Matthew Abraham: Polls, tips, mugs... and the federal election
Picking politics is a mug’s game, Matthew Abraham writes — but that isn’t stopping him from chancing his hand and picking the winners for SA’s seats at the Federal Election. Will he be right?
Analysis
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Sometimes it’s a good idea to quit while you’re ahead.
Ahem. In 1993, I was one of only three journalists in the Canberra press gallery to correctly predict Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating would defeat Liberal leader John Hewson in the “unlosable election”.
It was meant to be unloseable for Hewson, who was convinced Keating was so unpopular, and the country so cranky with Keating’s recession “we had to have”, that the Liberals would romp it in.
Unemployment was 11 per cent and long-term unemployment numbers had doubled to 189,000 people.
Journos were in awe of Hewson’s energy on the campaign trail – he even caught an egg thrown by a protester without missing a beat at one rally – but to me he looked like a sweating, wild-eyed, half-crazed wreck.
Keating did him like a dinner, increasing Labor’s majority – the first time since 1966 an incumbent government had increased its two-party vote.
Keating called it the “sweetest victory of all”.
As The Advertiser’s struggling political correspondent, it was also my sweetest moment. It’s been all downhill since then.
Tipping election results is a mug’s game. Which is why I’ll give it a go for Saturday’s poll.
It’s harder to think of a wackier election.
From Adelaide, it feels like it’s being played out in another time and space continuum, out beyond the Hay Plain, somewhere east of Tooleybuc.
A record 16.4 million Australians are registered to vote in this election. Well over a million have already voted, gleefully using the nation’s lax and relaxed early voting laws, where the lamest of the-dog-ate-my-homework excuses gets you off the hook on election day.
It’s almost as if we just want the pain to stop. Thanks to The Advertiser’s Mad Monday polls, we already know the likely result in two of SA’s three wobbly seats.
In Sturt, where incumbent Liberal MP Chris Pyne is retiring at this election, the polling shows his anointed successor and former Marshall aide James Stevens will hold the seat for the Liberals, with a leg-up from Clive Palmer’s United Australia preferences.
In Mayo, former Xenophon now Centre Alliance incumbent MP Rebekha Sharkie looks set to romp it home against Liberal Georgina Downer, just as Sharkie did in last year’s by-election. The Liberals keep saying Downer is a great candidate, but great candidates need to win, occasionally.
That leaves Boothby, held by Liberal MP Nicolle Flint.
She’s carrying the baggage of backing Peter Dutton to roll PM Malcolm Turnbull and is up against Labor’s Nadia Clancy.
She’s also fighting Labor’s good friends in the GetUp! organisation – a cashed-up, smarmy army that’s getting too big for its boots.
Labor’s plan to scrap franking credit refunds is political poison in a seat like Boothby and will shore up Flint’s self-funded retirees and pensioner base.
I’m told the Liberal internal polling shows that while she was looking shaky last year, she’s now in “pretty good shape” and has been for the last month.
“I think we’ll win it ... despite her,” one Liberal told me.
But Labor sources say they’re “picking up a bit of excitement about Boothby, nobody is down in the mouth about it”.
Tomorrow’s final Mad Monday poll out at noon will paint a clearer Boothby picture.
My tip? Flint to hold Boothby.
That just leaves the Senate, with six spots vacant. Labor and Liberal will win two each, with the remaining two vacancies a veritable barrel of monkeys between the Greens, Centre Alliance, United Australia and Billy the Goose.
Xenophon-backed Skye Kakoschke-Moore could just sneak in but the Greens Sarah Hanson-Young is more likely.
And then there was one. Ladies and gentleman, I give you the 61-game Adelaide Reds defender and sometimes driver for Big Clive, Kristian Rees, to claim a surprise Senate spot for Palmer’s party.
From Adelaide United to United Australia, it’ll make as much sense as anything else on Saturday.
With a quarter of the electorate likely to have already voted in record early vote numbers, the election may already be done and dusted.
So who’ll win government? Beats me. I may be a mug, but not that big a mug.
Originally published as Matthew Abraham: Polls, tips, mugs... and the federal election
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