Tally Room mail - Tasmania teetering on the edge (Patreon)

As a new part of my Tally Room work, I am going to be trying out a regular newsletter, sent out via Patreon. Think of it as a bit like a Substack newsletter, but I'd rather not split my contact list and donor base across another platform, so I'll try it on Patreon. I'll discuss what I've been thinking about, writing about and reading about since the last newsletter, and have links to some stuff.

Election guides for 2024-25

January was a big month for writing election guides. My plan was to try and get ready for 2024 by drafting most of the election guides for the year. I figured if I could get them all done, that would then give me a bit more capacity to do other projects as the year goes on.

That means there's now a hell of a lot of content up on the Tally Room website.

If you sign up to donate $5 or more per month, you can access my partial guide to the federal election, my guides to the Queensland, Western Australian and Tasmanian state elections and the ACT and Northern Territory elections, as well as the guide to the NSW council elections.

I think these guides are really useful and well worth the $5, so please consider signing up.

The podcast kicks off with Indonesia

I'll be recording my first podcast episode of 2024 today, which will be an interview previewing the Indonesian election.

Indonesians will go to the polls on February 14 to elect a new president, with Joko Widodo (or Jokowi) stepping down after ten years in the job.

The front-runner at the moment is Prabowo Subianto, who was Jokowi's defeated opponent in 2014 and 2019, but has reinvented his image and has formed an alliance with Jokowi, adding Jokowi's son Gibran to his ticket as his vice presidential candidate.

This is Indonesia's fifth direct presidential election. The first four all saw a candidate poll over 50% of the vote, but this time it looks like Prabowo will instead win a large minority of the vote. If he doesn't clear 50%, there will be a run-off in June.

Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country, and is Australia's close neighbour, but its politics is often not on the Australian agenda. I think it will be worth following the campaign.

Tasmania's parliament teetering on the edge of an election

Tasmania's next election is not due until the middle of 2025, but it's hard to see the parliament lasting anywhere near that long.

The Liberal government of Jeremy Rockliff is reliant on two ex-Liberal independents and the relationship is not strong. Last week Rockliff made an ultimatum that those independents agree to a more restrictive deal committing to not supporting Labor and Greens motions in parliament, and threatened to call an election if they wouldn't agree to that deal. One of those independents almost immediately dismissed the prospect of a new deal, and Rockliff quickly went to ground.

Rockliff's hand is weak, and everyone knows it. He clearly doesn't want an election, but at some point it might be impossible to avoid.

Tasmania's parliament resumes in early March. If Rockliff holds off calling an election until then, it would suggest an election held in April. But it could well be even earlier.

My election guide is ready to go, and was just updated last night with some more Jacqui Lambie Network candidates and independent David O'Byrne, the former Labor leader who finally quit the party years after being pushed out of the leadership.

Redistribution number shock

Federal electoral boundaries are currently being redrawn in three states.

Two rounds of submissions were made last year in each state, and we're now waiting for the mapmakers to release the draft boundaries. The submissions were made based on ABS estimates of expected growth over the next four years, but a number of commenters had pointed out that the Victorian data made no sense, projecting that every area would grow by about the same proportion.

The AEC announced in late January that the Victorian and Western Australian numbers were incorrect and released new numbers that make a lot more sense, showing the outer suburban fringe electorates growing fastest. It was good that the AEC has corrected the error, but it's unfortunate that this happened after people had made submissions based on faulty data.

This process is also why any talk of an election before September is nonsense. If an election were called (which would have to be for the House only before August) it would trigger mini-redistributions in three states. In New South Wales and Victoria, neighbouring seats would be merged to reduce the count by one in each state. In Western Australia, two neighbouring seats would be split into three new seats. Antony Green on Twitter explained which seats are in the firing line. 

What I'm reading

I just finished Michael Crick's biography of David Butler, Sultan of Swing. David Butler was basically the founder of psephology in the UK, aged 25 in 1950 when he helped with the first BBC television results programme. It was a really interesting insight into the process of developing some of the ideas around how to analyse elections, and also understand how one particular man's career in this area progressed. Butler also had a role in advancing Australian election analysis, and was a regular participant in election nights here in the 1960s and 1970s.

I've been reading an interesting journal article in Electoral Studies called The Local Party Voter: A localist anti-establishment voter? The piece is about Sweden, where local government is much more partisan than in Australia (elections are held at the same time as national elections), but in recent decades local parties have become a much stronger presence. They used survey data to look into what sort of people voted for these local parties and how they compare to voters for national populist parties (in this case the Sweden Democrats). They found that while these voters were a type of anti-establishment voter, they differed from Sweden Democrats voters in their civic engagement. I've been interested in learning more about how local parties work in Australian councils, so it was an interesting case study.