OK, Poss, take you up on that once the redistributions have happened.

Zoomster – They might be faux independent parties, but their fortunes are still pretty much tied together. With a swing against the Coalition, a couple of coastal Nats seats will be in danger of falling in the same way that urban Lib seats would be in danger (and pretty much in the same rough proportions to the overall number of seats each party holds).

On the interactive pendulum, Antony probably has one somehwere on his ABC site. If not, I can build one – I’m just a bit hesitant to do it at the moment with the redistributions in NSW and QLD being imminent – the boundaries of quite a large number of seats could change making the exercise a bit premature and redundant.

Just out of interest, how many seats would have fallen to the ALP if an election were held last weekend (with a uniform swing, using whichever poll average you feel would be best)?

Is there an interactive pendulum anywhere on the net? I think there were a couple around prior to the 2007 election but am unaware of anyone doing a pendulum for the present Parliament.

What happens if you treat them as independent parties?

Way, way, way off topic but have you heard of the Policy Analysis Market and it’s variants? It uses an Intrade system to measure the likelihood of an outcome with national security implications in it’s more popular form.

Agents and analysts from the CIA, FBI, NSA, Pentagon etc etc are given credits which they can bet on a market. The market has lots of possible bets. As an example, imagine it has one “The House of Saud to fall in the next 12 months”. Say it trades at 5%, but then analysts from various agencies see a few patterns and it goes up to 10%. Then the agencies know to look really hard at what’s going on there and get info from other agencies which may all tie together and put the price up to 50%, meaning operatives are sent in to stabilise Saudi Arabia.

Assassinations, terror plots and coups are also predicted. The version where the public could bet as well got snotted on for obvious reasons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policy_Analysis_Market

The best estimate for simulating an election recently was using the January-March Newspoll quarterly breakdowns, which would have delivered a Parliament consisting of 104 Labor members – a 21 seat gain.

Caf, there was a fair bit of polling up and down there as the final spasms of the Nelson leadership combined with Truffles taking the helm washed through the system.

It’s hard to tell if it was issue based or leadership based volatility there – probably a good slab of both.

…or is a lot of this just an artifact of the way pollsters allocate preferences?