There has been a lot of commentary on the Greens’ victory in last weekend’s Fremantle by-election result. First of all, it is clearly a significant result for the Greens. It is the first time the Greens have come first on primary votes in a state or federal election, and the result is fundamentally different to the Greens’ win in Cunningham in 2002. While the Cunningham result was largely a fluke and depended on extremely strong preferences from voters who normally voted Labor, the Fremantle result appeared to have little to do with freak circumstances aligned with a by-election.
Even if there had been no by-election in Fremantle, the seat would have been a likely gain for the Greens at the next Western Australian state election. The Greens would have won the seat in 2008 if they had overtaken the Liberals, and they came close to doing so. There appears to be two memes being pushed by ALP spinners and anti-Green conservative commentators: that the by-election was a freak occurence, and that it was because Liberal voters sneakily voted for the left-winger to hurt Labor.
As I said above, the result is no freak occurence. The Greens were already on track to win Fremantle, and it is exactly the sort of area where the Greens are strong in general elections. Adele Carles is a strong candidate who has a good shot of holding on in the future. It’s also worth considering this result as part of a trend which has seen significant gains for the Greens at the WA and ACT elections in 2008, the Mayo by-election and local government elections in New South Wales and Victoria. Even the snap Northern Territory election saw strong results for the Greens. The Queensland state election was pretty much the only major election in the last 18 months to not see the Greens gain ground.
In the near future there are a number of opportunities for Greens to gain lower house seats in state Parliaments. Balmain and Marrickville look plum for the picking in March 2011, assuming no major shifts in NSW politics (Carmel Tebbutt becoming Premier may be the only thing that could save her seat). The state seats of Melbourne, Richmond and Brunswick are all vulnerable in Victoria in late 2010, as is the federal seat of Melbourne.
I don’t think any other federal seats can fall at the next election, but Sydney could be vulnerable in 2013, and there are a whole tranche of seats that could fall if the Greens can raise their primary vote to 15-20%, such as Grayndler, Wentworth, Cunningham, Batman, Melbourne Ports, Denison, Fremantle, and, once Rudd retires, Griffith. If the ACT can get over the hump and regain a third seat, a central Canberra electorate would also be vulnerable.
If you look at the United Kingdom and Canada, you have third parties winning around 20% of the vote and winning a sizeable number of seats in their core areas. There’s no reason why, in a decade’s time, we could see the Greens holding 8-10 House of Representatives seats while comfortably electing a Senator in every state and the ACT at each election.
The other issue that has been raised is the idea that Liberal voters elected the Greens over the ALP, and somehow this makes it illegitimate. First of all, I don’t understand why it matters. If a majority of the electorate prefer the Greens to Labor, then that’s the whole ball game. Indeed, there is a problem in the preference system where a majority prefer Greens to Labor but end up with a Labor MP because the Greens fall just short of overtaking the Liberals.
But I don’t actually believe that is what happened. Considering Tagliaferri’s limited Labor credentials and conservative record, as well as the ALP’s terrible campaign effort which managed to alienate much of the union movement, I tend to think many Liberal voters would have switched to Tagliaferri, while Tagliaferri lost traditional ALP voters to the Greens. I tend to think that, if you were to simply disenfranchise all those who voted Liberal in 2008, the result would have been largely similar.
Elsewhere: other takes on the result at New Matilda, Inside Story, Alex Schlotzer and An Ononymous Lefty.
I would say that Wills is more winnable than Batman but that the way to get a winnable federal seat north of the seat of Melbourne is to persuade the boundary drawers, using demographic arguments, that the area currently represented by Batman and Wills would be better represented by seats with an east-west axis rather than the current north-south axis.
Good post Ben. I’ve also got some discussion on this in my blog with a list of reasons why I think the Greens will continue to get stronger and take some of these seats in the future. Check it out! http://polswatch.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/is-fremantle-a-sign-of-things-to-come/
I don`t think that becoming premier of the current government would save any seats. It would just be asking to get Bruced/Howarded.
Nice post Ben. Yes, the Greens do appear to have the real possibility of lower house seats, something the Democrats were not capable of – not due to a failure of will, but a failure of their demographic. It is becoming much clearer that the Greens are more like the Nationals in having a geographically more concentrated vote, appealing to a particular segment of the electorate. Unfortunately this also means Greens will find it tough out in the fringes and in rural seats. And you now have the likes of Henderson & Ackerman annointing the Greens as “the Left” in Parliament (Ackermen’s column was a complete scream), which paradoxically may now concentrate that vote even more – syphoning off even more votes from the ALP’s dwindling left factions.
In NSW I think that Tebutt becoming Premier would save her, and might have a knock on effect for Firth in Balmain, but I just don’t believe that Tripodi & Obeid will let it happen (or Sartor, wnho still thinks the job is his). What this means though for the remnants of the NSW ALP left is that they could lose 3 of their MP’s at the next election, if you consider Pearce in Coogee is in a parlous state, threatened by both Greens and Liberals (and if the rumours are correct, from within as well).
Lastly, I note that Richard di Natale is now the Victorian Greens senate candidate which should improve their chances through recognition alone. With Barber re-endorsed for North Met as well, we equally have the prospect of the brothers-in-law emulating the tradition of other parties with relatives entering parliament (think the various Burke’s, Ferguson’s, Bowen’s), although former Green Senator Jo Vallentine is already ahead of them with a cousin as a current Liberal Senator and a grandfather as an Independent MLC.
“Grayndler, Wentworth, Cunningham, Batman, Melbourne Ports, Denison, Fremantle, and, once Rudd retires, Griffith”
Maybe, no, no, no, no, no, no and no. The Greens have 3 lower house shots in the next decade; Melbourne, Sydney and Grayndler, and they will all be on large Lib preferences. Shoot for the senate first. And there is no chance in Wills or Batman for at least 20 years. Seriously.
The fact is that the Greens hit a ceiling at a certain level – you can see it in Tassie where it’s levelled off at high teens. These are good senate results but some of those seats you predicated are just ridiculous.
And Ben, I mean this with no disrespect, but I wish the Greens would stop predicting how they’ll win ‘Senate seats in all states’ or ‘are odds-on in many inner city seats’ (both quotes for Green MPs).
The Greens were not set to win Freo at the next election. Remember, they came third, albeit a close third at the last general election. That there is now a Green MP was a result of it being held in a by-election, which is fine, but it doesn’t guarantee Carles at the next general.
The next election in Freo will be close; if Carles can establish herself as a good local member I expect she will hold on, but taking it for granted is stupid. It will be a closely fought contest.
And Stewart, the Dems came very close to lower house seats a few times – they even nearly knocked off Downer, which would have been a wonderful wonderful achievement.
Ben, thanks for the blog. Have any Green Senate candidates been chosen yet (I note that Stewart said that Di Natale was selected again).
I didn’t give any time frame about when I thought that list of seats would be within grasp. I said they would be achievable if the Greens can raise their vote to 15-20% (when, by the way, Senate seats would be automatic).
I don’t know how long that will take, but it’s worth bearing in mind that there will be at least four federal elections in the next decade, and I think you can’t say what will be happening by 2016 or 2019 if the existing Labor government is coming towards the end of its life-cycle.
I don’t know where the Greens’ vote ceiling is. The highest vote level for the Greens in Tasmania was in 2002, so there has only been one election since then with a slight decline. It’s far too early to say that the Greens have flattened out in Tasmania. But even still, that would leave room for the vote to grow substantially more on the mainland, and I think even amongst those demographics that are most strongly pro-Green there are enough people to bring the Greens close to 20%, even without appealling to a broader constituency. And if we were to do that, it would be concentrated in particular areas, which helps us in those seats.
I did some estimates a few months back of the effective Labor-Greens two-party preferred vote in Sydney, Grayndler, Batman, Denison and Cunningham, and I calculated Batman to be 62-38. If the Greens were to get, say, 19% federally, and you think that more of that swing would come from the inner city, then that is totally achievable.
I don’t know who is predicting we will win Senators in all states or are ‘odds-on’ in lower house seats. Do you have any quotes for these?
We have never been in a position to consider Fremantle a safe gain at the next general election, before or after the by-election. But the fact remains that the Greens came incredibly close. You say we came third, but you have to remember that the Liberals were preferencing the Greens and this would have been enough if we had overtaken the Liberals, so the effective margin in Fremantle was the gap between Liberal and Green. I don’t think anyone is taking it for granted, but I think that, if you assume she won’t have any trouble staying ahead of the Liberals this time, then she is the favourite.
In the Senate, only Di Natale has been chosen. I don’t know what process is going on in WA and Tasmania, where I assume Senators Siewert and Milne will be re-preselected. These may have already happened. NSW will conclude its process in about 5 weeks time. Queensland and ACT are happening later this year. I don’t know about South Australia.
Thanks for the reply. All the best.
And all the best to Di Natale, I’ve always thought he was a very intelligent candidate.
Phil, do you think that the boundary changes I have proposed above would provide another seat winnable for the Greens (the one that would be mostly the same as the state seats of Northcote and Brunswick)?
Yes. The best Greens vote for the lower house at state level was at the Tasmanian state election, 2002 (18.1%). The record for the upper house was the Fed Senate Election 2007 in ACT, where The Greens polled 21.5% (Bob polled 18.1% for Tasmania in the Senate election 2007).
Phil
Yes the Democrats came close to knocking off Downer (the guy from Redgum whose name I can’t remember), but Lynton Vronov also came close in the by-election. I think it may have some of the right demographics. The issue for the Dems, particularly in their later days, was that their vote started to be more evenly spread. The Greens had this issue early on too, but this has started to change as their appeal has broadened AND the demographic they appeal to has grown. While Goot and a few others have argued that the post-materialist vote, where the Greens are strongest, is going down, what is likely happening is that the identifiers used in the polling are no longer as strong an indicator as they once were.
Anyway, I wasn’t having a shot at the Dems, just that their vote was more spread than the Greens. And excepting their earliest days the Dems did not win lower house seats, being perhaps rightly perceived as an upper house party, but not a party of government.
Ah, just had a hunt around – Robin Millhouse was the Democrat MP for Mitcham from 1977 (when he joined the Democrats as a sitting member of the New Liberal Movement), won the seat again in 1980, before retiring to become a judge in 1982. Heather Southcott won the seat in the by-election but lost it in the general election at the end of the year. So the Democrats have had lower house MP’s in SA (not counting Norm Sanders in Tassie).
The Democrats have had MHAs (one in each HA) and one MLA in the ACT.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Capital_Territory_general_election,_2001
The Dems did have that stronghold of support there in that part of SA that was a stronghold of their predecessors the New LM (generally the federal seats of Mayo and Boothby), but they certainly had that problem of their vote being too thinly spread across the rest of the country. They were also seen as almost exclusively a Senate party (and indeed, did little to counter such perceptions), and generally polled significantly better in the Senate than in the House of Reps. It is an interesting comparison with the Greens, who, during the 90s, generally did the reverse, with lower house candidates doing better than their Senate vote. Perhaps that underscores another key difference between the two parties the Greens are much more of a grass-roots movement, whilst the Dems effectively built from the top-down, attracting support courtesy of popular or charismatic leaders such as Chipp, Haines, Kernot and Stott-Despoja, hence the lack of an enduring grass-roots organisational base was an inevitably fatal flaw.
I do wonder though what would’ve happened to Australian politics if, in 1990, Janine Haines had contested one of the safe Liberal seats (ie Mayor or Boothby) rather than the marginal Labor-Liberal seat of Kingston, where, like the bloke from Redgum, she would’ve been able to outpoll Labor and hence have had a very strong chance of winning the seat.
Actually I’ve made a mistake in the previous comment. There was no general trend of the Greens doing better in the House of Reps than in the Senate. That trend does show up in the figures for the local booths where I’m from here in northern NSW, but not overall, and nowhere near the degree of disparity in the Democrat vote anyway.
Tom, I’m not counting the ACT and Tasmanian lower house MPs because they were not elected in single-member electorates.
But if we’re counting them, then it’s worth noting that the Democrats managed to win a seat once in Tasmania, whereas the Greens have won 26 times (1 in 1983, 2 in 1986, 5 in 1988, 5 in 1992, 4 in 1996, 1 in 1998, 4 in 2002, 4 in 2006).
And the Democrats have likewise won one seat in the ACT Legislative Assembly (2001), while the Greens have won seats 9 times (2 in 1995, 1 in 1998, 2001 and 2004, and 4 in 2008).
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