Christine's winBy KEVIN BONHAM
Credit where credit is due and Neil Cremasco In fact, the media reporting of the two candidates' prospects has been woeful from election night onwards. A couple of errors are particularly worth mentioning. Firstly, Wayne Crawford reckoned that Christine Milne would be fine because Greens voters vote below the line disproportionately. This was irrelevant because Milne's below the line votes received at that stage were always included in her primary totals (I rang up the AEC to make absolutely sure of this too.) Also, minor party voters in general vote below the line a lot, not just Greens. In this election, the below-the-line figures were : Libs 13.8%, CEC 36.4%, Democrats 30.5%, Family First 24.5%, CDP 44.8%, Shayne Murphy 44.7%, Group G 52.6%, Greens 36.6%, ALP 14.1% Another furphy was the claim heard on 7ZR that Christine Milne needed only 5.3% of the below the line preferences to reach her to win. This was incorrect because those below the line votes that were for any Liberal candidate or for either of the top two Labor candidates were reduced in value and passed on as surplus when those candidates were elected, so the figure required was much higher. I had a spreadsheet set up from just after election night to track the percentage of votes Milne required ahead of Petrusma (based on the total effective value of the below-the-line votes) through the count. It started at around 38%, peaked at 45% around a week into counting, and then declined rapidly to finish at only 21% as what Bob Brown calls "the bushwalker vote" but I call "green disorganisation" kicked in. Significantly, although the Greens only lifted by .04 of a quota (equivalent to around 1800 votes) between the middle and the end of the count, minor changes in the standings of the other parties made the shift in the final week more like 5000. This meant that the Greens' estimated lead based on above-the-line votes and assuming the below-the-lines split 50-50 (which was close to true) went from under 1000 in mid-count (at which point Milne still looked fairly likely to win, but uncertain) to around 6200 at the end. I called it on Saturday after seeing the final primaries, as there was no way at all that that gap would be bridged. While Milne was almost 20,000 ahead of Petrusma when the button was pressed, the remaining preferences included a big swag of ALP above-the-line preferences that would have gone to Petrusma. Milne's final true margin over Petrusma was probably almost 6000 votes, which is "winning by a whisker" if your name is Eddie Storace, but a semi-comfortable win in the end if you're anybody else. This shows how small changes in the votes for different parties can have a very large impact on the final result. It remains the case that the Greens' claim of victory was premature, as was conceded mid-count when Bob Brown said the race was line-ball (which, at that stage, it was.) The late surge to the Greens in postal voting had happened before, but it was not known whether it was a one-off effect or something that happens all the time. Now that it has happened twice, it's likely that it can be used to predict swings during counting in further polls and call close results like this sooner.
For those wanting to see how the cut-up proceeded, I recommend Antony Green's analysis here:
RAPID RESPONSE EMAIL: What do you think? Saturday, October 30, 2004 |