Oz Politics Blog

Scott Bennett, Gerard Newman and Andrew Kopras, from the Parliamentary Library, have completed their comprehensive analysis of the 2004 general election (but be warned: this link is around 4.6Mb). This paper is seriously worth reading.

The key trends they identified are:

the figures over the past two decades suggest that the problems of the Labor Party have been as much long-term as a number of particular electoral failures a measure of Labor’s decline is that it is now the major beneficiary of the compulsory allocation of all preferences on House of Representatives ballot papers

the Liberal Party now has a strong grip on the seats surrounding Sydney, and if it maintains this, it will continue to be difficult for the Labor Party to regain office

Labor has seemingly lost touch with many of its traditional supporters, a touch that it needs to regain

the shifting electoral strength of the Coalition partners suggests future non-Labor victories are quite likely to see the Liberals gaining a House majority in their own right, and

Labor not only needs to improve its House performance, for its performance in Senate elections since the last increase in the size of the Senate has been weaker than its performance in House of Representatives elections.

One of the cautions to come out of the paper is the importance of looking at the primary vote in the opinion polls in the light of the Peter Walsh aphorism, ‘a party that cannot get a vote above 40 per cent is unlikely to win a Commonwealth election.’

Perhaps election analysts have become used to focusing on the two-party preferred vote, and now tend to put insufficient weight on the first preference figure. The two-party preferred figure, after all, with its over-simplified reduction of the contest to just government versus opposition, is less complicated for the analyst to deal with. On polling day 2004, the Weekend Australian gave the final Newspoll figures with a story headed: ‘Latham within striking distance’. This was despite the fact that Newspoll gave the Coalition’s first preference lead as six points (39–45 per cent). Labor’s Newspoll figure in the final six polls had fluctuated between 39 and 41 per cent, while the Coalition readings were between 43 and 46 per cent. The Weekend Australian indicated why the election was being called in this fashion. Having noted that the parties were apparently equal on the two-party preferred vote, the journalist explained that although the Coalition lead on first preferences would ‘normally’ see it returned to office, it was the fact that people’s likely preference allocation would strongly favour Labor that ‘could neutralise the primary vote’. Clearly the two-party preferred vote was being focussed on rather than the first preference vote.

The Newspoll figures during the three months prior to the election showed little alteration in the first preference margin between the parties, nor was there any evidence of any voter volatility. The figures suggested, then, that as the Coalition’s first preference vote was healthy, the most likely result was a Government victory.

The researchers devote some space to analysing Labor’s failure over the longer term. They suggest that the 2004 result is as much evidence of a Labor decline since 1990, as evidence of a stand-alone campaign failure. Among the challenges for Labor is reconciling its two constituencies — one (small-l) liberal, cosmopolitan and middle class, the other traditional working-class. An interesting observation in this vein was that the dissonance between Labor voters and Labor candidates is wider than for Coalition voters and Coalition candidates. The paper quoted Katharine Betts of the Swinburne University of Technology.

… the gap between voters and candidates is very much wider for Labor candidates and their voters. Overall Coalition candidates are quite close to their voters whereas Labor candidates are quite distant from theirs. On average the gap between Labor candidates and Labor voters is almost three points wider, in terms of percentage points, than it is between Coalition candidates and Coalition voters.

Judith Brett is quoted as saying the Labor party is seen by the public as:

a self-serving, faction-driven political machine, filled with professional politicians who place the survival of themselves and their factional colleagues above the interests of the people who vote for them.

The movement of the Sydney urban fringe to the Coalition is another striking element of the analysis. In the following diagram the Liberal seats are shaded for each election.

All-in-all, an interesting paper.