Victorians likely to leave Andrews scarred

26 November 2022

Voters in Victoria might well know tonight whether the Labor Party governs for a third straight term or if the Coalition takes power. The latter possibility is considered remote, but I’ve seen too many elections to write it off – though I still tip the former, albeit after a close call.

Daniel Andrews led Labor to a decent victory at an election in 2014, and increased his majority at the next election, in 2018. At first glance, with the Coalition hardly having given voters that much of a reason to turn its way, few would give it a chance. However, as we all know, events since 2018 can hardly be described as normal for governments anywhere.

When Australia was caught up in a massive outbreak of coronavirus which spread from another country and triggered a global pandemic in 2020, governments were forced to shut most places and things down, and people had to stay clear of each other in order to limit how far that virus could spread. In Victoria, Andrews was very firm in locking the State down – but many would say that he was too firm. Even then, his pandemic management was very bad, and there were many outbreaks and deaths as a result. Many Victorians have staged massive protests against lockdowns and the loss of freedoms, with some of these turning really violent. Although many restrictions have eased over time, resentment remains in many parts of Victoria.

Beyond the coronavirus and the pandemic, Victoria currently isn’t in the best shape. The State economy is heavily in debt, and some scandals have plagued Labor, even as Andrews has done much to upgrade and improve infrastructure, particularly through the removal of lots of archaic level crossings from railways all around Melbourne. Added to this, Andrews has perceivably become more arrogant as Premier. Indeed I know about an Independent campaign against the Premier in his own seat, in Melbourne’s east, which the Coalition can’t win.

But the Coalition, as noted earlier, hasn’t exactly given voters much of a reason to change their minds in a State election contest, ending today. Notwithstanding some shortcomings in power of Andrews, and an apparent growth in Victorians who really dislike him, there’s a distinct lack of confidence among the masses in the Coalition, and this means that Labor looks like winning.

This disillusionment among voters will see more crossbenchers elected, because Independents, and to some extent the Greens, can benefit from voter rejection of both Labor and the Coalition.

At the 2018 election, Labor won 55 of 88 seats and the Coalition won 27. The remaining seats went to a trio of Greens and a trio of Independents.

Since then, an electoral redistribution has changed most seat boundaries and margins. Electoral redistributions usually happen every ten years or so, because of population change and the need to give each seat as near as possible to an equal number of voters. This redistribution has seen six Labor-held seats and three Coalition seats abolished, but nine new seats have emerged.

I tip Labor to win five of the new seats, and the Coalition to win three of them. Labor should win Ashwood, Eureka, Greenvale, Kalkallo, and Laverton. The Coalition should win Berwick, Glen Waverley, and Pakenham. As for the ninth seat, Point Cook, I’d have tipped Labor to win it under normal circumstances, but I’m tipping an Independent to win.

I tip the Coalition to win Bass, Bayswater, Hawthorn, Nepean, and Ringwood – all seats going to Labor in 2018. The Coalition should also win Morwell, in the Gippsland region, left vacant by the retirement of Independent MP Russell Northe.

But I also tip the Coalition to lose Benambra, Caulfield, and Kew to Independents.

Apart from the aforementioned seats from 2018, I tip Labor to lose Melton to an Independent, and Richmond to the Greens.

Plenty of other seats could also change hands in this election, but I expect that they’ll ultimately stay unchanged – albeit not without some really close contests.

Victorians look likely to leave Andrews scarred once the results are all in. But I tip him to hold power with a small majority. Opinion polls suggest a swing of about 3-4 per cent against Labor here, so I expect that Labor will have 47 seats and the Coalition will have 30. This would mean an election which Labor wins narrowly.

As for the Upper House of State Parliament, where Labor lacks a majority and there are several minor parties holding the balance of power, things look like remaining that way.

Governments often struggle to win three terms in power, but the Andrews Government appears likely to achieve this feat. The close result today probably won’t deny Andrews this triumph.

Seselja’s ten years between lightning strikes

21 November 2022

Does lightning strike twice? Some people think so and some people think not. We might well argue over the answer to that question forever.

But I wonder if Zed Seselja could be forgiven for thinking that lightning has struck him twice, with the first strike coming ten years before the second.

He lost his Senate seat in a Federal election earlier this year, and was among several big election casualties for the Liberal Party, which lost office after nine years in it. This could be considered his second “strike”, with his first “strike” taking place a decade ago. In fact, last month marked the tenth anniversary of that first strike.

To understand this, we need to go back to the time of that first strike, in October 2012, and what happened in the years leading up to it.

During 2010, the Labor Party managed to hold power after losing its majority in a close Federal election result. It only hung on after winning the support of crossbenchers who held the balance of power in the House of Representatives.

After that Federal election, the Liberals and their affiliated parties won major elections all over the country during the following two years. They won general elections in Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, and the Northern Territory. In each of these elections, Labor governments were defeated after more than ten years in power, so perhaps their time was thought to be up.

But another factor to consider was the nastiness of the Liberals and their allies, and particularly from the Federal level, as they seethed over their narrow 2010 loss and were stopping at almost nothing to get the balance-of-power crossbenchers to withdraw their support for Labor, so that there could be a fresh election. Tony Abbott was then leading the Liberals, and we hardly need reminding of how nasty and divisive he was. During this time, the Liberals fought ferociously for voters to turf Labor out at other elections – and they largely succeeded, until they eventually got the big prize of a Federal election victory in 2013.

However, there was one election where Labor managed to withstand this onslaught. In October 2012, Labor only just held power at an election in the Australian Capital Territory. Here Labor won the same number of seats as the Liberals. The balance of power was lying with one Green, who – as you might’ve guessed – gave his support to Labor and enabled it to keep governing.

This is as close as the Liberals have come to winning an election in the ACT since losing power there in 2001. And leading the ACT Liberals to that close result was Seselja.

Labor arguably stopped the rot following its losses elsewhere, while Seselja was the one Liberal loser during a time when leaders of the Liberals and their allies were winning elections.

In hindsight, this loss in October 2012 was Seselja’s first lightning strike.

A year later, Seselja switched to Federal politics, winning a Senate seat in the ACT. He actually got there after winning a preselection vote, to be the leading ACT Liberal Senate candidate, over Gary Humphries, who was previously ACT Chief Minister and had led the Liberals to that 2001 election loss. Humphries later switched to Federal politics, filling a Senate seat left vacant after the resignation of Liberal stalwart Margaret Reid. As such, both Humphries and Seselja walked down the same path, of losing an election in the ACT and then entering the Senate.

Seselja held his Senate seat at a few elections. But this year, he lost his seat to an Independent candidate, in the form of former rugby union footballer David Pocock. He was the first person from outside both Labor and the Liberals to win a Senate seat in the ACT since it first obtained Senate representation in 1975.

Losing that ACT Senate seat was a blow for the Liberals, and for Seselja. One could therefore consider this to be Seselja’s second lightning strike, after his 2012 ACT election loss.

But with this year’s defeat coming a decade after Seselja led the ACT Liberals to that very close election loss, one could consider the two losses together to represent Seselja’s ten years between lightning strikes – although nobody could’ve predicted this stuff as such.

The next Federal election will show whether ACT voters come to like Pocock, at least enough for him to hold his Senate seat. He made history in winning that seat, at the expense of Seselja, whose days in politics look done. The Liberals might take time to win that Senate seat back.

Reading teal threats the wrong way

13 November 2022

Sydney’s northern beaches will look a little different next March. This relates to an upcoming State election in New South Wales. The Liberal Party holds all State seats on the northern beaches at this time, but most of the incumbent MPs there will retire in March – hence the different look to come.

The seats in question wouldn’t normally be watched. Admittedly, the Labor Party actually managed to win two seats on the northern beaches in the 1970s, when Neville Wran was Premier. But that era has long since passed.

Apart from during the Wran Labor era, the Liberals have normally held these seats, but at times Independents have also held them. And in light of events earlier this year, there is talk of Independents taking these seats next March.

When Australians went to the polls for a Federal election in May, the Liberals lost a number of seats to Independents, which Labor really couldn’t win. One of the seats on the northern beaches had fallen to an Independent a few years earlier, but in May the other seat there also fell, as did another two seats based in Sydney. Three similar seats in other parts of Australia – two of them based in Melbourne and one of them based in Perth – fell as well.

Common features in these seats were that the winning Independents were all women, and that voters there had lost faith in the Liberals, particularly over climate change and corruption and women’s issues. But no matter how much the Liberals upset these voters, they distrusted Labor more, because they saw Labor as obsessed with wealth redistribution, through higher taxes on wealthy people, and they hated left-wing perceptions of them as tax cheats becoming wealthy through pure luck instead of hard work.

Possibly because they liked economic policies of the Liberals and their party colour of blue, but had green tinges with their interest in environmental issues such as climate change, to which they saw the Liberal response as disinterest or denial, they might well have made the Independents adapt the description of “teal” – being a colour somewhere between blue and green.

Zali Steggall, the Independent who won Warringah from the Liberals in 2019, ran with teal campaign colours. This year, those other Independents winning Liberal seats beyond Labor’s reach, thereby emulating her success, somehow earned the description of “teals”, even if they used other colours in campaigns.

Personally, I tipped three of the six teals to win seats in May’s election. I got the seats of Mackellar and Wentworth and Goldstein correct, but I got North Sydney and Kooyong and Curtin wrong.

Mackellar was the other seat on Sydney’s northern beaches, situated alongside Warringah, while North Sydney was also alongside Warringah and Wentworth was in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Both Goldstein and Kooyong were situated in eastern Melbourne, and Curtin was in western Perth. And apart from Celia Hammond in Curtin, the fallen Liberals in the “teal wave” were men.

Here I bring up gender, because of perceptions that the Liberals care little for women’s issues, as well as a perception of Liberal men being seen as the main casualties of the teal wave. In a sense, the defeat of one Liberal woman here is virtually overlooked.

Now the Liberals in NSW look like choosing women as candidates for certain seats where threats from teal candidates might emerge before March. Should this be so, they’re probably reading the potential teal threats the wrong way.

Already they’ve chosen a woman to run for Vaucluse, a State seat overlapped by Wentworth, which fell to a teal in the Federal election in May. Going back to the northern beaches, they might choose two women currently in the Upper House of Parliament as candidates in two of the seats falling vacant. Another teal gain in May, Mackellar, fully overlaps one of the State seats in question, and partially overlaps the other seats.

Do the Liberals think that choosing women will shield them from teal threats?

No disrespect is meant to the Liberal women in question. They may turn out to be incredibly popular among locals in the seats that they seek. But to what extent would their popularity count? History has shown, at times, that when voters are really angry with a political party or leader, even though they might actually love the local MP or candidate representing that party or leader, local popularity doesn’t stop that MP or candidate from losing a seat.

If the Liberals are really unpopular at the local level in any of their seats when the election comes, even really popular candidates running in those seats will struggle to win, whether Labor or a teal or someone else is the big threat.

The prospect of a teal wave in NSW, or also in Victoria with a State election happening later this month, might make for some interesting contests.