Victoria votes, the day after
Well, wow. Anybody who would have predicted this outcome at 5:55pm yesterday would have been called a lunatic. Less than an hour and a half later, and Antony Green was already calling it for the ALP.
There have been some amazing hot takes in the aftermath. I have to wonder if the Liberal Party will learn much from this. Obviously the instability in Canberra was not the only cause of this rout, but it clearly played a role. Also, in campaigning on state-based issues such as law and order, Matthew Guy was using a playbook common to the party nationally. Its failure should suggest a need for new ideas and approaches. I expect, however, many in the federal party to say that “oh Victoria is the ~*progressive state*~ so we don’t need to worry about that elsewhere”. Never mind that a generation ago Victoria was the jewel in the Liberal Party’s crown.
Was this election also a disaster for the Greens? I think that this even needs to be asked suggests the answer is yes. They might come out of this with the same number of lower house seats, three, or they might be reduced to one. Their vetting of candidates has been deficient, and their internal squabbles have spilled into the public domain rather dramatically. In an election when the Greens should have ridden an anti-Liberal tide into office, picking up a seat or two alongside the ALP, they might not even win the one seat they should have cruised into: Brunswick. As somebody who has been an elector in Brunswick since 2007, I was sure the state seat would go Green sooner or later—and, after the massive South Ward result in the last local council elections (which covers much of the territory of the state seat), it seemed all but certain to go Green this election. We will have to wait and see if Tim Read sneaks in.
The problems facing the Greens also pertain to the upper house, and of course that’s my main interest as someone who has been blogging fervently about the microparties running for the Legislative Council and about the need to vote below the line. The Greens’ vote for the upper house is poor—their worst in over a decade—but the fact they might be reduced to just one seat while unknown microparties with a third or even a tenth of their vote could score two or more seats is an utter indictment of the Group Voting Ticket system of election.
The outcome in the lower house is clear: the Andrews government will have an easy majority. The outcome in the upper house will not be known for some time. The AEC has to tally all the votes and then push “the button” to calculate the complex preference flows and get the results. Anything before that point is pure guesswork. You will see people making claims based on election calculators but these assume 100% of voters went above the line. Across the state we’ve had about 10% of voters go below the line, which honestly is a bit disappointing even though it’s much better than the 4% below the line in 2010.
Every vote below the line makes a difference. It complicates the preference flows further, so at crucial points of exclusion in the count it might suppress some of the wacky flows. Kevin Bonham has a post on his blog that details some of the possible outcomes. I will reserve commentary for now, except to say two things. First, it is no small relief that, at the moment, the Aussie Battlers (they of the ever-changing bait-and-switch policy platform) do not look like getting in. Second, I think the upper house will be poorer for the presumed replacement of Fiona Patten and some capable Greens with a rabble of opportunists from parties that almost nobody supports and whose platforms are either incomplete or unsavoury.
I find voting in Australia to be personally enjoyable, as a politics nerd who likes handing out intricate preferences. I do, however, think there is a case that our parliaments ought to be more proportional. Historic factors mean that the Nationals have a statewide vote well below the Greens, yet the Nats comfortably hold a number of seats in both houses of parliament while the Greens could come away with just two seats, one in each house—that means about 10% of the statewide vote will translate into just 1.7% of the seats in parliament. I do not think this is a good outcome, especially not when the method of election for one house of parliament is so easily gamed by those who would do dodgy deals. So if some of the poor result for the Greens is of their own making, other components of it are institutional.