With the parliament dissolved and the election only a few weeks away, the 2023 New South Wales Festival Of The Vote: The Bout To Knock The Other Out has begun in earnest. Current incumbent Dom Perrotet has kicked off his campaign with a proposal to bribe parents to the tune of $400 per year every year, if parents put aside money into a savings fun for their kids. This sounds like a great plan until you consider that very poor families who live from payday to payday will likely never get any of it, and that Mr Perrotet's own family stands to gain $50,400 by my calculation. Charity begins at home - his home. To those who have, more shall be given but to those who have not, they will be given nothing. This is the Matthew Principle in full swing. Meanwhile Chris Minns and the Labor Party have decided to adopt the policy of not saying anything at all and not being the Liberal Party. Given that two of the four Premiers who have served since Labor last held office in NSW have been referred to the ICAC, then this might be a policy of pure genius.
However is simply existing, enough to swing the electorate? To be honest, I have no idea. Given that the pandemic is still in pretty recent memory, and former Premier Gladys Berejiklian's referral to the ICAC will likely not be reported in full until after the election, I do not know how either of those will affect the intentions of the good an decent people of New South Wales. My sense of not knowing is amplified by a complete lack of silence from rural print media which no longer exists. It used to be that you could gauge the intent of people in that great expanse that we call "not Sydney" by reading through the local newspapers. That is now impossible.
The cold, hard, mechanical facts of the election are as follows. There are 93 seats in the NSW Legislative Assembly; which means that 47 are needed to form government. The Liberal and National Parties have since the 2019 Election held 48 seats; which has meant that in order to pass legislation, they needed everyone on the floor of the chamber. Fortunately, that's really easy considering that the NSW Parliament Building is so incredibly cramped and small that apart from running up stairs from their respective offices, nowhere in the premises is any more than 3 minutes from anywhere else.
To get to 47 seats though, the Labor Party will have to take an additional 11 seats, to the 36 that it already holds, if it wants to win government. It could in theory take them from any of the 9 independents but given that all of them are likely to hold, then flipping them from the Liberal/National government is the only realistic way that Labor will take the keys to the kingdom for the next four years.
The 11 seats most likely to flip, are in order of most marginal to safest are:
East Hills
Upper Hunter
Penrith
Goulburn
Willoughby
Tweed
Winston Hills
Holsworthy
Riverstone
Parramatta
Oatley
Oatley was won at a margin of 6.8% on the 2PP basis at the 2019 Election; which means that realistically, there needs to be a 7% swing towards Labour if they are to take government in their own right. 7% in Australian politics at any level is not impossible but it is unlikely. Of those 11 seats, 6 of them are in Western Sydney; which means that for the first time in possibly a long time, the Liberal Party and the media companies will have to cencede the fact that Western Sydney actually exists.
The demographics of Sydney which is distinct from the rest of NSW is such that there are a collection of very rich and very staunchly Liberal voting electorates along the coast. What we've seen over the last few Federal election cycles is that when the people get so fantastically rich that they have all possible needs met and more, that they may be pushed towards uncontrolled Independents. There is a big collection of electorates which always will vote Labor. Then there is a ring of seats which blink with either colour, depending on which way the wind blows.
I also have no idea how much immediate recency bias plays into this. If there is some catastrophic train failure in the week before the election, then the people of Sydney who by themselves have the power to make and unmake state governments, may decide to do that. It hasn't explicitly been brought up but the threat of privatisation of the railways, is always lurking in the background. I find it interesting that even with the privatisation of the buses, this has made zero difference to voting intentions in staunchly blue seats.
What I do not know is if the 11 seats listed above, which sit inside that 7% swing threshold, have stable voting patterns. Willoughby would likely revert to being a Liberal seat under most circumstances but given that it was their MP who was Premier and referred to the Independent Commission Against Corruption, there might be pent up anger there. Upper Hunter is confusing as the electorate might either reflect wishes of a decidedly working class mining demographic or a semi-agrarian bloc who might vote National. Tweed is unknowable. Tweed is quickly becoming a place where old and rich people retire to because they want to be on the Gold Coast but it also has poorer people who have been priced out of living in Brisbane; then you add in the further complication that it is a border electorate and I've got not idea.
My suspicion is that the Liberal/National Coalition will not hold government. What I have no idea about is if sufficiently enough of the electorate across the state is going to run across the aeroplane and make it lurch in the other direction. Queensland with its single chamber, does this a lot. It is also highly likely that the Labor Party will flip some seats and we'd be left with a blue and red bloc with about 44 seats each. This whole election might then rest on the decisions of a few kingmakers who then get to decide who to hand the keys of government to. If that happens, then get prepared for the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald to get as close to slander as they possibly can, to pressure them into choosing the Coalition. As it is, the right-wing trashmedia already hates "the Teals".
47 - seats for government
11 - seats need to be flipped
7% - swing
Those are the key numbers. That's what this election hinges on.
No comments:
Post a Comment