Call of the board: Western Australia

Another deep dive into the result of the May federal election – this time focusing on Western Australia, which disappointed Labor yet again.

The Call of the Board wheel now turns to Western Australia, after previous instalments that probed into the federal election results for Sydney (here and here), regional New South Wales, Melbourne, regional Victoria, south-east Queensland and regional Queensland.

Western Australia has been disappointing federal Labor ever since Kim Beazley elevated the party’s vote in his home state in 1998 and 2001, and this time was no exception. After an unprecedented Labor landslide at the 2017 state election and expectations the state’s economic malaise would sour voters on the government, the May election in fact produced a statewide two-party swing of 0.9% to the Coalition, and no change on the existing configuration of 11 seats for the Liberals and five for Labor.

As illustrated by the maps below (click on the images to enlarge), which record the two-party swings at booth level, Perth typified the national trend in that Labor gained in inner urban areas, regardless of their political complexion, while copping a hit in the outer suburbs. This will be reflected in the seat-by-seat commentary below, which regularly invokes the shorthand of “inner urban” and “outer urban” effects. The map on the left is limited to seats that are clearly within the Perth metropolitan area, while the second adds the fringe seats of Pearce (north), Hasluck (east) and Canning (south).

For further illustration, the table below compares each electorate’s two-party result (the numbers shown are Labor’s) with a corresponding two-party Senate measure, which was derived from the AEC’s files recording the preference order of each ballot paper (with votes that did not preference either Labor or Liberal excluded). This potentially offers a pointer as to how much candidate factors affected the lower house results.

Brand (Labor 6.7%; 4.8% swing to Liberal): Like so many other suburban seats distant from central business districts across the land, Brand recorded a solid swing to the Liberals after going strongly the other way in 2016. This dynamic drowned out whatever impact candidate factors may have had: Labor’s Madeleine King picked up a 7.7% swing on debut in 2016, but this time copped a 4.8% reversal despite theoretically being in line for a sophomore surge. The Senate result was little different from the House, further suggesting candidate factors were not much of a feature.

Burt (Labor 5.0%; 2.1% swing to Liberal): On its creation in 2016, Burt recorded a swing to Labor of 13.2%, the biggest of the election. This partly reflected the dramatic boomtime suburban growth that had caused the seat to be created in the first place, and which has since ground to a halt. The Liberals swing of 2.1% this time was typical for suburbia outside the inner urban zone, overwhelming any sophomore effect for the seat’s inaugural member, Matt Keogh. However, Keogh very substantially outperformed the two-party Senate metric.

Canning (Liberal 11.6%; 4.8% swing to Liberal): Covering Perth’s outer southern fringes, Canning was another seat that typified outer suburbia in swinging heavily to the Liberals, in this case to the advantage of Andrew Hastie. Hastie came to the seat at a by-election held a week after Malcolm Turnbull’s rise to the prime ministership in September 2015, at which he survived a 6.6% swing to Labor, most of which stuck at the federal election the following July. The swing in his favour this time has returned the Liberal margin to the peaks of 2013.

Cowan (Labor 0.9%; 0.2% swing to Labor): Anne Aly gained Cowan for Labor in 2016 by a margin of 0.7%, slightly less than she would have needed to hold out the 0.9% statewide swing had it been uniform. She was in fact able to boost her margin by 0.2%, in a seat slightly out of the range of the wealthier inner urban areas where Labor did best in swing terms. The disparity between the House result and the two-party Senate metric, which records a 1.5% advantage for the Liberals, suggests Aly can take much of the credit for her win, over and above the exercise of the sophomore surge effect.

Curtin (Liberal 14.3%; 6.4% swing to Labor): The most prestigious Liberal seat in the west had a complicated story to tell at this election: Julie Bishop retired after more than two decades as member; the party raised some eyebrows locally by endorsing a Christian conservative, Celia Hammond, despite the seat’s small-l liberal complexion; and Labor initially endorsed former Fremantle MP Melissa Parke, who shortly withdrew after copping static over contentious pronouncements about Israel. An independent, Louise Stewart, held out some promise of harnessing support from Malcolm Turnbull loyalists, but her campaign was torpedoed after polling she circulated showing her well placed to win proved to be fabricated. Stewart claimed to have been the victim of a trick, while the Liberal response to the episode betrayed a certain inconsistency in attitude towards the dissemination of fraudulent documents for political purposes. The loss of Bishop’s personal support and the broader inner urban effect were evident on the scoreboard, with the Liberals down 11.3% on the primary vote and 6.4% on two-party preferred. The Greens continue to fall just shy of edging Labor into second – this time they trailed 17.6% to 15.6% on the primary vote and 20.4% to 19.6% at the last preference exclusion. Louise Stewart finished a distant fourth with 7.8%.

Durack (Liberal 14.8%; 3.7% swing to Liberal): When she first came to the seat covering northern Western Australia in 2013, Melissa Price had to fight off the Nationals, over whom she prevailed by 4.0%. However, she has since gone undisturbed over two elections as the Nationals have fallen to earth. The applecart was upset slightly on this occasion by the entry of One Nation, who scored 9.5%, contributing to respective drops of 4.3% and 5.8% for Labor and the Nationals, while Price’s primary vote rose 2.6%.

Forrest (Liberal 14.6%; 2.0% swing to Liberal): Nola Marino was re-elected with a modest swing amid a generally uneventful result. One Nation and Shooters Fishers and Farmers were in the field this time whereas the Nationals were not, but this was rather academic as the primary votes for all concerned were inside 6%.

Fremantle (Labor 6.9%; 0.6% swing to Liberal): The scoreline in Fremantle was not particularly interesting, with little change on two-party preferred, and downward primary vote movements for the established parties that reflected only a larger field of candidates. However, the results map illustrates particularly noteworthy geographic variation, with the area around Fremantle proper swinging to Labor in line with the inner urban effect, while the less fashionable suburbia that constitutes the electorate’s southern half went the other way (a pattern maintained across the boundary with Brand, where there was a 4.6% swing in favour of the Liberals). Labor member Josh Wilson was in line for a sophomore surge effect, although this was not his first bid for re-election thanks to a Section 44 by-election in July 2018, which passed without incident in the absence of a Liberal candidate.

Hasluck (Liberal 5.2%; 3.2% swing to Liberal): The Liberals’ most marginal Western Australian seat going into the election, Hasluck delivered Labor a particularly dispiriting defeat, with Ken Wyatt securing the biggest margin of his four election career. The swing reflected the general outer urban effect, although Labor did manage to pick up a few swings around relatively affluent Kalamunda.

Moore (Liberal 11.7%; 0.6% swing to Liberal): This northern suburbs beachside electorate is affluent enough to be safe Liberal, but not fashionable enough to have partaken in the inner urban effect. Third term member Ian Goodenough picked up a very slight swing, as the primary vote told a familiar story of the three established parties all being slightly down amid a larger field of candidates.

O’Connor (Liberal 14.5%; 0.6% swing to Labor): Covering the southern part of regional Western Australia, O’Connor was held by the Nationals for a term after Tony Crook unseated Wilson Tuckey in 2010, but Rick Wilson narrowly recovered it for the Liberals when Crook bowed out after a term in 2013, and the Nationals have not troubled him since. One Nation entered the race this time, but managed only a modest 8.4%.

Pearce (Liberal 7.5%; 3.9% swing to Liberal): Among the many Liberal scalps that went unclaimed by Labor was that of Christian Porter, who emerged the beneficiary of the outer urban effect after being widely written off in the wake of the state election landslide and the coup against Malcolm Turnbull. One Nation landed a fairly solid 8.2%, contributing to a solid 5.2% primary vote slump for Labor.

Perth (Labor 4.9%; 1.6% swing to Labor): One of Labor’s few reliable seats in the west, Perth has undergone frequent personnel changes since Stephen Smith retired in 2013, with Alannah MacTiernan bowing out to return to state politics in 2016, and her successor Tim Hammond failing to make it through a full term. This complicates sophomore surge considerations for current member Patrick Gorman, who retained the seat without Liberal opposition at a by-election in July last year. The swing in his favour reflected the inner urban effect, but he also managed to outperform Labor’s two-part Senate metric for the seat.

Stirling (Liberal 5.6%; 0.5% swing to Labor): In a once marginal seat that looked increasingly secure for the Liberals after Michael Keenan gained it in 2004, this election loomed as a litmus test of how secure the party would look when stripped of his personal vote. The results were encouraging for the party, with new candidate Vince Connelly suffering only a slight swing. The results map suggests a pattern in which the beachside suburbs and areas near the city swung to Labor, while the unfashionable area around Balga at the centre of the electorate went the other way.

Swan (Liberal 2.7%; 0.9% swing to Labor): Together with Pearce and Hasluck, Swan was one of three seats in Labor’s firing line, but Steve Irons was able to secure a fifth successive win in what has traditionally been a knife-edge seat. This was despite the pedigree of Labor candidate Hannah Beazley, whose father Kim Beazley held the seat from 1980 to 1996, when he jumped ship for Brand. The results map tells a family story in that the affluent western end of the electorate swung to Labor, while the lower income suburbs in the east went the other way.

Tangney (Liberal 11.5%; 0.4% swing to Liberal): Liberal sophomore Ben Morton held his ground in this safe Liberal seat, despite the riverside suburbia of Applecross and Attadale partaking of the inner urban effect. He gained 4.8% on the primary vote in the absence of former member Dennis Jensen, who polled 11.9% as an independent in 2016 after being defeated by Morton for preselection.

ANNOUNCEMENT: If this painstakingly compiled post interested you enough that you have made it all the way through to the end, perhaps you might care to make a donation. These are gratefully received via the “become a supporter” button that appears just below, or the PressPatron button at the top of the page.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,840 comments on “Call of the board: Western Australia”

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  1. Some telling analysis here..

    The review commissioned an ALP internal statistical analysis of categories of voters who swung from and to Labor to more fully understand the demographic swings at the 2019 election. We are able to determine voting patterns at the SA1 level, the smallest grouping reported by the ABS.

    Using this rich dataset, the internal statistical review determined voting patterns by running various regression models designed to isolate the effects of one variable while holding all others constant. The variables included were: age, weekly household income, educational attainment, unemployment rate, net rental loss, franking credits, place of ancestry and religious identification. The main findings are described below.

    When all other variables were controlled for, SA1s with a high proportion of the following groups were associated with a swing against Labor:

    • Voters aged 25-34 years living in outer-urban and regional areas;
    • Christians;
    • Coal mining communities;
    • Chinese Australians; and
    • Queenslanders.

    There is overlap between some of these groups, such as Christians living in Queensland and mine workers aged 25-34 years. However, each characteristic was an independently statistically significant contributor to the anti-Labor swing.

  3. It’s quite simple. Stop being wedged on the climate. Stop treating it as the culture war the LNP want it to be.

    Start treating it from the science on.

    Do that and Labor wins.

    Remember Trump campaigned in Red State Kentucky with Green New Deal supposed to be one of the wedges.

    He lost.

    Labor can stand up. As long as it looks to the national interest not that of one particular union.

  6. What does the government want with clapped out farms which are full of weeds, ferals, and built environment messes?
    If the farms are ‘unviable’ why pay a cent for them?
    Far, far better to prioritize scarce gov dollars to buy high biodiv remnants for the conservation estate.

  8. Sprocket

    That’s with the self confessed confused messaging.

    That’s why the Democrats election results are a good counterpoint to look at. Conservative aspirational voting area.

    The Democrats messaging worked.

    Very different from here. Yes the Democrat candidate is a “moderate”.
    However the national trajectory in debates is pretty clear.

    Corruption
    Action on Climate Change.
    Inclusive equality
    Gun Control

    The list goes on.

    The gun control one is very interesting. Kentucky is the home of the NRA.

  9. Some more demographics from the report..

    Coal mine workers and those working in allied industries such as wholesale trade, electricity, gas, water and waste, manufacturing and agriculture, forestry and fishing swung strongly against Labor. These voters contributed heavily to Labor’s loss of Herbert and to big anti-Labor swings in the Coalition-held Queensland seats of Capricornia, Dawson and Flynn, as well as in the Labor-held Hunter Valley seats of Hunter, Shortland and Paterson.
    ………..

    The group that swung strongly to Labor was voters with university degrees or higher. Tertiary-educated voters explain much of the pro-Labor swing in Victoria. The Melbourne seats of Kooyong, Higgins, Macnamara and Goldstein all swung strongly to Labor. These types of voters also help explain the swing to Labor in the ACT and why, in Queensland
    – despite the state as a whole swinging savagely against Labor – the Party enjoyed small swings to it in the Brisbane inner-metropolitan seats of Ryan, Griffith and Brisbane.

  10. Sprocket

    To be clear I think the Democrats won in Kentucky on education as the primary issue. It’s just those other policies were not enough to lose the Gubernatorial election

  12. Guytuar

    The Kentucky result has 2 key elements

    1. The Republican Governor was widely disliked
    2. The anti-Trump trend amongst suburban, college-educated white women first evident in the 2018 mid terms is accelerating. The Soccer Moms didnt much like Hilary, but by Jingo, they sure don’t like the Orange Embarrasment.

  13. ‘sprocket_ says:
    Thursday, November 7, 2019 at 8:21 pm

    Some more demographics from the report..

    Coal mine workers and those working in allied industries such as wholesale trade, electricity, gas, water and waste, manufacturing and agriculture, forestry and fishing swung strongly against Labor. These voters contributed heavily to Labor’s loss of Herbert and to big anti-Labor swings in the Coalition-held Queensland seats of Capricornia, Dawson and Flynn, as well as in the Labor-held Hunter Valley seats of Hunter, Shortland and Paterson.’

    IMO, William’s regional seats analyses reflects this to some extent. The Greens are happy to the rude and condescending to regional and rural people because they are targetting Inner Urbs.

    Labor cannot afford the same sort of approach at all, at all.

  14. I suppose the inner urban swing to the alp in liberal held seats is a backlash against the removal of Turnbull. I’d expect some correction next election.

  17. This evidence in the report is at odds with Guytuar’s prescription for electoral success…

    ‘Labor lost support amongst its traditional base of lower-income working people. Economically vulnerable workers living in outer-metropolitan, regional and rural Australia have lost trust in politicians and political institutions. Not only are they alienated from the political process, they are too busy working and caring for their families to be concerned with issues they consider irrelevant to their lives. Indeed, they are often resentful of the attention progressive political parties give at their expense to minority groups and to what is nowadays called identity politics.

    The media often described these types of voters as “Howard’s Battlers” during the 1990s and 2000s – until he inflicted WorkChoices on them. Today, the Coalition seeks to label them Scott Morrison’s “Quiet Australians”. They are the same demographic that swung against the Democrats towards Donald Trump in 2016 and who are ditching progressive parties around the western world.

    Labor’s suite of policy offerings was largely designed to benefit these voters. But the large number and size of them crowded each other out, making it impossible for voters to absorb them and for local campaigns to promote them.

  18. ‘sprocket_ says:
    Thursday, November 7, 2019 at 8:29 pm

    This evidence in the report is at odds with Guytuar’s prescription for electoral success…’

    Really?

  19. D&M,

    Ta. It is all going swimmingly

    My office has a view through the gums, over the lakes,to a stand of jacarandas and some sports fields. Waterbirds and lizards everywhere. It’s very nice.

  20. Sprocket

    It was teachers that was at the heart of the Governor’s dislike.
    They went on strike.

    That’s what I have heard commentators say was the primary reason for the dislike. Trying to gut the healthcare and just governing for the rich instead of the voters didn’t help either.

    It’s why the Democrats were so easily able to link Bevan to Trump before the rally.

    Basically what the Tories want the UK to become. Austerity on steroids.

  22. P1 re unviable farms….

    The National Farmers’ Federation says it has written to Prime Minister Scott Morrison, asking him to consider providing financial incentives for drought-affected farmers to leave the land.

    Exit packages are one of six measures the farm lobby has requested of the Federal Government in a bid to help those affected by what it says is unprecedented drought.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-23/farmers-call-for-government-to-consider-exit-packages/11628764?pfmredir=sm

    iirc Morrison has rejected this measure.

  24. “ You mean like we are currently doing?”

    Yes.

    I wish we’d focus our collective enthusiasms on that, rather than obsess on one aspect – CO2 emissions and coal. It’s a shame that XR distracts from the one big thing that matters in this country: agricultural land management: we are still crushing a continent and all of the ‘action plans’ being peddled by ScoMo, One Nation, Alan Jones, Nine-Fairfax etc etc to ‘drought proof’ the continent are just going to finish the job – not coal, not petroleum, not methane:

    – the mass clearing of land, the weirs, levies, dams west of the GDR.

    – East of the GDR the urban sprawl, the monoculture cash cropping of sugar cain from the Daintree to Coffs. This – not ocean temperatures – is what has killed half the reef to date (in the last 3 years actually – which is the most mind blowing environmental disaster in recorded history, but hardly rates a mention in our MSM – but hey how good is Susan Ley and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation of marketing spivs sucking the marrow out of that $450 million Turnbull-ScoMo-Joshie boondoggle)

    – The Western Australian wheat industry, but

    – most of all the obsession with cattle (and sheep) which are not grazed for domestic consumption but for a few (billion) bucks on the international export market. There are some jobs, sure, but most of that money goes into the pockets of home grown toads like Gina, Rupe, Lil’ Kerry and big agribusinesses owned by foreigners.

    Mass extinction on this continent is being caused by land clearing: driven, as always, by the blinkered narrow interests of graziers. Climate change on this continent IS happening but so far its being driven by the direct consequences of land clearing, not greenhouse gasses (yet).

    Not many people are ‘woke’ to this: the oxygen – what the Wentworth Group have been banging on about all these years – has been sucked out by the CO2 narrative.

    While I applaud efforts to dramatically reduce fossil fuel emissions globally, politically sensible action on this continent has been emphatically defeated politically. We should refocus on the main game – land clearing and defeating easy shibboleths like the fucking Bradfield Scheme before its too late. Then hopefully the political tide will change again and we can mop up on CO2 emmissions (maybe sometime next decade it will be politically viable to pursue that again).

    Anyway, just before anyone things this is ran to is just labor deflection, let me say this: Labor is presently rating at just above hopeless on this issue. But the Greens are worse – for them land clearing etc is a case of ‘oh, that too’ rather than being placed front and centre as being the most important area for political action on this continent.

  25. sprocket_ @ #1762 Thursday, November 7th, 2019 – 5:26 pm

    Guytuar

    The Kentucky result has 2 key elements

    1. The Republican Governor was widely disliked
    2. The anti-Trump trend amongst suburban, college-educated white women first evident in the 2018 mid terms is accelerating. The Soccer Moms didnt much like Hilary, but by Jingo, they sure don’t like the Orange Embarrasment.

    Yep. Virginia is the bigger story IMO.

  26. ‘nath says:
    Thursday, November 7, 2019 at 8:27 pm

    I suppose the inner urban swing to the alp in liberal held seats is a backlash against the removal of Turnbull. I’d expect some correction next election.’

    Possibly some wealthy people were concerned about the trends in Coalition outcomes: poverty, domestic violence, wealth gap, record high household debt, bastardizing reffos, kids being strip searched willy nilly, precarious employment, wage theft, and so on and so forth.

    It is possible. But unlikely.

  27. “ You mean like we are currently doing?”

    Yes.

    I wish we’d focus our collective enthusiasms on that, rather than obsess on one aspect – CO2 emissions and coal. It’s a shame that XR distracts from the one big thing that matters in this country: agricultural land management: we are still crushing a continent and all of the ‘action plans’ being peddled by ScoMo, One Nation, Alan Jones, Nine-Fairfax etc etc to ‘drought proof’ the continent are just going to finish the job – not coal, not petroleum, not methane:

    – the mass clearing of land, the weirs, levies, dams west of the GDR.

    – East of the GDR the urban sprawl, the monoculture cash cropping of sugar cain from the Daintree to Coffs. This – not ocean temperatures – is what has killed half the reef to date (in the last 3 years actually – which is the most mind blowing environmental disaster in recorded history, but hardly rates a mention in our MSM – but hey how good is Susan Ley and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation of marketing spivs sucking the marrow out of that $450 million Turnbull-ScoMo-Joshie boondoggle)

    – The Western Australian wheat industry, but

    – most of all the obsession with cattle (and sheep) which are not grazed for domestic consumption but for a few (billion) bucks on the international export market. There are some jobs, sure, but most of that money goes into the pockets of home grown toads like Gina, Rupe, Lil’ Kerry and big agribusinesses owned by foreigners.

    Mass extinction on this continent is being caused by land clearing: driven, as always, by the blinkered narrow interests of graziers. Climate change on this continent IS happening but so far its being driven by the direct consequences of land clearing, not greenhouse gasses (yet).

    Not many people are ‘woke’ to this: the oxygen – what the Wentworth Group have been banging on about all these years – has been sucked out by the CO2 narrative.

    While I applaud efforts to dramatically reduce fossil fuel emissions globally, politically sensible action on this continent has been emphatically defeated politically. We should refocus on the main game – land clearing and defeating easy shibboleths like the fucking Bradfield Scheme before its too late. Then hopefully the political tide will change again and we can mop up on CO2 emmissions (maybe sometime next decade it will be politically viable to pursue that again).

    Anyway, just before anyone things this is ran to is just labor deflection, let me say this: Labor is presently rating at just above hopeless on this issue. But the Greens are worse – for them land clearing etc is a case of ‘oh, that too’ rather than being placed front and centre as being the most important area for political action on this continent.

  28. Why don’t these people just ‘get it’?

    The anti-Adani campaign entrenched the view in Queensland mining communities that the progressive parties considered their jobs unworthy, reinforcing the divide between “self” and “other”, where the “other” were southerners telling Queenslanders how to live their lives. The entire communities of central and north Queensland reacted savagely to this perception, voting strongly against Labor and the Greens.

    For similar reasons the coal mining communities of the Hunter Valley in NSW swung strongly against Labor.

  29. It’s good to see Emerson and Weatherill are not recommending Labor be as condescending and rude to the Greens as Boerwar demonstrates here every day.

  33. Sprocket

    No that’s the message Labor let be told. That’s what happens when you try to be everything to everyone by sitting on the fence.

    Others get to write your story for you.

    It’s the main danger for Corbyn in the UK too.

  34. Not many people are ‘woke’ to this…

    What does this mean? AE uses “woke” often. Do those “low-information blue-collar workers” speak like this? I suspect some inner city urban elites/hipsters do. Are you one of the latter AE?

  38. And yep, keep these in the tent….

    ‘The average swing to Labor in 2019 in the 20 seats with the highest representation of university graduates was +3.78 per cent. This contrasts with an average swing of -4.22 per cent against Labor in the 20 seats with the lowest representation of university graduates. Since university graduates, on average, earn higher incomes and have more secure jobs than those without tertiary qualifications, they are more readily able to think about issues such as climate change, refugees, marriage equality and the rights of the LGBTQI+ community.

    Labor gained support among these voters at the 2019 election, but not enough to win
    any extra seats beyond the notionally Labor Victorian seats of Dunkley and Corangamite. Nevertheless, it is important to Labor’s future success as a progressive party that it retains these voters. Labor cannot and should not abandon principled positions on issues such as climate change and non-discrimination on the basis of race, religion and sexuality, although it might find language that is not capable of being characterised by its opponents as a threat to other voters.

  40. Buce: ‘Since when has a comparison between Australia and a third world basket case like the Solomon Island where we have recently deployed Peace Keepers been relevant.’

    Me, me….I know the answer.

    When you said South Australia had the most expensive electricity in the world (WTTE). Solomon Islands are part of the world so the comparison is relevant.

  43. Boerwar @ #1754 Thursday, November 7th, 2019 – 8:15 pm

    But, but, but…

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oct/21/britain-is-g7s-biggest-net-importer-of-co2-emissions-per-capita-says-ons

    This is essentially the same argument that some people here make that a country should be held responsible for the emissions that occur as a result of their trade with another country. But others here argue the opposite – e.g. that Australia can’t be held responsible for any emissions its fossil fuel exports generate. If you want to make the UK responsible for emissions that occur (say) in China during the manufacture of their imports, then you should make Australia responsible for the emissions that occur in China when our coal is used in the manufacturing process – i.e. Australia exports “virtual” C02 emissions the same way that the UK imports them.

    You can’t have it both ways. It’s got to be both, or neither.

  44. I hope Hamish does RN Breakfast as well as QandA – he can share it with Geraldine. Fran can stay at Insiders as I never watch it………

  46. Boerwar @ #1756 Thursday, November 7th, 2019 – 8:19 pm

    What does the government want with clapped out farms which are full of weeds, ferals, and built environment messes?
    If the farms are ‘unviable’ why pay a cent for them?

    Because every year an unviable farm is left in operation, it draws subsidies from the government in many forms. Not to mention the human misery involved. How many of these farms are going to pay back their “interest free loans”, and how many of them are going to end up bankrupt, possibly after yet another rural suicide?

    It is cheaper to shut them down sooner rather than later.

    Far, far better to prioritize scarce gov dollars to buy high biodiv remnants for the conservation estate.

    You are offering a false dichotomy. With the money they save from subsidizing farms that are eventually going to go under anyway, the government can afford to invest in biodiversity.

  47. And the divergence between ALP’s internal polling, the leadership team and public polling…

    ‘The research program faced three critical dynamics that limited its effectiveness. Each of these challenges exacerbated the other two, leading to strategic campaign decisions being made without the thorough research examination that should have occurred.

    First, the publicly available Newspoll figures had a persistent technical error that overstated Labor’s primary vote, understated the Coalition’s primary vote and consistently suggested Labor was in an election-winning position. While the YouGov campaign track had a similar but smaller error, the fact the campaign track reported a Labor two-party preferred vote that was less optimistic than published polling every night of the campaign, provided warnings about key problems for the campaign. Seat polling conducted during the campaign also provided early warning Labor’s campaign was struggling, particularly in regional Queensland. However, the persistent Labor lead in Newspoll (and other published polls) created a mindset dominated by high expectations of a Labor victory, and this affected the Party’s ability to process research findings that ran counter to this.

    Second, there was a lack of integration between the various research elements. Research methods and providers were not exposed to robust interrogation where there were inconsistencies or differences in their findings. Instead, when inconsistencies arose, the campaign’s response tended to be to interrogate and analyse the accuracy of individual research findings. This was particularly the case where the research findings were inconsistent with published polling.

    Third, as we noted in Chapter 1, the research program was not embedded in the strategic decision-making of the campaign. Decisions in favour of policy continuity after the
    2016 election, and a view that turbulence within the Parliament and the Government could lead to an early general election, meant strategic options were continually being framed by tactical pressures. This left the research program focused more on the tactical implementation of decisions already taken, rather than building a strategy that could inform campaign planning and tactical decisions.

  48. Apparently a recent survey of ex-farmers, who had left the land several years ago, showed that over 80% of them were totally happy about their decision.

    We do few favours to farmers when we put them in a position where they have little choice except to ‘soldier on’.

  50. This is fascinating stuff. Labor’s internal research team may as well have been counting crows…

    ‘An assessment of the accuracy of the research is difficult to make, even with the benefit
    of hindsight. There were inaccuracies in the quantitative research program, most notably
    in the campaign track. The National Secretariat’s technical review of the quantitative work conducted for Labor during the campaign has provided the Party with a clear assessment of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different quantitative methods deployed by the research program.

    Notwithstanding these inaccuracies, the research program (including the track) continued to identify key strategic problems for the campaign, including:

    • Quantitative research showing negative campaign impressions, reasons for switching and barriers to voting Labor including the standing of Labor’s leader;
    • Seat polls showing an inability to win seats needed for government, particularly in Queensland;
    • Qualitative research reports showing growing concerns about the economy, Labor’s policy agenda and its negative campaign struggling against the new Liberal leader; and
    • Message testing showing Labor’s message was not as compelling as the Coalition’s.

    The campaign was put in a difficult position from this multiplicity of research findings. On one hand, the fundamentals of the campaign show key strategic weaknesses growing in dimension as the campaign progressed. On the other, published polls, particularly Newspoll, built public expectations of a Labor victory and showed the campaign was on track to win, despite the weakening fundamentals.

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