And barely a race at all.
If Pocock gets a high enough vote to get over the Greens into third place, then he could, in theory, get a cascade of preferences from everywhere and beat the Liberals.
Dr Kevin Bonham
I do love me a good theory, but this election’s ACT Senate race is barely a race. David Pocock (along with Kim Rubenstein) is the latest in a string of high-profile independent or third party candidates that have attempted to wrangle the two Senate seats in the ACT away from the major parties – or more correctly, the Liberal Party. In every previous election, this has led to a whole lot of not much – the Senate seats have always fallen 1 to the ALP, 1 to the Liberal Party.
In 2022, when all the dust has settled, this will remain the same.
The reason why is not down to the strength of the candidates, or their policies, or even their ability to cut through the media cycle and get noticed (Pocock, in particular, has had a wave of press over the last 6 months, his name on the ballot paper should surprise no-one when they step into the ballot box). The problem for third candidates is simply a matter of maths.
Antony Green, in his fantastic analysis of the 2019 Senate Election, pretty much covered this and the state of play has not changed sufficiently in Canberra for there to be any reason to think things will be different this time.
The ACT and the Northern Territory gained Senate seats at the 1975 election, but unlike the states with 12 seats each, the territories only gained two seats. This means that for a party or candidate to win one of these seats they must reach a minimum of 33.3% plus one vote of the total votes cast. Compare this with Senate races in the states (14.29% plus one vote) and you can quickly see just what a monumental task this becomes for a independent or minor party candidate.
Canberra’s demographics only serve to further work against smaller players.
Being a city that was founded to be the seat of the Nation’s parliament, Canberra’s population has always been more educated, better paid and more politically astute than almost any other electorate in the country. Whilst the percentage of people employed directly by the Federal Government may have decreased over time, the number of businesses that exist to support the public service, and indirectly its employees, means that Canberra is very aware of, not only the politics of the nation, but it’s own state of play within it.
Given the high level of education in the city, progressive politics has been the major feature of the the city’s political identity – Labor has won every House of Representatives election bar one by-election in 1995 that quickly swung back to the ALP the following March.
The Senate has, at every election since 1975, produced one Labor Senator, and one Liberal Senator, without exception.
Going back to that figure to get a Senate ‘quota’ – 33.3% – the ALP has never failed to reach quota at any election, and the Liberals have only failed to reach 33.3% on five occasions – in 17 total elections.
Which begins to paint the problematic picture for any other candidate.
Let’s look at the most recent election as there is a widely held belief, wrongly, that the Greens went close to securing the second ACT Senate seat. Whilst it is true that the count was finally completed after 25 preference and exhaustion counts, at the point that the Liberal candidate, Zed Seselja, got elected, the Greens candidate was on 19.16%, still some 14.2% away from quota.
Whilst Canberra is a progressive city, the Liberals still have a large proportion of ‘rusted on’ voters in their own right. It is the volume of this support that makes a third party candidate’s job verging on impossible. The smallest the Liberal Party first preference vote has ever been in an ACT Senate election is 31.2% in 1998, and since then, has only dipped below quota twice – once in 2013 (33.1%) and then last time out in 2019 (32.4%).
In order to stay in the count long enough, a candidate needs two things to happen – their first preference vote to be high enough to allow them to hang around in the count in the first place, and the Liberal first preference vote to dip below quota enough to make them vulnerable. It is that second factor that is so difficult in the ACT.
The other issue that confounds this is that more likely third candidates, in the ACT, come from the progressive side of politics which has little impact on the first preference choices of Liberal voters in the territory. Looking at every election since 2000, the last time there was a serious third candidate was in 2013, when former GetUp organiser Simon Sheikh ran for the Greens.
The Liberal Party vote did fall – from 33.4% to 33.1% (and under quota) – however both the ALP and Green vote fell as well. Sheikh received 19.2% of the first preference vote (-3.65%) and the ALP received 34.4% (-6.4% – and Labor’s lowest First Preference vote since 1975). This was the anti-Rudd election, which accounts for the fall territory-wide for progressive politics generally, and the two major progressive parties (ALP and the Greens) specifically. Almost all the falls went to minor party candidates and independents who helped push the Liberals over quota very quickly.
In 2019, there was some thought of a push by the Greens to claim the second Senate seat, but the further erosion of the Greens first preference vote (falling again in both 2016 and 2019) to 17.7% made that task a false prophecy. The Liberal vote was down (32.4%) but the seat was never really in threat as minor parties (in particular a 2.4% vote for UAP) easily pushed the Libs over the line.
This is likely to be the case again in 2022. It’s not too far to predict a further depression in the Liberal vote, the question is how far will it fall. In my view, it needs to be below 30% for there even to be an outside sniff for a third candidate.
And that field is pretty packed. With the Greens, Rubenstein, and Pocock, there are three nominally progressive candidates fighting to take votes away from the Liberals first, and then ensure that they get preference flows from the other candidates before the Liberals. There is likely to be some form of protest vote, but how much of that vote then swings back the the Liberal Party is the $60 million question.
Can a candidate get 20% first preferences (or close to it) AND the Liberals fall to below 30%? It’s an election and anything is possible.
But it will always be a question of maths. And I just don’t think the votes are out there.
Addendum (May 8): Polling released in The Canberra Times, undertaken for Climate 200 it should be noted, on Saturday May 7 suggests a Senate first preference vote for Labor of 27% (down from 39%), Liberals 25% (down from 32%), David Pocock 21%, The Greens 11% (down from 17%), Kim Rubenstein 6%, and the UAP 6% (up from 2%). This would demonstrate the lowest major party vote in ANY ACT election (House of Reps, Senate or ACT Government) since the first ACT Government election in 1989 (with it’s massive and embellished field thanks to more than a handful of ‘joke’ parties and candidates).
My initial reaction is that whilst the numbers are hard to believe, they do in essence reiterate a point that I’ve been thinking for a while – that being that the rise of independent, nominally left of centre candidates hurts progressive parties more than conservatives in non-conservative electorates, and the ACT is certainly non-conservative for the most part . Almost all of Pocock’s vote here is drawn from the loss in the ALP and Green vote and the rise in the UAP is drawn from, mostly, the loss in the Liberal vote.
Further, if these numbers are to be believed, Katy Gallagher is at serious risk of losing her seat. Assuming the overwhelming majority of UAP preferences flow to the Liberals, and the majority of Kim Rubenstein’s preferences flow to Pocock, this will put both the Liberals and Pocock within striking distance of quota. There’s always a flow from the Greens to the Liberals (albeit small) which could be enough to get them over the line, plus a preference split, I would wager, between the ALP and Pocock which will make the second seat close and likely become quite drawn out.
All of that being said, without seeing the polling questions in depth, it’s hard to know what to make of the figures. They look too low for both major parties for me to really take them at face value, but that of course won’t be known until well after May 21.