Overall, however, Labor’s campaign was efficient,
though there was some internal unhappiness over its upper house preference
negotiations that were a reminder of its Victorian 2004 Senate deals.(5)
Liberals focussed on the claimed administrative mistakes,
omissions and deceptions of the Government. Much was made of ‘broken
promises’, most colourfully with a huge photograph of Bracks with a
‘Pinocchio-style’ elongated nose hung across a road in Bayswater, reminding
voters of his failure to keep the no-tolls promise.
The Liberals made many promises, including $1.77
billion to be spent on public health, tougher water restrictions for
Melbourne, $250 million for a desalination plant, the
building of a toll-free Lilydale bypass and the abolition of Zone 3
fares on Melbourne’s transport system. The Liberals
also promised to reform Parliament by the appointment of an independent
Speaker who would be required to relinquish all party positions, the
establishment of eight-week sitting periods, and the forcing of ministers
to directly answer questions without notice.(6)
It seemed probable that the Liberal Party would increase
its Legislative Assembly seats, but as its 2002 performance had been
its worst since the election of 1952, this was more likely to be a saving
of face, than a return to a position where its parliamentary presence
was significant.
The Nationals’ major concern was to protect their
official party position of 11 parliamentary seats, particularly as they
were likely to lose seats in the Legislative Council due to the change
in the electoral system (see below).
For much of their history the major Victorian non-Labor
parties have had a much more independent existence in state elections
than their colleagues in New South Wales and pre-1983 Queensland. Despite
some pressure from the Prime Minister, who said he believed the only
way the Liberals would be able to form a government would be in a coalition
with the Nationals,(7) the two parties reflected this history
in their determination to campaign separately. Each spoke of different
roles and policies and views of government. This was particularly important
to the Nationals, concerned about being swamped by the larger party.
It was not surprising, therefore, that 20 of the 88 seats had nominations
from both parties, including the seven held by the rural party and four
of the Liberal Party’s seats.
In 2002, Green candidates had gained an average first
preference vote of 25.6 per cent in the four inner-Melbourne seats of
Brunswick, Melbourne, Northcote and Richmond. With
Green candidates contesting every seat for the first time, there was
an expectation that the party would comfortably eclipse the 2002 vote
and win its first lower house seat, with Melbourne
the most likely.
In nominating in all but two seats, Family First
was seeking to build on their surprise success in winning a Victorian
Senate seat in the 2004 Commonwealth election. Earlier in the year they
had gained a statewide vote of 5.9 per cent in the South Australian
election.
In the 2002 election the first preference margin
between the Government and its Liberal opponent was 14.1 per cent. Although
opinion polls suggested that this lead had lessened, by late 2006 the
Government’s popularity was still high enough for its comfortable return
to seem certain. In final polls before the election the margin was only
slightly less than at the 2002 election, with Newspoll, ACNielsen and
Galaxy suggesting that although a significant number of voters had shifted
their support from Labor, the Government was very likely to be returned—though
with a loss of seats.(8) It seemed that the closer the election
date loomed, the less certain that voters were about turning to the
Liberals. During 2005, Newspoll was reporting a decline in Premier Bracks’
popularity, but in 2006 the Premier’s satisfaction rating climbed back
to a healthy 52 per cent, giving him a comfortable margin over his challenger.
The Legislative Assembly result
|
Party |
Seats |
% |
| ALP |
55 (-7) |
43.1 (-4.9) |
| Lib |
23 (+6) |
34.4 (+0.5) |
| Nats |
9 (+2) |
5.2 (+0.9) |
| Green |
- |
10.0 (+0.7) |
| FF |
- |
4.3 (+4.3) |
| Other |
1 (-1) |
3.0 (-1.5) |
The Government is returned
Labor lost 4.9 per cent of its support. It won 55
seats, a loss of seven, but retained a Legislative Assembly majority
of 22. The major factors accounting for this result have become familiar
in recent Australian state elections.
An Age journalist has described ‘the House
of Bracks’ as having been built on ‘the three pillars of integrity,
competence and cohesion’,(9) and opinion polls in the years
between the 2002 and 2006 elections repeatedly confirmed that this was
how it was seen by a majority of voters. Despite his opponents’
description of Premier Bracks as a ‘do-nothing’ administrator, the Premier’s
standing remained relatively high for most of the four years between
the elections, and this no doubt played a part in his party’s remaining
electorally healthy enough to win its third consecutive victory.
Opinion polls and election results suggest that economic
growth has helped the Howard Commonwealth Government and the state and
territory governments retain office in recent elections. Victorian evidence
for this was a Newspoll finding that 53 per cent believed that Bracks
was ‘more capable of handling the Victorian economy’ than Baillieu,
who scored only 33 per cent on economic management.(10)
In all Australian state elections during 2006, the
issue of the use and preservation of water featured prominently. In
the Victorian battle Baillieu accused the Government of failing to act
quickly enough to face the issue of permanent reductions in water availability,
due largely to inadequate resources being put into the Victorian dam
system. As in the other states, however, where it was clear that the
respective governments and oppositions were very much in the early days
of establishing how best to deal with this emerging issue, water policy
seemed not to be a major factor in the Victorian outcome.
The Liberals mark time
Although the Liberal Party
gained six seats, giving it 23 of the 88 in the Legislative Assembly,
its vote barely moved —just an increase of 0.5 per cent. Most voters
who deserted Labor seem to have moved to The Nationals, the Greens or
Family First, than to the Liberals. It can be argued that this was a
poor return for a party which was in power from 1955 to 1982 and for
most of the 1990s. Since the party’s creation in the mid 1940s, only
its first preference votes of 1952 and 2002 have been lower.
For the second election running, the Liberals’ chances seemed
not to be helped by controversy and uncertainty concerning their leader.
In 2002, such uncertainty had led to the replacement of Denis
Napthine by Robert Doyle
barely three months before polling day.
Six months before the 2006 poll, Ted
Baillieu replaced Doyle, giving voters
little time to accept such an important change. A journalist claimed
that various ‘suspicions’ attached to Baillieu and his party.(11)
One was the belief that the party had written off its chances for 2006,
seeing this election as part of a two-campaign election strategy designed
to return it to office in 2010. Another criticism was that internal
party divisions had resulted in the Liberals focusing more on personality
and political infighting, rather than on putting in the ‘hard yards’
needed to develop sound policies. This was the same claim made about
the party in South Australia, Tasmania and Queensland during the recent
campaigns in those states. There was also concern about the Liberal
leader’s ‘privileged’ background. Media consensus was that Baillieu—the
so-called ‘Toff from Toorak’,(12)—needed to convince voters
that he was committed to putting in the hard work needed to oust the
Labor Party from office. Attention was paid to his wealth, and his refusal
to make public any details of his shareholding portfolio.(13)
In some unexplained way, all of this seemed to suggest that the challenger
lacked ‘the hunger necessary for the job [of Premier]’.(14)
The Nationals and party status
During the campaign there was speculation that the
Nationals might retain only two of their seven seats. In fact, the party’s
final vote of 5.2 per cent was its highest for three elections, though
lower than its relatively healthy years of 1985 to 1992. Most importantly,
the party’s gaining of the seats of Mildura and Morwell (see below)
gave it a total parliamentary representation of 11 seats. Official party
status was thus retained. There was satisfaction in the party over the
decision to stand apart from the Liberals in the campaigning, Queensland’s
Senator Barnaby Joyce
claiming that voters will support a party ‘that stands up for itself’.(15)
Green frustration
Although the election had many issues such as climate
change, water and nuclear power that might have helped increase support
for the Greens, the party’s statewide vote of 10 per cent was only 0.3
per cent above its 2002 figure, even though Green candidates contested
all seats for the first time. This was barely an increase of 15 000
votes across the state. Apart from Tasmania, the Greens have been unable
to push their statewide first preference vote above ten per cent in
the recent run of state elections, and do not have a presence in any
of the seven legislatures elected from single-member electorates. The
party did not really come close to winning a seat, despite being in
the final count in the seats of Brunswick, Melbourne and Richmond, and
receiving an average 75 per cent of Liberal preferences in the those
seats. The narrowest final margin was in Melbourne,
where the Green two-candidate preferred vote was 48 per cent.
Family First’s vote of 4.3 per cent was described
in the media as ‘the most significant swing of the election’.(16)
It was claimed that this was a great improvement on the party’s performance
in the recent Queensland state election.(17) In fact, although
in that election the party’s statewide vote was just 1.9 per cent, its
average vote per seat was 2 per cent higher than in Victoria.
Craig Ingram
retained Gippsland East comfortably, but Russell
Savage lost Mildura to the Nationals’ Peter
Crisp. Crisp was the focus of some attention due to
the fact that he had previously lived in Dareton across the New South
Wales border, and was a member of the Wentworth Shire Council in that
state. Critics asked: was Crisp truly a Victorian?
Seats which moved
The relative ineffectiveness of the Liberal Party
can be seen in the different seats that the Government lost.
The marginals—a return to normality?
In losing Evelyn, Hastings,
Kilsyth, Ferntree Gully and Bayswater, the Government lost five of its
seven most marginal seats, suggesting that the statewide fall in its
vote was sufficient to account for these losses. Labor’s losses could
easily have been greater, for in its third most marginal seat (Gembrook)
and its sixth most marginal seat (Mount Waverley), the Labor sitting
members were behind on first preferences, but regained each seat narrowly
after preferences.
Apart from marginality, there were also issues specific
to some seats that probably helped bring about their loss.
The Scoresby Freeway
A matter of great controversy was the Scoresby Freeway
being built to link Ringwood, Dandenong and Frankston from mid-2008.
Labor candidates in Melbourne's south-east had to cope
with the fallout from the Government’s decision to break its promise
that the proposed freeway would be toll-free. However, although the
issue may have played a part in the loss of Bayswater, Evelyn
and Ferntree Gully, it is probably misleading to suggest that this was
the sole factor. Across the state there was a drop of 4.9 per cent in
the Government vote, but the loss of votes in the various ‘Scoresby’
seats was only 0.5 per cent higher, far less than was being predicted.
Labor’s general loss of Melbourne votes, plus the seats’
marginality, may have been a more important factor than the Freeway
issue.
Gippsland water
Although the water issue seems not to have had a
major impact as a statewide issue, Tim
Colebatch of The Age has claimed that
the seats of Narracan and Morwell ‘sank partly because of [Minister
for Water] John Thwaites’
water recycling plan’.(18) This was a proposal to secure
a drinking water supply for Melbourne and Geelong for the next 50 years.
The plan involved replacing fresh water used by Latrobe Valley power
stations with treated effluent from the capital. This was widely criticised,
with the Government also attacked for its plan to treat Latrobe Valley
power stations’ water at lower than the required standard. The Nationals’
leader spoke of the Government treating the Latrobe Valley as a ‘receptacle
for Melbourne’s waste’.(19) This issue seems to have been
crucial in Labor’s loss of Morwell. ALP strategists believe the issue
also stripped the party of the neighbouring, marginal seat of Narracan,
because that seat shared the same TV news service and newspaper as Morwell.
Russell Savage
had won Mildura as an independent in 1996, retaining the seat three
years later when he achieved notoriety in rural Victoria
for joining with two other independents in supporting the advent of
the minority Bracks Government. Despite this, in 2002 Savage
retained Mildura on first preferences. After maintaining a reasonably
comfortable relationship with the Government, by October 2005 Savage
was calling its ministers ‘miserable bastards’ and accusing the Premier
of betraying him over a plan for a toxic waste dump at Nowingi, 50 km
south of Mildura.(20) Savage was criticised
by many in the Mildura community for not standing up to the Government,
and in the election his first preferences plummeted by 17.7 per cent,
with him well beaten.
Previously, each of 22 provinces had elected two
MLCs, one at each state election. This was now altered. The Legislative
Council was reduced to 40 members, with all to be elected at each State
election. Five members were to be elected from each of eight regions,
the boundaries of which were to include 11 of the Legislative Assembly
electoral districts.
Proportional representation, as used for Senate elections,
was to be the method of election, and, as in Senate elections, the ballot
paper was to be divided by a horizontal line, meaning that there were
two ways to vote—above or below the line. However, a Victorian Legislative
Council below-the-line vote would require a minimum of five boxes to
be marked. The required quota of votes to win a seat was 16.7 per cent.
The use of proportional representation made it less likely that a major
party could gain control of the upper house. A minor party that could
gain at least 10 per cent in any region, had a good chance of winning
the fifth seat in that region.
|
Region |
ALP |
Lib |
Nat |
Grn |
DLP |
| E Metro |
2 |
3 |
- |
- |
- |
| N Metro |
3 |
1 |
- |
1 |
- |
| SE Metro |
3 |
2 |
- |
- |
- |
| S Metro |
2 |
2 |
- |
1 |
- |
| W Metro |
3 |
1 |
- |
1 |
- |
| E Vic |
2 |
2 |
1 |
- |
- |
| N Vic |
2 |
2 |
1 |
- |
- |
| W Vic |
2 |
2 |
- |
- |
1 |
|
Total |
19 |
15 |
2 |
3 |
1 |
The Government fell two seats short of winning an
upper house majority. A major surprise was the Democratic Labor Party
winning a seat in the Western Victorian region, despite winning just
2.7 per cent of the vote in that region. This was achieved as a result
of the ALP’s preference deals with various parties, in which the DLP
had been put ahead of the Greens on Labor’s group voting ticket. Labor
thus helped achieve the election of a candidate of the party which had
been so important in keeping it out of office in Victoria
for about twenty years after the party split in the mid-1950s.
The Bracks Government’s 55 Legislative Assembly seats
leaves it in a healthy position. For Labor to be displaced in 2010 the
Liberals need either to work in coalition with the Nationals and gain
a 5 per cent two-party preferred swing, or else achieve a 6.7 per cent
swing to be able to govern alone. Through most of the 20th
century the ALP’s weakest state party was to be found in Victoria—it
was not until 1982 that John Cain
jr led the party to its second majority ministry. Such has been the
change in Victorian politics since, that by the time of the 2010 election
Labor will have governed for 21 of the previous 28 years, and Steve
Bracks, presently the fifth-longest serving Premier, will be second
only to the Liberals’ Henry Bolte.
- ‘Small earthquake in Victoria,
not many voters shaken’, The Age, 24 October 2006.
- ‘Choose not to settle for less than we deserve,’
editorial, Sunday Age, 19 November 2006.
- Stuart Rintoul,
‘Steve conjures up Jeff’s
ghost to spook the voters’, The Australian, 1 November 2006.
- Michael Warner,
‘Ad ambush on schools’, Herald Sun, 3 November 2006.
- Ellen Whinnett,
‘ALP urged to forget Family First’, Herald Sun, 31 October
2006.
- Michael Warner,
‘Big Ted thrives on the campaign trail’,
Herald Sun, 21 November 2006.
- Michael Warner,
‘PM pulls rug from Baillieu’, Herald Sun, 11 November
2006.
- Kenneth Nguyen,
‘Polls, and the only one that counts’, The Age, 25 October
2006.
- Paul Austin, ‘Cracks open in Bracks’ house’, The
Age, 26 August 2005.
- Newspoll 13 November 2006, http://www.newspoll.com.au/,
accessed on
15 January 2006.
- Paul Austin,
‘Plenty of promises, but will premier-in-waiting deliver?’, The
Age, 13 November 2006.
- Ashley Gardiner and Ellen Whinnett, 'A blueblood pin-up', Herald
Sun, 6 May 2006.
- Michael Bachelard, ‘Baillieu share silence may be hurting
campaign’, Age, 8 November 2006.
- Austin, op. cit.
- Ewin Hannan, ‘Defeat sparks push for coalition’,
The Australian, 27 November 2006.
- ‘Major parties lose support to the Nationals, Family
First’, The Australian, 27 November 2006.
- Ibid.
- Tim Colebatch,
‘The ghosts of polls past’, The Age,
28 November 2006.
- Richard Baker,
‘Water fight” fury over $1.5bn plan’, The Age, 13 September
2006.
- Jason Dowling,
‘Independent savages Bracks’, The Age, 23 October 2005.
