Griffith – Australia 2022

@Glen and @Yoh An, the same thing is true for all the Green target seats. They have a few areas with very high Greens support, which is enough to drive a general sense that the seat is winnable, and get a base of volunteers for a campaign. Greens can actually make decent inroads into country towns (like the non hippie parts of Ballina), middle ring and outer suburbs, but not without the base and the hype.

I guess the theory now is all of South Brisbane is strong enough for Greens to buoy the campaign elsewhere. Previously it was West End etc. boosting the rest of South Brisbane.

South Brisbane is not a useful comparison this time, because at the state election the incumbent (Jackie Trad) had so much baggage. Various scandals made her a sitting duck. Terri Butler instead has some incumbent advantage. I suspect the key this time around will be how many more “Labor” votes the Greens can swing in the more working class suburbs, with their big ground campaign and how many more “Liberal” votes the Greens can swing in the affluent corridor from Norman Park to Bulimba, with their nimby anti flight noise campaign.

Will there be an exit poll as in 2019 and at what time will it be released? Other than that I see that Albanese was in Ryan yesterday or was it today?

Reports that Labor was putting extra resources into Brisbane, Ryan and Higgins (and presumably away from traditional ALP vs LNP seats), deploying Penny Wong on the trail. Also sandbagging Griffith. Meanwhile they seem off the boil in outer suburbs and regions.

If this was their strategy from the outset, it’s completely baffling that they moved to the right on issues like Climate Change. I think electability was the excuse, not the reason, for a party that wanted to move right for other reasons.

I’ll never fully understand why Labor dislike Greens more than Liberals and teals, but it’s clear as day that they do.

Chloprophyl is quite correct about The Fact that Jackie Trad’s candidacy in South Brisbane dammaged the ALP. The decision of the Palaszczuk government to partially Lance the boil was probably the difference between an ALP government and an LNP government in Qureenslamd. However the damaging aspect of Trad was not in South Brisbane but in rest of State. She was a liability to every ALP candidate in Queensland.
I can not think of any LNP Federal Wueensland membrr who has such a damaging impact by merely remaining a candidate. Dutton is the closest and his negative impact is compensated by a greater positive impact on LNP vote.

The Australian this morning reports that Griffith residents are being inundated with Robo Calls from Kevin Rudd urging support for Australian Labor Party’s Terri Butler.
Robo Calls are the most annoying advertising technique there is. They are nearly always not wanted and I suspect do more harm than good. Rudd is not going to cut much ice with the infants prone to voting Greens he is ancient history. He may have a bit of an impact in traditional Wotrking class suburban seats like Oxley but in the inner city suburbs like East Brisbane I think him interrupting a tv show will have a negative impact. Public Servants will remember Rudd as the bloke who started the sacking process. There are lots of public servants in Griffith. Best to put him in a room and talk to himself.

The fact that Labour feels a need to campaign so hardly in this seat suggests they fear losing the seat to Greens.

Green man
the fact that Labour needs to campaign indicates that they fear losing the seat not that the Greens are their main worry.

I wonder what the general tone of the RoboCalls are?

Are they trying to shore up Labor’s Green credentials or are they campaigning against the Liberals?

That would give a pretty clear indication of what party they’re worried about.

Resorting to Robo calls in an electorate like Griffith is a sign of real disillusionment by party members.
I managed Katter campaign in Griffith By election a few years back and with a dozen volunteers we letterboxed whole electorate. Most of the electorate are in units or on small suburban blocks and rest on 32 Perch blocks. The distance from one letter box to next one ranges from 20 cm to 10M. Ie it is the easiest seat in Queensland to campaign in. If Robo calls are being used it indicates no party members willing to do anything. Even Party member Jane Doe ringing and saying Kevin Rudd would like you to know that he thinks TerribButler should be returned to Canberra is better than a Robo call.
Without any shadow of a doubt the outstanding feature of this election has been the lack of human volunteers.

Ten minutes after writing my 10:26 commeny I rad Greg Sheridan’s comment in this mornings The Australian the elect toon campaign “ indicates a deep crisis in politics, a loss of faith in politics by ordinary Ripley. No one any longer believes in a political cause or grand narrative. The only thing voters accept from politicians is cash”.
Well I still believe in a grand narrative even if it is out of step with great majority in electorate. That narrative is free society, Social Justice with a government that is not afraid to become involved. It certainly is not the Freedom that Palmer talks about, it involves an acceptance of rules that I do not like when society imposes them. It includes being vaccinated for the common good and accepting that the rule of lake results in more responsibility than rights.

do you think terri’s worried about the greens now

Well looks like I called Griffith right and that Ryan and Brisbane were seats to watch.

Bye Terri 🙂 That’s what you get for trying to conduct scare campaigns against people who represent the policies and values your party is supposed to. Now hopefully Labor hacks don’t try to parachute her into some other electorate or give her a job she doesn’t deserve.

I’m surprised by the Green swing in metropolitan Brisbane. Terri Butler and Labor probably assumed that they would finish in the top two and:
1. The LNP would come third and its preferences go to Labor OR
2. The Greens would come third and its preferences go to Labor.

This must be the only seat outside of Melbourne with the Greens coming 1st on primary votes.

I disagree Votante, I think she was afraid the whole time. Her campaign was almost as nasty as South Brisbane in 2020, which is usually a good sign- not for the volunteers getting harassed at the booth of course, or vandals coming to their houses etc. At least there wasn’t a repeat of the Mean Girls saga, although I guarantee the ALP dirt units were combing through social media for it anyway. But the ‘Only Labor can defeat Scott Morrison’ flyers that came in the last week, not to mention the ‘no minority government’ bs that Terri personally ran were all signs of a very desperate and flailing campaign.

But the media doesn’t interrogate any of these discrepancies. They’ve got no interest in surveying voters on the ground beyond a quick vox pop for the camera. They don’t talk to volunteers and organisers, they don’t do enough investigative reporting on the issues that the Greens were campaigning on. I don’t think they even know what the Greens were campaigning on at all beyond ‘climate change’. The media’s idea of covering campaigns is to ask pollsters who have a limited perspective, no offence to Ben, or just ring their buddies at party HQ, like Murray Watts or Terri herself. Well turns out those sorts of people have good reasons to lie, and often do, as Labor did here. After all their entire pitch to progressive voters who’ve watched the party slide to the right is that the Greens aren’t a viable alternative.

I’d like to hope this might prompt the media to reconsider their coverage of this sort of thing but let’s face it, best case scenario is they just start ringing Douglas instead of Peel and George St. Well, Greens head office at least tends to take more notice of qualitative feedback at least.

Andrew Jackson said the outstanding feature of this election has been the lack of human volunteers. Well, maybe for some parties. This seat didn’t get a huge Greens swing by accident, it was due to Max Chandler-Mather mobilising a huge number of volunteers and having 30 000 conversations with voters in the electorate. As Greens staffer Emerald Moon said on the latest episode of the Serious Danger podcast, “the Greens run campaigns differently because we have to. We don’t just sit there and say ‘we deserve this seat because the demographics have changed’. We don’t sit there and wait, we fight for it”.

Is the reason that Greens are winning in Griffith and Ryan right now because there was a higher swing against the Liberals, presumably to Green, and that therefore the postal votes are higher for Green? I note that Green postal vote totals are tied with Labour at 21.73% in Ryan, whereas in Brisbane the Greens trail Labour 17.6% to 26.97% in postal votes. The swing from Liberal in Griffith and Ryan is currently 11.89% and 10.16%, whereas in Brisbane it is only 9.69%. So are the Greens better organized in Griffith and Ryan or are former Liberal voters more adept at postal voting. I note, for example, that 37.85% of the postal votes in Melbourne are Green, so again is that better organization by the Greens or more a reflection of the origin of Green votes?

I was planning on writing up a whole thing about this but in short, yes, the Ryan and Griffith campaigns were definitely better organized and resourced.

I know I’ve been harping on it so much but the Brisbane campaign emphasized doorknocking and in person canvassing much less than even Ryan, certainly less than the Griffith people did, to the extent that I think those campaigns beat them in sheer numbers by something like 4-8 times the number of houses doorknocked. I think the results speak for themselves.

That’s not the full story obviously, there were a million other little things I could nitpick, they did do a lot of phonebanking and Stephen Bates worked incredibly hard for what he achieved, and he did achieve more than any other Greens candidate ever in Brisbane, all while working a day job for much of the campaign. But the Brisbane campaign definitely made mistakes, and it’s looking like it could have cost them the seat.

Just checked in on some chatter and apparently the campaign think they’re on track to win Brisbane anyway based on minor party preference flows and postals not favouring Labor quite enough, but either way it’s going to be an incredibly tight result. If the Brisbane people were running the Ryan campaign they would absolutely have lost imo

So when is the last day to receive postal votes and when will Absent and Pre-Declaration votes start to be counted?

It wasn’t so long ago that Bill Glasson almost won this seat for the LNP after Rudd quit.

The vibe I’ve gotten is that the Brisbane City branch didn’t really want to put in as much effort as the other campaigns which is probably why Bates didn’t get as large a swing as the others, as shown with Kirsten Lovejoy at state level.

Ryan Spencer, I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. Unlike Griffith or Ryan, Brisbane doesn’t have a Greens state MPs office in its boundaries to share resources with, and that lack of a strong Greens voter base might also mean they had fewer volunteers to draw upon. Also, Furtive Lawngnome has commented in the past that the Greens branches in the inner north aren’t as organised or united as the ones south of the river (and presumably the inner west too). And as I’ve commented here before, Bates was taking over as candidate from former Senator Andrew Bartlett, who probably commanded some personal vote.

I think given those constraints and challenges, Bates did a good job. He was good at marketing himself and capturing media attention (at least the media young people might actually read) with his Grindr ads, and he seemed impressive and assured when speaking at the community forums.

Bringing this back to Griffith, Chandler-Mather seems like a pretty switched on and high-energy fellow. Will he go on to be a long-term player in Australian politics or flame out early like Wyatt Roy, another high-energy youngster?

Furtive Lawnmower

“Brisbane campaign emphasized doorknocking and in person canvassing much less than even Ryan, certainly less than the Griffith people did”

Absolutely untrue. It was not a decision by the Brisbane greens campaign to do less doorknocking and in-person canvassing. There’s more reasons than simply intent that go into whether a volunteer campaign kicks off or not.

I remember once Butler was on a panel with Richard Di Natale, and the issue of debates was brought up. She argued that Di Natale should be excluded from the debates because he was “not vying to be Prime Minister” and had “one out of 150 seats in the House of Representatives”. Very fitting that Butler has now lost her seat to the Greens. Good riddance.

Widget, if you feel like sharing those reasons then feel free to.

FTR I’m not saying they discouraged it or tried to prevent anyone doing it or whatever. But I know which campaigns were constantly rostering canvassing days and training nights, getting word out about them on the web and on facebook, and blowing up my inbox about etc- by and large, it wasn’t Bates’ people. It’s not like they didn’t do those things at all, they did, but it’s also not like they had a quarter of the volunteers to work with (although they *did* have trouble securing a full time campaign manager until late in the campaign. Which would have hurt).

Well ABC has posted alleged AEC data that says Greens are 606 preferences ahead of Labour on three part preferred in Brisbane. That said, which contingent will have the larger parliamentary caucus in the Legislature and Senate, the Greens at 16 or the Nationals?

This isn`t North America and neither the Greens nor Nationals have ever had a King O`Malley equivalent filling the party with American terms, so they have party rooms.

The Nationals will still be bigger as they kept all their 15 MPs and gained a 5th Senator (because the Fiona Nash section 44 disqualification replaced a long term National Senator with a Liberal Senator, artificially supressing the number of Nationals Senators).

@FL just because the Greens rattle off a list of ‘target seats’ doesn’t mean they’re all resourced the same. I’m reliably told by friends in the party that Griffith received something like ten times the funding support Brisbane did. Before the Brisbane campaign had even launched Griffith had half a dozen organisers on staff already. The Brisbane and Ryan wins were happy accidents as far as the party’s strategy is concerned.

Furtive Lawnmower

I understand your interest but I think these reasons will be saved for the internal debrief not aired in public. Despite the QLD Greens target seat campaigns being massive successes there are lessons that I hope are learned about potential improvements. The rest of the country’s Green movement will undoubtedly be copying the template of these QLD greens campaigns.

Is there a particular reason why Griffith and Brisbane have the second and third lowest informality voting rate after Canberra: 1.98%, 2.04% versus 1.78%?

Fascinated by the result here based on the primary vote swings. GRN (+10.94%), LNP (-10.23%), ALP (-2.01%). From these results, it looks like the Greens’ vote surged primarily at the expense of the LNP’s vote. The same kind of trend seems to have occurred in Ryan. However, this interpretation does not take into account that many traditional LNP voters might have switched to Labor, but this was offset by a large shift from ALP to GRN. I wonder if anyone has any guesses as to which interpretation is more correct? Did many LNP voters go straight to the Greens, or did they first go to Labor while many disaffected Labor voters also moved to the Greens?

I find it interesting how this seat seems to have similar voting trends to Macnamara in Victoria – a rising Greens vote, gradual donward trend in the Labor primary vote, increasing marginality between Labor and the Liberals in recent years, 2PP swings against Labor in 2016 against the nationwide trend, then a reversal of the previous trends towards the Liberals starting 2019 & accelerating in 2022 with big swings to Labor on a 2PP basis.

Particularly interested in the point about these seats becoming more favourable to the Liberals as we saw in 2013 and 2016, but the reverse trend starting in 2019 and accelerating in 2022. Are these two results just temporary blips in the trend towards the Liberals here and in Macnamara, or are the Liberals unlikely to regain competitiveness to the extent of 2013 or 2016 here despite the ongoing gentrification in both electorates?

Chances are much higher that Liberals start running third in 3PP than winning either division. At least in the foreseeable future

@Furtive Lawngnome

In that case, the Greens could be looking at a cursed situation where taking a certain amount of votes from the LNP directly (I think both EWB and MCM said it on separate interviews, I can’t remember which, that this has been done) could deliver a win for the ALP.

Assuming a LNP -> ALP Preference flow rate (From 3cp Stage, not Primaries) is 80%, ALP cp stays static, and a 4.21% swing directly from LNP to the Greens, this can easily happen:

Party 3cp 2cp
LNP 29.70% Excluded
ALP 29.71% 53.48% WIN
Greens 40.58% 46.52%

Of course, ALP is bound to lose votes too, and if Greens take an even further 3.49% directly from LNP with ALP staying static, or completely alternatively if the LNP -> ALP Preference flow rate 70% then they are safe anyway. It still really does point out a monotonicity issue with STV/IRV, and the potential where voting Greens can unintentionally hurt them.

My seat of North Sydney (which I talk about a lot these days – used to be the most boring seat but suddenly got interesting with both a Teal and a strong Labor candidate) was another potential case in 2022 which monotonicity could have become an issue. (Tink lose 3cp despite winning a hypothetical 2cp against LNP, ALP doesn’t quite do enough to beat LNP on 2cp, thus those swinging LNP -> ALP voters by just the right amount accidentally making LNP win). The 3cp issue is most likely gone come 2025 and even if not I project ALP can beat LNP on 2cp (No incumbent, Dutton as leader, Zimmerman not running, apparently the area demographically trending ALP), but my point still stands that there is a monotonicity problem here.

It depends I guess. There’s some evidence that once the Greens win these sort of seats that they tend to consolidate the ALP/GRN vote, which keeps the ALP out of the 2PP and prevents Liberal voters playing kingmaker. So I think that scenario is more likely to happen in Macnamara than Griffith (although not impossible there either, especially if Labor decide to make more of an effort winning seats back from the Greens, which many in the ALP hierarchy are pushing for). As for NS, and speaking more in general from the perspective of any candidate you could broadly describe as ‘progressive’, I don’t think it’s worth worrying about finessing the electorate just-so. It would be extremely difficult to engineer and the results could very easily backfire. Instead, you just run the best campaign you can, and you take the votes you can get. What happens, happens. Of course from my perspective, this Labor government is barely any different to Morrison’s, the Teal independents are fairly useless, and any seat lost to either of them might as well have been lost to the Liberals anyway.

Furtive, why do you think the new Labor government is ‘barely different’ from the previous Coalition administration? I personally believe that Albanese is like Rudd or Whitlam progressing with a bold agenda.

Sure, some aspects like workplace relations and environmental controls are not at the ‘ideal’ standards you and the Greens would prefer but you have to remember a country as vast as Australia has communities with different priorities, so Labor are making the most out of a challenging situation especially after a time when the Coalition was seen as a ‘do nothing’ administration.

@ FL
Good points raised. i agree with you that once a Green win these seats (Green versus Liberal 2PP) the Greens consolidate the ALP/GRN vote a good example of this would be Maiwar or Ballina (Nats/instead of the Libs) and Prahran in 2022 although one exception was in 2018 with Prahran where collapse in Liberal vote went to both Greens and Labor and there was a battle between them for second place. I suspect the seat that we will seat this is the federal seat of Brisbane where there are both strong Liberal (Ascot, Clayfield) and strong Greens (Petrie Terrace/Kelvin Grove) but no strong Labor areas anymore which should see the ALP vote falling in the low 20s and Labor voters vote Green to prevent the Libs taking the seat back. In Griffith there Liberal leaning areas such as Bulimba are not as strong as Ascot so there is an outside chance that Libs could fall into third place. In Macnamara the issue that prevents this is the Caulfield tail where if the Liberals are no palatable then Jewish community will vote Labor instead of Greens. This means the chance that the Labor falls to 3rd place is less likely while the Libs have chosen a more conservative path. Note that since Labor fell to a low ebb in 2016, the Labor PV has increased in both 2019 and 2022 there a chance it could increase again in 2025 with Dutton as leader if Labor can win more votes around Caulfield to offset the increase in Green vote elsewhere

Yoh An, I appreciate you and others have a different perspective, but for once I’ll be good and keep my commentary here psephological. I just mentioned it as a way of putting my cards on the table.

Nimalan: Good points of yours too. However, and I’ve said this before, but honestly I don’t know how ‘real’ ‘The Jewish Vote’ as a discrete constituency is. I don’t really have any objective facts to back this up but I tend to believe, for example, that the average Jewish person’s support for and even interest in Israel is probably vastly exaggerated, even if (at least some) Jewish community leaders are much more invested in it, and therefore invested in the ALP (and of course there’s a very strong tradition of progressivism among Western Jews and support for the Palestinian cause). It could be that the ALP vote has a higher floor in Macnamara but I’d sooner attribute that to material rather than religious reasons (or just the general existence of Centrist Dads). I could be wrong, obviously.

Otherwise I generally agree that erstwhile Liberal voters turned off by the Liberal Party’s lurch to the right definitely works in Josh Burns’ favour. What’s more I fully expect the ALP to throw everything at keeping Josh’s seat anyway. Whether or not they’re willing to spend money unseating Greens incumbants, the party has definitely resolved to put the brakes on any further Greens incursions. So they won’t let him lose Macnamara without a massive fight.

It’s pretty remarkable that in 2016, the Libs almost won Macnamara and this seat. Goes to show how poorly the Libs have been doing with young professionals since their shift towards right wing populism and social conservatism.

Labor will win this back, whispers off Rudd returning around APH

Uhh, could we have a source?

Rudd returning seems less likely than finding Elvis on mars.

From what I can see on Wikipedia, all appointments in the last 10-20 years to the position of Australian ambassador to the US have lasted 3-5 years. Since Rudd was only appointed last month (March 2023), if he is like the last five, you would think he will hold the position until at least around March 2026. I understand the next federal election has to be held before May 2025, so it seems unlikely to me that Rudd will return to contest Griffith at the next federal election in 2024-2025, as that would seem to go against recent trends in term lengths for the Australian ambassadorship to the US.

max is one of the most annoying mps imo, he’ll still retain his seat though

I doubt Labor would allow this to happen. Labor has successfully been able to distance itself from the Rudd/Gillard division. A Kevin Rudd return to parliament would be viewed as destabilising. Even if it wasn’t Rudd’s intention and he’s great mates with Albo.

Sydney Morning Herald reported last year that Rudd pondered a comeback before the election standing in Fairfax. But was talked out of it by party officials. Rudd has denied he was interested in standing.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/kevin-3-0-rudd-attempted-a-short-lived-comeback-to-political-life-20220225-p59zoo.html

I imagine every LNP supporter in the land would be overjoyed with the prospect of Rudd coming back and stirring up trouble.

Rudd will not come back in Griffith. End of story. But I can imagine the Labor branches presenting Terri Butler again, just for the chance she has that she can attract some of a personal vote that she wouldn’t get if there was a new candidate. I think in 2022, there was just a general dissatisfaction with the major parties, but Labor, especially in Queensland, is doing so much better in every poll by every pollster, and the Liberal PV is down. I can imagine some Greens voters would be impressed by Labor, and switch to voting Labor, and well as some Liberals. Labor just has to come 2nd in the count to win Griffith from The Greens. Although Mr Chandler-Mather might have the benefit of incumbency. In Brisbane and Griffith, it will, for a long time, come down to the order of the candidates, and its not hard to see Labor regaining Griffith if there is such a significant swing in Queensland to the ALP.

Political Nightwatchman
Rudd’s return would likely prompt a reopening of investigations into The Heiner Affair, as outlined here;
http://www.heineraffair.info/site_pages/Rudd.html
So your suggestion that he ‘ was talked out of it by party officials, ‘ is plausible.