Flying blind (open thread)

A Labor-eye-view of the election result from the party’s national secretary; the AEC’s response to social media misinformation; but nothing doing on the polling front, apart from some numbers on media trust.

Despite the polls not having failed as such, in that they uniformly picked the right winner, it seems we’re having another post-election voting intention polling drought just like we did in 2019. This is unfortunate from my perspective, as it would be interesting to compare Labor’s strength during its honeymoon period with that of newly elected governments past. It also means I have to work harder on material for regular open thread posts. Here’s what I’ve got this time:

• The Reuters Institute last week published its international Digital News Report 2022, the Australian segment of which was conducted by the University of Canberra, which asked questions on media consumption and trust. Respondents were asked to rank their trust in various media brands on a scale of one to ten. Typically for such surveys, this found the highest level of trust in public broadcasters, with ABC News ranking first and SBS News ranking second; television networks and broadsheet newspapers in the middle; and tabloid newspapers, specifically the Herald Sun and the Daily Telegraph, ranking last. The survey was conducted online in January and February from a sample of 2038.

• In an address to the National Press Club last week, Labor national secretary Paul Erickson dated a shift in voter sentiment in Labor’s favour from the announcement of the Solomon Islands’ pact with China on April 1. Erickson said voters were struck by the contrast between the Coalition’s “immature” warmongering rhetoric and attempts to associate Labor with the Chinese Communist Party and Labor’s promise to “restore Australia’s place as the partner of choice” for Pacific Islands countries. He further noted that the rot set in for Scott Morrison amid COVID outbreaks in mid-2021, when Labor internal polling showed his net competence score fall by 14 points in two weeks over late June and early July. The Coalition was also damaged by cabinet ministers’ partisan attacks on state governments in Western Australia and Victoria, and it was rated lower by voters on housing and wages.

• Saturday’s Financial Review reported on the Australian Electoral Commission’s efforts to confront online disinformation about the election process head on, through the work of its election integrity assurance taskforce and a media unit that abandoned bureaucratic formality in engaging with social media on social media’s terms. Electoral commissioner Tom Rogers claimed they had a “70 to 80 per cent success rate in changing minds”, and that Twitter had been “a bit self-correcting as a result”: “Someone would say something and you’d see people say, ‘hang on, that doesn’t sound right, I heard the AEC say this or that’”.

• Tom Rogers also foreshadows possible changes to electoral laws to allow for faster counting of postal votes after election day by streamlining the existing process whereby ballots are sorted at a central location and then sent to the voter’s electorate before they are counted.

• Nominations for the South Australian state by-election for Bragg on July 2 closed on Thursday, drawing a field of six candidates who are listed on my by-election guide.

Other recent posts on the site:

• A post on the Queensland Senate result, which was confirmed on Thursday. The buttons will be pressed today on the results for New South Wales at 9:30am and, most interestingly, Victoria at 10am. That will just leave Western Australia – the post just linked to considers at length the remote possibility that Labor might not win a third seat, as is being generally assumed.

• Courtesy of Adrian Beaumont, a preview and live commentary of France’s legislative elections, plus news on British by-elections and American opinion polling.

• A post on Saturday’s Callide state by-election in Queensland, a safe conservative seat which the Liberal National Party has retained with a swing in its favour of 6.5% against Labor.

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.

856 comments on “Flying blind (open thread)”

Comments Page 3 of 18
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  1. nath says:
    Tuesday, April 12, 2022 at 1:11 pm

    Pi says:
    Tuesday, April 12, 2022 at 1:10 pm

    I’m sitting pretty high on the bitcoin ladder nath, thanks for your concern.
    _______
    Uh oh. Should have listened to me.

  2. “Honest Bastardsays:
    Monday, June 20, 2022 at 11:17 am
    The Vice President Elect for Columbia after Sunday’s election …”

    The Colombian election is a clear reaffirmation of the swing going on in South American politics towards Progressivism… I am looking forward to Brazil jumping on the wave in due course. The Chilean situation should also be watched closely. To quote Gabriel Boric, the new Progressive President of Chile:
    “Chile was the birthplace of neoliberalism, and it shall also be its grave!”

    Oh, and we must also say that the swing to Progressivism in South America has nothing to do with their historical situation in the 1970s and 1980s. This time around, nobody is going to political battle telling the voters that a “Marxist Nirvana” is coming, it’s all about economic progress, in social justice and environmental sustainability.

  3. B S Fairman at 11.32

    So when can we expect the coup to happen in Columbia?
    ____________

    Just as well there’s no Cold War…

  4. I have a friend who is a barrister and she keeps applying judge roles for various commissions, she has been always gazumped by a non-practicing lawyer from the Coalition after a “rigorous global talent search”. Hopefully the new government will start merit based appointments rather than what appears to be a mates based ‘quota’ system.

  5. Looking at the pendulum (thanks Holdehillbilly and SnappyTom for reposting) I have to ask, how useful is the quoted margin in a three cornered contest?
    Compare:
    GRN 10.2 Melbourne VIC (v ALP)
    GRN 10.5 Griffith QLD (v LIB)
    ALP 10.5 Lilley QLD

    ALP 16.9 Fremantle WA
    ALP 17.1 Grayndler NSW (v GRN)

    Are the GRN results in Griffith and Melbourne as “safe” as the ALP result in Lilley? Is the ALP result in Grayndler safer than the win in Fremantle? Without checking, it feels as if a smaller difference between second and third or first and third might flip the result to a different winner. I guess where that takes me is to wonder how useful the pendulum is in ranking three cornered results, or whether there’s a better calculation for margin.

    https://antonygreen.com.au/2022-post-federal-election-pendulum/

  6. C@tmomma @ #27 Monday, June 20th, 2022 – 6:45 am

    Alan Finkel describes it all very well:

    From an engineering perspective, hydroelectricity and nuclear are dream players, producing electricity on demand and contributing to the secure and reliable operation of the grid. Solar and wind generation are less co-operative, but realistically that’s all that mainland Australia has at hand. To deploy them, they must be supported by transmission lines, storage and arguably a modest amount of natural gas generation.

    Australia has made good progress. There has been record investment in the past three years that has seen our solar and wind generation in the east coast grid almost double from 12 per cent in 2018 to 23.5 per cent in 2021. On a per capita basis, our solar and wind generation is comparable with California. Looking just at solar electricity, on a per capita basis Australia is No. 1 in the world.

    Where we are behind schedule is on the construction of transmission lines, especially the local lines required to connect solar and wind energy zones to metropolitan and industrial loads. These transmission lines, combined with batteries, will substantially improve the reliability of our electricity system.

    The requirements for transmission lines are well described in the Australian Energy Market Operator’s integrated system plan, a recommendation of the 2017 review of the national electricity market that I chaired. The new federal government’s $20 billion fund for transmission lines and grid strengthening will accelerate implementation.

    As we design the electricity system of the future it is essential to plan for the extremes, not the averages. In the past few weeks alone, we have suffered from a combination of floods, international price pressures, generator breakdowns, lower than usual wind and the normal low winter sunshine. A rare combination of events indeed, but rare events come in many shapes and sizes and, overall, one or the other happens frequently. More foreseeable is that every few years we will see low sunshine and low wind weather patterns lasting for many days or a week or two.

    The solution is to invest in long-duration storage. Today, the only way to achieve long-duration storage is with pumped hydro, but such projects have been few and far between because of local objections to the facilities themselves and to installing the transmission lines to connect them. In future, hydrogen made from excess solar and wind electricity during good weather will be stored in large volumes and used to fuel converted natural gas generators to provide long-duration storage.

    Great summary of the current reality.

    Highlights the things the previous Government should have been doing to facilitate the transition.

    The glaring issue is the final point, long duration storage.

    Without this we can not cut our ties to fossil fuels.

    I favour pumped hydro. The east coast of Australia is flanked by the Great Dividing Range which provides many suitable locations for it. I’m “sure” Barnaby would be in support of building a lot more dams.

  7. Ven, thanks for quoting.

    “There were 16 seats won by trailing
    candidates. Seven were won by Labor (Bennelong, Boothby, Gilmore, Higgins, Lyons, Robertson, Tangney), seven by Independents (Curtin, Fowler, Goldstein, Kooyong, Mackellar, North Sydney, Wentworth), and two by the Greens (Brisbane from 3rd place and Ryan).”

    Hmm. Perhaps there’s a clue for an alternative calculation for “margin”. Trailing margin?

  11. You know what’s weird? The amount of people that can’t grasp that the wind doesn’t stop blowing at night. Australia doesn’t need energy storage right now, and won’t ‘need’ it for a decade. What we need is 5x to 10x the capacity of wind, and enough battery storage to regulate that energy delivery.

    Yes, pumped hydro is great, and I think there should be, and will be, a number of those facilities created over the next 10-20 years. Kidston is a great model. But they take 5-6 years to build at a minimum. Wind generation facilities take 2-3 years. The primary restriction on there being more renewables in the grid is the transmission system isn’t up to that particular task, and that is changing. It will take about five years for it to get to the point where it can start taking in the vast amount of renewables that we need, and are already building.

    Storage is a long-term problem. We have short-term problems, and medium-term problems, that need to be resolved first before we start throwing up road-blocks about what is the best solution long-term.

  12. Barney in Tanjung Bunga says:

    I favour pumped hydro. The east coast of Australia is flanked by the Great Dividing Range which provides many suitable locations for it. I’m “sure” Barnaby would be in support of building a lot more dams.
    _______
    I’m assuming that more La Nina events will make that an increasingly attractive option.

  14. ” I have bitcoin, and bitcoin isn’t ‘crypto’.”

    Thanks for making me do a real life spit take.

    If the WA Senate spot goes wonky donkey it mostly means Labor and the Greens need a close working relationship with the Jacqui Lambie Network and can’t pass things with just Pocock.

  15. Indeed they are on the wrong track. In their fantasy about “Bowen the Neoliberal”, both forget that Bowen was the shadow ALP Treasurer who supported the negative gearing and other tax changes in the ALP program at the 2019 federal election. .. How “neoliberal” was that?

    It was extremely neoliberal, just look at how Bowen tried to sell it: “our budget deficit will be smaller than the Liberals!” Entirely predicated on the assumption that deficit = bad and that a smaller deficit is always and everywhere virtuous (these pre-Covid deficits being extremely tiny in hindsight). And the fact that Bowen thought he was on to a political winner with this small-deficit nonsense proves what a pathetic politician he is. A neoliberal nerd trying to impress other neoliberal nerds. As if the punters in 2019 gave a rats ass that your deficit was going to be a bit smaller than the other guys’!! All it did was scare the horses and open Labor up to a totally predictable and totally avoidable scare campaign. And then he goes and tells everyone to vote Liberal if they don’t like it!! What an idiot. They lost an unloseable election because of him. He really should have been put out to pasture after that contribution.

  16. Me: “I have bitcoin, and bitcoin isn’t ‘crypto’.”

    Arky: “Thanks for making me do a real life spit take.”

    I could get into the specifics of why ‘crypto’ isn’t crypto-currency at all, because every single example is hopelessly centralized, and therefore cryptography doesn’t dictate the state-change of tokens. But that would actually take a person wanting to understand this subject, and it’s a complex subject. Most times, people would prefer to just take established peripheral understandings of a subject and then pronounce their judgements loudly without ever attempting to validate them. You know… life.

  17. Another gem from Antony Green’s ‘pendulum’ analysis…

    “Of the 15 seats that recorded the largest swing to Labor, 12 were in Western Australia. ”

    In WA, unlike just about everywhere else, rusted-on Liberal voters learned to vote Labor.

    If these former rusted-on Liberals discover a) the sky doesn’t fall in; and b) the Labor govt they supported in 2022 does a pretty good job, will…

    1) they vote Labor again in 2025?
    2) the ‘Liberal-rusted-ons-shifting-to-Labor-virus’ spread to other jurisdictions, especially those with Labor state govts doing a good job?

    Could WA 2022 show that not only Teals can break down the Blue Wall?

  19. P.S. to my rant about Bowen…

    obviously if the electorate were more intellectually sophisticated, and the media less pathologically biased, then what Bowen was saying in 2019 would not have been a problem. But the electorate is stupid and the media is evil, and a Labor politicians entire job is to navigate those two basic realities. Bowen sucks at this.

  20. Media Wars:

    Apparently Murdoch’s Mob will run a 90 minute documentary on the sins of the ABC.

    I see tonight the ABC returns fire with a ducumentary about the abduction and murder of Milly Dowler. That’s the case where Murdoch’s Grubs hacked Milly’s messages and that caused the Police and her parents to believe she was still alive, and also derailed the police investigation.

    I know which documentary will have credibility.

  22. Player One

    “ What he actually said in 2019 was “if you don’t like our policies, don’t vote for us.” Australians took him at his word, and didn’t.”

    It seems the voters saw the error of their ways however and recanted in 2022. Just shows therefore that Bowen was right the first time and ahead of the pack. Probably smarter than the average bear.

  23. As an environmentalist, I have a few concerns about pumped hydro being a panacea. Yes, there are potential sites for traditional hydro storage that will not be too environmentally destructive. But are there enough? Weighing up the environmental cost vs environmental benefit of sites will be tough. Or… will the non traditional options (ie, off river, not dams) fill the gap and be affordable enough?

    And…. how well do traditional hydro storage options work in an extended El Niño?

  25. Alpo

    “ Conclusion, it looks like that the Coalition only has enough friends among the Christians…. I wonder how religious Dutton is…..”

    I’m not envisaging a great deal of growth in that cohort over coming years.

  26. [‘UAP failed to win a Senate seat in any other state, and also failed to win a seat in the House of Representatives, despite Mr Palmer spending tens of millions of dollars on campaign advertising.

    The party gathered just over 4 per cent of the vote nationwide, with a swing of 0.69 per cent.

    The party’s highest profile candidate, former Liberal MP Craig Kelly, failed to win in the NSW seat of Hughes, gathering just over 7,000 first preference votes.

    Mr Kelly had held the seat for the Liberal party since 2010, but defected to the UAP in 2021.

    In Victoria, just over 147,000 people cast Senate votes for the UAP, while Mr Babet attracted 4,425 below-the-line votes.’] – ABC

    So, a swing to the UAP of 0.69, at the cost of millions, resulted in one Senate seat. It means that Greg will be able to spend more time with dear Sophie. And poor Craig just missed out on becoming the prime minister.

  27. Pi at 11.57

    Thanks for the reminder about Kidston pumped hydro.

    I went to their site…

    https://genexpower.com.au/250mw-kidston-pumped-storage-hydro-project/

    I take it from your further comments that we need ‘Rewiring Australia’ to enable the grid infrastructure to accommodate a wide variety of electricity sources.

    IIRC, PM (yay! again!) Albanese has said the Rewiring policy is simply what the electricity sector requested. Which means we could’ve started it years ago if we didn’t have an ideologically-driven Coalition govt determined to use Climate Inaction as a wedge. We could’ve had a bunch of Kidstons, we wouldn’t have the current ‘energy crisis’ and we’d be further down the track of an energy transition that creates jobs and results in cheaper, more secure electricity supplies.

    But no, the Coalition had mates to favour and votes to chisel off. Bastards.

  29. Also wrt Bowen and neoliberalism…

    We are seeing the proof in the pudding of the privatisation of basic utilities. Bowen’s job, as Right Faction stooge of private Capital, is to convince us not to believe our lying eyes, to tell us that there is no alternative, that institutionalised private monopoly power is the natural order of things, that corporate profit is inviolable, that “there is no magic bullet”; government is helpless.

  30. It seems the voters saw the error of their ways however and recanted in 2022.

    Albo and Chalmers saw the error of Labor’s 2019 ways and adopted the smallest of small-targets strategy. They are much more politically astute than Shorten and Bowen were. (Tho objectively speaking, raising taxes now makes much more sense than it did in 2019 when the deficit problem and inflation were not genuine concerns)

  31. I know about Kidstone. Very limited options for on river pumped hydro in SA so mine sites are of interest. They dont need a large elevation differential to work well. But I would state that mine sites are supposed to be environmentally rehabilitated. And I noticed this last year….

    Genex Power’s $777 million Kidston pumped hydro project in north Queensland has received more public funding than its total capital cost, casting doubt on the value of using taxpayers’ money for a technology that has been around for more than 100 years.

    https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/taxpayers-prop-up-genex-power-s-pumped-hydro-project-20210604-p57y3c

    There is no doubt these types of pumped hydro will be necessary. They deserve and need public funding. Site selection, planning, design and approvals are now urgent. But cost benefit (both financial and environmental) compared to other options is important too.

  33. Also…. these new sites often need transmission lines. SMRs can be built on old Coal PS sites where transmission lines already exist.
    Quietly exits stage left – gets jacket and quickly goes and waits in the car.

  34. ANU keeps a site on potential hyro-storage locations across Australia and the world.

    http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/index.php

    “How much storage is needed?

    “An approximate guide to storage requirements for 100% renewable electricity, based on analysis for Australia, is 1 Gigawatt (GW) of power per million people with 20 hours of storage, which amounts to 20 GWh per million people [2]. This is for a strongly-connected large-area grid (1 million km2) with good wind and solar resources in a high-energy-use country. Local analysis is required for an individual country. For example, Australia needs about 500 GWh (and has storage potential that is 300 times larger) and the USA needs about 7000 GWh (and has storage potential that is 200 times larger).”

    Like I said, these are long-term problems, and we have the resources to be able to meet them. But the thing we need, right now, is to massively expand our renewables generation. Australia should be a literal super-power in exporting products that are produced by renewables. The main thing we needed to get rid of was the LNP.

    If you’re still talking about any form of nuclear, then you never were interested in actual solutions to the problem. And you should probably stop watching so much youtube.

  35. Jan 6 at 12.21

    As an environmentalist, I have a few concerns about pumped hydro being a panacea.
    ____________

    Jan 6, here is a precis of the ANU study to which I’ve referred…

    https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-22000-potential-pumped-hydro-sites-in-australia

    The precis doesn’t include a list of criteria for excluding sites from the total, although my recollection is national parks were excluded.

    My central takeaway is about scale. Power stations like Liddell (Hunter Valley) could generate about 500mw in their heyday. Kidston (referred to earlier) is a pairing of solar generation plus pumped hydro storage using an old mine site, rated at 250mw continuous when the sun shines optimally and 250mw for up to 8 hours with zero sunshine.

    I assume it would take more than two Kidstons to replace one Liddell, but I doubt it would take 20.

    With 22000 (let’s express that in words: twenty-two thousand!) candidate sites, even if the vast majority are rejected on local environmental grounds, there surely remain enough to guarantee energy security across the nation, using technology no more sophisticated than that for hydroelectric power generation.

    The main requirement is willpower.

  36. Dog’s Brunch says:
    Monday, June 20, 2022 at 10:21 am
    BK says:
    Monday, June 20, 2022 at 10:09 am
    Bloody Molan’s scraped back in to the Senate!

    “A few ex-army guys I work with at an ACT charity were saying they were glad he got in as he’s a “good bloke”. I went off to get coffee at this point in the discussion.”

    I know somebody (non military) very very well who worked directly to him while Molan was in the Army who says he was a nightmare to work for.

  37. Boerwar at 12:36 pm
    After the Rudd-Gillard era I wouldn’t trust Bowen as far as I could throw him. However that still puts him eleventy kilometres ahead of his recent predecessors.

  38. Jan 6 says:
    Monday, June 20, 2022 at 10:31 am
    Queensland is the West Virginia of Australia.
    “Ha. Dont let Upnorth hear you say that.
    But seriously, there aint nowhere quite like West Virginia.”

    Montana perhaps?

  39. ABC News (Canberra) this morning saying that ‘modelling’ had been done to show that Zed would have got in if not for Pocock! File this under “No Shit Sherlock”.

  41. Jan 6

    gets jacket and quickly goes and waits in the car.

    Glad you remembered to take your jacket. Looks a bit chilly up there. Nice view though.

  42. Jan 6 at 12.35 re pumped hydro cost/benefit and govt subsidising…

    Total number of coal-fired power stations built in this country without govt money? Zero.

    As others have observed, one of the ‘electricity privatisation’ failures is the Coalition’s wilful ignorance of the fact that electricity supply is a vital community service and allowing capitalism to supply it will (and has) lead to distortions and failures.

    Pumped hydro deserves no more public money than coal-fired power stations have received – which is considerable. Come to think of it, pumped hydro deserves no more govt money than coal mining receives – which is also considerable!

  43. The main requirement is willpower.

    That, plus you have to justify the added effort, build cost, construction time, moving parts, space requirements, and restricted location over just plonking down some batteries wherever storage is needed.

  44. How many cars are there in Australia?

    Recent count over 20 million. Assume half go electric at average battery size 50kWh that is one hell of a lot of storage.

    Fast electrification of the vehicle fleet seems the most obvious path forward to massive capacity only requires the grid to make it work.

    Tony Seba has already identified the future as SWB (Solar Wind and Batteries).

    The Snowy Hydro 2 is a massive cock-up.

  45. Jan 6 at 12.38

    Also…. these new sites often need transmission lines. SMRs can be built on old Coal PS sites where transmission lines already exist.
    Quietly exits stage left – gets jacket and quickly goes and waits in the car.
    ____________

    Old coal power station sites often include cooling water storage dams! Half the ingredients needed for pumped hydro!

    I live in the Hunter and have driven past Liddell and Bayswater power stations many times. Just next door to Liddell power station is…Lake Liddell! I’m not an engineer and have no capacity to assess that site re pumped hydro potential, but, taken in aggregate, the Hunter has old power stations – with the poles and wires infrastructure to match, disused underground coal mines, a variety of dams and lakes and, given that it is a valley, variable altitude topography. Somewhere in that mix is a list of pumped hydro candidates.

    What does SMall nuclear Reactor technology bring to the table? Let’s start with lack of existence in any practical sense…

  46. @Dog’s brunch – it was not immediately obvious and the ABC analysis is very useful.

    In the ABC’s analysis with Pocock excluded, the Greens would have ended up on 0.92 quota when Zed was elected. That’s considerably closer than the 0.86 quota that Zed ended up on when Pocock was elected in the real count.

    The 0.92 quota is WELL above the Green’s result in 2019 at the stage in the count when Zed was elected (they had 0.57 quota in 2019 at the last count). Although that’s not primarily due to swings between years, it’s just that in 2019 Zed was elected when there were still 2 non greens candidates left in the count – Labor’s 2nd and an inde, who held on to a bunch of quota that would have mostly gone to the Greens.

  47. “ Montana perhaps?”

    Montana isn’t anything like West Virginia.

    West Virginia is a quintessential representation of depression Appalachia which exists in pockets elsewhere – parts of Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri come to mind.

  48. If Pocock didn’t run, does anyone know for sure where all of his vote would have landed? Zed may have snuck back in, but one of the other progressive candidates might have pipped him. Who knows for sure. From a distance there did seem to be quite an anti Liberal – especially Zed – sentiment running in the ACT that would have put his lock on the second senate seat in jeopardy.

  50. A E at 12.59 re ‘Arkansas’…

    I knew an army officer who’d been posted to the US. On his return to Australia, he decided to standardise his pronunciation of ‘Arkansas’ and ‘Kansas’ by insisting on referring to the Great State of ‘Kin-saw’! (Or was it ‘Ken-saw’?!)

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