I suspect I’ll be going on about the Western Australian election like a broken record over the next three weeks, but the fact is that it’s easily the best case study available if comparative psephology is your bag. That being so, I thought it might be worthwhile to compare today’s Galaxy issue polling with that the very same agency performed a week before the election that saw off Alan Carpenter.
Unfortunately, the two polls were not conducted in quite the same way. The Western Australian results on each issue curiously add up to over 100, so I’m guessing they must have asked if an area would improve over the term of a Labor or Liberal government, allowing answers of yes to both. This time, more sensibly, the two parties were put head to head on each issue. I’ve dealt with this by dividing each party’s results by the sum of them both, so all results add up to 100. Another anomaly is that Queensland respondents were asked about “water supply”, whereas Western Australians were asked about “water resources and environment”.
The first thing to be noted is that the headline figure of today’s poll, the LNP’s lead on health, was essentially replicated in WA. The big difference is that this wasn’t the worst of it for WA Labor, who were seen to have even less to offer on education, law and order and two other questions which Queensland respondents were spared: “sharing benefits of WA boom” and “providing open and accountable government”. Queensland Labor also did well in the two areas not included in the WA survey, roads and public transport. It might just be that the overall public mood in Queensland is less sour, and the swing that seems to have been recorded on voting intention comes down to cynicism about the early election.
That being so, it’s unfortunate Galaxy hasn’t given us results from a most pertinent question that was asked in the WA survey: “Has the decision to call an early election made you more or less likely to vote for the Labor Party?” Three weeks after the announcement, at a time when Labor would have hoped the issue had faded from memory, 27 per cent said it would make them less likely to vote Labor (against a contrarian 4 per cent who said more likely). It remains to be seen if similiar sentiments which are evidently abroad in Queensland prove quite as durable.
18 Comments
Interesting similarities there William with the big difference being that Barnett only had to go as far right as the National Party to form government. The National Party would have to go to a grab-bag of loopy independents.
The WA election was basically a Perth election plus 500,000 people in the rest of the state.
The Qld election is a Brisbane election but the 2,000,000 people who do not live in Brisbane are more than the entire population of WA. The ALP hold an overwhelming number of seats in Brisbane with large margins. Not the case in WA re Perth. Qld is the only state where the majority of the population do not live in the capital city.
Sorry William any attempt to draw a correlation between the two state elections is folly.
They are both two-party contests in Australian states with long-established governments taking place roughly one year after a change of government at federal level that was preceded by 21 successive state Labor victories and has thus far been followed by one Labor defeat. To pretend that they have nothing at all in common because of a few differences is totally stupid.
It kinda works, ruawake… it’s just got the confusing feature that WA Libs = Qld Nats / LNP, and WA Nats = Qld populist independents. I don’t doubt if there was a hung parliament that Foley, Wellington etc would try to get some goodies for their neck of the woods – Brendon Grylls got his ‘Royalties For Regions’ $$$, and Tony Windsor did similar in Tamworth at the 1991 NSW election when Nick Greiner lost his majority. Grylls has much more in common with people like Peter Wellington than he does with the Qld Nats, let alone the LNP.
Sorry William you are wrong. There are entirely different factors in play. This is the first election held with the GFC in full swing.
WA and Qld have vastly different economies and vastly different population demographics.
The only similarity is that they are Australian States.
Ruawake, there is enormous synchronicity between the macro-political factors of the two elections, such as the operation of the electoral cycle and the interplay of state and federal politics under a new government. Not for one second have I suggested that these matters are the be-all and end-all of the election. In fact, I don’t expect the two elections to produce the same result – although I do expect a swing against Labor, for preceisly the macro-political reasons I’ve mentioned.
This is serious abuse of the word “vastly”.
No it is not. State GDP from mining 8% Qld – 21% WA. for instance.
I suppose a 38% difference is not vast?
Hmm…
Perth = Brisbane
Gold Coast / Sunshine Coast = Mandurah
Bunbury, Albany, Geraldton = Townsville, Cairns, Toowoomba
Kalgoorlie = Mt Isa
up north = up north
Qld does have a larger proportion of people outside the capital, but by another way of looking at it they’re quite similar. Compare the populations of pairs of cities: Perth and Bunbury (1.5m vs 60,000), then Brisbane and Townsville (2m vs 150,000). Both states have the capital, followed by beach satellite cities, followed fairly distantly by a few regional cities, mostly in the same general region (south west WA, the Qld coast).
Certainly the economies are different, but the only way you can say they are vastly so is by cherry-picking WA’s single most distinctive industry, as you have predictably done.
Place of birth: WA has more from Britain and South Africa. English speakers: slightly lower in WA. Median income: slightly higher in WA (for now). Age profiles, religion, marriage rate, full-time workforce, home ownership: just about identical.
OK
Tourism?
Domestic Property? (50,000 population increase per year).
Infrastructure? ($17,000 per head – more than all other states combined).
Medical Research?
Gold Coast population 527,660 / Sunshine Coast population 290,645 = Mandurah population 67,813 – a vast difference
Train to get there: 130 km/hr vs, um… can you even get to the Sunshine Coast by train?
Governments cynically going to an early election…..check.
Oppositions desperately trying to paper over the cracks until election day…..check.
Er yep. Tilt train.
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Ruawake scores a free lunch from Qld Tourism!
Adding a solitary comma, for fun…
Dear Qld Tourism: ‘fast’ is an adjective. ‘Quickly’ is an adverb, which goes with a verb such as ‘becoming’ like bacon with eggs.