Tomorrow’s Australian Capital Territory election looks likely to maintain the remarkable continuity in Australian electoral politics that began in 1998. Prior to Kevin Rudd’s win last November, Labor won 22 successive state and territory elections, starting with the election of Peter Beattie’s government in Queensland. Two elections and numerous opinion polls since have indicated that John Howard’s demise has broken the circuit, notwithstanding that Labor made it to 23 in a row when it scraped home in the Northern Territory on August 9. This was achieved in the face of an 8.8 per cent fall in the Labor primary vote and the near-defeat of a government that went into the election with 19 seats out of 25. Labor’s winning run finally came to an end a month later when Alan Carpenter’s Western Australian government was dumped from office after shedding 6.0 per cent on the primary vote.

The other story to emerge from the two elections was the strong performance by the Greens, who demonstrated an ominous capacity to siphon votes from ageing Labor governments. The Greens vote in Western Australia was up from 7.6 per cent in 2005 to 11.9 per cent, and its average vote in the six seats it contested in the Northern Territory was over 16 per cent. The one public opinion poll to emerge during the ACT campaign makes it very clear that both trends are going to be replicated tomorrow. The Patterson survey published in the Canberra Times a fortnight ago suggested that a 12 per cent drop in the Labor vote has been harvested almost entirely by the Greens.

In other jurisdictions, Labor could console itself with the thought that most of those votes would return to them as preferences – but the ACT’s Hare-Clark system of proportional representation means the shift in votes will translate into seats lost to the Greens. As Chief Minister Jon Stanhope freely admitted on Monday, Labor has no chance of repeating its feat in 2004 when it became the first government to win an outright majority since self-government began in 1989. The Greens stand to increase their representation from one seat to three or even four: one each in the five-member regions of Brindabella and Ginninderra, and possibly two in the seven-member region of Molonglo. Labor would thus be reduced from nine seats to six or seven out of 17, with the Liberals down from seven to six.

This makes life very interesting for the Greens’ senior candidate for Molonglo, Shane Rattenbury, who has been designated his party’s presumptive leader following the retirement of its sole sitting member, Deb Foskey. Rattenbury looks set to enter parliament not only as kingmaker between Stanhope and Liberal leader Zed Seselja, but also as a potential Deputy Chief Minister if he pushes his party’s claim with sufficient force. The money, smart or otherwise, suggests a Labor minority government is a lay-down misere: Centrebet is offering $1.19 on a Labor win against $4.35 for the Liberals.

However, one precedent exists in Australia for a Greens-backed Liberal minority government, albeit a rather unhappy one. This happened after the 1996 election in Tasmania, when Labor refused to take the reins due to ongoing bitterness over its experience of relying on the Greens (then led by Bob Brown) between 1989 and 1992. The Labor and Liberal parties then contrived to put an end to the situation by agreeing to reduce the size of the lower house from 35 seats to 25. The idea was that the Greens would be reduced from five seats (one in each of the five seven-member regions) to one or two if they were lucky, but their ongoing electoral strength in Tasmania has been such that it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

UPDATE: Ben Raue in comments disputes the assertion that Rattenbury is the “presumptive leader” of the Greens.

Labor’s Wayne Berry is retiring after 19 years in parliament, reducing the risk of an incumbent emerging as a casualty. In any case, it was highly unlikely that Chief Minister Jon Stanhope was going to run into trouble. Stanhope entered parliament at the 1998 election and was immediately elected leader of what was then the six-member parliamentary party. A former staffer to Kim Beazley, the unaligned Stanhope was deemed the best prospect to lead the party after a disastrous election result neutered the previously dominant Left faction. Stanhope’s personal vote went from 8.0 per cent on debut to 24.5 per cent at the 2001 election, at which he led Labor to victory, to 36.9 per cent in 2004. Mary Porter was elected to parliament in 2004 with 3.8 per cent of the vote, and has thus far remained on the back bench. A member of the Right faction, Porter was previously chief executive of the ACT Volunteering Association, a staffer to Keating government minister Ros Kelly and a midwife in remote Aboriginal communities. Newcomers on the Labor ticket are Chris Bourke, described by the Canberra Times as a “prominent Aboriginal dentist”; Adina Cirson, advisor to Jon Stanhope and former CFMEU official; and Dave Peebles, a training consultant.

The Liberals also have a former leader bowing out, namely Bill Stefaniak, who led the party from May 2006 to December 2007 as a compromise candidate between the warring factions who supported Brendan Smyth and Richard Mulcahy. The remaining incumbent is Shadow Education and Transport Minister Vicki Dunne, who was elected to parliament in 2001 with 3.6 per cent of the vote, which she increased to 5.7 per cent in 2004. She was stripped of her portfolios in February 2006 following an argument with Brindabella Liberal MLA Steve Pratt in a corridor of the Legislative Assembly building, of which she was accused of leaking details to the media. Then-leader Brendan Smyth said she had been dropped because she could not assure him of her loyalty. Dunne returned to the front-bench when Stefaniak deposed Smyth as leader three months later, and she remained on Mulcahy’s side of his ongoing leadership stand-off with Smyth. The absence of other incumbents has created opportunities for the newcomers to the party ticket: Jacqui Myers, an accountant; Andrea Tokaji, a “mental health professional and small business owner”; Matthew Watts, whose unspecified occupation involves “assisting vulnerable new migrants or cracking down on migration fraud”; and Alistair Coe, 24-year-old former vice-president of the National Young Liberals, a late addition to the ticket following Stefaniak’s retirement announcement in late August.

The Greens’ only sitting member in the parliament is not seeking re-election, but in each of the three electorates they have designated senior candidates who have taken prominence in party advertising. In the case of Ginninderra the candidate is Meredith Hunter, director of the Youth Coalition of the ACT. Also on the ticket is James Higgins, a 23-year-old field organiser for the Community and Public Sector Union.

The most noteworthy of the micro-party and independent candidates is Canberra politics veteran Harold Hird, who was a Liberal member from 1995 until 2001 when Dunne defeated him by 55 votes. He polled 2.0 per cent in his first bid to recover the seat as an independent in 2004.

The five-member electorate of Brindabella covers Canberra’s southern suburbs, beginning in the north with Chifley and Farrer and extending through Tuggeranong, along with the unpopulated balance of the ACT. The Liberal vote of 40.4 per cent in 2004 was around 8 per cent higher than in the other two electorates, although this resulted from lower support for the Greens (7.2 per cent) and minor candidates (6.7 per cent) rather than Labor (40.4 per cent, compared with 50.1 per cent in Ginninderra and 45.3 per cent in Molonglo). The first two elections under the current system, in 1995 and 1998, returned two Labor and two Liberal members along with one independent, Paul Osborne, whose support helped maintain the minority Liberal government of Kate Carnell and Gary Humphries. Osborne’s defeat at the hands of Labor’s Karin MacDonald in 2001 was a crucial factor in the election of the Stanhope government, helping boost Labor from six to eight seats and allowing them to govern them with the support of Kerrie Tucker of the Greens. The only change at the 2004 election was the election of Labor’s Mick Gentleman in place of the retiring Bill Wood, who had been in parliament since 1989. The least clear-cut part of the outcome was Liberal incumbent Steve Pratt’s win over party colleague Steve Doszpot, whom he outpolled by only 6.1 per cent to 5.8 per cent.

Two of Labor’s three sitting members are seeking re-election, with Karin MacDonald retiring after seven years in parliament. The senior of the two is John Hargreaves, Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Territory and Municipal Services and Housing. Hargreaves entered parliament at the 1998 election at the expense of sitting Labor member Andrew Whitecross, and polled 17.8 per cent at the 2004 election. When first elected he was described as “socially conservative”, and he remains a stalwart of the Right faction. Mick Gentleman is a member of the Left, and has remained on the back-bench during his first term. He won the third Labor seat at the 2004 election after polling 7.4 per cent of the vote, not far behind Karin MacDonald on 8.3 per cent. The other Labor candidates are Wayne Sievers, a former Australian Democrats candidate and ACT branch president who served with the Australian Federal Police in East Timor; Joy Burch, a nurse and director of the Australian Rural Health Education Network; and Tracy Mackey, a public servant with the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs.

Both Liberal incumbents are seeking re-election, but the past electoral weakness of one means the internal contest is of considerable interest. Despite having lost the party leadership in May 2006, Brendan Smyth’s record in polling 16.5 per cent in 1998, 15.8 per cent in 2001 and 21.4 per cent in 2004 suggests he is unlikely to be troubled. Smyth first came to prominence after winning the federal by-election for Canberra in 1995, but the seat reverted to Labor type amid the party’s otherwise disastrous performance at the 1996 election. Eighteen months after entering territory politics Smyth became Deputy Chief Minister when Gary Humphries replaced Kate Carnell as Chief Minister, and he replaced Humphries as Liberal leader when he departed for the Senate in 2002. The 2004 election initiated a leadership stand-off between Smyth and newly elected Richard Mulcahy, who each claimed two supporters in the seven-member party room. Bill Stefaniak was able to marshall the support of the Mulcahy faction to depose Smyth in May 2006, with Mulcahy emerging as deputy leader. It was well known that Smyth continued to harbour ambitions to recover the position, but he was persuaded to settle for deputy to Zed Seselja when Mulcahy was dumped from the parliamentary party in December 2007. One of Smyth’s party room backers was Steve Pratt, who made national news in 1999 when he was imprisoned on spying charges while working as a CARE aid worker in Yugoslavia at the time of NATO’s Kosovo bombing campaign. Pratt scored 7.0 per cent of the vote when first elected in 2001, but this fell to 6.1 per cent in 2004. He was only narrowly able to defeat newcomer Liberal candidate Steve Doszpot, the managing director of Canberra Strategic Marketing, who is again taking the field at this election. According to Liberal sources quoted in the Canberra Times, both Doszpot and another new candidate, David Morgan, outpolled Smyth and Pratt at the Liberal preselection vote. However, beyond a “background in economics and finance”, information on Morgan’s professional background is elusive. The other Liberal candidate, Audrey Ray, is described on the party website only as a “professional project manager”.

The lead Greens candidate is Amanda Bresnan, a policy officer with the Mental Health Council of Australia. Bresnan polled 3.4 per cent as a candidate in Molonglo at the 2004 election, and was also the candidate for Canberra at last year’s federal election. Her running mate is Sue Ellerman, described on the party website as a “counsellor and health educator”.

At the 1995 election the bar for minor party candidates was raised with the abolition of the shambolic “modified d’Hondt” system of Territory-wide proportional representation. It was replaced with the present Tasmanian-style Hare-Clark system based on three multi-member regions, two of five members (Brindabella and Ginninderra) and one of seven (Molonglo). As in Tasmania, the “Robson” system of rotating ballot paper order means candidates are forced to compete against their party colleagues. The first such election produced a Liberal minority government of seven members, headed by Kate Carnell, which was sustained with the support of two independents. Carnell achieved a status quo result at the 1998 election, before resigning in 2000 to head off a no-confidence motion resulting from an unfavourable auditor’s report into the revamp of Bruce Stadium. Her successor Gary Humphries led the government to defeat in 2001, moving a year later to the Senate where he has remained ever since.

The change of government after the 2001 election followed Labor’s gain of two seats at the expense of Liberal-leaning independents, with the Liberals retaining their existing seven seats. Re-elected Greens member Kerrie Tucker had ruled out supporting the Liberals, meaning Labor’s eight seats were enough to ensure a comfortable hold on government without having to rely on the one Democrats member. New Chief Minister Jon Stanhope introduced four-year terms effective from the 2004 election (held one week after the October 9 federal election), at which Labor gained the one extra seat required for majority government at the expense of the collapsing Democrats. The vote for both major parties increased, Labor from 41.7 per cent to 46.8 per cent and Liberal from 31.6 per cent to 34.8 per cent, but the Liberals remained on seven seats with the Greens on one.

There are several reasons to think Labor will struggle to match that feat on October 18, most notably an electoral cycle that has lately shown its force in Northern Territory, Western Australia and various state Newspoll surveys. Stanhope’s government has accumulated a heavy burden of baggage in the last four years, the low-point coming with a horror 2006/07 budget that sought to balance the Territory’s tottering finances by closing 39 schools (nearly a quarter of the total). The ACT edition of the Daily Telegraph reacted by describing the Chief Minister as an “economic vandal” who headed a “disgraced government”, beneath the front-page headline: “STANHOPE-LESS”. A large part of Stanhope’s political strategy consisted of needling the Howard government over terrorism laws and civil unions for same-sex couples, which lost much of its utility after Kevin Rudd came to power.

However, Labor’s woes have been matched by an eerily familiar story of leadership disarray among the Liberals. There have been two leadership changes in the current term: from Brendan Smyth to Bill Stefaniak in May 2006, and from Stefaniak to the 31-year-old incumbent Zed Seselja in December 2007. Both Stefaniak and Seselja were compromise leaders of a kind, Stefaniak taking the reins because Smyth and rival Richard Mulcahy each mustered three party room votes out of seven. Stefaniak’s departure followed a dramatic week that began with Mulcahy being stood down from his portfolios pending a federal tribunal inquiry into his past activities as executive director of the Australian Hotels Association. Mulcahy did not take this lying down, claiming to know of unspecified allegations against Stefaniak and Smyth and calling on them to join him on the back bench. The party room reacted by unanimously voting to expel Mulcahy, who will run in Molonglo at the head of his own grouping. Shortly afterwards Stefaniak and his deputy Jacqui Burke announced they would clear the air by standing aside, and Seselja and Smyth were elected in their place without opposition.

Posts on each of three electorates will follow over the coming weeks. Antony Green offers plenty to keep you going on with in the interim.