The Labor Party’s marginal-seats strategy is now spread very thin, and puts the party in the worst position it has been since it won office in 1983.
The strategy over the past four elections has been for the party to concentrate its efforts on marginal seats (those requiring less than 4 or 5 per cent to change hands) and to do very much less work in safe seats.
The result has been that a lot of safe seats have turned marginal because swings against Labor were not uniform because of the strategy. True, there are lots of factors in an election campaign and the result it yeilds. But there is a pattern that has got worse for Labor as time goes on.
The table shows the pattern. (The figures are cumulative down the column.)
Excuse all the figures, but perhaps analogy will help. Labor is a bit like a plumber maintaining a hot-water system. Early on there are only one or two leaks (marginal seats) and they can be attended to. As time goes on, there are more and more leaks and they are getting harder and harder to attend to all at once. While putting lot of time and effort into patching up one, another springs up.
It looked fairly grim in 1993, but Hewson Plumbling Supplies Pty Ltd helped with a bit of spare GST welding. In 1996, there is no Hewson Plumbing and there are quite a few more leaks.
In 1987 Labor went into the election defending only one seat with a margin of under 1 per cent. This time there are nine such seats. In 1987 it was defending 11 seats with a margin of under 3 per cent, that has steadily risen in successive elections to 19 now. Go up a percent and you find that this election Labor is defending 25 seats at a margin of under 4 per cent, more than at any previous election.
I think Labor has now stretched the laws of thermodynamics too far.
It has a eerie similarity to the position of the Coalition going into the 1983 election, which it lost. Then the Coalition was defending 26 seats with margins of under 4 per cent. (Though the House was smaller then.) In 1983 the Coalition was defending 6 seats under 1 per cent; 14 under 2 per cent and 19 under 3 per cent.
Looked at state-by-state, the picture looks even grimmer for Labor. Swings are invariably uneven between states, but usually fairly even within them. Swings against Labor are ameliorated by an opposite-persuasion state government and accentuated by a same-persuasion state government. Labor is defending the most marginals in precisely the state where it has a same-persuasion state government _ NSW.
Labor may well hold its own in Victoria and South Australia and restrict its losses to one each in Tasmania and Western Australia. But my guess is that it will lose government by loses in NSW and Queensland alone. It is defending seven under-4-per-cent marginals in NSW and 10 under 5.1. Most of these are in regional NSW where polls show Labor is doing poorly. Queensland has only just changed government and the new government has not had time to make the Coalitin look bad in that state. There are five under 4-per-cent marginals in Queensland.
Then there is the beyond-the-marginals effect. Sometimes, concentration on marginals results in a party ignoring safer seats at its peril.
Labor, on the other hand, benefits from changes in the composition of the electorate. About 4.5 per cent go off the rolls and about 9 per cent come on between elections. The young and the migrants (generally pro-Labor) come on and the old who go off through death and emigrants (both of whom are generally more pro-Coalition) go off.
In summary, policies, promises, leadership aside, I think the stretching of the marginals makes Labor’s task too difficult this election and that the Coalition will get a modest majority constructed around a more even picture in NSW than the present 33-17 split of seats.