Australian Financial Review

Lies & Statistics
5 Mar 2005
Peter Brent

Recently resigned West Australian opposition leader Colin Barnett has been judged a disaster after last Saturday's state election. But, really, he didn't do too badly.

The Gallop government's probable nine seat majority is, in the electoral context, modest.

Over the past decade, voters at the state level have followed the same script: narrow initial win for the ALP followed by a re-election landslide - in some cases, record-setting ones.

Now, you might believe Bob Carr, Peter Beattie, the late Jim Bacon and Steve Bracks to be brilliant politicians with sublime connections to middle Australia. Or, perhaps, as John Howard's former chief of staff, Graham Morris, has suggested, today's state Liberals are all "boring boofheads". But in the real world lightning doesn't strike four - now five - times in the same place.

We are witnessing a pattern in Australian voting behaviour, and one no less real for our not being able to pinpoint its exact causes.

How does Barnett compare?

At Carr's first re-election in 1999, the NSW opposition won 35 per cent of lower house seats. In 2003 it went backwards to 32 per cent.

In 2001 the Queensland opposition managed just 17 per cent (followed by 22 per cent last year) and at Bracks's 1999 re-election the coalition's Robert Doyle ended up with 27 per cent of seats.

Tasmania's proportional voting system makes seat comparison difficult, but three years ago the Liberals clocked in their lowest vote ever, 27 per cent.

South Australian Labor is yet to progress to re-election.

And Barnett? He actually improved the coalition's vote and appears to have emerged with 39 per cent of Western Australia's Legislative Assembly. Not great but better than his interstate peers.

Expectations of him were high, mainly because of his fine opinion poll performance last year (and the Gallop government's poor one), but also for other reasons.

The 2001 result, when there was a high One Nation vote and One Nation decided to preference against sitting members, led many to consider the Gallop government somehow electorally illegitimate.

But those commentators hadn't been paying attention for the past decade. Beattie's 1998 elevation was also One Nation-induced, and Carr snuck in with just 49 per cent of the two-party vote 10 years ago this month.

It's incumbency that's important, not how it came about.

Others thought Perth's suburban electricity blackouts would rebound on Gallop, but that was never likely with a first-term government; voters recognise it can't be all its fault.

But the funniest line to emerge last weekend was that this result was something federal Labor could take heart from. (Presumably they also celebrated each of the other 13 state and territory Labor wins during their last nine years in opposition.)

The reality, as Malcolm Mackerras wrote in The Australian Financial Review last Monday, is that these state ALP administrations are an unmitigated curse for Kim Beazley. They help John Howard get elected, and he does the same for them.

Last Saturday just made Beazley's job that much harder.

Peter Brent is publisher of mumble.com.au, a website that looks at electoral behaviour.