Australian Federal Election - Results Thread

[Filuwaúrdjan]

WA Nats did run alone, but they polled 2% and I assume their map would be boring without any interesting patterns.

I've just checked, and the patterns are predictable but interesting; like 22% in O'Connor and 0.6% in Curtin. lol.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

List of swings.

Be there patterns? Well 12 of the 22 seats with a swing of over 7% are in Sydney and most of the rest are in Queensland. The two exceptions are rural seats in NSW where the ALP did well in 2007 but didn't seriously contest this year. So, yeah. Exactly the pattern you'd expect to see. And of the ten highest swings, five came from inner Sydney divisons; which is interesting as it was previously assumed that Western Sydney would be the zone of electoral collapse.

The highest swing of all came in Fowler (13.2) which is a very working class and 'ethnic' area in Western Sydney and includes the bulk of Liverpool. Interestingly, the ALP did better in the Senate elections there than on House primaries (very unusual in an urban division), suggesting that something strange was going on. Which is interesting, because something strange was going on; the knock-on effect of the abolition of the old division of Reid (the name was given to the re-drawn division of Lowe) meant that Laurie Ferguson (an important figure on the centre-left of the ALP) was left electorally homeless. Fowler was an open seat, but not a suitable home for Ferguson; the local organisation there is controlled by the Right. So (in a bizarre deal in which Gillard apparently played a major role) Chris Hayes (on the Right and then the member for neighbouring division of Werriwa; previous MPs include Mark Latham and Gough Whitlam) became the ALP candidate in Fowler, while Ferguson became the ALP candidate for Werriwa. It's possible that other factors were at work, but that story has not been told here yet.
The second highest swing was in Wentworth (inner far-eastern Sydney, very posh) which is Malcolm Turnbull's seat. It's pretty clear that Labor's vote was greatly inflated there in recent elections; the Greenies nearly overtook them. This fits into a wider pattern of very rich urban divisions, actually.
On the other end of the scale, the ten highest swings to the ALP were in the expected places. Four in Tasmania, three working class Adelaide suburban seats, and three in Victoria; McEwen (a Labor gain), Lalor (Gillard's seat) and Corio (Geelong). Most seats that swung to Labor were in Victoria, and those that weren't were in Tasmania, South Australia or coastal NSW, with the exception of Canning, WA, were Labor had a very good candidate.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Socialist Alliance in NSW:



I noted their slightly strange 'strength' in a couple of divisions and thought 'lol; why ever not?'. The patterns are... er... could anyone explain? Socialist Alliance are a coalition of Trot groups, but that was probably obvious from the name. They stood elsewhere but did so badly there was no point in mapping them.

The delightful and totally sane CDP - Fred Niles Group:



Outside WA and NSW there seemed no point mapping their vote.

General points about the maps (and those to come)... I've tried to be fairly consistent with rounding and so on, but if there is inconsistency it shouldn't be systematic. I've also only done a few of the many minor parties to poll relatively strongly in certain places. I couldn't see any interesting patterns wrt the Sex Party or the Liberal Democrats so haven't bothered and I was well underway with the maps before I noticed that One Nation still managed to poll over 1% or so in much of regional Queensland.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Various rural protest parties:



The DLP:



Logically I should only have done Victoria, but finding out were re-grouped groupers live was too amusing/tempting.

Family First:

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The ALP:



The Coalition:



Just the Liberals in WA, actually.

The Greens:



As always, there are bigger versions hiding in the gallery.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

He's a country politician for country people rather than a conservative politician that happens to represent country people.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Question for those who know about Australian history than my wikipedia-perusing self - why has been historically so many right-wing splits from the Labor party like the DLP or various 'anti-communist' factions? (Catholicism?)

The big split (that created the DLP) had a lot to do with Catholicism, but there was more to it than that. It's sort of complicated to explain briefly, but basically a Catholic organisation usually called 'the Movement' (under the guidance of prominent Catholic activist B.A. Santamaria) infiltrated and took over the Industrial Groups (organisations set up by the ALP to fight Communist influence in the Unions) with the aim of wiping out Communism and things that looked like the might be Communist in Australian politics and society. The 'groupers' became very powerful within the ALP and by the mid fifties effectively controlled the Party in Victoria. Grouper MP's would often break ranks with the federal leadership on certain issues (usually relating to Communism in some way or other). After a painfully narrow defeat in the 1954 election, H.V. Evatt, the Labour leader, basically went ape and had the groupers thrown out of the ALP. They then formed the ALP (Anti-Communist) which later changed its name to the DLP. The DLP never managed to win a House seat on their own, but were a significant force in the Senate and were also able to ensure significant damage to the ALP by directing their preferences to the Coalition, something that caused a long-running electoral catastrophe in Victoria in general and Melbourne (the most consistency Labor big city in Australia during the first half century of federation) in particular. The DLP's strategy was to prevent the ALP from taking power federally until suitable terms for re-unification were agreed; they collapsed following the election of the Whitlam government.
Things get even more complicated, btw, because in Queensland the split was a little later and had nothing to do with Catholicism or Communism; the QLP (which merged into the DLP) was formed in 1957 by supporters of Vince Gair (the last Labor Premier of Queensland until 1989) who was expelled from the ALP because of a political crisis that began with a shearers strike. Gair later played an important role in the collapse of the DLP. But that's enough of that.

The ALP (Non Communist) was just one of many chapters in the long-running spat between Jack Lang and the federal ALP and had nothing to do with Catholicism.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Not sure if this has been posted yet, but according to this:

http://vtr.aec.gov.au/HouseStateFirstPrefsByParty-15508-NAT.htm

the latest vote tally now has the Coalition ahead in the national 2PP vote....by 636 votes out of over 10 million cast.  Not that the national popular vote technically counts for anything.  But it'll surely enter into the Coalition's talking points for why it has a "moral claim" on holding power.

The reason for the change is that the number of divisions temporarily not included in the national 2PP count has increased from six (O'Connor, Melbourne, Lyne, Denison, Kennedy and New England) to eight; Batman and Grayndler have been added to the list. Those two seats are just about the worst parts of Australia for the Coalition.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It would be an improvement from the ALP's point of view; a DLP Senator would probably vote with them about a third of the time or something like that.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ah, it's over good. Good.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Will the National Party survive this? The whole point of the County Party project was to hold Conservative governments to ransom for goodies and protection for rural areas, something that they've become less and less effective at in recent decades (which is why rural independents and rural protest parties have been doing increasingly well). Now two rural independents have that sort of arrangement with a Labor government and appear (the stress must be on appear) to have done a better job of it than the Nationals have managed for quite a while. And there's no reason why similar arrangements could not be don with future Liberal-led governments. Therefore, what's the point of the National Party? If you want a capital-c Conservative MP, just vote Liberal, if you want Country Person for Country People MP, vote for an independent.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

And by 'survive this' I mean 'survive this as an independent-ish force' and not like the National Liberal Party in post-war Britain.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The defeat of the government in NSW will do wonders for Labor's ratings in Sydney. Presumably the same is true of Queensland, but there may be other reasons for concern there.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Final 2PP figures:

ALP 6,216,435 (50.12)
Coalition 6,185,948 (49.88)