Local Senate voting may be more interesting than local lower house results in federal poll

This month’s federal election seems unlikely to change the Hunter’s political landscape, though it may well change the nation’s.

Labor has held the federal seat of Newcastle since federation, and there’s no reason to believe that the current Labor incumbent, Sharon Claydon, will have any difficulty holding it comfortably in this month’s election.

But there’s still plenty to hold interest in other aspects of local voting results, particularly for the Senate.

The number of candidates standing for the seat of Newcastle (seven) is pretty much on par with the size of past fields for a regular federal election, with candidates from Labor, Liberal, Greens, Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party (UAP), The Christian Democrats (CDP), Animal Justice (AJP), and the Great Australian Party (GAP).

Only the GAP, formed last year by former WA One Nation Senator Rod Culleton, hasn’t stood candidates in Newcastle before, though the UAP and AJP didn’t field candidates in 2016.

For parties with no realistic chance of winning a House of Representatives seat such as Newcastle, one of the primary reasons for still standing local candidates is to boost the party’s Senate vote.

Every voter in NSW participates in the ballot to elect candidates to fill the six NSW Senate seats up for election at this poll, and the method of Senate voting is now similar (though not entirely the same) as for the NSW state upper house.

Contrary to widespread misunderstanding, political parties do not control how voters’ preferences are allocated – voters do this themselves, particularly now that registered tickets are no longer used for the Senate.

A formal vote for the Senate (on the large white ballot paper) now requires a voter to number at least six boxes above-the-line (from one to six in order of preference), OR at least 12 boxes below-the-line, from one to twelve.

Except for the GAP, all the parties standing in the seat of Newcastle have at least a realistic chance of winning a Senate seat – though the odds would be long for the AJP and a little less so for the CDP.

This election will be a normal half-Senate election for six NSW Senate seats, whereas the previous (2016) election was for all twelve NSW Senate seats, which were spilled as a result of a double dissolution of the federal parliament.

Because of the way that Senate terms are calculated after a double dissolution election, most of the major party Senators elected in 2016 will be up for re-election at the federal election after this one.

Three of the six NSW Senate seats at stake in this election are currently held by non-major party Senators (Greens, UAP, and Liberal Democrats).

Half-Senate elections require a significantly higher quota for election than full Senate elections, making it much more difficult for minor parties to win seats.

The Liberal Democrats are almost certain to lose their Senate seat in this election.

Both the Coalition and Labor are each certain to win at least one, probably two, and possibly three, of these Senate seats.

The Greens will be fighting to retain their sole NSW Senate spot, and their current NSW Senator, Mehreen Faruqi, will face election for the first time, after being appointed to replace former Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon, who resigned from the parliament in August last year after losing the party’s preselection ballot to Ms Faruqi.

If the Greens don’t retain this seat, it’s likely to be won by Labor.

The UAP, bolstered by Clive Palmer’s long and lavish advertising campaign, will be hoping to retain their incumbent NSW Senator, Brian Burston, who was elected for One Nation in 2016, but who fell out with Pauline Hanson and switched to the UAP in June last year.

They are likely to be vying for this Senate spot with other right-wing parties, such as One Nation and the Christian Democrats.

If one of those parties doesn’t win this seat, it is likely to go to either the Coalition or Labor.

The recent NSW election demonstrated again that an increasing number of voters are choosing to vote differently in lower and upper house elections, and this little-studied phenomenon is one of the more intriguing aspects of modern election behaviour, including in our region.

Sound and fury of State Election signifies little change for Hunter seats

The NSW election is now done and dusted, with all its sound and fury signifying not very much in terms of obvious political change in the Hunter.

While results were still being finalised at the time of writing, NSW voters have given the NSW Coalition its third term, probably with the thinnest possible majority (47 out of the 93 Legislative Assembly seats).

Labor appears to have increased its representation by two seats, taking Coogee from the Liberals and Lismore from the Nationals.

In the Hunter, all sitting members were returned with increased majorities. While both the Liberal and Labor vote were down across the state, Labor picked up positive swings in local seats (Charlestown, Newcastle, and Wallsend).

The Liberals also recorded a slight positive swing in Charlestown, but their vote dropped more than 9% in Newcastle and nearly 5% in Wallsend.

The Greens also lost ground in Newcastle and Wallsend, though many in the party are relieved that their vote didn’t collapse given the factional divisions that have beset them in recent times.

The media response to the election result has been intriguing.

Despite winning seats from the Coalition, Labor’s campaign performance has been widely criticised, while that of the Berejiklian government has been applauded, despite losing four seats (three previously held by the Nationals and one by the Liberals).

Certainly, against expectations of a knife-edge result, Labor fell short, and may well have blown their chance of winning in the nightmare final week for their state leader, Michael Daley.

But after the 2011 electoral landslide swept away 28 of the 48 seats Labor then held, most pundits predicted a three term recovery for the party. After two terms, Labor is well within striking distance for the next state election in 2023.

 (An interesting aside is that the former Labor state member for Newcastle, Jodi McKay - the current Labor member for Strathfield - is now being touted as a potential NSW Labor leader, despite the fact that she was instrumental in preparing the ground for the Coalition government’s decision to cut the Newcastle rail line and oversaw disastrous changes to our local bus system, and was duly voted out in the largest anti-Labor swing in that 2011 landslide).

While initial focus is understandably on the Legislative Assembly, where state governments are won and lost, attention will soon shift to the NSW upper house, which is likely to see several interesting additions, including former federal Labor leader, and now One Nation MLC, Mark Latham, who will have a parliamentary seat for the next eight years.

Data from Legislative Council voting in local booths can be a treasure trove for anyone interested in patterns of political behaviour.

What leaps out starkly from the data is how differently many Labor and Liberal voters vote in the upper house.

For the non-major parties who stood in local lower house (Legislative Assembly) electorates, the difference between their party’s lower and upper house vote is usually minor (e.g., Legislative Council votes cast for The Greens in the electorates of Charlestown, Newcastle and Wallsend are within a few percent of the Green vote in those Legislative Assembly seats).

However, Labor’s Legislative Council vote is significantly less (often by more than 20 percent) than its Legislative Assembly vote in most local booths, particularly in Wallsend, where Labor’s Legislative Assembly vote in this election is around 64 percent, while its Legislative Council vote is less than 40 percent.

Where are these votes - nearly a quarter of all the votes in the electorate - going?

The huge Legislative Council ballot paper offered voters plenty of choices, but unfortunately the Electoral Commission’s election night counting method (which bundled many of the smaller group tickets and all below-the-line votes into a single “Other” category for the booth counts) makes it difficult to draw evidence-based conclusions about this on a booth or electorate level.

This “Other” category, which will be separated out and counted at the central counting centre in Sydney over the coming weeks, comprised around 14 percent of the vote in the three local electorates.

Among the groups not buried in this “Other” bundle, One Nation recorded an 8.4 percent upper house vote in Wallsend, higher than The Greens vote there, and two percent higher than One Nation’s state-wide average.

The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party vote (also itemised in the booth count) is on 4.4 percent, pretty much spot on its state average, but unusually high for a predominantly urban electorate.

It’s clear that many Wallsend (and to a slightly lesser extent, Charlestown and Newcastle) voters are quite happy to have a Labor government, but want a more politically diverse upper house.

However, the rise of the far right – in Australia and other parts of the world - should concern all of us, and this local drift toward supporting far right parties accentuates the need for a more politically aware community, where the beliefs, practices and policies of these kinds of groups can be exposed and discussed in a way that informs people’s voting preferences.

(* the voting figures given in this article were accurate at the time of writing, but may change as the final count proceeds).