Gaven review

(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.