Victorian election: late counting week two

Continuing coverage of late counting from the Victorian state election.

Click here for full Victorian election results updated live.

Friday, December 8

The last in doubt seat was determined in Labor’s favour today, with the preference distribution in Bass showing Labor incumbent Jordan Crugnale the winner with 20,803 votes (50.24%) over 20,601 (49.76%) for Liberal candidate Alan Brown. Labor thus emerges with 56 lower house seats, up one from their total in 2018; the Liberals on 19, down two, and the Nationals on nine, up three, with one or the other presumably to win Narracan when the supplementary election is held; the Greens four, up one; and independents from three to zero.

In the upper house count, the ABC’s projected margin for Transport Matters incumbent Rod Barton over Aiv Puglielli of the Greens at the final count for North-Eastern Metropolitan has narrowed to 16.95% to 16.38%, at which point the Greens could be confident that below-the-line votes would win them the seat. Barton is also a hair’s breadth away from exclusion behind Sustainable Australia at an earlier point in the count.

Thursday, December 8

Labor chalked up another win today when the button was pressed on Pakenham, revealing that their candidate Emma Vulin prevailed over David Farrelly of the Liberals at the last by 19,587 (50.39%) to 19,280 (49.61%). That gets Labor to 55 seats, which most likely will get to 56 when the button is pressed tomorrow on Bass, barring the emergence of some as yet undetected anomaly that up-ends the 211 vote margin on the two-candidate preferred count.

Wednesday, December 7

The preference distribution for Pakenham, earlier promised for today, will now be finalised tomorrow according to the VEC. That remains the only seat in doubt now that Northcote is decided for Labor, although I note that the ABC still rates Bass, where Labor leads by 211, as in doubt. There too the VEC is promising a preference distribution tomorrow. The preference distribution in Preston established that independent Gaetano Greco did not in fact make the final count, at which Labor retained the seat ahead of the Greens by a margin of 2.1%.

Tuesday, December 6

A preference distribution has been run for Northcote, which I believe was conducted electronically, with Labor incumbent Kat Theophanous making it over the line at the final count with 21,413 votes (50.22%) to Greens candidate Campbell Gome’s 21,229 (49.78%). The VEC site says “a recheck is taking place for this district”, but the ABC reports the figures as final.

In the other yet-to-be-called seat, Pakenham, Antony Green relates that the re-check of first preferences has shown up anomalies that will put Labor ahead when corrected, with the published results remaining those of the initial count. This involved an increase in the number of votes designated informal, which cut 274 from the Liberal primary vote tally compared with 111 from Labor’s. The difference is sufficient to cancel out the Liberals’ 90 vote lead on the two-candidate preferred count, though not so handily that you would rule out further anomalies tipping the result back the other way. The matter will seemingly be clarified when a full preference distribution is conducted tomorrow. Should the result go Labor’s way, they will have repeated their feat from 2018 of winning 55 seats, despite a statewide two-party swing that looks to be in excess of 3%.

Monday, December 5

My previous update dropped the ball with respect to Northcote, where a 1523-994 break on absent votes brought the Greens right back into contention. Labor now leads by 189 with the outstanding vote likely to consist of around 1500 postals, of which the latest batch broke an even 123-123, and a handful of provisionals.

The Liberals have opened a 90 vote lead in Pakenham, after the latest early votes broke 450-356 and postals broke 80-67, outweighing a 208-189 break to Labor on absents. There are still about 1500 postals to be accounted for, and since these have broken 51-49 in favour of the Liberals so far, this seems assured to remain close.

Mornington continues to edge out of reach of independent candidate Kate Lardner, with absents (349-338), early votes (268-203) and postals (110-102) all breaking slightly the way of Liberal candidate Chris Crewther, whose lead is out from 491 votes to 575. My results system is now calling it for Crewther, leaving only Northcote and Pakenham in doubt.

In the upper house count, second Liberal candidate Joe McCracken’s position in Western Victoria has strengthened appreciably, leaving him a likely winner over Stuart Grimley of Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party. The Greens and Legalise Cannabis remain in a race for a third left-wing seat, with Labor and now Liberal on course for two seats each.

Sunday, December 4

There are probably three lower house seats that are still in real doubt, not counting Narracan which will presumably be won by the Liberals or Nationals. This gets Labor to 54 seats with a best case scenario of 56; the Coalition to 26 with a best case scenario of 29; the Greens to four; and one outside possibility for an independent.

The most remarkable of the close races is Pakenham which was tied as of Friday, before Liberal candidate David Farrelly opened up a three-vote lead after a batch of absents were added over the weekend. Farrelly held a 220 vote lead mid-week before postals broke 964-781 to Labor and early votes did so by 457-420.

Labor holds a 285 lead in Bass, out from 53 after favourable results on early vote (1768-1643), absents (539-438) and recent batches of postals (826-820). Postals, of which the first batch broke strongly to the Liberals but more recent arrivals have been neutral, should account for most of the remainder, although there may also be significant numbers of outstanding absents.

Liberal candidate Chris Crewther’s lead over independent Kate Lardner in Mornington is now at 491 votes, out from 353, after postals favoured him 751-717 and early votes did so 413-329. The former were less strong for Crewther than earlier postals, of which at least 3000 yet to come. Together with the fact that further absents are likely outstanding, this means Crewther can’t be considered home and hosed quite yet, though he is clearly a short-priced favourite

Elsewhere, Paul Mercurio is probably home for Labor in Hastings, his lead out from 659 to 803 after the lastest postals broke 151-116 his way and absents broke 290-221. Labor’s lead over the Greens in Northcote is down from 874 to 781 after a batch of early votes favoured the Greens 1645-1454, outweighing an 832-734 break to Labor on the latest postals.

Now, finally, to the upper house, where the ABC is currently projecting a final result of Labor 15, Coalition 13, Legalise Cannabis three, Greens two and (deep breath) Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party, Liberal Democrats, Animal Justice, Shooters Fishers and Farmers, Transport Matters, the Democratic Labour Party and One Nation on one each. However, the ABC projections assume all votes are above-the-line and duly follow the group voting tickets, which likely means an over-estimation of the number of micro-party winners. To deal with the eight regions in turn, all links below being to the ABC projections:

North-Eastern Metropolitan. Labor and the Liberals will clearly win two apiece, but the last seat could go either to the Greens or the beneficiary or the micro-party preference network, which on current numbers is projected to be Transport Matters but they come close to dropping out at a number of points in the count. Other contenders could be the Liberal Democrats and the DLP, although I would imagine below-the-line leakage would be such that their collective chances are weaker than the ABC projection indicates.

Eastern Victoria. The Liberals and Nationals have a clear two quotas and Labor one, and Labor’s surplus is well clear of what the Greens can muster, ensuring the latter drops out and elects Labor’s second candidate with a substantial surplus of left-wing votes. These then ensure that the final seat goes to Shooters Fishers and Farmers rather than One Nation.

Northern Metropolitan. Two Labor, one Liberal and one Greens candidate each stand to be elected with little surplus to spare. This makes the final seat a question of whether a right-wing preference bloc elects Adem Somyurek of the DLP, or left-wing bloc (Victorian Socialists, Legalise Cannabis and Animal Justice) elects Fiona Patten of Reason, with the former seeming increasingly more likely as the count progresses.

Northern Victoria. The Coalition has two quotas and Labor has one with a big surplus. Beyond that, it seems clear that One Nation will emerge the beneficiaries of a right-wing preference snowball that will push them from 3.75% all the way to a quota, and that Animal Justice will win a seat out of the Druery preference network they ultimately reneged on, soaking up preferences from Sack Dan Andrews, Health Australia, Derryn Hinch’s Justice, the Liberal Democrats, as well as the left-wing surplus from Victorian Socialists, Reason, Legalise Cannabis and ultimately the Greens.

South-Eastern Metropolitan. Labor has two seats with about 0.4 quotas to spare and the Liberals one plus about 0.6. Labor’s surplus plus the Greens’ 0.4 quotas will elect Legalise Cannabis, leaving the final seat a tight race between the second Liberal and the Liberal Democrats.

Southern Metropolitan. This seems straightforward: the Liberals win a clear two seats without much to spare, Labor falls just short of a second quota on first preferences and the Greens just short of a first, with both of the latter absorbing enough preferences to push them over their respective lines.

Western Metropolitan. Labor will win two seats with about a quarter of a quota to spare and the Liberals one with about a half. The latter two seats then develop as parallel races between the Greens, Legalise Cannabis and Victorian Socialists on the left, respectively at 8.10%, 7.45% and 7.13% at the relevant point of the count, and the second Liberal and the DLP on the right, who are respectively projected to end the count on 17.48% and 15.85%.

Western Victoria. Labor has two seats and about a quarter of a quota to spare, and the Coalition one and a bit more than half. That leaves enough left-wing votes for a third seat that could go to Legalise Cannabis or the Greens, with the former projected to emerge 11.72% to 9.57% clear after one-way traffic on preferences from Reason, Animal Justice and Labor. Most of the ensuing surplus transfer then goes to Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party, who are then projected to win the final seat over the second Liberal by 17.45% to 15.88%, although this could seemingly go either way.

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.

401 comments on “Victorian election: late counting week two”

Comments Page 2 of 9
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  1. Of note are comments made today by the estimable Kevin Bonham on his blog, explaining his view that there has been an error in the Pakenham count and it is likely that Labor is currently some 100s of votes ahead. He is now predicting Labor to win 56 seats.


  2. Outsider says:
    Monday, December 5, 2022 at 10:04 pm

    It’s staggering to see that 7.4% of votes cast in Pakenham were informal. More than 3,000. Maybe something to do with 11 candidates on the ballot paper?

    At our local polling booth informal was the third most popular candidate. A Couple confused the number below the line needed for the upper house with lower house voting.

  3. Mick Quinlivan @ #43 Monday, December 5th, 2022 – 9:03 pm

    Re Narracan
    I would not write off labors
    Chances. Remember the retiring liberal mp won the
    Seat by defeating the sitting. Alp member
    He built a personal vote
    This combined with. boundary swaps with
    Next door Morwell lead him to be untroubled in holding the seat
    Now his personal. Vote. Is
    Gone.this will.harm the liberals. The national party.are in.trouble over the poor vetting of their candidate and cannot.leap
    Frog the liberals and. Win

    This is a reflection of the demographic changes happening..lastly there is a good chance labour is in govt for another 8 years. Would the voters in this seat prefer a voice in government

    Yes Labor may be in Govt for sometime to come and I too can’t fathom why you would vote for a member who can basically do nothing to really improve your conditions as a whole.
    In the circumstances and based purely on self interest why not vote for the ALP candidate and maybe have a seat at the big table?
    Give them a try and see how they perform,if you don’t think they have worked hard enough, go back to the other guy next time.It’s seemingly working out that way in Bass.

  4. It’s interesting that Victoria has the lowest approval (36%) of any state of how well its state government handled the pandemic according to the latest Australian Election Study. With a figure like that you would expect a significant hit to a government seeking a third term, that there was basically another landslide victory is a massive cause for concern for the LNP.

    https://australianelectionstudy.org/wp-content/uploads/The-2022-Australian-Federal-Election-Results-from-the-Australian-Election-Study.pdf

  5. mj @ #54 Tuesday, December 6th, 2022 – 9:51 am

    It’s interesting that Victoria has the lowest approval (36%) of any state of how well its state government handled the pandemic according to the latest Australian Election Study. With a figure like that you would expect a significant hit to a government seeking a third term, that there was basically another landslide victory is a massive cause for concern for the LNP.

    https://australianelectionstudy.org/wp-content/uploads/The-2022-Australian-Federal-Election-Results-from-the-Australian-Election-Study.pdf

    Better to whinge about it and be alive sure beats the alternative.
    The alternative showing nightly video of our relatives in India not being able to source oxygen for love or money,dying like flies and being cremated in the street focused minds on survival.
    We might not have liked the medicine but we took it anyway.

  6. Just throwing something out there, do we think when the preference distribution is done for Hawthorn, there could be a surprise result where it actually turned out to be a LIB v ALP instead of LIB v IND count?

    Just thinking about it, looking at vote types like absents, postals & early votes, preferences really haven’t flowed particularly well to the IND. Even vote types where the Liberals got a pretty poor primary vote (like absents), they overperformed in the 2CP count compared to what you would expect, which indicates a lot of non-ordinary voters seemed to go with the known majors above the IND.

    Considering how many non-ordinary votes there are, the fact that ALP & IND are almost tied on primary votes, and that right-wing minors are likely to go straight to LIB and therefore bypass IND & ALP altogether, the 3CP result will probably depend on how Greens preferences break and even though they put Lowe higher on their HTV cards, it’s not out of the question that they might actually break better for Labor and result in a LIB v ALP result.

    I’m not predicting that… But just putting the possibility of it out there.

  7. It’s interesting that Victoria has the lowest approval (36%) of any state of how well its state government handled the pandemic according to the latest Australian Election Study. With a figure like that you would expect a significant hit to a government seeking a third term, that there was basically another landslide victory is a massive cause for concern for the LNP.
    ______________________________
    How would things have been had the Liberals been in charge?
    3 words come to mind. Let-it-rip…

    It was the Victorian government that drove the response across the nation and we ended up with an expectation that zero covid was the only solution. Compared to the rest of the world, the results of Australia were exceptional. Had there been a coordinated across the world effort, we showed that this virus could have been eliminated. Israel demonstrated that the first iterations of the virus could also have been eliminated with vaccines. It would have taken time, effort and a bit of money to do so, but the investment of a couple of months could have yielded the avoidance of the on-going waves that we are seeing now, which whilst the death toll is relatively low, the cost of the lost productivity and the impact to the health system is going to cost us many more times the cost of the impact of doing coordinated work.

    As for the response now, I’m surprised more isn’t done to keep the infection numbers lower. Simple things like promoting outdoor rather than indoor gatherings, open air shopping, mask use and better case tracking information.

  8. Alpha Zero @ #58 Tuesday, December 6th, 2022 – 11:03 am

    It’s interesting that Victoria has the lowest approval (36%) of any state of how well its state government handled the pandemic according to the latest Australian Election Study. With a figure like that you would expect a significant hit to a government seeking a third term, that there was basically another landslide victory is a massive cause for concern for the LNP.
    ______________________________
    How would things have been had the Liberals been in charge?
    3 words come to mind. Let-it-rip…

    .

    Or uttered from the mouth of the Liberals.
    This is not the time and place to be Catastrophizing about the shocking loss of life blah blah blah.

  9. I note posters have steadfastly ignored the the second contribution in this thread.

    Meanwhile the AGE has dropped a federal opinion poll with numbers very close to 60/40 against poor old Dutts who has crashed to 19%. I look forward to the “Why does this man bother” front page. Both in celebration and a warning to never write off truly awful LNP leaders.

  10. Outsider
    The situation with the early vote is strange. I can understand small numbers when they are doing the recheck but the early vote count in Pakenham is definitely odd – 500 votes have been moved from the Lib primary to the ALP primary and the number of informals has gone up by 10%. Depending on how close the final vote is – a full recount is a definite possibility or it may end up in the courts.

  11. This morning, Kevin Bonham has tweeted the following:

    “Northcote 3 pm today
    Preston 4:30 pm subject to data entry being complete

    (These are button presses like in upper house – ballots have been entered.)”

  12. Re Pakenham, clearly something strange has happened. I guess we find out tomorrow, when the full distribution of preferences is scheduled to take place.

  13. Clearly William has apparently entered the Twilight zone in search of results and returned in an astral snafu with his thread header
    “Click here for full Victorian election results updated live.
    Monday, December 6”

  14. Computerised preference distributions today appear to be:
    3:00 – Northcote
    3:15 – Hawthorn
    3:30 – Brighton
    3:45 – Melton
    4:00 – Werribee
    4:15 – Point Cook
    4:30 – Preston

    Obviously most will be inconsequential apart from Northcote & Preston, but as mentioned earlier, I think Hawthorn will be interesting as well to see how the 3CP pans out as there’s the off chance of it being a surprise LIB v ALP 2CP depending on how Greens preferences flow.

  15. mj says:
    Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 9:51 am
    It’s interesting that Victoria has the lowest approval (36%) of any state of how well its state government handled the pandemic according to the latest Australian Election Study. With a figure like that you would expect a significant hit to a government seeking a third term, that there was basically another landslide victory is a massive cause for concern for the LNP.
    ———-
    It may just reflect the salience of the pandemic as an issue by election day. There might be a cohort of voters who subscribe strongly to the narrative- amplified by the Murdoch media among others – that the Victorian government handled the pandemic poorly. You could hold that view while also feeling that the consequences of that are mostly in the rear vision mirror, and that when it comes down to the question of who is most likely to competently manage the State, the current government looks like a much more plausible proposition than the alternative..

  16. One of the Labor twitterers posted on Friday that the count in Pakenham was way off and Vulin was up by a hundred or more votes. It sounds as though it’s the external reporting that’s glitched, not the results as known to the scrutineers.

  17. From Kevin Bonham’s explanation, I think what happened is that there’s roughly a 200-300 vote difference between the original primary vote count and the ‘rechecked’ primary vote count; with Labor being 200-300 votes better off in the rechecked numbers.

    The provisional 2PP count reported on the VEC & ABC websites is based off the original primary vote count, not the rechecked one, which is why it’s assumed that the correct 2PP margin is probably 200-300 more favourable to Labor than the reported 2PP is showing, therefore that 90 vote Liberal lead is probably more like a 100-200 vote Labor lead.

  18. The ABC website (presumably Antony Green) now explains the situation in Pakenham as follows:

    “In the Re-check count of first preferences, an extra 230 informal votes were found, and the Liberal tally fell by 274 votes while Labor rose by 111 votes. These corrections are not reflected in the current preference count. If these changes flow through in the preference distribution, then Emma Vulin will win Pakenham for Labor unless there is some other error in the current preference count.”

    This is the same issue that Kevin Bonham has discussed over the past 24 hours.

  19. Outsider says:
    Monday, December 5, 2022 at 11:37 pm
    He is now predicting Labor to win 56 seats.

    Pfft. That would be described as neck and neck in the Age.

  20. Hawthorn distribution complete and guess what – it did turn out to be a LIB v ALP count in the end.

    Pesutto beat Kennedy 51.74 – 48.26.

    So going back to the comments yesterday around how I thought the LIB v ALP 2PP and LIB v IND 2CP would probably be about the same as each other based on their primary votes being similar, that’s exactly what happened: Pesutto only did 0.28% in a 2CP runoff versus Labor (51.74) compared to Lowe (51.46).

    Looking at the distributions, at the 4CP count, Greens preferences flowed:
    54% to IND, 37% to ALP, 9% to LIB.

    At the 3CP count, IND preferences flowed 76% to ALP and 24% to LIB.

  21. Oh, the Lowe camp was so excited on election night when they thought they had won. Instead they came third. My pre-election thesis that there was not the “need” for a “teal” candidate when the seat was already a marginal Labor held seat is actually reenforced. The volunteers might have been better off going to help in Kew (but even then the “need” for a Teal decrease once Smith drove into the fence and was replaced by someone else as Liberal candidate).

    In the end it was quite a strong result for Kennedy given that he barely won last time, so the swing was only 2.3%. Without the Teal running it might have been even closer as some voters might have voted Presutto for fear of the Teal or a woman or a blonde or whatever every makes voters dislike a candidate.

  22. From the distributions, we can infer that Campbell Gome picked up about 1460 preferences from the Liberals’ decision to preference Greens rather than Labor. (That’s the difference between Liberal votes for Labor, ignoring the HTV cards, and for the Greens, following them.)

    Correcting for that decision that neither the Greens nor Labor had any control over, we get a figure of 53.6% to Labor holding conditions from 2018 constant, implying a “true” pro-Labor swing of 1.9%. That would appear to be a fairly modest sophomore surge.

    Knowing nothing about Kat, Campbell, or their respective policy platforms, my only observation about that result is that it has significantly improved the visual appeal of the Victorian Parliament.

  23. Trent – So that 0.28% difference means that very few Lowe voters preferred Pesutto over Kennedy? So it does seem that the Teal voters at this election were certainly not disaffected Liberal voters.

  24. In terms of Greens chances in 2026.

    Prior to the election the pendulum had 3 seats held by the Greens, plus 3 seats where they made the final count – Labor margins of 1.7% (Northcote), 5.8% (Richmond) and 21.3% (Preston).

    Post election 4 seats held, plus 3 where they made the final count – on margins of 0.2% (Northcote), 2.4% (Pascoe Value), 4.3% (Footscray). Plus 1 where they missed out on the final count, but could make the final count next time, absent an independent running (Preston)

    In 2026, the Greens will have a lot more seats they can target, and have 3 or 4 pickup opportunities that are more marginal than Richmond was this election.

  25. For the record, the Libs appealed to no one. They were pointlessly appealing to voters on the left, (hello, those on the left will never vote Liberal in a thousand trillion years) and ignoring many issues that conservatives, ie, most people, are concerned about.

    Where was the colorful rhetoric over these absurd, illegal drug injecting rooms? The only winners from these rooms are vicious drug syndicates. How does allowing people to inject themselves with drain cleaner help them? Andrews promised ice would not be allowed but promptly backtracked. How many lives has it saved? None but it’s cost thousands, including the lives of all those who have been murdered by these thugs. (10 000 in Mexico alone in the last 3 years). If you really want to help people don’t give them a choice and force them to go cold turkey in hospital.
    No one likes these rooms and if you told voters that you wouldn’t support them in electorate X or Y you’d be on a winner. You could have ads saying ‘Say no to violent drug syndicates. Vote Liberal’. Perhaps interspersed with images of their dead victims to really ram it home.

    That’s just one example of why they didn’t win.

  26. The Greens are akin to the 76 year old retired truck driver, on the pension and still with a mortgage on his outer suburban home

    And the lead headline at 9 Entertainment

    Financially and commercially illiterate

    Society can not afford them anywhere near the levers of government

    As a conscience on climate in times of a Conservative government – yes

    But apart from that absolute fringe

    And dangerous

  27. @Jeremy, ignoring all the rest of your rant about injecting rooms, “most people” are not conservatives especially in Victoria. Social conservatives are a distinct minority.

    Also if you look at election results in Victoria over the past few decades, the Liberals – while nearly always failing here – always do better when they are moderate than conservative.

    Look at 2016 with Turnbull as PM. They picked up some big swings here and Vic was the only state where they gained a seat while losing in other states. Then being more conservative in 2018 and 2019 and had huge swings against.

    Their only win in this state since the ’90s was with the moderate Baillieu.

    So no, conservatives are not “most people”. Far, far, far from it.

  28. Outsider: “He is now predicting Labor to win 56 seats.”
    Somethinglikethat: “Pfft. That would be described as neck and neck in the Age.”

    Scraped in.

  29. Goll, Upnorth, Grime and Trent

    Will a bull feel anything if rain falls on it unless it is swept away by floods?
    The answer is no.

    Grime
    You may understand above idiom.

  30. Here we go again @ #85 Tuesday, December 6th, 2022 – 5:22 pm

    The Greens are akin to the 76 year old retired truck driver, on the pension and still with a mortgage on his outer suburban home

    Financially and commercially illiterate

    Society can not afford them anywhere near the levers of government

    As a conscience on climate in times of a Conservative government – yes

    But apart from that absolute fringe

    And dangerous

    Most Australians are illiterate when it comes to things financial.It’s a shame budgeting etc is not comprehensively on the school curriculum.
    In the meantime how about Domain instead of harping on the “We’ll all be wiped out” point the way to assisting people in accessing help before things get desperate and totally out of control.
    Most councils would have free financial counselors on the books to help work out whats wrong and how can we work to change the situation to your benefit.
    We don’t know what other debts the 76yo retired truckie has but surely someone can point him in the direction of the Commonwealth Home Equity Access Scheme eligibility.

  31. Because I live by the mantra of not feeding trolls, I would like to emphasise I am not posting this for any particular reason, but I thought I would just put up the report of the independent panel into the efficacy of the safe injecting room for the edification of PBers.
    To quote the headline finding:
    “In its first 18 months of operation, MSIR staff safely managed 2,657 overdoses, many of which may have been fatal or resulted in serious injury if they had happened outside the facility. ”

    https://www.health.vic.gov.au/publications/medically-supervised-injecting-room-trial-review-panel-full-report

  32. @ Rocket, the 3CP count in Hawthorn was:

    LIB -45.3% (20,088)
    ALP – 27.5% (12,164)
    IND – 27.2% (12,058)

    @B.S. Fairman, agree that the teal support came from the left, especially since there was very minimal primary vote swing away from Pesutto.

    Kennedy may have retained if there was no IND…

  33. Noted Grime

    In the first instance a lender has approved the lending to a home purchaser AND over a term of 25/30 years

    The lender has a responsibility to address contingencies – because no lender wants bad and doubtful debt on their books courtesy of loan servicing pressures

    And those contingencies should be part of the process leading to any approval – the amount of the deposit also of significance including that mortgage protection insurance not being required

    So, cart before the horse, is the loan approval process

    Of interest is that lending to business is subject to at least Annual Review (and quarterly in regard the testing of liquidity and the cash to cash cycle)

    Housing Loans are a set and forget lending, only coming to attention in the event of the monthly principal plus interest loan repayment falling into arrears (or the Insurance premium not being paid, where the bank has recourse under the caveats in the mortgage document)

    The RBA retain a prudent overview of bank lending, including loan arrears along with pre-payments (because there is a demographic who pay down their mortgage debt ahead of what is required)

    Then you get to life events and those events impacting on income and consequently the ability to service the loan (and meet Council Rates, home insurance, utility provision and property maintenance)

    In the first instance you would hope that the lender would be pro active in that space – it was them which approved the loan in the first instance after all

    It used to amuse me when business was subject to appointment Directors opined that they had no clue

    Because that was never the case

    The appointment was for a reason or reasons and a failure of capacity and/or intent to correct the matters of concern

    Data and the testing of the Covenants at the Letter of Offer were the determining factor – so such as Capital Adequacy, Liquidity Ratios, Interest Cover as examples

    And that you were not dishonouring because facilities were not being observed

    And you always sought a work out, giving a time span

    That said your best loss was always your first loss – so not good money after bad

    And I do agree that money needs to be taught in schools because it appears to me the responsibility is in the home currently

    There was an old story that you spend what you earn – and if you spend more you are in strife

    That is my view of “reverse mortgages” with which I have no brief – for a raft of reasons

    Compounding and time makes money, the emphasis on makes

    In regards those under financial stress without mortgage the services you quote are appreciated

  34. I think the other thing that Lowe had running against her was that the Victorian Liberal party was already in a state of collapse and they were running credible candidates in Hawthorn (and Kew) on a platform of trying to right the ship. During the federal election, the Liberals were merely collapsing and Frydenberg especially but moderate Libs in general had demonstrated that they weren’t prepared to fight for their alleged values.

    This is precisely the value of an independent. It is not acceptable that reasonable commentators just go “something something two party system”. It’s a thought-terminating cliche, not an analysis. When there’s independents and other non-major party candidates afoot, it means the major-party candidate needs to represent the electorate in the party room, not the party leader in the electorate.

    The federal moderates were judged to have failed at that. These state moderates have convinced their electorates that they would be capable of it, and the electorates have at least offered them the chance to fail.

    The other issue that helped the Libs win was also just that aside from the journalists, everyone in Melbourne probably knew that the Libs wouldn’t form government under any circumstance, while that was very much in doubt at the federal election. This would have amplified the previous analysis – in either direction. I wonder whether the collapse of rural independents was related to this albeit in the reverse – perhaps from a more distant vantage point their voters thought they would be better off with a government MP, and were more reliant on journalism and less able to get an independent feel on public sentiment? If so, I’d have to say they were very poorly served by the MSM and every campaigning journalist needs to hang their head in shame.

  35. Mel Lowe should have gone for yellow.
    The electorate would have gone Bananas for that one, it’s bound to be the very next thing…

  36. The teals bombed because:
    1. It’s harder to be distinctive running against an opposition.
    2. Integrity was a huge issue in May because the Morrison government was both irredeemably sleazy and, more importantly, at the same time hopelessly incompetent. People will forgive a certain degree of sleaze if there are runs on the board. (That’s pretty much how every dictatorship works, after all.) But despite the media’s best efforts at false equivalence, the Andrews government’s integrity issues are just nowhere near the same scale (does anyone but a total political tragic even know what ‘Red Shirts’ was about?) and, whatever you thought of its response to COVID-19, it had *a lot* of runs on the board (level crossing removals et al).
    3. Victoria’s strict caps on political donations meant that Climate 200’s money was of little use.
    4. Climate change was just not as salient an issue.
    5. I think that there was also a sense that they were just trying to roll the arm over again after doing so well in May. The federal teals had a much longer run-up. The state teals had a whiff of Johnny (Janey?)-come-lately opportunism about them.

  37. Alpha Zerosays:
    Tuesday, December 6, 2022 at 9:17 pm
    “Mel Lowe should have gone for yellow.
    The electorate would have gone Bananas for that one, it’s bound to be the very next thing…”

    Quite rightly…

  38. Basically correct Alpha

    And Felix, the common denominator is the IPA, so NOT moderate

    They hide behind “moderate”, never referring to their IPA affiliations

    And media never calls them out for who and what they are

    And what and who they stand for

    Moderate they are most definitely not

    The competition within the “Liberal” Party of today is between religious God botherers and the IPA

    Hence unelectable

  39. Recently I’ve seen a few light suggestions about who might replace Andrews if he does decide during the next term to put up the gloves, at least as far as Vic is concerned and I’m just not convinced he’d want make it federal, but then to put forward Jacinta Allan. An excellent contender.

    But… you know… Lily L’Ambrosio is pretty good. She has transformed this state in the past few years. I’m just not sure I’d want her as a leader because I’d like her to continue doing what she’s doing. A bit like Matt Kean.

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