Gaven review

Yet our political commentators and their obsessions with uniform swings, associated swing pendulums, and their recycling of post-election spin, seem time locked in some black and white television world of the 50s, as dated as Richie Benaud flogging Victas in his baggy creams.

With some of them, you can almost hear the pencil tapping the coconut shell and Alan McGillivray’s reassuring tones in the foreground, confirming the wisdom of the umpire’s call from the ticker tape reports.

In Gaven we are not comparing the performance of one candidate from one party in the 2004 election with the same candidate from the same party in the following by-election. In Gaven in fact, we are looking at two different candidates for the Labor Party, opposing two different candidates from two different Coalition parties.

In Redcliffe and Chatsworth, we were looking at the same opposing parties, but different ALP candidates. In fact, out of the three seats and three major parties, only one candidate, the Liberal Terry Rogers, contested 2004 and the by-election - and he won.

What happens when a sitting member retires, or dies, and forces a by-election is that the personal vote of that sitting member is lost, and normally distributes back to the party from which it was taken.

A two-party preferred vote is just that: a closed system, where there are two parties and a personal vote won by a candidate from one party is taken from the vote that would otherwise be won by the candidate from the other party.

Former Queensland Treasurer and MP for Chatsworth Terry Mackenroth, all parties acknowledge, was a canny long term sitting member with an excellent personal vote. A lot of Liberal supporters voted for Mackenroth in 2004, and took their votes off the official Liberal candidate, but later returned to the fold in 2005 to vote for prominent local Liberal Michael Caltabiano at the by-election.

On the other hand, Bob Poole, the former Labor member for Gaven, was unpopular in his electorate and with his ALP branch members. A lot of Labor supporters voted against him in 2004, but returned to the ALP fold to vote for new Labor candidate, Phil Gray, at the by-election.

So, the 2004 votes for the ALP sitting members for Chatsworth, Redcliffe and Gaven need to be adjusted for the loss of this personal vote component of the ALP 2004 2PP vote, before they can be compared with the Labor by-election votes, where, with respect to all, none of them really had the time to obtain a personal vote.

Our computer modelling allows us to do this as we’ve been benchmarking MPs using demographic data by electorates for more than 30 years and our modelling estimates of the personal votes (residuals) of three sitting members is set out in Table 5, below.

Table 5. Predicted, observed and residual votes in by election seats 2004.

Here we see Terry Mackenroth pulled up the Labor vote in Chatsworth by 5.7 per cent, and obtained a vote of 61.4 per cent in 2004, compared with the computer projection of 55.7 per cent. Similarly, Ray Hollis was worth plus 3.9 per cent to the Redcliffe ALP vote, while the unfortunate Mr Poole was worth minus 2 per cent to the Gaven ALP campaign.