I will use this post to provide ongoing commentary of late counting in doubtful seats over the coming days/weeks.
UPDATE (27/3/07): Christian Kerr points to a slow count in today’s Crikey:
The ever-protracted count for the NSW Legislative Council election is likely to be even slower this time, with the Australian Electoral Commission refusing to authorise any more overtime for the AEC staff engaged for the count. There have been unprecedented levels of cooperation between the AEC and the NSW electoral authorities this election, but after just two days of preparing for the Upper House count over the weekend, the AEC has gone into a panic about the likely level of overtime, and has literally ordered its workers to take a “rest”. Counting will now finish each day at 5pm, with no approval for overtime to complete the count. With Easter imminent, this delay is likely to push back the announcement of the Upper House results substantially. The NSW Electoral Commission is understood to have expected the AEC to finish the Legislative Council count by Wednesday. The AEC told staff that the Electoral Commissioner has been informed that he will have to adjust his timetable. No amended timeframe for the conclusion of the count was suggested. A major outcry from furious Government, opposition and minor parties about the delay in finalising the count for the Upper House count in 2003, marred by slow counting and a total meltdown in the computer software used for calculating the results, saw new procedures adopted for the 2007 election. Efficiency was supposed to have been increased by the use of AEC staff in the count.
Legislative Council
| Roy Smith (Shooters) | 83,320 | 0.61 |
| Trevor Khan (Nationals) | 57,727 | 0.43 |
| Arthur Chesterfield-Evans (Democrats) | 50,335 | 0.37 |
| Janey Woodger (AAFI) | 46,332 | 0.34 |
| Robert Smith (Fishing) | 45,460 | 0.34 |
Sunday 3pm. I’m not doing too well here – I now realise the Legislative Council Summary figures I was just getting excited about have been little changed in the past week. They tell us of 3.3 million votes out of roughly 4 million in total, including 293,240 "other" votes that include (I believe) both informals and below-the-lines. The progressive totals figures show us the destination of 13,566 out of a probable total of about 80,000 below-the-line votes; from these the Democrats have polled 5.6 per cent and the Coalition 17.2 per cent, bearing in mind that not all of these votes will stay within the party ticket. Using these figures to extrapolate the as-yet-uncounted votes, I have the Democrats with a fractional lead over the Nationals’ Trevor Khan, but the margin is far too close (and the method far too crude) for anything to be stated with confidence.
Saturday 11pm. Okay, turns out all that effort on the previous entry was wasted. Because as well as the daily PDF file update, the NSWEC also has on its main page a different count with 3,278,467 votes. This includes 293,240 "other" votes, which probably means about 200,000 informals plus yet-to-be-counted below-the-line votes. There would be about 700,000 further to come. These figures show that the Shooters Party are home, while the gap between the Coalition and the Democrats has narrowed considerably. If the Coalition’s share continues to decline at the same rate as it did between the 1.9 million count and the 3.3 million count, the outcome will be very close indeed.
Saturday 10pm. A further 765,023 votes have been added, bringing the total to 1,938,396 out of a likely 4 million. This has resulted in a significant shift in the aggregate vote from the Coalition (down from 35.4 per cent to 34.4 per cent) to Labor (up from 40.4 per cent to 41.4 per cent). If there was reason to think that trend would continue, Labor’s number 10 candidate Barry Calvert might still be out of the hunt. However, aggregate lower house figures (Labor 39.0 per cent, Coalition 37.0 per cent) suggest that won’t be the case, even when taking into account the Coalition’s traditionally lower vote in the upper house (33.0 per cent against 35.0 per cent in 2003). In the meantime, the drop in the Coalition vote has reduced their surplus over the seventh quota from 0.78 to 0.56, almost enough to return the Nationals’ Trevor Khan to twenty-first place, with the Shooters Party up from 0.53 to 0.55.
Friday 8pm. The NSWEC has published a group and candidate votes report, based on the results of 1,168,246 group votes and 5,127 below-the-lines. The totals in 2003 were 3,721,457 and a bit over 70,000. Ben Raue says the two combined suggest the Nationals’ Trevor Khan has moved up a spot from 20 to 21; if this continues, the final spot looms as a race between the Shooters Party (0.53 quotas), Unity (0.35), the Democrats (0.35) and AAFI (0.30), with the Fishing Party slowly but surely headed for the exit (don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out, Bob Smith).
Friday 3pm. Props to Upperhouse.info for pointing out the following message from the NSWEC: "Legislative Council progressive totals will be provided daily in this directory from the evening of Friday 30 March 2007".
Sunday 5pm. The raw numbers at present look straightforward enough: Labor 9, Coalition 8, Greens 2, CDP 1, Shooters Party 1. However, Stephen L in comments cautiously offers that the Democrats (and perhaps also AAFI and the Fishing Party) might do well enough on below-the-lines and preferences to stay in the hunt against the Nationals’ Trevor Khan, eighth Coalition candidate and Poll Bludger fan.
| Greg Piper | 12,913 | 30.3 | 18,656 | 50.1 | ||||
| Jeff Hunter | 17,294 | 40.6 | 18,550 | 49.9 |
Wednesday 2am. One more change of lead in the final strait has given Greg Piper a 106-vote win after the full distribution of preferences.
Monday 2.30pm. Another 940 absent votes have produced yet another change of lead, Jeff Hunter now ahead by 65 votes. Antony Green notes in comments that the closest outcome in modern times was the Liberals’ eight-vote win in Coogee in 1973; this was overturned on a legal challenge, and Labor won the ensuing by-election by 54 votes.
Monday 1.30pm. The lead changes again after the addition of 496 further absent votes, which have put Greg Piper 44 votes in front.
Friday 5pm. In an exciting late-count development, Greg Piper has done very poorly from the addition of 1,988 absent votes (23.7 per cent compared with 30.7 per cent overall), which have turned Labor incumbent Jeff Hunter’s 272-vote deficit into a 22-vote lead.
Thursday 10pm. More than 3000 postal votes and about 700 further pre-polls added; still no absent votes. Greg Piper’s lead has changed little, from 263 to 272.
Wednesday 9pm. Excellent account of today’s slow progress from Sally McEwan in comments, along with informed talk of deep Labor pessimism.
Tuesday 4.30pm. Very good call yesterday from Sally McEwan – the second batch of pre-polls has been very similar to the first, barring a slightly higher primary vote for the Liberals. This boosted Greg Piper’s lead by 243 votes; however, 122 "Dec Inst" votes have reeled him in slightly, going 59-15 in Labor’s favour. Piper’s lead is now 263, but with well over 5000 postal and absent votes pending, it’s still too close to call.
Monday 11.30pm. Sally McEwan corrects my previous description of Carey Bay as a conservative area: "Carey Bay pre-poll is different from Carey Bay conservative lakeside waterfront booth … The remainder of the pre-poll votes will favour Piper in the same proportion or greater".
Monday 10pm. Partial pre-poll results have been posted, 999 votes out of what scrutineer Sally McEwan says is about 2000. These votes are "a mix of Cooranbong and Carey Bay", which is to say they include the much touted Seventh Day Adventist community, along with another conservative area. As expected, these votes have strongly favoured Greg Piper, whose 158-vote deficit has turned into a lead of 64. This sounds a little disappointing from Piper’s perspective, because the remainder of the pre-polls will presumably be strong for Labor. Next comes about 3000 absent votes and 2250 postals – these differed only slightly from the polling booth results in 2003, though Labor’s vote was notably a little lower and the "others" a little higher.
Monday 2.30pm. Looks like those Dora Creek votes for Piper stayed missing – his tally there has gone from 533 to 508. No word yet on pre-polls.
Monday 4am. A scrutineer at the count, Sally McEwan, says in comments she can "confirm the expected advantage to Independent Piper from the pre-poll votes from Cooranbong". These votes "will be counted and distributed tomorrow". McEwan also reports that "24 or so Piper votes" from the Dora Creek booth are "missing", "leading to extra State Electoral officers being called from Sydney for a reconstruction of the Dora Creek booth tomorrow".
Sunday 5pm. Labor incumbent Jeff Hunter leads independent Greg Piper by 158 votes. That would normally be difficult to close, given Labor’s organisational efficiency with respect to pre-poll and postal voting. However, Lake Macquarie has the quirk of the Seventh Day Adventist community at Cooranbong, which produces a big flow of mostly conservative pre-poll votes due to its observation of the Sabbath on Saturday. In 2003, Labor polled 795 votes (34.2 per cent) to the Liberals’ 1173 (52.4 per cent) on pre-polls, compared with overall totals of 54.9 per cent and 30.7 per cent. Pre-polls accounted for 5.1 per cent of the total vote; also still to come are the less quirky absent (7.3 per cent) and postal (5.3 per cent) votes. The latter might go a little better for Labor than last time, as consciousness of their danger might have resulted in a better organised postal vote campaign.
| Craig Baumann | 17,894 | 42.5 | 19,375 | 50.1 | ||||
| Jim Arneman | 17,544 | 41.7 | 19,311 | 49.9 |
Wednesday 2am. The margin widened to 64 votes after completion of the full preference distribution.
Friday 3pm. The notional preference count has been completed, and it points to a 19-vote Liberal victory. However, a "proper" preference count will now follow, and these can turn up anomalies. For example, the primary vote recount cut Chris Baumann’s vote by five votes and Jim Arneman’s by six (UPDATE: And more pertinently, as Geoff Lambert points out in comments, there were variations of up to five votes at individual booths).
Thursday 10pm. Absent and postal votes are now coming in at a fair clip, and while it’s still extremely close, the trend has been with the Liberals. Antony Green’s regular updates show how Labor candidate Jim Arneman’s lead narrowed and then disappeared in late afternoon counting, with the Liberals’ Chris Baumann currently ahead by 56 votes.
Tuesday 8pm. Not much progress today: polling booth re-check completed and 213 "Dec Inst" votes added, increasing the Labor lead from 76 to 86.
Monday 10pm. Either Port Stephens has had an extraordinarily high number of section votes, or the pre-polls have been entered on the wrong line – I will assume the latter. There are 1,244 of them and they have tipped the see-saw back towards the Liberals, whose deficit has narrowed from 153 votes to 76. However, the 2003 figures suggest Labor should do better on absent and postal votes. Slow progress on the polling booth re-check for some reason.
Monday 4am. The Daily Telegraph reports confident noises from a Liberal scrutineer, as "many votes were exhausting because of a decision by the Greens not to preference Labor". Conversely, the Australian Financial Review reports that "Labor strategists are sounding increasingly confident".
Sunday 5pm. Labor’s Jim Arneman was 153 votes behind the Liberals’ Chris Baumann at the close of counting last night, but is now 111 votes ahead. Pre-poll and postal figures from 2003 are probably no guide, as the seat was less fiercely contested last time.
| Jodi McKay | 12,951 | 31.2 | 13,793 | 50.7 | ||||
| John Tate | 10,003 | 24.1 | 13,430 | 49.3 | ||||
| Bryce Gaudry | 8,774 | 21.1 |
Friday 9.30pm. Those two-candidate figures quoted in the Herald have now been posted on the NSWEC site.
Thursday 10pm. Yesterday, the Newcastle Herald told us that "an Electoral Commission notional distribution showed Ms McKay on 13,793 votes and Cr Tate on 13,430". Today it reported that "preliminary counts show that Cr Tate would gain more than 2000 votes on McKay once preferences are distributed". On present indications, that would leave him about 700 votes in arrears.
Tuesday 2am. The NSWEC reveals nothing of the two-candidate preferred count that has evidently been conducted between Jodi McKay and John Tate, but the Sydney Morning Herald reports Tate conceding he is 700 votes behind. Morris Iemma is claiming victory.
Monday 4am. Yesterday’s recheck of first preferences from polling booths has increased Tate’s tally by 18 and reduced McKay’s by 12. The aforementioned Anthony Llewellyn says: "having reviewed the results in total now, my guess is a McKay win over Tate by around 500 … Gaudry will not pull ahead of Tate (of this I am now very confident)". The Sydney Morning Herald reports Labor "has become more confident".
Sunday 5pm. Still anybody’s guess as far as I can see. There is a 2.6 per cent gap between John Tate (24.1 per cent) and Bryce Gaudry (21.5 per cent), which might be closed with preferences from the Greens (11.2 per cent), who directed to Gaudry. Last night’s NSWEC notional preference count assumed Gaudry rather than Tate would finish second; if that is so, Labor’s Jodi McKay will win quite comfortably. If not, the race between McKay and Tate will come down to unpredictable preference flows. Last night, reader Anthony Llewellyn provided a preference breakdown from a booth at which he was scrutineering: if this is applied consistently, Tate emerges ahead with 12,792 votes to 12,327 (not counting preferences from the CDP and three other independents, who collectively account for 915 votes). However, Llewellyn also spoke of better preference flows for Labor at other less conservative booths.
| Pru Goward | 16,994 | 39.9 | 18,632 | 51.3 | ||||
| Paul Stephenson | 10,544 | 25.3 | 17,657 | 48.7 |
Thursday 8pm. Paul Stephenson has conceded defeat after being buried by absent and postal votes, widening the lead to 975. This entry, and the figures above, will not be further updated.
Tuesday 2pm. A further 670 pre-polls have gone rather better for Goward than the previous two batches, increasing her lead by 10 votes. Even better for her are the 154 "Dec Inst Votes" (declaration and/or institution?), which have run 70-31 in her favour.
Monday 10pm. I was mistaken to say all the pre-polls were in – it was in fact only about half. The newly added second batch was not quite as bad for Goward as the first, but it still cost her another 40 votes or so.
Monday 2.30pm. Pre-polls are in (all of them, or almost all), and they are surprisingly poor for Goward – she has polled 35.7 per cent compared with her 39.8 per cent of ordinary votes, while Paul Stephenson has 30.6 per cent compared with 25.1 per cent. If preferences follow the same pattern, this will narrow the gap by 134 votes to a little over 300. In 2003, pre-polls were 5.6 per cent of the total – still to come are absents (8.8 per cent), postals (5.6 per cent) and a few others (0.7 per cent).
Monday 4am. Yesterday’s recheck of first preferences from polling booths appears to have unearthed 38 extra votes for Stephenson and only one for Goward. It appears that Goward is better placed than it seemed on election night due to an across-the-board increase in "plumped" voting (numbering one box and then exhausting) at this election.
Sunday 5pm. An updated count (polling booths only) has seen Pru Goward’s lead after preferences increase from 311 votes last night to a fairly handy 455. Talk of the Labor candidate beating Paul Stephenson into second place on preferences has faded.
| Frank Terenzini | 14,819 | 39.7 | 16,741 | 50.9 | |||
| Peter Blackmore | 10,093 | 27.1 | 16,157 | 49.1 |
Friday 9.30pm. The NSWEC has finally unveiled its notional Labor-versus-independent two-candidate preferred, which shows Frank Terenzini a comfortable 584 votes ahead. That wraps it up for my coverage of this seat.
Thursday 10pm. This count has stayed on ice for some reason, at least as far as the NSWEC website is concerned, but the ABC reports Labor is more than 1,000 votes ahead.
Tuesday 2pm. Very slow progress in the count, but Morris Iemma has claimed victory for Labor.
Monday 4am. The Sydney Morning Herald reports Labor "has become more confident".
Sunday 5pm. As with Newcastle, this is one that will depend on preference flows we don’t know about yet because the notional count was Labor-versus-Liberal, rather than Labor-versus-Peter Blackmore. For what it’s worth, the primary vote figures (Blackmore 27.1 per cent, Labor 39.8 per cent, Liberal 20.1 per cent) are similar to those Pru Goward faces in Goulburn (Paul Stephenson 25.0 per cent, Liberal 39.9 per cent, Labor 22.4 per cent). The difference being that Blackmore will need a strong flow of preferences from the Liberals, while Stephenson will need them from Labor. Can anyone suggest if supporters of one party or the other are more dutiful with respect to how-to-vote instructions?
| Dawn Fardell | 17,158 | 41.9 | 19,270 | 50.9 | ||
| Greg Matthews | 17,518 | 42.8 | 18,590 | 49.1 |
Wednesday 8pm. With most postals and about 600 absent votes now in, any remaining doubt is now gone. Fardell’s lead has now widened to 680 votes, or 0.9 per cent. No further updates will be added to this entry.
Tuesday 4.30pm. Pre-poll figures are now up at the NSWEC site, and they tell a different story to the Financial Review – 2318 for Dawn Fardell and 2177 for the Nationals, widening Fardell’s lead to a surely unassailable 521.
Tuesday 2am. It falls to the Australian Financial Review to inform us that "two-thirds of the pre-poll votes have been counted, according to the returning officer. The results have favoured Nationals challenger Greg Matthews, who garnered 1495 of the pre-poll votes on offer while 1453 went to incumbent independent Dawn Fardell". These results are yet to appear on the NSWEC site. However, this makes only a modest dent in what had been a 401-vote lead.
Monday 2.30pm. Re-checking of polling booth first preferences has now been completed, giving a 42-vote boost to Dawn Fardell. Most notably, 37 votes have been deducted from the Nationals at the Forbes booth.
Sunday 5pm. Independent candidate Dawn Fardell leads Nationals candidate Greg Matthews by 401 votes. The precedent of 2003, when then-independent member Tony McGrane did somewhat less well on non-ordinary than polling booth votes (from a near identical vote total to Fardell’s), suggests this could yet narrow.
542 Comments
I think Labor has lost Lake Macquarie. As Antony notes on his site, the pre-poll goes heavily against Labor because of the sabbath keeping Seven Day Adventist community at Cooranbong
Thanks for pointing that out OC; my Lake Macquarie entry has been comprehensively rewritten. I still would not write Labor off though because I expect they would have put a lot of effort into their postal campaign this time, although I am inclined to defer to your superior wisdom.
It would be tragic if the dems didn’t get in in NSW.
Re your question about following preference instructions – having scrutineered last night, I would say Labor voters are very good at it. Liberals have a more maverick streak, particularly in Labor-held seats.
Labor sent out at least two postal vote invitations, five weeks and two weeks ahead of the poll, and had them on all their street stalls, plus chased all the phone calls they got from little old ladies asking for help with signing them.
Is the possibility of Labor finishing second ahead of Paul Stephenson in Goulburn still being discussed?
Does anyone know anything about reports Carmel Tebutt is standing from the Ministry for “family reasons”?
If true, it is sad. She is truly one of the most competent ministers in the current cabinet.
But then it must be really hard to run a household that contains two high profile MPs, particularly in double election year.
We should have a vote on the NSW Commissions web site. I am not impressed nearly as bad as Victoria’s. Why it that you can not pull down the polling booth upper-house results as one data file. At least they had a breakdown which is better the the Victorian Electoral Commission who still refuses to publish polling place results four maths after the election.
Looking at the results of Sydney, Balmain inner city booths the Greens did well. out polling on many occasions the ALP. Maybe this is a “Gay vote” as Danish claims exists in parts of Melbourne also (but to a much lesser extent).
Who much of the Green vote is branding as opposed to serious policy development.
As in Victoria access to the preference data files is fundamental is and when scrutinising any electronic count.
Any assessment on the impacts of optional voting or oddities in the NSW count system such as random sampling etc..?
Having scrutineered @ Lake Macquarie today, I can confirm the expected advantage to Independent Piper from the pre-poll votes from Cooranbong pre-poll. They will be counted and distributed tomorrow.
In other news, about 10 scrutineers arrived from Sydney ALP, led by former member for adjacent seat Wallsend, John Mills, in his second day of retirement, and there were about 5 Piper Scrutineers.
The Dora Creek booth recount produced the most excitement, with 24 or so Piper votes missing, leading to extra State Electoral Officers being called from Sydney, for a reconstruction of the Dora Creek Booth tomorrow.
The office will again be guarded by security officers tonight.
Melb city, on the point about the gay vote, Clover Moore did very well in Surry Hills, which has got a strong gay population – she got about 50% of the primary vote (as opposed to about 40% over the entire electorate). The Greens primary vote in the seat stood still at 15% – I suspect that some otherwise Greens voters vote for Clover.
Certainly, the Legislative Council vote for the seat of Sydney appears to show that, if Clover wasn’t contesting the seat, the Libs, Greens and ALP get roughly the same vote (although it’s hard to know how all the votes for “others” would distribute to), and it’d be a fight between Labor and the Greens.
Just on the seat of Sydney, I’ll probably write a post about the result on my blog, but briefly, the Greens stood still, the Libs went slightly up, Clover got ~9% swing to her, and Labor got a 9% swing against, on the primary votes. Interestingly, the swing to Clover on a Clover vs ALP basis was only ~2.5% – one explanation for which could be that more Greens/Lib voters did not preference Clover this time as compared to last time. I don’t know what the HTV cards looked like last time, but I think that this time all four major candidates just suggested that voters just mark a 1.
On my blog, someone associated with the Liberal candidate (Edward Mandla) wrote that Edward can be working very hard, that a lot of money had recently been bet on him winning and that we should get ready for an upset. Unfortunately for him, the Lib vote only slightly increased and not nearly enough to win.
I can think of at least two reasons for the 9% swing from Labor to Clover on the primary vote. My guess is that Clover is an obvious Independent candidate to vote for by people who didn’t want to vote for Labor and didn’t want a Liberal govt – she generally supports “progressive” policies and could be acceptable to many people who might otherwise support a labor govt. Secondly, it could be that Clover has gained support from her being Lord Mayor of the City of Sydney. Some people might be quite happy with her work.
One question in inner-Sydney state and local politics is, when will Clover not contest a state or local election? Some people have suggested that she won’t contest the next state election.
William, Green preferences are going 2nd to Stephenson in goulburn, then to ALP, so their is NO WAY the ALP will overtake Stephenson. The full list of Green preferences are available on their website:
http://nsw.greens.org.au/materials/leaflets/A4%20Absentee%20Booklet.pdf
I’d like to know which of the independents the Libs have preferenced in Newcastle, as this will decide which of them faces off against the ALP.
I’ve checked the Lib website and there’s no info. Does anyone know?
http://www.nsw.liberal.org.au/images/stories/htv2007/coalition-sw_htv.pdf
Actually Sacha, neither of your reasons are correct. Clover Moore’s 9% increase in her primary vote comes about simply because of a mathematical quirk. The swing comes about because everyone has just taken my redistribution calculations without thinking about what they represent.
At the 2003 election, Clover Moore polled 41.6% in those parts Bligh within the new electorate of Sydney. However, she polled nothing in the areas added from Port Jackson, which means her total primary vote for the entire district of Sydney ended up at 32.4%.
In a back of the envelope calculation, she appears to have got roughly the same vote in her old parts of Sydney, with all the increase caused by the votes for her in areas she had not previously contested. There is no mystery behind the 9% swing.
Antony said: In a back of the envelope calculation, she appears to have got roughly the same vote in her old parts of Sydney, with all the increase caused by the votes for her in areas she had not previously contested.
Yes, the swings in the “common” booths seem to average about 3%, not 9%, but even this is necessarily skewed by the different catchments for the same booths before and after redistrib..
Thanks Antony – of course – I think I must have trusted the ABC web-site!
Can anyone tell me who holds the balance of power in the NSW upper house?And people on here have said the Greens never voted with the ALP on anything. What where these votes on?
More (Moore?)on Sydney
By extreme Excel lookup contortions, based on the NSWEC’s EMA file, it would seem that there was a swing against Moore of about 5.4% in the 20 booths that share a common name between 2003 and 2004. In 2005 there were 28 booths…. 8 have gone, there are 4 new ones, leaving only 20 that can be used for comparisons.
The EMA data does have SOME uses, after all.
So far the cross-benches in the Council seem to be 4 Greens, 2 Christian Fasc… oops Democrats, 2 Gun-nuts, and 1 seat in doubt, which might go to either the Democrat Chesterfield-Hyphen, or the Fish Party.
The references to the Greens’ voting record related to Victoria, not NSW.
I’ve just copied the voting figures for the Bligh 2003 and Sydney 2007 results from the electoral commission website into a spreadsheet to compare them. Comparing the booths in the suburbs that were in both Bligh 2003 and Sydney 2007, I get Moore on 41.1% in 2003 and on 42.8% in 2007. (Caveat: a polling booth called The Oval appears in the 2003 file but not the 2007 figures and I havn’t included it. Including this booth in the 2003 data gives a figure of 41% for Moore in 2003).
Using these same booths, the ALP vote drops by 5%, the Liberal vote goes up by 1.7% and the Greens go up by 2.1%. Malcolm Duncan, this time at the top of the ballot, goes up by 0.9%.
In the areas that were not in Bligh but are in Sydney (Millers Pt, Ultimo and Pyrmont), Moore received 32.7%, Labor 26.8%, Liberals 23.8% and Greens 12.1%.
More more Moore….that would be TO Moore…. have to get your cells round the right way.
My computer can’t load up the webpage for the Vaucluse LA results.
You said it Adam – to borrow/steal from Monty Python: “Fred Nile has taken Umbrage – no suprise there…”
Geoff, about booth names: Plunkett St is no doubt in Woolloomoolloo (it’s probably the state school). Flinders would be Flinders St and the area is still in the seat, there’s Chippendale and Chippendale East – each would have been in both seats.
I had mistakenly included Redfern booths in comparing the 2003 and 2007 results. Taking these out, the ALP vote drops by 4%, the Lib vote goes up by 1%, Moore’s vote goes up by 1.2% and the Greens go up by 2%.
and all this micropsephology proves what exactly?
It certainly says something about the nature of this election that only one of those “seats to watch” is a contest between the major parties, and none of them are in Sydney. Goulburn is the closest to Sydney out of the bunch of seats, and Newcastle is really the only urban seat on the list.
As an attempt at a summary of the Leg Council position, and the change from the pre-election Council:
Labor: 18-17
Coalition: 13-14/15
Greens: 3-4
CDP: 2-2
Shooters: 1-2
Democrats: 1-0/1
Jon Jenkins (ORP), David Oldfield (ex-ON), Peter Wong (Unity), and Peter Breen will all lose their seats.
The Fishing Party and Australians Against Further Immigration all have a chance of winning their first seat, and are up against Arthur Chesterfield-Evans (Democrats) and the 3rd Nationals candidate.
As an attempt to analyse it, I’ll categorise people as left-wing minors (Greens, Dems, Breen) or right-wing minors, and you get this:
Labor: 18-17
Coalition: 13-14/15
Minor-Left: 5-4/5
Minor-Right: 5-4/5
There’s also Unity, but I don’t know who you categorise them as. What it tells me is that the minor parties are being more consolidated in fewer parties, without a big change in the total number of overall crossbenchers. On the left, you could say that Breen’s seat went to the Greens and ACE is then a question mark, and on the left you could say that Jon Jenkins’ seat has gone to the Shooters Party and Oldfield’s seat is also left as a question mark.
Why isn’t Miranda on the list of seats? Labor is only ahead by 500 votes, according to the NSWEC website.
It may be 500 votes, but Collier is on 50.7%, and it is very very rare for a city electorate to turn around by that much on declaration votes. Collier would have to poll only 47% on the remaining votes to be defeated, when his declaration vote was slightly higher than his booth vote in 2003. After four more years as sitting member, it seems hard to believe he would do that badly on the votes to come.
Very well.
Antony,
Are you willing to hazard a guess on Port Stephens and Goulburn?
I don’t mean to post so many times so quickly, but I meant Labor 19, not 17.
So am I correct in saying that the Liberals did not win a single seat from Labor, and have no prospect of doing so? If so, surely Debnam cannot last much past the end of the year. Decorum will be maintained until the federal election, but then the knives will be out.
It looks like there is only one seat in doubt in the upper house and the Lib/Nats are a little in front of the Dems for that one, with AAFI and Fishing a little further behind. Unless there is a big swing in counting of pre-poll, postals and absentees votes then its 9 Labor, at least 7 Coalition, 2 Greens, 1 Nile, 1 Shooter, 1 in doubt.
The Electoral Commission upper house count includes below the line (BTL) votes and informals as part of the percentage of counted vote without allocating the BTLs to any groups. This distorts the percentages of the groups especially those that polled well, significantly underestimating their percentage vote. In the case of Labor who polled the best their raw percentage on the website is about a quota less than what Labor is polling in reality.
Also its great to see independents and minor parties upsetting the electoral pendulum. The Greens are coming second to Debnam in Vaucluse. Greens local Councillor David Shoebridge is just ahead of the Labor candidate. The Greens are also coming second in North Shore just ahead of the Labor candidate. Maintaining that lead through pre-poll and postal votes will be difficult, but the point is there are an increasing number of seats where one of the major parties does not figure in the two candidate preferred count.
On tonight’s figures there are two Greens v Liberals two party preferred seats, and with Balmain and Marrickville 2 Greens v Labor 2 party preferred seats. There are a few other seats where The Greens are not far off toppling one of the major party candidates for second place.
So how many seats are now not Labor v. Coalition contests, and is that a record?
A quick list
-Balmain
-Marrickville
-Vaucluse
-North Shore
-Manly
-Pittwater
-Dubbo
-Goulburn
-Northern Tablelands
-Newcastle
-Maitland
-Tamworth
-Lake Macquarie
-Hawkesbury
-Orange
-Port Macquarie
That’s 16 out of 93, which is 17% of the seats. Is there any more, and is that a record?
Adam, they might win Port Stephens. Your other points still stand.
Adam – Port Stephens remains a “prospect”.
And I just remembered that ON had 11 seats in the 1998 Queensland election, which I assume means that they came second in enough other seats to beat that record, but I reckon it must be a record for NSW.
Ben,
Independents polled 2nd in Shellharbour and Willoughby.
Although Green prefs might shoot Labor into the Willougby runoff.
Ben, add Barwon, Charlestown, Shellharbour and just maybe Myall Lakes. Might be a bit early to call North Shore.
Geoff, why is it “great to see independents and minor parties upsetting the electoral pendulum”? Do you want a hung parliament, a weak and unstable government, being held hostage by loopy independents and their narrow barrow-pushing NIMBYism? I don’t.
Hung parliaments and weak and unstable governments held hostage by loopy independents and their narrow barrow-pushing NIMBYism, I can handle. But there’s one thing I cannot stand, and that’s an untidy pendulum.
Antony
Just a mythtake
http://www.abc.net.au/elections/nsw/2007/results/lccount.htm
seems to refer to the “Senate” in NSW
perhaps a template error?
Its still the LC , I’m sure.
Disasterboy
Adam, it would take an essay to respond properly to your question. Whether one party control or minority goverment is better depends on the politics of those in power. Labor for example has not had a majority in the upper house in NSW in its 12 years in office, but that has not caused the sky to fall in, and in the years 1988-91 when there was no majority in the NSW lower house the independents brought about some good reforms such as fixed four year term elections to remove the undemocratic practice of the gov calling an election when it suited them. The worst legislation eg WorkChoices, has come about with one party control of the House of Reps and Senate.
I have no time for right wing independents/parties, but most of the independents in the NSW parliament are/were moderate or progressive. We have two party dominance by two conservative parties, one less so than the other. Both are almost puppets of big business including commercial media interests, and that is not good for democracy. The best achievable outcome for NSW in the 2007 election given the politics of the independents that had a chance, would have been a minority Labor goverment. At least no one party dominates the upper house. Its not really much of an inconvenience for Labor in any case – if they want to pass conservative legislation they can rely on the Coalition, Niles and Shooters for support, and if they want to pass progressive legislation then they can rely on The Greens. And I’m sorry about the pendulum William.
Geoff,
I think it was 1991 to 1995 that independents (Peter MacDonald, Clover Moore, John Hatton & Tony Windsor) held the balance of power and brought about reforms.
From 1988 to 1991, I believe that the coalition held an absolute majority even though there were 8 independents in a house of 110.
Make that 7 not 8 independents from 1988 to 1991.
In answer to the question about who the libs preferenced in newcastle – it was Tate. This was in my opinion a problem for Tate. He needs lib pref flows but would have been better off if this had been disguised somewhat better. Tate made a significant tactical blunder imo in returning the favour to the libs. Had Tate managed to do a pref deal with gaudry it would now be all over results wise. To give gaudry his due (which is to elevate him from rodent to reptile) he was too clever to get involved in such a deal. Having reviewed the results in total now my guess is a mckay win over Tate by around 500. Gaudry will do slightly better on green prefs than Tate will on liberal. At least a third of each of these will exhaust first. Gaudry will not pull ahead of Tate (of this I am now very confident). The nsw EC shows a high exhaust total of about 25% when its mckay v gaudry. I’d expect it to be higher with Tate v mckay as gaudry die hards were following his instruction for a 1 vote only a lot. I would expect at least half of his pref flows to go alp. A few green prefs may end up finally assisting Tate but most will exhaust. Many people will probably view this as the best result possible I.e. a new and more capable labor member in a labor govt on a tight margin.
Having only made a quick glance view of the upper-house polling place results (Something Victoria use to publish but now refuses to publish and are seeking $5,000 for the information) I noticed that the Greens had out-polled the ALP on a number of inner city seats. Anyone care to provide more detailed analysis?
The NSW electoral commission is responsible for a major stuffup with the vote count for Epping. On my estimation, there is no way Greg Smith had a 2PP swing to him of 10%, and Martin Levine, who only got 5% of the primary vote and came a distant 5th, would have ended up with 30% of the 2PP vote.
Someone with a lot more knowledge of distribution of preferences might have a better idea what is going on there.
Evan, weren’t you the one saying how Greg Smith would be under serious threat from Levine?
Regardless, the count there surprises me as well – the way I can see it happening is if Levine swallows enough minor party preferences to unlock the Greens preferences, putting him ahead of Labor and receiving a few votes from Labor, giving him a result of around what we’re looking at. 2pp vs ALP definitely seems more likely though.
Anyone else with me on thinking that Graham Annesley in Miranda may outpoll Collier on pre-polls because of desal being more prominent earlier rather than later in the campaign, and also from Green preferences in pre-polling for same reason?
“a new and more capable labor member ”
You’ll get some argument about that. I went to the candidates forum and all we got was a repeat of the mantra of the last 6 months: community, passionate about Newcastle, fight for Newcastle. Cliche after cliche. All style no substance. We’ll now see how she copes when the Sydney machine chews her up and spits her out. The most profound thing she said on the night was:
“The future is in front of us”.
Adam, it doesn’t prove anything. I was just trying to understand what happened in the seat of Sydney.
Geoff Ash Says:
“I have no time for right wing independents/parties, but most of the independents in the NSW parliament are/were moderate or progressive. We have two party dominance by two conservative parties, one less so than the other. Both are almost puppets of big business including commercial media interests, and that is not good for democracyâ€
You might want to have a look at the campaign contribution of the Labor party and compare with contribution to the Liberals
You might also note that Bob Carr in his final act, put out a tender for a desalination plant, which Macquarie Bank got 40 Million (?) for supplying one. About 2 weeks after he quit, he was on the board of Macquarie Bank. Guess who is the favorite to get the Desalination plant infrastructure project?
Can the assembled commentariat let me know how long – approx – it will take to count the Town Hall, absent, postal etc votes? I understand the results won’t be officially declared for some time now, but can we expect the non-booth votes sometime today? Thanks
Epping: All electoral commissions do indicative counts of preferences on election night. These are done entirely to assist analysis on the night. However, it requires each officer in charge of a polling place to be given a list of two candidates to whom the preferences will be thrown. All primary votes are tallied, then the votes for all but the nominated final two candidates are re-examined to determine which of the final two will get their preferences. This is not an official count, merely one done for information purposes. The real distribution of preferences is only done for the electorate as a whole once all primary vote counting is completed. In the case of Epping and Maitland, the Commissioner picked the wrong two candidates. In Newcastle, the Commissioner picked a pair that may or may not be the final pairing.
Goulburn: Ms Goward is ahead by 455 votes, and given the difficulty Independents have with organising postal and absent votes, she should hold that seat. Her lead is over IND Stephenson. She will be even further ahead if Labor passes Stephenson.
Port Stephens: Labor on 50.2%, if the decalaration votes flow as last time, Labor will lose with 49.9%. In other words, if the declaration votes go stronger for Labor this time, they could win. So, it’s a definate undecided.
They start counting Postals and pre-polls today. Absent votes and the Sydney Town Hall booths get to the home district on Tuesday. The cut off for Postals is Thursday. The closer the seat, the greater the scrutineering effort, the longer it takes to get the final result.
Well done to EdwardStJohn, whom my memory (never reliable) tells me predicted the 53-47 2PP vote to the ALP.
However, that size swing (around 3.5%) can only be considered modest, given the circumstances. Labor should have been out on its ear, and it’s an indictment of the Libs that they did not even get close. They have made some gains in the marginals, so a win in 2011 is not out of the question, but they are going to have to run a damn sight better campaign that they did this time.
But it’s clear that it wasn’t just Debnam’s ineptness that got Labor back. WorkChoices is clearly one Federal issue that had a big impact, as has been suggested by numerous oped pieces, exit polling, pre-polling and focus groups. Of course, Howard and Hockey have been trying to explain it all away, but they are fully kidding themselves. These IR laws are poison for the Libs. I sometimes wonder that the reason the Libs just don’t get why people are worried about these IR laws is due to its preponderance of pre-selecting small-business types and corporate lawyers. Clearly the Liberal Party needs to broaden its variety of candidates!
So that’s 18 seats where an independent or Green came 1st or 2nd, with three others (Willoughby, North Shore, Myall Lakes) where there’s a chance.
It was the hung parliament of 1991-95, that brought about the demise of Nick Greiner during the Metherill affair. Greiner was cleared of all charges by the Supreme Court but this was well and truly after the independents gave him the choice of resigning or handing the baton to Carr.
If they had not done this, I am sure Greiner would have stayed leader till the 95 election and I will speculate that he could have easily won.
Even though I was happy to see the end of Greiner, I will agree with Adam that a stable majority in the house that provides government is much better than a government dependent on sectional interests.
I believe the system in NSW is very fair, with the LC you only need 2-3% public support to get a publically financed soap box on which you can broadcast your interests.
Hi Barney
I guess only time will tell if Jodi McKay is a “more capable member”. I think she can do it (but admit i am biased). The point is she could hardly be less capable than the now ousted member.
I was puzzled by the campaign slogan – “Bryce Gaudry – Standing up for Newcastle”, when a lot of people felt “Bryce Gaudry – Sleeping on the Job” was probably closer to the mark.
This became even more comical on election day when his campaign workers referred to him as the “Bryce Gaudry – the Sitting Member”.
“Which one is it?”, I ventured to say. “Sitting or standing?”. I wondered if it was possible to do both at the same time and whether the candidate would be prepared to come to the booth and demonstrate the new pose?
At which point one of Bryce’s campaign posters fell over with a puff of wind…
According to The Australian, O’Farrell will be announcing his challenge to Debnam at 1pm.
Thank you Hugo,
You may see the SMH analysis and indirectly Nielsen that WorkChoices is worth 1-2% swing to the ALP federally which I think is likely to be correct.
Given that its not likely to be enough particularly as the outer west swings were equal to or better than the North Shore/ Sutherland swings suggest the outer Western Sydney Howard battlers wont change over WorkChoices (where it is needed)
Where Labor did better than expected was in the Illawarra which suggests Labor voters swung towards Labor on WorkChoices.
Bottom Line: Violent agreement from Labor voters. Heavy Kevvie aint going to become PM without root and branch reform of the ALP and new policies as Costello says if you want a Liberal government why wouldnt you vote for the real thing and not the imitation.
oakshott, the current system maybe ok for you, but if your part of that large group that isn’t represented by the big two, then you can understand why we hate it.
and of course Adam like the current system, he is part of it. Or was until recently.
I was pretty sceptical about ESJ’s predictions, and the fact is that he was (significantly) over-optimistic on the LNP side, at one point listing 8 Labor seats and predicting 6 of them would fall.
But, give the guy his due, he got 53:47 bang-on. I just don’t think that state/nationwide 2PPs are as informative as many people think they are, and the 2007 NSW state election result (contrasted with the 2003 result) is a good example of why.
As for the whole WorkChoices thingie, the following was ESJ’s pre-poll take on assessing whether the NSW state election says anything about it as a vote-winner/loser:
“the Howard battlers which in NSW are your outer western sydney tradesman type voter are the people who supposedly have been turned off the rodent by workchoices. If WChoices is the silver bullet election changer you would expect they would all vote ALP in a campaign which has run an almighty scare about W/Choices without a response from Team Debnam (ie swings to the ALP in Camden and Wollondilly or a lower than state wide Lib swing).”
Surely Penrith would have to be included in the “outer western Sydney tradesman type voter” demographic. So, the evidence on the theory:
Statewide 2PP swing- 3.2% to LNP (apparently– why is data so hard to come by on this one?)
Wollondilly- 1.8% to Libs
Camden- 5.0% to Libs
Penrith- 2.6% to Labor (in its best half-dozen results in the state)
So there may well be an effect, but if so, it’s very inconsistent. As a rule, I’m pretty darn sceptical about the influence of any federal issue on state campaigns (and vice versa). However, to say that working conditions is analogous to Tampa, Iraq etc (i.e. something that gets the political classes very excited but the average voter doesn’t care about), wouldn’t be borne out by chatting with the residents of the ‘burbs (nor, I expect, by the parties’ internal polling).
More telling than number-crunching was Howard’s (in retrospect) somewhat foolish statement a few months back that he’d be mucking in to help Debnam win, which just served to underscore the fact that he was conspicuously missing from the Libs’ campaign.
Today’s interesting poser, following on from mumble’s pertinent observation that Goward has a lot to thank Nifty Nev for (she would have clearly lost if not for OPV): would Greg Smith have lost Epping under a compulsory preferential system?
In relation to Antony Green’s previous comments.
I wonder if anyone would be prepared to venture an opinion as to why the Returning Officer cannot decide to change the 2 candidates for the Notional Distribution of Preferences.
Given that all the ballots are recounted the next day it seems silly that in a situation such as Newcastle that the redistribution occurs again the same way. Situations where the 3rd placed candidate comes from behind to win are extremely rare. If the RO had been able to change his form guide we would probably be closer to knowing the result in Newcastle by now which would seem to be good for democracy.
Re Epping: Martin Levine got 6% of the primary vote. Has there ever been a poorer choice of an indicative count candidate?
And a big “wag of the finger” to the SMH not only for overemphasising this meaningless two candidate count, but also for referring to it as “two party preferred”. (link)
The point about the 2-party swing is that it was coming off a rock-bottom base last time. All the Libs have done is restore their base vote, regaining Manly and getting big swings in their safe seats. They also cut Labor margins in middle-class marginal seats back to a level which reflects the actual class composition of those seats. So all they did was get back to a “normal” opposition level, rather than totally down the toilet as they were before. The work still lies ahead of them, and meanwhile Iemma has established himself as a legitimate and even modestly popular premier, which I for one didn’t think he could do when he took over.
And now the Libs are going to have a leadership stoush without even waiting for the federal election. Howard will be thrilled.
Quite simply, no.
Smith got 42% of the primary vote. He also got HTV preferences from Unity (5%) and CDP (4%).
Smith would probably also get the bulk of prefs from the far right Metlikovec (Ind, 2%) and AAFI (1%).
Levine (6%) preferenced Labor in his HTV, but given he’s the centrist former Lib, you’d expect a fair amount of leakage there.
So even under CPV, a comfortable win for the Liberal Party.
O’barrell is challenging Dudham for the leadership
Dudham might as well resign, if Bob Carr challenge him for the leadership, Bob would probably win as well!
Simon,
I agree I was a shade high on the seats – but there are 3 (Port Stephens, Dubbo and Miranda) that have less than a thousand votes in them and Port is rated an unknown by Antony Green so “significantly over-optimistic” is a bit harsh.
Penrith had a swing to the ALP because it had a highly unusual swing against the ALP last time so it does not prove the point about the outer West.
Maybe the Howard battlers are like poor white voters in the US South – people who vote against their economic interest because of their perceived social interest.
Any word on the status of Dubbo and Port Stephens?
On the stability vs ‘unstable governments held to ransom by loopy independents’ argument, I’m on the side of democracy, and I can’t understand why anyone on a psephological (sp?) website wouldn’t be. A system where all 4 point something million voters were confronted with a simple choice– Leader A or Leader B– put a cross next to the happy face they liked, and were then subject to absolute rule by them and their cronies for the next 4 years, would sure be ’stable’.
Life, happily, is more complex than that; and if the actual vote of the people, including those who are so foolish that they vote in ‘loopy’ candidates, means that a given party doesn’t win a majority of seats in the lower house, then– shock, horror!– for once in its life some actual meaningful debate may be held, and some actual policy made, in that house. And wouldn’t that be a shame?
Under the current system, all Governments are wholly dependent on sectional interests. However, rather than those sectional interests being known, elected and having to put their cards on the table in the House and in Hansard in the way that independent and minor-party MPs do, these sectional interests set significant personnel and agendas secretly by trade-off deals done in backrooms. They are called factions.
Quote from the EC’s website Media Release
“In the following days
In the week after the election, postal votes are received from New South Wales, interstate and overseas.
Legislative Assembly Votes
The first preferences of ordinary votes are re-counted. Then a notional distribution of preferences for the Legislative Assembly is conducted, in which preferences are distributed to the two candidates for each electoral district who are considered most likely to be in the lead.”
This would seemingly imply that the RO can change his or her mind about which 2 candidates to redistribute to.
The ’stable government’ argument, to be frank, is a load of cr*p.
It is true that in Australia hung parliaments tend to lead to less stability and more power in the hands of a few. But that is due to the fact that our system means that all crossbenchers come in the form of local independents who get all their votes from one area, rather than minor parties who have a relatively stable and well-known platform (even if they don’t have as much detail as major parties) and are accountable to a membership.
It’s also due to the fact that major parties are used to a political system where all power is in the hands of one power, so generally are unwilling to genuinely share power. They expect a mandate because they beat the other major party, despite not winning a majority of the vote.
Any country with a long-term multi-party system quickly adapts to such a system in a way that means stability is restored. Parties learn to negotiate and work with each other better. People get used to the idea that policies are presented as that party’s agenda, but then are compromised with other parties so that the government’s policy represents a majority. Minor parties develop as more stable organisations then they are in Australia and in some ways resemble the big parties more. Look at most of Europe, such as Germany, Austria, Ireland, the Norse countries.
Anthony:
The notional distribution of preferences is up to the RO, but that doesn’t have any impact on the result, as if this turns out to be incorrect it will be changed when the proper distribution takes place.
Usually they’ll pick the two major candidates, unless the sitting member is not from either party. So that’s why, I guess, they put Gaudry in the count in Newcastle, likewise they did that for Michael Organ in Cunningham in 2004, which began to show a swing to the Greens, before they realised that we were being beaten by the Liberals and the notional 2PP was changed.
Thanks Ben
I was aware that the RO makes a best-guess prior to the close of the ballots.
My question was more around whether they have the authority to change their minds based on new information or whether they have to wait till all the absentee and postal votes were in. The information from the ECs website seems to imply that they can change their minds.
In some situations, I would also suggest that it would make sense to do a notional distribution of preferences to the 3 highest candidates before going on to a second cut-up of the 3rd placed candidate after that event e.g. if there were 3 candidates with each between 20% and 40% of the primary vote.
Anthony Llewellyn, they can’t change on the night, because the votes are counted in individual booths. As to Newcastle, they would have to do two counts, because at this stage, it it not clear whether Tate or Gaudry would finish second. It is the Electoral Commission’s overwhelming job to get the result right, even if that causes a few days delay.
Anthony,
We will indeed see if she is any more capable. One of the reasons that the factional deal which replaced him was done was that he actually stood up to the Sydney cabal on the issues of electricity sell-off and the train line. On both occasions he put his constituency ahead of a factional powerplay.
If Jodie does the same and stands up for the electorate what’s to stop the same thing happening to her?
Austin’s comment was held up in moderation so long I’ll give it another run:
Fatty O’Barrel takes his tilt at the leadership. Won’t be that hard. All the pitchforks are already in place against Debnam. Now what’s left is to see whether Fatty can actually do any better than Debnam over the next 4 years [if he lasts that long]. Mind you, Debnam was the longest Liberal leader at state level lasting just over a 1 1/2 years. Says much for the state of the liberals.
It might be easy to sit at the sidelines and barrack, but Malcolm Mackerras is just too fond of painting ‘hit me!’ targets on himself: there is “every reason to expect [Debnam] will become premier in March 2011″ (today’s Australian). Put in the context of the whole article, it gets worse, not better.
Mackerras obviously doesn’t know too much about the internal machinations of the NSW Liberal Party. I absolutely could not believe it when I heard that Debnam isn’t stepping down. He has obviously mistaken stubbornness for strength.
He has presided over a result where his party, coming off a low base and against an unarguably unpopular government, has failed to win a single seat from Labor (or, at best, one– Port Stephens). Reduced margins don’t sit in the Parliament with you, Peter.
Witness him having to hang around with Baird and Stokes, Liberals who won back Liberal heartland seats from indies, in order to look like a ‘winner’ by association yesterday. I have about as much chance of ever being Premier has he does. The anonymous LP insider Debnam supporter who said (in today’s Tele) that a challenge would be “an axe right through the heart of the party” had it completely arse-up; a proven failure should stand aside to avoid a pointless and acrimonious internal scrap. Give the Barrel a go.
It’s not too late Simon, you could join now!
Here is a Wikipedia article which I took a malicious pleasure in compiling last year:
The position of Leader of the New South Wales Liberal Party is one of the more senior positions in Australian state politics, but also the one with the highest failure rate and the highest turnover. The New South Wales branch of the Liberal Party of Australia was founded in 1945, but in the 60 years since its foundation the party has won only six state elections to the Australian Labor Party’s 13, and has spent only 18 years in office (1965 to 1976 and 1988 to 1995) to Labor’s 42. The majority of the 18 Liberal Leaders have been deposed, either after losing elections or when their colleagues determined they could not win an election. Their average tenure of office has been only 3.3 years. Only five have become Premier of New South Wales, and of those only two (Askin and Greiner) have actually won a state election.
Leaders of the New South Wales Parliamentary Liberal Party
Reginald Weaver: 1945 (died)
Alexander Mair: 1945-1946 (resigned)
Vernon Treatt: 1946-1954 (deposed)
Murray Robson: 1954-1955 (deposed)
Pat Morton: 1955-1959 (deposed)
Robert Askin: 1959-1975 (Premier 1965-1975) (retired undefeated)
Tom Lewis: 1975-1976 (Premier 1975-1976) (deposed)
Eric Willis: 1976-1977 (Premier 1975-1976 (defeated, resigned)
Peter Coleman: 1977-1978 (lost his seat)
John Mason: 1978-1981 (deposed)
Bruce McDonald: 1981 (lost his seat)
John Dowd: 1981-1983 (deposed)
Nick Greiner 1983-1992 (Premier 1988-1992) (forced to resign)
John Fahey: 1992-1995 (Premier 1992-1995) (defeated, resigned)
Peter Collins: 1995-1998 (deposed)
Kerry Chikarovski: 1998-2002 (deposed)
John Brogden: 2002-2005 (resigned)
Peter Debnam: from 2005
Word is that the Newcastle ballots will be redistributed notionally again today McKay vs Tate. I’m going to revise my prediction of 500 votes to greater than 1,000 McKay versus Tate.
I have added new updates for Goulburn, Lake Macquarie and Dubbo. Goward has taken a hit on pre-polls, but she would still be doing badly to lose from here.
Nicely illustrated Adam – I think it helps sum up why the Libs have only been in power for 18 years in the 70 year period 1941-2011. Various commentators (including Antony Green) are talking up the Libs’ chances of winning in 2011. certainly it’s a smidgin easier than this year, but it still requires an 8+% swing to get a majority and a 6+% swing to get a hung parliament. Certainly if Iemma Labor looks like it does now in 2011, then the Libs should win easily, but one would expect the government to be in better shape by then (a big assumption, I know).
And so now Fatty O’Barrell (not so cutting now he’s lost the gut and the beard) is asking for the poison chalice. While several psephs have argued that he (or Broggers) would have won on Saturday, I’m not so sure. Either probably would have done better than Dudman, but they’d still have been leading the NSW Liberal Party (weight in any saddlebags this year) and it still would’ve been too big a mountain to climb.
And it’s still a long road back in what is clearly, in demographic terms, a Labor leaning State (at least at State level).
Hugo,
I think its actually 4.8% for a hung parliament.
I think it’s only 4.8% if independents win in both Lake Macquarie and Newcastle (at the moment it looks like Labor will win the latter but not the former). At any rate, it’s a little misleading, as any independents in Hunter territory could be expected to support a Labor government, assuming that the ALP don’t win those seats back next time anyway.
Antony Green Says: Anthony Llewellyn, they can’t change on the night, because the votes are counted in individual booths.
They seem to have done it in Cunningham at the 2004 Federal election. TCP votes were initially allocated wrongly, they suddenly stopped, cleared, and resumed later with the correct 2 candidates. Must have been a few frantic phone calls.
But that was the AEC, not the NSWEC. I was chatting to a Booth RO on Saturday just before they shut the doors behind the scrutineers and asked about the technology. He said… “listen mate… this is NSW… we do everything with pencil and paper here” The Commissioner asserted in a Parliamentary hearing that NSWEC was much less mature on IT than were the other Electoral Commissions.
I can confirm that there is a difference in NSWEC vs AEC Geoff. This was my first time scrutineering a NSW State poll but I have done it several times Federally.
Everything went smoothly but there was a sense of the poor cousin, e.g yellow post-it-notes for candidates names (they have pre-printed cards in the Federal Election).
At Federal elections everyone seemed to know what they were doing. At my booth only the two officers in charge seemed to have any past experience.
I did notice one palm-pilot but it did not seem to be being used very much.
Conceptually, the booths could count a 2PP vote between initially chosen candidates. After all the primary votes are in to the returning officer, the RO could ask (if there’s the time) the booths to do different 2PP votes.
Hugo, I wouldn’t be so sure about Lake Macquarie. Ahead by only 0.4%, the Labor Party always gets thumped in that seat on the declaration vote, as most of the district’s large Seventh Day Adventist community vote pre-poll or postal. Labor polled 66% 2PP in the ordinary vote in 2003, but only 64.5% after the declaration votes were included. The Labor 2PP was only 41.8% in the pre-poll and 61.7% in the postal. That doesn’t mean Mr Piper will poll as well in 2007, but it does mean you can’t just assume because Labor is in front it will stay in front. All previous elections would indicate Labor’s vote in Lake Macquarie will decline with the counting of declaration votes. The question is by how much.
Hugo
Isn’t Peter Blackmore an ex-Liberal candidate, running in a seat held 12 years ago by Liberal
he’s the ex-Liberal member, or perhaps the Liberal ex-member would be more accurate
Why did The Greens lose 100 votes and Tebbutt gain 100 votes from the election night to post election night count? How do you misplace a whole bundle liek that? Surely not. Fishy.
http://vtr.elections.nsw.gov.au/lafirstcandidates.marrickville.aspx
Also, why did Marrickville West/Riverside booth increase so much in size?
Labor ahead in Lake Macquarie by 158 votes on election night. After the first batch of pre-poll votes in Lake Macquarie, the Independent is now ahead by 64 votes. Will be interesting to watch.
Some pre-polls have been posted for Lake Macquarie, after preferences: Hunter 317 and Piper 539 exhausted 131. At approx 2.5% of the vote, I guess they are about half the pre polls – Coorenbong is one of the pre-poll centres, but I am not sure if these votes are from that box.
Lake Macquarie: 1000 of about 2000 pre-poll votes were counted today, Piper now leads by 64 votes.
Votes were a mix of Cooranbong and Carey Bay, mixture unknown.
999 Distributed (1 missing): Hunter 317, Piper 539, Exhausted 131, Informal 12.
ALP has asked for the approx 4000 postal vote signatures to be checked against postal vote application form signatures.
At Dora Creek booth, 26 Informal votes were added to Piper in error on Saturday night.
Max, you’ll note that 100 votes from the Stanmore booth have marched straight from the Greens to Labor. It’s possible that a bundle was put in the wrong pile on election night, although I must confess I don’t know as much about election count operations as I should. I do remember such a circumstance from the 1993 WA state election produced a dramatic last-minute reversal of fortune in the seat of Perth, which overturned a narrow Liberal lead and kept the seat with Labor.
“Debnam was asked to climb Mount Everest at this election. He is now halfway to the pinnacle with every reason to expect he will become premier in March 2011.” Dear old Malcolm Mackerras, what a goose he is. This is what happens when a STATISTICIAN (which is what MM started out as), allows himself to be turned into a POLITICAL ANALYST (which he has never been and never will be). Psephologists beware: stick to what you know about.
As I’ve said before, but I will say it again: why hasn’t Mad-Macks been put out to pasture? Once again, his predictions have been so far wide of the mark its utterly tragic.
Adam has been kind to Mad Macks by picking the Debnam / Mount Everest comment as the one he chose to refer to in his post. If you have today’s edition of The Australian, take a look at the entire article and try not to laugh.
Actually, its the best laugh I’ve had since Saturday night when a certain ABC election analyst put a bit of humour into the seat-by-seat summaries at the bottom of the screen at the expense of an alleged strangler (apparently the member for Coffs Harbour didn’t see the funny side of it!) Nice one Antony!
Re: Malcolm Mackerras
Chris / Adam,
Of course you know who else Malcolm has predicted as a cert this year, our very own Heavy Kevvie.
Be Afraid, Very Afraid
Edward, we’re on the same side mate…although given I’m a not-so-distant relative of one John Grey Gorton, not sure if you’d be shouting me a beer if we ever crossed paths??!!
Well Edward, even my mum has predicted that one. Just because Malcolm agrees doesn’t make it untrue. But really, someone should tell Malcolm never to *predict* anything.
You never know Chris, lol
Adam, Adam, Adam – fervent hope does not translate into reality. $15bn budget surplus translates into lots of bribes. The rodent aint Debnam.
You know what is strange. The ALP will end up reforming the public service not too far from what the Libs wanted to do. They have been carefully scrutinising vacant positions for the last year or so and reducing numbers as they go. It probably will not be quite as savage as the Libs but the public service has been given the message that all will not be the same. My point to saying this is that the Libs should just have shut up on that point and not gone on about the 20k people etc.
And yes I am a NSW public servant and whilst some heartache for us will happen, it is much more palatable than the radical unpredictable Debnam.
Anyway, sorry to get off the subject I think I rambled:)
Those with long memories will recall the last budgets of both the McMahon and Fraser governments. The Fraser budget was so irresponsible that the Treasurer (one J W Howard) nearly resigned over it. Never have so many goodies been thrown at so many people with such gay abandon (in Bill’s case anyway), with so little return from the ungrateful proles, who took the bribes and voted Labor anyway. Huzzah for the secret ballot! Once one is on the slippery slide, it is very difficult to bribe one’s way off it.
Yes and I remember the 1998,2001 and 2004 budgets.
# Anthony Llewellyn Says: I did notice one palm-pilot but it did not seem to be being used very much.
Yes, this is the I_Roll (a PDA), it has the updated electoral roll on it. This seems to have been Colin Barry’s initiative, an idea he first seems to have had in Victoria. NSWEC developed it and other states have bought it. In Queensland this week, they are using borrowed IRolls to update their own roll.
It is, however, only a device for cross-checking whether voters are on the roll, and where…. you cannot use it to cross off names, etc. on voting day- they still use a pencil and paper for that, as everyone will have noticed on Saturday.
The IRoll is updated with a plug-in card and the final issue of cards happened very recently, perhaps not till after pre-poll started. One senses there were teething troubles- early last week NSWEC issued a lengthy PDF document to DROs, instructing them on how to handle problems and debug the things.
Yes Edward, but that is not to the point. My point is that when a government is in terminal decline, a throwaway budget will not save it. Howard in 1998, 2001 and 2004 was not nearly as far behind as he is now, and in fact I don’t think (without checking) that Fraser or even McMahon were this far behind at e-minus-7-months. He was certainly not terminal, although he was trailing. And in fact I don’t think there was a throwaway budget in 2004, because the Libs knew by May that Latham would win the election for them. So IF your argument is, yes Howard is in a deep hole, BUT he can spend his way out of it, I don’t agree.
In 98, Howard was not totally on the nose, thus it was not difficult to bribe people. In 2001, the ALP’s stance on refugees and terrorism were so close to the Libs it was almost the same. Again not much needed to change people from the pretend Libs to the real ones (plus this was against big Kim again, a proven loser). In 2004, there was a difference between parties but it was policy more then bribes (forestry and interest rates) that made the difference.
The only two things Howard has left is a budget and the dubious honor of being the under dog. I cant see either of these helping.
Updates added for Goulburn, Lake Macquarie and Port Stephens.
Dave, I don’t want to take up space here with ancient history, but your comments about 2001 are total bilge. Not only was Beazley right in principle on the issues, he also saved Labor from a catastrophic defeat by defying the left and defending Labor’s long-standing policy in support of mandatory detention. Go here: http://www.ozpolitics.info/blog/page/2/ and scroll down to the table “Newspoll: Labor’s TPP predictions for 2001, 2004 and 2007″. Look at the purple line at the bottom right. That upturn you see between weeks 35 and 40 is Beazley single-handedly turning public opinion around after Tampa and 9/11 and saving Labor from the thrashing that the left would have led us into.
Mackerras has two big problems. One is that he’s a pendulum fundamentalist. He thinks that pendulum is king. The other thing is that he doesn’t seem capable of expressing doubt. Any political analyst who’s worth anything knows well enough to know that we’re all just trying to make predictions and estimates which can always go wrong. I can’t believe he can say that Labor WILL (not “probably will”, or “might”) win Bennelong and Eden-Monaro. It’s just ridiculous.
Adam, I agree with you about Beazley saving Labor from a hiding in the 2001 election. Remember, at that time there were polls in which 80% said they agreed with the govts response to “boat people”, and many people were scared of “Muslims”, “terrorists” and “boat people” – boat people especially pushed the “Muslim” and “potential terrorist” buttons. As much as some people might have disliked it (I was one of them), Beazley saw that the ALP risked being wedged in an almighty way by Howard leading to a massive defeat, and so supported govt legislation. I have not doubt that, if he had become PM after the election, the cabinet would have relooked at the legislation.
Whatever gets you through the day Adam. My point still stands that the policies were very similar and thus from the general perspective the parties were saying the same thing.
What I was essentially saying was in those three elections there was not a huge shift needed for Howard through bribary while this time there is.
Can we at least agree on that?
Well, I happen to think Labor’s policy was correct as well as tactically necessary. But this is not a forum for debating policy
Sorry, should have explained that Carey Bay pre-poll is different from Carey Bay conservative lakeside waterfront booth.
The major (non-SDAdventist) pre-poll is now in Carey Bay, when previously it was was in close neighbouring population centre of Toronto.
The mix of these two pre-poll sources is a matter of contention.
The remainder of the pre-poll votes will favour Piper in the same proportion or greater.
The absent and postal ratios are difficult to predict with Mayor Piper the new third horse in this race.
Lake Macquarie
PIPER 15,180 50.1 15,979 49.6
HUNTER 14,186 41.4 15,116 49.9
This is a blog, and you can correct your comments about numbers of postals, ratios, and local geography, as you learn new things about this previously undiscovered electorate.
That’s now corrected, Sally – it was only like that for a minute or so. Thanks for your contributions, BTW.
James
You are right there. It was a really stupid tactics of the liberals to keep mentioning cut to 20,000 public servants, that is the best way to get the 500,000? Public servant in the whole state to vote against you.
Yes Morris is smarter, he plans to cut probably the same staff, never denied it once when ask during the election, not table report that talks about cutting staff at train stations and increasing shifts. He win the election and now put the rail boss under notice. It is great politics
Time for a new Federal thread William
dovif – Debnam marketed his public service jobs policy the wrong way. He should have marketed it as “moving 20,000 head-office jobs to the service front-line, and have a small amount of natural attrition”.
It sounds much better than saying “we’ll cut 20 000 jobs and with the savings employ more front-line staff”.
Yes, it’s particularly stupid to talk about cutting jobs when you will be spending a lot of the money (or so they claimed) on employing new people. That’s not cutting, that’s moving.
I’m always amazed at the fact that no-one in the Liberal Party put their hand up and said “um, excuse me, maybe we shouldn’t say that?”
Ben, we are talking about the NSW libs here remember. From whats been said here, they don’t seem that smart at the moment.
Dave C/Ben/Dovif,
Is it politically smart to say one thing and do another?
Might that be part of the reason Australians are so cynical about politics in this country?
Once upon a time, boys and girls, there were two Honest Johns. The first Honest John campaigned on bringing in a GST, which was indeed honest of him, and got beaten by Big Bad Paul. The second Honest John lied through his teeth and said he would never, ever bring in a GST. He vanquished Big Bad Paul and then brought in a GST. And the moral is: never campaign on nasties from Opposition.
Sacha/Ben: I thought about that at the time, and then guessed the implication was meant to be that the new services would, so far as it was possible, be contracted out to private suppliers. But, like so much Liberal policy, it was poorly articulated; probably because it had been poorly thought-out in the first place.
In other news, the ABC news service today is describing Barwon as “still too close to call”. Is the indicative 2PP distribution to date (53.8 to 46.2) wrong, or is ‘too close to call’ just code for ‘counting is ongoing, no-one has conceded, and we don’t have a clue what’s going on’? The ABC election webpage distribution of only 2671 votes to Horan out of a combined total of 7161 ALP/Green votes (not to mention just over 1000 CDP/other indie), seemed a bit skinny. (Although whether Greens were handing out HTVs at all, I have no idea.) Not that I expect he could actually overhaul Humphries without stunning preference flows. Any news/ideas?
What amazes me about the NSW Libs policy to cut public service jobs is that its the exact same policy, put forward in the exact same manner, that the SA Libs ran with at the SA state election a year ago.
In SA Labor and the PSA spent the whole campaign thumping the Libs over the head with that policy. I find it incredible that the NSW Libs tried a tactic that had failed so miserably in other states
Surely they wouldn’t be contracting out positions of police officers?
I’m not talking about being deceptive (although it does surprise me that Debnam wouldn’t be willing to lie through his teeth like most opposition leaders and premiers/PMs do all the time), but if your policy is “when people retire, we’ll use their salary to employ a person in a different position”, that genuinely isn’t a “cut”. I’m not talking about them lying to make their policy appear better, it’s about them saying something that is both misleading and makes their policy appear worse.
Saying that, I still think the policy was terrible. Don’t take this as anyway supporting it.
I think what people are forgetting is that conservatives would find the idea of cutting the public service as basically a good thing, and I imagine they think most people agree with them. Cutting fatcat bureaucrats – I’m reminded of Montgomery Burns when he ran for mayor of Springfield. But in the real world, things aren’t that simple. The problem for them wasn’t so much the policy, but rather the unforgiveable lack of detail, which made it easy for Labor to make hay with it.
The fundamental problem for the Libs in State politics (in all states) is that their gene pool is so shallow, they make the ALP appear like a party rich in talent in comparison (no easy feat). Consequently, for “policy formation”, half-arsed commitments based on naked populism are considered enough preparation for government. The last 20-odd state elections suggest that they are not.
Adam, while Johnny may have promised to “never, ever” introduce a GST in 96, he introduced it after campaigning for it in the 98 election.
Kindly do not spoil the symmetry of my story. The point stands: the time to introduce nasty-but-necessary things is once you are in office. When campaigning from opposition, you smile a lot and avoid specifics.
If Adam is reflective of the ALP (with an attitude like the above) is it any wonder people are so cynical about politics.
We dont expect boy scouts but at least some level of honesty is appropriate – or is he from the “whatever it takes school”?
New update added for Goulburn – Goward has performed better on the latest batch of pre-polls.
Simon, I don’t know where they’re on about re Barwon.
Does anyone other than me find it rather ironic that after an election campaign that seemed to be about the failure of government services, we now have the situation where event the counting of ballots will be delayed because of a failure to plan for apropriate funding for staff?
I suggest that people write to our (newly re-elected) Premier and suggest that this be one of the first things that he could “head in the right direction” to and fix.
Melb City, who often has a thing or two to say about the VECC, should find it amusing that we northerners have our problems too…
Um, Edward, I am describing the behaviour of a Liberal prime minister here. The voters rejected the GST in 1993, so Howard flatly denied in 1996 that he would introduce a GST. Then once he was in office he announced that he would, after all, introduce a GST. It’s true that he won the 1998 election (just) on the GST, but by then he was in government. The fact is that he obviously lied about it in 1996. Everyone noted at the time that Howard had adopted a “small target” strategy of making no specific commitments about anything.
I disagree Adam. there is something to be said for standing up to the right instead of *gasp* appeasing.
But then Beazley did wake a sleeping giant in the Greens.
I suspect a party that attracts 5-10% of the vote is better described as a “sleeping dwarf” than a giant, but one that is awake nevertheless.
Among blog commentators you would expect many of those who always imagine themselves to be in the lucky 1% grappling with moral and strategic dilemmas in their comfortable beds and making the hard decisions.
Greens an awakened giant? more like an underfed runt…why did they completley fail to capitalise on Labor’s poor performance in govt?
Will Barry O’Farrell be the Kim Beazley of the NSW Libs? 2011 will be interesting?
I don’t think the Greens should be doing too much skiting. Their result on Saturday was very poor (a gain of 0.8%) given the unappetising alternatives. They should have been able to exploit dissatisfaction with Labor and steal Labor’s vote in the inner city. Instead Labor’s base rallied, at least partly because of the IR laws.
Adam,
As Mao said the people are poor and blank ready to be written over by the party.
What is the modern ALP if not a pale echo? Apart from WorkChoices what is the die in the ditch, no surrender, true believer issue of the ALP – higher broadband speeds? (AND of course we all know what will happen to that if Comrade Rudd is elected, don’t we ? I am sure there is principled disagreement with the BCA)
I would have thought that standing up for the principle of collective bargaining is a pretty solid one.
At any rate, the historical strength of the Liberal Party has been that they have largely eschewed ideology. I think that part of the reason that the Libs have struggled over the last decade (one successful government out of nine ain’t a great record) is that they have been hi-jacked by the radical right. This will only get worse for them when /if they lose Federal office later this year.
Why didn’t the Greens capitalise on Labor’s performance? Well, apart from the Tele being almost pathological in its dislike of the Greens, the SMH trying its best not to mention them (even if they were at the core of a story), and having less than 1/20th the budget (and that’s not even considering the resources of Government to propogandise – as people have already mentioned here)…and the rest of the mainstream media only interested in talking about how ordinary Iemma and Debnam were, rather than what alternatives might exist…I don’t know how else we might have done it. Oh, we could have gone stunt mad like Xenophon in SA, but then we’re bagged out as just pulling stunts and not being a ‘real’ party. We develop policy and get bagged for that even though it looks quite like, but better developed, the other parties (drug’s for Labor, small business for the Libs).
No, I think it was Adam who made a comment a few weeks back about incrementalism being the way things change – one day people in major parties are going to wake up and find a Green or three in mainland lower house seats – we might still be polling 10-12%, but then the Nats only polled this and they won 13 seats. Maybe the inner-city, as opposed to the bush, will be were the Greens carve out their niche?
Dare to struggle, Dare to win, Stewart J
If I had a choice between avoiding criticism for pulling stunts and polling 20.5 per cent, I know which one I’d pick.
BTW I don’t normally react to comment’s but remarks about ‘why haven’t the Greens capitalised on Labor’s performance’ deserve retort. The exact same remarks can be made about the Liberals, or Nationals, or Independents, but the range of factors (money, policy, media access, voter demographic, etc etc) are taken into account. I haven’t heard people complain about the Nat’s ‘only’ getting 13 seats. Oh sorry, they’re already part of the ‘team’, part of the cartel on the inside, aren’t they, where being in power, or limiting the damage if you don’t get it (and by corollary, limiting access to outsiders) is what its about.
And I note that Tebbut announced her resignation from Cabinet the day after the election – maybe the result would have been different if she was just another backbencher?
ps: this of course doesn’t mean that ALP candidates aren’t improving in the inner city areas – certainly in inner-Sydney Paul Pearce, Verity Firth, Carmel Tebbut and Tany Plibersik have lifted the ALP game in their electorates, I would suggest directly as a result of the Greens. Shame The Greens aren’t ina position to do the same for Tripodi, Obeid or Costa.
ESJ – have been for almost 20 years
WB – yes, but I don’t think Nick’s 20.5 is repeatable. Any vote for the Greens has to be repeatable and sustainable.
Shame The Greens aren’t ina position to do the same for Tripodi, Obeid or Costa.
If the Greens could do something about them I am willing to bet that they would have no worries about being invited into an ALP coalition!!
Updates added for Lake Macquarie and Dubbo.
anonymousie, the Greens will be very cautious about even thinking about a coalition with the ALP after the behavior of the ALP after The Accord in Tasmania. The ALP broke a principle agreement (no new saw mills) and then blamed the Greens for supporting a no confidence motion.
Oh I know, but I guess it cuts both ways. Labor don’t reflect kindly on that accord either.
The issue with regards to cutting public servants is that Debnam made stupid comments such as cutting back the spin doctors that included anybody putting out information to the public. Whilst I agree there is certainly people employed to paint a positive spin on issues (hello this has been happening everywhere for decades), he also (previously) attacked any staff in public education or media. In some cases these positions were directly related to community safety such as informing the public about immunisation etc. The real problem is that the opposition didn’t do their homework and really work out where savings could be made.
Also for the public service bashers, per head of population the NSW public service is considerably smaller than it was 30 years ago.
There is this big push around the country to reform public service into clusters and amalgamate corporate services. This ends up creating more jobs than it saves. It just amazes me the stupidity of it all.
Anyway, Debnam was on a hiding to nothing helped very much so by an ill informed National Party Leader Mr Stoner (another mental giant)
I understand that this is a little off topic but I just get so sick and tired of the constant public service bashing. Do I think some should go? aure there are still some deadwood but all in all decent people doing their best.
Ok, off the soap box now:)
What planet do you live on James,
300,000 public servants in NSW and 60,000 people who actually pay tax in NSW (land tax) and for most people a once off payment of stamp duty when they buy a home.
What a sick joke
Its the ALP’s fault that they didn’t like what happened when the accord broke. They expected the Greens to accept a crucial broken promise and were surprised when the Greens did what they did.
Hi has anyone done a comparative analysis between the upper-house and the NSW Senate vote by lower-house district? Its worth noting that Colin Barry cam from Victoria and whilst there he was also heavily criticised. But in comparison to Steve Tully he is a doctor of electoral management the lateor being a junior janitor.
Ben Raue:
I think Mackerras is right on the money that if Labor wins the election, they will win Eden-Monaro. Bennelong on the other they will not win.
Can anyone offer a plausible explanation as to why and how the Labor Party could lose the seat of Tweed – of all people to a Nationals candidate ? I am in absolute shock !!!!
Aah DaveC…
Its nice to see that Greens supporters are still pushing their wannabe-Whiggian version of history about the Tasmanian Labor Green Accord.
The truth is the Greens pulled out of the Regional Forest deal after they had agreed to a compromise but then decided they could extract more concessions.
In so doing they cost Tasmania a very good government and one of the most decent Premiers it has ever seen (Michael Field). A government which is largely credited with cleaning up the economic mess of probably the worst Government Tasmania has ever seen, the Gray Government (don’t believe me, check out the Green aligned website McGunns.com which says pretty much the same about Robin Gray).
Of course, Labor in Tas had the last laugh. After vowing “never again” with the Greens and watching the Liberals go through the same experience they were elected in a landslide in 1998 and have not looked back since.
In any other State they would be looking at to at least 2014 in Government but there is the issue of the Hare-Clark system which is single handedly responsible for the rise of the Greens in Australia.
Despite the comments criticising the media in NSW for not giving the Greens a go – they definitely should have done better at this election. Both major parties were on the nose and Climate Change is definitely a major issue.
The Greens however have met a ceiling in their vote having not progressed significantly at any State or Federal poll in years. Sure they can organise a good result at a by-election occasionally but its mass elections where it counts.
Why? Possibly its the Greens “holier than thou” attitude. Or possibly the lack of discipline.
Its hard for a big slice of mainstream public to take a Party seriously when it says it preferences Labor because of its “slightly better stance” on issues like worker’s rights and climate change.
Its also hard to take the Greens seriously when time after time they leave themselves open to criticism (fairly or otherwise) on their drugs policy.
I think the Labor Party in NSW may soon realise what the was realised some time ago in Tasmania that dealing with the Greens is not such a great thing. Not since Richo’s deal in the 80s have Green preferences actually mattered tremendously and we all know what happened in the last Federal Election when Labor tried to woo Green voters.
The fact that the Greens hierarchy cannot exert some pressure on local branches for preferences will also eventually turn Labor off. In the Hunter the preferences of the Greens look likely to cause the loss of one Labor seat in Lake MacQuarie and have also endangered the campaign in Newcastle.
The rationale stated on the Greens own website for its preference reccomendation in Newcastle is quite interesting:
Newcastle
…
Newcastle Greens have decided to recommend a preference for Bryce Gaudry only. We are making no preference recommendation for either John Tate or Jodie McKay.
…
As a party committed to grassroots democracy, Newcastle Greens share the concern of many ALP members that Mr Gaudry’s removal by Sydney ALP powerbrokers is the thin end of the wedge and the selection of celebrity candidates in this manner is an affront to democracy.
Newcastle Greens believe Mr Gaudry is the candidate most likely to support Greens’ positions and policies.
John Tate has constantly opposed Greens’ initiatives, policies and positions during his time as Lord Mayor.
Jodie McKay was parachuted in by ALP power brokers against the will of the majority of local branches.
Ms McKay has an untenable position on the continued expansion of the coal industry.
One is left with the impression that the Greens members in Newcastle were more interested in internal ALP politics than their own Party.
Tate also supports the coal industry and wanted to cut the rail line. He has always been supported by those who are pro-business which translates into anti-worker so far as he could get away with it in a Labor leaning seat. He has also been a thorn in the side of the Newcastle Greens on Newcastle City Council. Handing him the State seat of Newcastle ensconces him in his reign and he would probably have stayed on as Mayor a la Clover Moore. A bad loss at either the hands of Gaudry or the ALP would have been damaging to his long-term political future in the City.
I can’t seriously believe that the Newcastle Greens thought that not preferencing McKay and the ALP over Tate was preferable but more importantly not a good strategic move.
It will be interesting to see how the Greens fare in the upcoming Federal Election. This is potentially their best chance to “break-through” by making climate change a mainstream issue. If the Greens can’t manage to secure a Senate seat from all or most of the States this time around (like they keep threatening to do) the assessment will once again that they have peaked in their following.
anonymousie said “Shame The Greens aren’t in a position to do the same for Tripodi, Obeid or Costa.
If the Greens could do something about them I am willing to bet that they would have no worries about being invited into an ALP coalition!!”
With no real organisation, local press coverage, or many booths staffed, GRNs did quite well in Fairfield polling a solid 6% which is an increase on last time and above average of the western Sydney seats. They can’t actually seek to unseat Obeid and Costa, a country member, as they are members of the Legco and the GRNs would have to form a ALP faction and purchase body armour in order to deny them pre-selection for a winnable spot.
they would need a sherman tank, not just body armour.
Alex Turvey Says:
March 27th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Can anyone offer a plausible explanation as to why and how the Labor Party could lose the seat of Tweed – of all people to a Nationals candidate ? I am in absolute shock !!!!
The answer is a combination of factors including:
1) A good hardworking local candidate who turned up to everything, including the opening of a letter;
2) Distance from Sydney…the residents of Tweed look as much to Brisbane as Sydney for their news.;
3) A good hardworking local candidate who turned up to everything, including the opening of a letter;
4) Some strong local issues such as the Murwillimbah Rail line closure and some planning issues that put the locals well and truly off-side; and finally
5) A good hardworking local candidate who turned up to everything, including the opening of a letter;
Alex, running in a counrty seat (and I include coastal country seats) is different from the city. The presence of strong local media can work enormously in favour of the incumbent, but if there are shortcomings then there is nowhere to hide. I think in this case it was strong local factors that saw the seat change hands.
Obviously I declare my membership of the Nats. Anyway, its almost 5.00 am and I’m off to a meeting in Sydney!!!
Trev
Hugo
Howard said he was not going to introduce the GST, because the Labor party was launching a second scare campaign to win another election (even through labor brought in the Sales tax, without ever campaigning on it, which is a GST on selected good, and it was brought in by……….Paul Keating)
He then got into government, went to an election proposing to introduce the GST and won the election. The GST have been one of the best tax in this country, and is part of the the tax system of almost every country in the world, and was first introduced by … Labor.
I do not see the advantage of collective bargaining, study have been done in the State and in Europe that shows unionise workforce slows wages growth. There was a study in the state, when comparing two companies in the same industry, one has a unionise work force, one rewards staff base on performance and productivity. In every instance the reward base company is more competitive and more profitable, the staff work harder and are paid more than the unionise staff and staff morile is higher.
It is not difficult to explain, if you are in a union, you do not need to work hard and will still get pay increase, so you are rewarded for doing nothing.
Union and collective bargaining worked well in the 1940s to increase living standard and wages, but have little value in the work environment in 2007. Back last century, labor was immobile, today companies can shift head quarters easily and people from overseas can come to work in Australia easier, what All unions is doing is making their member not competitive with the rest of the world, and eventually make sure their member lose their job to India/China (see motor vehicle industry).
Unfortunately for Australia, the Labor party (once the reform party which I supported), will try to win another election base on lies. I see Kevin Rudd today saying that he supports free markets ….. I cannot fathom how he could say that on one hand, and is supposedly going to rip up work choices on the other hand.
dovif don’t be dumb. Keating just increased the sales tax rates after ‘93. Sales taxes had existed for a long time. Also, you can’t generalise the impacts of a unionised workforce by comparing two companies – sample size?
I’ve heard that there are studies that suggest that collective bargaining leads to greater productivity growth, which is the basic economic argument in favour of people being able to collectively bargain.
I reckon if people want to bargain collectively, they should be able to. If they want to do individual contracts, they should be able to. If nothing else, unions can negotiate on their members’ behalf, so to say that “they have little value in the work environment in 2007 is just nonsense”. Many people don’t want to negotiate their own work contracts. I don’t.
“Can anyone offer a plausible explanation as to why and how the Labor Party could lose the seat of Tweed – of all people to a Nationals candidate ? I am in absolute shock !!!!”
From memory, the Nationals have mostly held this seat and Labor only marginally held it in ‘99 and ‘03, so I’m not that surprised the Nats won it.
I’m not sure where you’ve got your figures from Dovif – every study I’ve seen suggests that employees get considerably better outcomes in union orientated collective agreements, and as Sacha points out, there is a wealth of evidence suggesting that productivity gains are greater under collective arrangements.
On another, but related, point, it is interesting to note that employment growth was bigger after Labor introduced unfair dismissal laws in 1994 (around 4%) than it was after Howard abolished it (around 2.5%).
Hugo,
The Left controlled the NSW Liberal party from around 1986 to 2002. To put their failure down to being “highjacked by the right” is nonsense. The reason why they were beaten soundly is because they had a lousy media performer as a leader and because they simply tried to get into an auction with the incumbent government who had the public service behind them. I never heard anyone say they wouldn’t vote for the Libs because they were too right-wing but plenty say they wouldn’t vote for them because they didn’t stand for anything.
John, I think you might be confusing voters who take an interest, with voters who don’t know or care about politics. The former are always calling for political parties to “believe in the something”, whereas the latter are scared off by ideology. No prizes for guessing which group is bigger.
Hugo
The last one I heard was commissioned by the State government of NSW and released by some employees of the State rail Authority. It compared the productivity of State rail (a unionise work force) against a lot of international rail system like Hong Kong’s MTR, Tokyos Subways (a non-unionise work force).
It showed the productivity of NSW state rail is the worst in the world and is worst than those of Moscow and Argentina. Sometimes rail drivers work only 3 hours in a 8 hours shift. This would explain why state rail loses money. (under these condition, it is not hard to show big improvement under trade off 5 hours of work out of 8 would be a 66% increase in productivity!)This would also explain why we pay so much for our public transport. I am not saying everyone who is part of a union is lazy, I am saying that if there is no incentive in the workplace, there is no efficiency.
Guess what this report will mean for the employees of state rail, Morris Iemma needs money at the moment. The State rail employee might have great conditions at the moment (ie working 3 hours out of
and the Unions have to be thanked for that, but how many will lose their job? Maybe Morris can blame it on Workchoice.
dovif, how can you extrapolate from rail systems to businesses in general?
CityRail has no end of problems, and I’ll admit that a degree of workplace reform would probably improve its general performance, though of course, the problems surrounding infrastructure and funding are much more serious ones for Sydney’s rail company. Most of Sydney’s rail network was built over a hundred years ago, whereas those in Hong Kong and/or Tokyo are much more recent (in the last 40 years). Consequently, your comparison is a rather fallacious one.
However, I suspect, Dovif, that you and I will never agree on this (on any?) topic, and other bloggers will no doubt be grateful if we don’t trade conflicting statistics on workplace productivity
RE: Anthony Llewellyn’s comments about the Newcastle Greens
>>One is left with the impression that the Greens members in Newcastle were more interested in internal ALP politics than their own Party.
I am not a member of the Greens, but am a Newcastle environmentalist, and I can tell you that if the Newc. Greens had preferenced the ALP they would have faced a serious backlash from their core constituents (greenies) because the NSW ALP Govt. has such bleak environment policies. In particular, they have no credibility on climate change because of their refusal to address coal.. but there is lots more. Not giving their preferences to Labor is the best decision they’ve made all year.
I had a look at the NSW electoral commission site earlier today.
It looks like the Independent will win Lake Macquarie.
Labor is probably going to hold Miranda – 400 votes ahead.
Labor 90 votes ahead in Port Stephens – that one will go down to the wire.
Anthony Llewlyn’s anti-Green rant misrepresents the histrory of the Green-Labor accord. However, in the interests of keeping this site on psephology rather than issues I’ll restirct myself to this:
“The Greens however have met a ceiling in their vote having not progressed significantly at any State or Federal poll in years.”
At the South Australian state election held just over a year ago the Green vote nearly tripled, only a small part of which can be attributed to running in more seats. The Qld election last year saw an increase of over 1% in the vote, although perhaps Anthony does not consider this significant. The last federal election saw an increase of over 2%.
None of this demonstrates that our latest votes will not be our highest, but it is interesting that our critics seem to so badly need to misrepresent the facts to make the case.
Latest figures on the ABC website (up this afternoon) suggest that Labor will retain Newcastle, Port Stephens and Miranda, the Libs will retain Goulburn (welcome to the Bear Pit, Pru!), and independents will win Lake Macquarie and retain Dubbo.
Nonsense Hugo. Since when does Port Stephens appearing on a page labelled ‘Still in doubt’ with the words ‘ALP ahead’ somehow translate into ‘Labor will retain’. That is entirely your interpretation. To be exact, we currently give Port Stephens a 59% probability of being won by Labor and Liberal 41%. We don’t mark seats as likely until the probability reaches 95%, and we don’t give them away until 99%. Apart from Newcastle, the seats you list above are all still listed as ‘In doubt’, and while Miranda, Dubbo and Goulburn are almost ready to disappear from that list, both Port Stephens and Lake Macquarie remain seriously in doubt. However, having fixed a preference formula problem, Newcastle is given away to Labor.
But to clarify that, I’m going to have the words ‘Still in doubt’ put on the predicted line of all seats we haven’t given away.
I think you’re being a little harsh on me, Antony. I did use the word ’suggest’ after all. But your point is taken – I won’t verbal the ABC site again!
I suppose I spend half of my time after every election fending of questions like “So you are saying Party A is going to win this seat” with the answer, ‘No, I’m saying at the moment Party A is ahead”. People have such a binomial view of what a prediction means. I still remember one senior journalist asking me how ‘Still in doubt’ qualified as a prediction.
In reply to Trevor Khan:-
Obviously I declare my membership of the Nats. Anyway, its almost 5.00 am and I’m off to a meeting in Sydney!!!
Trev
Trevor- are you Trevor Khan no 8 on theCoalition Upper House ticket? Were you elected ? Are you off to the National Party Meeting on Wednesday 28th?
Finally – when is the next letter opening to be held in Tweed?
There must have been alot of exhaustion, or very tight preference flows, for Labor to win Newcastle with 31% of the vote.
OK, now the probability for Dubbo has just ticked to 96% on the latest count, which means it is almost certainly an Independent Retain.
Any word on how Port Stephens or Lake Macquarie are shaping up?
I think Labor will retain both. That’s just my gut reaction, but am more than happy to defer to more reliable and mathematical means of determining of who’s ahead and who has the greater chance of winning.
Labor might retain both, but on the declaration vote trend of 2003, they won’t. But if the declaration vote trend is different, they could retain them. The result is in several thousand sealed declaration vote envelopes. Only time will tell.
Hi Antony
What is the normal amount of people (%age wise) who fail or forget to vote?
i.e. with 78% of votes tallied would we expect another 12% or perhaps 17%?
State election turnout should be around 91-93% of the vote. Federal election turnout is usually 94-95%, partyl because it is higher profile, but also because the AEC put more effort into cleansing the roll for Federal elections.
Edward, I obviously don’t live on the same planet as someone who thinks that the number of people who pay land tax should equate to the number of public servants in NSW. I think your coalition colours are showing though. Maybe you consider a few more points like the number of NSW residents paying GST and income tax maybe and something even more radical like the number of people who actually live here. By the way, it is 280,000 not 300,000.
I can imagine the number of police and nurses around using your methodology. Lets stick to the facts huh?
GST goes totally to the States. Since Federation NSW has contributed more because it pays for the smaller States. Its just spin to say NSW is ripped off on GST.
Income Tax goes totally to the Feds.
Payroll Tax, Land Tax and Stamp Duty pay for State Government, therefore only about 60,000 people actually pay for the State Government. That may be a comforting thought but if you sting those people too much they stop investing their capital and put it into something else which isnt taxed like the share market. That’s exactly what has happened in NSW because people buy land (other than a home) in the hope of capital gains or to develop it.
So if you want those people to invest/spend their money they have to get a decent rate of return. In NSW there is a capital strike which means the State Government has to do something to give them an incentive to spend.
Ultimately some of that 300,000 or 280,000 are going to get it in the neck. Its foolish in the extreme to claim there is no inefficiency, for example NSW is the only state with an roads and traffic authority, yet no other State Government has seen fit to recreate it. That’s about 2000 people there alone.
Of course, promise, never, ever the State Government re-elected is not going to cut the public service are they? They should offer Centrebet odds on that.
Update added for Dubbo, where Dawn Fardell is home and hosed. Couple new figures in for Newcastle, but not worth commenting on – by all accounts Labor will hold on.
SEO in Newcastle has announced it will not release any more updates on the count from this seat, as it is so close, if that makes any logical sense.
In Lake Macquarie, a far more interesting, close, and glamourous seat (when will the likes of Antony Green see the water and the trees?) counting did not take place today, as the absentee votes arrived by truck.
There are literally a truck load of these, far more than anyone anticipated, and up from 2003.
I repeat my comment that the ALP asked for 4000 postal vote signatures to be compared with the postal vote application signature, and only a couple of handfuls were knocked out. About 20 paid young ALP members were called from Sydney to scrutinise the result, with minimal outcomes, and spent the afternoon lying on the floor between the squash courts of the counting office and playing soccer outside, after the check was completed quickly by 10 extra SEO staff.
The ALP scrutineers, with former member for Swansea, Don Bowman (who declared the finished pre-poll count “a sickening trend”), joining former member for Wallsend, John Mills, were given a list of suburbs in Lake Macquarie where Independent Piper polled very well, and queried the signatures on postal votes from voters in these suburbs such as Cooranbong and Sunshine, which in the end yielded minimal results for their efforts.
It should be noted that these postal votes contain an unusually high number of SDA voters, who might usually vote pre-poll, yet voted postal due to an error in the SDA church bulletin about the availabilty of pre-poll voting in Cooranbong.
The postal votes will be counted tomorrow, and there is idle chatter of the incumbent ALP member conceding after 400 votes have been counted.
Edward,
I do actually understand that GST and income tax is paid to the feds, but it is expected that it will be returned to the State in the form of service provision. I didn’t suggest that the proportion of distrubution is wrong, although it is very antiquated but I think only really provides a unfair advantage in QLD.
In my orginal email I didn’t say that there is not efficiencies to be made and they will be. I actually support reforms that ensure that the average punter is getting value for his taxes (wherever the are derived). My point is that the Libs simply didn’t do there homework and work out where those savings can be made and not simply put the whole public service in the same catagory.
As far as land tax goes, Peter Debnam’s showcase of the battlers being ripped off was very good at illustrating the land tax issue. I actually think the tax is fundementally unfair but it is a complex argument. Part of the reason that property is so expensive in Sydney is the investor market utilising negative gearing and quite rightly trying to improve their lot in later life. If they were not in the market, houses would be significantly cheaper and more first home buyers could afford to buy.
There is plenty of arguments on both sides and to be honest I don’t know the simple answer but all things that are done have a ripple effect.
As for the RTA, I have no idea what the other states do as far as road management but if it is more effecient then bring it on!
re Anthony Llewellyn’s comments on the Greens and their vote
The Green vote is still rising in the inner city areas of NSW. I note that (Sydney aside) Marrickville, Balmain, Vaucluse, Heffron, Coogee & Maroubra all saw the Greens improve their vote. Marrickville now has a Green vote over 30%, Balmain just under, Vaucluse and Coogee both over 20% Heffron just under. In 3, maybe 4, seats Greens will be in the 2pp. This is a long way from the 3.0% in 1999 (and 11% & 7% in Marrickville and Port Jackson respectively).
So I don’t think the ‘natural ceiling’ has been reached. I do think that the nature of the Greens is slowly changing, and while local branch autonomy is still jealously guarded by a number of branches, there is a broader sense of acting more strategically in such decisions.
As to Tasmania, well yes, Robin Gray’s Govt was atrocious, but I also think your view of Accord history is as ‘coloured’ as anyone else’s. What I find unconscionable on the part of Libs/ALP was the change to the Tas electoral system specifically aimed at the Greens – this is changing the rules because you don’t like another team, rather than for reasons fo improving democracy, electorate access to MP’s or decision making etc. Whatever it was dressed up as it was not based on principle. This isn’t to say that all parties don’t act pragmatically at times, and that sometimes they just simply get it wrong, but then I wasn’t the one to bring up Tasmania.
I am, however, interested in what people make of the results in the Illawarra, where both Campbell and Hay got swings to them on primary’s (10% in Hay’s case), and McMahon in Shellharbour got a small swing to her overall, along with 4% in Brown in Kiama. There had a been a pre-election thought that the Illawarra might abandon the ALP, with the demographic & industrial changes occuring, but this didn’t eventuate. The only thing I can think of is that (and here I’m leaving the 1/2 Sydney-1/2 Illawarra seat of Heathcote out) is that with a dip in the Green vote and an influx of sea-changers, the ALP vote has been propped up this time round. Hay was also part of a nasty factional fight/deal in 2003 which would have softened her vote then, which might then have returned, but Campbell hasn’t as far as I’m aware done much for the Illawarra to warrant an increase in his primary (other than become the Minister for the Illawarra…)
Sally, re Newcastle, I presume you mean no more 2CP counts. Can’t see why they wouldn’t release any more primary counts, and they have been doing so this afternoon.
Great description of the count in Lake Macquarie by the way. Just shows why I always tell people to vote pre-poll rather than postal.
Thanks Antony
Stewart J – good post.
I took a look at the 2003 and 2007 results in Marrickville and Balmain [the two best chances the Greens have of getting a lower house seat]. In Balmain in 2007 the Greens only increased +0.3% to the Dems -0.4% On face value, it seems this time around the Greens have taken the Dems share. [This has been happening for a while.] But an increase of 16% and 21% in 2003 of M and B respectively is hard to point out where it came from. Perhaps the Greens have ‘reached their ceiling’ in Balmain. In Marrickville ‘07 the increase so far is +3.7% OTHers from last time was -3.9% so basically the Greens took the missing vote. What seems to be happening is the Greens taking other minor parties [Dems] and Indeps vote. To the whole ceiling idea, it will be 2011 in these two seats to see whether their ceiling has been reached and if there is actually a growing core or… it was due to the continual demise of the Dems translating into votes and the lack of Indep candidates in some electorates. What happens if we add more independent candidates? That will give us the true result of the ceiling theory. I guess Fed ‘07 we’ll have to wait, but for Marrickville and Balmain it’s 2011.
Hi Politics_Obsessed.
The Greens had competition in Balmain from Jane Hyde, who had the endorsement of the Climate Change Coalition. There were plentiful young people in light-green CCC shirts at booths in Balmain. I think Rochelle Porteous’ primary vote would have been a bit stunted by that. (Not to mention the bad drugs policy stuff. That would have hurt too.)
I don’t think the Balmain results will ever say anything about whether the Greens have peaked, be it in inner-city electorates or state-wide. The Greens had the advantage that there was no sitting member. Even Sandra Nori had SOME personal vote, I’m sure. Verity Firth will develop a personal vote in the next 4 years making Balmain a much harder prospect.
You don’t think it’s possible that the Greens vote could be affected by ordinary political trends, such as the fact that Labor’s new candidate in Balmain, clearly better than Sandra Nori, may have helped them out, whereas (just a theory) Carmel Tebbutt having been around since the by-election didn’t have the same effect.
Also, Marrickville having had a by-election, thus more attention from the Greens and on the Greens in the area could have been the reason why we did better in Marrickville.
As regarding a “ceiling”, I could appreciate that we’ve reached a point in the inner west seats where it is really hard to win each extra vote. But when you consider our position, a relatively small turnaround in the vote could result in a Greens MP, and an incumbent Greens MP would totally change the character.
And speaking as a Green living in Western Sydney, there’s no way we’ve gotten close to any sort of ceiling out our way, and there’s many other places where the same can be seen.
The level of organisation in Western Sydney has been very weak in the past, but is becoming much stronger, and has the potential to get much stronger in the years before the next state election. I reckon we have very good chances of breaking through onto Bankstown, Parramatta, Liverpool, Fairfield, Camden and Wollondilly councils in 2008. We won’t break through in all of them, but all of them have good chances. At the moment we have very few councillors in Western Sydney and that is a big factor. So there is no way we have reached a ceiling in terms of our vote. It’s much harder now, we benefited from the collapse of the Democrats and now are having to work as hard for every vote as any party does.
Antony Green Says:… we currently give Port Stephens a 59% probability of being won by Labor and Liberal 41%. We don’t mark seats as likely until the probability reaches 95%, and we don’t give them away until 99%.
Love to see how you calculate these probabilities Antony. Of course, on sampling probability stats alone (i.e. all ballots at all stages of the count are being drawn from a uniform population), the “probability” of NOT winning when one has, say 50.5% of the TCP and with 90% counted, is a ridiculously small number (like 10^-200).
I imagine one could come up with a number representing the probability of a particular different TCP %age in the REMAINING votes, based on how the “remaining” has performed in the past and how it has varied. In general, the non-booth TCP seems to be about 2.6% better on average for the Coalition or Conservative Independents, than it is for the booth vote.
On this basis, there is really only 1 seat where such an effect could change the “pre-existing” result- and that-of course- is Port Stephens. But the “remaining” vote is shrinking and the “ask” is getting bigger.
Ben, I think you’re quite right with that analysis. Verity Firth is intelligent and presents well and is definitely an improvement on Sandra Nori. Which is why I think 4 years of her will be bad for the Greens, she will develop a personal vote – though she’ll have to be careful balancing her own opinions with that of the electorate’s and her party’s.
Another thing is that the Liberal candidate was actually very well-prepared and campaigned hard as well. Those seeking a protest against Labor had a decent Liberal candidate to go towards who wasn’t directing preferences that might have otherwise gone to the Greens.
Cheers Edward O for your post – but the point of that Jane Hyde was an indep [two jane doe's in one seat] was my discussion of whether the indeps have helped the greens enough. But I agree Balmain will be harder to win. Which is why I’m looking toward Marrickville. Is it possible Carmel will resign in 2011 after ditching her ministerial commitments? Then again, the Greens didn’t win the by-election when she was transferred in and get less coverage at general elections so they probably wouldnt get in. Nevertheless, a good seat to watch next election should Carmel pull the plug.
I’m not sure if I understand what you mean – whether the indeps have helped the greens enough?
One, I’m not sure they have at all, in some places. Two, why should they?
Another thing to note is, in comparison to the Victorian Greens, they have gotten Liberal preferences in the inner-city seats in 2002 and 2006, while the NSW Greens did not get these in 2003 and 2007.
So clearly the primary vote position of the Greens in Balmain and Marrickville is substantially improved on Melbourne and Richmond, and if we were to get Liberal preferences at one election we would see that breakthrough. Although I don’t have anything to say that the Liberals would be any more likely to preference us in 2011.
Counting ballot boxes is cluster sampling not random sampling.
“Alex Turvey Says:
Trevor- are you Trevor Khan no 8 on theCoalition Upper House ticket? Were you elected ? Are you off to the National Party Meeting on Wednesday 28th?
Finally – when is the next letter opening to be held in Tweed?”
Sorry, I literally just got back from Sydney.
To your four questions the answers are:
1) Yes, one and the same;
2) No I am not elected yet, the count is very slow and extremely close. A media release has gone out from the Party that reads as if I have got there, but frankly, it is “premature”. Those who are snapping at my heels deserve the courtesy of seeing this play out before anyone claims victory.
3) Yes, I attended my first party meeeting yesterday. Interesting…..
4) Geoff is heading back to Tweed today I expect, so no doubt he will be in search of some mail upon his arrival.
Trev
# Antony Green Says: Counting ballot boxes is cluster sampling not random sampling.
Grateful thanks Antony. I thought of doing it that way, based on the swings rather than the TCP- according to Rod Medew’s “Matched Polling Places” theory, the swings show lower variability between clusters.
Based on the TCP yesterday afternoon, Port Stephens shows 55% probability of an ALP win. Sounds close to your number.
About an hour go Goulburn went into the decided category, and Miranda will tip over that way with the next update. Which leaves only Port Stephens and lake Macquarie.
Any further indication how they will fall?
2:33 update put Labor 32 votes up in Port Stephens now. No updates in Lake Macquarie since 10:22 when Piper led by 266 votes. No new figures released in Miranda for two days.
Two points about the interesting Greens discussion.
In reply to Stewart J’s question about the Illawarra and why Labor has improved there – mate, if anyone should know it’s you! Michael Organ won the Cunningham by-election in Oct 2002, 5 months before the 2003 election. With regional media, it was a huge focus and Labor was seen as being in terrible shape in the region. After Michael inevitably lost in 2004 it swung back the other way.
Re Greens ever winning Balmain and Marrickville, the key issue it seems to me is not whether the Greens can grow the vote, but why the Liberals are so stupid. All it will take is the Libs preferencing the Greens; in that scenario the Greens don’t need another primary vote. The last 2 polls the Lib tactic has been to paint Labor as too close to the loopy Greens, and so preferencing the Greens was unacceptable as it would have undermined their case. And hasn’t that tactic worked for them! By preferencing the Greens, for no real cost, they could force Labor to spend money and time defending otherwise safe seats. Seems like a no brainer to me.
MORRIS LEMMA???
Oh yes it is!
The Electoral Commission has him listed thus on its Candidate List…. but with a lower case “L”. Drives the spreadsheets nuts.
Since a “lemma” is “a proven statement used as a stepping-stone toward the proof of another statement” (Wiki), is the NSWEC trying to tell us something?
New update for Lake Macquarie just arrived, Piper on 50.3%, leading by 217 votes. Looks like the first batch of counted postal votes.
And new update for Port Stephens, Labor lead by 42 votes.
I think the Libs are doing the wrong thing by dropping Debenham.
Debenham’s concession speech had some fire in the belly in stark contrast to Iemma’s sonorific apple-pie statements. I agree with Kerry Chikarovski’s election night comments where she said that Debenham had earned teh right to stay on after weathering Labour’s vicious, multi-million dollar hate campaign.
Debenham capaigned poorly and is presently a shocking media performer, always looking like he is about to suffer spontaneous explosion of the head while speaking. he always looks harried and hurried and out of control of the interview.
Yet I thought his concession speech and at certain moments in the campaign he showed passion and steel. I say give him time to grow into the job.
I predict that as time goes by Iemma will be shown to be what he is – a big shiny vacant balloon of a politician. Nice looking but as light and insubstantial as fairy floss. I predict he will be progressively revealed as a totally vacant neuron-free zone in the months to come.
John Watkins is the NSW ALP Dick Cheney. The power behind the throne but too disagreeable to be put in the public light. Rarely has such an oily politician disgraced the cabinet room.
Barry O’Farrell looks like a Kim Beazley to me. Nice bloke, but too warm and cuddly to be a really effective leader and too plauged with self-doubt as to his ability. If the Libs elect him they will suffer the ‘Curse Of The Beazer’ – four close election losses on the trot, but all so close, they will think ‘Next time, next time…’.
Nah give us the Debber. Yes, he’s psychotic, but then so were Keating and Whitlam and they gave us….err…entertainment (and colossal interest rates).
4:15 update on Port Stephens, Labor ahead by 7 votes.
It looks like the postals and pre-polls are breaking the Libs’ way watching Labor’s lead slip like this …
5:15 update, Liberals now 56 votes ahead. This seat will require the official distribution of preferences to decide.
Update on Miranda:
ALP: 50.76%
Libs: 49.24%
The postal votes counted so far are extending Barry Collier’s lead.
Lake Macquarie: Postal votes have been completed, and Independent Piper maintains a lead of a couple of hundred votes.
The Carey Bay squash courts, where the count is being conducted, today became the scene of an ALP Séance, with ghosts of campaigns past such as Richard Face and Peter Morris joining John Mills and Don Bowman in earning their Parliamentary pensions. There were enough grumpy ghouls to scare the local wildlife out of the trees.
The final votes to be counted are the absentee votes, with the deadline for a final distribution in Lake Macquarie having been extended from next Monday to Tuesday.
It has been suggested that absentee voters generally pick the candidate with the name they recognise, usually the local member, but in this seat they also have the choice of the local Mayor. The preference flows from the Liberal and Greens candidates, if any, are likely to be less, disadvantaging Piper.
There are several thousand to be counted, and it is likely the lead Piper currently has will see-saw from large to small and back again several times over the course of the absentee ballots.
To my discussion earlier about the Greens… sorry Edward – clarification – I was saying that indeps have an impact of taking away the Greens vote and wanted to see in the electorate next time if more independents would lead to a decrease in the Greens vote or if the Greens can actually hold on – that would help explain the whole ceiling or not trend. I looked at the closest 2CP results for the Vic election [these being Melbourne, Richmond and Brunswick] and the same idea holds true. The Greens +5.1% was due to the removal of -4.9& of others. In Richmond they went backwards with the introduction of 1 indep but also PP and FFP. In Melbourne they increased by 3% with the removal of the alliance, CEC and others. Also to note, the 2CP between Labor and Green was an exact status quo of the previous election. So it would seem from the above that they have hit some sort of ceiling primary wise and perhaps on prefs in the Melb case. I’d like to see some analysis into that seat as to where the prefs went compared to last time and if it went for or against Greens. I guess time will tell if they’ve peaked or not, but with growing discontent with the majors, I wouldn’t say they’ve quite hit their ceiling but are close to it.
Goward’s won her seat.
Any news about the LC? Inquiring democrats want to know!
According to Antony Green’s update the ALP lead has extended marginally – 1.6% to 1.9% in the course of 5.5% extra vote counted – in Newcastle, representing the addition of the first batch of postal votes.
I am not sure if these are actual or modelled results as reports in the local paper report different 2pp outcomes.
I also cannot understand why the Electoral Commission persists with pusblishing an update of the notional distribution of preferences between McKay and Gaudry. If there are still Gaudry scrutineers watching the ballots they must either lack meaningful employment, have no social life or be as obsessed about elections as most of the bloggers (self included) on this site.
An examination of the primary data for the first batch of postals from the EC’s website shows that both McKay and Gaudry performed better (an extra 3% of votes) on postals versus normal and Tate worse (3% less of votes). The greens have done almost half as worse on postals and Libs slightly better.
Breakdown is as follows:
Normal votes % (excluding informal) ALP 31.14% Tate 24.14% Gaudry 21.56% GRN 11.16% LIB 9.34% OTH 2.65% – Non-ALP 68.86%
Postal votes % (excluding informal) ALP 34.99% Tate 21.56% Gaudry 24.86% GRN 5.96% LIB 10.88% OTH 1.75% – Non-ALP 65.01%
Thus McKay and ALP are almost 4% better on postals versus normals. Absent votes are also better for McKay than normal. I would assume that of the 3000 to 4000 odd votes left all are now postal – but if a mix of absent and postal the story is the same.
I can’t really think of a reason why the postals would reverse or be any different at this point nor why the preference flow would be remarkably different.
Explanation for this is probably the following: ALP campaign had 2 direct mail outs for postal votes. Tate 1. Gaudry nil. Party machines are generally more adept at organising postal votes. This probably explains why the Gaudry campaign also did beter as (although I can’t attest to it) one assumes that the local “Gaudry machine” were aware of the importance of postals and pushed the issue.
Of possibly lesser importance, I believe that McKay was the only candidate actually canvassing support door-to-door during the campaign. Again I can’t be sure of this but I certainly received no “sorry you were out when we came” material from anyone apart from McKay and had no reports of either Gaudry or Tate doorknocking.
Some people reckon doorknocking is overrated. I reckon they are wrong. Just ask Alex McTaggart in Pittwater. Apart from probably increasing your personal support vote by a few %age points, doorknocking provides the opportunity to enquire whether the elector will be out of the electorate on polling day and organise them a postal vote.
I’d also argue that collecting postal vote applications also has a morale-boosting effect for a campaign as it represents one of the few tangible pieces of evidence of one’s toil apart prior to election night.
Newcastle must be won by the ALP. Iemma claimed it on Monday but the real proof is that Centrebet has paid off on my 2 bets on McKay for a total $21.75 gain for total $15 waged.
This raises a potential provocataive and profane question.
Who is the more accurate? Antony Green or Centrebet?
Dembo, I can only tell you that the online count is proceeding at a snail’s pace, so I guess they’re getting the lower house out of the way first. Anyone else know anything?
Re Liberal’s preferencing of the Green
I agree totally that the liberal should not preference the greens.
If the Greens wants preference from the Liberal in the inner city seats so they can get elected, they will need to do a deal with the Liberal. If the Greens won’t even offer a split ticket in an electorate like Miranda, where they are against the desalination plant. The Greens are just a puppet of the Labor government (or has a secret preference deal, senate 2nd pref for preference in lower seats?)
Under that scenario I do not see any reason Liberal should preference Green, they are going to side with labor anyway, so some green candidate vs Labor condidate means the same thing. Better to make the Greens work for a seat
Have the Greens reached a peak, I suspect they have, sure they may win a seat here and there but our politics has always had two major parties with one or more minor parties winning seats.
While I’m not across NSW political history but if its like Victoria there always been that way, for its always been common for rural seats to have independents and in the inner city seats for they are normally very safe for one of the majors, a third party has polled well.
While the Greens like to see themselves more closely aligned with the ALP, its quite possible as the political landscape changes one day the Greens as there membership grows may move into relationships with the Liberals.
Now before you say never, would the Greens have got along well with Dick Hamer or a more “Liberal” Liberal after all the ALP and the Liberals both move around and the Greens are still a young party which itself will move with the political planets.
Today’s SMH says the Liberals are 7 votes ahead in Port Stephens.
“I don’t have anything to say that the Liberals would be any more likely to preference us in 2011.”
You would think that the second best outcome for the Liberals in any given seat is that their main rival is embarrassed and/or forced to put a great effort into the seat to make it safer next time. The Liberals should have resisted climbing onto the knee jerk Daily Tell-a-lie bandwagon and implicitly supported GRN candidates in seats like Balmain and Marrickville. GRN wins in such seats would not threaten them in parliament in the unlikely event that they ever win office or even in their own marginals but would cause the ALP much grief.
This proves how mad they are because principle isn’t in play here. I mean like this is NSW isn’t it?
This election saw the Greens preference the ALP in many more seats than 2003, and there were a few reasons for that. Firstly, Debnam was seen as worse than Brogden, and worse also than O’Farrell. Also, we are in the leadup to a federal election where ALP preferences may be key in deciding if we can get Kerry Nettle re-elected. Thus there was a greater impetus to preference the ALP.
In 2011 the election will fall after the federal election and I don’t expect the Liberals to be as scary to Greens members and supporters as in 2007. So while I’m not saying we would deal with the Liberals, and we certainly shouldn’t, our own preference decisions may mean that the Liberals are more likely to preference us in Balmain and Marrickville.
A question for the Green members could you see a situration where the Greens and Liberals swapped preferences
re Preferencing the Libs – given the current political climate (particularly in NSW) I’d say its unlikely, but that’s not to say that it mightn’t happen elsewhere, at either a state or federal level. Whether it happens in a marginal seat is another thing too – the Greens WA preferenced the WA Nats over the ALP & Libs in solidly conservative (rural) seats in a couple of state elections, but I suspect the best the Libs/Coaltion can expect currently is an open ticket (maybe a split ticket in some instances, but again very unlikely in NSW).
in reply to bmwofoz… “A question for the Green members could you see a situration where the Greens and Liberals swapped preferences”
For those of us that are naive enough to believe that issues matter, I would think that all the Liberals would need to do is get some good environment policies! (And keep the Nationals in check…) This election they had that opportunity, since Labor are as dead and black as a lump of coal environmentally, but they missed it… Issues do seem to be of little importance to most people who engage in politics though, so perhaps it wouldn’t happen. In Newcastle, most of the candidates sent preferences to candidates or parties they professed to be deeply antagonistic towards, and numbers-driven preferences seem to be the order of the day.
I’m not a member of the Greens, but if there are any on this blog, I can tell them that giving Labor preferences lost them votes at the polling booth I worked at (in a safe National seat) because voters who didn’t understand how preference allocations work were afraid that their vote would go to labor against their will…
Blokes and Blokettes,
Where can I find a swing by region ? e.g.
Western Sydney
Illawarra
North Shore
Hunter
etc.
Antony,
Who would you say is more likely to win Port Stephens?
The Libs have won Port Stephens by 21 votes – the final count of absents are in. Will be a recount on Tuesday.
I have unconfirmed reports from scrutineers in Port Stephens that Craig Baumann has just won by twenty-something votes. Can anyone else concur?
Ah… BenC beat me to it!
Electoral Commission figures give 19 votes, but they will not be the final distribution of preferences.
Antony, is the full distribution of preferences likely to affect the outcome? Surely after two counts there couldn’t be that many votes incorrectly counted to put Baumann back in danger?
The figures reported by the Electoral COmmission are indicative preference throws from election night, plus indicative throws for all declaration votes. They did not go through and completely re-count the indicative preferences from the booths, so there may be a few vote differences here or there. The final distribution will be the official count.
Update finally added for Port Stephens, plus a little note (at last) on the upper house.
“They did not go through and completely re-count the indicative preferences from the booths, so there may be a few vote differences here or there..”
In the primaries, the differences between Saturday and the check-count ranged from 1 to 8 votes. The grand total, though, did not alter. At a booth level, there were discrepancies of up to 5.
The scrutineers will be out in force looking at the cut-up.
Lake macquarie,
Absentees added and now notional preference allocation has reduced Piper’s lead to just 40.
don’t know if this is final count
Bruces:
On election night, Deputy Premier John Watkins made a comment to the effect that ‘Western Sydney ALP voters have come home’ and ‘Federal Liberal members in Western Sydney will be very worried after tonights result”.
The ABC website shows that nearly all swings in Western Sydney were away from the ALP. The exceptions were: Penrith = a correction from last election 2.5%; Lakemba – Iemma’s seat, a leader’s bounce of 5.2%; Auburn – Muslim anti-Liberal swing 2.4%; Parramatta and Strathfield – negligible at 0.1%.
What was Watkins talking about?
Does he have any justification for his comments at all ?
What happened in Charlestown? It looked to me like it should have been very close between Scarfe and the ALP, but the NSWEC is giving the wrong preference count
Election night notional preference counts are not 100% accurate – usually the last job on a very long day for tired booth staff. Just a 1% error rate on 6500 or so prefs is 65 votes and we can expect it to be a bit higher than that. Both seats have a way to go yet.
Bruce, I think Watkins meant to say they stayed with Labor – he was pretty tired too – and I agree with him that this result should worry Jackie Kelly at the very least.
I think I’ve got my own answer for Charlestown…did the Greens preference the ALP or Libs ahead of the independent? if they did so that’s appalling, and they deserve every coal mine and desalination plant they get.
Update added for Lake Macquarie, where Labor has snatched a remarkable late-count lead.
where did those votes come from William?
From the SEO site it looks as if the absent votes went strongly to Hunter. I guess the 7DAs may pre-poll and postal vote but one thing they don’t do is leave home on a Saturday.
Barry Collier now more than 600 votes ahead in Miranda: I think we can definitely give that seat to the ALP.
The counts in Lake Macquarie and Port Stephens: very exciting(though obviously nerve wracking for the candidates).
Gonginalong, if you mean what part of the electorate, the answer is “all of it and none of it” – these were absent votes, i.e. those cast on polling day outside the electorate.
Who was this independent in Charlestown? The Greens don’t automatically preference independents ahead of the ALP.
I’ve started crunching the upper results, try and put some quotas up soon.
Hey all,
Got these figures for the upper house. These are simply found by adding BTL votes with ATL votes. I’m assuming that the very small number of BTL votes means that not a significant number will flow away from the ticket they’ve been cast for.
Group A 0.13
The Fishing Party 0.29
AAFI 0.30
Group D (SEP) 0.00
Liberal/Nationals 7.78
Group F (Climate Change) 0.09
Democrats 0.35
Group H 0.02
The Greens 1.85
Unity 0.35
Christian Democratic Party 0.90
Restore the Workers’ Rights 0.17
Group M 0.02
The Shooters Party 0.53
Labor 8.87
Horse Riders/ORP 0.10
Socialist Alliance 0.08
Save Our Suburbs 0.07
Human Rights Party 0.08
Most interestingly, Trevor Khan should be up aruond .7 or .8 of a quota.
After 8 Labor, 7 Coalition, and 1 Green are elected, with 5 vacancies, we get this count:
Fred Nile 0.9
9th Labor 0.87
2nd Green 0.85
3rd National 0.78
Shooters 0.53
Unity 0.35
Democrats 0.35
AAFI 0.3
Fishing 0.29
So rather than the Nationals having to fend off the others, it’s the Shooters. I don’t expect any of those parties to be able to overcome that gap of .18 of a quota, but it’s interesting as well that Unity ended up with a third of a quota.
Lake Macquarie: Ever heard of an “absent pre-poll”?
Can you guess how many there are for Lake Macquarie still to be counted?
No and no, Sally. My expertise should not be overestimated – I still don’t know what a “dec inst vote” is (something to do with hospitals and/or old people’s homes, I assume).
TO Sally McEwan Says
Never heard of an absent pre-poll but I guess there are 4,500 ? Looks like the Court of Disputed Returns will have some work to do this year.
Aren’t they people who pre-polled outside of the electorate?
Declared Institution vote is indeed a hospital or a nursing home, taken over a few days prior to polling day. These are done for Lake Macquarie.
There are still a lot of votes to be counted, and yes, as I predicted, Piper would be disadvantaged by the absentee votes, like most new Independents.
If we had not counted the last 250 of those today Piper would still be in the lead. It was almost a decision to go to the weekend papers in front or behind.
It is that fluid, a la Lake Macquarie.
re absentee pre-poll votes: They are allowed – see s,114P and also s.114Q and a114QA of the PARLIAMENTARY ELECTORATES AND ELECTIONS ACT 1912 –
However must admit they should be very rare – given the circumstances in which a person is entitled to vote pre-poll.
Alex luv, you can quote sections of the Act, yet I would suggest you also study sections of the Bible, as interpreted by Adventists.
Rarity is a relative term, depending on which part of the State of NSW you are familiar with, if any.
This Lake is special.
Sally – I have sailed on Lake Macquarie – I know how special it is – but being an agnostic – my reading of the Bible – whether interpreted by Adventists or any other sect has been fairly limited of late.
Alex, politics is all about “the people”.
Before anyone else gets in, a few more punch lines for friend, ally, colleague, associate, and co-co-conspirator of Milton – old Jeffrey:
“Holy water.”
“Water into whine.”
“Fire, Water, Wind and Earth.”
“The best and safest place in the world – for raising children.”
“Pragmatic ALP.”
There are no secrets amongst the people of Lake Macquarie.
Sally – don’t think I don’t I know a lot of things – I was told about alleged circumstances which form the allegations against Mr Orkopoulos about 2 years before any charges were laid. I have been made aware of other allegations – but at the time I was given the information I was confused because of terminology. Anyway all these things remain allegations only. As such I would prefer not to discuss them as I have no proof of any of them.
Good idea, wait and sea.
“Fire, Water, Wind and Earth.â€
The four elements, yes?
The Mountains, The Lake, and the Beaches.
Ben, given that less than a third of the votes have been counted in the upper house reallocation is there any reason to think these are randomly distributed by area, rather than doing some seats first.
If the vote count is not random and favours coalition seats then the fact that Khan has pulled ahead at this stage doesn’t mean much.
Possibly of more signficance is that so far the ratio of informal to below the lines is running 8:1. Since the Democrats, and to a lesser extent AAFI, woulf be counting on good btl votes to keep them in the race if the number of btls is low then that is bad for them. OTOH the Dems have more than a third as many btls as the coalition at this stage, so there is no doubt these are favouring them – they’d better hope the current low figures indicate that btls are being counted more slowly than other categories.
Sorry, it didn’t click for me that this was only a partial result.
I thought it was all being posted in one part, but come to think of it the total was far below the total number of voters.
I’ve just had a look at it again and Stephen is absolutely correct. This PDF only contains 1.2 million votes, whereas the rough count on the night put the total number of votes at around 3.2 million. So any prognostications I made were too early.
I assume we’re gonna have to wait until Monday afternoon for another update.
Of course if we knew where these came from things might be different – for example if the all the booths beginning with the letter A-f had been counted that should be random enough that things won’t change much. However, if its a case of the seats where the lower house result was going smoothly so the ROs had time to get onto the upper house then that may not be a typical selection of seats.
You can see “Legislative Council Results by District” at the NSWEC site – these results suggest we’re getting a random sample. Every district I looked at had about 2500-3000 votes counted, including those with exciting lower house counts like Lake Macquarie and Port Stephens.
I reckon that the Coalition’s upper house prospects have gone up against their rivals for the last spot. The reason for this is that when the quota is increased, it has far more of an affect on a person who is #8 on a ticket than those who are #1 on a ticket. While it may effect preference flows, the relative number of votes between Shooters, AAFI, Democrats and Fishing Party don’t change when the quota changes. But when the quota goes down, Trevor Khan does relatively better, and vice versa.
So if, as Stephen said, informal votes are outnumbering BTL votes 8 to 1, that’s going to help the Coalition.
McKay vs Tate and Terezini vs Blaxkmore figures are now available on the SEO website. McKay is in front by 363 votes but there are no postal or absent votes in the count.
This is off-topic, but I was looking for the detailed results in the 2004 NSW local govt elections (in particular the City of Sydney) which should be on the NSW electoral commission web-site – and while I get to this page: http://www.elections.nsw.gov.au/local_government_elections/local_government_results/local_government_general_election_2004.html the “Detailed results” page doesn’t load up.
Can anyone do better?
Interestingly, that link sends you back to whichever page you’re on when you try to bring it up. This mystery is beyond my meagre powers.
William when I look at the results by district I see about 30,000 counted – presumably the figures the statewide total of 3 million odd comes from. The only figures I can see in the 2500-3000 range are the “other” pile. Can’t see anything that indicates where the million or so in the above and below count comes from. Am I missing something?
No, I was indeed looking at the wrong column. I did realise not long after that 2500-3000 votes per seat was slightly inconsistent with the total of over a million.
SEO site now lists 3.2-odd million votes counted for LC… Who wants to do the honours?
Re:Newcastle.
I am not sure that McKay’s victory is all that assured. The SEO listings under “post election night” show she did not do particularly well on Absent and Postal votes. If the Green preferences exhaust after Gaudry, I think she’s fine but if they then went onto Tate it will be a close contest.
Christ on a bike – I’ve just spent an hour going through their super-duper daily update on PDF file, and now I see this page has the count at 3.3 million!
Updates added, with about four-fifths of the vote now in. The Shooting Party are home; there is the tiniest flicker of an ember of a remote possibility that the Democrats can still run down Trevor Khan of the Nationals to take the last spot.
That page with 3.3 million, very importantly, doesn’t distinguish between BTL and informal votes.
So unless someone could develop a statistical model which uses this sample of BTL votes to distribute the “others” listed on the front page, we’ll just have to wait and see.
As I said, I still think it depends on the number of BTL votes (which aren’t measured properly in the summary) as to whether Trevor Khan is really in trouble or not.
Ben said:
“April 1st, 2007 at 1:28 am
That page with 3.3 million, very importantly, doesn’t distinguish between BTL and informal votes.
So unless someone could develop a statistical model which uses this sample of BTL votes to distribute the “others†listed on the front page, we’ll just have to wait and see.
As I said, I still think it depends on the number of BTL votes (which aren’t measured properly in the summary) as to whether Trevor Khan is really in trouble or not.”
It’s 5.15 am and here I am reading this blog site again!!!!!
I obviously have missed something because before it went a little off track on Friday I was working on the basis that the Coalition had a .05 quota (wafer thin) lead over the Democrats.
It seems to me that’s what we are still talking about.
pBen said:
“April 1st, 2007 at 1:28 am
That page with 3.3 million, very importantly, doesn’t distinguish between BTL and informal votes.
So unless someone could develop a statistical model which uses this sample of BTL votes to distribute the “others†listed on the front page, we’ll just have to wait and see.
As I said, I still think it depends on the number of BTL votes (which aren’t measured properly in the summary) as to whether Trevor Khan is really in trouble or not.”
It’s 5.05 am and hear I am reading theis blog again!!!!!
I obviously have missed something because before it went a little off track on Friday I was working on the basis that the Coaliyion had a .05 quota lead.
Perhaps the only difference (to this uneducated mind) seems to be is that we now know that the “other category” now seems to be composed predominantly composed of informal votes, with much fewer BTL votes than earlier anticipated.
Have I got that wrong?
Trev
Dear oakeshott country
See my previous post about Newcastle. McKay and Gaudry actually did better than Tate on postals versus election night. McKay’s absentee vote rate was even better in the end.
If one looks at the election versus “non-election” night votes you get the following results (all exclude informal as a percentage):
Election night:
McKay 31.14% Tate 24.14% Gaudry 21.56% Green 11.16% Lib 9.34% Others 2.65%
Non-election night votes:
McKay 31.60% Tate 23.85% Gaudry 19.17% Green 11.39% Lib 11.41% Others 2.59%
Overall these are slightly better for McKay, probably neutral or possibly slightly better for Tate (assuming that he benefits from the better Liberal performance and also assuming that those who voted for Liberal flowed on to Tate without the help of the how to vote) and slightly worse for Gaudry (who would have continued to benefit from the Green preferences altough possibly postal and absentee Green voters may have headed to the ALP candidate in greater numbers).
The notional figures on the SEO website reflect the Pre-Poll and Dec-Inst votes. The Pre-Poll votes are the only post-election votes which went much better for Tate. These are the figures that were also quoted in the Newcastle Herald from earlier in the week.
McKay has done significantly better (on primaries) on the remaining outstanding votes – absentees and postals – with Gaudry being let down on absentees and Tate on postals.
(Presumably the absentee voters didn’t vote for Gaudry because they were all the ones who had moved out of the electorate because they couldn’t stand the guy and just hadn’t changed their enrolment quite yet :;)
You can see the full breakdown of all primary votes now on the SEO site for Newcastle under post-election night votes. The SEO did a full Notional Distribution of Preferences between McKay and Gaudry as late as Friday (if I recall correctly) which reflected the full breakdown of votes and showed McKay extending her lead over Gaudry.
I am at a loss to know why they continued to do this when clearly Gaudry had no chance of pulling ahead of Tate. Perhaps once the RO has determined the 2 candidates they are not able to alter this until all votes are in? This would be the only excuse I would offer up.
Antony Green has McKay now about 1300 votes ahead now of Tate on a full distribution of preferences. I don’t believe that he is computer modelling this anymore. He seems to have access to some information that the SEO does not want to release via its own website.
The whole process must be very frustrating for the candidates. I know I am annoyed as it is my electorate and I would like to know officially who has won by now.
As I said Centrebet has already paid off on my wager on Newcastle. That seems to me to be an indictment of the SEO process in this case.
“Presumably the absentee voters didn’t vote for Gaudry because they were all the ones who had moved out of the electorate because they couldn’t stand the guy and just hadn’t changed their enrolment quite yet :;”
Anthony i assume this means we can expect to see a raft of absentee voters at the next election who have moved out cause they can’t stand Jodi?
I haven’t been doing too well following the upper house count so far – I only just noticed that the 3.3 million count has been little changed in the past week, and is thus old news. So Trevor, you are not missing anything – you have indeed consistently been about 0.05 ahead on this count. The trend to the Democrats I detected by comparing these results and these ones is meaningless, because it was done under the incorrect assumption that the latter was a more advanced version of the same count.
The 293,240 “other” votes include informals, and the precedent of 2003 suggests they include about 200,000 informals and 80,000 BTLs. We also have a grand total of 3.3 million votes out of what should be about 4 million, so there should be about 700,000 ATLs still to come. If the remaining ATLs follow the same trend as those already counted, and if the BTLs follow the same trend as those already counted (only 13,566 out of at least 80,000, so that may not be the case) … well, I’ll only say it will still be very close.
William:
I agree that the Upper House count is a bit of a mystery but I am tempted to believe that what we have been doing (on Friday and Saturday) is comparing apples with oranges. My reasoning is this (and of course I could be wrong!!!).
On the night of the election, at each polling booth there was a count done of the LA votes. There was then to be a count of the ATL LC votes (I assume time permitting). This is what we saw on the night.
Either that day, or the following morning the LA and LC votes were moved from the polling booths to central (second) locations in each area. For instance in the North West the votes were moved from Barwon and Tamworth to Armidale (in Northern Tablelands) where the count continued. I assume at these (second) locations the emphasis was on completing the LA counts. If this is correct then at some central (second) counting locations little LC counting may have been done over the next few days.
I was told (before the election) that the votes taken to the central (second) locations would be “merged” so that after this point it would be impossible to identify votes coming from specific polling booths. What I did not ask is whether this process of “merging” would extend to “merging” LC votes from different electorates.
Anyway, I assume that even if some counting of LC votes was done at these central (second) locations, no BTL counting was started at all (and that makes sense, because what would they do with any data collected).
On about Wednesday of last week LC votes from across the state were moved to a central (third) location in Sydney.
On Thursday the LC count commenced again, at this new (third) location. What I don’t know is what votes they started counting at the Sydney location. It is possible they have started with the uncounted votes from locations where close LA votes precluded LC counts….who knows.
Alternatively, they may have gone back to the start and simply randomly selected bundles of votes and started counting ATL and BTL votes.
Alternatively they may be taking the bundled ATL votes, imputing that data, and then taking the BTL votes from the same locations and imputing that data at the same time.
The problem with this third scenario is that there are above the line votes that will have second , third etc prferences expressed. These votes will have to be separatley inputed into the computer so that the distribution of prefernces can proceed at thye end of the count.
It is this final aspect that is interesting.
On this site we have talked about the BTLs but not much has been said about prefernces. I have no idea how many people have put in a second or third prefrence, but I assume it will turn out to be relatively few. Nevertheless, this factor may come in to play as well.
All very interesting….
Perhaps someone elese may have a better idea about the process and let us know.
Trev
Perhaps someone elese may have a better idea about the process and let us know.. Trev
Antony??? Antony has the numbers for 2003, showing how many are usually in each class, as listed below.
1. “Classic” ATL votes
2. Across the Tops, which NSWEC calls RATL (R for Random),
3. BTLs, which NSWEC calls RBTL
Only 1. was counted on election night.
In the NSW Local Council elections, the RATLs and RBTLs were bundled up (in bundles according to the party of the candidate showing the “1″), and sent to the Counting House. The DROs did keep records of how many were in each bundle, and made them available. There never was a web-site with the numbers available, not even the ATLs. The “Classic” were counted and remained at the local office.
At the Counting House, all knowledge of what was going on was obscured for the duration of the count, about 10 days, appearing in one gynormous bunh at the time of declaration. The main task was to enter an “image” of each RATL and RBTL. Many surprises emerged at the end.
At the 2003 LC election, this was the stage that produced the “meltdown” referred to earlier. One problem was that the software was not configured to reject certain types of errors keyed in by the operators (who were entering “0″s for some papers which were formal according to the Saving Provisions, but which had an allowable number of errors.)
What is happening now is not clear. There is a whole new computer system (EML) for many stages of the election this time round. It has not been completely bug-free.
Thanks Geoff, perhaps it is a little clearer, but only a little.
Trev
What exact formula is used to calculate the quota?
Sunday’s count has 2682934 votes in the count.
Using that as a starting point, is it simply dividing that number by 22, which produces 121952, or is it 121,953 (total/22 + 1), or is it something else?
I’ll add up all the figures from today’s count, and if someone can clarify the quota I’ll produce a quota update.
On my count, the figures are these:
Fred Nile (CDP) 0.93
Mike Veitch (Labor) 0.88
John Kaye (The Greens) 0.84
Trevor Khan (Nationals) 0.63
Roy Smith (Shooters) 0.61
Arthur Chesterfield-Evans (Democrats) 0.36
Robert Smith (Fishing) 0.32
Janey Woodger (AAFI) 0.32
I’m not sure how William is getting the figure putting Trevor Khan just ahead of the Democrats. Maybe I’m making a mistake in calculating how the votes will flow through the other 7 coalition candidates ahead of him.
Quota =1+ (Votes / (N+1)), rounded down
Ben, I’m not looking at those daily PDF file results – I’m looking at these ones. I’m simply calculating a quota by dividing the total of counted votes by 22 (i.e. 22+1), and listing the Coalition’s surplus over seven of these quotas (along with the others’ percentage of one of these quotas). Not doing anything sophisticated involving preference flows. I’ve only just noticed that big juicy updated new file you refer to.
William, Ben, et al,
If I am not being a little presumptuous, and if you had the opportunity of appearing before an Upper House Committee to raise issues regading the running of this election, what would your prime issues be?
Trev
Ben, you are including informal votes in your quota calculation – remove them and you get 117,050. Not that it makes that much difference. Hard to see how Trevor can lose from here.
I can’t see the reasoning in lumping in BTLs with informals. And I can’t work out why the summary figures, aren’t updated by the daily PDF. Or in producing the daily results in PDF! What sort of software are they using that can’t export into XML?
And if Geoff’s tale of confusion is correct (and it fits with my memory of the sorry saga) it looks like it is being replayed.
Fair enough Barney
It was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek spurious explanation for Gaudry’s lack of absentee votes. Possibly a better explanation is that all of his supporters stayed in Newcastle to try and help him. He would have also been disadvantaged by these electors going to other booths and being given a HTV absentee form by Labor or Liberal.
I reckon this tactic probably aids the big parties by a few hundred votes in tight marginals. Seems to be the case in Newcastle and Lake MacQuarie and Goulburn. In the Lib / Lab contest of Port Stephens the absentees are much closer.
I think I managed to give away about 20 absentee HTVs in one afternoon at my booth. The voters who took them all seemed quite thankful that we had some information for them.
William, I noticed that error and fixed it before I posted those quota figures.
The problem that always occurs at this stage of the count is that there are several computer systems in use. One is a simple election night reporting system for primary votes and reconciling ballot papers. The second is the data entry system from BTL and ATL preference votes. The returning officers will tally all the single 1’s and send the ballots and a total into the data entry centre. All the other ballots are sent in as a batch for data entry. And slowly all the numbers will come together.
But trying to get these systems to reconcile and published to the web in a manner that makes any sense to anyone is truly a nightmare. Especially when you remember such eccentricities as a ballot filled in above and below the line will count below the line first, and if that is informal, will become an above the line vote. And also when you remember how few people actually want to look at the data.
The pdf document is the output of their data entry system. It has not been re-developed since the last election and does not have xml output. In discussions before the election, it was agreed that xml for this was not a high media priority, pushing instead for a post-election lower house feed to be developed. (There wasn’t one originally.) That feed worked very well and was the best yet achieved by a state electoral authority.
re LC figures: I got the same results as Ben did from tonight, but comparing to 2003 I noted that (from the numbers we have) the informal rate appears to be down. That being the case, there doesn’t seem to be enough BTL’s counted yet, which may shift the final quota calculations for each party (and who is elected in which spot) somewhat, but not enough to change the actual outcome (at present that Dems are getting about 5.5% of BTL’s, compared to 17.38% LNP). Comparing to 2003 again, there should be another 50000 BTL’s to come.
re Trevor’s question on what to say to an UH Committee? Well, I’m not in the position I was in back in 2003, so didn’t get the reports of RO’s not knowing what was in the Act/what to do, bad rulings, poorly trained staff etc, so I’m not really able to yet say how the two elections compare. Things do seem to have improved, though! I’ll think some more on this before commenting (perhaps more formally!).
The question I have for you is: when will the LC count be complete?
The votes counted so far are (cumulative totals):
30 March: 1,214,000
31 March: 2,011,000
1 April: 2,683,000
That seems to be about 700,000 a day.
By my maths that should mean that all data will be in by about Wednesday. Any guesses as to when the button will be pressed?
Trev
Antony said: But trying to get these systems to reconcile and published to the web in a manner that makes any sense to anyone is truly a nightmare. Especially when you remember….. how few people actually want to look at the data.
Ah yes, the Tragics. Most of them hang around here.
The various Electoral Commissions have put quite a lot of work into keeping this small band happy. Providing data for us is, however, only a small portion of a mucher wider IT picture. There is an international consortium called Oasis (http://www.oasis-open.org/home/index.php), which is attempting to set up a set of standards for all of this. Australia is “on board” driven largely, it seems to me, by the AEC, who have circulated a set of proposed standards for Australian elections. “Feeding the chooks” forms a rather small niche in all of this.
Distribution of preferences.
This has started.
First seat was Macquarie Fields, one of many with a majority on primaries, so only Count 1 of the DOP is strictly necessary. Eventually (today?) it will be carried through to completion for information purposes.
Macquarie Fields was declared immediately after the 1st DOP, although it is doubtful that there was time to have the traditional tea and cakes ready in time for the declaration. They have now proceded to DOP count 2.
Coffs was also declared a pair of moments ago.
Geoff, I know. I’ve been involved in the meetings. Talk about over-complicating processes.
Peter Debnam just resigned as Lib leader …
News Updates:
Debnam withdraws from the Liberal leadership contest – OFarrell set to be elected unopposed.
One of Iemma’s new ministers Paul Gibson under investigation by police, the Premier suspends his swearing in.
And the Independent ahead again in lake Macquarie, 44 votes.
The breaking news about Gibson is absolutely fantastic. What a nasty man. Dying to know how this has happened and what the charges are.
My information is that it may have to do with a polling day incident at the Doonside High School booth. Or it could be something else.
St Peter is dead. Long live St Barry. No policies or political philosophies of course just a frantic grasping of the baton of the power and influence that they perceive the Liberal leadership will give them.
Anyone else who despairs of what passes for major party politics might like to listen to a discussion on The National Interest yesterday between Greiner and Cain – audio at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/nationalinterest/stories/2007/1885846.htm
Re Edward O’s comments on Jane Hydes ‘plentiful young people in light-green Climate Change Coalition shirts at booths’. This overnight army of backpackers on $20/hour covered many booths in the Balmain electorate, and managed to collect 2.3% of the vote, either an independent vote or people mistakenly casting a ‘Green’ vote. No word on whether the Climate Change Coalition covered so many booths in any other electorate. Curious.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the ALP gave a bit of a “boost” to the Climate Change Coalition in Balmain.
I know a few friends in the ALP Left who handed out HTVs for Liberals for Forests in Parramatta.
Interesting turn of events re Greg Piper in Lake Macquarie. When is the recount taking place in Port Stephens? If Baumann’s 19 vote margin holds, will this be the closest contest in NSW electoral history?
No. Tumut was a tie decided by the returning officer in 1895, and there have been several other districts decided by single votes over the years.
Lake macquarie: just updated Hunter back in lead by 51!
Ahhh, thanks Antony …. do you know which one was the most recent contest decided by less than 19 votes? Am just curious.
Though Labor is 51 votes ahead again in Lake Macquarie.
Coogee 1973, 8 votes.
65 now
Ahh, my electorate
… although way before my time…
Lake Macquarie developments have been noted with two further updates. For the record, the Liberals’ eight-vote win in Coogee in 1973 was overturned on a legal challenge – a by-election followed and was won by Labor by 54 votes.
And by the way, there is not a re-count in Port Stephens. Re-counts almost never take place in Australia. Votes are counted in the booths on the night, and check counted in the Returning Office on the Sunday and Monday. The next week involves counting of various declaration votes. What is taking place tomorrow is the formal distribution of preferences, which is essentially the third time most votes will have been counted. It is not a re-count, though it is a proof-read on the notional distribution of preferences.
If it is really close, a re-count can be requested. That did occur in Victoria in Ferntree Gully, and in some upper house provinces. But if both sides have scrutineered every vote closely, there is usually little reason to re-count.
So I should say “re-check” rather than “re-count”?
Previously “declared” results “de-declared”???
I may have posted a previous item about the preferential counts disappearing from the web-site in the wrong place. Anyway, both the preferential counts and the two declarations (MacQuarie Fields and Coffs Harbour) have returned to a “not yet declared” status.
In my experience, the declarations are made at the electoral level by the DRO, who usually signs the writ in the presence of witnesses and scrutineers, and not via notification on the website. At least this way, the prospects for tea and cakes remains.
No. It’s just the distribution of preferences. The Notional distribution shows a 19 vote gap, the scrutineers are all quoting 21. The booth notionals from election night have not been significantly re-checked, but they are not usually significantly out. If the primary counts are agreed to, and they have been re-checked, they will then just sequentially exclude candidates and distribute preferences. The distribution of preferences is the legal final count, where the notional distribution is done entirely for information purposes. Tomorrow’s count is the official count of preferences.
My own use of the word “recount” (”the primary vote recount cut Chris Baumann’s vote by five votes and Jim Arneman’s by six”) referred to the check count from last Sunday and Monday.
There were climate change coalition people in nicely printed t-shirts at the Potts Pt and Kings Cross booths.
I’m a little confused so I have two (probably very stupid) questions:
1) What is a declaration vote? :S
2) Don’t they distribute all the preferences on Election Night? Otherwise, how can a 2PP tally be determined? :S
A declaration vote is any vote where you fill in a ballot paper and enclose it in a declaration envelope. The main types are postal, absent and pre-poll votes. As your name is not crossed off the roll when you cast one of these votes, the declaration envelope is later verified against the roll. The declaration is verified first, a pre-counting process after which the declaration flap is removed so that the secrecy of the ballot is protected when the votes are later counted.
The only real distributiuon of preferences takes place after the finalisation of the primary count. However, after the 1990 election, at which a lack of knowledge of preferences made it difficult to know who had won on the night, the AEC began doing a ‘notional’ preference count in booths. Two candidates are nominated before hand, and the votes for all other candidates are examined to determine which of the final two nominated candidates received that ballot’s preferences. It is these counts reported on the night and used in prediction, but they are notional distributions and abandoned if the wrong two candidates are selected.
Antony and others – what is the precedent for a tied vote (both in Assembly and Council) in NSW? I couldn’t find anything in the Act, though other states seem to go to Court of Disputed Returns… on that note, how have they applied their powers in other states?
It would seem to me that the most equitable outcome is a countback to primaries, though it somewhat flies in the face of STV.
Any tied vote would end up in the court of disputed returns. It would be a remarkable poll if out of 43,000 ballot papers, you can’t find one disputed ballot or one error in the administration of the poll.
As to the law, varies from state to state and the inherited common law of election could come into play. Ask Graeme Orr, he’s the country’s expert on the subject.
Some states changed their laws after the Victorian Nunawading tie in 1985. Some state acts now automatically declare ties as a void result. The old tradtition inherited from Britain, used in Tumut in 1895 and also in Nunawading, was that the Returning Officer cast the deciding vote. In Tumut, he voted for the candidate he supported. In Nunawading there was a famous draw from a box. A void election causes an automatic new writ without the need for a Court of Disputed Returns ruling. Other provisions that would void a result are ballot papers missing from the distribution of preferences that could have a real affect on the final reuslt.
In Lake Macquarie, depending on the size of the final margin , my information is that there are sufficient “disputes” of a “let the judge decide” character that would warrant a challenge in the Court of Disputed Returns. For that reason I am not getting too excited about the varying fluctuations in the notional preference distribution. There is a long way to go yet in this seat – formal distribution of preferences, recount and depending on the result and the quantum of the margin, court decision.
In some senses, where there is a genuine dispute a court decision is the best outcome for democracy – otherwise there always remains the potential for grievances of the ‘we wuz robbed’ nature to leave a stain on democracy.
So sit back and relax and watch the story in Lake Macquarie unfold.
The NSW Local Govt election results are here:
ftp://ftp.election.nsw.gov.au/2004%20Local%20Government%20Detailed%20Results/
Someone was asking about it earlier.
I thought this thread was dead and haven’t checked it in days only to discover it was still being updated. Gotta catch up !
Hi Antony,
Was the bye-election in Millicent, SA in 1968 (?) a tied vote and did the returning officer vote on that occassion.
On the LC figures, I’d reckon 9 Labor, 8 Coalition, 2 Green, 1 Christian Democrat and 1 Shooter looks most likely. The eighth Coalition and single Shooter both have nearly twice the vote of any of the other party, making it hard to see preferences altering the result.
Gibson’s behaviour on polling day.
A neighbour of mine, an ordained Christian minister, was handing out HTV’s for the Christian Democrat on a booth in Blacktown when he says he was both physically and verbally jostled by none other than the sitting member Paul Gibson himself. Apparently Mr Gibson also intimidated some teenage volunteers as well. I’m sure this isn’t the “serious allegation” the hapless Morris Iemma is referring to. . . but nonetheless in my mind anyway – it says a lot about the character of Paul “stay safe, stay sober” Gibson. Perhaps he and Cherie Burton followed the same user manual?
Labor’s Des Corcoran defeated the Liberals’ Martin Cameron by one vote in Millicent in the 1968 general election in South Australia. From memory, Cameron led by two votes with three postal votes to count – and Corcoran got all three. It was later revealed that the returning officer had voted and this was one of the reasons a court of disputed returns ordered a new election. Corcoran won comfortably but the first Dunstan government (in which Corcoran was deputy premier) had fallen anyway. Corcoran later moved to the Adelaide seat of Coles and served again as deputy premier before becoming premier when Dunstan resigned. Caneron went on to become a senator and then Liberal leader in the SA Legislative Council.
If, as was believed, the returning officer had voted for Cameron, then the actual margin for Corcoran should have been two votes. If he had voted for Corcoran, then the result should have been a tie.
Cameron, by the way, says he was beaten by his aunt. As well as Corcoran and Cameron there was a DLP candidate in the original election. “I gave you three votes, Martin,” the aunt said, meaning she’d put a ‘3′ against his name.
Cheers Mr/Madam Speaker.
This is what I’ve got for today:
Christian Democratic Party 0.95
The Greens 0.85
Labor 0.84
The Shooters Party 0.62
Liberal/Nationals 0.59
Australian Democrats 0.37
The Fishing Party 0.33
AAFI 0.33
Unity 0.28
About 2.6 million votes have now been counted.
ABC news is reporting that the allegations against Gibson are much nastier than mere rough and tumble at a polling booth (nasty and unacceptable though that is). Domestic violence, actually.
Thanks Phil, I knew the returning officer had something to do with it.
Whilst one shouldn’t seek to convict Gibbo before the police investigation is even properly started it has to be said that he has “form” not the least of which is the fact that on the public record are two affairs with the wives of mates on top of a criticism of his evidence by the commissioner of his evidence before the ICAC some years back.
Now Gibbo has always made much of his prowess… on the spurting field errr… I meant sporting. His most recent parly bio cached in Google says “Community Activity – Played various levels in most sports including athletics, rugby league, basketball and swimming” whatever that means.
Previously he has claimed to have played grade for Manly Warringah in the ’60s. Has anyone got any information on his playing record for the club?
Wobbly margins
Two seats had a full preferential count today- Macquarie Fields and Coffs Harbour.
The total number of votes in the full distribution differed from the notional distribution by +94 and +71 respectively. The Coalition was definitely the beneficiary in this “recount”. These alterations are as big as, or much bigger than, the current margins in Port Stephens and Lake Macquarie.
Yes, but no one would have been scrutineering in Macquarie Fields or Coffs Harbour.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Booths have scrutineers like dogs have fleas. The difference is surely in the Saturday night booth results, when there would have been at least one scrutineer for each candidate?
The count does not appear on the web-site, which seems to have relegated these two electorates back to a CC-enabled status (the names now appear in blue).
If anyone was scrutineering in Macquarie Fields eight days after the election, could someone please tell them to go home and get a life? I mean, we may all be election tragics, but there’s tragic and then there’s tragic.
When I was candidate on the North Shore of Sydney in the last state election I was slapped by a very well to do ‘North Shore Lady.’
She simply walked up to me said how dare you and then slapped me…
I think she was referring to the fact that I dared stand.. unless she didnt like the shirt I was wearing…
but none the less slap me she did…
tensions do run hig hon election day but why do peopple get angry…
lol
I have another question…
When do the votes become declared / confirmed? I just find it curious that Iemma swore in his Gov’t today whilst the votes were still being counted . . .
The Climate Change Conspiracy were well represented in the Sydney electorate stealing 700 votes from the Greens. Their stooges were obviously instructed to get close to Green signs and workers to pretend they were one and the same. Some of the workers said their ATL preferances would go to the Greens, creating confusion amongst voters. I wounder if lying about preferences distribution is a prosecutable offence?
Psephophile, I wondered the same thing.
Psephophile said: When do the votes become declared / confirmed? I just find it curious that Iemma swore in his Gov’t today whilst the votes were still being counted . .
Well, it’s whatever Marie wants, on the advice of Maurice. NSW is run by the Executive Council:
Constitution says:
35E Appointment of Ministers
(1) The Premier and other Ministers of the Crown for the State shall be appointed by the Governor from among the members of the Executive Council.
(2) The Premier and other Ministers of the Crown shall hold office during the Governor’s pleasure.
and
35C Members of the Executive Council
(1) The Executive Council shall consist of such persons as may be appointed by the Governor, from time to time, as members of the Executive Council.
(2) The members of the Executive Council shall hold office during the Governor’s pleasure.
In theory, members of the Executive Council could be anybody, and there seems to be no requirement that they have been formally elected via the return of a writ to the Governor. The convention is that the EC is formed of Ministers, who are supposed to be elected members of either house.
It’s all very flexible…. although there is mention of a creature called the “Premier” in the Constitution, for instance, what sort of creature that might be, or where it might be found, is not explicitly defined.
Surely the Governor is able to swear in a new government as soon as she can see that they have a majority in the Legislative Assembly.
William said there was a debate about dead-heats going on, and my name was invoked as an electoral law nob. I suspect you folk know more about such intricacies than me! In the event of a tie or a single vote margin, very likely both sides could find a couple of disputed ballots to support a petition, and hence either a fresh election or a judicial award of the scrutiny to one side or the other. NZ specifies that if the result is still tied after judicial ruling, a lot is used.
It’s v.inappropriate to have a casting vote.
In theory there is no need for legislation on the topic. The writ can be returned with no-one elected and leave it to the parties to petition, or the Governor/Speaker to move for a fresh election. But it is much preferable to have some clear rule, lest the Speaker/Governor move precipitously to claim the election ‘failed’ – possibly on politicised advice to avoid a judicial scrutiny that might award the seat to the non-governing party. In such a case there could be a clash between court and executive, as to who should defer to the other.
Generally now the R.O. only has power to split dead-heats during the preference-exclusion stage – sometimes this is resolved by a count-back – and in the absence of any method being laid down I’m sure a court would insist the only proper process is a random one.
Personally I prefer the idea of a ‘golden point’ period of extra time…
Going around the grounds:
* Automatic Court of Disputed Returns – W.A. (EC must petition); S.A.
* Result declared tied, up to parties or Commission to petition
* Nothing specified: Tas; NSW; Commonwealth; NT; Qld; ACT. Depending on automaticity of ‘failed election’ rule, in some jurisdictions, as Antony says, this suggests an automatic fresh election, but compare my point that this leaves potential for clash between new writ and petition.
Thanks for clearing that up for me Geoff. I assume that if Iemma, for argument’s sake, didn’t end up having a majority, he would be defeated in a motion of no-confidence at the first sitting of the next parliament? In which case the Governor would ask the Leader of the Opposition to form Government? Is this what happened in SA in 2002 when Kerin refused to quit despite Labor stiching up a deal with the Independents?
D’uh. Victoria is the place where the result is declared tied and it is explicitly up to parties or Commission to petition. The time to petition is cut back from 40 to 14 days. The Vic, or the WA/SA approaches are preferable.
Thanks for clearing that up for me Geoff. I assume that if Iemma, for argument’s sake, didn’t end up having a majority, he would be defeated in a motion of no-confidence at the first sitting of the next parliament?
Yes. I don’t think it explicitly says so anywhere, but the Governor or Governor General commissions the person whom the Guv thinks will have “the confidence of the house”. Given that a “want of confidence” is demonstrated by a no-confidencer motion, always along party lines, this implicitly locks-in the convention that Government goes to the majority party.
Preference counts
They are going Hell-for-leather on this. Counts are underway in 58 seats and completed for 23, as at lunch-time.
It seems as though the GRN –> ALP preference flow is about 35%-40%. This would probably support Arbib’s contention about how many seats which the ALP won on GRN prefs. I hope he won’t do a Richo and immodestly and falsely claim it was all his idea.
Geoff.
Do you happen to have a handle on how are the CDP prefs going. My gut feeling is that they are more disciplined but I could be wrong.
Geoff: Do you have any figures on the difference in preference flow between seats where the Greens preferenced the ALP and those where they didnt ?
At 4 pm (not formally “declared”, but counting finished)
State of the House (Declared)
2003 2007
ALP 55 26
COAL 31 21
IND 7 1
GRN 0 0
UNDEC 0 26
CDP prefs?…. seem to be about 45-50% to LIB
GRN? don’t know, don’t have a list of where tickets were issued. In Manly, with a 1,2 ticket to IND, the flow was 45%; I suspect barely above what would have happened “naturally”)
The “Undeclared” above is obviously wrong, it must be 93-26-21-1=47
Err…45?
What is the take out from this? That people like being able to make a single mark on a ballot paper with optional preferential? I note that the informal vote in most western Sydney seats which was scandalously high at the last Federal election was quite low in the recent stat election.
You can find out where and how GRN prefs were directed/exhausted at http://www.nsw.greens.org.au/materials/leaflets/A4%20Absentee%20Booklet.pdf
Port Stephens status has been changed from “Election Night” (which it was set back to yesterday I believe) back to being listed green again – margin is now 17 votes. I assume that this notional distribution will have the same votes ruled in and out as full distribution, so the final margin should be within a couples of votes of this figure?
Geoff, where are you getting this data from? When I click the preference distribution button on the commission website for the seats where they claim to have done the distributions I get a page saying 0% and 100%, which is not very helpful. Is the data up somewhere else, or is this some problem with the computer I am accessing from?
Piper win by 106 in Lake Macquarie.
Has anyone noticed that in Balmain the number of exhausted votes is exactly the same as the number of Liberal votes? Such discipline…
SMH is reporting Port Stephens taken by Libs by 67 votes. Where are the actual results of preference distribution on the SEO website?
I also note that in Barwon the ALP vote exhausted rather than help Tim Horan beat the Nationals. Does anyone know why this was?
Distribution of preferences postponed until Tuesday 3 April 2007.
From SEO website.
The distribution of preferences for each of the 93 Legislative Assembly
Districts has been postponed until 9 am Tuesday, 3 April 2007. The distribution of preferences was initially scheduled to take place on Monday, 2 April.
A larger than expected number of postal votes have been received which need to be processed.
Returning Officers have advised candidates of the change in arrangements.
Perhaps another postponement and night of anxiety for candidates and psephophiles?
Comments by Andy and Sam Ricketson have been belatedly liberated from moderation.
ADAM says
I also note that in Barwon the ALP vote exhausted rather than help Tim Horan beat the Nationals. Does anyone know why this was?
The reason for the Labor vote exhausting has a number of reasons-
1. Voters have become accustomed to just voting 1
2. Country Labor people dislike being told by Head Office how to allocate their preferences- and they get liitle if no funding from head office so why should they do as they are told
3. Country Labor members – some that is – actually tell voters to only vote 1 – they are aware of the Labor/Independent “alliance ” and do not agree with it
4. Country Labor conference in 2004 I think it was was very critical of the way the ALP supported Independent candidates but would not support Country Labor candidates- the same has happened again this time – ALP Ministers visiting seats and visiting Independent candidates – but not going near Country labor candidates
5. Barwon Country labor members are true believers and won’t engage in tactics which keep Country Labor out of a chance of ever winning the seat
“Adam Says:
April 3rd, 2007 at 5:48 pm
I also note that in Barwon the ALP vote exhausted rather than help Tim Horan beat the Nationals. Does anyone know why this was?”
Adam, one theory might be that the electorate knew what they were doing and decided to elect the best candidate.
Remember it was labor that introduced optional preferential voting.
In the case of Barwon, Labor voters supported Meryl Dillon and some decided to place a second preference for other candidates, including the Independent, Tim Horan. That was their democratic right, and good luck to them.
Surely your not suggesting the voters’ decisions were not a considered and thoughtful execution of the democratic process?
Trev
Stephen asked: Geoff, where are you getting this data from?
The ftp site. I don’t know if its address is a secret or not….. I got it by phoning the NSWEC and the receptionist shouted something to someone in a back room and a man in the backroom shouted the address back to her. The site was actually referenced on the web-site for a while. By AEC standards, an election ftp site should be “Public”. I’ve got into trouble before from blabbing about it. Maybe Antony can make a ruling???. You could probably find it via Google.
Anyway, while I was walking home, all but 4 electorates were decided. It seems that the variation between notional and actual TCP margins in Port Stephens and Lake Macquarie really was quite large (49 and 171, a reversal- surely not?)… would such a big difference induce a party to ask for it to be done again?
I will try to answer the other questions raised here later.
William, the bug is back. I can’t post anything longer than a line.
It’s at ftp://ftp.elections.nsw.gov.au/Results/EMA/LA/
These were the files the NSW EC were proposing the media use until we all kicked up a fuss about their manifest inadequacy as an election night media feed. Amongst other problems, the EMA file had no candidate totals by district, which required the media to store all the booths, add them all up, and in doing this, figure out what stage of the count had been completed so we could figure out which totals to use. In the end, we insisted the MediaFeed files be produced in which the totals that the NSW EC considered to be correct would be provided.
The EMA files are used to generate the NSW EC website. As those preference counts have not been published, I can’t tell you whether they are final or not. The mystery of trying to work out whether something was final or not was why we were never keen to use this file in the first place. As it is, the data is published in this file, but its status is a mystery.
So where have these final figures for Lake Macquarie etc been posted?
I haven’t had any luck with the ftp server. Word from those at the count at newie is mckay has won by 766.
GRN flow to ALP
I should get a medal for this, I had to multiply 5 matrices together….. anyway..
The flow is 37.8% across the 75 electorates where such flows were possible and/or have been done. This is a weighted average, giving greater weight to the seats where the GRN vote was higher.
Now all I need is for the original questioner to supply me with a list of where GRN issued HtVs preferencing ALP. I suppose it’s on the Greens web-site?
Would you like to know what the ALP flow to GRN was?- it happened in North Shore, Pittwater and Vaucluse… GRN outpolled ALP
As Antony says, the EMA files are a minor nightmare, not the least of all because candidates and booths are only identified by name; the candidate names appear in alphabetical order not ballot paper order and; the names are sometimes misspelt (see Morris Lemma” in one of my previous posts). There were many other peculiarities.
The schema for the EMA (”the vessel with the pestle…..?”) (SEO.XSD) does have a list of the various “status” descriptions. Most, but not all, that have completed a distribution today are now shown as “Distribution complete”. But there are 3 more stages to go… “Recount”, “Recount complete” and “Publish”….. the latter will presumably be the real McCoy.
You can open these files in Excel or use an XML parser. It only takes about 6 weeks to learn how to decode what you see. The NSWEC even supplies an application to build your own Virtual Tally Room from the EMA.
Newcastle
McKay was ahead by 1646 when they stopped counting (or at least stopped posting the results to the server at 1811 tonight). There are 11485 Gaudry ballots to cut-up.
Maybe I will wait for William or Antony to post the results at their respective sites
Vaucluse and North Shore.
I was being flippant but, when I looked, it turned out that in these seats the TCP was (or will be- Vaucluse is not yet cut-up) between LIB and GRN…. add them to Balmain and Marrickville as seats that are now non-traditional TPP seats. In Manly, at the penultimate cut-up GRN and ALP were dead-heated. If there be no IND in 2011, Manly might join the list. Ditto Pittwater (remember Nat Young)?
One Line Test
Two Line Test
Three Line Test
I’ve never had any problem posting. Except for that time I had a ‘less than’ symbol in my post.
Both the NSWEC and ABC websites still show Labor winning Lake Macquarie. Can someone post the actual 2-party result?
“Now all I need is for the original questioner to supply me with a list of where GRN issued HtVs preferencing ALP”
Seats where GRN directed prefs to ALP at 3 or better:
Albury 3
Balmain
Barwon 3
Baulkham Hills
Burrinjuck
Cabramatta
Camden
Cambelltown
Canterbury
Castle Hill
Charlestown
Coffs
Drummoyne
East Hills
Epping
Goulburn
Granville
Hawkesbury 3
Heathcote
Heffron
Kiama
Kogarah 3
Lake macquarie 3 after Piper
Lane Cove 3
Lismore 3
Liverpool 3
Londonderry
M Fields
Maitland
Menai
Miranda
Mulgoa
Myall Lakes
Oxley 3
P’mtta 3
P Stephens
Riverstone
Rockdale 3
Smithfield
S. Coast
Strathfield 3
Tamworth 3
Toonga Bay 3
Vaucluse
Wallsend
W’dilly
“it happened in North Shore, Pittwater and Vaucluse… GRN outpolled ALP”
In the Upper House GRN outpolled ALP in Vaucluse and P’water so they must’ve meant it in the lower house too.
Of course the Green vote is maxxxxxxxxxxxxed out as we all know.
Another little thing of interest is that CDP polled their highest vote in Auburn where they heavily pushed their AAFI clone policies.
http://www.cdp.org.au/docs/A5_Musilm_Poll_Flyer.pdf
Sould we not be speaking out against this stuff?
Where’s the falmin edit button. My suggestion that CDP had done well in auburn was based on a doc on their site which I note has now been taken down. Sorry.
So Labor has lost both Port Stephens and Lake Macquarie?
It seems so.
http://www.theherald.com.au/articles/2007/04/03/1175366243731.html
The new pensulum:
http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/a/australia/states/nsw/nsw20073.txt
or “pendulum” as we say in English
I have finally updated Port Stephens and Lake Macquarie, using figures from the FTP site. Adam, I have removed my spam filters – I can’t think else what it might be.
Trevor, in belated response to your question of a few days ago. The only aspect of the NSWEC’s election operations I’m in a position to comment on is their publication of the results. This was by and large handled well, but I am puzzled by a decision that seems to have been made last week to cease publishing updated results in certain seats. In a comment above, Sally McEwan says: “SEO in Newcastle has announced it will not release any more updates on the count from this seat, as it is so close, if that makes any logical sense.” I can only say that it does not. New notional preference counts for Newcastle and Maitland were conducted on Monday and/or Tuesday as it had become apparent that the wrong candidates had been picked for the election night count, and the progress of this count was widely reported on the press. However, the figures were only posted on the website on Friday. I’m not sure on what basis it was thought this served the public interest.
Personally I think we have the right to find out ourselves directly from the SEO without having to rely on reports from Newspapers or other media as to who has won e.g. primary source verification.
This may not seem such a big thing in Australia but one only has to look at what has occured in the US in previous Presidential elections.
I note that Iemma is in the safest Labor Seat, while O’Ferrell is in the safest Liberal Seat, I have no idea what conclusion I can drawn from this
A swing of 5% could led to a change of government, lets hope this keep the Iemma government working for NSW and not themselve over the next 4 years
Re: CDP is ‘AAFI-style’
Fred Nile does not advocate ‘White Australia’ or ‘no further immigration’.
In regard to suspending Muslim immigration he would replace that with immigrants of persecuted Christians from Muslim nations i.e. replace immigration of, say, Algerian Muslims to Australia with Algerian Christians.
Lake Macquarie
My understanding is that a about 200 formal votes were found in an informal pile of votes. These tipped the vote to a Piper majority.
Both the NSWEC and ABC websites still show Labor winning Lake Macquarie. Can someone post the actual 2-party result?
Cut and paste from my spreadsheet:
Final TCP Candidate name PIPER Greg HUNTER Jeff
Party IND ALP
Progressive TCP votes 18656 18550 37206 50.1%
Win for IND by 106
Fred and Disciples’ Discipline?
I’m afraid Fred Followers are less disciplined than Greens. The average flow from CDP-LIB was 36.4%, as opposed to the GRN-ALP flow of 37.8%
I’m now working with the list provided above to calculate the Deep Green discipline.
So the Electoral Commission has more to do to provide a better service.
But lets hope they are heading in the right direction.
it just needs someone to fix all the “bugs”.
GRN-ALP flows:
In ticketed seats 42.8%
In non-ticketed seats 29.5%
So does this resolve the question????—- about 13% of Greens voters consult the HtV to help determine their preferences?
But, remember that the Greens were usually last to be cut-up, so they were often carrying substantial numbers of ballots gathered from the minnows during the exclusions.
From experience in TWS, handing out “specific” (differing-from-party) HtVs at State and Federal elections, my analysis is that about 2.3% of voters will follow a ticket that is slightly different from their natural inclination.
Due to finding some 25 spelling errors in the NSWEC’s list of GRN and ALP candidates, I can now add some further data on GRN—>ALP flows, which now work out to be
Total flow 39.1%
In ticketed seats 44.6%
In non-ticketed seats 34.9%
Hypothetically, is it possible to devise a Coalition v Labor pendulum? I note that on Adam’s pendulum it has that a uniform swing of 3.8% would see Labor lose it’s majority. However, there are two sets under the 3.8% mark pendulum which are unlikely to be considered at-risk seats come the 2011 election, Maitland and Newcastle, in which case the uniform swing required would need to be higher.
Just wondering if devising a Coalition v Labor pendulum for these seats, and others like them, is possible …
Thanks Geoff, much appreciated. This is Gold.
umm.. I dont suppose you could tell me how many exhaust and many flow to the Libs for ticketed/non-ticketed ?
It’s also worth noting that a lot of the Greens groups that didn’t preference Labor are outside Sydney, where I believe there is generally a tendency for more Greens voters to preference the Coalition than in Sydney. So that 13% might be exagerrated. What you need are two seats near each other with different preference recommendations, but I don’t know what those would be.
It’s probably about time that all seats with 2PP contests not between the majors are removed from the list altogether, as they don’t fit any concept of uniform swing. I don’t believe a swing to the Liberals necessarily results in the Greens vote improving in Balmain and Marrickville.
It would seem that some results are being declared this morning, because the Status fields are gradually changing to “Publish” on the ftp server.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, recounts appear to be underway in Lake Macquarie and Port Stephens….. these have now the status “Recount Enabled”. I suppose you can see this on the web pages
Ben is of course correct. For Labor to lose its majority in the event it loses seats only to the Coalition would require a bigger swing than I have shown, but there is a limit to how many variables I can fit in one pendulum.
The AEC does a notional 2-party distribution for all seats, but I don’t know if NSWEC does this. If they do, it would be possible to make a pendulum showing all seats as 2-party contests. It would presumably show the Nats winning the four rural indy seats and Labor winning Sydney and Lake Mac.
I would think that even if Maitland had been a 2-party contest, the Labor majority wouldn’t have been very great.
Incidentally, hands up all those who said that Black would hold Murray-Darling. Tsk tsk. Not only did he lose, he copped a very large swing, more than could be blamed on the redistribution. Maybe his lairish style didn’t go down well in Ruralia after all.
The Country Labor candidate got (on my calculations) 4.35% of the first preference vote in Northern Tablelands.That is dangerously close to less than 4% – being the point at which candidates suffer the humiliation of losing their deposits.
Is anyone aware of any major party candidate who lost their deposit, in NSW in say the last 75 years ?
The Speaker rapped his gavel and said…”umm.. I dont suppose you could tell me how many exhaust and many flow to the Libs for ticketed/non-ticketed ?”
for GRN—>LIB
Ticketed 11.6%
non-Ticketed 6.2%
for GRN—>NAT
Ticketed 1.9%
non-Ticketed 2.9%
Doing the exhausts may induce epilepsy, I’ll put it off for a while
The ALP won Newcastle by 3312 votes. The Gaudry preferences split very evenly.
It’s only humiliating to poll 4.3% if you’re trying to win. Since Phil Usher was chosen precisely because of his total obscurity, in order to poll as low a vote as possible in order to help the Independent beat the Nationals, his vote should be seen as a great triumph Well done, Phil.
Nevertheless, the ALP should be concerned about its performance in country and regional NSW. When the electoral contest in NSW between itself and the Coalition tightens (as inevitably, it must), it will need to win and hold seats in these areas.
I really don’t think the ALP should be so depressed about not performing in Northern Tablelands.
The Coalition can’t get at the ALP by doing any better in the country. They actually need to win seats off the ALP, and that means Western and Southern Sydney (ie. Penrith, Macarthur, Sutherland regions) as well as places up and down the coast.
Thanks Geoff.
Does “Ticketed” mean they followed the ticket as specified by the Greens ? (even when they didnt direct preferences).
Or does it mean they followed the Greens HTV exactly, even when the greens didnt allocate preferences ?
I’m a bit confused by your ‘ticketed’ liberal preference figure as I didn’t think the Greens preferenced the Coalition anywhere.
——————————————-
Someone please correct me on this very rough analysis…
In a seat where the Greens get 3000 votes
If they direct preferences to Labor,
Labor gets 1338 preference votes (44.6%)
if the Greens dont preference
Labor gets 1047 preference votes (34.9%)
a difference of 291 votes ? in a seat with 42000 formal votes, thats.. 0.7%
Most of those would exhaust rather than going to the liberals, so I’m not sure how much of a real effect it has..
Anyway bodgey analysis done while I’m supposed to be working..
it also needs to win and hold urban fringe seats – Macquarie, Lindsay and Dobell are standouts in NSW. Only one of those has a confirmed quality candidate.
My hand is up, Adam. Note however my prescient election-eve escape clause:
Permission to make a statement Mr Speaker?
GRN exhaust rate
Ticketed seats: 39%
non-Ticketed seats: 55%
May I be excused now?
“Ticketed” always means seats where the Greens issued a HtV preferencing the ALP. It came from the list provided (above) this morning, except I can’t find an electorate called “Toonga Bay”
The peasant mentality is indeed difficult to fathom.
Can anyone calculate what the 2-party majority in Maitland would have been if it had been a 2-party contest?
The web-site doesn’t say so, but the ftp server now shows 86 seats with “Publish Results” status. I assume this probably means they have been declared and the writs are on their way to Prof Bashir?
sorry for my bizarre comment up above.
no excuse, wrong thread, wrong party, wrong brain ….
North Shore results have just been released, it’s now LIB vs GRN along with Vaucluse, both with margins of 16%. With my by-now traditional Green optimism that’s not insurmountable! That takes Greens in the 2CP candidates to four, with a difference of 24 votes at the crucial cut-up taking them out of a fifth in Ku-Ring-Gai, of all places.
Pardon my cynicism, Josh, but so what? You think the Greens are going to win Ku-ring-gai or Vaucluse next time? You think the ultra-rich are going to compost their Volvos and start eating tofu? These results prove nothing except that Labor is very weak in super-wealthy areas, so that a fringe party gets to come a very distant second behind the Libs. Whoopy-do.
“Adam Says:
….The peasant mentality is indeed difficult to fathom.”
and
“Pardon my cynicism, Josh, but so what? You think the Greens are going to win Ku-ring-gai or Vaucluse next time? You think the ultra-rich are going to compost their Volvos and start eating tofu? These results prove nothing except that Labor is very weak in super-wealthy areas, so that a fringe party gets to come a very distant second behind the Libs. Whoopy-do.”
Mate, how many chips do you have on your shoulders?
Putting aside my political inclinations, you appear blessed with the capacity to make derogatory comments without making any constructive contribution to the debate.
As best as I can tell most people on this site are attempting to analyse what has happened in the elction, and keeping their political views generally in check…you seem to be the exception to the rule.
How about a little more insight, and less of the cynicism.
Trev
The LC count has basically now caught up with all the election night counts, and looks very strongly as being 9 Labor, 8 Coalition, 2 Greens, 1 Christian Democrat and 1 Shooters Party. What’s to come is all the postal, absent, pre-poll votes. It seems highly unlikely that any of the minor parties can catch the 8th Coalition candidate or the Shooter candidate on preferences.
Labor polled single figure pcts in 5 lower house districts. I think that explains why Labor looks on-track to again get a slightly higher vote in the upper house. The Greens look set for the same vote in both houses, while the Coalition vote looks likely to be lower in the LC than the lower house. That’s because of votes lost to the Christian Democrats and Shooters by the look of it.
ABC website update will have to wait for next week. Final preference counts aren’t delivered in the media feed, so it will have to be done by hand, once the final figures are official. I’m not coming in over Easter to do that!
“Antony Green Says:
April 4th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
….
….
ABC website update will have to wait for next week. Final preference counts aren’t delivered in the media feed, so it will have to be done by hand, once the final figures are official. I’m not coming in over Easter to do that!”
Why not?
I need some sleep!!!!
Trev
Memo to self: do not attempt irony with the Nationals.
“Adam Says:
April 4th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Memo to self: do not attempt irony with the Nationals.”
Mate, good idea, us bushies obviously can’t keep up with your intellectual superiority.
Trev
Trev, Adam is so full of bile and hate.
I’m sure his friends say he simply needs a(nother) good enema.
agree with you about the bile and hate Isabella. Maybe he tried the other parties and they rejected him?
# Adam Says: Memo to self: do not attempt irony with the Nationals.
Indeed no. I attempted same at a Nationals’ State Conference in Dubbo once.
Wal Murray threw a tomato at me.
He was very drunk.
I think they are taking down the tents tonight. Come again in 2011
mebbe he threw a tomato at you, but did he connect or miss?
Trevor, I don’t know anything about you apart from what I’ve read on pollbludger – and I hope, if you’re lucky enough to be elected, that you do your best in parliament and always try to contribute with a good heart. There is too much one-eyedness and too little open-mindedness in politics. Cheers.
Isbella, I have no idea who you are, I have certainly never spoken to you here before, in fact I have no recollection of ever seeing you here before. Yet you feel entitled to make offensive remarks about me in a public forum (where unlike you I comment under my own name). If Trevor finds my remarks not to his liking that is a matter between him and me. Could I ever suggest that you mind your own business?
Look, sorry, I’ve inject myself into the centre of things a bit here, and that was not my intention.
I will return to the role of mere observer and keep my opinions to myself….in other words, truce.
Trev
I have a question for Geoff or Antony or really anyone who knows the answer.
In calculating the percentage of the vote won in the LC, and I guess the LA too, is it correct procedure to include the informal votes in the grand total, or to exclude them?
From my limited experience counting ballots I would have thought that they should be left out. But the SEO site downloads seem to imply that they are included. It makes a big difference to the Greens’ LC vote at this stage of the count – 8.6% vs 8.2%.
Yeah Josh WK, I definitely can see it, the greens can definitely win those seat, see the Liberal Vote was 55%, if the Green get every one of the other vote ………….
Maybe, if at the next distribution, they move part of Lakemba into the North Shore electorate ………
Maybe on the date of polling in 2011, a tsunami hit Manly beach and wash away 20,000 Liberal voters ………
Yeah and Hell will freeze over ……….. lets look at getting the Green’s first seat, before you think of World domination.
I think there was a protest vote against Labor and Liberal in those electorate, and those vote went to the ind or Greens, I think they are very lose support and the Greens real base in those electorate is less than 10%, which will make it hard for them to win these type of electorate. I think Sydney, Balmain and Marrickville are still their best bet, and the keys for the greens is to get Liberal preference
Hey Karno – it’s been a real treat to have you here and to read your comments. I hope that you stick around and let us have some more of your views and thoughts from the inside. And I say this as someone who is diametrically opposed to you on some matters.
Geoff – thank you for all your terrific work on the pref flows
Dovif is right about the need for the Libs to run dead (as they did in Cunningham) or preference the GRN candidates in electorates where it will cause grief to the ALP. In this election they did the reverse in Balmain where they had a candidate with very good enviro cred but who had no realistic chance of winning and if he had been put up in a real Lib-ALP marginal could have given it a real shake. But tactics is not what the NSW Libs are good at.
To those confused about “Toonga Bay” this is how the residents of the third settlement deprecatingly refer to their suburb in the same way as some people say they got their clothes at “Tar Jay”. Otherwise known as Toonie the area was a wonderful rural place to grow up 40 years ago but with suburbanisation, being divided between 3 (count ‘em) LGAs, and having areas renamed to satisfying the marketing aspirations of developers it entered a decades long period of decline. However recently its proximity to the health and ed campuses at Westmead and the redevelopment of the shopping centre has meant that house prices are rising and the future for the suburb and residents is buoyant.
Andrew, I think you’re looking at the figures from election night. There’s actually a PDF update being posted every day from the actual count, which you can find here: http://vtr.elections.nsw.gov.au/LCProgressiveTotals/
This count has individual BTL vote counts for each candidate.
With the election night figures, BTL votes weren’t separated into separate piles, and the complexity in determining formality meant that they were kept in the one pile for the purposes of the %s on the website. However I wouldn’t count informals within the %s now that they’ve been sorted out from the BTL votes.
I’ll post the %s and quotas from the Wednesday figures in a couple of minutes.
Hi Ben
No I am looking at the daily pdf downloads. I understand the election night figures issue, which was quite irritating because it artificially depressed everyone’s vote percentage, leading to lots of questions about how come our vote had fallen when in fact it hadn’t. I was in the tally room on the night & it came up a lot.
But on the downloads, the Grand Total figure includes informals. There is no grand total given without them. It’s obviously very easy to work it out, but it implies to me that they are included in the grand total figure for the purpose of calculating the vote percentages.
Possibly I’ve just spent too long looking at it and am over-thinking the whole thing.
Yeah, considering there is actually no official role in the process for percentages, it’s just up to us, and I wouldn’t include informals.
For everyone who’s interested, here is today’s positions:
Christian Democratic Party 0.94
The Greens 0.89
Liberal/Nationals 0.7
Labor 0.69
The Shooters Party 0.6
Australian Democrats 0.37
AAFI 0.34
The Fishing Party 0.32
Unity 0.28
There was quite a lot of extra votes this time, and Labor’s vote has clearly declined so they are now below the Libs/Nats, but it still doesn’t make a difference. The Dems have remained steady, the Greens have gone up a bit from 1.85 to 1.89. The Coalition has gone from 0.59 to 0.7.
Just quickly, could someone give a rundown of the total votes and seats won in the lower house?
My apologies to William for breaking the rules of his site last night. However I have no apologies for Isabella, who has (I now discover) a history of personal abuse at this and other forums, and who will get as good as she gives from me.
To the speaker on Greens prefs,
You seem to have assumed that Green primary votes and Green votes at the point where they are cut up are the same. This was seldom the case. As Geoff noted, when the Green candidate was cut up they were usually carrying some votes from Democrats, Independents etc. Consequently, while your calculations are correct for a Green who finished on 3000 votes, such a typical candidate would probably have started on 2700 and picked up the rest on preferences.
Given that under OPP the Green preferences that don’t go to the ALP exhaust, rather than resulting in an increased Green-Liberal vote as might be expected under compulsory preferential the loss of 0.7% Green preferences to ALP is equivalent to half of these votes going to Lib – ie 0.35%.
Further on Green preferences:
I’m not sure Ben’s theory that the preference flows had as much to do with the demographics of the seat as the Green ticket actually holds. I haven’t been systematic about this, but tried to look at seats I think are probably similar where we did preference the ALP and we didn’t. For example
Kiera v Kiama (I understand they have more in common than similar names – a local please correct me if I am wrong). Lismore vs Ballina (on stronger grounds there). Looks to me like there is a pretty big difference in those seats in what our voters did, and I’d imagine the party recommendation has to be the main explanation.
I wouldn’t say Keira and Kiama are that similar other than being staunchy Labor. I used to live in Keira and it’s got an interesting mix – lots of older voters and lots of Uni of Wollongong students. It won’t ever budge from Labor ever. Kiama I would guess has many more young families and would be more volatile electorally under “normal” circumstances (i.e. not crap opposition).
I’m sure I just misread.. a National defending a Green against Labor.
Wonders never cease.
Stephen:
Thanks, yes my analysis was flawed.
In general it does tell me that in seats with less than a 100 vote margin greens preference decisions do make a difference.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I didn’t mean to say that demographics were the main reason. I just mean that it probably exagerrates the difference caused by HTVs.
How-to-votes are still the main reason for the difference in the flow of Greens preferences, but demographics of those groups probably exagerrates that difference.
Murray-Darling looked doubtful from the 2004 federal election when Labor did poorly in Broken Hill due to state issues, but when you consider there was a swing to Labor in Murrembidgee it was a bad performance by Black. Labor has held Armidale/Northern Tablelands in 1953, 1978, 1981 and 1984 it is a seat Labor has given up on. Labor vs. Green in Vaucluse Whitlamite baby boomers vs their children? Paul Gibson: triumph for rank and file preselection in 1988 unfortunately when he organised Richmond branch against Faye Lo’Po.
Oh boo hoo Dr Carr.
You love to dish out the abuse but you run squealing when anyone actually shines the bright light of the truth upon your own squalid dealings.
The biased, ill-informed drivel and lies you pass off as fact on Wikipedia says so much about you. There you are, an active member of the ALP, churning out biographies on Coalition MPs that are nothing more than leftist abuse and opinion dressed up as factual information.
Isabella, I challenge you to find one piece of “leftist abuse” I have ever written about any Coalition MP in any article at Wikipedia, and produce it here. (Wikipedia Talk pages don’t count, since they are forums for opinion.) Every edit at Wikipedia can be traced to a particular editor, and all my edits have been made under my own name. I will accept the judgement of other contributors here as to whether any edit of mine is “leftist abuse.” If you don’t come up with something by the end of Easter, I will ask William to have you banned from this site as the lying, slanderous slag that you are.
To help you with your research, here is a complete record of my Wikipedia contributions in the period I edited at Wikipedia (I have now withdrawn because it has become infested with people like you):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Adam_Carr
Happy trawling
Dr Carr, you hit the fence last winter when Lincoln Wright cast an eye over your meanderings on the dreadful Wikipedia. The Herald Sun skewered you. Not opinion, fact. F-A-C-T. June 2006 from memory. The Herald Sun is a newspaper that deserves plenty of praise for many reasons – its exposure of your intellectually dishonest behaviour is simply another reason it is a top journal worthy of our support.
All over Adam and it’s just clicked over to Good Friday.
All too easy.
Lincoln Wright’s article dealt with articles about Labor MPs, not Coalition ones, and even in that regard he got nearly everything wrong. He did not cite a single example of any edit I had made to an article about a Coalition MP, which is what I asked you to do. Do I take it from your reply that you are declining to take up my challenge?
Sheesh—and I was going to be sensible–but far be it for me to step in the way of a bun-fight or hand-bags at 10 paces or whatever the choice of weapon is –
BUT GEOFF R – Labor has held Armidale/Northern Tablelands in 1953, 1978, 1981 and 1984 it is a seat Labor has given up on.
Labor would I suspect hope that Independent Torbay would rejoin the Party – although having offered him the Speakership I guess he doesn’t need to anymore. Just a thought.
“The Herald Sun is a newspaper that deserves plenty of praise for many reasons – its exposure of your intellectually dishonest behaviour is simply another reason it is a top journal worthy of our support.”
Is-a-not-bella: April 1st is over dear.
… Herald Sun is a newspaper that deserves plenty of praise for many reasons …
I did have to pick my jaw up off the floor after that one, thanks for the laugh Isabella!
Trevor Khan, can I just second ‘Not to be taken seriously’ and say that I hope you do not withdraw from commenting. I’m also one that that is diametrically opposed to you politically but I hope you stick around.
“Charlie Says:
April 6th, 2007 at 10:57 am
Trevor Khan, can I just second ‘Not to be taken seriously’ and say that I hope you do not withdraw from commenting. I’m also one that that is diametrically opposed to you politically but I hope you stick around.”
I haven’t taken my bat and ball and gone home. There is however nothing particularly attractive about a catfight on a site such as this…hence my decision to restrict my posts.
I should complement Ben on his assessment of where the LC count is up to. I generally agree with his figures excepting that, by my maths the ALP has 8.78 quotas compared to the Coaliton with 7.77. In other words, I have the ALP in position no. 19, the Coaliton (me!!!) in possie 20 and The Shooters in 21 (with .603 of a quota).
By my rough reckoning the Coalition is about 26,000 votes ahead of the Shooters and over 64,000 anhead of the Democrats in position 22.
Ben et al, I would appreciate your comments.
It is all becoming a little academic now. I am told that the button will be pressed on Tuesady at 11.00am to distribute the preferences.
Rest assured, I am not going away, just being a little circumspect in my posts.
As I have indicated before, this is a quality site.
Trev
Based on yesterday’s figure, I have the following:
CDP 0.94
GRN 0.92
ALP 0.68
NAT 0.68
ShP 0.61
DEM 0.38
AAFI 0.35
FISH 0.33
So as far as I can tell, I don’t see any change happening. I guess a strong preference flow could put AAFI or Fishing over the Dems (I guess plenty of Fishers may have then gone #2 AAFI considering their ballot position), but still not enough to get them elected.
It’s worth noting the Greens vote has jumped a bit. On Monday we were on 1.85 quotas, and on Thursday it’s up to 1.92
I’m not sure what you’re doing differently, Trev, to get those figures, but I can’t see you losing. You might fall behind Shooters (although you could equally likely go further ahead, or Labor might fall behind Shooters and/or you) but still I can’t see Dems or AAFI or Fishing winning.
Getting back to politics, perhaps Trevor can say whether the Nats have yet chosen candidates for Richmond and New England? If so, who are they? If not, when will they be chosen?
Adam, I can’t tell you about Richmond, I’ll (I’ll get back to you). For New England the answer is no. Everything was on hold for the State Election.
Obviously I stood last time, but having been seriously mauled by Tony Windsor, was not really enthusiastic to go round again. I should add, even if I had wanted to, there were some who felt I didn’t do enough so I was in no way assured of preselection a second time round….I think you could say that was a view I didn’t share so there was, how would you put it?….an agreement to disagree.
Trev
Yes, not many candidates get a second go after seeing a 20% drop in their party’s vote. But I doubt anyone could really blame you for that – popular independents in country seats are almost impossible to beat (unless they’re Russell Savage, but in that case there was a big local issue he was on the wrong side of.) Being an independent is all self-publicity and no responsibility.
Here is another question for Trevor. I am currently looking at the demographics of federal electorates. I note that country seats, despite their low income levels as measured by median weekly family income, have quite high proportions of people in professional occupations, much higher than many suburban electorates. To take your own area, New England has a median weekly family income of $737, but 30.2% of its workforce are in professional occupations. This is the same level as Deakin in Melbourne, but Deakin has a median weekly family income of $1,051. My questions is: who are all these professionals in country areas, and why are they apparently earning much less than their urban equivalents? I know New England is atypical because it has a university, but the same pattern applies to most rural seats. (I’m aware this is off-thread-topic, but this is where Trevor is)
Adam Says:
April 6th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
Yes, not many candidates get a second go after seeing a 20% drop in their party’s vote. But I doubt anyone could really blame you for that – popular independents in country seats are almost impossible to beat (unless they’re Russell Savage, but in that case there was a big local issue he was on the wrong side of.) Being an independent is all self-publicity and no responsibility.
Geez, thanks for those kind words….I didn’t want to get into the numbers…it took me about two months to start reading newspapers again, so there are still a few raw nerves.
I’ll get back to the issue of Tony Windsor in a separate post, but rest assured he is a consummate politician, you can’t take that away from him.
Trev
Adam Says:
April 6th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Here is another question for Trevor. I am currently looking at the demographics of federal electorates. I note that country seats, despite their low income levels as measured by median weekly family income, have quite high proportions of people in professional occupations, much higher than many suburban electorates.
I will say a couple of things:
1) There are very few rural seats (as such) left now in Australia. I think the new Calare is probably the only one in NSW. Otherwise most are seats with large amounts of empty space with one or two population centes…it reflects, if you like the “urbanisation” of regional Australia.
2) Look at New England. The vast majority of the population is in the southern half of the seat, with the close to 40% of the population in Tamworth (population about 50,000 if you inclue the surrounding satelite towns).
3) The change in demographics has been the challenge for the Nationals… it’s not just the sea changer phenomenum (which is an issue on the coast), it is the change in ‘west of the ranges) seats as well. despite the perception from the capital ceities, you increasingly have a sophisticated urban middle class that do not perceive themselves as “in the bush”.
4) Wage and salary levels are quite different from in the cities however. If you look at slaries and incomes, of, say, lawyers, they are markedly lower than for their city cousins. I think that reflects a number of factors, but some of those are ‘what the markey will stand” coupled with lifestyle choices. For pweople like me, who choose to live here, we want to spend time with our kids, we want to be involved in running the local hockey club or footbal team. We like to go play with our toys. In short, whether its a doctor or a lawyer, a dentist or a banker, time spent at work is likely to be far less than in the city.
5) Let me say, for what it is worth, the lower salary levels means that talk, for instance of cutting the hifghest rate of marginal tax probably has a different impact here than it does in other conservative seats in eastern Sydney….it probably doesn’t cause too many to go out and celebrate.
6) On the other hand, the costs of living are quite different as well. House prices are much lower, so home interest rates are probably less of an issue.
7) Finally, I don’t think I can answer why there are more “professionals” in New England than in particular city seats, but what I can say is that it is pretty clear that in a seat like New England more voters work in, say, the health sector, than earn thier income directly from agriculture. That trend has been going on for many years but it has a telling impact upon the way people vote.
Trev
Thanks for those comments.
NSW seats showing % working in agriculture (new boundaries)
Calare 20.2
Parkes 19.9
New England 16.7
Farrer 16.7
Riverina 16.0
Hume 10.8
Adam,
I don’t think even the raw numbers tells the story.
If you look at Calare I reckon you will find that the agricultural workforce is largely related to what you could say is the tradtional wheat/sheep/beef pursuits.
I think in the new Parkes it will be quite different. Here you will see those industruies but also quite a lot of wine industry, particulalrly around Mudgee, and cooton around Moree and Narrabri and parts of the Liverpool Plain.
Issues of water security, for instance will play a big part in parts of the seat. You can’t get away from the fact however that now Parkes has Dubbo at the southern end with about 40% of the population….interesting….
I’m not sure how that plays out, but I think they are quite different seats, despite the percentages being pretty close.
Trev
Actually I misrepresented Trevor’s performance in New England. The Nat vote did drop 20%, but half of that was caused by a Liberal who polled 10%. So the actual drop in the coalition vote was only 10%.
Only?????
Five months of solid campaigning to achieve a fall in the vote of “only” ten percent!!!!!
Trev
I didn’t realise there were more results from Good Friday, but here we go.
The total vote is now up to almost 3.7 million.
GRN 0.95
CDP 0.95
ALP 0.65
NAT 0.63
ShP 0.61
DEM 0.38
AAFI 0.35
FISH 0.33
Notice the Greens vote has risen. It’s now up to 8.88%, and gone up 0.1 of a quota since Monday.
Just a question: now Labor, Nats and Shooters are all around 0.6-0.65 of a quota. Does anyone think one of them might fall below one of the ones just below (Dems, AAFI, Fishing)?
Ben with the Greens on the above figures what does that mean for the upper house?
The changes in regional demographics in NSW. and their effects, are complicated.
Without boring you too much, take, as example, average incomes. You have to ask why average incomes are lower. If you look at the pattern across NSW, the poorest areas are the Northern coastal strip. With the exception of the far west, average inland incomes are higher, in some cases higher than some of the Sydney regions.
In each case, average incomes are affected by demographic structure. Older people who receive lower incomes are a higher proportion of the population in both the coastal strip and inland. But just because you are retired need not affect your traditional voting pattern.
As another example, look at the decline in the farm population. This is not new.
Even when the Progressives (the original name for the Country Party in NSW) ran for the first time, the majority of the population in most electorates actually lived in towns and villages. So the Progressives targeted the non-rural vote from the beginning.
Further, the decline in the pastoral/farm sector has arguably hurt the ALP more than the Nats.
One hundred years ago there were a number of workers for each farmer/grazier. While many of these did in fact vote Progressive/Country Party, they also represented the core Labor vote. That vote has largely gone, leaving the ALP without a natural base in many areas.
Bill, the Greens are on track to get 2 MLCs elected, for a total of 4, up from 3 during the last term. This has never been in any doubt during the count. But our vote has increased over the last week, so that now we actually are sitting on 9.1%, which should mean we have a few preferences to distribute. I’ll post today’s figures in a few minutes.
Today we have a further offering from the SEC on the LC count.
Entitled Summary of First Preference and Group Counts for each Candidate the results are…drum roll:
Group A 0.6807
Group B 1.5307 The Fishing Party
Group C 1.6369 AAFI
Group D 0.120
Group E 34.2189 Liberal/ Nationals
Group F 0.4985
Group G 1.7840 The Australian Democrats
Group H 0.0825
Group I 9.1190 The Greens
Group J 1.2083 Unity Party
Group K 4.4223 Christian Democrats
Group L 0.9241 Restore The Workers Rights Party
Group M 0.0909
Group N 2.7947 The Shooters Party
Group O 39.1399 Labor
Group P 0.5659 Horse Riders/Outdoor Recreation Party
Group Q 0.3973 Socialist Alliance
Group R 0.3136 Save Our Suburbs
Group S 0.4401 Human Rights Party
I intend to load all this into the upperhouse.info calculator and see where we end up. I will report back.
Trev
So today’s figures (available at http://vtr.elections.nsw.gov.au/LCProgressiveTotals/) seem to be the final figures. They add up to 4.05 million votes, including informals, which would mean a turnout of 92.8%, which seems fairly reasonable.
On these figures, I get the following leaderboard. The Greens have now reached 2.01 quotas, meaning I’ve removed them from the list. This is up from 1.85 quotas last Monday. But if this is the final figures, we really won’t have any preferences to help anyone.
So here are the figures, remembering that the top 4 get in:
CDP 0.97
ALP 0.61
ShP 0.61
NAT 0.53
DEM 0.39
AAFI 0.36
FISH 0.34
So this actually puts the Nationals within the sights of the Democrats, AAFI and Fishing.
The result form the upperhouse.info site is as follows:
Elected: Coalition 7 Seats
Elected: The Greens 2 Seats
Elected: Labor 8 Seats
4 Remain to be filled.
Elected: CDP with 4.42 Pct
Elected: Shooters Party with 2.79 Pct
Elected: Labor with 2.78 Pct
Elected: Coalition with 2.4 Pct
All vacancies filled.
Remaining percentages:
0.68 Group A
1.53 The Fishing Party
1.64 AAFI
0.01 Group D
0.5 Group F
1.78 Democrats
0.08 Group H
0.03 The Greens
1.21 Unity
0.92 Restore Workers Rights
0.09 Group M
0.57 Horse Riders/Outdoor Recreation
0.4 Socialist Alliance
0.31 Save Our Suburbs
0.44 Human Rights Party
This gives the last spot to the Coalition (me!) with a not too comfortable margin over The Australian Democrats…..now for the distribution of prefrences!!!!!
Ben, you are right, the prefrences from the Fishing Party and Outdoor Recreation/Horseriders may come into play.
I am told both groups preferenced the Coalition however if some of the Fishing Party voters “donkey vote” then it could boost the AAFI.
Thoughts?
Trev
It’s an interesting question. It puts Trevor 0.14 quotas ahead of ACE, and 0.17 ahead of AAFI.
Now, I expect more Fishing preferences to flow to AAFI than vice versa, since Fishing was Group B and AAFI was Group C. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Fishing getting knocked out would increase AAFI’s vote ahead of the Democrats. I wouldn’t be surprised if they got to, say, 0.45, with their support, and who knows if other preferences could make the difference.
Ben,
I thought I would have a look at how the vote went in 2003. It seems to me that increases in the vote above .1 of quota (when prefernces are distributed) are unlikely (although of course the data available is limited).
I went to the “font of all knowledge”, Antony Green. His analysis (on the ABC site) shows that between Count one and count 280 (when the count was complete) the following increase in vote (as a proportion of a quota) occurred:
Greens: 0.1015
Christian Democrat: 0.0488
Labor: 0.0994
Shooters Party: 0.0454
Pauline Hanson: 0.0155
Australian Democrats: 0.0342
One Nation: 0.0113
Liberal/National: 0.0382
What I draw from all that is that it seems hard to increase the vote beyond .1 of a quota. In the case of the Democrats they only achieved a lift of about a third of that (about the same as the Coalition).
Certainly it may well be possible, but based on 2003, it looks like a pretty big ask.
What do you reckon?
Trev
Oh yeah, I reckon it will be difficult, but not anywhere near as hard as it looked a few days ago.
Trevor you have won a seat in the upper house??? for the Nats?
Bill,
My final comment for the night….no Upper House candidate wins the seat when they are on a party ticket…the party wins the seat.
What does that mean…it means that my obligation is to those (fine people) that preselected me…in my case the NSW Central Council of The Nats.
My job however is to represent the whole of the State, not just one sector.
Perhaps on another occassion I will expand on that view.
Trev
Trevor
Ok but you will be in parliament representing the party/ members and voters?
If so congratulations. Wrong party and side of politics but good on ya! Ive met great conservative pollies, havent met a good ALP one yet. ADAM please note!
You are living the dream
Congratulations Trev.
I hope you have a productive and trouble-free parliamentary career.
Any ambitions for high office? Could we see “The Hon. Trev Khan MLC”
in the first O’Farrell Ministry? (now just 205 weeks away!).
Congratulations, Trevor, if you are elected. If you are elected, I trust you will do the best job you possibly can.
Congratulations Trevor.
Thanks to you all, but it is still a little premature. Let’s wait and see how the numbers fall.
A scrutineer tells me that he believes that there have been more preferences this time round than in 2003, so, whilst hopeful, he is not handing out the cigars yet.
Trev
I hear tell they are pressing the button first thing this morning? Back in 1999, the count took about 11 hours…but that was with the Tablecloth and tickets. It goes blindingly fast by comparison these days (they say).
The gap between 21st and 22nd is about 0.05Q and there are about 0.34Q in the RATL and RBTLs.
Mathematically it is therefore possible for 21st and 22nd to swap places in the cut-up…and it has happened before… but is is politically unlikely.
Hearty congratulations to Trevor! The official candidate sequence just arrived on the VTR website, so the suspense is finished.
Yes, congrats Trevor.
The distribution of preferences completed. On the primary counts, 8 Labor, 7 Coalition and 1 Green were elected. The 2nd Green had to wait until Count 313 and the arrival of the final Green BTL votes at the top of the ticket.
From that point on, no preferences flowed. At the end of Count 329, the Christian Democrats were on 0.99 quotas, Labor 0.68, Shooters 0.65, Coalition 0.57, Australian Democrats 0.44, Australians Against Further Immigration 0.41. 1.26 quotas had exhausted by this point.
On the exclusion of AAFI, 76% of preferences exhausted. The Christian Democrats achieved a quota, and the Labor, National and Shooters Party candidates were declared elected. The Democrats were 28,123 votes behinf the last candidate elected from the Coalition.
Anthony, are you going to have a holiday away from voting totals and processes now?
According to the SMH, Paul Gibson will not be appointed to the Ministry and Barbara Perry will replace him.
The NSW system seems to work well. Processing time was about 40 minutes and the result in terms of who was elected, and when, seems to be exactly what was expected based on a simple ranking of above the line primaries from about 11 pm on election night.
Well, I have some research to do this evening at the NSW State Library on the 1872 NSW election, then the rest of this week is Federal Election graphics design. Couple of publications for State Parliament on the election results coming up over the next few months, but I’ll talk to the Electoral Commission about the data sources for that next week. Lots of preperation for the Federal election, and the WA and QLD state redistributions. Plenty to keep me going for the rest of the year. Holidays will be next year, not this year.
Oh well, congrats to those that participated! The word on the street is that ACE will run for NSW Dems preselection at the 2007 campaign.
Congratulations, Trevor. I was worried.
who or what is “ACE”?
Why would they bother with a dodo carcass?
Congratulations, Trevor.
Paul, ACE is Arthur Chesterfield-Evans, the defeated Democrats member/candidate. Can’t help you with the dodo carcass.
I guess ACE could always go back to defacing billboards – that would be more productive and useful than being a Democrats Senate candidate.
Well done to Trevor. That makes twice in my life I have congratulated a National – the first was John Forrest when he resigned as whip over the immigration bill. I must be getting soft in my old age.
ACE is probably the best-known Democrat in NSW (where is Aden Ridgeway now?), but he has as much chance of being elected to the Senate as I have of being elected to the Qld Legislative Council.
Presumably among other things, Aden Ridgway is now the presenter of ABC TV’s indigenous affairs program Message Stick. Note their item from March 26 on changes to the Electoral Act.
if the NSW ALP had half a brain they would offer Ridgway Blaxland or Fowler
I hope all of you will understand that I am exhausted…I have not had a good night’s sleep since th election. I am shortly going to bed.
I was told that ACE was at the count and was distressed. If that is is so, I genuinely feel for him…not only are we two old Wollongong Boys together, both the sons of doctors, but also both committed in our own ways to advancing the interests of the people of this state…I am sure he still has a lot to offer.
As I say, I am buggered….I thank you all, and I will be back soon.
Trev
Interesting you should say that, Adam. It had occurred to me that if he were interested, the ALP could certainly do a lot worse than to approach Ridgeway. Do you think he’d consider jumping to a major party now that the Democrats appear extinct?
Personally I dont think Ridgeway will jump, but then I thought the same about Garrett.
Why would the ALP approach Ridgeway? Isnt there enough ALP members to fill the positions?
Bill, you’re very critical of the type of people that are getting ALP preselection. Surely you’re not ALSO critical of suggestions of talented outsiders to approach?
I’m critical of candidates that don’t live in the area from a pro company union and rides on the back of people like myself who promote YR@W. As for talented outsiders why go that way again? What happen to the last Demo the ALP took? Its been mentioned by a few on these lists before what is needed is some “ordinary” people in government not union bosses, Stars, or Millionaires
Congratulations Trevor, I really wanted ACE to win as I saw it as one of the very few chances the Democrats have of making a comeback and I think Australian politics needs them. However, I have been very impressed by your comments on the site, both in style and content.
Although at the moment I have less in common with National policies than Labor or Liberal, I think that as a smaller party they are far more likely to be influenced by a few individuals, and where good people in Labor tend to struggle to make an impact I look forward with a lot more confidence to you making a difference to the Nationals party culture.
(And I’m very glad the AAFI did not get a look in – or Fishing for our host’s sake).
I hope Trevor doesn’t share the political views of his great-uncle Genghis. Perhaps he can tell us when he has had some sleep.
Genghis has 16 million male descendants. How they worked that out, I don’t know.
Adam Says:
I hope Trevor doesn’t share the political views of his great-uncle Genghis. Perhaps he can tell us when he has had some sleep.
YOU really cant help yourself can you Adam?
When in doubt pull out the race card – thats what the political text book says doesn’t it. So what if Trevor’s ethnic background isn’t British ?
AND Adam – I actually know Trevor – not in his capacityas a politician but in a prior life in his occupation as a lawyer – and i would hardly describe him as a “red-neck” as you infer without having met him or knowing anything about him.
BUT then you really are brave – you wait until he goes to bed before launching into your snide remarks. ~END~
Oh do grow up, Alex. I neither know nor care what Trevor’s “race” is (not a concept I like much anyway). And nor did I say or imply (which I think was the word you wanted) that he is a “redneck”. I assume he is a conservative, and I’m not, but I haven’t directed any political comments at him at all since he’s been here. I enjoy a well-turned insult but spare me this level of childish political correctness.
Bill
Would you prefer another union boss, or someone who had life experience involve in politics. I had heard Aden Ridgeway speak many times, and it is my believe he belongs in Federal politics. He is smart, articulate and has a good grip on reality and he would make an excellent addition to parliament, whether it be an Labor/Coalition/Democrat candidate.
In my opinion, he is one of the few who had any sense in the whole Democrat party
Alex, Be kind to Adam, Adam only knows 2 groups of people in the whole world – Union leaders and ALP parliamentary members……. Wait, that would only be one group of people. Anyone else is just “foreign†to him
Trevor, congratulations, we need more different group of people in parliament, not just machinated drones that often forms the Labor and Liberal party. From what I have read here, you will be a great addition to parliamentary.
Righteous indignation does not become you, Adam. Please keep to your (usually) incisive and clever commentary. By the way, “infer” was acceptable.
ADAM – I do really want to assist you so that you can make informed comment in the future.
Go to your friendly newsagent and get a copy of todays (11th April) Northern Daily Leader.
It has a full coverage of Trevor Khan.
Front page story plus pic, a profile and an opinion piece.
To further help you ADAM I have put up some more information on Tamworth :
http://www.independent-nsw.com/PostNews20.html
Pendulum update: Based on final prefs distribution. ALP now loses its majority with a 5% swing (Gosford and The Entrance) but the Coalition needs 7% (Wyong) to win outright.
Anyone on the Central Coast need a new road, school, hospital, sports facility?
Start on your wish list because your chances will be pretty good come 2010-11.
Saturday Nite Fever
There was some discussion here during the recount about how much the final result might differ from the Saturday Night implied result, due to changes in the patterns in non-booth votes and possible miscounts in the booth votes.
Leaving aside those seats where the Notional TCP candidates differed from the final TCP candidates (and there were some of these in perhaps unanticipated electorates), the average change in numbers for the Saturday night counts between Saturday and Declaration Day look like this:
Avg Min Max %age
Booth Primaries change 48 0 622 0.13%
Total Booth TCP change 110 0 922 0.36%
Booth Cand. TCP change 74 0 512 0.14%
Non-booth TCP advantage to conservatives 1.37%
There was no significant difference in these changes between hotly-contested seats and walkover seats, implying that the scrutineering intensity doesn’t have a big effect on miscounting on Saturday night.
These numbers would make predictions based on Sat night TCPs a bit more uncertain than mere statistics would point to.
What nationality is Trevor?
Trevors Bio
http://nsw.nationals.org.au/html/nsw-upper-house.cfm
Presumably as he is a member of parliament, he must be an Australian. (and I thought Port Macquarie was stuck in the 1950s) Geez!
Arthur Chesterfield Evans on why he lost his seat:
http://chesterfieldevans.com/opinion/?m=200704
“What nationality is Trevor?”
Interesting that this question keeps coming up…indeed it has come up throughout my life….I’ve got past the point where it causes me any offence.
Below is one of seventeen sets of questions put to me by my local paper, together with my reply…it deals with a similar theme.
Read on, Trev:
2. What is the origin of your family name, Khan? Do you have Indian/Pakistani heritage? If so, to what extent did that influence your upbringing?
My paternal grandfather Fazzee Gulam Mohammed Khan, came from the Punjab, northern India in the 1890’s. My grandmother Grace Kelhear, married him late in his life and bore him a number of children. Fazzee passed away in 1944, well before my birth.
It is safe to say that my father’s memory of his early life are not entirely happy. My, father at least in part, defines himself by reference to the circumstances in which he grew up, that is as an anglo-Indian, living in fairly straightened circumstances, during the depression years in Surrey Hills, Sydney.
From my perspective the experiences of my father reflect on to me.
Sorry I let this thread get so long, everybody. I’m really feeling it now I’m having to put up with dial-up internet. Also, apologies for dropping the ball on the later stages of the upper house count – fortunately, the comments thread pretty much did the job for me. Thanks to all concerned, and congratulations to Trevor.
oakeshott country Says:
Presumably as he is a member of parliament, he must be an Australian. (and I thought Port Macquarie was stuck in the 1950s) Geez!
I meant no offense to Trevor i am actually interested in peoples heritage etc. I gathered he is Australian and was speaking about his ancestors.
No Hanson here
As Trevor says: He is past the point where this causes him offence.
I believe that someone having a “funny name” does not excuse the implications of your question.
To me it does however, indicate the nationalism/xenophobia implicit in much of the Green Movement in the west. My argument is this: People of the western world are the most affluent in the history of the world. They have achieved this affluence with a complete disregard to the environment and plundering of the natural wealth of the rest of the world – Europe no longer has significant forests and has the greatest population of all the continents.
Meanwhile, the third world, despite its inherent wealth of resources, lives with endemic disease, a lack of food, fuel and drinking water. The green movements response is to attempt to stop the third world developing – e.g. Don’t cut down trees in Brazil so that you can feed your family, Don’t dam that river in India for irrigation, power and clean drinking water because you’ll upset the tigers who live in the area, Don’t have more than two children – even though infant mortality is shamefully high and children are an investment for your old age.
In fact don’t do what I do but do what I say and don’t expect us to share our wealth because of your restraint. Greens as watermelons? More like fascists for mine.
Oakeshott, obviously you haven’t read the Greens policy!…. no i don’t mean the Daily Telecrap version.
Actually I have read your web site and I gather that the Greens think that motherhood is, in general, a good thing.
Apart from feeling warm and fuzzy I couldn’t find any answers to how the third world can use its resources so that its population is fed, watered, clothed, housed and free of malaria.
oakeshott country Says:
Apart from feeling warm and fuzzy I couldn’t find any answers to how the third world can use its resources so that its population is fed, watered, clothed, housed and free of malaria.
Gee i think the removal of capitalist plunder of the third world would be a good start. And maybe less profit motivation by the west. We produce enough now to feed and clothe the world yet we would rather throw it away.
oakeshott country Says:
As Trevor says: He is past the point where this causes him offense.
I believe that someone having a “funny name†does not excuse the implications of your question.
Did i said he had a funny name? In fact for everyones information i have only seen him as Trevor until someone said about Genghis then i noticed his last name. As i have a vast library on both political and Indian religious topics i then became interested in his ancestors. To hint that i am racist is very disappointing as anyone who knows me can tell you i am the total opposite.
I have suffered racism myself and suffered standing up for others. Gee my surname is English but i am not