2022 Federal election

[Bemblebuu]

I'm so tempted to just write 'F yas all!!!' on my ballot this election, but probably won't. So tired of fear campaigns and people being swayed by lies (or 'spin')...maybe I will throw my vote away

[DELTAprime]

I'm so tempted to just write 'F yas all!!!' on my ballot this election, but probably won't. So tired of fear campaigns and people being swayed by lies (or 'spin')...maybe I will throw my vote away

That's pretty much how I feel. But I'll probably do a propper vote for Labour and the Greens. Surely they can't be any worse than the idiots in conservative parties.

[Burn]

I'm so tempted to just write 'F yas all!!!' on my ballot this election, but probably won't. So tired of fear campaigns and people being swayed by lies (or 'spin')...maybe I will throw my vote away

I live in the Kennedy electorate, my vote is essentially worthless until Bob is legally declared insane.

[griffin]

At this rate we are going to end up with a hung parliament again, like in 2010, the year that Gillard replaced the more popular Rudd, and got punished at the election, needing the support of 4 people on the Crossbench.
As it stands, just as the election was called, Morrison was in Minority after losing 2 people to defections (one to palmer's party, the other to one nation), which means that he needs to win at least one seat just to get back into guaranteed power (although, enough left leaning people on the crossbench would still support him if he kept the same number of seats after this election).
The number needed for a technical majority is 76, out of 151 seats... but with the role of the Speaker usually coming from the ruling party, the majority now needs to be 77.


Going back to the crazy proposal of UAP fixing home loans to below 3% for 5 years - I saw some of clive palmer's campaign launch on the news the other night, and he explained that he would be able to do it by changing the constitution, to have control over the banks.
Okay... changing the constitution would require a referendum, which is a state-based vote AND a national popular vote (each of the 6 state votes separately and a majority of states must vote in favour, as well as the majority of Australians), and that is after both federal houses of parliament support the referendum. Polling suggests that he has zero chance of winning enough seats in the house and senate to be able to have the power to instigate a referendum. Even if he wasn't delusional to think that he would sweep into power winning 76 seats of the lower house and all 40 seats in the senate (to gain a majority there too), it is irresponsible to be offering things that aren't realistic just to sucker people in... even if it is legal to claim anything that is technically possible (like I've noted, a government could force the banks to restrict their rates... but it would be a bad idea for the economy, and very unlikely that he would win government to do it).
But aside from that, it goes back to the real outcome of the Banks collapsing if they are not able to set their own rates based on the national or global rates, which cripples the superannuation industry, because of how much of your Super fund is currently invested in the share market, and the banks are a hefty share of the stock market. Something he doesn't care about, because he doesn't need a Super fund.


The history of clive palmer's party is a trainwreck, but people have short memories... or, as we have seen in the modern era, people don't believe facts if they aren't from the people that they listen to. If the people they listen to says something untrue, they don't go and see if it is true, they accept it and dismiss everything else as fake news, and that they are "doing their own research".
It notes that his party is expected to put all sitting members last on preferences, unless the sitting member supports craig kelly's wreckless views... which will hurt the coalition more than labor this time (at the last election, the coalition managed to gain two seats from labor thanks to preferences from clive palmer's party)
At least we only have to worry about him once every three years now, as he is only focussing on Federal politics, as he has de-registered his party from all states for state-based elections.

[DELTAprime]

I'm watching the results come in on the AEC's site. No idiot talking heads, just numbers.

[Handsprime]

So it seems that the Independents have taken over the Northern Beaches in Sydney. After the last election I'm not suprised, considering howpopular Zali Stegggall has been, and how her LNP counterpart probably shouldn't of ran.

[griffin]

(this was started while WA results were yet to be included, as it was still less than an hour into counting, so some details may change, but not expected to be by much)

I'm so glad that all of that money and all of that bright yellow in-your-face advertising by Palmer and his party didn't translate into votes again. It might actually mean that Australians in general are more intelligent than Palmer was expecting, with all of those election promises that he either couldn't practically deliver or shouldn't deliver if we didn't want the economy to collapse.

I guess the protest vote still had to go somewhere, but both One Nation & United are (only) ending up with 4-5% each, but (fortunately?) Greens and Independents are absorbing about 25% of the total vote between them as the main protest vote, with the two major parties down to a combined 67% (36% to Coalition and 31% to Labor).

The polls were mostly accurate to everyone except Labor, who was projected to be closer to 35%... and are nationally down from the last election*, which means that they aren't going to "win" the election, but the Coalition will "lose" the election, and Labor is only really gaining from preferences that are flowing from the Coalition through other candidates who were the protest votes (as the Coalition was down more from last election than Labor, but that loss didn't flow directly to Labor).
(* early results from WA has Labor with a higher primary vote than the Coalition, so that could get Labor closer to the polling projection)

The talking point is the inner city seats of the three largest cities going against the major parties (to Greens in Brisbane and "Teal" to Melbourn and Sydney), resulting in 3 corner contests in most of them that won't be decided for at least a week, because of preferences being needed when none of the candidates gets more than 35-40% of the primary vote and traditional preference flows do not apply to the on-the-day calculations.

There looks to be a record number of members on the crossbench this time, so if Labor doesn't get a majority (76 seats), they will need support of some on the crossbench... and we saw how difficult that was last time when Gillard was Prime Minister.
And as we saw with the Government (the Coalition only just had a majority at the start of the last term and ended in technical minority at the end), if you don't have a buffer majority of at least 5 seats, it only takes a couple of scandals and controversies to lead to by-elections or ejection to the crossbench to essentially neuter the Government. With the Senate still likely to remain held by the Coalition, who will block most of what Labor will want to pass, a Labor minority government would have trouble passing legislation in the lower house to begin with, without compromises to Greens or independents.

It was noted on the ABC coverage - if Labor doesn't reach 76 and they stubbornly refuse to negotiate with anyone on the Crossbench (as they promised during the campaign - a promise both sides always break when they want to secure government), and if no one on the Crossbench wanted to support Labor as a minority government without getting anything in return, it would mean that the existing Prime Minister remains in power, no matter how small their minority is... they just would struggle to get anything done, resulting in another election very quickly.
(saying that, there is no way Labor would reject taking Government, just so that they can get rid of the Morrison government, no matter what they have to give up to enough Crossbench people to do it)


At about 9pm on the East Coast, enough seats (more than 76) were called to non-Coalition candidates to prevent the Coalition from reaching a majority. Now that WA results are coming in, Labor are doing a lot better than the national average... so it is getting more likely that Labor will reach 76, but maybe not much more. And I would predict that if Labor get any less than 80 seats, they will only be in power for one term, as scrutiny is always on the party in power (so even if there are scandals on both sides, it will hurt the Governing party more), while their internal factions will be more keen to fight among themselves to assert their dominance... and if popularity polls for Albanese aren't good after he is elected (he is starting from a below average rating, and it is harder to gain support while PM), it could see efforts to force him to step aside before the next election (he can't be easily deposed, after Rudd changed the rules for leadership changes, so he would need to be talked into falling on his sword "for the good of the party" ).

[griffin]

I wouldn't be surprised if Morrison's ego had him stay on as leader. There is no rule or requirement that the leader of the losing side has to stand aside, and on the Coalition side, Morrison didn't really let too many others step out of his shadow to make a name for themselves.
The two that were allowed to have significant public roles were Dutton and Frydenberg... and both could end up losing their seats (Frydenberg most likely, Dutton will depend on postal votes).
If both of those people lose, Morrison is probably guaranteed to stay on as leader so that the party has an experienced opposition leader to pick apart the newbie PM and improve their chances at the next election, and even if Dutton survives he (Dutton) is probably even less popular than Morrison... so party members would be less likely to install him as leader if they wanted to regain the protest vote.

Okay... Morrison just spoke, and said that he was stepping down as leader and won't re-contest it... but I think he has so much power over the party that he would still be nominated by his puppets to make it look like his party refuses to have anyone else as leader. Especially if Dutton and Frydenberg lose their seats, or if a "nobody" gets the leadership and fails to improve the party's popularity, Morrison will be "asked" to re-take the leadership, and hope to get the same "return to power" that Howard gained when he returned to the position of party leader in the 90s.


The good news (IMO) is that the two crazies who dropped out of the coalition to join UAP (Kelly in Hughes) and One Nation (Christensen was in Dawson but tried his hand in the Senate for ONP), didn't win their seats, so they will no longer be that distracting vocal minority voice injecting conspiracy theories and anti-science into the Government.


The extraordinary thing about the 2022 result is that if Labor does gain a majority, they are doing it from just 32% of the primary vote... less than a third of the population voting for the governing party who now makes decisions for two-thirds of the country that didn't vote for them.
It has been a long time since the winning party has managed more than 50% of the primary vote, but that 32% for possibly 76 seats compares to the last election requiring the Coalition to need 41% of the primary vote to get 77 seats. And if Labor had managed to get that same 41%, it would have gained 90+ seats... so it just goes to show that a preferential system can be difficult to predict, as Labor didn't win the popular vote, but through preferences they were the more preferred option of all options.

[Handsprime]

IMO I don't think Labor will be a one term government, because the reason people voted for the Teal Independents was they were over the government not doing enough on climate change. Unless the LNP changes their behaviour and actually does something, I imagine that even if Labor doesn't become a majority government, or doesn't get the 80 seats, we'll have at least 2 terms of ALP.

[Ode to a Grasshopper]

Not going to go too much into my personal feelings here, suffice to say I'm out and out Lefty scum who mostly follows politics for the schadenfreude so I'm enjoying the show. But in terms of long-term trends/probable future outcomes this has been an interesting one.

With the Senate still likely to remain held by the Coalition, who will block most of what Labor will want to pass, a Labor minority government would have trouble passing legislation in the lower house to begin with, without compromises to Greens or independents.

Quick little correction here: the Senate is basically Hung as it usually is, with the Coalition usually getting their way through One Nation and whoever else they can wrangle votes from. At present there's a swing to progressive Independents and more greens, so Labor's issues are - based on current polling - more likely to swing the other way (i.e. they'll have to negotiate with more progressive Senators rather than the Coalition).
I've gotta say I'm really enjoying reading your take on things @Griff, cheers for the perspective/s.


Anyway, for me there were a couple of really interesting things that came out of this season. I was honestly expecting Morrison to sneak back into minority government (or at least a larger minority than Labor) on the back of UAP/One Nation preferences, with both majors losing seats and a large number of Independents. I still hope the Independents get the balance of power, I know both two-and-a-half major parties have been pushing the 'chaos and instability' angle but when you look at what actually happened with Gillard-Rudd2 there were a lot of good legislative results and having to actually negotiate policy with people who WEREN'T beholden to Party politics lead to better outcomes and a LOT more transparency and accountability. So I'm pretty pleased at the rise of more Independents. It helps that I live in Tassie these days and we've got a really good track record with people like Wilkie and even Lambie, she started off a bit wobbly but has turned out really well - effectively, having more 'regular people' in politics seems to deliver better results.

I read somewhere that we had 50%, possible as much as 58% (I forget the number, think it was 50.8%) pre-polling day votes cast. A certain amount of that is probably due to Covid, which is still around and we're doing about as poorly at as we ever have despite it not rating a mention much in the campaign, but voter comments suggest a fair amount of that was also an 'I'm sick of it' factor. That's pretty incredible, especially since the LNP government actually made it harder to cast an early vote - they cut down the time you could do so and really pushed people to vote on polling day. So yeah, that's a pretty significant shift there, and changes how campaigns are likely to be run in future as well as reflecting (in a negative-for-mainstream-politicans way) a significant level of voter disaffection and/or hostility towards politics in general.
It was also quite interesting to see a lot of public hostility to the 'gotcha' journalism we saw so much of over the past 6 weeks, especially since voter questions during the public forums were a lot more substantive and concerned with actual policy. So it's not just the pollies who are on the nose.

Lastly, there's doubtless going to be a really interesting ****fight over future direction in the Coalition over the next few weeks/months/years. The much-diminished 'moderates' have been decimated and will point to the Coalition's incredible march to the Right as the cause, while the Nationals (who have been largely responsible for said march) have kept all their seats and will doubtless blame not pushing far-right enough as a result (likely as much/more for political jockeying's sake than out of genuine analysis). Barnaby's already out there starting to lay the narrative, and the Nats are always pushing for more power/influence within the Coalition even if it means trading off national-level electability. If Dutton gets back in (oh please oh please oh please let him lose his own seat, it'll so satisfying to watch) then he'll almost certainly be the new leader, and it'll probably mean yet more Trumpification rather than the 'return to the Centre' the already-ignored-and-now-even-less-powerful Moderate wing are already pushing for. Given that they've just barely squeaked into power with both wings for the past two elections, and that support for the two majors has been going steadily downhill for a long time, it's hard to see how 1) they can reconcile the two camps and 2) win a majority again if they don't. I personally doubt we'll see 'the End of the Coalition' exactly, both sides know they can't win on their own, but where it gets interesting is that Party loyalty only ever lasts as long as their own personal survival isn't at stake, so what we might (probably IMO) see if/when the Coalition lurches even more to the Right is a few of the remaining Moderates decide that going Teal themselves is a better bet than staying as a hostage/accomplice to the likes of Barnaby and Matt Canavan. And that's before seeing what happens with the Morrison/'center-Right'/Pentecostal camp, who are/were the weakest camp in terms of numbers but have enjoyed a lot of power and influence under Morrison and were the 'compromise' group. It's hard to see them just lying down and giving all that up, and Morrison personally (if he even stays in Parliament) and his apparently-very-loyal team isn't likely to enjoy copping the blame for losing, much less losing so comprehensively. Which is tricky because just about everyone else hates the smarmy fat smirking git and were apparently already gearing up to throw him under the bus ASAP. I can't wait to see what the next lot/s of leaked SMS messages are like.