Today there’s an opinion poll with a difference — Roy Morgan Research has released a poll of Senate voting intention, showing the Greens set to take the balance of power. That’s no surprise, but there’s a surprise in how easily they would do it — electing seven senators, one in each state plus the ACT, taking their total to 10. Labor would have 33 or 34 and the Coalition 31 or 32.
That’s not an impossible result, but the preference flows make the Greens’ task in New South Wales and the ACT very difficult. Most observers think they won’t win more than five seats unless they can secure a big increase in their primary vote. And that’s just what Morgan is suggesting, with a Greens vote of 15.5% nationwide, a swing of 6.5% since the 2007 election.
There are two reasons to treat that number with a lot of scepticism. First, the Greens vote tends to be softer than that for the major parties — it has a habit of ebbing away before election day. That’s particularly likely here, since polling in the smaller states was conducted over June and July, and so would be influenced by the big spike in the Greens vote in the late Rudd period, since largely dissipated. Sure enough, it’s those states where Morgan finds the biggest swings: 10% in South Australia and 8.7% in Western Australia.
The second reason is not specific to the Greens — it’s the fact that Senate polling is generally quite unreliable. As I explained before the last election, “when people are asked a poll question about the Senate, they think about the Senate separately”. But when they get to the polling booth they’re more likely to just take the how-to-vote card of one of the big parties, and vote the same way for both houses.
That’s why Senate-specific polls usually overstate the vote for minor parties. It’s true that the minors (except Family First) do better in the Senate than in the House of Reps, but not that much better. In a similar phenomenon, polls also overstate the number of people who vote below the line: a survey a few years ago had 20% claiming to do so, but the real figure is about 3%. Voters don’t like admitting to pollsters that they just do what they’re told.
But having said all that, Morgan’s numbers are broadly consistent with what polls for the lower house have been saying. And it should be pointed out that their last Senate poll before the 2007 election, in contrast to the usual pattern, got the Greens result exactly right (although it overstated Labor’s vote and understated the Coalition’s).
If that happens again, there’s going to be a big Greens contingent in the new Senate. And even if it doesn’t, it’s very hard to see them not winding up with the balance of power.
I’d love to see the Greens do well in the Senate, but their vote is as soft as a baby’s bottom and the shadow of what happened to the Lib Dems in the UK election will be hanging over them. The LDs were doing fantastically well in the polls, but their vote imploded on electi0n day in the face of a tight election. I’m in a safe Labor seat and will be voting Green, but it would be a different story in a marginal seat.
Anyone who’s been around with the Greens for while will be excited but to crack 10% nationally and have the Senate BOP with 5 or more Seators will be significant enough. Anything above that is a bonus. Sadly the COALition and Labor aren’t going to change before the next election or the one after, so the Greens will continue their steady growth. Melbourne will fall eventually, then Sydney, Grayndler and Senate seats around the country. 20% by 2020!
A great thing about the Aussie voting system (at least in the lower house, it is a great feature, because people know what is going on) is preferential voting. It allows people to vote for their preferred smaller party or independent first, and then vote for their preferred major party after that. It has great benefits:
– it sends a signal to the major parties that they need to copy the best policies of the smaller one before they get your vote back.
– it allows smaller parties to grow over time as more people realise what is going on
– it does not waste the vote (like it would in a first past the post competition) because if no one gets 50% of the vote, it goes to preferences and the number 2’s are counted again but with full value.
@Jim Reiher
What you say would be true if enough people actually did know that a vote for a smaller party is not wasted, but speaking as someone who has handed-out for a smaller party outside voting booths, the problem is that a lot of people told me they didn’t want to ‘waste their vote’. It really was surprising just how widepsread this lack of understanding was.
I always thought the Greens should make more of an effort to educate people on this.
The Greens were polling up to 20% or more in South Australia before the state election, but managed to get only 8% of the vote.