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Griffith by-election result bad news for Tony Abbott

By Graham Young - posted Monday, 10 February 2014


When I sat down to write this my thesis was that the Griffith by-election was more or less a draw.

Bill Glasson, the LNP candidate, picked up 1.41% on first preferences, and moved closer to winning by 0.74% on a two-party preferred basis, but even after preferences, just fell short, with Terry Butler for Labor winning with 52.27% of the 2PP vote.

Or at least that is how things stood at close of counting on Sunday.

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On the basis that my colleague John Black thinks from his modelling that Kevin Rudd's personal vote was around 3%, then the net result was a swing against you of 2.26%.

This is not good, but tolerable, particularly given history where electors tend to vote against governments at by-elections, and where an opposition has only once lost a seat to the government in a by-election, and that was almost 100 years ago in Kalgoorlie.

But those who look at historical precedents, and leave it at that, are not doing their job properly.

Kevin Rudd was a phenomenon, and rewrote the historical precedents, and when I got around to looking at his personal vote in Griffith, it was phenomenal.

On the basis of my analysis, this should have been an easy Liberal win. That Labor maintained their margin is a tribute to their campaign, and a warning to you that if you are going to roll back the tide of Labor legislation, you have a big job in front of you.

John Black has a complicated model based on inferential statistics which profiles key demographics in seats around the country to arrive at his forecasts.

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My model for working out a personal vote for a federal seat is quite different. What you do is compare the first preference Senate vote in the seat against the House of Representatives first preference vote, and you then compare it to the state averages.

The Senate vote for the majors is always slightly lower than their House of Representatives vote, but it is generally devoid of local voting factors. So, once you have captured the general difference across the state between the lower and upper house votes, you can make a rough stab at what the personal votes are in individual seats.

Across Queensland at the last federal election the Labor first preference Senate vote was 28.52%, and in the House of Representatives it was 29.77%, a difference of 1.25%.

The previous election the figures were 29.39% and 33.58% for a difference of 4.19%.

What we see when we look at Griffith is at the last election the figures were 30.36% in the senate and 40.36% in the House of Representatives – a difference of 10%.

While not all of that is personal vote, it is safe to say that somewhere around 8% to 9% is.

So, taking out the 3.01% swing Glasson needed to win, this is in effect a swing away from the Government of around 5% or 8%.

There are three things which tend to confirm this analysis.

One is that the ALP claims that Glasson was up 9% at one stage in the campaign and that they pulled it back at the end.

Another is that Glasson has refused to concede defeat hoping that postal and early votes will carry him over the top.

Early and postal votes often reflect the state of play early in a campaign, so if the default position was a 9% swing to the Libs with the loss to Labor of Rudd's personal vote, then that would have reflected in the Liberals polling, and give them some hope they could pick up the difference from these votes.

The last is the fact that the ALP ran television ads during the campaign, at least one in the middle of My Kitchen Rules (I mention this because it wouldn't have been a cheap spot).

It is very unusual for parties to do television advertising in a by-election because most of the people who watch the ad will not be voters in the electorate, and TV ads are expensive.

Labor was very worried that they were going to lose this one, and were labouring under the load of Kevin's last poisoned chalice – his personal vote.

The problem for Labor with this by-election is that most commentators don't bother to try to analyse personal votes, and so all of the coverage I have read takes the figures at face value.

That means they call the result a draw.

But imagine if the result had gone where it could have with the loss of Rudd's personal vote?

A big swing would have called into question all the polling showing that Abbott could lose an election and convinced pundits that they were mere vanity polls.

A big swing would have convinced pundits that Bill Shorten was in trouble.

No wonder that Labor threw so much into the campaign – not just television ads, but a cyclone of robo-calls in the last weeks.

While superficially the result is not bad news for Abbott, the same applies in reverse. That Labor was able to pull the result back with their campaign says that he is vulnerable.

Labor's campaign was dishonest – it concentrated on "cuts", which had not occurred, or in the case of a Medicare "co-payment", were not even in contemplation (although the Liberal candidate helped them out with some unwary comments on the last).

In fact, given that the biggest swings against Glasson were in lower income areas, as well as the hospital votes, the "co-payment" may well have been the decisive issue.

If Abbott goes into the next election with the suspicion that there are more cuts to come, then Bill Shorten may prove to be just as effective an opposition leader as Abbott was.

On the evidence, it will not matter what Abbott actually intends to do – he appears to be vulnerable to scare campaigns on what he "might" do.

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About the Author

Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.

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