Gaven review

The Gaven result was perfect for Queensland Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg in three respects.

First, it confirmed the Nationals could win an outer urban seat in southeast Queensland, so long as the Liberals agreed on terms beforehand.

Second, the swing looked small enough for Peter Beattie to hold his job as Labor Premier until the next state election, and remain, according to our on-line polls, as a Coalition electoral asset.

Third, when we allow for the personal vote of former Gaven MP Bob Poole, the swing against Labor in Gaven was worse than Chatsworth last August, meaning Springborg is still on track to be premier and clearly in the lead, but without the pressures associated with being the frontrunner.

Point One

The Labor Party, when in government would normally hold Gaven. It is a fast growing, outer urban, blue-collar seat, typical of the 60 state seats within the southeastern region.

Table 1 shows selected Industry Census figures for the three seats in which by-elections have been held since last August. We can see here that all three seats are essentially urban, in terms of industry, with Gaven containing fewer farmers than either Chatsworth or Redcliffe and well below the state mean.

Table 1. Selected male industry for by-election seats

Table 1 and 2 together show a picture of Gaven as less upper white collar than Chatsworth, with fewer Professional and Para professional males, but similar to the State average. Gaven contains more skilled blue-collar trades workers than either the state average or the blue-collar seat of Redcliffe.

Table 2. Selected male occupations for by-election seats

From the above tables, Gaven would therefore be expected to return a similar Labor vote to that for Queensland as a whole, perhaps a little better. In 2004 Gaven recorded a vote of 55 per cent two-party preferred (2PP) for Labor MP Bob Poole, compared to a mean of some 55 per cent for Labor across all 89 seats.

If strong urban style National candidates like Dr Alex Douglas can win Gaven, with a preferred vote of 53.3 per cent, then similar National Party candidates can beat Labor in the marginal to comfortable Labor seats among the fast-growing outer urban southeastern band of seats surrounding Brisbane.

Despite some speculation, the voter turnout in Gaven of 82.3 per cent was not low for a by-election, when compared to 86.5 per cent for Chatsworth and 87.8 per cent for the stable seat of Redcliffe, in the August 2005 by-elections. Gaven in 2004 had a 3 per cent lower turnout than these two seats.

When we compare like for like, and look at Gaven relative to the 2001 by-election for another Gold Coast seat, Surfers Paradise, we see only 77.7 per cent of Surfers Paradise enrolled voters actually voted at their 2001 by-election, despite there being 12 candidates to get out the vote, and with candidates from all three major parties and a very strong field of independents, including the ultimate winner Lex Bell.

The persistent low turnout in Gaven, compared to the formal roll, means nothing other than Gaven, with 32,223 enrolments, is a faster growing, younger Gold Coast seat, with a huge turnover of voters and many of them nominally on the Gaven roll on election day would have moved out in the previous months.

ALP campaigners knew this, which is why they letterboxed the seat urging electors to get out and vote just before the poll.

Many of the Labor votes that swung against Labor in Gaven went first to an independent, Daren Riley, instead of directly to the National candidate, Alex Douglas, who nonetheless polled a primary vote of 42.5 per cent.

This in no way contradicts the fact that this 42.5 per cent primary vote was a stunning improvement on the Nationals’ starting position on March 1 and 2, of only 8 per cent, according to the TNS Gaven poll.

Whichever way you slice this statistical cake, the Queensland Nationals, led by Lawrence Springborg, came from nowhere in one short month, to win a comfortable Labor seat in Labor’s outer urban, blue-collar heartland.

Apart from Labor, the real losers of the Gaven campaign were the Queensland Greens, who gave Labor preferences they couldn’t deliver for a cruise terminal they didn’t want, lost primary votes as a result, and now have a post-Gaven state government decision to review uranium mining in Queensland.

Point Two

Gaven is an extremely volatile seat, in terms of its demographic profile, but the headline swing in Gaven last Saturday seemed to be less than that observed last August in Chatsworth and Redcliffe, indicating to some that the swing against the State Government was moderating.

When we look at the likely swing in any electorate, we first look at the demographic profile of the seat, to see if it contains disproportionate numbers of politically volatile groups. If it does, it will tend to swing more than average.

In Australia, if you’re a political candidate looking for swinging voters, you should begin your search at Child Care Centres and simply wait for the mums to arrive.

Mothers of pre-school age children have typically moved from two incomes and a highly geared mortgage down to a single income and child birth, and then slowly back to sustainable family incomes, as the mother moves from being a permanent at-home carer, to a part time carer and then a full time worker.

This is why every Government since the post World War II baby boom has come up with similar policy initiatives for young mums and why we now have federal government family tax packages. It’s a cost effective way of buying swinging voters with our tax dollars.

Table 3 below, shows Gaven to have disproportionate percentages of 0 to 4-year-old girls, and correspondingly disproportionate percentages of their mothers, in the 30 to 34-year age group. Gaven is just ahead of Chatsworth and well ahead of Redcliffe, a much older seat, containing high percentages of 80-plus females, who do not change their vote.

Table 3. Selected female age groups for by-election seats

We would expect therefore, any swings in Gaven, to be much greater than Redcliffe, a little larger than Chatsworth and a little ahead of Queensland as a whole. Figures for income and mortgage levels confirm this analysis.

When we look at the swing in the three by-election seats however, see Table 4, below, we see a different picture. In the two by-elections, held last August, the two party preferred swings were much higher in Chatsworth, than that in Gaven and the stable seat of Redcliffe was almost the same.

Table 4. Two Party Preferred swings in by-election seats 2004-5

It would appear therefore, on this superficial analysis, that the State Government was “clawing back” the anti-Labor swing from last year’s by-elections.

This is currently translated into the Premier keeping his job, providing what seems from our ABC online research, to be a significant advantage for Lawrence Springborg and the Coalition. As one senior Labor figure agitating for a leadership change told me this week: forget your research mate, even Lassie knows he’s had it.

Lassie however had not been briefed on our latest ABC online polling, which shows the Coalition leading the Beattie Government on the issues of health, water, infrastructure, roads, road transport, crime, the state economy, population growth, rail transport, urban planning and public transport.

The Government remains ahead of the Coalition on Aboriginal issues, industrial relations, the environment (this was taken before the post-Gaven back flip on uranium mining), education and unemployment.

Education, administered by new Minister Rod Welford, represents the one major plus for the Labor Government, while Energy Minister John Mickel has done a good job taking the electricity distribution crisis off the front pages. Voters also like seeing the State Government oppose the Federal Government’s IR changes.

Point Three

By looking at the adjusted swing in Gaven in the context of Chatsworth and Redcliffe we can see who is really in front.

Australians seem to be more interested in cricket than politics, understandably enough, so we use expensive slow-motion cameras and sophisticated computer software to track the imaginary flight of a cricket ball after it has hit a batman’s pads, and small microphones and images of sound wave patterns to detect if a slight snick was off the bat or the pads.

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.

(One of Poole’s former Labor Caucus colleagues assured me on by-election day this 2 per cent was an underestimate and that it was more like 5 per cent. If it was, you can’t have it both ways and claim that this negative personal vote didn’t hold back Labor’s 2004 vote in Gaven. If it did, then the real anti-Labor by-election swing in Gaven was even bigger).

When we try to calculate a swing for the three seats, rather than using the 2004 vote, we should be comparing the adjusted party votes in 2004 (2004 Predicted 2PP votes, below) with the actual 2PP votes for new and comparatively unknown candidates in 2005-6.

This comparison is shown below, in Table 6.

Table 6. The swing corrected for personal votes in by-election seats

Table 6 shows the corrected swing. This shows that the swing in Gaven was larger than that in Chatsworth and well ahead of the more stable electorate of Redcliffe.

This 2PP result in Gaven of 46.6 per cent is within one per cent of the 46 per cent, which was predicted from the modelling we conducted of the Chatsworth and Redcliffe swings last August (and published in The Courier-Mail of March 9), showing little had changed, in terms of the public opinion of the State Government in the interim, despite all the changes announced to Queensland Health.

When we apply the same modelling to other Queensland seats, we find Labor’s likely tally of seats in 2007 (if the opinion of the State Government and the Opposition remain unchanged and this is a pretty big assumption) to be in the mid 30s, leaving a Coalition firmly in control of the 89 member House of Assembly.

Within the Coalition, the early projections, not yet updated for Gaven, show the Nationals on 27 seats in Coalition with the Liberals on 20, with Independents on six.

This balance between the three major parties looks pretty similar to the Queensland House of Assembly between 1957, when the Coalition returned to power after an extended period of conservative Labor Governments, until 1974, when Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen began winning state seats at the expense of an unpopular Whitlam ALP Federal Government.

History tends to repeat itself politically every 30 years or so, with John Bjelke-Petersen contesting his father’s former stronghold, now called Nanango, and Prime Minister John Howard presumably wondering what a change of state government in Queensland could mean for his current dominance of Queensland’s federal seats, where the ALP now holds only 6 out of 28, soon to be 29.

There are few things more attractive to a Queensland premier than an opposing government in Canberra, to bash, and Canberra also finds it pretty convenient too, with eight state and territory Labor Governments living in a comfortable symbiosis with the Coalition Government in Canberra.

We are soon to live in very interesting times.