Labor’s centralising plans, but overriding it is the aforementioned absence of bipartisanship.

It all ends up as a giant by-election, and we know what usually happens to governments at those.

It’s easy to snipe. I don’t want to be that negative guy. I can’t fault the “campaign” so far because it hasn’t really started, and it’s hard to know what else the government could have done. The opposition’s sudden quasi-No campaign caught everyone off guard. It’s early days.

I’ll be voting Yes because I respect the consultation process and the people who produced the proposal. In statistics alone, the gap between Indigenous Australians and the rest is dire and the status quo untenable. I don’t see our Constitution is so fragile that changing it threatens the edifice. This view doesn’t generate a totally blank cheque: if, for example, it really was a third chamber, with powers similar to the other two, I would run a mile, because in my opinion one of our chambers (the upper one) is already too big for its boots.

So, how to maximise the odds of success?

Labor’s only successful referendum was on “Social Services” in 1946, part of a set of three. It was held with the first general election for a new Liberal Party, led by the man who created it, Robert Menzies, and he supported “Social Services” but opposed the other two. Because it was an election campaign, his support (and opposition to the other two) was muted; he preferred to talk about the ghastliness of the Chifley government. In the end all three got majority national support but the bipartisan question received four percentage points more than the others, so clearing the double-majority hurdle.

Bipartisanship made the difference, but looked at another way it was only worth a few percentage points.

The Voice referendum’s best chance lies in its being held with the next general election. That’s how they should be done anyway, on logistical and cost grounds. It’s how the first three were put after Federation (two of them successfully) until a Labor government with very big constitutional ambitions developed the habit of midterm ones. Recent events have put paid to the idea that bipartisanship is more easily attained outside a campaign. Concurrent with elections, referendum proposals tend to be buried beneath the campaign proper, and people don’t overthink them. If this sounds cynical, well it is.

A big government win at the 2025 poll (itself not particularly likely) might drag the referendum across the line.

But this seems a forlorn hope, as the Voice vote seems almost certain to be held this year.

Comparisons with the 2017 marriage-equality survey are limited, because people held opinions on that for years, LGBTQI people have long been increasingly out, virtually everyone knows a few, often in the family, and that “vote” truly was about equality. But one stark feature was that almost three-quarters of eventual turnout took place in the first week of a six-week campaign. (Apparently postal-only elections tend to be like that.) If a scare campaign did indeed bite late in the piece, it was too late.

Its voluntary nature probably also helped the Yes side. Replicating those two features might be desirable. But how to do it without, well, appearing tricky?

Some advocates envisage a massive education campaign, but I don’t know how you force people to pay attention. An informed voting electorate would be a first; usually, it’s mostly about vague, half-informed vibes.

The 1967 experience, under a prime minister (Harold Holt) who had just recorded the Coalition’s biggest win since the creation of the Liberal Party and so enjoyed immense internal prestige, also doesn’t help us much. Labor, led by Gough Whitlam, campaigned for the Yes case (as he and his party did for Malcolm Fraser’s set of four ten years later). It was one of a pair, and less controversial than an ultimately doomed attempt to break the nexus between the sizes of each house of parliament. So, in a sense, the now more famous event was a bit like a referendum held with an election, relatively undiscussed at the time.

The important part of 1967 was kickstarting the Commonwealth “race power” to facilitate, eventually, land rights, Abstudy, ATSIC and a host of other special programs. But most Australians probably thought they were just excising constitutional discrimination.

That referendum fifty-five years ago did indeed take out all references to “aboriginals” from the founding document. But it left the ugly word “race” in there. That can’t be taken out (via referendum) without replacing it with something else — some kind of reference to the advancement of Indigenous people — otherwise all sorts of current legislation would become susceptible to legal challenge.

Add some sentences about First Nations people having lived on the continent and surrounding islands for dozens of millennia and you’ve got the minimal “recognition” model that was being spruiked a decade or so ago. It was rejected at Uluru because it would be merely symbolic. When Dutton insists he is in favour of constitutional recognition, it is presumably something like this.

Where is it written that the government is limited to just one referendum question? Holding two together, one for the Voice, another for recognition/taking out “race,” might at the very least throw a curveball at the opposition, and opponents more generally.

Political parties know that choices at elections tend to hinge on simple, often subliminal, messages and ideas. Campaigns are mostly about the horridness of the other side. A successful referendum can be seen as like a change-of-government election: people have been persuaded that the grass is a bit greener on the other side.

About a third of the electorate can be relied on to instinctively vote Yes to the Voice. Another group, probably smaller, never will. What do most (or all) of the rest think of Indigenous people? Through stereotypes, out of sight out of mind, often with a mixture of guilt and resentment. The “better angels” strategy would peck at the guilt. But perhaps Voice campaigners need to get real about what drives electoral outcomes: explain how the Voice will, yes, improve outcomes for Indigenous people, but more importantly why that is good for all of us, individually, in our everyday lives, and as taxpayers.

“What’s in it for me?” is, perhaps, the timeless campaign question. •

The post What’s in it for everyone? appeared first on Inside Story.

A record 33 per cent were “pre-poll ordinary” votes. This option, available since 2010, essentially replicates the election-day experience but can happen anytime during the two weeks before. (For the 2016 and 2019 elections the period was three weeks.) Another 4 per cent voted early, in person, by “declaration,” meaning their ballot was submitted inside an envelope with a signed form (usually because their name couldn’t be found on that portion of the roll).

And a record 14 per cent voted through the mail — an almost doubling of 2019’s 8 per cent, which was a drop from the previous election. This year’s figure was, of course, a result of the pandemic. And like many Covid-induced behavioural changes, the extent of any snapback to previous modes of behaviour remains to be seen.

What does the electoral class — experts, parliamentarians and others interested in the running of elections — think about these evolving voting methods? Should we all relax and go with the flow, or would it be better to insist that as many people as possible turn up on election day to immerse themselves in its binding rituals?

The answer so far has been to accommodate demands for convenience gradually, repeatedly drawing a line before yielding a little more several years later.

In the medium term, the explosion has been most obvious in pre-polls. Eighteen years ago, pre- and postal voting each accounted for around 5 per cent of turnout. As figures quoted above show, even in 2022 pre-polls were more than double postals. That’s due to the 2010 changes, and a commission that publicises pre-polling’s availability almost to the point of encouragement. Postal voting, on the other hand, is treated more like a necessary evil. (See, for example, electoral commissioner Tom Rogers explaining to a parliamentary committee just before the 2022 campaign why the commission prefers pre-poll.)

And yet, according to the electoral law, if you meet a criterion for one you meet it for the other; indeed, criteria for both are stated in the same schedule. Postal voters must sign a form or tick an online box declaring they meet one of those conditions. The pre-poller verbally affirms it to an electoral official. (The long schedule of reasons obviously isn’t read out; instead there’s a conversation along the lines of “Do you qualify to vote pre-poll?” “Yes.”)

What’s wrong with postal voting? To most election watchers its greatest sin is that it can hold up the election result because postal votes are not counted until the following week. (It really needn’t be like this; the Brits manage to count theirs on election night. If we really tried we could include most of them in the Saturday evening tally.)

A random voter, if asked, might offer that postal voting is more vulnerable to abuse. Letterboxes can be stolen from and postal workers might be tempted to interfere. Anecdotes — or sometimes versions of the same anecdote — abound of postal voting applications going unanswered. (It certainly happens, as two people I know found out in May.)

Perhaps people worry about postal delivery times. Letters take much longer to deliver than they used to, potentially missing the cut-off two weeks after polling day.

But there’s another problem. It doesn’t tend to worry the average voter, but it does concern many in the electoral law class: postal votes are not truly secret.

Why do we have the secret ballot? In Australia and other “advanced democracies” we tend to see it as a “right” — and so, by implication, an add-on. But secrecy was actually an integral part of the “Australian ballot” right from the beginning. It had to be, because if people were bribing or threatening others to vote a certain way (including at polling places), opt-in secrecy alone wouldn’t eradicate it. The state had to ensure a person had no way of proving to another how they had voted.

And postal voting isn’t compulsorily secret. Voters could be filling out their ballots in the visual presence of family, friends or anyone else. That was why voting by post came so long after the move to the Australian ballot in the 1850s. If postal voting had been available in the nineteenth century, bosses could instruct their employees, and landlords their tenants, to (a) apply for a postal vote and (b) fill it out the desired way, show it to them and let them to put in the mail. It was obviously a tractor-sized loophole.

In democratic countries with less-developed economies, such as our close neighbours East Timor, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, postal voting is either non-existent or limited to tiny classes of people — for example armed forces overseas — for this very reason. (In the case of East Timor at least, the absence of a postal system is an overriding factor.)

In Australia, though, anyone can vote postal as long as they sign the form claiming they qualify. Does this loose arrangement matter? The logistics, expense and likelihood of getting caught render the risk of this potential absence of privacy tiny, but we might still envisage, for example, one spouse (most likely the husband) instructing and supervising the other. Nursing home staff voting on behalf of residents is a possibility. Maybe the question is whether it would happen enough to worry about.

Earlier this year, as a Covid measure for a set of by-elections, the NSW electoral commission skipped the application process and sent postal votes to everyone on the roll. Voters could use them, or they could cast their vote in person. A touch under half of the turnout, 49 per cent, was postal.

In Switzerland they do this as a matter of course for national elections, and about 90 per cent of voters mail their ballots back. Estonia has for many years made internet voting available to all, and around a third of the electorate uses it. Some Australian local council elections are postal only. Is our third tier of government so unimportant that enforced secrecy doesn’t matter?

This, then, is a question for the future of voting at national and state elections: should remain hung up about secrecy?

There’s one other complicating factor: how private is in-person voting anyway? The Electoral Act says votes must be cast privately, but no penalties seem to apply for breaches. Australia’s booth layout sits at the more relaxed end of international practice. It’s easy to peek at your neighbour, especially if they’re willing to show you. (A couple of visual examples.) Few eyelids are batted. Electoral officials would probably intervene in egregious examples — but it would be too late in most cases.

And if I filled in my ballot and then, on the way to the ballot box, shouted out who I was voting for and held it up, I would likely receive a stern admonition but little else. Even if the official reached me before I got to the box, would they throw my ballot away?

Contrast this with rules during the counting of votes: if you put your name, or anyone’s name, on the ballot it is rendered informal because it supposedly breaches secrecy. (This rule really is an unneeded remnant of a bygone era, if for no other reason than that officials really have no way of knowing who wrote the name.)

Let’s step back and imagine elections were just invented and we were setting up an apparatus to conduct them. What might the arrangements look like?

We would create and maintain the electoral roll largely as we do now. A decade ago, with direct enrolment, Australia embraced modernity, using various government agency databases to do most of the work, complemented by elector-initiated activity.

And voting itself? Would it really be in person, on a single day? Or would it mostly be via the internet, including by email — security, and perceptions of security, allowing? A lot more work would be needed; NSW’s Ivote, which has been wound back to its original use by vision-impaired voters, provides a cautionary tale.

People who can’t access the internet would need some form of postal voting. And voting in person? In a big country like Australia, the fewer people who vote on election day the less easy it is to justify having six or seven thousand polling places scattered across the continent. (Switzerland, mentioned earlier, has a population density around sixty-six times Australia’s.) But decreasing the availability of Saturday voting would further encourage other voting channels.

The most recent ACT election, conducted during the pandemic, was framed by that jurisdiction’s electoral commission as a five-week “election period.” This might provide a partial template.

The early forms of “postal voting” in this country, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, actually involved people visiting their post office and doing the deed there, in front of the postmaster (but without he or she seeing how they voted!). The postmaster then posted an envelope containing the ballot to the returning officer. Gradually the class of people who could take votes in this way was widened. (Federally, it wasn’t until 1918 that electors began posting their own ballots.)

The mid-twenty-first-century version might see people voting at various government agency offices during the voting period.

And would something like MyGov have a place? In terms of perceptions of integrity, something might be said for people possessing evidence of how they voted. But see notes on secrecy, above.

Around the globe all manner of vote-taking can be observed. In America alone, the 3000-odd counties provide a rich tapestry, not just for their own but also for state and national elections. Some of that international experience is worth considering.

My crystal ball is no less murky than the next person’s, but change is already happening thanks to evolving social expectations and the contradictions inherent in current laws governing convenience voting: yes it’s allowed, but floodgate’s hinges remain intact by making people claim to have a good reason, even if it’s with a wink and a nod.

And much of the change will depend on decisions, explicit or otherwise, about mandated secrecy. •

The post How will we vote in the future? appeared first on Inside Story.

Current two-party-preferred polls are more encouraging for the new government than they were for Abbott at this point, but not as heartening as for the other two. Does this point to anything? No. Both Abbott and Rudd were dragged down by their parties before their governments’ first re-election. Howard was looking rather shop-worn by the time of the 1998 election, which he survived with the lowest national two-party-preferred victory in history. Only after the 2001 election was he the untouchable man of steel.

They don’t call it a honeymoon for nothing. Young governments find they can make mistakes and barely anyone notices, while ageing, more experienced ones can get away with much less. Fledgling government ministers are boosted by their new positions at the top table.

On the other side of parliament, stripped of the authority of incumbency and the allure of power, the nakedness of former Morrison government members is faintly embarrassing. Did this bunch really run the country for so long? Was that Liberal leader really home affairs minister so recently?

Scott Morrison’s bizarre, secret swearings-in to multiple portfolios provides further revisionist fuel. Were the higher echelons of the just-deceased government particularly lacking in talent, or does it just seem that way?

The early Hawke government went to town on the fiscal misdeeds of its vanquished predecessor, and Howard and team used the same playbook thirteen years later. While Rudd and his treasurer Wayne Swan were negligent on this front — yes, it’s harder when you inherit a budget surplus, but they barely tried — Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers aren’t making that mistake. They’re rarely missing an opportunity to employ the “t” word — a trillion dollars of debt. It’s not fair, it’s not honest, but politics is often like that.

What did the 21 May result tell us about voters’ changing behaviour?

After every election the Australian Electoral Commission provides us with two-party-preferred results for all House of Representatives electorates. Those two parties are Labor and the Coalition, whether or not the actual two-candidate-preferred count was between them. (The Liberals are given a 51.4 per cent two-party vote in Warringah, for instance, though Zali Steggall was the victor.) Total all 150 seats and you have the national two-party-preferred vote.

In 2007, a national Labor vote of 52.7 per cent saw eighty-three of the 150 seats return Labor two-party-preferred majorities, and all of them were won by Labor. This time eighty-four seats out of 151 recorded two-party victories for Labor, but MPs representing seven of them sit on the crossbench: four Greens plus independents Andrew Wilkie in Clark and Dai Le in Fowler, and — the surprise Labor two-party win — the Centre Alliance’s Rebekha Sharkie in Mayo.

So although Labor’s countrywide vote of 52.1 per cent was well below 2007’s, and although its seventy-seven-seat haul was lower than 2007’s eighty-three, its victory over the Coalition, nineteen seats, was larger by one than it was fifteen years ago.

The leakage to the crossbench was even worse on the other side. Of the Coalition’s sixty-seven two-party-preferred wins, nine were taken by independents and minor parties.

The massive crossbench is a result of the decline of support for the major parties, and there is no reason to believe it won’t continue over the medium term. Recent history tells us that Labor will have difficulty evicting the Greens from their lower house positions. We don’t know if the teals will prove similarly durable, nor the extent to which they will become, or be seen as, a quasi party. The future of Dai Le, the independent who won Fowler, is similarly unpredictable.

Does it worry you that the party that won 33 per cent of the primary vote formed government? It’s a bit like Emmanuel Macron becoming French president in April despite receiving just 28 per cent of the first-round vote. But at least Macron topped that first round.

You’d rather the Coalition, with 36 per cent primary vote support, had been sworn in? But then there’s no point having preferential voting, which gives the voter multiple bites at the cherry. Overseas, our voting system is often called “instant run-off” because it roughly replicates the French-style two-round system, but does it on a single voting occasion, using the one ballot paper.

Back in 1995, France’s first-round winner Lionel Jospin lost the second round to Jacques Chirac. A majority of the voters who cast a ballot two weeks after the first bout found Chirac the lesser of two evils. Same with primary vote versus two-party-preferred here. Australian federal elections have seen primary vote losses turned into two-party-preferred wins three times: 1987, 2010 and, now, 2022. The victor on each occasion was Labor.

Even under the awful first-past-the-post voting system, which Britain and Canada still have and New Zealand used to, the overall vote winner can lose the seat count.

Perhaps you’d prefer more proportional results, giving parties representation closer to the share of support they received? Then you need an electoral system of — drumroll — proportional representation. Single-member electorate systems are in many ways a relic of a pre-party time, when men (as they were) were elected to represent their geographic constituencies in parliament. Much of our system — indeed our Constitution, and most obviously the make-up and powers of the Senate — is like that. (I’ve argued before that PR in our lower house would improve governability by giving the upper house more incentive to make life easier for the executive.)

But back to our current government, and the question of how long Anthony Albanese will be prime minister. Our longest-serving PMs — Bob Menzies, Howard and Hawke — were elected at or near the beginning of longish periods of sustained international economic growth. They got the boasting rights and the favourable comparisons with their predecessors.

We live in different, stranger times, with unemployment very low yet growth sluggish and wages stagnant. And leaders are more disposable these days.

Both major parties are on the nose, but the contradictions in the Coalition’s support base are more glaringly on display because it’s in opposition. Peter Dutton gives every indication he won’t try to win back teal territory, and will instead prioritise what used to be seen as swing seats, the ones that tend to go to whoever forms government. They’re in the outer suburbs and regions: “aspirational,” socially rather conservative, not very multicultural, the fabled western Sydney seat of Lindsay being their archetype. But those voters and seats simply aren’t numerous enough to come close to a governing majority.

They also have a habit, at state level, of swinging to narrowly elected incumbents. (While the states and territories boast plenty of examples, we’ve not had a federal opposition squeak into government at an election since the formation of the two-party system over a century ago.)

That’s one way it could turn out: a stronger vote for Labor in three years. But Dutton is unlikely to be leader at the next election, and his successor would probably take a different tack.

And with a global recession on the cards, the pendulum could — in the context of low major-party support — swing back, quickly.

Did I mention we live in strange, uncertain times? •

The post Strange, uncertain times appeared first on Inside Story.

What’s a personal vote? It’s the small level of support that attaches to any House of Representatives MP simply because they are the sitting member. A per cent or several of the electorate will vote for that person because they know their name, or have seen them at events, or in the local paper, or perhaps in parliament on the nightly news.

It’s conceptually simplest in the two-party contest, and is best estimated, or at least identified, after a change. When an MP retires (or is forced out) support for his or her party slumps a bit in that seat relative to the rest, or at least relative to surrounding electorates and/or similar electorates.

Western Sydney’s performance at the last federal election — when it famously swung to the Morrison government — is a good example. (Much of it was simply reversing outsized swings to Labor in 2016.) This chart shows the swings to the Liberals in decreasing order of size. The two seats at the bottom — one the seat of a retiring Liberal MP, Craig Laundy — swung to the opposition, the rest to the government. The next three were sophomore seats: Labor members elected at the previous election; having been largely unknown candidates in 2016, they had generated at least some profile in the community in the intervening three years.

(Lindsay, which swung big, would have been sophomore if the Labor MP Emma Husar had not been shafted. As it was there was no sitting member on offer.)

As Reid shows, personal vote effects also tend to show up when an MP retires (or is forced out by their party), particularly if they’ve been there for a long time. In 2019 four NSW seats had departing MPs. Lindsay, as mentioned, had no personal vote effects, but the other three, all Coalition-held — Reid, Cowper and Gilmore — swung to Labor, and Gilmore even changed hands. (And not just because of the disendorsed MP; Scott Morrison captain’s call of Warren Mundine as candidate proved a disaster.)

Back in 2016 Julia Banks was the only Liberal candidate to take an electorate from Labor. Buried in the fine print of this achievement was the fact that it was an empty seat, the sitting Labor MP of sixteen years, Anna Burke, having pulled up stumps. Burke had built up a good personal vote, particularly during her term as speaker in the Gillard government, so a drop in the Labor vote was inevitable.

Personal vote effects don’t always show up, but they usually do. All sorts of other things matter too. Sometimes sitting MPs end up with negative personal votes; they are a drag on the vote and the party would have been better off with somebody else there. That was the case in Warringah in 2019, when Tony Abbott’s unpopularity created the opportunity for an insurgent. Labor, the party of unions and workers, could never have won that upper-middle-class seat, but an independent stood a chance in a compulsory preferential system. Step forward Zali Steggall. Independent candidates are hoping to do this country-wide in 2022. Their endeavours will nearly all come to nothing, but one or two, maybe, could get through.

Major party campaigners tend to be sceptical of personal vote effects, particularly sophomore surges. They instead nominate the seats to throw resources at, and if they do relatively well there, they claim vindication of their campaigning prowess. In reality they chose these electorates because conditions were welcoming.

Maybe the most dramatic example of this was in 2010, when the Gillard government suffered a swing that should have put them into opposition, at least according to the pendulum. Of the NSW seats the apparatchiks crowed about “saving” — Eden-Monaro, Page, Robertson, Greenway, Lindsay — all but Robertson was sophomore (and Robertson was complicated.)

In general, the sophomore surge means that governments tend to do well, swing-for-seat, at the election after they’ve taken a big bunch of them off the other side. In October 1998 the Howard government survived a swing that, if uniform, would have sent them into opposition. It was put down to brilliant marginal seat campaigning, particularly in New South Wales, where it turned the then state Liberal director into a rock star, but only until the Carr government’s huge win at the state election in March the next year, which sent the same party official to the electoral dog house.

Retiring MPs in 2022 (announced so far) can be found here. Sophomore seats are here. Over the summer I will write a much bigger, wonkier examination of personal vote effects in 2022.

Have a wonderful break everyone! •

The post Missing persons appeared first on Inside Story.

This is on song — in two-party-preferred terms at least — with all the other public pollsters except for the Nine papers’ Resolve, whose most recent outing gave the Coalition a whopping seven-point lead in first preferences, 39 to 32 per cent, which would translate to a small Coalition lead of about 51 to 49 in two-party-preferred terms. If Resolve keeps this up, the possibility of wall-to-wall pollster “herding” will not be a problem during this election campaign.

The Australian is headlining another finding: that a plurality of voters, 47 per cent, believe Labor will form government after the next election, 37 per cent think the Coalition and the rest aren’t sure.

Now, some political observers believe the expectation of a win is a good thing because it generates momentum and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your correspondent is definitely not in this camp.

Yes, expectations and outcome have correlated across electoral history. As they say in the classics, though, correlation doesn’t equal causation. Sure, the polls point to a likely victor, which largely generates expectations, directly and indirectly. But rather than millions marching dreamlike to vote for X because everyone else is — because the media says it’s so — the opposite is the case: it’s usually better to be the underdog because some voters are tempted to mitigate an expected big win.

During the 2019 campaign the Coalition seemed to grasp this, while Labor, by all appearances, believed playing up the likelihood of victory was just the ticket. We saw how that turned out.

The good news for Labor is that this time the expectations are not so one-sided. Once bitten by the opinion polls, voters are twice shy. And a prime minister who pulls off an unexpected victory will always be given some benefit of the doubt. In early December 2018, before all that happened, Labor was favoured by much more, 55 to 24 per cent, than it is now.

Back then, most of the commentariat were convinced a change of government was on its way. They could just feel it; they could smell the government’s decay. They had internalised the polls, and found further reassurance in the chaotic August change of Liberal leadership and in the November Victorian Labor landslide.

This week’s 47–37 lead on expectations — 56–44 if you exclude undecideds — actually seems surprisingly optimistic for Labor, given what happened last time.

Over in the United States the polls got it wrong in 2016 and got it wrong again in 2020, by about the same amount. The difference the second time was that Joe Biden’s surveyed lead over Donald Trump was about twice what Hillary Clinton’s had been four years before.

On that basis, Labor would want an election-eve lead next year significantly better than 2019’s average 51.5 to 48.5 per cent to feel confident of victory. (The result three years ago was 51.5–48.5 the other way.)

Right now Labor leads by roughly 6 to 8 per cent in all the polls except Resolve. A 2019-style 6 per cent error would put Labor on 51 or 50, which would be a probable (though messy, and perhaps in minority) government win. But we shouldn’t really compare today’s polls with those in the dying days of last election’s campaign. In December 2018, Labor was ahead by about what it is now, or a bit less.

As a rule, it’s best to be the underdog, but this can be complicated by another factor: the prospect of a minority Labor government reliant on Greens and independents. The Coalition has long believed it is in its interests to play up this scenario, and while it hasn’t really got much traction in past contests, this time the Greens are also pushing it energetically.

As most voters prefer majority governments, and some can even change their vote between the major parties to ensure this, that factor adds another dimension to the expectations game. It possibly played a part in that unexpectedly big Victorian result three years ago — Labor’s going to win, let’s make sure Dan Andews has a majority — but it can also work the way the Coalition wants it to. •

The post The expectations game appeared first on Inside Story.

One popular one is that by-election wins portend general election results. They simply don’t, because by-election voters aren’t deciding who will form government, and that frees them to be influenced by all sorts of other things. But while commentators might understand this at one level, many still can’t resist overlaying by-election swings onto state or national pendulums to produce high drama.

Another is that leaders’ personal ratings in the polls matter more than voting intentions. As in “that 53 per cent lead is well and good, but you can’t win with such a low preferred prime minister/leader satisfaction rating.” It’s rubbish. In fact, if there is a relationship it’s the other way around: for a given voting intention figure it’s better for the leader to have a low personal rating than a high one, because the latter can artificially inflate party support. But this one too won’t go away. Very often it is wielded by a leader’s internal enemies.

(Just one federal Australian election in polling history might be cited to support that view: Bill Shorten’s low ratings in 2019. But the surprise of Labor’s defeat was an opinion poll fail; the polls were simply wrong, right up to election day, and we don’t know how long they’d been wrong for.)

Another classic: “Disunity is death!” Except when it isn’t (in 2019, for example).

And that voters “reward” governments for jobs well done. This is pertinent in the Covid era, of course, when all our governments have accrued goodwill. But I reckon voters look forwards, not backwards, and that a fine performance is only relevant because of what it suggests about the future. With Covid, it’ll be about what is happening at the time of the election, and what looks likely in the months and years ahead.

Like by-elections, plotting state election results onto the federal pendulum is a pointless pastime, too. But again it makes good copy.

Which brings us to the persistent idea that popular state premiers generate support for their federal counterparts. Right now, some expect rampaging Western Australian Mark McGowan to deliver votes for Anthony Albanese at the next federal election — perhaps enough for that state alone to deliver a Labor victory.

Just this year McGowan clocked up the biggest election win — federal, state or territory — since Federation. His zero-tolerance attitude to border crossings in arguably the country’s most parochial state (Queensland and Tasmania are also in contention) has delivered both low case numbers and, along with Commonwealth largesse, economic health. While the other states are mostly slowly relaxing their boundaries, Western Australia’s remain sealed. In the ongoing stoush with the feds (who want McGowan to quickly join the rest of us) there’s no doubt on whose side the WA majority sits.

On top of that, Scott Morrison’s standing over there is dire, so it is said, and come March, April or May, voters will back their guy against the prime minister.

Do the polls support this expectation? Nationally, they tend to have the federal opposition on 53 or 54 per cent after preferences, a swing of about five percentage points since the last election. In Western Australia the number is also around 53 or 54, or a swing of around nine points. (See Pollbludger on the most recent Newspoll.) So that’s some mild evidence for the idea, although it’s nothing like state Labor’s 69 per cent eight months ago.

But there are opinion polls, and then there are elections. They are not the same thing. One is trying to estimate the other by asking people to imagine a certain ritual, known as an election, is held today. In some circumstances the response to that hypothetical is more realistic than in others.

In the thirty-nine federal elections since preferential voting was introduced, Western Australia has given Labor a majority of the two-party-preferred vote just eight times. And five of them were when the party was led by someone perceived as one of their own — John Curtin in 1943 and 1946, and Bob Hawke in 1983, 1984 and 1987. For a similar reason, the party in opposition didn’t do too badly in the state under Kim Beazley in 1998 (49.5) and 2001 (48.4). But it’s been downhill from there, fuelled by the mining boom, and in 2019 Labor recorded a miserable 44.5. (At the 2007 Kevin Rudd landslide the party only managed 46.7 per cent.)

Generally, across all jurisdictions, the electoral record shows that the idea of a popular local leader bringing votes to their federal counterpart is bunkum. To the contrary, the two have often worked against each other. In the Howard years, for example, we saw soaring Labor premiers, often with record wins under their belts, alongside comfortable Coalition victories federally. After the Rudd government took office in 2007, state Labor governments started dropping.

Queensland’s Peter Beattie in 2001 and South Australia’s Mike Rann in 2004 clocked up their state parties’ biggest wins in history, achieving two-party-preferred votes in the high fifties. It didn’t stop those states thrashing federal Labor in the same years, giving them 45.1 and 45.6 per cent respectively. In both cases the federal vote took place months after a state contest in which Coalition parties had been reduced to a rump.

These are extreme examples. But popular premiers delivering the goods for federal counterparts? It. Just. Doesn’t. Happen.

The historical polling record offers some evidence that those high-flying locals boost support for federal counterparts. But only in the surveys, and it can crash as the federal campaign starts and minds start to move towards the contest at hand, and matters such as economic security.

And so, by the time of the election next year, if the new Omicron strain allows it, Western Australia’s borders will again be reasonably porous. Covid restrictions will largely be scaled back and cross-jurisdictional bickering mostly a thing of the past.

As usual, the Coalition’s key message for sandgropers will be about Labor’s secret plan to steal their mineral royalties, force them to quickly decarbonise, and perhaps dud them on the GST to boot.

Voters will know that McGowan won’t take any nonsense from Scott Morrison, but would he stand up as aggressively against an Albanese government?

So expect Labor’s WA surge to dissipate as election day approaches. Off such a low base last time, there should be a decent swing to the opposition, but not enough to even hit the 50–50 vote mark.

A federal Labor victory, if it comes, will be off net gains spread across most of the states. •

The post Western Australia to the rescue? appeared first on Inside Story.

But it wasn’t always so. For the first eight years an even bigger star was Parramatta.

After the Coalition’s landslide 1996 victory, the fourth estate craved a compelling yarn about the whats and whys. Liberal apparatchiks provided one: John Howard, this down-to-earth everyman, had stolen Labor’s base. Ordinary, blue-collar, working-class Australians, fed up with Paul Keating and his grand visions about the arts and Asia and Indigenous affairs, had flocked to someone they recognised as one of their own.

And for the first few terms the legend was exemplified by that electorate with the instantly recognisable name. Most people, even in other states, had heard of the seat’s best-known suburb, Parramatta, around twenty-three kilometres west of Sydney’s CBD. It conjured (in 1996 at least) flannelette shirts, hotted up cars doing burnouts — you know, westies. The Liberals had stormed Labor’s heartland; it spawned a thousand opinion pieces.

Buried in the fine print was the fact that the electorate had mostly been won by the Liberal Party and its conservative predecessors since it was created at Federation; indeed, none other than Howard’s immigration minister Philip Ruddock was the local MP from 1973 to 1977. But over its life it has often been drastically reorganised by the redistribution knife, moving this way and that, favouring one side and then the other.

The Liberal candidate who won in 1996 was the religious, morally upstanding (at least publicly) and occasionally outspoken Ross Cameron. For the next eight years he was cast as the archetype of the Liberal MP the battlers now craved, a symbol of the new electoral landscape.

An unfriendly redistribution before the 2001 election threatened to send Cameron packing, but in the event didn’t. Shortly before the 2004 poll, though, he revealed that he’d had an extramarital affair, and “reporters in Canberra immediately ran with further details of Cameron’s private life, unleashing stories they’d been sitting on for years.” He was done for.

Parramatta moved back into the Labor column. The scandal had almost certainly made the difference.

With that seat gone, the focus on “Howard’s battlers” moved much further out, to Parramatta’s former understudy, Lindsay, around Penrith. (Fine print: created in 1984, it is best characterised as the kind of outer-suburban seat that tends to go to whoever forms government.) It was a much longer traipse for CBD-based journalists, but the tale thrived: values, conservativism and, best of all, the “Lindsay test”!

These two very different electorates serve nicely to illustrate the confused media presentations of “Western Sydney.”

Journalists’ sketches of this exotic species tend to oscillate. One day Western Sydney voters are all “aspirational” — (white) working class made good, often in well-paid trade jobs and perhaps owning a McMansion, many of them having fled to Sydney’s fringes.

The next day Western Sydney might signify immigrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds. They also aspire to good things for themselves and their families, of course, but they tend to have lower incomes, and the stereotype emphasises a religiosity and social conservatism that draws them to the Liberals. Recall Western Sydney’s relatively high No vote in the 2017 marriage equality survey.

The first cliché applies most of all to Lindsay, with one of the lowest populations from non-English-speaking backgrounds in Sydney. But the bulk of Western Sydney — Banks and Barton (southwest), for example, and Blaxland, Chifley, Fowler, Greenway, McMahon, Reid, Watson and Werriwa — more closely approximates the second (and most of those electorates still vote Labor, albeit not as reliably as decades ago). See this AEC map.

Multicultural Parramatta, like neighbouring Bennelong, can be seen as West meets leafy North Shore. The Liberals do best in the wealthier northeast, near the border with deep blue Liberal Berowra. (Lindsay, by the way, supported marriage equality 56 to 44 per cent. Parramatta opposed it 62–38.)

Enough scene-setting. Last month Julie Owens, Parramatta’s Labor MP for the past seventeen years, announced her upcoming retirement. The seat last experienced one of those massive redistributions before the 2010 election, when Owens lost almost half her voters to Greenway and took in a big chunk of Reid’s. That added 3 per cent to her estimated notional margin, which came in very handy in 2013 when Tony Abbott led the Coalition to a big victory and Owens held on by just 0.6 per cent. A smaller redistribution in the next term added another 0.7.

The upshot is that Parramatta is currently very Labor; and this chart suggests that under today’s boundaries the seat would probably have remained in Labor hands throughout the Howard years. (Several caveats apply, including demographic changes.)

Like much of Sydney’s west, Parramatta swung relatively strongly to the Morrison government in 2019. But then again it had swung to Labor (by even more) the election before.

I was expecting this piece to contain a rave about Owens’s big personal vote — she seems the type to have one, and since her announcement several colleagues have enthused about her enviable door-knocking prowess — but the evidence from the House-minus-Senate Labor votes doesn’t support that. The chart, in particular the gaps over time between the adjusted Parramatta line and the NSW one, lends at best modest support.

These are imprecise measures, but if it’s true that her personal appeal is not responsible for much of the 2019 Labor vote, that’s good news for her party, because the smaller her personal vote, the less it will be missed.

So the Liberals will certainly include Parramatta in their hit list (they routinely do), but it seems an unlikely gain.

Unless something unexpected happens in that part of Sydney overall. If we’ve learnt anything at recent elections, it’s that the unexpected should not be unexpected. •

The post Whose heartland? appeared first on Inside Story.

Any discussion of this topic needs to first extract itself from a fallacy that befalls so many debates about voting rules (compulsory voting is a fine example): that the United States is the only other country in the world. And look at how terrible things are over there!

Voter ID has a long and ugly history in America, and has become deeply embedded in the ideology wars. Australian partisans tend to inhale these battles as if they’re happening here. But the world contains many functioning democracies.

Yes, America has a ridiculously decentralised voting system (state legislatures decide rules for national elections; local councils do their own thing) that’s riddled with partisanship. Australia does not. In fact, with a permanent national body that conducts elections — the independent Australian Electoral Commission — we are at the opposite end of the spectrum. (Most liberal democracies have national election laws administered by public servants and local government employees.) So let’s leave America out of it.

Our centre-right parties have been itching to introduce voter ID for decades (although John Howard didn’t when he had his 2005–07 Senate majority). While some current advocates of voter ID spend too much time on American right-wing websites, the reaction from opponents of the idea can actually be worse. No less than Labor’s national secretary, former treasurer Wayne Swan, has tweeted that it involves “rigging elections.” (He accuses the Coalition of “Trumpist” behaviour, but claiming your opponent will steal the election is actually part of the Trump playbook.)

But it’s true that Australia doesn’t have a problem with voter impersonation. In Antony Green’s much-quoted words, voter ID is a “solution in search of a problem.”

And yet…

The fact is that most countries do have voter ID laws, including most of those we would compare ourselves to: longstanding liberal democracies with advanced economies. But then, most of them are in (western) Europe and have national ID cards that people must carry around anyway. Of the more comparable nations — New Zealand, Canada and Britain — all without civic registers, only Canada requires voter ID for national elections.

Still, being in the minority is not a good reason to change. In this case, there is really only one good one: public perceptions. Most Australians support voter ID because it just makes sense, and it seems strange you don’t do it already. In the pre-Netflix era, advocates would point out the apparent incongruity of needing ID to rent a video but not to employ that precious possession, your vote.

The answer then and now is that enabling nearly all people to exercise this right — as might be the case with voter ID — is not good enough. As a society we don’t want voting to be restricted to the 80–90 per cent who have no trouble producing ID. Elections are supposed to be the big leveller; all our voices should count equally.

But the public confidence factor can’t be dismissed.

The last federal election’s jaw-dropping outcome, dramatically contradicting all published opinion polls, produced a dollop of social media conspiracy theorising — but no more than that. Virtually everyone accepted that it was a genuine result. We want to keep it that way. Perceptions matter.

When Queensland’s Newman government brought in a voter ID law in 2013, I gave it a single thumb up. If we were going to have such a thing, this one seemed pretty innocuous. If you didn’t have ID you would fill in a declaration vote to be checked later. It was used at one general election, in 2015, before the new Labor government repealed it.

Anecdotally, Queensland’s experiment produced longer queues. As Graeme Orr notes, turnout dropped, but turnout fluctuates between elections anyway, and cause and effect can’t be reliably identified. Still, it wouldn’t be surprising if voter ID laws turned a lot of people off. And it also produces another possible excuse for not voting. While “I don’t have ID” might not, strictly speaking, be a reasonable defence, it’s likely the Electoral Commission of Queensland was lenient.

(Data from ECQ annual reports mildly supports this. The 2012–13 annual report says $5 million was paid in non-voting fines in that financial year, “the majority… in connection with the two major electoral events conducted in 2012” — that is, before the new voter ID laws. Its 2014–15 and 2015–16 reports, covering the first election under voter ID, recorded just under $1.5 million in total.)

The planned federal legislation, which at time of writing hasn’t been seen, looks as if it will be like Queensland’s, but with the added feature that you can get someone else on the roll to vouch for you if you’re without ID. Not mentioned in current media reports is whether the AEC will send all voters a letter that could be used as ID (as happened in Queensland).

The fine print is that little checking of those declaration votes was done in Queensland. If the claimed voter was on the electoral roll, the vote was counted, because logistically it wasn’t feasible to check if their name was already crossed off one of the many copies of the roll. So for all intents and purposes, that voting paper might as well have gone straight into the ballot box in the first place, along with all the IDed votes.

The Queensland rule was really just a disincentive to vote fraudulently. And, of course, a means to maintain a perception of electoral propriety.

Technology has changed since 2013, too. Increasingly, electoral rolls are being accessed electronically by officials on election day. As far as I know the rolls are not yet live at federal elections, which would facilitate the immediate cross-off of names across all copies of the roll. But even then, under the Queensland arrangements, nothing would have stopped someone impersonating someone they knew wasn’t going to turn out.

So much of this discussion is very twentieth century. Technology is changing the way we live our lives; letters and paper ID are becoming obsolete. Most people don’t receive utilities bills in the post. Not everyone has a printer. It is, of course, impossible for postal voters to show original identification. Widely used internet voting will come eventually (but not soon, fear not).

If the federal government’s ID plan becomes law, the AEC will require extra resources. There will be teething problems. It’s probably easy to overstate the contribution to public trust. Conspiracy theories about electoral malfeasance could take root regardless, and would be likelier in the event of a Labor win. (Already the AEC has to deal with wacky social media disinformation.) The loophole described above creates plenty of space for feverish speculation.

And while the Newman government in 2013 enjoyed a massive majority in its single chamber of parliament, the current legislation must pass the Senate to become law. That’s quite a hurdle. •

The post Is it time for voter ID? appeared first on Inside Story.

Of course, it’s the two-party-preferred vote that decides elections in Australia. But the declining major-party primary support increases the chances that minor parties or independents will pick up seats. And so it is that the current parliament boasts a crossbench of six out of 151 MPs, a postwar record.

Will that number grow again in 2022?

In the case of Labor-held electorates, the chief threat remains the Greens, although since 2013 the Coalition has alleviated the pressure by routinely preferencing its main opponent ahead of the minor party. This has left the Greens with mostly Coalition-held electorates in their sights, or at least ones that they envisage winning with the help of Labor voters’ preferences.

“Preferencing,” of course, is simply a recommendation on how-to-vote cards. Evidence suggests these can sway a third or more of major-party voters.

For the Coalition, Labor’s preferencing habits take the sting out of the One Nation challenge outside the cities. That leaves a threat from independents in the bush, and a more recent insurgency from urban independents in hitherto-safe Liberal electorates.

Most House of Representatives crossbenchers have tended to arrive one of three ways. They move from the state arena (see Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, and before them Ted Mack). Or, like Bob Katter, they enter parliament as a major-party MP and then spit the dummy. Or they get over the line with the help of a major party’s how-to-vote cards.

Labor how-to-vote cards got Helen Haines elected in Indi in 2019. If Labor had preferenced the Liberal candidate, or run dead (say with a two-sided card), the Liberal would have won. Haines’s predecessor, Cathy McGowan, also relied on Labor cards for her initial win in 2013, but not her 2016 re-election.

Adam Bandt and Andrew Wilkie have Liberal how-to-votes to thank for their initial 2010 victories in Melbourne and Denison respectively, and then used the benefits of incumbency to make sure they no longer needed them. In Bandt’s case that’s just as well; the Liberals haven’t preferenced him since.

Katter (these days leader of the Katter Australia Party) has only needed Labor’s help once since his 2001 departure from the Nationals: in 2013, after he cozied up too much to newly installed Labor leader Kevin Rudd. Election night’s 16 per cent swing to the Nationals gave him the fright of his life; Labor cards very likely saved him.

Those cards also got Kerryn Phelps over the line at the 2018 Wentworth by-election. But Zali Steggall’s 2019 win in Warringah was big enough not to need them. And the victory in Mayo in 2016 of Rebekha Sharkie — a member of the Nick Xenophon Team/Centre Alliance but from her electorate’s point of view an independent — couldn’t have happened if Labor had preferenced Liberal MP Jamie Briggs. (Had they preferenced neither, it could have gone either way.) Sharkie easily survived the 2018 by-election, and again in 2019, needing no help from Labor (though she received it anyway).

On the back of Phelps and Steggall comes the “Voices for” or “Voices of” movement. Actually, they claim they’re not a movement — that they use the word “voice” but there’s no connection. McGowan, formerly of Indi, has told Nine papers that “there is no franchise in place and any group using the ‘Voices for’ tag has chosen to do so quite separately,” but the mere fact that she has knowledge of it suggests… something. The Liberals have asked the Australian Electoral Commission to investigate.

Former high-profile Liberal “wet” Ian McPhee, best-known in the 1970s and 1980s, has endorsed Voices for Goldstein (his old electorate). Malcolm Turnbull is a fan.

What kind of electorate are “Voices” after? Safe (against Labor) high-income Liberal ones that find their party too (socially) conservative, particularly on climate change, but baulk at opting for the party of unions. Labor support needs to be low, because the independent wants to beat it into the two-candidate-preferred count. And the other crucial ingredient, so far anyway, has been an unpopular sitting member.

Sophie Mirabella was in her electorate Indi’s bad books in 2013, assisted by a ferocious campaign by a local newspaper. Briggs had been dropped from the ministry in late 2015 after allegations of creepy misbehaviour.

Wentworth 2018 was an empty electorate, a by-election, whose residents had witnessed their representative dragged out of the prime ministership by his own colleagues. Highlights of the campaign included a government Senate vote in favour of a white nationalist slogan and the Alan Jones horse-races-on-the-Opera-House-sails fiasco, which saw both prime minister Scott Morrison and the man destined to be Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, instinctively side with the far-right radio announcer. And Kerryn Phelps was a local with a national profile.

Tony Abbott was on the nose in Warringah in 2019 (he had been in 2016 as well), thanks mostly to his destructive behaviour after losing the prime ministership and his increasingly strident utterances on climate change.

Going into 2022, does any Liberal MP fit that bill? One that comes to mind is Christian Porter, assuming he runs again in Pearce. A Voices of Pearce is up and running, though the seat is not quite in the leafy blue-ribbon category.

Can previous election data point us towards vulnerable MPs? In Abbott’s case, yes: 2016 saw a big 9 per cent drop in his primary vote, double-digit support for independent candidate James Mathison, and the Greens elevated to the two-candidate-preferred count.

In Mirabella’s case, the 2010 data doesn’t particularly add up to writing on the wall. And Indi, of course, is not urban, let alone particularly wealthy.

Ranking the difference between their own and their parties’ performance in the House and the Senate respectively can give an imprecise idea of MPs’ relative personal votes. On that score, the vulnerable Sydney Liberals are Jason Falinski in Mackellar and Trent Zimmerman in North Sydney.

Mackellar was the site of Labor speechwriter Bob Ellis’s 1994 “swing” against Bronwyn Bishop at a by-election (not really a swing; he hadn’t contested before), which was credited with ending her leadership ambitions. Several times in recent weeks Falinski has responded via Twitter to his Coalition colleague Matt Canavan’s climate change cynicism. An independent, Alice Thompson, hit double digits in 2019 (which accounts for Falinski’s low showing on the table linked above).

North Sydney was the home of long-running independent state MP Ted Mack. In 2019, though, former NSW upper house Democrat Arthur Chesterfield-Evans got only a modest 4.4 per cent.

John Alexander’s low placing in Bennelong is partly a reflection of his high-profile Labor opponent, Brian Owler. Next on the list is Julian Leeser in Berowra.

Down in Victoria, Oliver Yates had a red-hot go in Kooyong last time, but was overshadowed by a high-profile Greens candidate. The Greens are perennially hopeful in Higgins, and Voices would be too. Tim Wilson in Goldstein seems torn between the ideologically charged Institute of Public Affairs identity that earned him preselection and his electorate’s decidedly Turnbullesque leanings. The electorate has a Voices page.

Individually, each of the MPs mentioned above is likely to survive, but the chances are good that one or two Voices candidates will pop up somewhere.

And if we’re after an indicator on social progressiveness, maybe we can go no further than the 2017 marriage-equality survey results. Wentworth was fourth out of 150, Warringah tenth and Indi sixty-fifth. Start from the top, zero in on Liberal-held seats, and watch those spaces. •

The post Crossbench on a roll? appeared first on Inside Story.

Does it behove Labor in particular to have a more ethnically diverse group of MPs in federal, state and territory parliaments? As the major centre-left party, it receives outsized support from Indigenous people and people from non-English-speaking backgrounds. It’s the major party one would expect to look “multicultural” and, of course, “looking” like that should translate into policies.

No one would nag One Nation or the United Australia Party or even the Nationals about a lack of diversity.

And yet, like most Australian institutions, Labor looks whiter than the country. An unwillingness to preselect people of colour seems to be part of its general timidity, its continuing capitulation to John Howard’s idea of the nation, its terror of falling out of favour with “middle Australia” (characterised as white). The same caricaturing of voters saw Labor lag behind other centre-left parties in Western democracies, and ultimately the electorate itself, in getting behind marriage equality.

Behind the scenes, by contrast, and particularly in New South Wales, diversity seems to rule, but those individuals themselves seem at least, if not more, enthralled by clunky ideas about what the electorate will tolerate. Remember national secretary Karl Bitar’s 2010 “Lindsay test”? (According to the census, Lindsay has Sydney’s second-lowest percentage of residents who speak a language other than English in the home, after Scott Morrison’s seat of Cook.)

This week’s political fuss is about the decision to parachute the high-profile former NSW premier, senator Kristina Keneally, into one of the country’s most multicultural electorates, the very safe (for Labor) Fowler. The immediate impetus came from her relegation to the third (unwinnable) Senate spot on the party’s ticket, but as someone with big ambitions she would probably have been eyeing the lower house at some point anyway.

Retiring MP Chris Hayes, who even when he first entered parliament in Werriwa in 2005 seemed like a throwback to a Calwellian golden age, and who himself was handed Fowler after the 2009 reshuffle-induced musical chairs of sitting Labor MPs, handpicked a local to take his place. That young lawyer, Tu Le, whose parents were Vietnamese refugees, has become “the” local candidate for the media in what’s presented as a binary choice, although it’s possible others in the local branch see things differently.

People of a certain age will remember Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett’s installation in Kingsford Smith in 2004. He’d only just joined the party, and his candidature generated a lot of complaining from people we hadn’t heard of. You’re waiting for years for the MP to retire, and when he or she finally does, some rock star is shoehorned in. Theo Theophanous’s 1995 televised tears after being pushed aside in Batman by ACTU head Martin Ferguson also come to mind.

But parties do this. It’s how they bring new talent into parliament. Very often the state office plays a role: no less than the current prime minister was installed in his electorate over the objections of local branches. And of course the preselection in Wills was just one stage of Bob Hawke’s unstoppable journey to the Lodge. He was hardly Wills born and bred.

The problem is that the reliably safe Labor seats are mostly high in people from non-English-speaking backgrounds.

At first glance, Liberal candidates in western Sydney seem more ethnically diverse, more representative of minority communities. But the catch is that those seats are safe Labor. In fact, the current list of major-party candidates contains plenty of “minority”-looking names, on both sides, but they’re overwhelmingly in unwinnable seats. There’s not much demand for those spots.

Keneally was premier for the biggest election loss in NSW history. But that would’ve happened whoever was in charge. She remained pretty popular to the end, and voters were lukewarm about opposition leader Barry O’Farrell, and yet it was the most one-sided result in the state’s history. It throws up the question of how much leaders’ popularity really matters at general elections.

Keneally did well at the 2017 Bennelong by-election (insofar as by-elections can be judged), with the biggest favourable swing for Labor, 4.8 percentage points, of all the by-elections prompted by the discovery of section 44 in the Constitution. (The most ballyhooed, Longman, was just 3.7 points.) Canning in 2015 (6.6) was bigger, but that came after the death of a very popular Liberal MP, Don Randall. (Section 44 by-elections were unusual, of course, because most of them had sitting MPs.)

Despite her obvious qualities, there’s a troubling — how should I put this? — Lathamesque side to Keneally, a similar mix of energy, headline grabbing and poor political judgement. A decade ago she was reported as suggesting the Gillard government dump its newly announced “carbon tax,” which was very Sussex Street advice, all polling and clipboards and no understanding of electoral dynamics, of how voters behave. The Rudd government had cut loose its own scheme a year before, and it cost the prime minister his job and (in my opinion) Labor its majority at the election.

And Keneally’s swashbuckling in the home affairs portfolio over the last two years, attacking the government from the right, left and centre on immigration, is just playing with fire. Two years ago I called her appointment to that portfolio Anthony Albanese’s “first big blunder.” Immigration is the area Labor needs to steer clear of.

Keneally’s ready-made personal vote would make her an excellent candidate for a Liberal-held marginal seat, such as Reid, but of course talent with a big T doesn’t want marginal seats, because they tend to go out with the tide.

Although much of the current discussion conflates the overriding of locals with the overly white face of Labor, they are really two different things. The high-flyers, those considered great enough to impose on grumpy locals, are still virtually all white. That’s a function of our society itself, but also of the institutionalised prejudices of the party and its somewhat outdated perceptions of the electorate. •

The post The ghost of governments past appeared first on Inside Story.

Retrospective formulations like this, which refer to margins in specific electorates while holding the rest of the country constant, are as unrealistic as they are common. It makes much more sense to talk of uniform swings. But even on its own terms this breezy statement isn’t remotely sustainable; many thousands of switched votes would have been required in 2019 to produce that situation. And a uniform swing (both from Coalition to Labor and from others to the Greens) would have needed to be in the hundreds of thousands. It didn’t come close.

About the future, on the other hand, there’s nothing to stop a person from dreaming, and Bandt thinks the “most likely outcome in the next federal election will be a minority Labor government and a power-sharing parliament between the Greens and Labor.”

The first portion, a minority Labor government, while not “most likely,” at least has a reasonable chance. The larger the crossbench, the more probable a hung parliament, and the current number — six — already opens up reasonable space. But the Greens are only one of the likely post-election half dozen or so.

(Ex-Liberal Craig Kelly is ignored as he will lose his electorate of Hughes, very likely to his former party.)

Of course, Bandt hopes the Greens will make gains in the House of Representatives. They hold similarly high hopes before every election, but the number of MPs has stubbornly remained one since 2010. And remember, it was Liberal how-to-vote cards that got Bandt into parliament eleven years ago. Had the Liberals done what they routinely do now, and preferenced Labor over the Greens, he wouldn’t have won. (And had the Liberals continued preferencing the Greens, the latter would very likely have won Batman in 2016, and possibly Wills the same year.)

But the Greens reckon the more they talk their chances up, the more likely it will happen. And they’re probably right; minor parties rely on publicity.

Generally speaking, in the electorates the Greens have in mind, which are mostly Coalition-held (or, at least, seats in which they envisage a two-candidate count between them and a Coalition party), they would count on a drop in the government support (a prerequisite for Labor’s taking office) that doesn’t mostly go to Labor (a taller order).

It’s true that Greens support, while not having grown much over the years (it peaked in most Australian jurisdictions around a decade ago), has become more and more concentrated where it matters. It no doubt speaks of the party’s campaigning prowess. But further increases in 2022 seem improbable.

Talk of a likely Labor–Greens alliance, arrangement, coalition or “power-sharing” is of course music to the Morrison government’s ears. They will be repeating the same message, citing the Greens leader, come the campaign. It works because most voters tend to shudder at the prospect.

In ACT elections, power-sharing is the norm, with Greens in cabinet, and is accepted by the electorate. But the nature of that electorate means it’s very rare for Labor not to form government. People are long used to it. By contrast, Tasmanian Labor (also under Hare-Clark proportional representation) has shared power with the Greens a couple of times, and memories of those times are more unpleasant.

In countries with proportional representation — in New Zealand and European countries including Germany — Greens have long been embedded in voters’ expectations of centre-left governments. But federally in Australia, as I’ve argued before, the combination of a majoritarian lower house and a proportionally elected upper house — and a powerful one at that — produces the worst of both worlds. It’s usually winner take all in forming government, with big crossbenches in the Senate whose members have no reason to make life easy for whoever is governing, and many motivations (mainly the publicity) not to.

Bandt’s “power-sharing,” whatever that would mean, would alter that equation. We got a taste from 2010 to 2013, but it proved awfully damaging to that Labor government’s authority, and particularly to its prime minister, with the “carbon tax” (actually an emissions trading scheme with a three-year fixed price) emblematic. When the legislation passed in 2011, the Greens and the opposition loudly (and correctly) sang from the same sheet: it would never have happened if not for the minor party’s insistence. Is this how partners behave?

Eventually, leading up to the 2013 election, Labor and the Greens went their own ways, preparing to battle against each other, as perhaps was always going to be the case.

Maybe this kind of arrangement — and that applies to the right of politics and prospective partners like One Nation — really requires a proportional representation system for the relationships to become normalised in voters’ eyes and the compromises, particularly by the smaller participants, to be institutionalised. The decades-old Realos versus Fundis battles within Germany’s Green Party have been much studied. From 1998 to 2005 the Green leader was foreign minister, a situation mind-bogglingly unthinkable in the Australian context.

What is true is that if Labor forms government after the next election, any legislation opposed by the Coalition will need Greens support to pass the Senate. The Greens probably won’t be sufficient to reach thirty-nine out of seventy-six, but they will almost certainly be necessary.

This would thrill Greens supporters, and a lot of Labor ones too, but it would also, as under Julia Gillard, stifle the government’s policy and ideological wriggle room.

Since the Australian Democrats departed the scene, and since the Howard government’s upper house majority in its final term, the Senate has frustrated governments of both stripes. Along with the global financial crisis, this has been a driver of the instability and the prime ministerial turnstile over the last thirteen years. Whoever wins office at the next election, that’s unlikely to change. •

The post Crossbench dreaming appeared first on Inside Story.