Obviously, the difference is that neither party won a majority of seats, but it’s worthwhile noting that on election night, George Brandis was quick to claim that the Coalition had won because it appeared then that the Liberals and Nationals were ahead of Labor in the AEC’s count. Then we had that quickly consigned to oblivion, as Julia Gillard staked her own legitimacy claim. Now it’s being reported all over the place that the Coalition is ahead again.

True, but meaningless, if the assertion is that we know now who won more votes in a two party preferred sense. Antony Green, William Bowe and Peter Brent all explain why.

The only number that counts is 76.

This won’t stop the rhetoric, of course.

The latest inflation thereof is Tony Abbott’s claim that “we are no longer in Opposition”.

Make of that what you will.

It’s required reading, I think.

In other news, the Governor-General has received written advice from the Solicitor General that she has no conflict of interest, and you can read it here.

It’s a small sample with a correspondingly high margin of error, but it’s saying much the same as the other recent polls.

So where are we at?

It’s obvious that Labor, on the current figures, will have difficulty winning, though on some permutations of seat outcomes, a very narrow Labor win or a hung parliament are possibilities. The difference between these polls for Labor, and the ones which preceded Kevin Rudd’s dumping is the strength of the Coalition vote.

It may well be that a large tranche of voters previously inclined to give Labor another go have finally switched sides. If that’s so, it’s hard to see how the ALP can win. Having said that, it may also be that the ALP can pull back a point or two over the rest of the campaign, and in a contest this finely poised, it’s absolutely essential to know how the swing is distributed, not just state by state, but also by class of seats.

My feeling in Queensland is that the ALP has been able to contain the swing in some of its marginals, and we may be looking at a scenario similar to that in the South Australian election where Labor lost lots of superfluous votes in safe seats, but held where it counted.

Antony Green made some interesting comments tonight on the 7.30 Report, drawing a parallel with the 1990 election, where Labor was on the nose in Victoria and surging in Queensland. The exact opposite is true now. It may well be, as Green implied, that state factors are key, which wouldn’t be entirely surprising in a campaign where the parties are running campaigns reminiscent of state ones, and campaigning on state issues.

As I said earlier today, I think the next round of polls will be crucial. It’s hard to imagine the government having a worse week than last week. If they’re still stuck where they are, and perhaps Morgan (taken last night) suggests they are, then Labor has real problems.

Antony Green has provided a compendium of useful and interesting information at this page of the ABC’s election website. At his blog, he analyses some of the political implications, and updates readers about where we can find results.

William Bowe has some further interesting background at The Poll Bludger.

The Twitter hashtag for the by-election is #penrith (though it also appears to be the hashtag for the NRL team, which might cause a little bit of confusion). I’ve previously assessed the Twitter debate in this post.

This is an open thread for predictions, links, reports and analysis.

Update: Live blogging of the result at The Poll Bludger will commence at 6pm AEST.

Elsewhere: Ben Raue at The Tally Room.

Update: Labor loses the seat on a -24.4% primary swing.

Fortunately, psephological bloggers are on the case!

Both Antony Green and Possum have written thoughtful and well informed posts on just this topic.

I’d add a couple of points:

(a) It’s quite right to be a tad suspicious about whether polls are measuring something slightly different from voting intention. To me, the biggest gap in the polls we have is always the lack of any data on intensity of interest in politics, which could, I think, usefully be correlated with strength of commitment to a particular voting preference. Part of the advantage to incumbents, I suspect, comes from the fact that a lot of the people, a lot of the time, are just not thinking much about politics;

(b) As I’ve commented on and off again and again for years, politics is not amenable to prediction in quite the same way other forms of behaviour are. (A good contrast is with consumption, where the aggregation of individual purchases makes more sense, I’d suggest, than the aggregation of individual votes; the frequent conflation of political behaviour with marketing terminology is misleading – ‘brand loyalty’ is just not the same thing with political parties as with mobile phones or flavoured milk.)

The final verdict – the whole thing is probably a bit of a side show.

The by-election results did, of course, lead to a particularly risible bit of Newspoll analysis (pace Possum) about the fabulous favour the Libs had done themselves by electing Tony Abbott, but since then, they’ve been kinda subsumed in the broader narrative of the Coalition’s Abbott/Joyce/Return of the Living Dead desire to rebadge ‘Howard’s battler’s’ as ‘Abbott’s Army’. A new piece of punditarial common sense in the making…

No doubt everyone will have forgotten Bradfield and Higgins soon, but in the meantime, Antony Green observes:

In my view there are very few implications that can be drawn from Saturday night’s result. Yes the Liberal Party improved its hold on both seats. However, both seats are unrepresentative of the general electorate because they are both very safe Liberal seats. There was no Labor candidate in either seat, making it hard to assess the results as a normal two-party contest. The Liberal party also ran highly localised campaigns in both seats and this played a part in isolating the result from the internal party shenanigans that went on in Canberra the week before the poll.

In summary, not much happened, everyone should move on.

Instead, journalists and bloggers across the country have become auguries, examining the entrails of the booth by booth results to try and divine some patterns. Godammit, it was an election, it must mean something!!

Green goes on to parse George Megalogenis’ claims in The Australian this morning (which I can’t find online). It’s a lengthy analysis, but the really important implications for Australian politics are contained in the last section:

In its article, the Australian draws implications for the Labor-Liberal contest from the swings in both seats. I think a better case could be made for using the results to examine how Labor voters react to the Greens as a political party.

The Australian is right in drawing the conclusion that Labor voters may react badly if the Labor Party adopted a strong Green agenda. Everything we know about the class support of Australian political parties shows that jobs, the economy and industrial relations are important for defining the differences between the Labor and Liberal Parties. Green issues are emerging as another point of difference, but old fashioned relationship based on the means of production still distinguish between the support bases of Australia’s major parties.

Were attitudes to climate change to dominate the political battleground at the 2010 election, then some of the conclusions drawn by the Australian would be valid. Attitudes to climate change plays an important role in defining Green support in opposition to the support base of the major parties. This is why a by-election between the Liberals and Greens can’t really be used to try and draw conclusions about a contest at the next election between the Labor and Liberal Parties. Some of the Green issues that created a difference between the Liberals and Greens also create a point of difference between Labor and the Greens.

My analysis of what happened to Labor’s first preference vote at the by-election reveals a more complex picture of the by-election than painted by the Australian and highlights the differences between Labor and Green support. The analysis also helps explain why the Labor Party has always wanted to negotiate passage of its emissions trading scheme with the Liberal Party rather than debate the detail with the Greens.

A final note should also be made on the quality of the data. The turnout in both seats was well down on the 2007 election and the informal vote up. The booths that showed the largest swings to the Liberals also happened to be the booths on the edge of the electorate, where the absence of Absent voting at the by-election may have changed the composition of who voted at the booths. Several of the booths with the largest swings, including Toorak West, Hughesdale North and Chatswood, were also booths where there was a dramatic change in the number of votes taken.

Update: The article Antony Green referred to can be found here.

Reports of the amount of money the Libs have been spending suggest that they must be seriously worried about Higgins. It’s difficult to say from this distance, but a number of observers suggest that The Greens’ Clive Hamilton has not run much of a grass roots campaign. That could be scuttlebutt, and I’d be very interested in any views from those closer to the action. But the prospect of the Liberals losing Higgins to The Greens is quite an extraordinary one, and the converse to the ‘Labor should have run’ argument is that it would be an even greater reverse for the opposition than the seat falling to the ALP (though, as Hugo Kelly and Rebekka Power argue, it could be a case of Labor strategists being too clever by half in handing The Greens an inner city Melbourne base).

If Hamilton runs Kelly O’Dwyer close, it will highlight the absurdity of the argument that the Liberals, in rejecting the ETS and elevating Abbott, were playing to their ‘base’. If Higgins isn’t a blue ribbon Lib seat, it’s hard to think of one. As Antony Green observed, while the margin has sometimes been deceptively narrow, the consistency of the Liberal hold on the areas that make up the core of the electorate is what counts.

The other fascination about these by-election contests is that they represent the first test of the new Liberal leader in seats held by one of his two predecessors this term (both of whom now hold sinecures courtesy of Kevin Rudd and the Labor government), and of course, the former electorate of the Great Pretender to the Liberal crown. A loss in either one would be a devastating blow. I wonder how the results will be called, and if there’ll be a bit of bar raising by the commentariat, but serious reverses on the primary vote in either or both seats should speak for themselves. Again, the case for Labor not running candidates in by-elections in Liberal seats is that the focus will be all on the opposition, as opposed to the usual media predictathon when governments lose traction at by-elections.

It should be interesting to watch both unfold. Please feel free to add any reports and links to this thread throughout the day!

Update: The Liberals have retained both seats, it would appear with increased margins on the 2PP. Looking at Higgins, the key is the fact that the Greens’ primary vote is less than Labor’s at the 2007 general election. [Update: That previous comment was made with a number of booths still outstanding. But see also this analysis from Rebekka Power.] It’s evident that there are a fair few ALP voters who won’t vote Green, something I noted on a number of occasions. No doubt these results will be spun as a great victory for Abbott, but the missing element in the equation is the absence of a Labor candidate.

Having said that, I still think The Greens made a big mistake by nationalising the contest, and running a candidate like Clive Hamilton. Kelly O’Dwyer’s ‘Mayor of Higgins’ campaign capitalised on his outsider status well, it would seem. I suggested previously that The Greens might have done better to run a well known local – parochialism always plays well in by-elections, particularly against blow-ins, as the Liberal research no doubt showed. As I intimated in the post, there may have been an element of expectations management going on, with the Libs talking down their chances in advance of the vote.

But I think it’s fair to say that The Greens won’t, and shouldn’t be, happy with the outcome.

But the Libs shouldn’t be all that happy either, as they know full well they ran defensive strategies avoiding the big issues of national politics. These seats should be a total shoo-in for anyone with the Libs’ label on the ballot paper.

The final verdict – the whole thing is probably a bit of a side show.

Antony Green has much more. He points out that Bartlett’s chances aren’t fantastic, because it’s easier for a minor party to take a marginal than a safe seat, as they need to outpoll one of the major parties to be in with a shot. I don’t necessarily agree with Green, though, that Teresa Gambaro brings anything particular to the Liberal cause. She was a pretty lacklustre member for Petrie, and I don’t know that the seafood angle in the name recognition stakes is worth all that much. The Libs have run fairly high profile candidates in the seat before – notably Ingrid Tall in 2004. Tall is a well known doctor whose sexuality disgracefully prompted the Nationals to run a “family values” candidate.

The Libs have usually run well organised campaigns, and Labor has been worried about gentrification and shifting demographics for some time. But the sorts of potential Liberal voters who’ve been moving into the seat are more the types who’d be attracted by a hypothetical Liberal party where Malcolm Turnbull had actually fulfilled his small l Liberal promise. Gambaro doesn’t seem to me to be the best candidate – and we still need to factor in whatever chaos the LNP label might wreak on the Liberal vote in inner city Brisbane.

Arch Bevis probably doesn’t have much of a political future – he’s unlikely to ever sit on the front bench again. But he hasn’t been the member for almost 20 years for no reason – he’s well liked and respected, and works the electorate assiduously. I think he’d have had no trouble holding it whatsoever, and I suspect that’s still more than likely to be the case, though Bartlett’s candidacy certainly promises a less predictable contest.

At any rate, I’ll now be thinking about where to direct my first preference.

While Possum appeared to believe that The Greens had a shot at Higgins (and blew it with the preselection of Hamilton), Antony Green is much more sceptical. In a new post on his election blog, Green highlights historical data demonstrating that the margin in Higgins somewhat belies how safe the seat probably is in reality. He also argues, on the basis of a number of federal and state by-elections, that a prominent local may well have been a better pick, a point I also made in my post.

In both Cunningham and Fremantle, the Greens ran candidates with local credentials who could concentrate on local issues, classic think global act local politics. Yet in Higgins the Greens have done the reverse, choosing a candidate who lives in Canberra and has no links to the electorate, and is running on a climate change agenda that can only be described as act global politics. It is the exact opposite of a previously successful Green strategy.

Among his observations:

Safe Liberal seats in Melbourne have never been as safe as the safest Liberal seats in Sydney. In Sydney the price of desirable land with trees and a view plays an important part in sieving people by class. Without the complex geography of hills, plains and harbour shores, Melbourne’s suburbs have always showed more class mixing than Sydney.

Green doesn’t believe Labor will run a candidate. I think he’s probably right, and the clue as to why is disclosed in another of his comments:

The Greens will nominate and poll well in the absence of a Labor candidate. The problem for the Liberal Party in both Bradfield and Higgins is to try and avoid an adverse swing. The Greens will campaign on the need for climate change action, so a swing to the Greens at either by-election would raise pressure on the Liberal Party during Senate debate on the government’s emission trading legislation.

Any swing would allow the Greens to argue the public wants more action on emissions than the government is offering. But it would also allow the government to argue the Liberal Party should at least back the government’s legislation.