Senate – Victoria – Australia 2022

3-2-1

If the Liberal party appoint Greg Mirabella to the senate that would be undemocratic as his wife was defeated in Indi in 2013. the Mirabella brand was rejected and so was Sarah Henderson. Democracy is at huge risk from both major parties appointing defeated MP’s or relatives of defeated MP’s to high political office.

These are just the dark days of democracy and it would be a dark day if Greg Mirabella is appointed. On my side of politics I am disappointed that they appointed the defeated member for Robertson in 2013 to the senate. This again is undemocratic. The seats should remain vacant until the election and then the people choose the replacement. The same thing happened in Arizona where a defeated candidate was appointed to the senate. There needs to be a constitutional change to ban these appointments from being made to save democracy.

The liberals could lose the 3rd seat if Greg Mirabella is pre-selected and Labor could win 3 seats.

What on earth are you on about Daniel? Most people do not view the Senate as a race between individual candidates (the exception is Tasmania) so I strongly reject your claim that the Libs will drop to 2 seats based on that. There are very few instances that I can think of where personalities in the Senate made the difference.

Senators who have been decisive:-Malcolm Roberts
Jacqui Lambie
Derryn Hinch
General Jim Molan
Vicki Singh
Pauline Hanson
Richard Colbeck
That’s a tally since 2016.
Harder to find examples in the majors, but there are Senators who lend their popularity to the whole ticket & eschew identification, so their plan’s working.
Decisive negatives;- suggestions?

Lambie, Hinch and Hanson are party leaders/one person bands.

Molan was mainly a preselection issue, his BTL campaign did not win.

Molan lost his BTW campaign by approximately 700,000 votes.

Phil, three of those have been in Tasmania (Lambie, Singh, Colbeck) and one didn’t even win (Molan). That really only leaves Hanson and Hinch.

When I said ‘very few instances’, I was thinking more about people like Syd Negus.

Oh no, not that fella Mirabella !

TERRIBLE NEWS
Vale Kimberly Kitching. Labor’s finest senator dead at 52. That leaves only 2 senators worth a lower house seat

Sad news to hear of the passing of Kimberly Kitching. She was a passionate crusader for human rights. We need more parliamentarians like her who truly speak up for what they believe.

Wreathy – I know you made this comment months ago, but the 2PP vote in Queensland in 2019 was 58-41, and that was enough to deny Labor a second Senator. Right now Pollbludger has the mean aggregate 2PP in Victoria at 57/43, so the Coalition’s not far off being in the same situation. The polls will probably tighten a bit, but give Morrison another few disaster weeks, which he seems to have a lot of, and a 3-2-1 result isn’t inconceivable imo.

John T – Passionate about human rights isn’t how I would describe her, given the way she used to whinge about how mean the UN is to Israel. Passionate crusader for human rights applying to ‘the right people’ maybe.

FN, Fewer competitors to the right of the Libs than the ALP have to their left in QLD. If the Libs had a 2PP OF 43, their primary vote would still be about 35 so two senators would be easy. Hard to see a 3rd from there though.

Would agree with you redistributed, the most likely result for Victoria would be 2 Coalition, 3 Labor and 1 Green (a 4-2 split in favour of the left). This would be the inverse of Queensland 2019 (4-2 split in favour of the Right).

If Labor get up into the low 40s and the Greens stay where they are, the Greens might struggle to get a seat as the ALP will have no surplus to pass on. The last seat would be a battle between the third Lib and the Greens and the winner would depend on how all the other preferences fall.

@FT, I don’t necessarily disagree – particularly in this political climate. I was rebutting Daniel’s specific claim that picking a particular candidate would cause the decline to two seats.

Current tracking has a 2pp swing to labor in Victoria of about 3.3%, according to Bludgertrack. This isn’t enough to get Labor+Greens a fourth seat in Victoria, despite the tracking suggesting that they should be within the plausible range in terms of 2pp value.

There would be about 0.23 quotas added to the Left’s numbers, which, even if it all went to Labor, wouldn’t get them past the Greens for the third seat, so I also don’t see a change on that front.

So I suspect this will remain at status quo – 3 LNP, 2 ALP, 1 GRN

‘If the case is successful, it could leave Victoria with no preselected Labor candidates because they would be overturned on the basis that the national executive lacked legitimacy to appoint them.’

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/kitching-labor-war-escalates-with-high-court-challenge-to-albanese-takeover-20220324-p5a7qs.html

just… lol

@ FL good find.

This will become a recurring problem for both the Labor and Liberal parties as their primary votes decrease more and more, and the spots available become less and less in the Senate.

Also crazy to think that the 2 major parties with a large membership base have never undergone a formal widespread audit of either their finances or internal practices, open to the public.

In 1955, the Victorian ALP ended up with two of everything, hence the Split. Not sure what happens when you have none of anything. This can surely only happen when the parties get smaller and smaller and consequentially less representative. The NSW Libs are the opposite side of the same coin.

Jana Stewart has been selected to replace Kimberley Kitching for the vacant Senate position, and Linda White will succeed Kim Carr.
Natalie Hutchins and Fiona MacLeod were supposedly mulling to get Stewart’s spot but didn’t run.
I suppose Labor need a new candidate for Pascoe Vale then.

Also this means that the Senate is becoming more and more female-majority.

Why aren’t the Independent candidates listed?

Labor has 2 excellent candidates at the top of its ticket this time. The next best candidate is the Reason party candidate.

Hold those martini’s Victoria! You get to vote for James Bond this election in the senate! I think that by far is the best candidate name this election. Pity he didn’t get a running partner and a group square… I wonder how many people would vote for him just for fun!

How likely is it that Labor takes the 3rd LibNat seat? it would only take a 2% swing from Libs to Labor for Labor to get in front on Primaries, but I always struggle to conceptualise preference flows and how to translate to quotas and seats in the senate so I may be totally wrong.

Susan Benedyka is running as a sort of ‘Voices’ candidate. She is from North East Victoria so there is a good chance she is a pal of Helen Haines and/ or Cathy McGowan. Are any of the Teal or Voices candidates giving her a HTV recommendation in the Senate.

The Victorian lockdowns of the last 2 years will lead to the liberal democrats to get one seat

I am not as flush with connections in Vic, and have no evidence other than the above and some psephological research, but I cannot see how the ALP will gain one, nor the Greens lose one, with current polling trends. On the other hand, it is also clear the Coalition vote will go down with a plethora of alternatives to them, and there is some tight preference harvesting (accepting less than half of voters follow the minor parties’ HTV cards, even if they get one) amongst the minor conservative parties.
I believe we will see:
ALP 2, LNP 2, Green 1, and a lottery for the last seat, but I will plump on the Human Headline (Derryn Hinch).

@Andy whilst i think the Liberal Democrats will improve their vote people might separate state and federal. Also the LibDems haven’t done much advertising. The UAP will most likely pick up most of the anti-lockdown sentiment except for those more on the left or Greens voters, they might vote LibDems.

How on earth is Greg Mirabella ahead here? Can someone explain how the coalition can get 3 senators only on 2.28 quotas???

They had a 3% swing against them which is enough to guarantee them being denied the 3rd seat. Absolute disgrace.

Why has Labor failed to gain seats in the senate other than the lone gain in Western Australia? How is the coalition holding onto to their senate seats despite their big primary drop this election? Either Antony’s system is wrong or something extraordinary unusual is happening.

Nothing unusual is happening. Who else should win the sixth seat in Victoria? After the first five candidates are elected, the Liberals have 0.28 quotas, the UAP have 0.28 quotas, and no one else has more than that! Combine the Liberal, UAP, ON, and LDP votes together and you have 0.92 quotas. Completely unsurprising that the Liberals will win the sixth seat.

Yeah but there was a SWING against them. Why would the progressive/conservative sided win 3 seats each when the progressive vote clearly outnumbers the conservative one? The conservatives did worse than in WA yet they get only 2 seats there so this makes absolutely no sense to me still.

Victoria was dubbed by John Howard as the “Massachusetts” of Australia yet The progressive side wins more senators in the west this election? I thought Labor won a bigger share of the vote in Victoria than in WA. I think it was around 58-42TPP last time I checked.

Mirrabella even said himself it was “unlikely” that he would win. And the UAP was ahead until today so what happened? Where did the shifts occur?

In don’t think you can call it “unsurprising”

@Daniel Antony Green has the TPP in Vic at 53.8% to Labor with a 0.7% swing to Labor, barely any net swing. The reason why so many seats changed hands in VIC, is that the swings to Labor are entirely concentrated in Eastern and Inner Southern Melbourne where there are plenty of Liberal held seats with relatively smaller margins compared to the massive margins for Labor in the West and North, allowing Labor (and the Teals) to pick up lots of seats there while everywhere else either didn’t swing or swung to the Libs, sometimes quite strongly like in Calwell. Since the areas which swung to the Libs already had massive Labor margins, no seat actually fell to the Libs. Basically Labor got swings to them in the right places while the Libs got them in the wrong places. In regards your comments on the Senate, maybe they started counting the postals for the Senate which would traditionally favour the Libs.

There was a swing to right-wing minor parties of similar magnitude to the swing against the Coalition.

Daniel, the 6-member system makes it hard to produce a result other than 3-3. So it’s possible for the left to significantly outpoll the right and still split the seats 3-3.

It’s not true that the conservatives did worse in Victoria – the Libs polled 31.6% in WA and 32.6% in Victoria.

But also the combined Labor/Greens vote is 3.16 quotas in Victoria and 3.44 in WA – big difference.

Daniel seems awfully unhappy for a supposedly die-hard bullish Liberal supporter…..

Coalition + UAP + Lib Dems + Hanson + Shooters already clears 3 quotas.

Why would the Right NOT get 3 Senators in this scenario?

Mark
The issue is that very few votes may flow to the Coaltion from UAP, LDP, ON or Shooters if they did not include the Libs in their 6 on the HTV card. Methinks that LDP voters are more likely to include the Coalition in their 6.

BTL still to count though?

BTL segment is being counted simultaneously. It is initially placed in ‘unallocated’ rank, which, will disappear once all votes have been slotted into correct rank. BTL, consisting of roughly 6 or 7 percent of the count is not treated separately from ATL, unless they are unclear. Last time this heavily favored the Greens over Labour over Coalition relative to ATL. Doubtless, still do.
Candidates with BTL votes currently Max Dicks 1 769,
Glen Floyd 1452,
Lidia Thorpe 546,
Labour #1;- 499

UAP’s Ralph Babet has won the final senate seat, making Clive Palmer’s 100 million look a little less wasteful.

Yes, UAP won the sixth Victorian seat with 4% of the vote and 0.28 times the quota. They’ll probably be celebrating as if it’s a “win for the people”.

Let’s see if Ralph Babet will stay the entire term in the UAP. Most UAP MPs quit mid-term but the difference here is that his boss won’t be in parliament.

Who replaces David Van if he quits if the next person on the liberal ticket was chosen? Who would it be?

Kyle Hoppitt was the next Liberal down the ticket for the Liberal Nationals in 2019. I think he runs an audio-visual services business.
(Anita Rank, a National, was at #4.)

Seems unlikely though. They obviously didn’t pick him when Mitch Fifield stepped down.

@Daniel T, I can see the Libs trying to get Roshena Campbell in.

Greg Mirabella just missed out at the 2022 fed election and plus his senate term was really short. If he weren’t the state Libs’ president right now, he’d be the most likely option to replace David Van.

@votante no thanks. David Van wont and shouldnt give up his spot. innocent until proven guilty. does anyone take lidia thorpe seriously? and the “unnamed woman” could be mary poppins for all we know

vic liberal, Amanda Stoker has publicly stated that Van groped her twice. Is that not good enough for you?

And regardless of what one thinks about Lidia Thorpe, I find it pretty ugly that anyone would dismiss her sexual assault claims out of hand. It takes guts to speak up, and her claims should indeed be taken seriously and investigated.

@vic liberal, I was following on from the previous comments about if David Van leaves parliament mid-term, now that he’s out of the party. We can agree that there are allegations, not convictions, of sexual assult. He may stay the full Senate term, who knows.

Lidia Thorpe’s and Amanda Stoker’s claims of sexual assault should be taken seriously and investigated, as Wilson mentioned. They are complete polar opposites politically and so I very much doubt there’s some plot between them. I believe all MPs, regardless of political affiliation, should have the right to a safe workplace.

@Votante Agreed, not just MPs but everyone has a right to a safe workplace. Such allegations, even though not convictions, should be taken very seriously. One should not dismiss them just because of political reasons.