A tale of two elections

The people of NSW will trudge to the polls in 17 days. Excitable types at the best of times, psephologists and commentators are on the verge of rapture. With the federal election due to be held six weeks or so later, insights and perspectives offered with the furrowed brows of the omniscient are there for the grabbing.

On the polling, it would seem minority government looms for either Gladys Berejiklian or Michael Daley. Labor needs big swings, up to nine per cent to form majority government in NSW.

So what sort of indicator will the NSW election be to the federal election? On March 24 and beyond, one thing we can rely on is the usual drivel about state factors, regardless of the result from the nation’s politicians.

Federally, NSW on its own can deliver a Labor win at the next election. But so, too, can Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. In fact, the only state where we can expect the status quo is in Tasmania, and there are no Liberal held seats in that state as we speak.

Labor needs to win six seats to form majority government in the new 151-seat parliament. Due to the vagaries of the electoral system, it really is only five as the newly created seat of Fraser in Melbourne’s west is nominally Labor by a whopping 20 per cent.

Those five marginal seats all sit within a band of one per cent — three in Queensland (Capricornia, Ford and Flynn), one in Victoria (Corangamite) and one in NSW (Gilmore). Labor is shorts odds-on favourites to win them all.

To those who extend the hope of a Coalition victory I ask, which seats might the Coalition gain? This usually draws blank stares or some vigorous noodle scratching. But let’s look at it. Can the Coalition win back Wentworth? Absolutely it can and I think it probably will.

But then it gets difficult, if not impossible. The seats required for the Coalition to form majority government without losing any to Labor are also in a one per cent swing range. If there is any individual seat polling, I am unaware of it but it tends to be unreliable in any event, given small sampling and dubious methodology. The betting markets, however, have Labor as hot favourites to win each one, at or around 4/1-on or $1.25.

Victoria is said to be a killing field for the Liberal Party. I am yet to be convinced of this although the betting markets do show some relatively safe Liberal seats in play. The result of the Victorian state election (I know, state factors blah-blah-blah) showed the big swings occurring in blue ribbon Liberal seats while in the suburbs, the swings to Labor were smaller.

If there is to be a three-and-a-half per cent swing Labor’s way this would give Labor only a one-seat gain (Corangamite) in Victoria with La Trobe in the outer eastern suburbs on the knife’s edge. The betting markets have Labor warm favourites in La Trobe. Elsewhere in the state, Labor is favoured to win Flinders, the seat Greg Hunt has held since 2001, presumably because Liberal independent Julia Banks will take a portion of the Liberal vote. Labor is favoured to gain Deakin (Michael Sukkar) but Speaker Tony Smith is in safer territory in Casey, with the markets giving him a better than even money shot to retain.

The betting markets can and often do get it wrong. This was especially so in the Victorian state election last year, when the markets, and to an extent the polling, did not predict the size of the swing to the Andrews government. Ominously for the Greens, the markets also failed to predict their fall from grace.

Just to push that point further, in Josh Frydenberg’s seat of Kooyong, the bookies installed Julian Burnside on the second line of betting at $4 within hours of Burnside announcing his candidacy. This is laughably short. Even if you were a tree-embracing anti-vaxxer sporting grubby dreadlocks, I would counsel against placing that bet in the strongest possible terms. There’s a Liberal independent running and a Labor candidate with half a chance so predicting the outcome is fraught. Suffice to say, if the Liberals are at $1.55 to win one of its most ultramarine seats, then there’s a real problem across the board.

One thing the polling won’t show and betting markets never seem to calculate is the relationship between a loss of primary vote and where second preferences end up.

We’ve already seen the Liberal vote split. In Queensland a large chunk of the LNP primary vote has gone to One Nation and to a lesser degree to the Katter Australia Party. There and elsewhere the Liberal primary vote also vies with Clive Palmer’s UAP (just between you and me, anyone who scratches a vertical line in the box next to any UAP candidate requires radical psychotherapy and sooner rather than later), Cory’s Tories, otherwise known as the Australian Conservatives and now there’s a smattering of Liberal independents in blue ribbon seats, some of which we’ve already mentioned.

The Liberal primary vote is splintering but worse, it seems the preferences are not coming back in any significant way. The Queensland state election and the Longman by-election revealed One Nation preferences running about 60-40 the LNP’s way. Remember, One Nation does not have the resources to hand out how-to-vote cards at all polling booths so what voters did in Longman for example is mark the LNP down.

This must be Scott Morrison’s gravest fear. A four per cent swing would give Labor seven seats in Queensland but if the LNP primary vote collapses and preferences do not come back, Labor could pick up 15 seats in Queensland alone.

On the polling and the betting, Labor is favoured to pick up three seats in Western Australia. It could be more but I doubt it will be less.

The government is vulnerable in four states. It could lose the election in any single one of them. This places pressures on strategy and campaigning logistics. Messages to Queensland voters are different to those extended to voters in Victoria. Resources and money, not to mention credibility will be stretched to breaking point.

The NSW election might not provide much by way of insight other than to confirm a change of federal government is more likely than not. If the end is coming for the Morrison government, then it will come from all points of the compass.

This column was first published at The Australian on 6 March 2019