It was informal what won it

Now, to the serious business:

The stewards have returned from the counting room with the declaration of the 2010 Australian Federal Election.

At the first whiff of election fever your humble correspondent immediately withdrew from public commentary, stocked up on tinned foods and a rather excellent and inexpensive scotch in a shack up in the mountains and stood by and observed what unfolded.

Now the result is, officially, in. Writs have been returned.

I writ for a living, so writs are dear to me.

The numbers are irrefutable. It was the informal vote that saved Ms Gillard’s posterior.

Jumping 1.6 percent from the last election it was only outdone by The Greens, who received a swing of just a smidge under four percent.

For the record, the party of The Pretender Abbott, the Liberal Party, received a swing of 0.76.

If Abbott had of been able to engage a quarter of the voters who voted informal he would be Prime Minister right now.

It’s swinga and roundabouts though, as thye seat of Macquarie had an inverse result to this received wisdom. There the AL would have won if they had of held the voters that were motivated by bthe rather successful Your Rights AtWEork camaign in the mountains end of that seat in 2007.

A booth-by-booth measure of Blue Mountains shows the informal vote (and Green vote) up from Lapstone to Mount Victoria: if 1,041 of the 5,067 voters who voted informal in Macquarie the result is an ALP victory. But if is a big word, and not a big part of the vocabulary of the modern political operator.

Such is life

Meanwhile, we are looking at interesting times.


This business about the crossbenchers is yet bto run its course. Back to the mountains I go...

"I know how I'm voting"

An interesting comment in Crikey this week from Shay Gordon-Brown, alluding to matters psephological.

Shay remarked on the large number of people who refused to take a how to vote flyer from any of the volunteers handing out for all the parties and the Rights Art Work campaign, insisting that they "know how they are voting".

It was remarkable and the first time I had seen this phenomena in 27 years of working on polling booths. The only thing I can put it down to is the extraordinary long campaign - effectively close to 18 months - meant many people had already made up their minds well in advance, as was pointed out by many commentators and pollsters prior to the election.

In any event one would expect a rise in the informal vote with many people not having a how-to-vote card and the difference between the recent election and the State Election a few months back, where voters could use optional preferential voting and just mark one box.

Well, as Shay points out, the informal vote actually fell approximately 25% on the previous result; 2007 approx 3.84%, 2004 5.18%, 2001 4.81%. Shay used the seat of Dickson - where he was a volunteer - but his statements rang very true, so I thought I'd have a look on the local front.

Lo and behold if the informal vote in Lindsay didn't drop a whopping 2.4%, something like the margin intellectual powerhouse Jackie Kelly held it by. It can't have been the ALP candidate, as the same candidate ran last time as well.

Was it the much gibbered about Latham factor? That would seem likely, as it's hard to think of how 2.5% of the vote could change accidentally. Maybe people who couldn't bring themselves to back the ALP last time finally cracked this time under the joint pressures of mortgage stress and WorkChoices?

But then again, in neighbouring Macquarie the informal vote dropped less than half a percent to be very close to the national average, which would make you think that the situation in Lindsay was candidate related. Bradbury did run a better campaign this time it must be admitted.

As usual, this sort of real world insight has been completely ignored by the psephological commentariat. Clowns like Malcolm Mackerras - who reminds me of the nutjob muttering to himself outside Coles on a Saturday Morning.

In the meantime Shay Gordon-Brown concludes with a telling observation:

I’ve pretty much worked the same booths for the past 10 years and the difference in this election to the previous federal and state campaigns was significant in terms of people demonstrating their intent both in public and in private. From a numbers game it seems to me that 1% of the population is a pretty significant number considering the swing required to change government was only 5%.