The three New South Wales state by-elections are now set down for 17
September (same day as the New Zealand election), and the Liberal Party
has confirmed that it will only be contesting Macquarie Fields, leaving
both Marrickville and Maroubra alone. Leader John Brogden
explained that “the party had a better chance” in Macquarie Fields but
“virtually no prospect of winning either” of the other two.

A glance at the pendulum casts some doubt on this reasoning. Macquarie
Fields requires a swing of 22.5%, Maroubra 23.5%. When you’re facing
numbers like that (Newspoll puts the statewide swing at only about 6%) does one percentage point really make much difference?

No doubt the Orange Grove scandal in neighbouring Liverpool might have
made some impact in Macquarie Fields. But I suspect another reason for
concentrating efforts there is that the NSW Liberals have fallen for the myth
of “Howard’s battlers” – the idea that the working class voters of
western Sydney can be wooed away from Labor in a way that the seaside
dwellers of Maroubra cannot.

So I had a look at the federal figures from last year, comparing booths
in Maroubra and Macquarie Fields. They show that the myth is just that
– a myth. In the Maroubra booths, the federal Liberal vote
(two-party-preferred) was running about 17.5% ahead of the state
figure, so based on federal levels of support its margin should be
around 6%. But in Macquarie Fields, the gap was only about 14.5%, for a
notional margin of something like 8%.

This is back-of-the-envelope stuff (maybe Antony Green will write in
with more detailed calculations), but it is enough to raise doubts
about Brogden’s analysis. He may still be right, but unfortunately,
with no Liberal candidate in Maroubra, now we’ll never find out.

And speaking of New Zealand, a wealth of detail from the most recent AC Nielsen poll is now available on the internet. Thanks to William Bowe, the poll bludger,
for pointing this out; as he says, “Given these outfits’ normal
standards of operational secrecy, this is breathtakingly generous
stuff.”