Australia 2022 Election

[Vosem]

2PP vote is 58-42 in a recent poll. That's not good.

The Coalition absolutely deserves to get annihilated.

[Vosem]

Campbell Newman for Senate! Down with the Liberals!

[Vosem]

What is that makes higher income people who are socially liberal and care about the environment so résistent to simply voting for the Labor Party, as opposed to voting for all these so called “teal independents”? It’s not as if the ALP stands for socialist Revolution. In the UK just about all of those urban “remain” types who care about climate change vote Labour. Is it some weird cultural vestigial attitude that makes professional university educated types in Australia look down their noses at the ALP because they grew up being told that only “icky manual labourers” voted ALP?

Doesn't the ALP also still represent lots and lots of working-class but socially conservative electorates in western Sydney (that voted against the gay marriage referendum, for instance)? Labor theoretically endorsed gay marriage in 2017 but in practice allowed a "conscience vote" among MPs -- so it was basically neutral, same as the Liberals (who were explicitly neutral). Of the 17 electorates to vote against gay marriage, 11 were Labor-held, including all electorates to vote against gay marriage in Victoria and 9/12 to do so in NSW.

I think the answer here is that the institution of ranked-choice voting, and the Senate providing the system some degree of proportional representation, means that left-wing bobos were largely comfortable forming the Greens instead of joining the ALP (...though some did join the ALP too), which has allowed the ALP to remain somewhat more "populist" than British Labour or the American Democrats. The long-term trend here is towards global norms -- the 2019 result in a lot of historical ALP heartlands in rural Queensland was abominable -- but it's slow.

Also in the Australian system it feels vaguely advantageous to have your electorate be represented by an independent, who isn't subject to any whip and can extract concessions in the event of a hung Parliament. Historically these were rare, but this happened in 2010 and came really close to happening in both 2016 and 2019. (Also, electing independents in case this happens makes it kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy that it'll happen more often in the future.) Given this, it makes sense that highly educated electorates would seek to elect independents.

[Vosem]

I don't expect Albanese to be a long-serving PM at his age.

I mean... he could be PM for 20 years and he'd still be younger than Joe Biden is now, but everywhere isn't like the US.  

Very wild (and very Australian fun fact) that Morrison is already the longest-serving Aussie PM since John Howard.

[Vosem]

Who are you supporting Ebowed if you support someone/plan on ranking the main two parties? I remember you supported Labor before the pandemic but I'm not sure who you are supporting?

I've supported the Greens and Labor in every previous election.  I'd number them this way this time

[1] Liberal Democrats
[2] Liberals
[3] United Australia Party
[4] Greens
[5] Labor
[6] One Nation

Protest voting against Labor?

Well, I've always despised Albanese, ever since I met him when I lived in his electorate ten years ago.  He was handing out pamphlets at the Marrickville train station and I turned up with a couple of my housemates, hungover, reeking of booze and cigarettes, wearing pajamas, and he said to us; "Thank God youse guys are here, I couldn't understand what any of these people are saying!" as we had been waiting in line after a large group of Vietnamise-Australians.  Those are his loyal constituents that he was making fun of to a few whiteys he mistook as bogans.  Oops.

The more pertinent reason that I'm backing the Liberals over Labor is that Scott Morrison is a better Prime Minister than Anthony Albanese could ever hope to be.  They have identical policies on most issues, but Morrison is placing less emphasis on nationalism, insularity, and xenophobia - ergo, Labor is no longer a viable choice for somebody badly affected by prolonged border closures and punitive lockdowns.  I don't like Morrison, and I don't like the Liberals, but they are easily the lesser of two evils at this election.

I don't live in Australia (obviously), but I'd vaguely been rooting for an ALP victory at this election to punish Morrison and the Liberals for instituting the strict lockdowns and the restrictions on exiting the country. Are Albanese and the ALP really so much more hardline that it makes sense for single-issue "the lockdowns were wrong" voters to preference the Coalition over them? (Would be extremely bleak if true).

[Vosem]

Thank you for the summary, Ebowed

[Vosem]

Rooting for an ALP-led government but also the largest crossbench possible (and especially the largest non-Green crossbench possible), and particularly Campbell Newman for the Senate. The feeling is absolutely bizarre -- I don't think I've ever supported a left-wing party at a top-level election in an Anglophone country since I started paying attention to politics at all back in 2007, and if anything my movement since ~2019 or thereabouts has been rightward. That said, Morrison has got to go, for civil rights' sake, and the consensus in this thread (and other places) that Albanese is a spineless little worm makes me think that his government will probably not try any sort of unreasonable enormous efforts. (I do understand Ebowed's perspective that the ALP does not actually have a platform which is any better on civil rights and that meeting spineless little worms in person makes you not support them. I can imagine coming to a different conclusion here if I were Australian, but I am not.)

I recall when the NDP upset the PCs in Alberta in 2015 that Nathan asked me if there was any election I'd ever oppose the right broadly at. Well, here it is. Denying exit rights to your citizens is absolutely, insanely beyond the pale, Soviet-tier stuff. That the ALP wasn't against it is immaterial; at least they weren't personally the ones to do it.

[Vosem]

Rooting for an ALP-led government but also the largest crossbench possible

Hell yeah!

particularly Campbell Newman for the Senate.

Well, this didn't work out. 2 Coalition, 1 Labor, 1 Green looks absolutely certain in QLD, with the second Labor seat very very likely and then a contest for the last seat between Pauline Hanson and the Legalize Cannabis party, who seem to have over-performed basically everywhere. Given the abolition of directed preferences (RIP Sports and Motoring parties, FFs) and Hanson's high name recognition 2 LNP, 2 Labor, 1 Green, 1 One Nation looks pretty solid, though I guess there're still lots of votes to be counted.

[Vosem]

Are the leads in the seats in doubt notional or pretty much a sure thing?

Alternatively: what's the likelihood of Labor still needing Green/crossbench support for a majority?

Generally depends. In one-on-one major-party vs. third-party contests, the ABC is generally slow to call and those are usually not in substantial doubt (though note that historically third parties decline in postcounts). In major-party vs. major-party seats, there is usually still some doubt. In three-cornered contests -- the only really significant ones this time around are Richmond and Macnamara -- there may still be very substantial doubt, because there are order of exclusion issues. In both seats, the winner is likely to be whoever moves forward with the Coalition to a second round, and while Labor is likelier than the Greens in both seats it doesn't appear certain in either. Also, Macnamara has historically had a very very Liberal postcount, and while the general Liberal collapse in wealthy areas is going to hurt them there, it's still probably unlikely that the final 2CP would actually be Labor vs. Greens. (Would be amazing if so, given that it was only Michael Danby's personal vote that saved the seat for Labor in 2013/2016, but this is a place where the proto-teal swing away from the Coalition was already visible in 2019.)

[Vosem]

Didn't it also take a very long time in 2016 to determine whether Turnbull had gotten a majority or narrowly missed out? The 2019 count was relatively quick but that was, IIRC, because there was an unusually low number of very close seats.

[Vosem]

I love the irony that arises from this election. Labor's vote went backwards and yet will still win enough seats to win government (might get to 78). The Liberals hold 16 of the poorest 20 seats. While Labor now hold more (7) of the richest 20 seats than the Coalition does (5). So much for the party of the working class.

This statistic is taken from this Roy Morgan piece which, while legitimately fascinating, chooses to base its statistics off average wealth in every seat rather than median -- the former is easily skewed by small wealthy communities and the latter is much more telling.



One observes from the chart that by median wealth, the poorest electorates are overwhelmingly Labor: of those with a median wealth of under $100K, 20 were won by Labor at the last election, 4 by the Coalition (all in Queensland -- Leichhardt, Forde, Flynn, and Herbert), 1 won by the Greens (Melbourne), 1 by an independent (Fowler), and 1 is yet to be called (Brisbane). Using this technique rather than education gives the result that very youth-dominated electorates like Melbourne are very poor, so it's not a perfect system, but it seems better than the one the article uses and there's no perfect way to measure class anyway.

Of those with a median wealth of over $400K, 7 voted Coalition, 5 voted teal (two teal seats, Wentworth and Kooyong, do not actually cross this threshold), and 1 voted Labor (Isaacs, which I am sort of confused by). Class-based voting seems quite alive in Australia, particularly outside of Queensland where it does appear much weaker than elsewhere.

[Vosem]

Looks like the only two House of Representatives seats left in substantial doubt are Gilmore and Brisbane at this point.

[Vosem]

Looks like the only two House of Representatives seats left in substantial doubt are Gilmore and Brisbane at this point.

In this late stage, do you expect a Labor majority or a Labor minority?

Majority without something very weird happening in Macnamara. My initial counts were off because I had credited Labor with 67 seats going in rather than 68, but this was because the source I was using was counting Spence as a vacancy (because the Labor incumbent resigned, but too late to have there be a by-election), but then not counting it among the gains. I think Labor is therefore already at 76 absent something very strange. They look maybe-just-by-a-hair disfavored in Brisbane and Gilmore, but both remain very plausible and neither is quite necessary.