Comments on: Labor takes a hit in the polls in Queensland and South Australia

By: OldSkeptic

OldSkeptic — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:37:56 +0000

Sorry I’m missing the point, what diference does it make if one wing or other of the Laberels win? They all believe in the same things .

Only the lies change.

By: steve

steve — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 10:20:45 +0000

Oh Dear, just when we were supposed to believe that the Liberal National Party were supposed to be on the verge of winning the next election we have this from Brough:

“Well, I’ve just had a gutful, quite frankly. I think this whole thing is a bit of a shambles,” he told 4BC radio.

“You try and do the right thing and, quite frankly, at this point it’s all over the shop and it’s no wonder voters get so disenchanted with the non-Labor side of politics.”

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/queensland/brough-quits-liberal-presidency/2008/09/25/1222217423498.html

By: danny

danny — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 05:48:49 +0000

Good, that’s cleared up, it was a green issue, not the Greens Party, that delivered the KKK seats. Taa Paul.
I’m envious of you being able to leverage an election analysis into a thesis. Christine Jackman seem to have leveraged the last one into a career. Maybe that’s what the Greens in Qld need, a pProfessional purveyer of puff pieces to the weekend glossies to take them on board as A Project. The real estate industry does after all categorise, for management purposes, the green demographic as “Alternate Rich”.

As to Greens’ (validating) statements shifting primary votes from one of the majors to the other, and it being a difficult and dubious task to measure the effect, maybe it’s like aerial asbestos levels, there just is no known safe level. What you say is no doubt true, but BlindFreddyTM, voodoo psepholigist extraordinaire, will tell you the effect was/is/will be real.

So it should be “handle with exterme care”. One week the Greens saying they are “ready to give up on (labor) and start talking to the Coalition as Queensland’s alternative government”, and the next warning “the Labor Party not to leave it until a month before next year’s state election before talking to them about preferences” as if

(a) it’s just a matter of course and timing and
(b) it’s not policies they should be talking about prior to preferences

just devalues Greens claims to be seriously engaged in the electoral process.

It works in reverse too. If you take away the effect of a noisy, tho ultimately unelectable candidate, the signal/picture can change radically. I’m talking Mayo where the Greens went excitingly close to knocking off a pretty damn safe Lib seat.

Hmm, best be careful lest this thread gets mistaken for Greens hustings. Sorry all.

By: Paul Norton

Paul Norton — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 04:56:51 +0000

I wrote an Honours dissertation on the 1995 Queensland State election and can confirm that none of the four seats along the route of the Koala Killing Korridor were lost by Labor on Greens preferences. In all cases the anti-Labor swing, driven by the local anti-tollway campaign, was so large as to render Green preferences irrelevant.

I don’t have my thesis to hand, but as I recall I calculated that the net effect of Green preferences in terms of seats was to:

* save Whitsunday for Labor (which was behind the Nationals on the primary vote); and

* knock off Labor’s Warren Pitt in Mulgrave.

Some critics of the Greens’ role in that election (Gary Maclennan, Jim Downey) argued that the Greens aided the Coalition in that election not so much by shifting preferences in swing seats but by making statements which made the Coalition look more environmentally friendly than they were, thereby inducing a shift in the primary vote from Labor to the Coalition. Needless to say, detecting and quantifying such an effect would be a very difficult and dubious task.

By: Kim

Kim — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:29:35 +0000

So a friend of Tom Waits? I’m sorry he’s not standing for parliament then. We need more Tom Waits fans in the State House.

By: Darryl Rosin

Darryl Rosin — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:25:32 +0000

Stuart Copeland anoounced today he will not contest the next Queensland election.
Who is?

He wrote the score for Rumble Fish and played drums in Curved Air for a couple of years back in the 70s.

By: Kim

Kim — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:15:34 +0000

And danny, Anna’s safe in South Brisbane. In the longer term, the Liberals are somewhat of a bigger threat in those inner city seats.

By: Kim

Kim — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:14:38 +0000

I’m with Darryl. The ALP lost because of Wayne Goss. (And Kevin Rudd… oopsy…)

Stuart Copeland anoounced today he will not contest the next Queensland election.

Who is?

By: danny

danny — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:13:02 +0000

Darryl: It might not sound it, but I’m with you.
However, like i say, I wasn’t here for the koala election, what i seem to remember reading, (sorry, can’t back it up), is that the 3 seat greens effect was localised to the koala seats, so we’re not talking significant aggregate statewide 2pp votes %s. I may very well be wrong. Graham at ambit gambit is bound to know.

I guess if you can’t go along with the idea of the tories owing the greens for back then, you can’t go with it being time for them to pay up, by delivering Sth Brisbane.

I couldn’t agree more about Jo Bragg being an excellent candidate, and considering how big the swing it was that was on to Campbell Newmann, being within a cuppla % to drews previous effort means she did better than those raw figures indicate, to my thinking.
Trivial detail: this year it was Gabba ward, not Dutton Park, (redistribution?) drew stood for.
I didn’t mean to suggest I thought Drew “just decided”. What I said, just my reading, was “It might have been a different story if they’d swapped and made Mr. Hutton go for the mayoral ermine, and let the other local candidate have a crack at the local ward.” Of course Jo could have been expected to have some input, it’s a highly democratic party I believe.
In the end, as I say, the anti-labor swing was on, the point being to functionalise a dysfunctional council, just deliver it to the mayor, and drawing too much other inference would be dodgy.
And yes, like a beacon to the future, I did hear, from the labor gabba candidate, that she understood greens preferences could no longer be taken for granted, though she was a beneficiary of drew’s, it wasn’t so for the morningside candidate. Excellent.
What will Gary, if he’s going to give Sth Brisbane another go, do, I wonder.

By: Darryl Rosin

Darryl Rosin — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:01:52 +0000

You might have missed my point Danny – it ALP lost the 1995 election all by themselves. It didn’t have a lot to do with the Greens preferences. If you’re right about Green prefs sending 3 seats to the coalition (a claim I’ve never seen any evidence to support) then the counterfactual is that the ALP would have held a working majority with 46.7&% of the 2pp vote, which would have been an outrageous result. I think you have to go back to the Playford era in SA to see a government formed with such a low vote.

As for Drew, well I think he still has the highest every Green state result (Mt Cootha 1995) and the highest ever council result (Dutton Park 2008). He was the candidate for Lord Mayor at the 2004 election and got (from memory) 2% more than our excellent candidate Jo Bragg did this year. By the way, Drew doesn’t just ‘decide’ he’s going to be the candidate for a seat. He faces preselection like everyone else and it’s up to branch members to decide. As it happens the Dutton Park preselection was closely contested and Drew won narrowly. The losing candidate ended up running in Morningside and directed preference to the Liberals.