Super Saturday by-elections look second rate

The media has decided to run with the puerile Americanism of Super Saturday. I can think of a better nonpareil — the most undesirable and entirely avoidable waste of people’s time and money in Australian political history but admittedly that doesn’t have the same fetching ring to it.

Labor’s Tim Hammond resigned as the member for Perth for family reasons. Fair enough. The other four are enforced, Section 44 by-elections with Labor’s Josh Wilson (Fremantle), Justine Keay (Braddon) and Susan Lamb (Longman) and Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo) formerly from the Nick Xenophon Team and now from the Centre Alliance, all having been found to have rather imperfect understandings of their immediate ancestry.

In Perth and Fremantle, the Liberal Party decided long ago to put up the white flag before a vote was cast. Labor’s return in both WA seats is a no-brainer.

The seats of Longman in Queensland and Braddon in Tasmania are where the serious battles are being fought.

Picking the winners is tricky. Local seat polling is always fraught. Sample sizes are invariably small with gaping margins of error. Polling companies can focus on landline users only and be said to be excluding large demographic chunks from their sample size. Or they can use both landlines and mobile phones and not be quite sure the people they are polling actually live in the electorates up for grabs. Individual seat polling is not a solid basis for predicting winners and losers.

Less scientific but arguably a stronger guide to the results are the betting markets.

In Mayo, Sharkie is short odds-on to defeat the Liberal candidate, Georgina Downer, who is a long way back in the second line of betting at 11/2.

A glance at the betting guide in Braddon today shows Labor has moved in to become the tepid favourite, paying $1.50 with the Coalition at $2.40, with both being a tick under even money a week ago.

In Longman, the market has been all over the shop in the past month but as of today the LNP’s Trevor Ruthenberg leads the Labor’s Lamb $1.65 to $2.20.

The reliability of betting markets is similarly problematic. In what I imagine are fairly small betting pools, odds can be skewed with as little as a couple of hundred down on one candidate or another.

Amid all the unwelcome campaigning and unwanted badgering of people going peacefully about their business, we must bow our heads in silent prayer for the good people of Longman especially. The by-election offers not a Melbourne Cup but more a dismally untalented Cox Plate field of 11 hopefuls, offering little more than a Hobson’s choice for voters.

Susan Lamb’s tale of Section 44 woe came to a head after a tearful speech she made to the parliament, speaking of family dislocation. Her father had passed away many years back and her relationship with her mother was non-existent, she claimed. Then Lamb’s stepmother entered the discussion with her own view of the truth leading to accusations Lamb had misled the parliament.

The LNP candidate, Trevor Ruthenberg, has been forced to apologise after overstating his military honours, not once or twice but thrice on various parliamentary and personal websites. The former fitter and turner also found the term engineer had a more compelling feel to it. We could call it quibbling over not very much, but it would seem Big Trev has done a bit of a Hyacinth Bucket on his resume.

Over in One Nation land, the PHON candidate, Matthew Stephen, has been under fire for what is said to be a somewhat casual attitude to his creditors.

But it gets worse in Longman. Much worse.

Number two on the ballot paper is Jim Saleam from the Australia First Party. Those of a certain vintage with solid long-term memories will recall Saleam getting about in brown shirts and swastika armbands in the 1970s as leader of a neo-Nazi group called National Action.

Back then his sidekick, Ross “The Skull” May was often seen at Saleam’s side looking photogenic in the full Nazi kit with his pointy bald bonce and Coke bottle glasses. Sadly, it would seem the master race is prone to strabismus (crossed eyes) and microcephaly (pinheadism).

The last I heard of The Skull was in 2014 when he was said to be running with a group of ugly misfits called Squadron 88 (the 88 is code for Heil Hitler, the letter ‘h’ being the eighth in the alphabet), who were passing out flyers threatening dark-skinned Sydneysiders with serious assault.

Saleam, who claims to have moved on from those heady days, has served two jail terms, one for property offences and fraud in 1984, the other for being an accessory before the fact in a 1989 shotgun attack on the home of an African National Congress representative who was living in Australia at the time.

Meanwhile down in Braddon, there are reports that the Australia People’s Party candidate, Bruno Strangio, is an undischarged bankrupt. If so, clearly both he and Saleam would be ineligible to sit in the federal Parliament in the unlikely event they would win.

If anything, the so-called Super Saturday reveals our democracy may not yet be cooked but it is roasting slowly over the embers of ineptitude and straight out electoral chicanery. Just to clarify, it is not the Australian Electoral Commission’s role to test the eligibility of candidates. All candidates sign a statutory declaration specifically stating they are eligible under Section 44 of the Constitution.

There may yet be more Section 44 surprises to come. In what is yet untested in the High Court, triumphant candidates may be found to be ineligible for receiving preferences from candidates who are prima facie ineligible. Labor and the LNP have both put Saleam last but PHON has placed Saleam above Labor. In Braddon, the Liberals have preferenced Strangio ahead of Labor.

Will it matter? In a close-run election it might and then the prospect looms of the people of Braddon and Longman having to do it all over again. Again.

I’m exhausted just thinking about it and no doubt like the denizens of Braddon and Longman, I think it’s time I had a long lie down.

This article was first published in The Australian on 25 July 2018.