Time for the Poll Bludger’s bi-monthly appeal for donations. This one follows a month of prodigious efforts on the Queensland election, which so far at least have not attracted anything out of the ordinary on the revenue front. The election results system that eventually started working about 45 minutes into the count continues to tick over, and I’m hard at work on a more elaborate three-candidate preferred model that will make sense of the increasingly common circumstance in which the two leading candidates cannot be confidently predicted in advance. A case in point is the current situation in South Brisbane, where the Greens’ slim hopes of holding on depend on who finishes second out of Labor and the LNP. Hopefully the new system will be ready to go for a looming by-election in South Australia, and then for the big events that loom in the new year – Western Australia’s state election in March, followed by a federal election that I hope and expect will be held in May.
