My thoughts will be in tomorrow’s Crikey email. In short, I argue:
Peter Beattie’s biggest problem is keeping his grin to manageable proportions while he claims underdog status. Liberal leader Bruce Flegg is trying to turn around his bad fortune by insisting that the media stop talking about the “process� . Flegg insists he’s not a polished politician. That much is true. But Flegg’s tactics highlight and reinforce the message about his inexperience which has been disastrous for the Coalition. The Libs have made themselves the issue.
In the meantime, Pollbludger has a pretty comprehensive analysis, which I’ve added to somewhat in comments.
This time last week, the Queensland Coalition’s 51-49 lead in a Courier-Mail/Galaxy Research poll contributed to a frisson of excitement about its prospects at the election which, it was correctly anticipated, would be called three days later. A second Galaxy poll published today shows just how much has changed since then. Labor now leads 53-47 on two-party preferred with a primary vote up 3 per cent to 45 per cent, while the Coalition is down from 43 per cent to 40 per cent. When a baggage-laden government seeking a fourth term faces a divided, incoherent opposition, you can usually expect a big vote for minor parties and independents, particularly in Queensland. However, so far the polls have shown no evidence of this. Galaxy has the Greens on 5 per cent, Family First on 3 per cent and the rest on 9 per cent, with Newspoll telling a similar story. This amounts to an unspectacular 3 per cent increase in the total non-major party vote since the 2004 election.
Please also feel free to regard this thread as an open thread for any Queensland election commentary.
Update: Over at Qld election blog Currumbin2Cook, Graham Young reproduces his Sunday Mail column, analsyses the influence of factionalism in the Libs on the Robina preselection and expresses some doubts about the Sunday Mail polls, with which I concur.
Flegg seems to have had one news cycle without a huge fuckup!
IMHO, today was a disaster for Beattie. And I am sure he would agree.
Many people want to give him a ’slap’ but realise that the opposition would be less than ideal. The problem is the force of the slap. Do I really want a change of government? etc
Flegg is an unmitigated disaster; and there is no suggestion, any improvement is around the corner. I can picture R Quinn with a grin; and justifiably so.
Beattie’s ‘underdog’ status (crucial in Oz politics), has been destroyed. Not good.
Watch the Courier Mail, and Radio Courier Mail, otherwise known as the ABC (Anti Beattie Crew) swing into action. (Murdoch not only owns the only daily newspaper, The Courier Mail, he also effectively controls the editorial content of the ABC morning program. How, you may ask? Well, Madonna King, the ABC host, is the wife of the CMs editor David Fagan. Only In Queensland???
At this stage, Beattie is just too far ahead for his own good. Remember Kennett and Goss. I am sure Peter does.
I think if the election had been on Saturday, wpd, Beattie would have won with only a small dimunition of his majority. I still expect the Libs are in danger of what has happened a few times before - losing seats at the same time as winning them. They may be in with a chance in a few NQ seats and on the coasts, but Brisbane is looking dire for them, I think. Catalbiano has to be worried about his chances. And it would be interesting to know how the campaign in Redcliffe is going.
Ironically, at the moment, Beattie probably needs the Coalition to lift their game a bit.
It would also be interesting to have some polls on who people think will win.
I’m not impressed with the methodology of the published polls.
Why?
What ‘insights’ do
offer? Apart from curiousity?
If everyone thinks Beattie will win, they’re more likely to make a protest vote. If they think there’s a real chance of government changing, they’ll think twice.
Make sense?
Kim, I agree. But given the intellectual insights available on this site can anyone point me to evidence that suggests that your assertion (and mine) has any validity?
I think perhaps you’d have to look at published election studies rather than find it online, wpd, but I strongly suspect that factor worked against Goss in 95 and Kennett in 99 and probably Greiner way back when too.
I am enjoying your election coverage, Mark.
I thought you were taking a blog break. It’s a hard thing to do.
My old Political Science blatherer, Paul Reynolds, used to waffle on about the importance of independents in Queensland in recent years. I’d be interested to know whether this is a factor this time around.
Thanks, Darlene, I’m enjoying writing about it!
The blog break is specifically to free up time to cover the election campaign for Crikey. So I’m not doing non election blogging, commenting, or blog moderation/administration. But I am blogging on the election.
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/08/19/blog-semi-hiatus-and-bleg-on-spaces-of-utopia/
Make sense?
There are currently 7 independents. Their chief importance this time round is that with the exception of Gympie and Noosa (ex ONP and Labor MPs respectively) they all hold seats the Nats need to win, and it’s going to be very difficult for the Nats to do so. You wouldn’t rate John B-P’s chances highly in his dad’s former seat, for instance, as Dolly Pratt is well and truly dug in. So it makes it harder for the Nats to pick up seats, and thus puts the onus on the Libs to do the heavy lifting to win Labor seats. That factors both into the tensions in the Coalition about what happens if the Libs come first in seats, and the extreme difficulty of them winning anyway.
Update: Over at Qld election blog Currumbin2Cook, Graham Young reproduces his Sunday Mail column, analyses the influence of factionalism in the Libs on the Robina preselection and expresses some doubts about the Sunday Mail polls, with which I concur.
Since we’re friends and all I’ll refrain from writing a snarky letter to crikey about this particular electoral fact-check failure:
“Labor would have been re-elected with its majority of 16 cut only by 5″
Labor currently holds 60 seats in a parliament of 89 which is a tad more than a 16 seat majority. Which I know you know, so I’m a-wondering, did this error creep in via an editor, or was it a little slip on your part? (and if the latter, what is it about writing for Crikey that provokes these sort of silly errors from its contributors?)
I know what you were trying to say, that Labor must lose 16 seats to lose it’s majority, but I’m in a ‘better living through pedantry’ phase at the moment.
d
I’m not sure its an error Darryl, I’m not a Queenslander, but if Beattie has 60 seats out of 89, he requires a drop to 44 seats to lose government, giving non-Labour 45 seats to form government. (60-44)= results in 16 seats changing hands.
On LP it’s all been maths, maths and more maths (I haven’t done so much maths since I was at high-school). Who can forget Joe Cambria’s Feral Abacus Suggeting Muslim’s are Going to Populate All of Europe now there was a high-water mark in voodoo mathematics. It was almost as non-sensical as Dana Vale, almost I say.
Darryl, 45 seats is a majority. Labor currently have 59 (Cate Molloy resigned from the ALP today, and given the dynamics in that seat, it’s much more sensible to regard it as Independent held than ALP held). Therefore 16 is the difference between where Labor is now and having to form a government based on providing the Speaker - ie on a casting vote, or another way of looking at it, forming a minority government with a re-elected Molloy supporting them on confidence and supply. I think! The maths seems to have become really complex since they lost all those bloody by-elections!
Anyway, I think that’s right, but I’ve confused myself enough that it may be wrong. Where these errors slip into Crikey is the very tight deadlines. And the fact, I guess, that contributors are not full time op/edders who have all day to think about every nuance of their copy.
I’d be more than happy to be corrected on the reasoning above!
I think Stephen is right that Mark is right.
But electoral mathematics does seem to be an imprecise art!!!
Nah - a majority’s about how many votes you win by and every seat that changes hands shifts that majority by two.
Consider, in a division the government has 59 ‘ayes’ (60 minus the Speaker) and the opposition et al has 29 ‘nays’. The ayes have it by a majority of 30.
But before the three by-elections, the government had 62 votes and the others had 26 - a majority of 36.
d
I stand corrected!