With tomorrow’s byelections, Bill Shorten faces what journalists intoxicated by the blood sport of leadership speculation like to call a “crucial test”.
Should he fail, he will carry the millstone of being “the first Opposition Leader to lose a seat at a byelection since 1920”.
It is indeed the case that the Kalgoorlie byelection of that year was unique among the 152 byelections held since federation in being won by the government party at the expense of the opposition.
Nor can it be denied that it will say nothing good about Shorten’s electoral appeal if either Longman, in Brisbane’s outer north, or Braddon, covering north-western Tasmania, falls to the conservatives tomorrow.
However, a bit of perspective never goes astray, and may well be lacking from accounts of the unprecedented disaster Shorten will have led Labor to if things don’t go his way.
Short of holding him personally responsible for Labor’s section 44 failures, it can only be counted as bad luck for Shorten that he faces two byelections in fragile marginal seats.
These days especially, most byelections are non-events, being held in safe seats after senior figures bail out in response to reduced circumstances for their political careers.
The last time a federal opposition had to defend a seat as dicey as Braddon or Longman was in November 1983, when a Liberal Party under the leadership of Andrew Peacock defied Bob Hawke’s stratospheric popularity to retain the Brisbane seat of Moreton with a slight positive swing.
A dozen politicians have gone through the wringer of the opposition leadership since then, in most cases unhappily.
One was Simon Crean, who never got to fight a federal election, and oversaw a defeat in the normally safe Labor seat of Cunningham in October 2002 – the one electoral test he faced in almost two years as leader.
However, this is deemed not to count for Bill Shorten immolation purposes, as it came at the hands of the Greens rather than the Coalition.
The fairest way of putting tomorrow’s results into context will be to compare the swings with the historic norm.
Sixty-seven byelections held since 1949 have produced clear two-party preferred results, with the average result being a swing of around 4% to the opposition.
However, the spread of these results has been very wide, and swings to the government have not been entirely unusual – to the extent that around one in five byelections appears to swing with enough force to knock over Labor’s 0.8% margin in Longman.
The diversity of results illustrates the point that no two byelections are alike, and that local peculiarities can have at least as much influence as the standing of the national leaders.
Longman is a case in point, thanks to the locally potent One Nation factor.
Labor’s win in 2016 was only its second since the seat’s creation in 1996, and was partly owed to the fact that One Nation came gunning for Liberal National Party member Wyatt Roy.
The situation this time is reversed with interest: One Nation is focusing its attacks squarely on Bill Shorten, directing preferences to the LNP rather than Labor, and polling strongly on the back of an unusually slick campaign (Pauline Hanson’s flakiness and the candidate Matthew Stephen’s travails notwithstanding).
If the polls’ reading of One Nation support is more-or-less accurate (big if), and if their preferences flow as they did when the party directed them to the LNP in local seats in the November state election, Labor could effectively be starting as much as 2% behind the eight-ball.
In Braddon, however, extenuating circumstances are harder to identify.
Certainly the Liberals underperformed in 2016 among Braddon voters, who have the lowest level of educational attainment in the country, and responded poorly to a Liberal campaign built around a presidential Malcolm Turnbull and the theme of “innovation”.
Even so, the seat has been excruciatingly tight in recent times, changing hands at four of the last five elections, and should thus be a relatively easy mark for an opposition party in the context of a byelection.
If Labor can’t hold on, there will be no avoiding the conclusion that regional battlers, who hold the key to a string of decisive seats along the eastern seaboard, are not responding to what Labor under Bill Shorten has to offer.
Has there ever been a leader of either major party, so despised and dismissed by the MSM as Bill Shorten is? Well at least not since Julia Gillard was pack attacked I’d suggest. The MSM are desperate to have Albo installed so that they can tear him down as well. Now that’s what I cal entertainment!
I really don’t get it…it isn’t policy related, as Turnbull nicks his policies from the ALP…OK, he then buggers them up in the implementation….it isn’t related to the sparkling alternative to the ALP…as there really is none.
I’d love it if someone like K Murphy or one of the scribblers on here would sit down and spend an hour explaining to the long suffering readership of her supposed left leaning rag, why exactly she hates Bill Shorten so much.
“The MSM are desperate to have Albo installed so that they can tear him down as well.”
Yep this is a well-worn tactic by the pro-LNP media in this country, constantly undermine the current ALP leader with innuendo and constant leadership speculation whilst simultaneously talking up their deputy. This is exactly what happened with Rudd and Gillard, when Gillard was the deputy the media was full of articles about what a fantastic and popular politician she was. Within a few months of her attaining the leadership the stories had reversed and now she was the scheming back-stabber who knifed Rudd. Now they are trying to do the same thing with Albo and Shorten.
Hear, hear. As if the Coalition and their media stooges don’t have an Albo critique ready to go: inner-Sydney latte-swilling elitist, dangerous leftie, weak on asylum-seekers. Oh, and Christopher Pyne would no longer be his best friend!
Its because he’s a manipulative fraud and liar.
He rose to the top of the union movement by trading on his own self interest and sacrificing union members rights and conditions. He has then sold out any credibility he could possibly ever have possessed just to rise to the top of the labor party like the pond scum he is.
You may not be aware, but when awards are negotiated, the Union membership are asked to vote on the wages and conditions. I hate to burst your fictional Shorten hate bubble, but he alone as Union negotiator cannot unilaterally reduce workers wages and conditions.
I’d counter the rest of your rant but unfortunately there is no substance to argue.
Now if you really want to look into unethical former employment,,,,try J Bishop for starters.
Sorry Rabid, not sure if you’re sure what publication you’re posting to and Bowe’s piece is not anti Shorten, he’s presenting polling analysis. I reckon he’s letting Shorten off lightly over section 44 also. Shorten’s tactics and strategy over this were dumb and now might come back to to bite not just him on the bum but all of us who just want the nongs in the LNP out of government before we die.
This.
Turnbull was in deep trouble late last year. Shorten could have just accepted that some of the ALPs MPs had messed up and demanded they resign and have by-elections in their seats too.
Instead he dragged it out through the High Court and looked like an idiot when they lost and has given Turnbull open space for the resultant by-elections
Utter rubbish Danny. Shorten was quite rightly going on the previous precedent established in regards to: all reasonable steps were taken. Its just a shame that the High Court decided to throw out that original precedent. This is very different from all the Coalition MP’s who never even bothered to *check* their citizenship status, let alone rectify it.
Changes to the precedent almost certainly place a number of other current Coalition MP’s in doubt.
You mean he should have ignored the advice he was given by the ALP lawyers who had setup a process for dealing with this and who believed they were in compliance. He should have ignored that advice and sacked who exactly? Everyone?
Don’t get me wrong, I give you a special merit award for the attempt at equivalence between the ALP and their faulty process and the Coalition and their non-existed process though. First rate attempt.
Happy to be of assistance Rabid. Thanks for acknowledging the ALP can have faulty processes and gosh, incompetent advisors; that’s my point.
A very interesting deconstruction. Thanks
“Should he fail, he will carry the millstone of being “the first Opposition Leader to lose a seat at a byelection since 1920”. Said William Bowe
No he won’t. As the former sitting members of Braddon and Longman both resigned, not retired, both seats are now vacant.
In Longman, the biggest problem for Labor is One Nation. It’s a case of the fox inviting the chickens into it’s den. If enough chickens are stupid enough to believe the fox, then anything can happen.
An odour relating to Longman’s One Nation candidate’s former financial dealings has emerged today. Matthew Stephen may not be the LNP’s Great White Hope with preferences after all.
Disappointed that Crikey and Guardian play this personality over the policy game which benefits democracy not one bit. We do not have a president and popularity of the leader should be secondary to the real issues that differentiate the major parties.
Absolutely correct. And, I haven’t heard discussion of the new rules for Labor put in by Rudd. As I understand it, the leader cannot be removed unless a “general election” has been held and lost. By-elections don’t count.
How stupid if true. I have some disquiet regarding Shorten, he just doesn’t seem to be able to cut through and tends to sound like a preacher at a pulpit. If he doesn’t carry the next few by-elections, I think he should step down and have a peaceful transition to another leader.
A peaceful transition wont feed the beast……Were Shorten to stand down, the MSM and even this Crickey thing would need an entertaining angle…some sort of feud which suits the factional narrative. Column inches to fill and Rupert to impress.
I guess now that Labor have won their by-elections, Shortens position has solidified. I hope his style and Labor’s performance improve over the next year lest they lose the unlosable election.
Let’s hope that policies prevail over personalities in the voters’ minds, but at least media chatter over Shorten’s leadership should now subside. I’ve thought for a long time that our Bill would benefit enormously from some elocution training. His speaking style usually sounds rehearsed and dispassionate, even glib. It’s something that eminently fixable, surely.
Yawn, this stuff is just getting boring now. Given that most by-elections tend to see a swing *against* the Party that previously held the seat (as no one likes being forced back to the polls early) & given that the majority of Bi-elections have historically been in very safe seats, there is literally *nothing* that can be discerned from Labor losing either 2 seats.
However, if Labor gains an even stronger hold on either of the 2 seats, then that will look extremely bad for a Prime Minister that is already having to fend off his raucous & highly narcissistic backbench. Even more so if their hand-picked, IPA plant fails to win in Mayo.