WA Election – Upper House goes to Libs & Nats
The state election in Western Australia looks like it will deliver a minority government in that state, although it will probably need to wait until some of the doubtful seats are finalised before it gets confirmed whether it is led by the Liberal Party or not. What does seem certain is that the Nationals will hold the balance of power in the Upper House and overall the conservatives will have a clear majority.
When WA was finally implementing a one vote-one value electoral system, the Greens supported it for the Lower House, but – for reasons which I have never understood - insisted on keeping the regional weighting (more commonly known as a malapportionment) in the Upper House. This means around 935 000 voters elect 18 representatives for the metropolitan area, and around 258 000 elect 18 representatives for the non-metro area. William Bowe provides some good background on this process, and the history of the WA Upper House in general over at The Poll Bludger.
Another equally baffling component of the ‘reform’ was to change from having an odd number of seats in each region (5 in some cases and 7 in others), to having 6 seats in each of the six regions. This makes it extremely difficult for the Liberal and Nationals to ever be in a minority.
While there is a huge amount of votes still to be counted in the six Legislative Council (Upper House) regions, the combination of the malapportionment massively favouring the rural areas (where the Liberals and Nationals are stronger) and the even number of seats being decided in each region will deliver a clear majority to the Liberal and Nationals.
Some significant shifts in the totals may yet occur, but even with the small number of votes counted so far, the preference tickets of the various parties and the straight-forward mathematics of six-member electorates means it will very difficult for Labor and/or the Greens to make up sufficient ground.
Surprisingly, the ABC site seems to have more up to date figures that the WA Electoral Commission, and has the added bonus of a preference calculator to show the likely outcome. The final seat can always throw up some surprises, but it seems likely to split three-three between Liberal/National and Labor/Green in the three metro regions, plus in Mining & Pastoral (where the popular and widely respected Robbin Chapple will be returned for the Greens after just missing out last time).
However, the Liberal and National will definitely get 4 out of the 6 seats in the Agricultural region, and as things stand, Antony Green’s preference calculator at the ABC site also has the CDP winning the final seat, which would leave Labor only winning 1 out of the 6! However, that final seat is very close at the moment, so it could well change given there’s 60% of the vote still to be counted.
Even if Labor grabs a second in Agricultural, the Liberals and Nationals are also likely to get 4 out of 6 of the seats in South-West region as well. Given the amount of vote still to be counted, there’s still an outside chance the Greens could get the final seat in South Metro instead of the Liberals getting a third seat, but that wouldn’t be enough to stop the Liberals and Nationals having an Upper House majority between them – most likely with 20 out of 36 seats. The Greens will probably end up with 3 – an increase for them of 1 – and Labor will have either 12 or 13.
My predictions of the Legislative Council results are as follows:
East Metro: 3 Liberal, 2 Labor, 1 Green
North Metro: 3 Liberal, 2 Labor, 1 Green
South Metro: 3 Labor, 3 Liberal (the Greens have a lot of ground to make up, but couldn’t yet be written off winning the third Liberal seat)
Agricultural: 2 Liberal, 2 National, 2 Labor. (the CDP is in with a chance of wining the second Labor seat, or if the Liberal vote strengthens in later counting, it could also deliver a third seat to the Nationals)
MIning & Pastoral: 2 Liberal, 1 National, 2 Labor, 1 Green
South-West: 3 Liberal, 1 National, 2 Labor.
UPDATE (11/9): Follow developments in the count over at The Poll Bludger – the predictions I made here look likely to be wrong in a couple of regions with the Greens getting one or two seats more than I thought. However, but the overall outcome of the Liberals and Nationals having a clear majority (or to put it another way, the Nationals holding the balance of power) is still a certainty.
FINAL UPDATE (1/10): Final results show I was wrong in South Metro with the Greens winning a seat at the expense of the 3rd Labor rather than the 3rd Liberal, but basically right with the rest, with the Nationals coming through to win 3 in Agricultural at the expense of the 2nd Labor. This leaves the Lib-Nat non-Coalition even stronger than I’d anticipated (probably a key factor in why the Nationals ended up choosing the Liberals to form government), with Liberals 16, Nationals 5, Labor 11 and Greens 4. This is a particularly dismal result for Labor, a huge gain for the Nationals and a positive boost for the Greens (although still below the 5 seats they won in 2001 from a slightly smaller total).
4 Comments, Comment or Ping
Kevin Rennie
For my take as an outsider who spent 15 months in the Broome ALP please read: How the West was lost. It was far more complex than the beginning of the cycle of conservative resurgence.
Sep 8th, 2008
AndyD
While the country-bias might seem unfair on the face of it, when looking purely at numbers, is it really fair to lump people who live several hundreds of kilometres apart into a single electorate? On what true test of fairness do metro voters deserve to outweigh non-metro voters to the extent that important regional infrastructure projects are ignored while billions are spent on fluff and nip projects in Perth?
Of course, for this election at least, it would seem Labor’s one vote, one value experiment has blown up in its own face. Ex-farmer and Nationals leader Brendon Grylls needs to make hay while the sun shines and get whatever he can for the regions during this next term. There’s no guarantee Perth voters will deliver such an even split again.
Sep 8th, 2008
LORIKEET
Thanks for the link, Kevin.
I still think it had quite a lot to do with the fact that the WA economy is very heavily supported by mining, and Green issues (taxes) have made the people exceedingly nervous.
I think the Greens have also polled fairly well, because mainly younger people are scared of what the future might hold.
There might even be another double dissolution on the horizon.
Sep 9th, 2008
Chris Pascoe
I have lost count of the number of workmates, former schoolfriends etc, who are saying things like “I voted Liberal because of Alan Carpenter but I didn’t actually think my vote would help them win, oh crap”. The media here was quite unreliable in the period leading up to the election, with many suggesting claims Labor could lose the election were completely unfounded. Just perhaps, this period of intense uncertainty likely to last well beyond the inauguration of the 38th Parliament may actually get some people to learn about their electoral system.
Sep 11th, 2008