Werriwa reportage
The post poll reporting includes some beauties: errors of fact and overly excited analyses.
The key Labor message has been the result is a kick in the pants for the government over interest rates. According to this analysis, the swings to Labor have been greatest in the seats with the largest mortgages. For example, Damien Murphy said this,
Voters living in so-called McMansion estates that are changing the demographics of south-western Sydney have given Labor more ammunition to attack the Federal Government over interest rates after the by-election in Werriwa on Saturday.
In suburbs such as Hinchinbrook, Cecil Hills and Prestons, where many are paying off mortgages of a least $550,000, the successful Labor candidate, Chris Hayes, attracted swings of up to 15 per cent, a substantial improvement on Mark Latham’s vote in October.
Mr Hayes said the by-election, in which Werriwa remained strongly Labor, had put an end to the drift away from traditional Labor-voting patterns. The ALP was taking heart from the McMansion votes, he said.
Glenn Milne and Andrew West made the same 15 per cent claims. At least Milne and West did not mention Prestons, where Labor went backwards on the primary vote. Excluding the 36 formal votes collected by the special hospital team, the largest swing to Labor in the primary vote for a booth was under ten per cent.
A number of journalists portrayed the weekend win as an 11 point two-party preferred swing to Labor. However, the provisional two candidate swing in this by-election cannot be compared with that for the 2004 election. Without an endorsed Liberal candidate in the by-election, this is not an analogous comparison. As Peter Hartcher said, ‘when there is no second party, “two-party” results become a meaningless measure.’
To be fair, the Coalition has been no less self serving in its analysis. Murphy’s piece includes this quote from the Prime Minister.
Mr Howard congratulated Mr Hayes but said the result was a below-average performance for an opposition in a by-election. He said oppositions had an average 6.5 per cent swing towards them in by-elections since 1949.
While Howard is technically right, his analysis confounds those by-elections where the punters get to send a message to the government of the day, and the one horse race by-elections like Werriwa. Also, the by-election result suggests a real vulnerability for Howard. If a 25 basis point increase in interest rates drives a two and a half percent strengthening in Labor’s primary vote (albeit in the context of a one horse race by-election), further interest rate increases could be diabolical for the Coalition. This is particularly so as opinion polls suggested around half the residents of Werriwa saw the recent rate increase as a broken 2004 election promise,
However, it was hubris to portray such vulnerability as the end for John Howard. Milne got beyond himself with this analysis.
… the swing to Labor was about 15 per cent. If even half of that was replicated in the mortgage-belt seats of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane that kept Howard in government on October 9, it would be a catastrophe for the Coalition. Howard and other leading government figures will, of course, argue that there was no Liberal candidate in Werriwa, so the big vote for Labor can in no way be seen as a reflection on the Coalition or its policies. Except the Liberals did effectively run a candidate in Werriwa. His name was James Young. He was once a staffer for former Howard government minister Jackie Kelly, who holds the adjoining seat of Lindsay. He publicly offered himself up for the Liberal vote, backed Howard repeatedly, displayed the Prime Minister’s photograph at polling stations and endorsed himself on his how-to-vote cards as the candidate standing for “your Liberal point of view”.
And yet he got just under 8 per cent of the vote. The only conclusion is that the Howard brand has suddenly gone bad among Liberal as well as Labor voters in Werriwa.
Not everyone agreed with Milne. Hartcher saw things more ambiguously.
Labor’s big, long-running problem is that the effects of 14 years of uninterrupted economic growth have recast much of Labor “heartland” as contestable territory.
David Burchell, a political analyst at the University of Western Sydney, said yesterday that “Werriwa was the seat that could have been the next domino to fall to the Coalition, and it remains so.”
Labor’s feeble victory means that the “blue circle” of Coalition seats that has started to encircle Sydney remains a real danger to Labor’s survival. So John Howard cannot take the Werriwa result as any kind of endorsement, but neither can Labor.
Another who got the spin right is the anonymous Labor source quoted by West.
One federal caucus member said the result should not have been such a surprise.
“I say the outcome was solid but hardly spectacular,” he said. “With interest rates up and no Liberal candidate, this result is really about the minimum we could have achieved. Anything less would have been terminal, I think, for Beazley.”
And another who got it right was Antony Green, quoted by Murphy.
The Herald election analyst Antony Green said it was difficult to read anything substantial into Labor’s improved showing because it was too little, and too far away from the next federal election.
“There were six by-elections in 1994 and none of them had any bearing on John Howard’s victory two years later,” he said.
In my view, the Werriwa by-election result was not unexpected. If there is any long term message, it is not a strong one. While it exposed Howard’s vulnerability to rising interest rates, it was no harbinger of a golden age for Labor under Kim Beazley.
One thing is certain, the reporting of the by-election shows that if you stare at the tea leaves long enough you will see what ever you want to see.