Federal election 2019: Who will win your seat

Early opinion polls show that Bill Shorten’s Labor is on track to triumph in the 2019 Federal Election - but what does that mean for your candidate? See election guru Malcolm Mackerras’ predictions for your seat.

There were recent state elections in Victoria and New South Wales and I made specific predictions of seats in articles for the Herald Sun and Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.

They were spectacularly successful for the NSW election but not so for Victoria.

In the Herald Sun on Saturday 27 October 2018, exactly four weeks before polling day on page 53 in an election special, was my Victorian State pendulum plus an article titled “Andrews to return, a bit green about the gills”.

FEDERAL ELECTION CALLED FOR MAY 18

INSIDE THE SCANDALS THAT ROCKED PARLIAMENT

THE NORTH EAST LINK’S HUMAN IMPACT

So all I could boast about was a correct prediction of the fact that Daniel Andrews would stay in office.

However, my prediction was of an election showing almost no movement in votes compared with that of November 2014.

But there was a five per cent swing to Labor during the campaign so Labor gained nine seats I predicted would be retained by the Liberals.

In predicting this federal election, therefore, I could be proved badly wrong if there is a major swing during the campaign. All I can say now is that I don’t expect it.

SCROLL DOWN TO SEE MACKERRAS PENDULUM

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the election will be held on May 18. Picture: Kym Smith

Opinion polls show Bill Shorten’s Labor is in the box seat to win the 2019 election. Picture: Daniel Pockett

The average of the opinion polls is 52.5 per cent for Labor and 47.5 per cent for the Coalition.

That means a swing of 2.9 per cent to Labor compared with the last election in July 2016.

The accompanying diagram is known as “the Mackerras Pendulum” and it ranks seats from the strongest for the Coalition, being Nicholls (Nationals, Victoria) and Bradfield (Liberal, NSW) to those where the Coalition vote is weakest, being in Grayndler (NSW) and Cooper (Victoria).

Consequent upon population changes the House of Representatives increases from 150 members to 151.

Victoria and the ACT each gain a seat while South Australia loses one.

New seats for Labor are shown in red and Labor definitely gets the new ACT seat of Bean. Note, however, that Labor does not definitely get any extra seat out of the Victoria-SA changes.

While there is a new safe Labor seat of Fraser in Melbourne’s western suburbs two safe SA Labor seats (Port Adelaide and Wakefield) have been amalgamated into a new safe Labor seat called Spence.

Cooper is the old Batman and there may well be a serious competition in Cooper between Labor and the Greens. The same goes for Grayndler and Wills.

The pendulum is based upon a strict Coalition versus Labor scale.

I’ll give my prediction and then defend it. I am predicting 83 seats for Labor and 68 for the rest combined, an absolute Labor majority of 15 seats.

The marginal seats are what determines this.

The seats of Dunkley and Corangamite are already notionally Labor by boundary change — that is why they are shown in red because they are to be defended by sitting Liberal members, Chris Crewther and Sarah Henderson, respectively.

The pendulum is based on the idea of a uniform swing but that actually means cancellation of deviations from it. They usually do cancel — more or less.

So suppose there were an overall swing of 2.9 per cent to Labor as average polls now show. Such suggests that Labor plus Greens plus Andrew Wilkie would exceed the Coalition and right-leaning independents by 85 to 66, a margin of 19.

Election guru Malcolm MacKerras predicts that Labor will win the Hosmajority of 15 seats in the House of Representatives. Picture: Michael Jones

But above that swing the following seats might fall to Labor, Chisholm, La Trobe, Bonner, Reid and Deakin.

In such a scenario perhaps the following might stay with the Coalition, Capricornia, Flynn, Banks and Boothby.

By “right-leaning independents” I mean those who sit in natural Coalition seats.

Thus Wentworth is shown as safe Liberal with the swing of 17.8 per cent being that needed by Labor to take the seat from Malcolm Turnbull, based on the 2016 general election statistics.

Anyway I’ll give my predictions on them.

In Wentworth the Liberal candidate, Dave Sharma, will defeat sitting independent, Kerryn Phelps. Indi will be won by the Coalition but I predict there will be a seat moving the other way.

Tony Abbott, in my opinion, has outstayed his welcome in Warringah. For that reason I predict he will be defeated by the independent candidate, Zara Steggall.

Malcolm Mackerras is Honorary Fellow of Australian Catholic University.

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Originally published as Federal election 2019: Who will win your seat