Other politics
Polling’s colours – teal, green and salmon
These roundups have regularly covered polls reported on and collated by William Bowe’s Poll Bludger. His BludgerTrack, a consolidation of polls, shows the TPP Labor-Coalition vote is now at 50:50. Labor’s primary vote is down 2.1 percent on the 2022 election, while the Coalition’s is up by 2.0 percent.
Mike Seccombe, writing in the Saturday Paper, reports on other polling which shows different results. One is a consolidation of polls, suggesting that Labor’s primary vote is down by 4.9 percent and that the Coalition’s is up by 1.1 percent. Bad news for Labor but no joy for the Coalition.
Seccombe’s article – Polling shows teals support is growing in Coalition base – is about independent candidates and their prospects. He reports on polling showing that all the teal incumbents should retain their seats, and that others have a good chance of winning seats from sitting Coalition or Labor members. For example a Climate 200 backed independent, Nicolette Boele, is in a good position to win the seat of Bradfield in northern Sydney.
Not only are the teals in a good position, but the Greens vote is also up by about one percent since the election according to the polling on which Seccombe reports.
As we get closer to the election, polling numbers are likely to become more erratic, making it hard to detect trends. Some polling is done by outfits with a partisan bias. It’s not that they lie about the results, but it’s easy to frame questions and to design an apparently unbiassed sampling technique that pushes the responses one way or another, in order to give an impression that the electoral tide is moving in a particular direction.
One of those biases can be against independents, because there are many interest groups who like to deal with a government holding a secure majority, undisturbed by nuisance members of Parliament who bring up distracting issues such as the public interest.
Polling about the fortunes of independents is particularly difficult because they aren’t identified on national polls and because for mathematical reasons polling becomes less accurate the further the numbers are from a 50:50 split.
Individual seat polling is even more difficult because of the way preferences flow. What look like safe seats for Labor or Liberal can be vulnerable. A high TPP margin for a Coalition or Labor member does not necessarily mean a seat is safe. Just in the last three days a case in point has arisen, described below.
Salmon
The polls about which Seccombe writes were conducted before the government’s extraordinary move to combine with the opposition to ram through Parliament changes to environment laws, to allow the salmon industry to continue operating in Macquarie Harbour, and to support Labor Senator Anne Urquhart’s bid to shift to the House of Representatives to take the Braddon electorate off the Liberals.
It’s hard to make sense of this: the Liberals hold Braddon with a 58:42 TPP and a 40 percent primary vote, but the Labor Party hopes that Urquhart, who has established her name as a Senator, has a chance.
Salmon farming is a big issue in Tasmania, and many people are angry about the bipartisan support for the industry. Even if the government takes Braddon off the Liberals, they may lose their only “safe” Labor seat in Tasmania to an independent.
On the other side of Tasmania from Macquarie Harbour is the Franklin electorate, which at first sight looks rock-solid Labor, with a 64:32 TPP lead. But Labor’s primary vote in 2022 was only 37 percent. Labor held the seat with preferences flowing from a Melbourne Cup field of smaller parties, including the Greens who secured a 17 percent primary vote. This year the seat will be contested by Peter George, an independent candidate who is well-known as a former ABC foreign correspondent. To quote from his site:
I’ve been fighting with Tasmanian communities against destructive salmon farming practices for a decade. I’m appalled that local Labor MP and Minister for Fisheries, Julie Collins, has shown unwavering support for multinational salmon farming corporations that are destroying the waterways we love. Now Julie Collins is endorsing new salmon farms in North Storm Bay that threaten to devastate more waterways and beaches—from Opossum Bay to Lewisham and all the way to the Tasman Peninsula.
George is not on Climate 200’s list of 35 candidates, but he seems to have good financial support. In 2022 the Liberal candidate won only 27 percent of first preference votes. If they and those who voted for the Greens give him their preferences, he has up to a 44 percent head start.
We won’t know which polls were accurate until the night of the election count.
Are we happy?
If we listen to journalists telling us we have a “cost of living crisis”, and to Coalition politicians telling us that in Australia we have the worst government in our 60 000 year history, we might be surprised to learn that on the World Happiness Report’s rankings Australia comes in at #11 out of 147 countries surveyed.
We’ve been pushed out of the top ten, which has the usual suspects – the Nordic countries, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. Costa Rica, which is one of the most prosperous and best-governed countries of central and south America, comes in at #6. It is surprising to find Mexico (#10) and Israel (#8), among the top ten – one a poor country burdened by corruption and a high rate of violent crime, the other engaged in a war.
Some explanation for these rankings lies in the researchers’ emphasis on social support, rather than on material living standards. Our happiness depends on the benevolence of others, particularly our perception of the benevolence of others. If we think others are greedy we are less happy than if we believe they are caring. The report’s authors note that in this regard Latin American societies are characterized by large household sizes and strong family bonds, which may help explain the high rankings for Mexico and Costa Rica.
The large “developed” countries – Germany, UK and the USA – are ranked at 22, 23 and 24 positions. Japan (#55) and Korea (#58) rank well below most other prosperous countries.
The researchers note, as we have seen in Australian surveys, that there is an increasing tendency among younger people to feel lonely.
Their detailed analysis of Australia shows a slow trend of expression of negative emotions and a steady rise in inequality.