This weekend’s seen the latest installment in the ‘media narrative’; demands in The Australian for either a Labor leadership change or a quick cave-in by Kevin Rudd to the mining industry on the RSPT (which would, of course, in the unlikely event it became a reality, produce even more demands for a leadership change). The way this move’s been played has been to round up an assortment of alleged “Labor luminaries”: Peter Walsh, Graham Richardson, and most egregiously, former Queensland Treasurer Keith De Lacy, who now sits on the board of a coal mining company, a fact which has been conveniently obscured by talking up his anti-Rudd rhetoric.
On the slightly calmer side of the fence, analysts have continued to point to the fact that:
the minority Greens have gained more than the Coalition from the fall in support for the government and Green preferences will eventually flow back to Labor…
A lot of the assumptions people have been making about the prospective outcome of this year’s election, however, might be wrong.
Let’s deal with them in turn:
First, we have to question what Possum calls the “ALP Protected Left Flank Hypothesis”. This is something I commented on in an earlier post, and if you haven’t read Possum’s superb and analytically rich post on Greens preferences, you really must.
The hypothesis Possum refers to underlies the sorts of commentary we see all over the place (and the example above from Geoffrey Barker at Inside Story is just that), and it would seem, the strategic thinking of ALP apparatchiks and consultants:
This theory relies on the assumption that there are a fixed number of left leaning voters that nearly all give the ALP their two party preferred vote. According to the theory, as left voters move from the ALP to the Greens, the ALP primary vote goes down, the Green primary vote goes up and the rate of Greens preference flows to the ALP increases as a result of these ex-ALP-come-Greens voters sending their two party preferred preferences back to Labor in very substantial numbers.
But this is not, he argues, what the polls have actually been showing:
as the Coalition primary vote has increased, so too has the size of the Greens preference flows to the Coalition – from a low of 15% in November through to a high of 32% this month. In functional terms, the observable relationship between the Coalition primary vote and Greens preference flow is the same as the relationship between the ALP primary vote and Greens preference flows – as the generic popularity of a major party increases (measured by the size of their own primary vote), the size of the preference flow they receive from the Greens increases as well.
The only real difference between the ALP and the Coalition in this regard is the actual base level of Greens preference flows each party starts off with as a minimum level – with Labor probably starting from a minimum of around 60% and the Coalition starting from a minimum of around 15%.
A substantial number of Greens voters – at least around 20% – appear to be swinging voters in terms of their preference allocations, behaving just like voters that swing between the major parties, except they do so with their preferences.
Possum concludes:
As we see from the Nielsen data, increased generic popularity delivers primary votes and preference flows. If a party is popular generally, that popularity also becomes reflected via increased Greens preferences.
Secondly, state based polls recently have been absolutely dire for Labor, and if the ALP vote is as weak as Galaxy in Queensland and Westpoll in WA indicate, then there are also implications for the composition of the Senate (if these polls are accurately measuring voting intentions, then they would translate into a Labor loss in the House of Representatives, as indicated by Nielsen last Monday).
I was initially inclined to discount Westpoll on the grounds of its small sample size, but I’m not so sure now after reading William Bowe’s analysis at The Poll Bludger:
The catch is that with a sample of just 400, the poll has a margin of error of about 5 per cent. However, it accords with the 63-37 result from WA in the most recent Nielsen poll, which would have involved a sample of about 150. If you add the two polls together, the margin of error comes down to about 4 per cent. At the lower end of that range is a swing against Labor of 4 or 5 per cent, which is what last week’s Brand poll pointed to if you distributed preferences as per the 2007 election.
Bowe goes on to make the important point that such low levels of ALP support also imperil the party’s vote in the Senate, and therefore change the calculations of what happens in the Senate more generally.
So, thirdly, we shouldn’t be assuming a Senate where The Greens hold the balance of power, because that is predicated on what Bowe now calls the “unsafe assumption” that Labor will win the election, and that Labor’s numbers in various states will improve, and the Coalition’s fall.
There are two factors here:
(a) The fight for the last spot often necessitates a flow of preferences from the major parties after they have attained quota; if Labor polls poorly in Senate primaries, there might not be sufficient preferences to elect a Green in the sixth spot in some states, if that candidate doesn’t attain quota;
(b) If the Coalition’s primary vote improves, and Labor’s continues to be at dire levels, the chance of the Coalition holding its own, or even picking up another seat or two, improves concomitantly.
Senate polling is rare and unreliable, but it’s obviously wrong to just proceed on the basis of previous assumptions made about the Senate outcome, if the picture in the House of Representatives is a prospective Labor defeat.
In short, things are not looking good.
