From today’s Crikey email:
I don’t often agree with former ALP Senator John Black’s political analysis — he places too much weight on demographics for my liking — but I did nod my head vigorously when reading his piece on the Queensland election in yesterday’s Financial Review.
Black argued that the same cohort of voters who Peter Beattie held through three successive landslides, who swung to Kevin Rudd and the federal ALP in 2007 after a long incarnation as “Howard’s battlers”, are in danger of deserting state Labor tomorrow. These voters are on low to middle incomes, socially conservative and worried about services and jobs. Many of them are the same voters, or coming from the same place, as the folk who gave One Nation 25% of the state vote in 1998. They’re also the same voters who swung some regional seats further in Labor’s direction in 2006 out of anger at WorkChoices.
While there’s often been an assumption in speculation about this campaign that Lawrence Springborg couldn’t easily be sold in Brisbane, few seem to have asked — until the swing became obvious — whether Anna Bligh could hold onto Beattie’s vote on the urban fringes and in the regions. Under Beattie, the very model of a blokey Queensland populist, a complex backflip could be executed where he surrounded himself with urbane Ministers — think Matt Foley and one Anna Bligh, talked up biotech and creative industries and cosmopolitanism, but still projected down home Canberra hating parochialism and praised Joh to the skies on well timed occasions. But all the hard hats in the world haven’t dispelled Bligh’s urbane image.
There’s more to the puzzle than this. Lawrence Springborg is no Barnaby Joyce, and doesn’t bang the populist drum like Nationals past. He’s more attuned to the monotonous tone of moderation. So neither leader has really convinced — anywhere much.
The other side of the coin is that a big chunk of the urban base Labor relied on is fleeing at a frightening rate of knots — parked with the Greens, not so much out of conviction, but out of disappointment at a Labor party that appears directionless and managerialist yet without the competence. Two party preferred votes are almost meaningless in Queensland’s optional preferential system. The key is the primaries. If there’s a high rate of exhaustion, and Labor is far enough behind in a lot of city seats, all the greenwash and social policy stuff from the last week won’t lure those voters back. They’re disengaged and not in a mood to be wooed. Outside Brisbane, it looks like a wasteland.
As I’ve been arguing throughout the campaign, neither party has succeeded in reviving Beattie’s state wide appeal, or even looked convincing talking of “plans” which appear too nakedly and opportunistically targeted to particular regions and interest groups. But while the campaign has been boredom incarnated, the electorate is exceptionally unpredictable. The outcome could be anything from a very narrow Labor win through a hung parliament to a small LNP majority. The latter appears most probable, but really we’re all guessing — locals wouldn’t make the same mistake as Peter Van Onselen and write of a swag of Labor seats in “southwest Queensland” — but all the same this is one of the most difficult of recent elections to read.
Aside from the obvious early election angle, there will be a motto here for the Rudd government. It’s this — sooner or later, maybe sooner when the economy’s in strife, it becomes impossible to hold together a coalition of urban denizens and outer-urban and regional voters. You need quite exceptional political skills — a la Beattie — to pull it off. You can’t do it with the political strategist’s soundbite laden focus grouped book of oh so clever tricks.
Cross-posted at Pineapple Party Time.
1. Did Beattie have this kind of statewide appeal before he won government, or only afterwards?
2. Who is most likely to cultivate this quality into the next few years, Borg or Bligh?
3. Is “this kind of statewide appeal”, however nebulous, the quality one needs to be a successful Premier of Queensland?
4. Given that neither Bligh nor Borg currently have it, is there anyone else who has it/is likely to develop it?
1.Yes
2.Neither
3.Yes
4.B.Joyce maybe?
Some nice analysis of Beattie’s appeal and the void (in political marketing terms) since.
But why is the electorate ‘exceptionally unpredictable’. The polls have been unprecedentedly consistent. It’s very close: that’s not unpredictable, it’s highly predictable. It just means the likely LNP TPP lead is not quite enough to guarantee a majority.
A considerable swing was obviously on from months out from the election. It is widespread and (i) the LNP merger and (ii) the calling of an early election consolidated it. Labor knew this. It’s not clear why so many commentators ignored the Peter Brent school of electoral analysis and assumed Labor would win despite its very tired look, or assumed that Queenslanders were old enough to see politics only through the lens of the Joh years.
In theory, running on a platform of ‘the economy is tanking but you can’t trust the other side’ would best have been done in mid year: at present most people are still blithe about the economic downturn. But Labor couldn’t afford to leave it any later. The LNP began this campaign 6-9 months ago.
No, they could get a majority with the primary they have if it falls in the right seats. 2PP is almost completely irrelevant given OPV and the high propensity of voters to eschew preferences, or quickly exhaust them. There’s a bit of polling that shows that’s greater than usual. We’ve really never had an election where Labor hasn’t led on primaries and where half the voters don’t give preferences.
There’s also a lot of evidence of volatility and fluidity in the vote. In other words, the primaries are staying about the same, but there’s much movement between the piles. People switching back and forth.
So it’s very hard to call.
1. Yes, and he wouldn’t have made it to the Labor leadership otherwise. He wasn’t well liked in caucus, and in the wrong faction. Remember he was a prominent mover in overthrowing the old guard in the early 80s with federal intervention, then joined the old guard faction in parliament for convenience.
2. Both have tried.
3. Yes.
4. Paul Lucas, Deputy Premier.
Ps – Graeme – the question about commentators is a good and fair one. I think the answer is we:
(a) overestimated the competence of the ALP machine;
(b) overestimated the bar Lawrence had to clear to be a credible (just) alternative.
Mark:
… Promises, promises…and what do you base that, the parking bit, on, pray tell? The directionless, managerialist, incompetent bit is non-controversial, you’d have to be a partisan stooge to not see that. If you are right, Indooripilly will be the tell, Ronan should be home and hosed. Unless your thesis, while broadly correct, is confounded there by strong local anti-rat sentiment. Plus the labor candidate is a simple traditional labor dynastic play, no real political agendas to spook the true believers in labor hegemonic(?) culture and ways, comfort sorely needed after the shock of the Lee. In which case, per your feleing labor, parking green thesis, what odds you giving now on the South Brisbane Green getting ahead of the South Brisbane Nat, in a #2? You think that Anna’s personal redoubt will stay on song en masse, there’ll be no fleeing here, and she still won’t have to go to preferences?.
She was sorely missed at the Meet the South Brisbane Candidates In The Back Bar Of The Boundary ( as if she’d turn up to a dive like that, what were they thinking, she’s moved on from Women’s House days, really). Her name was pretty much mud, especially with the largish cohort of well-heeled (literally) women, if that’s not a genderist term, who arrived as a blocque, expecting Her Blighness to be there. they were doubly dissapointed, a tad angry perhaps, first at the her disperformence in the policy area closest to their particular crankiness, ( hospitals were oft mentioned) and secondly at Anna’s arrogant no-show ( apparently her office kept the organisers on a string about her turning up or not). I explained to them that this seat was safe for Anna, famously low maintenece, she’d have way more importnat things to do than a “meet the electorate” opportunity which she couldn’t stage manage. If Anna’s counting on women like these, who looked and sounded like public service professionals to me, from the health and education sectors, to save her ass just because she and they are women, well watch out Anna.
But they weren’t at all typical, I don’t think, Anna can breathe easier, south brisbane isn’t about to become the New Bennelong. I put that down to the Nats being dullards, not seeing the opportunity, and Ronan and Drew, with their tunnel vision labor prefs deal, thereby crueling any chance of the inner city greens, who absolutely need liberal prefs to get in if they are to, to chase those deals. Here in South Brisbane we’ll just have to wait till Anna retires for the inevitable greening. Which may not be that long.
Danny, why would Indooroopilly be home and hosed for the Greens, just because a small but significant slice of left-Labor voters is prone to swing between the two parties?
Indooroopilly is not homogenous: there’s very wealthy pockets who will only ever vote conservative or neo-liberal; there’s an educational (staff and student) belt; and above all there’s a mass of fairly ordinary suburbia.
It’s not an inner-city enclave of the type that appears to be the Greens only ongoing, single-member electorate target.
Mark (comment 4). I misread you. Yes, the fate of the government is unpredictable, though the voting patterns aren’t.
Mark says:
Oh Mark. Reverting to your bad, old habit of Norman May trilogy race-calling again. Dear me.
The election may be hard to call. But whats moving the electorate is an open book, from this distance. (Admittedly I know very little about QLD apart from what I read in the papers.)
When the polling margin of error exceeds the probably margin of victory then elections will always be “hard to call”. UNdoubtedly such factors as voting systems, preference allocations and seat distributions will significantly effect the political outcome.
But we as social scientists are primarily interested in the change in voter sentiment, not the bureaucracy of power. The former is after all, the point of trying to understand the citizen.
What one should be looking for is the direction, magnitude and volatility of swing a fair way out from any likely election. This is a reliable index of momentum, which leaders and campaigns can do little or nothing to arrest.
In the case of the current QLD election it is obvious to me that psephological momentum favours the LNP on account of the simultaneous recessionary phase of the economic cycle and electoral swing.
UNdoubtedly the reformation of the LNP has helped the Right-wing forces. Party unity goes beyond program policy or politician personality. Disunity smells of death.
Graeme:
… I was extrapolating from Mark’s possibly knowledgable ( remember, he had the scoop on the Green’s preference maneuvre ) assertion :”a big chunk of the urban base Labor relied on is fleeing at a frightening rate of knots “….
Mark is usually parsimonius with hyperbolic rhetoric, so I took (a) his insider status and (b) his fabulously florid use of ‘big’,'fleeing’, and “frightening rate of knots” to mean that, well, the swing is on from labor to green, and in the indooripilly context that parses to: Ronan (green, the flee-ee) should be home and hosed, urban labor voters ( the flee-ers) being the encumbent majority species there, and ‘a big chunk’ of them going his way being exactly what Ronan’s plan has been. If Mark’s semi-quantitaive assertion is accurate, then I don’t see the conclusion I drew (there’s that word again, it always seems to co-locate with ronan) as at all controversial.
As you know I have the greatest respect for your poitical skills and accumen ( well, I think we agree on some things, how much more respectful respect can ya get?) but I’m having difficulty with your ‘small but significant’ as concept: do you mean ‘significant’ in it’s non-numerical connotation, as in influential, or is there a statistical quanta ‘small but significant’, the straw that broke the camels back, the tipping point, as it were? How big is it? 5% of the total electorate?
You’ll know why I’m interested. Think what a “small but significant” cohort like that, say 5%, could do here in south brisbane, based on 06 numbers, if it was evident as a swing greenwards from both the major’s constituencies: Anna would be going to preferences, Greens would be #2, and that great unknown, tory preferences, would be counted for a change. Depending how many spoil, and how many go green ( I think we can discount the Tory1/Labor2 species), that scenario could be very interesting. But it won’t happen, the Borgias assiduously avoided letting anything like that get set up, and the local branch greens were trapped by their head offices’ decision. After all, it might have led to a minority tory gov’t, with greens as BOP. No one wants that, even the greens it seems, otherwise they wouldn’t have cut off any chance of adult talking with the tories about what them strongly directing preferences greenwards could do, run dead as it were. Well that’s not entoirely true, the greens are interested in the BOP, but obviously only if that green is Ronan. Which if Marks apparent quanification is correct and applies to Indooripilly, could happen.
I hope the ALP loses in QLD tomorrow, if only because it is not good for our system of government to have any one party in office for so long.
Lest this upset the ALP partisans here, for the same reason I was not too upset to see Howard defeated, and said so prior to that election here and at Tim Blair’s. (Of course, I hope that, if elected, Springborg proves more capable that the utter cretins on Krudd’s team of brainless wastrels, but that’s another issue!)
MarkL
Canberra
Clive Bean reckons Bligh will hang on.
Danny, Graeme is right. The point is a drift away on primaries from the ALP to The Greens without the intention to return via preferences.
Labor has lost 10.3% of its primary vote in Brisbane according to Galaxy. Of that, about 2 or 3% has gone to The Greens. That bumps their Brisbane vote up to about 11% overall, and if Labor is just ahead or just behind instead of well ahead in a range of seats, and the exhaust rate is higher – as the leaked polling shows and as the ALP was picking up prior to the election being called – then there are really big problems potentially.
The implications for Indooro are almost nil because the LNP will poll first, and Ronan would need somewhere near 35%. If you take The Greens’ vote in Indooro last time as their baseline, it’s the worst in comparable inner city seats @ 16% odd. A personal vote couldn’t be worth more than 2 or 3% under normal circs, and if you’re generous perhaps you could predict 5% – which would leave Lee at just over 20% – below The Greens’ primary in Mt Cootha and South Brisbane.
The ALP could manage 25% running the proverbial yellow dog.
Odds are, therefore, that Lee comes third. I don’t see him picking up any significant numbers of LNP votes with the general swing in their favour.
I wouldn’t discount a bigger swing to the LNP than the 3% ish they need to be in a very good position to win the seat.
With South Brisbane, Anna Bligh quite frankly has more worries than whether she turns up to a forum in her own electorate.
Oh, to answer your question about votes being parked with The Greens – a third to a half of The Greens’ vote outside the inner city always comes from a generalised protest vote that has no particular affinity with the party. This time, there’s more of that around, and that likely accounts for a large part of the swing to The Greens on primaries in Brisbane, rather than their campaign efforts, which go largely unnoticed except in a few electorates – and where they have a much smaller impact than political junkies are inclined to think.
They are, in fact, a minor party, and don’t loom large in most voters’ thinking.
In addition, we know that there’s a lot of volatility and fluidity in the vote from these sources – the “might change mind” questions from last week’s Galaxy poll, the movement Graham Young’s picked up in his polling, and both the internal ALP polling and what can be inferred from their campaign tactics over the last week.
Mark:
“Anna Bligh quite frankly has more worries than whether she turns up to a forum in her own electorate.”
… quite, which is why I told those surprised, yet dissappointed, souls that did expect her to turn up, as I noted above:
“this seat (is) safe for Anna, famously low maintenece, she’d have way more importnat things to do than a “meet the electorate” opportunity which she couldn’t stage manage”.
Goes to show to show how disconnected some punters are from politicians’ realpolitik. Mind you, pollies can get disconnected from punters’ realpolitik, that’s I guess when they cease to be pollies.
So, your two assertions:
“Labor has lost 10.3% of its primary vote in Brisbane according to Galaxy. Of that, about 2 or 3% has gone to The Greens.”
Is that the same as your previous
“…a big chunk of the urban base Labor relied on is fleeing at a frightening rate of knots — parked with the Greens”
that I was referring to, or does the latter, somehwat more impressive claim, rely on different intelligence to the modest Galaxy gleanings?
Yes, danny, it does. I think I already alluded to where it comes from in a previous comment.
Newspoll’s just in – shows a slightly better position for Labor:
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/electioncentral/2009/03/20/borg-cant-be-sold-to-brisbane-nor-bligh-to-beatties-battlers/comment-page-1/#comment-3273