Well may they publicly applaud Queanbeyan Mayor Frank Pangallo’s declaration as a candidate for October’s Legislative Assembly.
But privately sitting MLAs will be cursing because it will make things more difficult for Labor and the Liberals and virtually impossible for business-inclined independent Richard Mulcahy.
The preference flow in Hare-Clark multi-member voting system will be critical to Pangallo’s chances.
In Hare-Clark preference flow from both ends – from the over-quota of elected major-party candidates and also from minor-party and independent candidates excluded early because they have so few votes.
In a Federal House of Representatives election if you vote for a major party, the rest of your preferences do not matter much. One or other of them will be elected.
In the multi-member ACT system the rest of the preferences can be decisive, particularly in the seven-seat Molonglo electorate.
Look what happened in the 2004 election, for example.
Labor got enough votes to elect three candidates outright with some left over – 7.5 per cent of the vote left over.
The leftover (or over-quota) of the major parties gets distributed in the same way as the preferences of excluded candidates.
Sometimes the over-quota is large enough for the major-party to stay in the vote and attract enough preferences from other excluded candidates to get the final seat.
This happened to the Libs in 2004. They got enough primary vote to elect two candidates with 7.5 per cent over-quota for their third candidate, Richard Mulcahy. He held on, attracting preferences of excluded candidates and ultimately got elected on Labor preferences.
It is not well known that the Liberal Party’s last candidate in Molonglo in 2004 was elected on Labor preferences. So it is important for voters to vote right to the end of the ballot paper in order to get a say in who should be the last candidate elected.
So what might happen with Pangallo’s candidature in 2008?
You can expect Labor to get three seats, Liberals two and Greens one. Labor may not get as much as last time. After all, in the eyes of the electorate, Chief Minister Jon Stanhope is no longer the Hero of Bendora Dam, but the Villain of School Closures. Even so, there will likely be an over-quota after three seats. The Libs will have a significant over-quota after two seats and the Greens will most likely just get approximately a quota.
At the other end of the ballot paper, Pangallo and Mulcahy will have a few per sent each.
Pangallo has got better recognition, even though he is a Queanbeyan, NSW, man.
He is fortunate that the boundaries of political jurisdiction are not the same as media boundaries. The Canberra media see themselves as also serving Queanbeyan. And a lot of Pangallo’s media coverage is about scraps with ACT politicians and bureaucrats. He is seen by his new voters as an independent fighter not in the pocket of business.
So you would expect Pangallo to head the shrapnel candidates and pick up their preferences as they get excluded. Shrapnel candidates tend to swap preferences.
The seventh Molonglo seat, therefore, will come down to a fight between the fourth Labor, the third Liberal and Pangallo.
Very likely it will therefore depend on Labor preferences.
If the Labor Party were smart – in the Machiavellian sense — it would direct its preferences – insofar as they can be directed in the Hare-Clark system, to the Liberal Party rather than Pangallo.
An extra Liberal would mean more factionalism, more disunity, more in-fighting. Pangallo as MLA would be a voice of moderation and good sense and a critic more capable than the Liberal Party in showing up short-comings in the Labor Government.
But Labor never likes putting the Libs ahead of independents, and similarly the Libs do not like putting Labor ahead of independents. So you would expect Pangallo to get their over-quota preferences – in much the way Michael Moore did several elections ago.
Pangallo is very likely to be elected if: Labor gets under about 40 per cent; the Libs under about 34 per cent; and he gets more votes (even if only a few more) than Mulcahy.
Oddly enough, these three events are more important to his electoral success than the precise percentage of his own first-preference vote, provided it is above a fairly easily obtainable 4 per cent.
The quota is 12.5 per cent of the vote for a seat, but that is after preferences. And when it comes to the last seat those preferences can come from unexpected places. Pangallo will not have to get anywhere near 12.5 per cent in primary vote to get elected.
You see, democracy is not in the voting, but in the counting.
A fair amount of opinion has been expressed that Stanhope and his Government are on the nose. That seems to me to be an over-statement. And is it unfortunate that there is no reliable, independent polling. Labor is obviously is not as popular as it was in 2004, but it is difficult to see a huge swing away.
The on-the-nose view seems like a view of insiders and people too close to events. Never underestimate the apathy of the ACT electorate. And in an apathetic electorate, recognition is a far more important virtue than merit.
That will help Labor, and, incidentally, Pangallo.
Hare-Clark is also helping Labor another way. Labor can lose a lot of votes without losing seats. It got 17 percentage points more vote than the Liberals in Molonglo in 2004 and the same number of seats – three each. That is a lot of buffer before Labor loses a seat in Molonglo – a very unlikely prospect.
In the two five-member seats, the question to ask is not how can Labor get three quotas (after preferences) but who can muster together a 16.6 per cent quota to snatch a seat away from them – given the Libs have got the other two.
Without the Democrats, the Greens are an outside chance, but they would have to double their vote.
The new Community Alliance Party smacks too much of the Residents Rally – dominated by planning and land use matters when education and health are more important in voters’ minds. They missed the boat in a way. If they wanted to capitalise on Labor’s handling of the aftermath of the fires, they should have called themselves the Bushfire Party and concentrated on Brindabella.
Don’t expect Labor to lose much, if any ground, Pangallo will take a Liberal seat, not a Labor one, if he is elected.