We all know that the various state Labor governments are a bit on the nose, you only have to click the State polling down the right hand side here to see it in full swing.
But how much have the fortunes of the various State Labor governments declined since the Federal election? To answer that we need to be careful what polling metric we look at. Optional Preferential voting with a low ALP primary vote in NSW makes the two party preferred results there virtually meaningless, and with an allegedly united conservative party in QLD, we’ll need an election to really see how united they are and whether two party preferred becomes a meaningful indicator in QLD.
So we are really left with looking at the Primary votes of the State Labor regimes, but particularly the primary vote swings since before the 2007 election. A primary vote swing is simply the number you get when you subtract a given primary vote in one period from the current primary vote polling estimate for the ALP.Normally the baseline is the last election result, so if the ALP scored 44% of the primary vote an election and are currently polling 40, they’ve had a swing of -4%, or 4% against them.
But we don’t have to use election results. If instead we use the last State poll for each State Labor regime before the 2007 Federal election as our baseline (using Newspoll data), and then measure the ALP primary vote swing in each State from that period, we get an interesting little chart:
It’s pretty clear that the State Labor regimes have been tanking since the election of the Rudd government, and not just one or two, but all of them. The big question is why? It would be pretty extraordinary if 5 separate governments all started to peeve off the public because of 5 separate sets of local issues, all at the same time – not impossible, but pretty extraordinary.
Yet, the idea that there is some mystical balancing force in the Australian electorate that drives people to have one colour of government at the Federal level and a different colour of government at the State level is a little too “faith based analysis” for my liking – even though the data certainly supports the proposition.
So – why is this happening? What deeper, more sophisticated explanations are there for what we are witnessing that don’t involve magic political fairies waving their mind control wands at a hapless electorate?
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Still on the States, Galaxy released a QLD State poll the other day and this is what the results look like when compared to QLD Newspoll results over the whole Bligh/Borg competition for 2008.
8 Comments
Perhaps, prior to the Federal election, voters minds were focussed on the problems evident at the Federal level. Now that that’s been fixed, the electorate has started pay attention to State level issues – and I guess they didn’t like what they saw! This is vaguely testable by looking at the proportion of State versus Federal issues in the media’s political coverage before and since the Federal election.
Alternatively, you could look at the one other thing those State governments have in common – their longevity. The theory goes that the longer in power, the more baggage one accumulates, and this eventually drags you down.
Poss, what about Tassie? Same as the rest?
It’s the economy stupid!
(Sorry, the stupid is not actually directed at anyone.)
Possum, I’d love to see a longer term plot of some key indicators of government satisfaction and/or voting intention as well as some key economic indicator (TPP voting intention and quarterly economic growth would be nice). That would give us the context in which to judge the current slide.
My guess is that the current trend is not a trend away from labor but a trend away from incumbent governments (it just so happens that all of them were Labor).
How the new Lib/Nat government in WA fares should also shed some light on the subject.
Caf – it’s got to be a fair chunk of that in play (or something like it), but it makes one wonder about the absurdity of it all. Having a population that was effectively saying “Stuff the States, I can’t walk and chew gum at the same time so I’ll only think about the Feds for the moment” is a little disturbing! Especially when in the next breath they go “OK, the Feds have changed, now onto those bloody State governments”.
The NSW government is a good case in point – dysfuntional to the point of really needing to invent a new adjective just to accurately describe the pure magnitude of it, yet it’s been obvious for years. The Opposition in NSW hasnt suddenly improved, nor the government gotten worse – yet straight after the Federal election everything seemed to change.
There wasnt a week that went by without the Daily Terror lavishing horror on the latest government failure in health, education, child protection etc etc etc etc etc, yet all of a sudden it matters.
Maybe longevity has caught up (even though all the State Labor regimes are at different points of longevity, yet still tanking together), but maybe longevtity should have caught up a long time ago in some places (Qld, NSW) but the last term of the Howard government was having some sort of effect that dampened State issues.
I find it hard to believe that the public can’t walk and chew gum at the same time – yet that’s what seems to have happened.
There must be something else somewhere hanging under the surface.
An Cu,
I’m still figuring out Tassie as Newspoll doesn’t do Tasmania specifically. I think I might have to go with the semi-regular EMRS polls. It’s still a work in progress there.
Eratosthanes,
That’s a good idea – I’ll hunt down the data and post in tomorrow. The problem though is that the State Labor government’s polling results before the 2007 Fed election didn’t actually move together. At any given time, some ALP government’s were going up in the polls while others were going down. It wasnt until this year that things all started moving in sync.
Maybe it is some effect where incumbency of long serving governments have become electoral poison. Maybe the country is just cranky and iin the mood to start belting governments.
Morgan used to poll Tassie but seem to have lost interest lately. Shame because their results are more reliable than EMRS, except within a few months of an election when EMRS seem to do OK. EMRS polls are vaguely useful for tracking changes in support over several months between elections but using them for long-term tracking is full of hazards. The main one is that they have a very high undecided rate between elections but experience so far (both including comparison with subsequent election results and comparison with Morgan) has been that the “undecideds” are overwhelmingly (80+%) soft Labor voters. The difficulty in interpreting any recent EMRS poll in terms of a projection to a potential election result is that with no Morgan comparison for ages, we cannot know if the “undecideds” in Tassie are still soft Labor or genuinely unsure.
Generally I’m not surprised for there are several factors at play.
1) I’m firmly of the view that many Liberal voters were using state elections to send Howard a message.
2) During the 1980s and 1990s we hade several reformist Governments which brought about radical change, for the most part recent ALP Governments have been Conservatative in nature.
3) For the most part State Liberals have been dysfunctional.
4) With a strong economy the State Governments have been able to focus on services.
5) But for the talk of services, they generally have detoriated, NSW Public Transport is one example
6) The various State Governments has they have aged have started to lose the unity that made them look so strong in the early days.
All up the tightening of the polls isn’t really a sign that the Governments are dead, but the polls returning to a more normal looking set of numbers, for example in Victoria the brumby Government a third term ALP Government holds severals seats that historically the ALP have only held for one or at most two terms or in some cases never held before, seats like Seymour, Macedon and Rippon come to mind.
Possum
I suspect in NSW at least, there is an emerging perception in the public’s mind of Government worse and Opposition better. The Government is of course now led by the neophyte Nathan Rees. With the passing of time, NSW Labor has lost talented and experienced performers like Craig Knowles, Tony Kelly and very recently, John Watkins, to the extent that Nathan Rees now has very little talent available on his frontbench (apparently, Joe Tripodi is its most economically literate member: a real concern in the lead up to November’s mini-budget). The O’Farrell led Opposition is an ‘unknown quantity’ (but, hey, what Opposition after 13.5 years in the wilderness, isn’t?), and there is a bit of ability on the frontbench such as Gladys Berejiklian, Mike Baird and Greg Smith.