Save the date

Confusion surrounding the likely date of the New South Wales state by-elections, to add to that we already have about the federal election.

This coming Monday is the last date on which an election can be called for this year, specifically for the December 11 date spruiked recently by Anthony Albanese, which few if any still expect. The parlour game thus seems likely to move on now to the alternative scenarios of March and May. A complication in the former case is a South Australian state election set in the normal course of events for the third Saturday in March, i.e. March 19. If I understand the situation correctly, the South Australian government will have the discretion to delay the election by up to three weeks if a federal election is called before February 19 for a date in March.

Here’s what we do know:

• Max Maddison of The Australian reports grumbling within the New South Wales Liberal Party over its failure to have finalised candidates in the important seats of Dobell, Warringah and Gilmore. The report cites Liberal sources, no doubt with an interest in the matter, accusing Alex Hawke of using his clout on state executive to delay proceedings to the advantage of candidates of his centre right faction. “Other senior Liberal sources” contend the problem is “a lack of quality candidates and impending local government elections”. Prospective nominees for Dobell include former test cricketer Nathan Bracken, along with Michael Feneley, a cardiologist who has twice run unsuccessfully in Kingsford Smith, and Jemima Gleeson, owner of a chain of coffee shops.

• Further on Gilmore, the ever-readable Niki Savva reported in her Age/Herald column a fortnight ago that “speculation is rife” that Andrew Constance will not in fact proceed with his bid for preselection, just as he withdrew from contention Eden-Monaro ahead of last year’s by-election. If so, that would seemingly leave the path clear for Shoalhaven Heads lawyer Paul Ell, who is reckoned a formidable opponent to Constance in any case.

• Labor has not been breaking its back to get candidates in place in New South Wales either, with still no sign of progress in the crucial western Sydney fringe seat of Lindsay. However, candidates have recently been confirmed in two Liberal marginals: Zhi Soon, an education policy adviser and former diplomat, in Banks, and Sally Sitou, a University of Sydney doctoral candidate and one-time ministerial staffer, in Reid.

• In Victoria, Labor’s candidate in La Trobe will be Abhimanyu Kumar, owner of a local home building company.

• In an article by Jason Campbell of the Herald Sun, JWS Research says rising poll numbers for Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party are being driven by “skilled labourers and lower-end middle-management”, supplementing an existing support base that had largely been limited to people over 65. Maleness and low education remain common threads.

• An article on the voter identification laws by Graeme Orr of the University of Queensland in The Conversation makes a point I had not previously heard noted: that those who lodge a declaration vote in lieu of providing identification will have no way of knowing if their vote was ultimately admitted to the count. This stands in contrast to some American states, where those who cast the equivalent of postal or absent votes can track their progress online.

New South Wales by-election latest:

• It is now clear that the by-elections will not be held simultaneously with the December 4 local government elections as initially anticipated. The Guardian reports that the state’s electoral commissioner, John Schmidt, told a parliamentary committee hearing yesterday that “it wouldn’t be possible or sensible to try and aim earlier than the middle of February”, in part because the government’s “piecemeal funding” of his agency had left it with inadequate cybersecurity standards.

• Labor has announced it will field a candidate in Bega, making it the only one of the five looming by-elections in which the Coalition and Labor are both confirmed starters. James O’Doherty of the Daily Telegraph (who I hope got paid extra for pointing out that “Labor has chosen to contest the seat despite Leader Chris Minns last month criticising the looming by-election as expensive and unnecessary”) reports nominees for Liberal preselection will include Eurobodalla Shire mayor Liz Innes and, possibly, Bega Valley Shire councillor Mitchell Nadin.

• Anton Rose of Inner West Courier reports Liberal hopes in Jodi McKay’s seat of Strathfield are not high, particularly if Burwood mayor John Faker emerges as the Labor candidate, and that the party would “not be mounting a vigorous campaign”. One prospective Liberal nominee is said to be Natalie Baini, a sports administrator who was said earlier in the year to planning a preselection against Fiona Martin in the federal seat of Reid.

Poll news:

• A Redbridge Group poll conducted for Simon Holmes a Court’s Climate 200 non-profit group records Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s primary vote as having slumped from 49.4% in his blue-ribbon Melbourne seat of Kooyong to 38%. With the Greens on 15%, well short of the heights achieved with Julian Burnside as candidate in 2019, such a result would put Frydenberg under pressure from Labor on 31%. Around half of the balance is attributed to the United Australia Party, which seems doubtful in an electorate such as Kooyong. The objective of the poll was to test the waters for a Zali Steggall-like independent challenge, and responses to some rather leading questions indicated that such a candidate would indeed be competitive or better. The survey was conducted from October 16 to 18 by automated phone polling from a sample of 1017.

• Liberal-aligned think tank the Blueprint Institute has results from a YouGov poll on attitudes towards carbon emissions policy, conducted in nine regional electorates from September 28 to October 12 with samples of around 415 each. In spite of everything, these show large majorities in favour of both halving emissions by 2030 and net zero by 2050 even in such electorates as Hunter and Capricornia. Even among coal workers (sub-sample size unclear), the results are 63% and 64% respectively.

• The Australia Institute has published its annual Climate of the Nation survey, based on a poll of 2626 respondents conducted by YouGov in August.

• It took me a while to update BludgerTrack with last week’s Resolve Strategic and Roy Morgan results, but now that it’s done, I can exclusively reveal that they made very little difference. Labor is currently credited with a two-party lead of 53.8-46.2.

Also:

• Antony Green has published his analysis of the finalised Victorian state redistribution.

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.

2,799 comments on “Save the date”

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  3. Lurker:

    The Invalid and Old-Age Pension Act was passed by Andrew Fisher’s minority Labor government. At the time Alfred Deakin was opposition leader, with Fisher governing with the support of Alfred Deakin’s Protectionist Party (well, most of them). Pensions were very much a Labor baby.

    It is possible Alfred Deakin was PM again by the time the legislation had actually took effect. They swapped around a bit in those days.

  5. Menzies increased Company and personal tax rates and increased the pension

    At the last election, the Pentecostal with the glass jaw was the beneficiary of “recently in the position, so we will give him a chance”

    And then there was Regional Queensland

    I would suggest that the view of the Pentecostal with the glass jaw, across the Nation, is now at a very, very low ebb

    So how does he turn around the current sentiment, that he is a blustering fool adept at waving a bit of paper around?

    Albanese has recognition of being Leader of the House, advancing legislation with the cross bench in a very effective manner and being a highly effective Infrastructure Minister

    And, at least, being honest

    And look at what the Whitlam government and what was achieved – in the first 100 days for starters

    That period coincided with my 3 year secondment to the PS in Canberra

  6. At federation in 1901 the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia gave power to the Commonwealth Government to legislate for invalid and old-age pensions. A Royal Commission on Old-Age Pensions was conducted during 1905‐6 and legislation for both age and invalid pensions was passed in 1908 during the Deakin administration.

    https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/FlagPost/2011/February/History_of_Australian_pensions

  7. Socrates

    Yep, you gotta wonder about the track contributing.

    “There is a dearth of rail engineering skills in Australia.”

    Some of my best friends are rail engineers – but yeah, you’re right. Those that we have aren’t all that innovative.

  8. Aged Pensions were very much a Liberal baby at this time. The Commonwealth Age Pension was based upon a NSW Age Pension which was passed by the Lyne Liberal government in 1900.

  9. Actually, I think you’re right Lurker. I got it the wrong way round – passed by the Deakin government, but come into effect when Fisher was PM. (It was then strengthened after Fisher won a majority.)

  19. Bushfire Bill says:
    Friday, November 5, 2021 at 6:49 pm
    Ladies and Gentlemen, I present you Australia’s angriest journalist: Phil “The-Woman-Who-Saved-Australia” Coorey…
    ____________
    Kind of ironic commentary coming from you BB.

  22. C@t

    I absolutely love the George Street light rail and have from the start when it was originally a City of Sydney proposal.

    What went wrong is that TfNSW is full of boring, talentless old men. They treated it as a heavy rail project. In fact the initial consultants they handed it to had no experience in light rail. So it got over-engineered.

    When they did their original explorations of utilities they only went 600 mm or so deep. Of course at that stage the detailed design hadn’t been done. When it was done, the trackform grew to over 1 metre deep in places. Layers upon layers of concrete and embedded conduit – all over specified. As a consequence, they didn’t really find out what utilities were in the way until actual construction.

    They also did stupid things like not having a central clearing house where contractors and utilities could sit down in one room and work out practical solutions. Instead the organisation acted kept everyone in their own silo and often simple engineering changes took months.

    It could have been implemented a lot better. Its also taken them a couple of years to finally win out against the road traffic engineers who were responsible for a lot of needless delays in operation. Its performing reasonably ok now.

  24. Shellbell,

    My “One of Chile’s finest and most detailed private model railway layouts in HO scale” video on you tube was interrupted by a 16 minute 34 second Clive Palmer video.

    Thanks for the suggestion. I am a great train enthusiast, and the model railway is lovely; but, featuring Die Bahn (Deutche Bahn).

    I may not have looked long enough, but no Chilean railways unfortunately. They were ripped up some decades ago, replaced by *very* dangerous buses.

    However, they have a metro system in Santiago that puts any Australian city to shame.

    Also, thanks for the info about the likely nature of a possible Federal court trial.

  25. In C@t’s seat of Robertson, the Morrison/Joyce government is considering allowing oil and gas drilling off the shore of the NSW Central Coast – the application is numbered PEP11.

    It has zero support from the locals, something highlighted by candidate Gordon Reid and Albo – who is now in campaign mode…

  26. C@t

    Oh and another thing. When the GS light rail was designed by TfNSW, the same curmudgeons from what was then the RMS insisted on full traffic south of Bathurst, including where any idiot could clearly see you needed more pedestrian space.

    Fortunately, CoS later decided to pedestrianise George further south. Its looking really good and I can’t wait to get back to Sydney to see it in person.

  27. And of course, that’s all being held up by the fact that the “adults in the room” have decided you can’t get a booster sooner than 6 months. Most of my friends and social life is in Sydney. A big fuck you to the bean counters, whilst there are doses of Moderna going to waste.

    I had a chat with a Chemist about this earlier. He told me some interesting stories about wasted vaccines and agreed about getting a booster earlier. He also had no clear advice on what “6 months” actually meant because no one from the government had actually specified it precisely enough.

  28. Lurker:

    William Lyne was a radical Liberal openly sympathetic to the Labor cause, and (I’m almost certain) would have been governing in coalition with Labor when he was premier in 1900. (When Deakin and the moderate/conservative Protectionists merged with Reid’s Anti-Socialists to form the Commonwealth Liberals in 1909, Lyne declared Deakin a “judas” on the floor of parliament, became an independent, and voted with the Labor party for the rest of his time in office.)

    The various bills around pensions were one of the many concessions extracted from state and federal parties of various persuasions (generally Liberal/Protectionist, but not always) by this very annoying minor party called the Labor Party (well, Labour, in those days), and arguments over just how far they should go were actually one of the contributors to the breakdowns of the early federal Protectionist/Labor governments. But by 1908, Labor actually had more seats than the Protectionists, with Deakin only still in office because Labor was reluctant to govern in such an unworkable parliament after Chris Watson’s experience and instead just giving Deakin confidence.

    I can’t recall the details surrounding these particular bills, but I would guess that Labor’s better parliamentary position meant they needed less Protectionists on board, and as such were finally able to come to a workable agreement. They would have been aided by the fact that Labor had adopted strict rules of caucus solidarity by this point, while whatever loose party unity the Protectionists once had was basically disintegrating by 1908 – ably demonstrated by the fact the Fisher soon took office with the support of renegade Protectionists.

  29. Poor old DimTim
    Not even the herald sun running cover for him.

    The QC, the mojitos and the phantom: Inside Tim Smith’s disastrous night
    Tim Smith speaks to the media at Parliament House in Melbourne after he crashed his car last weekend while drink driving. Picture: Andrew Henshaw
    The Kew MP was allegedly “stonkered up to the eyeballs” when he made the ill-fated decision to get behind the wheel. This is how his evening played out.

    Not just a couple of wines. More porky pies.

  31. In C@t’s seat of Robertson, the Morrison/Joyce government is considering allowing oil and gas drilling off the shore of the NSW Central Coast – the application is numbered PEP11.

    Phew! For a moment there, I thought it said “Stop PDP-11.”

  34. Catprog says:
    Friday, November 5, 2021 at 6:43 pm

    Australia is the largest coal exporter country in the world.

    Australia would do well to dwell on the impacts on agriculture, on flooding, on extreme weather events, on the coral before trying to say other countries should stop using coal.’
    ———————————-
    Well done. The point of my post is that in China this conversation is not possible and is not happening. Deflecting to slagging Scomo on a gaff is no substitute for a genuine public policy discussion in China on the impacts of China’s increasing CO2 emissions.

  35. Lurker:

    I mean, “So it was the Labor Party and some Protectionists (and possibly even an Anti-Socialist or two) wot done it after all!” is probably more accurate, but yours flows off the tongue a bit better.

  36. That’s such an in joke

    Is it?

    I’ve never worked on one – but I know that there’s bound a vital corner of the Internet dependent on one.

  37. Boerwar @ #384 Friday, November 5th, 2021 – 8:09 pm

    Well done. The point of my post is that in China this conversation is not possible and is not happening. Deflecting to slagging Scomo on a gaff is no substitute for a genuine public policy discussion in China on the impacts of China’s increasing CO2 emissions.

    It seems to me that the point of all your posts is to deflect attention from Australia onto China, in the vague hope that Australians are scared enough of China to miss the fact that China is acting whereas Australia is not.

  38. Cud,
    I don’t mind the George Street Light Rail either. If it means less car traffic on the street, then that’s a good thing.

    Amazing, though, isn’t it how Gladys’ snafu with the GSLR was excused? It’s like there never was a mistake made by her and the electorate were infinitely tolerant of all her mistakes, and there were plenty as she made her way through portfolios to the top job in the state.

    I was in Sydney today for lunch and to drop some things off to someone. Everyone (bar a few ‘courageous’ tradie types), was wearing their masks outside and on public transport and maintaining social distancing, so I think you should maybe chance your arm and come down. It’s great for the mental health relief it brings. 🙂

  39. Hi Cud chewer
    I have been posting the occasional item ,every now and then.
    Just leave most of the crap being posted here at times alone

    Remember the scroll button is your best friend.

  41. Trivia: tonight is Guy Fawkes night. Until relatively recently, marked by bonfires and fireworks in much of the former British Empire to celebrate the rather gruesome execution of a terrorist who plotted to blow up the British Parliament.

  43. Definitely one of the more eventful parliamentary terms:

    The 1906 Australian federal election was held in Australia on 12 December 1906. All 75 seats in the House of Representatives, and 18 of the 36 seats in the Senate were up for election. The incumbent Protectionist Party minority government led by Prime Minister Alfred Deakin retained government, despite winning the fewest House of Representatives votes and seats of the three parties. Parliamentary support was provided by the Labour Party led by Chris Watson, while the Anti-Socialist Party (renamed from the Free Trade Party), led by George Reid, remained in opposition.

    Watson resigned as Labour leader in October 1907 and was replaced by Andrew Fisher. The Protectionist minority government fell in November 1908 to Labour, a few days before Reid resigned as Anti-Socialist leader, who was replaced by Joseph Cook. The Labour minority government fell in June 1909 to the newly formed Commonwealth Liberal Party led by Deakin. The party was formed on a shared anti-Labour platform as a merger between Deakin, leader of the Protectionists, and Cook, leader of the Anti-Socialists, in order to counter Labour’s growing popularity. The merger didn’t sit well with several of the more progressive Protectionists, who defected to Labour or sat as independents.

    The merger would allow the Deakin Commonwealth Liberals to construct a mid-term parliamentary majority, however less than a year later at the 1910 election, Labour won both majority government and a Senate majority, representing a number of firsts: it was Australia’s first elected federal majority government, Australia’s first elected Senate majority, the world’s first Labour Party majority government at a national level, and after the 1904 Watson minority government the world’s second Labour Party government at a national level.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_Australian_federal_election

  45. The PDP11 boxes ran the Sydney traffic light system for many decades, probably still do in some locations. Made by a company DEC which once challenged IBM for ownership of the universe…

  48. Also haven’t been to the CBD for quite a while, but had cause to go to the Qantas T3 at Mascot airport yesterday.

    Departures? You could have fired an elephant gun at 3pm and not hit anyone – virtually deserted.

    The arrivals on the other hand, was like a morgue. Not a suitcase on the row of carousels, not an incoming flight listed on the board.

    Probably not the impression you get from the ‘we’re back in business’ boosters…

  49. If anyone bullish on Labor’s chances is after some better odds, Sportsbet also has a “type of Government” bet with various majority and minority possibilities, with “Labor majority government” at something like 2.70.

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