Brighter Green House of Representatives prospects
As the pollsters keep telling us that the Greens are on course to do substantially better at this election than in the past the pundits keep warning us that the eventual Green vote will be less than what is being predicted. Why that is the accepted wisdom of the media experts I'm not sure. Looking at what has happened at recent elections seems to suggest, if anything, that the actual Green vote will be higher than the predicted one rather than the reverse.
The opinion poll figure in the above table is the prediction in the second last Newspoll published before election day. In all four cases the actual Green vote was higher than the prediction.
The apparent myth that the Green vote falls away probably has its origins in what has happened in recent Tasmanian state elections where a slight fall did occur but those were quite different circumstances with the major parties both warning of the dangers to democracy of a hung Parliament in Hobart where the Greens had the balance of power. There is no such scare mongering in this federal campaign.
Hence my belief that on Saturday we will see the Greens gaining a 12 to 15 per cent share of the national vote as is being predicted and if that happens there could be a few surprises in store for some Labor Party candidates in supposedly safe seats.
In a comprehensive and thoughtful paper for the Parliamentary Library in Canberra called The Rise of the Australian Greens, researcher Scott Bennett describes how the Green vote varies substantially depending on the type of electorate and the state. At the 2007 House of Representatives election when the Greens nationwide polled 7.8% of the votes, the figure for inner metropolitan seats was 10.8%, 7.6% in provincial seats, 6.5% in outer metropolitan seats and only 6.4% in rural seats.
Should this distribution pattern of the Green vote be repeated this Saturday then, taking a mid-point of what the recent polls have predicted nationally, a 13% Green vote would turn into an 18% share of the vote in inner metropolitan seats.
An 18% share of the vote across all inner metropolitans seats is getting close to the level where several seats would see the Greens vote higher than that of the Liberals which is one precondition for a potential Green House of Representatives victory. A second requirement, naturally, is that Labor does not get above the 50% mark so that Liberal preferences have to be distributed.
If we do happen to see a seven or eight percentage point increase in the Green vote, with almost all of it coming from Labor, then it is not only the inner city seat of Melbourne where Labor will be in trouble. Sydney, Denison and perhaps Grayndler would enter the endangered list.
The apparent myth that the Green vote falls away probably has its origins in what has happened in recent Tasmanian state elections where a slight fall did occur but those were quite different circumstances with the major parties both warning of the dangers to democracy of a hung Parliament in Hobart where the Greens had the balance of power. There is no such scare mongering in this federal campaign.
Hence my belief that on Saturday we will see the Greens gaining a 12 to 15 per cent share of the national vote as is being predicted and if that happens there could be a few surprises in store for some Labor Party candidates in supposedly safe seats.
In a comprehensive and thoughtful paper for the Parliamentary Library in Canberra called The Rise of the Australian Greens, researcher Scott Bennett describes how the Green vote varies substantially depending on the type of electorate and the state. At the 2007 House of Representatives election when the Greens nationwide polled 7.8% of the votes, the figure for inner metropolitan seats was 10.8%, 7.6% in provincial seats, 6.5% in outer metropolitan seats and only 6.4% in rural seats.
An 18% share of the vote across all inner metropolitans seats is getting close to the level where several seats would see the Greens vote higher than that of the Liberals which is one precondition for a potential Green House of Representatives victory. A second requirement, naturally, is that Labor does not get above the 50% mark so that Liberal preferences have to be distributed.
If we do happen to see a seven or eight percentage point increase in the Green vote, with almost all of it coming from Labor, then it is not only the inner city seat of Melbourne where Labor will be in trouble. Sydney, Denison and perhaps Grayndler would enter the endangered list.
Comments
Newspoll changed its methodology in national polls after the 2007 election and began to ask directly if people were voting for the Greens rather than expecting them to nominate the party's name themselves. So we don't know what effect this will have on the figures on Saturday. What we do know is that when the methodology changed, there was a jump in Newspoll figures for the Greens.
See Antony Green on this issue: http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2010/06/how-well-the-greens-are-polling.html