Aweek before the election, I wrote a piece arguing that preferences did not really matter.
This was at a time of a huge amount of static and chatter about One Nation. Every politician and psepologist (studier of elections, after the Greek word for stone, with which the ancient Greeks voted) was tea-leaf reading about how preferences would decide the election and how crucial it was to ensure the Coalition or the Labor Party worked on the preferences.
Well, I was reminded of that article shortly after the election by a man who has watched the Australian political scene for some time. He thought I should revisit the question as soon as the final results were known. He thought I would have to emulate Kim Beazley and eat a certain amount of humble pie when it was obviously proved what all the knowledgeable commentators know to be true, that the election was decided by preferences and that preferences are utterly vital to political success.
I will eat a smallish slice of humble pie over the ACT Senate result, though. More of that anon.
Well, the final results came in on Sunday night, and I have done the number-crunching. In the interests of expunging the myth that preferences matter, it is now my unreluctant duty to report that the article before the election was essentially right: preferences do not matter much, though the illusion remains.
Out of 148 seats, preferences changed the result in only three seats — that is the person who was leading at the end of the count of first-preference votes was ultimately beaten after preferences were distributed by the person who was running second.
For the purposes of the exercise I am treating the Coalition as a single party.
Three seats was not enough to change government. And even then one of those seats was a freak in that a minor party candidate topped the poll and was ousted because both parties unusually put a minor party below the other major party. That was Blair, where One Nation’s Pauline Hanson topped the voting with 36 per cent, followed by the Coalition on 31 and Labor on 25. Labor’s preferences went to the Liberals, tipping Hanson out.
The other two seats where preferences changed the result were: Bass in Tasmania where Family Services Minister Warwick Smith led on the primary vote 45-43, but was beaten by Labor’s Michelle O’Byrne by a handful of votes; and McMillan in Victoria where Coalition MP Russell Broadbent led 39-37 on the primary count only to be beaten by less than 100 votes by Labor.
Of course, the presence of One Nation got a lot people into a tizz over preferences. They thought that One Nation would make a profound difference, dragging primary votes away from the Coalition. Well, they did not make much difference. The Coalition was slightly behind in total national vote after first preferences were counted and remained slightly behind after preferences were all distributed.
Obviously, preferences, to the extent they are important, are going to be more important in close elections. Well, you don’t get much closer than the 1998 election where the primary vote split 39.4-40.1 and the two-party-preferred vote split 48.6-51.4. And still preferences did not change the result.
One Nation, however, did have an effect. If a candidate gets more than 50 per cent of the vote, there is no need to distribute the preferences. In this election a record 91 seats required the distribution of preferences, even though it made no differences in 88 of those seats. Given that preferences had to be distributed in 91 out of 148 seats, it gives the illusion that they are critical to the outcome.
In 1996 only 50 seats required the distribution preferences, so with 91 in 1998 the illusion that preferences are important is likely to grow.
The importance of preferences has been over-stated largely because the very freak circumstances in the 1990 election have taken on mythical proportions. The results in seven seats were changed because of preferences, but they all went Labor’s way, three of them in Western Australia. If those seven seats had gone the other way the Coalition would have won the election with a very narrow, but workable majority. Further, that election was very close and Labor had gone out of its way to woo the preferences of Democrat and Green voters. So it needed several unusual circumstances for preferences to make a difference.
In 1996 when the results of seven seats were also changed by preferences, it made virtually no difference because some went from Labor to Liberal and others the other way.
In 1993 preferences mattered even less. The results in only three seats changed because of preferences. Two went to Labor from the Coalition and one went the other way.
There is a myth that the preferences of the Democrat Labor Party (after the 1955 Labor split) kept the Menzies Government in power. In fact, they changed on the result of the 1961 election.
Australia could have a British system of first past the post and it would not make much difference. Not that I am advocating such a thing.
At federation, Australia had the British system. Voters put a cross against one candidate. The candidate with the most crosses wins, even if that is less than 50 per cent of the votes. Preferences were bought in because of the rise of rural conservative parties in World War I. The leader of the main conservative party, Billy Hughes, thought a preferential system would prevent the conservative vote splitting. But the fear was a bogey. Without preferential voting those parties would probably have done deals to stand a single conservative in each seat.
So no humble pie on preferences. They did not matter much.
As to the ACT Senate, which was also finalised this week, a slither of humble pie is warranted. I wrote that the Democrats were dreaming if they thought they could get the second ACT Senate seat. Well, they came much, much closer than I imagined. If just 1400 people had changed their vote in an electorate of some 200,000 voters, the Liberals’ Senator Margaret Reid would have lost her seat. That margin is 1.4 per cent (0.7 per cent each side of the middle).
The Canberra Times opinion pollster Datacol had a better prediction. After distributing undecideds it had Labor on 45 (actual 43); Liberal on 27 (actual 31); and Democrat on 19 (17). That put the Democrats Rick Farley in with a chance when you add Labor Kate Lundy’s over-quota to Farley’s vote.
But it is only a slither of humble pie. After all Reid was elected, even if not as easily as I imagined. And the Democrats are still dreaming about getting the second ACT Senate seat. Farley is disputing the result.