Barnaby Joyce is about as gracious in victory as you would expect.
Assuming the Coalition are re-elected, I’m at a complete loss as to how dysfunctional they need to be before the majority of Australians decide to look elsewhere. Eating out last night I overheard the table of young women next to me talking about their lack of interest in politics but they’d heard that Labor spends all their money. Maybe three more years of catastrophic climate events, dwindling resources to public health and education and a further lurch towards totalitarianism will make people like that take a bit more interest. After tonight, I won’t hold my breath.
Antony Green doesn’t think that Labor can get there - he hasn’t officially called it yet, as he says it is uncertain if the Liberals can form majority or if it will end in a minority government, but it seems pretty unlikely to have a good result now.
I worry that a loss will encourage Labor to move further towards the Liberals on policy, which is the last thing I want.
I think I just need to accept that every major election skews further to the right than expected.
I really can’t wrap my head around Scott Morrison doing better than Turnbull. How is he more popular? But then again, I’m not a liberal voter. Oh well. I guess the lesson that Labor will learn is that you need to run a scare campaign and not bother trying to actually reform anything. They’ll probably move further to the right now that they lost. Of course, if the libs lost they probably would’ve moved further to the right as well. Though I’m probably being a pessimist there.
I’m told that according to regulation, your vote was not informal this year if you only entered “1” above the line. (I also seem to remember that some time ago, it was made illegal to advise people to do that).
Also: Where do the news channels get their minute by minute updates? I can remember that, back in the day, they used to do coverage from the return centre in Canberra, but they weren’t showing that this year?
I’m not trying to start a discussion about science here, in this thread, but politically, the climate “debate” was a scare campaign. “Vote labour/green or the world will end.” And labour has traditionally always run scare campaigns, for as long as I can remember. It’s just that this time they lost. And they were running hard with hospitals/education as well, but they knew they wouldn’t get any traction there by making stuff up this time.
A big difference is that they didn’t run a personal scare campaign against ScoMo this year, like ScoMo ran against Shorten (“Bill Shorten will kill you in your bed”). But look how well that worked for the American Democrats against Trump: it’s not always a success either.
I know this is simplistic, but good looking candidates seem to do better. I was surprised when labour chose Shorten
(1) Well, I did not see a coalition majority coming. I talked to a lot of people while handing out how-to-votes at the pre-poll and yesterday, and many asked me how I though the election would go. My response was that I don’t predict election results any more, since I got it wrong on several in the past, and I am confirmed in that stance.
(2) But even with the shift to the right nationally, Queensland is an outlier. It’s a different country up there north of the border.
(3) But there’s some good news. Tony Abbott is gone, even if the more toxic Peter Dutton managed to hold on in Queensland. Clive Palmer’s millions could not buy him a single seat. And Pauline Hanson’s One Nation might not get a seat: the fight for the last Senate seat in Queensland is going to be very close.
(4) On the Senate results in Queensland, I will make a prediction. (It’s easier to make predictions when the first counts are in.) The coalition has two full quotas and Labor has just one full quota. The Greens will with the fourth position quite comfortably. The last two positions will be a close contest between the coalition, Labor and One Nation. Obviously it depends on preferences of all the smaller parties, but it particularly depends on where the United Australia Party’s preferences go. If (as I suspect) they go to the coalition, then the fifth seat goes to the coalition, and Labor very narrowly beats One Nation for the sixth position, giving as a result 3 coalition, 2 Labor and 1 Greens. Oddly, that’s the same result as in NSW (which is very easy to predict), so perhaps in the end Queensland is not all that different.
That makes sense - the poll workers were telling everyone at our location that you had to number at least six, so no doubt that was what their instructions said to say
Well, I was meaning they didn’t run a scare campaign against ScoMo, but yeah I guess the climate ads could count. But, as a leftie, I of course think that’s something we should be scaring people about.
Nobody thunk it possible, nobody knew it could be done but the inner sanctum of LIBs. Nobody but nobody with political nous is yet saying they know why.
So ol’ PT’s view from the lower dregs is as valid as anybody else’s.
The AEC official results aren’t declared until it is mathematically impossible for the result to change in each seat and so we are still waiting, probably to end of month for the last results. Notwithstanding that LAB leader Shorten conceded on the night and the new Morrison ministry has been sworn in.
The Morrison (LIB/NAT) government was returned picking up 6 seats and a 1.2% national swing.
They hold a 77:68 majority over LAB with 6 independents who are evenly split between conservatives and progressives and therefore the LIB/NATs have a tight but workable majority government.
There was a swing to the incumbent LIBs in all states. Even in Victoria. The inner-city seats of the Melbourne LIB heartland swung heavily to LAB, probably with climate change most in mind, but insufficiently to win them.
There were very large swings to LIBs in three mining seats Dawson Capricornia & Hunter. George Christensen picked up +12% for Christ’s sake. Why? In a word Adani. A proposed bloody great export coal mine by operators with dodgy financial and worse environmental credentials. The locals taking umbrage at the notion they’d be picking up the cost of the southern liberals imposing their conscience. Nice own goal from Bob Brown and his apostles in the Stop Adani convoy.
Climate change was a major factor, but climate change policy was more potent.
Clive Palmer spent $55 million (more that all other parties combined) for absolutely no political representation gained, though in effect he personally funded the anti-Shorten/LAB attack adds.
The swing to LIBS was highest in the electorates with lowest income and lowest education standards. (sound familiar to any of our American readers?)
LAB now need a uniform 4% swing to win the next election. Worse is a continuance of a long term trend with the LAB share of the national primary vote is now in the low 30s. You might be able to win an election in the US with a turn out that low, you can’t here.
For me, the first sign that Labor were not going to get the numbers was an observation on the ABC coverage from Arthur Sinodinis (who will now be Australia’s next ambassador to the US) that the LIB scrutineers in Queensland seat of Longman thought they were ahead in a seat the pundits had written off. Then progressively the same message spread across the voting nation.
After two hours of counting the “no electoral path to victory” mantra was applied by election analyst Antony Green to LAB when most of the past parliament it’s been applied to LIB.
Despite the LIBs copping a bucketing in the campaign over their under representation of women MPs and candidates, the LIB girls did very well; winning the marginals of Lindsay, Bass and Chisholm and holding marginals like Reid and Higgins that were thought gone for all money. It might well be a case of preparing a much bigger win for the longer term.
Opinion polls got it totally wrong. It’s amusing to hear them claim they actually picked the late swing. Bunkum. Pollsters had LAB consistently ahead for essentially the entire period of the 45th parliament.
There are concerns that all the polls methodology now fundamentally flawed, being reliant on random calls to mobiles rather than land lines. Consequently they don’t get truly representative sample responses and need to apply discretionary weightings. For the all polls to be so consistently one way 49:51, without a single outlier during the campaign when the reality was mirror imaged is statistically improbable. The polls are manipulated to fit to the conventional wisdom, and have been for some considerable time.
If they’d been true to their core purpose we’d still have Malcolm Turnbull as PM.
Morrison is now lord of those he surveys, and though he has no better majority than Turnbull did, he has unbridled prime ministerial authority. Alas it looks like the economy is severely slowing and maybe our golden run of 28 year of uninterrupted economic growth might be under pressure. We could be in far worse hands.
LAB leader Anthony Albanese now has the opposition leadership. He’s a scion of the left but he needs to take his economic platform to the right.
In a particularly prescient comment by Tony Abbott in his concession speech (losing to a neophyte, but damm good riddance) that some the paradigms of political class seem to be unravelling.
From 1996 to 2007 through four Federal elections the “Howard battlers” the outer suburbs of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, the tradies, the new immigrants, the aspirationals defied their notional blue collar roots and voted LIB.
LAB need to find a way to reconnect with their traditional supporter base (there’s no other available demographic which can give them 40%) who have for most of the past 20 years shown their economic and social aspirations as more closely aligned with the LIBs. The trendsetters who now live in the gentrified working class suburbs now favour the LAB progressive agenda, provided it doesn’t try to flinch their franking credits. But there aren’t enough of them. Sydney used to be a blue inner circle surrounded by red. It’s now a red inner west and blue surrounds culturally defined by it’s food chains i.e. the Red Rooster and Wendys and Harris Farm lines. The interactive charts on the url below are a hoot.
I think that Senate results were finalized this week in my state (vic). But damned if I can find a press release or actual statement. There must be something like a Gazette? Any source of AEC press releases?
I’m sorry, I did not find an actual statement by the returning officer there, or a press release.
Just to be clear, I already know who won the election, I’m looking for an official, dated and authorized, statement about the finalization of counting, or a press release. I believe that both of those must have been issued.
Thanks to all the DoneUnders who posted to the thread. Always interested to know what’s happening politically in the Antipodes, even if I didn’t post much to the thread.
The officlal, formal conclusion of the election process has two parts:
The electoral officer declares the result of the election. This is an oral declaration, and normally takes place at the same venue where he accepted nominations for the election
Having made the declaration, the electoral officer signs a certificate setting out the result of the election and he attaches the certificate to the writ which he received from the Governor (or, in the case of electing senators for a Territory, the Governor-General) some weeks previously, which instructed him to hold the election. He returns the writ and the certificate to the Governor (or Governor-General).
When issuing the writ for the election, the Governor sets a date by which the writ should be returned with the certicate of results. That’s usually five weeks after polling day. Even if the count is completed in less than that time, the writ is not returned until the set date, in case questions or challenges to the conduct of the election are raised.
SFAIK there’s no explicit statutory requirement for the certificate of results to be published in the Gazette. I don’t know whether there’s a practice of doing so. Presumably it is communicated to the Clerk of the Senate so he knows who to expect on the first sitting day. And presumably there is some official communication to the succesful candidates informing them of their election and summoning them to Parliament.