Australian federal election 2022

[stui magpie]

Give McGowan time, he's just warming up.

Dutton does look like Voldemort though.

[stui magpie]

Interesting article, food for thought for political parties

https://www.theage.com.au/national/australia-didn-t-turn-left-it-wised-up-20220527-p5ap3z.html

[David]

He gets the analysis of primary votes badly wrong (as a lot of people have been pointing out online, and he seems to have acknowledged in the added postscript), but the basic point seems inarguable. It seems self-evident that the Australian voting public hasn’t turned "left" because people en masse don’t generally change their fundamental ideological leanings in a three-year period. What’s clear is that, on certain issues (however you categorise them), both major parties have been falling behind public opinion.

Otherwise I think it’s debatable to call the Teals centre-right and suggest that Labor are to the left of them. I suspect the Teals’ success can be put down in part to them being something of a Rorschach test: Liberal voters saw them as small-l liberals, whereas a lot of Labor and Greens voters saw them as centre-left. It’s hard to generalise about their politics – Allegra Spender, for instance, seems like she might be a Liberal moderate in all but name, whereas others like Zoe Daniel seem like they could be further left than Labor on a range of issues. In this context, perception is much more important than reality.

[swoop42]

Comparing the Coalition primary vote to that of Labor is like being surprised that the points for column of Essendon and Port Adelaide combined is greater than Collingwood's.

Well duh.

The reality though is a little more complex and Labor is currently ahead by 1.1 million primary votes over the Liberal party while the total for the Greens is only slightly behind (13,000) those of the Liberal National Party / The Nationals combined.

Of course for all those Green votes they're only afforded 4 seats at the table while the "Coalition" get 31.

That hardly seems a fair and accurate reflection of what the Australian populous wants or good for democracy when one side of politics is so obviously favoured by electoral boundaries.

[pietillidie]

Very close to the 76 seats now from what I can tell.

I think results likely capture a broad discomfort with the embrace of the extreme right by the Glibs. That doesn't imply an enthusiastic embrace of the ALP, as the numbers show, but more a sense that the crazies need to be better contained.

In the first instance, policy and management are about a maturity and sensibility that doesn’t get things grossly wrong, such as invading Iraq, electing Trump, denying global warming, uncorking racist hysteria, responding too late and too little to a dangerous pandemic, etc.

In the second instance, you hope to start instituting productive long-term policy platforms that do more than merely avoid creating catastrophes. But you can't even make it to serious discussion about policy, or surface quality leaders to engage in that discussion, if you're mired in a destabilising hysteria such as that associated with the populist far right.

I think enough people finally realise that it's up to the Gilbs to clean out those destabilisers before the political dynamic becomes locked in an American-style hopelessness. For all the vaccine supply mishaps and crazed right nuttery over lockdowns and mask mandates, Australia significantly outdid nations even more in thrall to those extremists.

In a sense, Australia's overweight obsession with Anglo-America has proven helpful because the US and UK have provided a string of real-time examples of the cost of this lurching right lunacy, including Brexit, Trump and pandemic deaths.

The next step is to stabilise things and make them dull enough for long enough that the stocks of quality leaders can replenish, and decent ideas and policy discussion can emerge once more. The extraordinarily drab ALP are obviously perfect for that task. But we have to embrace the fact that, in a context of social and global instability, drab is okay. Voting against extremists is far better than granting them power, which is why I've never bought arguments such as 'not being Trump isn't enough'. Of course it is when the alternative is the wreckage of a destructive malignant narcissist.

In a two-party race, it only takes a minor percentage of extremists to commandeer an entire party and by doing so destabilise an entire nation. Unfortunately, these destabilisers have been suffered way beyond what would be the case if they were a dangerous weirdo religious sect, even though that's what they effectively are, but draped in the colours of a mainstream party to appropriate legitimacy and gain exaggerated reach.

[stui magpie]

[stui magpie]

[David]

Counting hasn’t finished yet (and will likely continue for around another week, including in all the decided seats that nobody is paying attention to). A lot of people in the media making claims like “turnout is down” but they simply don’t have access to that data yet; it’s like looking at the score at three quarter time and saying that we haven’t kicked as many goals as usual. Anyway, it’s been pointed out that the combined Labor+Greens vote is actually up, not down as he asserts, which somewhat undermines his entire premise.

Re: Swoop’s post, I’d advise against basing any meaningful conclusions on the Liberal or National Party vote that treats the combined "LNP" in Queensland as a separate entity, particularly as Queensland is the Coalition’s strongest performing state. It makes some sense to treat the Coalition as a single party given the Libs and Nats generally don’t run against one another and are understood to effectively be two arms of the one party.

I do agree though that it’s a pity that minor parties get so poorly represented in the lower house (when, if allotted proportionally according to national primary vote, the Greens would get something like 15 seats, One Nation 6 and so on), but at least the senate somewhat adjusts for that. There’s a lot to be said for multi-member electorates (as exists in Tasmanian state politics), but there are good arguments for single-seat representation too I reckon. No system is perfect.

[David]

By the way, Antony Green reckons that counting will resume in earnest for Macnamara, Gilmore and Brisbane tomorrow. If I understand correctly it’s quite possible we’ll have an indication of who’s going to win those seats (and, thus, whether or not Labor have won majority government) by the end of the day.

Macnamara in particular has gotten insanely close, with the three parties just a few hundred votes apart in 3CP (that is, once all the other minor party vote preferences have been allocated to either Labor, the Liberals or the Greens and added to their respective primary vote tallies). The Greens can only win if Labor finishes third; otherwise Labor wins if they finish in the top two.

[stui magpie]

[David]

They're the current numbers at this stage of the count. Here's an archived snapshot of the same page from a week ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220522020936/https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/HouseTurnoutByState-27966.htm

I do think the AEC could make it clearer that these are in-progress figures.

[stui magpie]

Yeah it's in progress, but surely they've counted 100% of the votes they've got and would know how many postal votes that they issued, so it's not going to go up much.

[David]

No idea how many are left, to be honest. But since Saturday afternoon (itself a whole 24 hours since the update that Hartcher based his piece on), the total turnout figure has risen by over 100,000. That might not seem like a lot, but it's already enough to turn an apparent –8.54% reduction in turnout in the ACT into –7.09% and a –15.17% downturn in South Australia into –13.64%, for instance (and the fact that the negative swings are that big to begin with makes me suspect that there are still a lot more votes to be counted). So drawing conclusions about single-figure percentage swings in party vote based on provisional figures is jumping the gun to say the least.

[David]

The Greens have won Brisbane, it seems – a fourth lower house seat confirmed! Never thought I'd be saying that …

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/greens-landslide-continues-with-victory-in-fourth-seat-20220528-p5ap9m.html

Macnamara's still up in the air (no news on that front yet), but apparently there's been a big shift to Labor in Gilmore on absentee votes – starting to look a lot like that will be the 76th seat they need, and that they're on track for 77 in total.

[Pies4shaw]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-30/anthony-albanese-and-labor-to-form-majority-government/101084236