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).
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