Antony Green has made available the Senate calculator, which allows you to put in your estimate for each party’s Senate vote and it tells you how the preferences will flow and who will be elected. We don’t have a chance in any other State, but under certain scenarios the NSW Senate calculator shows Terje being elected with as little as 0.4% of the primary vote.
While it’s still a long-shot, there is hope. The important point now is for us all to work as hard as we can to get Terje’s primary vote as high as possible to increase our chances. Details of the possible good-news preference flow is below.
This is what we need:
* We need to get at least 0.4% of the vote and beat “Hear our Voice” and “Conservatives for Climate & Environment” to pick up their preferences
* With those preferences, we need to get to about 0.8% of the vote and beat “Carers Alliance”
* With those preferences, we need to get over 1% of the vote to beat the “Fishing Party”
* At this stage we should be over 2% of the vote, which should take us ahead of Family First (whose vote will be low in NSW because of the high profile of the Christian Democratic Party)
* Once we pick up FF preferences we should be around 4%, which should be enough to beat the combined vote of Democrats + Climate Change Coalition
* With Democrat preferences we should be around 6%, which should be enough to beat the combined vote of One Nation + Pauline
* With Pauline’s preferences we should be on about 7.5% of the vote and in the final race for two spots, along with the Greens, ALP, Liberals and the Christian Democrats (who will have preferences from DLP, shooters, one nation & NCPP)
* On the left side of the ticket, either the Greens or the ALP will be elected
* If CDP > Liberals then the CDP gets the last spot. If Liberals > CDP then Terje gets the last spot.
There are lots of things that could go wrong and it would be silly to get our hopes up too much. But there is a legitimate chance, and the higher the LDP primary vote then the bigger the chance. So with less than 3 weeks remaining, let’s see what we can do to help Terje.
UPDATE: Political commentators are starting to notice.
November 6, 2007 at 12:33 am |
Forgive my ignorance, but why will FF preference LDP? Is there ANY area where their policies are not diametrally opposite?
November 6, 2007 at 12:45 am |
Perhaps it’s because Terje is such a charming man?
Terje did a marvelous job working out preference deals in NSW given a very short amount of time and he managed to convince several parties to come to us quite early. Even if it doesn’t work out, it was a top effort.
November 6, 2007 at 12:59 am |
[...] As I have written previously, it’s my view that the political ideology that best guarantees us those freedoms is libertarianism. It is therefore of particular interest that there is a libertarian party, the Liberty and Democracy Party, running in the coming election — and they have a real chance. [...]
November 6, 2007 at 2:07 am |
Yeah, even if he isn’t elected, he’s done a bloody awesome job.
Boris- I’m not sure why FF preferenced us, I guess they saw our return preferences as valuable to helping them. Ideology is less important than strategy with preference deals. I don’t know FF preferenced us over CDP, but I’m glad they did.
November 6, 2007 at 3:32 am |
John, with further tweakage I saw Terje elected with .24% of the vote.
Probably not a likely situation. But it is possible- Family First need to poll less than 1.5%, Fishing Party can’t poll more than about .35%, Carers and Hear Our Voice both need to poll below us, and HoV has to be eliminated before the Carers.
If we can get past that point, we’re likely to be in the running.
November 6, 2007 at 6:05 am |
I believe that the FF preferencing the LDP (and others) is a ‘dummy spit’ on their part over the fact that the Libs are preferencing the CDP before FF. There was a deal between FF and the CDP to exchange prefernces which it appears that FF has broken.
November 6, 2007 at 8:34 am |
Socially the LDP are quite different from Family First and the Christian Democratic Party, but economically, there are several similarities.
I think it’s more interesting the LDP got One Nation preferences. One Nation doesn’t have much in common with the LDP. They are socially conservative and economically protectionist. The few similarities I can find are on the rule of law, access to national parks, and fixed-length parliamentary terms. Still, minor parties have to preference each other to have a real chance of getting elected.
November 6, 2007 at 8:41 am |
I think the Carers Alliance and the Climate Change Coalition will poll higher than the LDP, which will make the job hard. Have you got many volunteers?
November 6, 2007 at 9:33 am |
Mikel — we don’t need to beat Carers or CCC. We just need to beat “Hear our Voice” and/or “Conservatives for Climate & Environment” to pick up their preferences… and hopefully the combined total will be higher than Carers.
The big challenge now is trying to make sure our primary vote is above 0.5% and preferably up around 1%.
We don’t have an army of volunteers at the moment… but we’d better start building one.
November 6, 2007 at 10:13 am |
I haven’t even heard of HOV. Do you think CFCE will get as many votes as Liberals for Forests did previously? They seem to fill the same void, albeit with less name recognition.
November 6, 2007 at 10:16 am |
No — both HoV and C4CE will poll quite badly I think — less than 0.5%.
November 6, 2007 at 8:14 pm |
I had a look at the ACT calculator, it looks like it has us prefferencing the greens ahead of the liberals which is wrong.
November 6, 2007 at 8:35 pm |
Look at when the party that receives our preferences is excluded. I just fudged some numbers- when Labor is excluded and only the Greens a Liberals are left-
2,062 (0.96%) votes originally from Liberty and Democracy Party distributed to Liberal Party (HUMPHRIES Gary) via preference 14.
The Greens definitely don’t get ours, they get everyone else’s, though.
November 6, 2007 at 9:42 pm |
Wow. On the numbers I tried, if LDP get over 1% of the votes, they’ll beat the Greens to the last spot. That’s entirely possible if enough people are handing out.
November 7, 2007 at 12:21 pm |
What do the “Hear Our Voice” mob stand for?
November 7, 2007 at 1:36 pm |
http://www.tonimclennan.com/yourrights.htm
A few things. *shrugs*
November 7, 2007 at 3:09 pm |
To add a little more analysis to the pot:
* We need Conservatives for Climate and the Environment and Carers Alliance to outpoll Hear Our Voice. If Hear Our Voice harvests preferences from those two parties their combined vote can top ours.
OR
* We need our primary vote to outpoll the C4CE/ CA vote, as well as the CCC vote (with Senator Online and a few others).
THEN
* We need the combined Christian Democrat vote (Shooters, DLP and CDP) to outpoll the Pauline/ON vote (Pauline, ON, NCPP)
OR
*We need our combined vote (with micros, Dems and FF) to outpoll the Pauline/ ON/ CDP vote.
Also, we need the Coalition vote to be below 3 quotas, which is highly possible.
Terje can get elected on a primary vote of less than .25% if the stars align. A primary vote of 1% puts him much closer to winning the race, however. It is easy to overestimate the micro parties. But provided our micro party harvest outpolls Family First or the Democrats, we have a solid chance.
November 7, 2007 at 3:30 pm |
Playing around with it, if we stay in the race for a while, the Coalition need to poll under 41%ish (with Shooter and DLP they need to be under a 3rd quota) or if they poll high, the Labor/ Green vote has to be short of a 3rd quota (unlikely based on polling) and our primary vote needs to be much higher.
November 8, 2007 at 10:52 am |
[...] for Climate, DLP, Fishing Party, CDP, One Nation and Carers Alliance. Given that the LDP has a real chance of getting Terje elected in NSW, it is very disappointing to see the Shooters Party working against a pro-shooting [...]
November 8, 2007 at 11:59 am |
You’ve made a press release about this, right?
On the numbers I’ve done, there’s a strong chance of Terje being elected, so it would have to be more upbeat than the intro here.
November 8, 2007 at 12:10 pm |
LDP Tipped To Win NSW Senate Seat
There’s a new party in Australia called the Liberty and Democracy Party. They are calling for lower taxes and more personal freedom, and their senate candidate in New South Wales has a good chance of winning on preferences.