A week after Western Australians went to the vote, and the counting and manoeuvring continues. The Poll Bludger has all the details on the latest results and a poll on which way the Nationals should jump.
I’ve got a feeling the Nationals might go with Labor. It’s hard to explain why Brendon Grylls should give Alan Carpenter a big assist to stay in the leadership otherwise. But the contrary hypothesis would be it’s part of a game plan to keep us all guessing.
Saturday’s election result in WA means the possibility of the political commentator’s dream: the hung parliament. Labor has suffered a massive swing, and now it’s probably going to come down to who can convince the Nationals to make a deal. Whose trainwreck? We’ll see…
The Nationals in WA are more agrarian socialist than they are in the rest of the country, and there are some who say that Brendan Grylls personally leans more towards the Labor Party. Common ‘wisdom’ and Liberal MPs suggest that the Libs and Nats will come to an arrangement, but Gryll’s personal politics, and a desire (and need) to appear genuinely independent and influential mean that there’s a good chance he may prefer to make a deal with Carpenter.
Whether Carps will want to, when it will mean having to fork out a huge amount of money to rural seats, in addition to meeting all his election promises, and dealing with the instability of an angry party and CCC reports, is another question. Whether he’s capable of working with another party when he’s so terrible at working with his own is a third. To be successful would require an ability to reach a consensus, at least with the most important bills; that just isn’t his style.
Continue reading ‘No, thanks’
I was very interested to watch interviews with both Alan Carpenter and Brendon Grylls on the 7 30 Report tonight. The punditariat – and Kerry O’Brien – seem to have no awareness of the specific history of the WA Nationals (whose former leader Hendy Cowan was much less socially conservative than his federal counterparts, and whose conference this year supported same sex civil unions) or indeed what occurred during the campaign. The lazy assumption that the Nats will jump to install Colin Barnett ignores, for instance, the bad blood that was signalled by Barnett refusing to meet Grylls during the lead up to the election, not to mention Grylls’ explicit statements about negotiating with both major parties. This is just speculation, but my feeling was that Grylls has an incentive to go with Labor to demonstrate that the Nats’ independence is genuine. This may well be very interesting.
This was the worst campaign I have ever seen run by the ALP.
Ever.
This was an election where all of the ALP’s problems over the last 6-8 years came home to roost.
There was no central theme. The campaign material was ugly, late out, badly written, and largely unrelated to anything voters actually cared about.
The central campaign was a shambles, courtesy of a complete disconnect between the Parliamentary Labor party, party office, and the lay ALP membership.
Continue reading ‘Worst. Campaign. Ever.’
MB: William’s been having problems with his database crashing, so he’s going to conclude his liveblogging of the WA election poll count here if the problems continue.
10.48pm. I’ll wrap it up here and carry on over at my place, so enormous thanks to Mark Bahnisch for allowing me to clog up his page. The Liberals have gained Ocean Reef, North West, Jandakot, Swan Hills, Mount Lawley, Bunbury, Darling Range, Kingsley, Wanneroo, Southern River and apparently Morley. Varying degrees of doubt remain about Riverton, Forrestfield, Collie-Preston and Morley. Labor might make a notional gain of Albany. Former Labor independent John Bowler has won Kalgoorlie from the Liberals. Labor may have lost Kwinana to independent Carol Adams. Independents Janet Woollard in Alfred Cove and Sue Walker in Nedlands may or may not lose their seats to the Liberals. The numbers are 27 to 29 for Labor plus Labor independents, with either one or two of the latter; 26 to 28 for the Liberals plus Liberal independents, also with one to three of the latter; and four for the Nationals.
Continue reading ‘The Poll Bludger’s live blog of the WA count [continued from The Poll Bludger]‘
WA goes to the polls today. Prediction, speculation, reports, links, etc, welcomed.
Possum and The Poll Bludger have rounded up the latest polling, which suggests a very close race.
Election bloggy goodness: Worst of Perth and the WA Greens both have posts. Liveblogging is going to happen at The Poll Bludger, and Antony Green’s place at the ABC, where the election coverage will also be streamed. ABC Local Perth Radio also has a tally room blog.
Update: The polls in WA have now closed and local lad The Poll Bludger has opened his liveblogging post.
Watch it on your computer: Here’s the url for the ABC’s live streaming tv coverage.
Update: [by Mark] William Bowe’s been having database problems at The Poll Bludger, so his liveblogging of the WA count continues here at LP.
Yesterday the WA Labor Party took the strange step of releasing its internal polling publicly, rather than pretending to some journo that it was an uncontrolled leak. They claim that Labor faces losing the election on Saturday, and are hoping that much of the swing away from them is a protest vote, that people don’t really want to elect Colin Barnett.
When polling was “leaked” in the usual way last week, Joe Spagnolo wrote that:
Labor is still quietly confident of victory.
It just doesn’t want to show it.
Labor still believes that come election day, voters will not want to bank on a Coalition which has changed leaders four times in three years.
It just wants to make sure that the expected protest vote doesn’t become a protest of tsunami proportions.
But after yesterday’s performance, “quietly confident” is not a phrase I would use to describe them. It looks like they really are worried. The punters, not so much.
Continue reading ‘Whose trainwreck will it be?’
On a day when speculation ran rife that WA had lost the nation’s biggest resource development project, the Inpex Liquefied Natural Gas project in the Kimberley valued at $25 billion, Alan Carpenter announced yesterday he would be closing the bars at Parliament House.
That announcement, aimed at wedging Colin Barnett over his predecessor Troy Buswell, was pretty typical of how this election has gone in the first two weeks and might explain why at the halfway mark of the campaign Labor finds itself in a tight contest against a crisis-ridden Opposition that only settled on a leader the day before the election was called.
Barnett may be obsessed with Brian Burke, but the Labor campaign is a little too fond of the Buswell jokes they had prepared to let them go this quickly. There are many valid points to be made about Buswell’s continued political success, in particular the effect it’s had, and will continue to have, on women in the Liberal Party, which translates to the women whom they seek to govern. But stunts like this impress nobody, and they belittle the real issues that Buswell’s behaviour brings to light. The problem with Buswell, and the boys’ clubs on both sides, is not that there are bars in parliament house.
Continue reading ‘The big issues’
After the Great Debate 05, it was always going to be a staid affair. Last time, Barnett used the forum to announce his plans for the “Far Canal“. The Howard Government wouldn’t speak in support of it, and then he got his costings wrong and denied that they were.
So it’s not surprising that the verdict this time: dull.
Carps focussed on his Vision for Western Australia, in a strategy that sounds a little “More to do but heading in the right direction“; talking about environment, infrastructure and services.
Barnett’s main theme was that the current government is too corrupt to win another term, although he refused to implement a ban like Gallop’s (and, eventually, Carpenter) on his team meeting with Noel Crichton-Browne or Brian Burke. He started off quite well, and the worm liked him, but he struggled when the focus turned to how he would deal with the problem. Frankly, it’s a little strange to make Burke the focus, yet be unwilling to say the word “ban”. Apparently, his team just won’t have any contact with them.
Continue reading ‘No Alarms and No Surprises’
With just under two weeks left until the earliest WA election in 100 years, the main story of the campaign is a Premier trying to position himself as a strong and decisive leader, and an opposition trying to paint him as devious and arrogant. It’s all about Carps, really.
He’s devious, because calling an election only a day after Barnett became leader was like “jump[ing] into the Olympic swimming pool five seconds before the other competitors“. But if length of time as leader is the issue, then it’s his own fault that he gave up his advantage; if he’d stuck around after losing the last election he’d now be ahead of Carps in time served.
He’s devious because he’s trying to avoid CCC reports that will prove just how deep he was in with Brian Burke. He went to parties with Burke, you see. The idea that Brian Burke installed Carps as leader is one of those stories that’s both true and not-true, all at the same time. Continue reading ‘I am not, nor have I ever been…’
I suspect none of the major parties federally or in any of the states and territories could entirely escape the accusation of being a “boys club”, but I’m very interested to see – for the first time I can think of – gendered cultures within a political party being raised as an election issue in Australia. The WA Labor Party is running a radio ad which you can listen to here. The ad highlights the disparity in female representation between the two major parties, and it’s reminds voters of some of the appalling behaviour associated with former leader (and current Shadow Treasurer) Troy Buswell. But aside from the ikkiness of the boy culture exposed by Troy “I did not have intercourse with that quokka” Buswell, there’s clearly something in the accusation – the way that “star” candidate Deirdre Willmott was casually elbowed aside to accommodate the resurrected Colin Barnett really seems to have been appalling from a story in the weekend Fin Review quoting Willmott at length. Apparently Barnett met her two days before, and mentioned nothing, and she wasn’t told what was going on even before the press conference at which Buswell resigned. A range of other female Liberal MPs resigned from the party in the last term, and some are recontesting, with independent Liberal Liz Constable being co-opted into a frontbench role by Barnett to try to soften the damage.
I’d be watching any gender breakdown in the polls in WA very carefully.
Elsewhere: More from William Bowe aka The Poll Bludger for subscribers in Crikey.
The Poll Bludger has a comprehensive post on what’s happening in the WA state election. The polls are showing it might be a close run race, with a 51-49 result from Newspoll and basically a dead heat in Westpoll (albeit from a 400 strong sample). There’s also lots of electorate level polling to read about.
Discussion of the Northern Territory election results continues to be framed in terms of its possible implications for WA, where Alan Carpenter also went early. There are at least two problems with this narrative – first that there’s no evidence but only supposition that the NT result was directly related to an early election (and it’s worth pointing out that after all the insta commentary, it’s now being recognised that the result was the second best Territory Labor had ever attained in terms of primary votes). Secondly, I’ve always felt that argument by historical analogy is at best risky – as patterns that might form the basis for prediction are hard to discern just from political history in the absence of quantitative data. It becomes riskier when you start assuming that what appears (and it only does appear) to be the case in one jurisdiction can unproblematically be the basis for an inference to what might occur in another. The number of qualifiers I’ve felt obliged to use here might be a bit of a clue to the logical force of any such arguments.
Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that politicians think this way, and often seek to learn from campaigns and tactics that appear to have worked elsewhere in the past. There’s a whole mini-industry now, for instance, of importing Australian political consultants to work on and direct British campaigns. One thing I’m surprised no one (to my knowledge anyway) has mentioned is the fact that Alan Carpenter is obviously taking a leaf or two from Peter Beattie’s campaign book.
Continue reading ‘Is Alan Carpenter the new Peter Beattie?’
There are some interesting power games and shifts happening in WA politics at the moment, which make this state election slightly more interesting than it would otherwise be. I’m sure they will have very little effect on the outcome of the election (I’m sure Mr Poll Bludger can confirm or correct me here) although some of them may have an effect on the dynamics of the government afterwards.
Continue reading ‘Party Games*’
There’s a fair bit of analysis of and commentary on the Northern Territory election results around the blogosphere.
The Poll Bludger is progressively updating late counting, while Tim Dunlop discusses the low turnout. Antony Green also looks at the impact of absentee votes and is critical of the administration of the election and Andrew Bartlett discusses the coverage of the election, and has some other interesting observations.
I noticed the usual predictable “it spells doom for the Rudd government” and “no it was fought on territory issues” dichotomy being produced in comments by pollies yesterday. I doubt that either Julie Bishop on one hand or Chris Bowen and Stephen Smith on the other were really following the election closely and that they are speaking with any authority on this matter. It’s always possible that they were privy to some internal polling, but unlikely in my judgement. I’d prefer to get some information on the dynamics of the contest from someone who’s actually an informed Territorian, so I’d take a lot more notice of Ken Parish’s take on the campaign and the result at Troppo.
Continue reading ‘Northern Territory election result analysis links post’
Recent comments
Ootz, desipis, John D, Fran Barlow, paul of albury, j_p_z [...]
David Irving (no relation), Deborah, David Irving (no relation), Pavlov's Cat, Deborah, Pavlov's Cat [...]
John D, HuggyBunny, Chris, Tim Macknay, carbonsink, Elise [...]
Quoll, David Irving (no relation), Wood Duck, David Irving (no relation), Mark, josh [...]
Ginja, GregM, PD41, Enemy Combatant, Matilda, Mercurius [...]
Frankie V., armagny, sg, Robert Merkel, wilful
Helen, Laura, conrad, murph the surf., Chris, conrad [...]
Caroline Church, Fran Barlow, Sam, Jenny, Sam, Kim [...]
Liam, anthony nolan, pablo, Ute Man, Col. Douglas C. Niedermeyer, Mindy [...]
David Irving (no relation), Roger Jones, David Irving (no relation), Elise, Paul Norton, Gummo Trotsky [...]
Kim, paul walter, Saint Furious of Ikea, Jacques de Molay, Fascinated, Deborah [...]
Helen, Kim, Helen, David Irving (no relation), Sam, Helen [...]