The definitive analysis: Legislative Council elections (Pt 2)

Peter Tucker and Kevin Bonham
This is the second part of a two-part series on Tasmania’s May 2 Legislative Council elections. The first part ( online here and with pictures here ) gave general background on the candidates and the electorates. This part briefly discusses the campaigns, and considers the likely outcomes of each of the three seats.
Derwent

Derwent has been Labor-held since 1979. In that year Charles Batt won it with an outright majority against two opponents, one of them the incumbent. Labor has retained the seat five times, each time with an outright majority.

In the absence of any high-profile bone of contention, at this election Derwent is essentially a referendum on the current Labor government’s performance and Treasurer Aird’s performance within it. But Aird has three major advantages in this referendum. Firstly he is facing it on extremely favourable territory. In the 2006 state election for the lower house, votes for the three main parties within Derwent split about 66% Labor, 23.5% Liberal and 11.5% Green, with Labor winning every booth and outpolling the Liberals and Greens combined in all but three. Secondly Aird is going to the polls as incumbent Treasurer with the global financial downturn yet to seriously bite his electorate (or indeed most of his state) and safely ahead of what could be a tough and unpopular budget, and thirdly his opponents are not especially dangerous.

Candidate selection has less impact on Green voters than voters of other parties, so it is unlikely Susan Gunter’s relatively low public profile will count against her, and Green voters are a forgiving lot, so there shouldn’t be much damage to the party’s brand from the Harry Quick candidancy farce. The Greens did poll 22.7% in Derwent in 2003 but that was as the lone opposition; it will be impressive if they get near that again this time. Assuming the Greens’ good run from the 2007 federal election, the 2008 council elections and the 2008 seat of Huon continues, they might poll something in mid teens.

Jenny Branch has a rather high profile as the state Parents and Friends Association President and a Glenorchy City Council alderman. (Derwent includes a small portion of Glenorchy). Given her P+F profile, her performance in being elected to the GCC was unremarkable (first-attempt wins on any city council cannot be sneezed at, but compare Elise Archer’s far more comfortable win in Hobart.) Branch entered the Derwent fray at a relatively late stage and her exit from the Liberal Party only just before nomination suggests this is a profile run to boost her chances at Council if not State level (the door is not yet firmly closed for Denison 2010). It is hardly an electorate where association with the Liberal Party at any time in the previous decade will win the candidate too many brownie points with the voters.

Notwithstanding the above, some backlash against Labor may occur. Although Aird is a very solid performer who has generally kept out of scandals and nonsense, he is not the most dynamic communicator and his Government has had a turbulent run almost since its day of re-election. The election may be seen by some voters as a chance to send some kind of message. There was, however, little if any backlash when Labor Pembroke MLC Allison Ritchie faced the polls in 2007, and while Aird is much more closely tied to the Government’s fate, the party’s standing with the voters now is at least no worse than then.

Michael Aird will be returned and should poll an outright majority. Indicative ranges are 55-65% for Michael Aird, 20-35% for Jenny Branch and 10-17% for Susan Gunter. Anything above or below these ranges will be an excellent or poor result for the candidate concerned.

Windermere

Windermere is the most issues-based of the three campaigns. The long-running pulp mill saga loomed from afar as the campaign focus, but incumbent Ivan Dean, an ex-police commander, has diverted to his strong suit (“Laura Norder”) with calls for tougher penalties for hooning and attention to bikie gangs. The Launceston General Hospital has been a prominent issue with Peter Kaye’s campaign forcing others to address it, and Dean has pushed the independence card in an unsurprising swipe at Kathryn Hay’s (not very?) Independent Labor status.

The pulp mill has given voters the full gamut of options, from Dean (ardently supportive) to Hay (more mutedly so), Kaye (initially pro-mill, but not pro-process) and finally Sands and Whish-Wilson (opposed). Whish-Wilson and Sands attended a meeting on the issue and the surprise appearance of a ship carrying plant for the pulp mill in the Tamar gave Whish-Wilson a free publicity kick, but debate about the mill has been less prominent than might have been expected.

Dean has been by far the most media-active, getting more mentions in the Examiner in the past month (22 in the paper’s online archive) than the rest combined. Although usual levels of postering and doorknocking were noted by TT poster Tony Saddington in comments to part I, Kathryn Hay has kept a very low media profile. She has no campaign website and skipped the ABC radio candidates’ forum without any known explanation. We find no evidence that any recent Hay press release has been picked up anywhere, but she was one of three candidates to make a video for Examiner Online, her bright, breezy and polished presentation coming off much better than Whish-Wilson’s competent but unexpressive performance and Dean’s somewhat waffly effort.

Sands is an old-fashioned campaigner and has had many signs up in the electorate for months, as noted by Ex Trans Profundum, Sands and Whish-Wilson have also been endorsed (1-2 in either order) by the Tasmanians Against the Pulp Mill Voters’ Block organisers. A post by Buck and Joan Emberg on Tasmanian Times (22 Feb) stated that the block includes about seven thousand Windermere signatories (the formal vote for the electorate in 2003 was just 17816).

Peter Kaye’s campaign has been very much LGH-centred; his activity as a broadcaster in the electorate was a long time ago, and his website and advertisements are wordy, issues-focussed, rather strident and without even a bio or endorsements. This style of campaigning is usually extremely ineffective in getting votes, although it may create attention for some issues. The LGH issue did attract five thousand people to a rally in 2007, and Kaye’s community and media connections are likely to be strong, but in this field he’ll struggle to break double figures, and could well be the first eliminated.

The Greens almost doubled their federal vote in Bass in 2007 on the back of the pulp mill issue. Despite this, the mostly low-income working-class Windermere has not been fertile territory for the party, with its vote there lagging a few points behind its Bass total (11% cf 13.6%, state, 2006; 12.4% vs 15.2%, federal 2007). In 2003, well-known Green letter-writer John R Wilson, running as an independent, recorded a dreadful result – just 4.6% in a field of four. With the party vote boosted by the pulp mill, and given his prominence in that campaign, Whish-Wilson may get 15%. It will be hard to get much more than that with a more politically mainstream alderman in Sands competing for the no-mill vote. Even if Whish-Wilson polls very well, it is hard to see any realistic way that the Greens could win this seat.

Ted Sands polled a surprisingly competitive 28% in coming third in the Launceston mayoral election in 2007, but given that his preferences flowed 70:30 to Albert van Zetten, it is likely most of these were Greens and other anti-pulp-mill voters. With competition from Whish-Wilson for the anti-mill vote, and Hay for Labor-aligned voters, Sands will not get anywhere near Ivan Dean’s primary tally. But if Dean and Hay poll modestly, and Sands outpolls Whish-Wilson, he could use Whish-Wilson’s preferences (of which he should get nearly all) to leapfrog Hay, and then Hay’s preferences (assuming he gets them, which he might not) to challenge Dean. This is a very remote scenario, and everything has to go Sands’ way for it to work. He may well be “high-profile” but his 2005 Councillor result (5th elected with 5.6% of primaries) was nothing special and his mayoral vote was clearly inflated by anti-mill sentiment, much of which will go back to the Greens. Most likely, it will be tough for Sands to even get over Whish-Wilson, unless the latter’s vote is too low for doing so to make any difference anyway.

Yes, the Voters’ Block sounds quite impressive, with its potential to muster over 35% of the expected formal vote (enough to place a candidate in a very competitive position). However, the signatories have only pledged not to vote for any pro-mill candidate, and as with all Upper House elections a proportion of them will forget to vote at all. Indeed, at around 70% of its existing size, the Block was unable to get the anti-mill vote above 15% in the Windermere area at the federal election. Even assuming a major increase in anti-mill sentiment since late 2007 (which is unlikely, more likely mainly an increase in registrations) and even assuming more voters will take the issue seriously at state level, it is hard to see the issue determining more than about a quarter of the vote in this electorate. That plus Sands’ modest personal vote is very unlikely to be enough.

As noted in part I, Kathryn Hay was extremely successful in her first state election in 2002. Some signs of Windermere’s pro-Labor leanings, and Hay’s potential strengths within the seat, come from the (excellent) ABC site, which notes:

“When Kathryn Hay contested Bass at the 2002 state election as a Labor candidate, Labor polled 58.3% within the area of Windermere as against 44.8% in the rest of Bass. Hay herself polled 22.2% in Windermere compared to 14.5% in the rest of the electorate, and she attracted a third of Labor’s vote within Windermere.”

So Windermere is a pretty strong Labor area. But the common voter preference for “independents” in the Upper House makes it harder to harvest this sort of support against Ivan Dean MLC. Indeed, despite the electorate’s leanings, Dean got there by thrashing “independent Labor” incumbent and ex-MHR Silvia Smith, albeit one better known during her LC term for eccentric musings about thylacine-searching and so on than for any great political achievements.

Most likely, Dean will win on preferences if he gets 45% or more on primaries, but lose if he cannot top 40. The close to 30% of Windermere voters who vote Liberal in state elections will vote 1 Dean overwhelmingly, or some may vote 1 Kaye 2 Dean which amounts to the same thing. Dean will probably only need about one-third of the lower house Labor vote to find himself in a very good position, and on paper that doesn’t sound too difficult.

Kathryn Hay faces two very serious obstacles. The first is that while she is a more electable candidate than Silvia Smith was in 2003, double-figure swings against incumbents don’t just appear out of nowhere. Even with the pulp mill issue and the (now less relevant) reservations over him holding down two jobs, the swing Dean suffered in losing the Launceston mayoralty was very much smaller than that. The second is self-imposed – there are signs that this is not a fully serious effort and that her campaign is a profile run to test the waters for a shot at Bass in 2010. Hay’s best chance is that the pro-Labor nature of the electorate and her appeal and profile within it are such that she has the seat on a platter anyway, but it’s really hard to believe this is so.

In summary then, Dean is the slightly embattled but nonetheless clear favourite, and of the rest only Hay has a serious chance. Sands is a remote possibility, but needs Hay to perform poorly and everything else to break his way. The most likely scenario is Dean winning on preferences after the last exclusion, but it is also still possible that he’ll win more easily than that.

Mersey

The Mersey campaign has seen the four candidates united on the need to work for their area and improve local services, including health. Issues of personality, experience, profile and approach will therefore most likely determine the seat.

As part I discussed, Steve Martin has plenty of electoral form on the board, but none of it is promising. Nothing he has done in past elections suggests he is a threat, although he should poll into double figures in this relatively small field, as he did in 2003.

Carolynn Jamieson is by normal standards very much a left-field (as distinct from left-wing) candidate. She boasts a stereotypically messy “Gen X” style resume with politically relevant experience in a remarkable range of unconnected and sometimes unconventional fields, and is a lively speaker on radio, but prior to this campaign she appears to have had no real profile in the electorate (one Advocate hit, that announcing her candidacy, in the past twelve months, compared to three for Martin, 19 for Gaffney and 37 for Laycock.) Her proposal for a new food festival based on a pun on the name “Devonport” is, however, one of the few policy announcements to have received any media attention.

Jamieson is chiefly seen as a chance because she is the daughter of the incumbent and there is a somewhat overstated history of transmission of Upper House seats along family lines. It has actually only happened about eight times in the last 100 years, and a close look at the more recent cases (Rattray-Wagner, Hodgman, Hiscutt) shows it is a far from automatic process. In these cases a family member taking over from a firmly entrenched twice-elected incumbent has only won narrowly. There is therefore nothing near inevitable about a successful transfer through the family of a seat won narrowly in the first place and held for just one term, especially to a youngish candidate in a conservative electorate.

Most likely the local mayors Laycock and Gaffney will be fighting out this seat, and in this fight Laycock has an obvious and large geographic advantage. Also, while the voters of Mersey are often mildly pro-Labor at state and federal elections, this Legislative Council seat does not have a Labor tradition, and there may be more concern about Gaffney’s Labor connections than Laycock’s Liberal ones. Therefore, most likely a win to Laycock on preferences, with Gaffney a realistic chance. Jamieson has some hope, but, despite her mother’s connection to the seat, it is hard to see her overcoming both of the high-profile mayors.

If previous years are any guide, these elections will be covered live at the Poll Bludger on election night. Both of us should be online commenting there on the evening of May 2nd. The ABC’s Antony Green has a preview of the election here and, it appears, coverage of election night also on his blog here.