Some very mixed signals were sent over the weekend about the future of the Nationals. Their huge defeat in Lyne will have been disheartening, not so much because it happened, but because Rob Oakeshott won so overwhelmingly with a primary of 64%. The result will encourage Indepedents to try to cherry pick their remaining nine seats. Outside Queensland, where the LNP deal will protect sitting members from Liberal competition and where their three seats are reasonably safe against Labor, the Nats also face potential threats from the Liberal Party when seats fall vacant, and there are some seats which are also potentially vulnerable to Labor. But in the meantime, Labor’s majority in the Reps over the Coalition has increased, and Brendan Nelson can’t take much comfort from a poor campaign in Mayo where the Liberal Party only just held off a challenge from The Greens in a blue-ribbon seat.
But over in the West, Brendon Grylls’ strategy has worked a treat, with the Nats improving their vote and holding the balance of power in both houses. At state level, agrarian socialism and the politics of pork barrelling and extortionate negotiation seems to be a viable strategy for the party. So both Warren Truss and Barnaby Joyce have been contemplating an exit from the federal Coalition. As Andrew Bartlett points out, this is pretty weird for two Queenslanders who are supporting a merged entity at state level. The Nats, of course, don’t see the dissonance, because they’ve effectively swallowed up the Queensland Libs, and are happily preselecting their own members as LNP candidates in state seats which the Liberals had a better chance of winning in, and claiming that the “new face of Queensland” comprises a frontbench where the Borg has only one Brisbane member. Meanwhile, some former Liberals sit on the sidelines, hoping to resurrect their party if the LNP bombs at its first electoral outing when Anna Bligh goes to the polls.
Continue reading ‘Nationals resurgent or dead?’
Interesting stuff happening in the two federal by-elections tonight. It’s all over red rover for the Nats candidate in Mark Vaile’s old seat of Lyne, Rob Drew, who’s on about 22% of the primary vote - a swing against the Nationals of over 30%. With two thirds of the vote counted, Independent Rob Oakeshott has romped in with nearly 64% of the primary vote counted so far.
The Nats are now down to a historic low of nine seats in the House of Representatives.
In Mayo, there’s a swing against the Liberals of around 11%, with the Greens’ Lynton Vonow polling strongly. So are former Liberal Bob Day and Independent Di Bell. The Libs’ primary is just over 40% and around 20% of the vote has been counted. I don’t know enough about the electorate to say anything about which booths have reported, but you could foresee a scenario where the Libs lose or are run close with a primary like that. It doesn’t appear to have changed much with more booths reporting since I’ve been watching. At the time of writing, the AEC is putting the 2PP at 52/48 Liberals - Greens.
It looks like a smart tactical decision for Labor not to run in either of these safe conservative electorates, and although no doubt local factors are the key to the results, it’ll be fascinating to see how the results are spun tomorrow, particularly since they’re probably going to be roped in with the WA result, whatever that turns out to be. I wonder whether Brendan Nelson spent much time campaigning in Mayo.
You can follow the count at the AEC’s virtual tally room - for Lyne and for Mayo. The Poll Bludger has open threads as well - for Lyne and Mayo respectively.
Update: The Liberals have claimed victory in Mayo. It’s possible but unlikely that postals and other pre-poll and absentee votes might change the picture if Independent Di Bell can get ahead of the Greens’ Lynton Vonow. On votes counted to date the Liberals have 51.74% of the 2PP vote, with the Greens on 48.26%. It’s a big slap in the face for the Libs, whichever way you look at it.
The raw ingredients of the right wing media narrative du jour have been stewing for all to see in a curious potage in the columns of The Australian over the last few days. That narrative? Take a pinch of “Rudd is symbolism and spin” (originally coined by one John Winston Howard), add a dollop of Nelsonian petrol populism, throw in Ute Man, and you’ve got a recipe for self-delusion - that Peter Costello will not ride into the sunset of international finance but rather rise again to lead the conservative forces back to their rightful place in the sun, their brief winter of Ruddian discontent dispell’d by glorious… something.
Former Labor Senator John Black, among whose exercises in psephological tea leaf reading was the prediction that Peter Beattie and Labor would crash and burn in the 2006 Queensland election, has redeemed his own subsequent prediction that Kevin Rudd and Labor would romp it home in Gippsland, by seizing on some leaked National Party polling reported by Glenn Milne. Ute Man has spoken.
So you can forget using the present national opinion polls of voting intention as a means of projecting the next by-election result.
Well, yeah, you can, because Labor isn’t running in Mayo, and probably won’t in Lyne. But, wait, there’s more: Continue reading ‘Peter Costello the saviour’
…Was it clever politics for the Liberal Party to preselect one of the (junior) architects of WorkChoices, Jamie Briggs, for the Mayo by-election?
Elsewhere: Pavlov’s Cat isn’t impressed. Tim Dunlop on the spectre of WorkChoices.
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