Marginals key in State race

In the lead-up to the State election, Joe Poprzeczny looks at some of the issues and battlegrounds on which the campaign will be fought.

The Gallop Government is holding power by just 700 primary votes.

That’s not many, considering more than 1.25 million voters are already registered for the looming State election.

The Gallop Government’s tenuous hold on power is disclosed in a research paper compiled for State Parliament by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Federal election night analyst and commenator, Antony Green.

Mr Green’s paper is titled: 2003 Electoral Distribution (WA): Analysis of Final Boundaries.

It shows that if just 700 electors in the State’s five most marginal Labor-held seats changed from how they voted at the last election, the Gallop Government would fall.

The five crucial marginals, in order of vulnerability, are Bunbury (0.2 per cent), Swan Hills (0.5 per cent), Murray (0.7 per cent), Mindarie (1.2 per cent), and Geraldton (2.7 per cent).

If the Coalition took these marginals it would hold 29 seats by adding the two Independent Liberals – Drs Liz Constable and Janet Woollard.

It is highly unlikely that parliament’s remaining two safe Independent Liberal seats – South Perth and Vasse – will fall to Labor.

Mr Green’s paper transposes the 2001 State election voting results onto the boundaries of all seats created by last year’s redistribution, which prompted Labor’s Electoral Affairs Minister Jim McGinty, to launch a determined bid to overturn in two WA Supreme Court challenges and a High Court appeal.

Superimposing the 2001 election’s figures to the newly created Bunbury seat, Labor’s most marginal seat, shows Gallop-led Labor holding it by just 52 votes.

The same tabulation for the next most vulnerable Labor seat, Swan Hills, shows it is held by a mere 118 votes.

Similar calculations for the three remaining marginals – Murray, Mindarie and Geraldton – have Labor holding them by 146, 428 and 646 votes respectively.

If these differences are aggregated and one vote added to each seat for it to change hands, and that total halved, the difference is 700 votes.

Although both Liberal and Labor party analysts generally use percentages to show swings required for seats to change, some party tacticians and MPs prefer using the vote aggregate statistical method (VASM) shown on the accompanying table.

They see the VASM as a far more telling guide to seat vulnerability.

For instance, former Liberal premier Richard Court preferred the VASM to percentage swing charts or pendulums.

And recently re-elected Prime Minister John Howard often resorts to the VASM when he’s addressing party faithful get-togethers such as the 500 Club.

Both believe that quoting differences in seat numbers or percentage swings can easily give party loyalists a false sense of security between elections as well as during campaigns.

That, in turn, also leads to difficulty in fund raising from potential donors.

After both the 1993 and 1996 State elections, which Mr Court won relatively comfortably when gauged on seat numbers and percentages, he preferred to tell party faithful that the Coalition held power by only relatively small numbers of votes in a handful of marginals.

Percentage measures fail to match the stark outcome that is so easily demonstrated by the VASM.

For instance, although Labor defeated Mr Court in 2001 by attracting just 37 per cent of the primary vote – compared with the Coalition’s dismal 34 per cent – this became 53 to 47 per cent respectively when converting this to the two party preferred measure (TPPM).

The former shows a three-percentage point margin between the Coalition and Labor, whereas the TPPM shows a six-percentage point difference, even though they are measuring the same contest.

Neither is a good guide to showing just how tenuous the Gallop Government’s hold on power is and therefore fail to show just how close Liberal leader Colin Barnett is to becoming premier.

The picture is no more encouraging for Labor when introducing WA’s next five most marginal seats – Collie-Wellington, Riverton, Wanneroo, Joondalup and Albany – into the equation.

Labor holds each of within a margin of four-percentage points.

The Liberals have targeted each of these 10 seats and are about to employ 30 full-time campaign workers to help tip Labor out of them.

This approach of staffing each marginal seat campaign with full-time party workers is the brainchild of former British Conservative Party agent, Mark Neeham, who was hired early this year by the State Liberal party director Paul Everingham to help unseat Dr Gallop.

Mr Neeham has had experience in combating Tony Blair-led Labor in several national, county and European Union elections in a marginal southern England electorate and across Scotland, a traditional Labour stronghold.

Seats to watch

• Bunbury (0.2 per cent): 6,410 ALP; 6,358 Coalition; margin 52, so 27 votes would win seat for the Coalition.

• Swan Hills (0.5 per cent): 10,166 ALP; 10,048 Coalition; margin 118, so 60 votes would win seat for the Coalition.

• Murray (0.7 per cent); 5,419 ALP; 5,273 Coalition; margin 146, so 74 votes would win seat for the Coalition.

• Mindarie (1.2 per cent): 9,272 ALP; 8,844 Coalition; margin 428, so 215 votes would win seat for the Coalition.

• Geraldton (2.7 per cent): 6,240 ALP; 5,594 Coalition; margin 646, so 324 votes would win seat for the Coalition.

• Total votes needed for a change in government: 700.
  
  *February 2001 election two party preferred votes transposed to boundaries for the forthcoming 2005 election.