IN 2002 Labor was re-elected in a landslide win with 14 seats to seven for the Liberals and four for the Greens.

The times since then and leading up to (and through the count of) the 2006 election have been turbulent ones.

The untimely retirement and subsequent death of Jim Bacon, the resignation of David Crean, the health crisis, Essential Learnings, the Community Forest Agreement, the Recherche Bay buyoff, various minor scandals, the Greens’ push for the Deputy Premiership and Cabinet posts, the Exclusive Brethren, the swing to the Liberals, Peg Putt’s election-night speech, Eric Abetz calling for the Greens to be stripped of party status …

After all that, the following has changed:

Nothing!

I cannot recall or find a single source that publicly predicted 14-7-4 before the election. If anyone has seen one, let me know.

Not only is the result of 14-7-4 exactly the same as in 2002, but the distribution of seats is exactly the same too. Furthermore all of the 23 sitting members who contested the election have been returned, the only changes to the parliament being Lisa Singh replacing the retiring Judy Jackson and Michelle O’Byrne replacing one-termer Kathryn Hay.

This piece examines how the results compare with various predictions, but firstly many things must be said about the standout result, the surprising (not “miraculous”, Southern Cross!) re-election of Kim Booth in Bass with a precarious margin of 136 votes.

An especially feeble performance in this regard came from ABC-TV News, which on the night of Tuesday 28th declared, without qualification, that Booth had fallen too far behind, yet today (Wednesday 29th) went into damage control and said Booth had been written off by the experts (expect similar nonsense in the papers Thursday morning). Not so, or at least, not consistently so.

Very well done to pollbludger

While most of us said Booth was unlikely to win, experts tend to be cagey creatures and rarely (though we all have our bad days) absolutely write off anyone who still has any realistic chance. Usually, we prefer to leave that to the media … and also would prefer that they blame themselves and not us when they turn our “likelies” into “definites” and something unexpected happens.

Furthermore, at least one Australian psephelogical website went against the trend and very well done indeed to William Bowe (http://www.pollbludger.com/346) for hitting the nail on the head, with the following posted on Tuesday 21st: […] it should be recalled that the election night results from 2002 had most expecting a result of 3-1-1, as few could see how Labor could fail to win a third seat after preferences when their aggregate primary vote accounted for 2.95 quotas. Leakage of Labor preferences proved them wrong, and it is at least possible that they might do so again this time. […]

There seems every reason to believe that erstwhile Greens voters who pumped Michelle O’Byrne’s vote up to a remarkable 23.5 per cent sent their subsequent preferences back home to the Greens. Kevin Bonham at the Tasmanian Times, who is without question more on top of this than I am, reckons that “even in an optimistic simulation, assuming 70% of Rochester’s preferences flow to the Greens, factoring in leakage only results in about 0.92 quotas for the Greens to 2.98 for Labor and 2.02 for the Liberals”. But it is not uncommon for unprecedented outcomes to make a nonsense of psephological modelling, and my gut feeling is that this might be one of those occasions.”

An outstanding call, except for the “without question …”! My own election-night assessment was: “This is closer than Lyons and postal votes may be stronger for the Greens but the most likely result is Kim Booth losing to the ALP’s Steve Reissig.” I still had Booth 400 votes behind in projections on Monday 27th and told a few people his chances were “15% at best” (this escaped publication anywhere but it’s fun to own up to these things). It all changed from my perspective on Tuesday 28th when (i) final primary figures showed Booth improving his position significantly just in the last day or two of postal votes when, unlike Morris and McKim, he had not really made much progress through the postal vote counting to that point (ii) the leakage from Michelle O’Byrne (including via Jim Cox) was rather greater than expected. I posted a piece late Tuesday afternoon declaring Bass on the wire and an update later that night saying Booth was now slight favourite. Margaretta Pos picked this up in Crikey and correctly slammed those who were prematurely calling it for Labor, but many media sources (and even a few experts) commenting this morning and today were slow to see the looming upset, still assessing it as a certain or almost certain win to Labor.

Greens have a history of talking up their chances

Naturally Peg Putt was cock-a-hoop about the unexpected result claiming that it vindicated the Greens’ belief that Booth would win. Actually party faithful I spoke to on polling night gave all sorts of assessments of Booth’s chances, from 2% to 50% (well done, you know who you are) to a very probable victory. Furthermore the Greens have a history of talking up their chances, often unrealistically, on polling night — claiming they could still win Braddon in 2002 when they had no real hope of doing so, and most memorably Christine Milne claiming they could still hold all four seats in 1998 when two were gone and a third was very unlikely.

However, they were right about this one, and the biggest humble pie in light of the Bass result should surely be delivered to Liberal Senator Eric Abetz, who repeatedly and then more repeatedly (I lost count of the number of times he said it — could somebody tally them for me?) insisted that the Greens must lose party status in light of the result. It is true that there was a swing away from the Greens and to the Liberals (so that instead of the Libs being 1.5 times as popular as the Greens they are now almost twice as popular) but because of the granularity (see below) of the 25-seat House it has counted for nix in terms of seats and I expect the Greens will now keep their resources and their limousine. Senator Abetz believes the Liberals deserve to be treated as the only legitimate Opposition, but in any other lower house except the ACT, a Liberal Party that could not even get one vote in three would win so few seats that it would be lucky to retain party status.

I now turn to the pre-election predictions and their accuracy or lack thereof.

Firstly everyone who believed a hung parliament was certain or extremely likely way in advance of the election, and that includes many who write for this site (most notably the scurrilous “Hag”) was wrong. Sorry, I just had to rub that in again — I know it hurts, but you just can’t go around writing off governments that opinion polls show to be within a few swing points of a winnable position.

I am aware of four pre-election attempts to call the result in seat terms by serious psephologists. All of us were close but not quite there with four electorates right and one wrong. Peter Tucker on ABC Radio had 13-8-4, while Charles Richardson at Crikey, www.upperhouse.info and I all had 13-7-5 (Richardson differed in getting Braddon right but not Denison).

Three polls were released in the days leading up to the election. EMRS (1000 votes) forecast 11-7-4 with 3 unclear, with Labor probably ahead in two and the Liberals in the third. Newspoll did not give a seat breakdown but gave a percentage breakdown of 50-29-17. TasPoll gave 12-7-5 with one unclear, which I showed as most likely to be a Labor win. Again, all the polls were reasonably close, with none quite hitting the jackpot — notably all overstated the Green vote slightly (I am still pondering the causes and ramifications of this fact.) The one that may have been very close indeed (but we don’t know the exact details of it) was the Labor Party internal poll well out from the election that showed Labor winning the 2PP vote 62-38 against the Liberals.

Now, some final seat-by-seat comments:

Braddon: I thought that if the Greens vote was going to increase this is where it would happen, since the base to build it from was lowest. Not to be. While the vote polled by the Greens could have won them the seat with a lucky distribution, Labor polled too well for this to happen.

Bass: Fortunately I pulled back from tagging this seat a “no-brainer” before my final piece but I never thought the Greens would go anywhere near losing until the votes started to be counted. If anything, it was the risk of 2-2-1 not 3-2-0 that seemed to threaten the 3-1-1 prediction. Really, Labor has to have a good hard look at what it is doing in this electorate in terms of publicity and profile-building. Its star candidates keep leaking ridiculous amounts when this doesn’t happen to it in other electorates, it keeps running six candidates without building a strong profile for a preferred third candidate, and twice in a row it has dropped 1000+ votes in the cutup and failed to turn a quota-plus lead into a win.

Lyons: While the general swing against the Greens put Tim Morris in just a little touch of doubt on election night, on the whole the predicted 3-1-1 held up very well.

Denison: It only became clear not long out from the election what was going to happen here and the results were really no great surprise. Some points of interest included Michael Hodgman easily holding off Fabian Dixon (many thought this would be closer) and Graeme Sturges struggling somewhat on preferences and going within less than 1000 votes of being beaten by Louise Sullivan, while Lisa Singh bolted in.

Franklin: Everyone thought this would be close. In the end it wasn’t really as Will Hodgman leaked far more than Paul Lennon and Paula Wriedt continued to gather leakage from everywhere while the Liberals’ lack of profile apart from Hodgman did them in. I flagged the likelihood of Labor winning from behind in my final predictions. I should have stuck with that on polling night but foolishly gave Goodwin a strong chance in view of the far lower than expected Green preferences. As my previous updates showed, the progress of the count and a close look at past results soon revealed the error of these ways. Also credit to Charles Richardson for getting this one right:

“I see the most likely outcome as Labor 15, Liberals 7 and Greens 3, although many commentators are saying 14-8-3. The difference is the last seat in Franklin, where the second Liberal and third ALP are both short of a quota (by 1.75% and 2.77% respectively), but Labor seems slightly better placed — the Liberal vote is more concentrated in its lead candidate, so there is more opportunity for leakage, and any leftover Greens vote is more likely to go to Labor. The difference is the last seat in Franklin, where the second Liberal and third ALP are both short of a quota (by 1.75% and 2.77% respectively), but Labor seems slightly better placed — the Liberal vote is more concentrated in its lead candidate, so there is more opportunity for leakage, and any leftover Greens vote is more likely to go to Labor.”

Franklin is a model of how to do it right for Labor — they backed their three high-profile candidates with two candidates who would poll modest parcels of votes but create no serious leakage issues.

Leakage was the big psephelogical issue in this cutup. I have not had the opportunity to look at detailed stats yet but I sense that there was generally more of it than in previous elections and that this threw many projections astray. Partly this reflected sitting members down on primaries but picking up preferences from everywhere due to their high profile at times when they normally would have been over the line and home, but I wonder if it’s not just that. Possibly there is a degree of weariness with the antics of all three parties.

Lastly, a comment on a major issue in the 25-seat house, granularity. At this election we have seen a 4.5% swing to the Liberal Party create no change in their representation, while Labor has polled 44.8%. 51.9% and 49.3% at successive elections without any change in its vote. Had the last three elections been held with the same proportions of votes and a single 25-seat electorate, these could have been the results:

1998: 11 Labor, 10 Liberal, 3 Green, 1 Tas First (actual result 14-10-1-0)
2002: 13 Labor, 7 Liberal, 5 Green (actual result 14-7-4)
2006: 13 Labor, 8 Liberal, 4 Green (actual result 14-7-4).

So not only does the 25-seat system tend to slightly advantage the most popular party (no surprises there) but it is not very sensitive to significant changes in support. The Liberals deserved, based on the swing to them, to take a seat off the Greens. However this did not happen, because the Liberals had close-ish losses in Lyons and Franklin but the Greens had a close-ish win in Lyons and an extremely close one in Bass. The long-term ramifications of the Greens outdoing the Liberals when it came to the “marginal seats” could be rather profound for both parties.

Kevin Bonham reckons even he could beat the Christian Democrats, and notes that for the first time in any election with more than ten candidates, the candidate he put last (the vote he thinks the most about, of course) was good enough to finish there!