How the Mercury helped Vanessa …

Dr KEN HART
In Legislative Council elections, each candidate has a strict spending limit $12,000. The purpose of this limit is to provide a level playing field for all candidates. However, with such a low limit, the mainstream media has the power to greatly influence the outcome. In the Pembroke by-election, the Mercury provided Vanessa Goodwin with extensive promotional coverage. I calculated that the additional promotional coverage the Mercury provided her above what it had provided to any other candidate would have cost over $10,774 if she had had to pay for equivalent advertising space. Effectively, she had about double the promotion of other candidates because of the Mercury’s assistance.

I wrote to the Mercury, fully detailing my calculations. My analysis has not been questioned but the editor responded by saying that the other candidates had not provided press releases suitable or sufficiently newsworthy for printing.

The effect the additional promotion by the Mercury can be estimated. It is reasonable to assume that with no promotion at all, Vanessa would not have received more than 10% of the vote. Any candidate will tell you that promotion is essential in a campaign like this. As Vanessa received 38% of the vote, 28% can be attributed to promotional effort. The question is therefore how much less would she have got with half the promotion?

Promotional effort can be assumed to follow the law of diminishing returns. That is, the more the promotion the less effective the additional effort is. The second half of the promotional effort is likely to be about half as effective as the first half. Therefore, if Vanessa had had about the same promotion as other candidates and half the promotion she did have, it is probable that it the promotional impact would have been reduced by about 1/3 and hence her vote would have gone down by about 9% to about 29%, give or take a couple of percent.

If Vanessa Goodwin had only got 29% rather than 38% and other candidates had increased by a total of 9% and preferences had been affected similarly, the result would have been a cliff hanger between Vanessa Goodwin (Liberal), Wendy Heatley (Green) and Richard James (independent). The Mercury would have had something really interesting to write about.

Dr Ken Hart
Hobart