Queensland Greens and Open Tickets

Queensland election update – less than a week before polling day.

Just Vote All?
Let’s examine the reasons for Campbell Newman’s Just Vote 1 strategy. Queensland state elections have optional preferential voting: you can number 1 or more candidates.

When it has suited the major parties, usually the one in the lead, they have adopted a Just Vote 1 strategy.

This makes it possible to win on a minority of the popular vote, and takes smaller parties out of the equation.

The ostensible reason for this strategy is it prevents a hung parliament. The UK has a first past the post system (essentially the same as Just Vote 1) and their last election delivered a hung parliament and the latest polls show that as the most likely outcome next time. So that is not a really plausible reason and in any case, up to Peter Beattie’s time, Just Vote 1 was the Labor strategy. Back then, the Libs and Nats were at each others’ throats. Times change and so, apparently, do principles when they no longer suit you.

Why does it suit the LNP now? After all, conservative minor parties and independents add up to a bit more than the Greens – depending which polls you believe. It’s a matter of marginals. The LNP will have done polling that shows they gain more from stifling preference flows from Greens to ALP than they lose from stifling preference flows to them from minor parties and independents on the right. I can’t find stats for past Queensland elections, but most other minor parties in the 2013 federal election had a roughly even split of preference flows to Labor – even if they were nominally on the right (possibly an indication of where Labor is positioned?).

So overall, Labor, who derive significant benefit from Greens preferences, loses out more than the LNP from Just Vote 1.

Labor is in a poor position to complain: optional preferential voting was introduced by the Goss Labor government and it worked for them when they could exploit the divide between the Liberals and Nationals.

Open Tickets: So What?
Meanwhile Labor is attacking Greens for issuing “open tickets”, i.e., How to Vote cards that tell the voter to make up their own minds. This is nothing new, and if we look at past elections, the effect has been pretty much that the ALP gets 80% of Greens preferences once they drop out irrespective of what is on the HTV.

Even in the 2012 election where ALP most certainly did not advocate Just Vote 1, nearly 70% of Labor voters (vs. nearly 80% of LNP voters) only marked 1 on their ballot. In doing so, they created the risk that if the Greens candidate came second, there would be insufficient ALP preferences to beat the LNP candidate.

50% of Greens voters also went for Just Vote 1 despite the fact that the Greens have never advocated this position. 80% of Greens preferences go to Labor.

What Labor should really do is to think about what it takes to be attractive to Greens voters, and focus on countering Just Vote 1.

They will win a lot more votes that way than going negative. Do the math: 50% of 80% is 40% of the total Greens vote (3-4% of the total vote) that is up for grabs as ALP #2 if they attack the Just Vote 1 strategy. For LNP, the extra votes they win if every Greens voter fills in every box is a quarter of Labor’s gain so no wonder they do not want everyone to fill in the entire ballot (stats from Anthony Green’s blog).

There is therefore absolutely no basis for the ALP complaint that Greens “open tickets” risk handing the election to LNP. The stats actually indicate that Labor voters are far more likely to behave in a way that is perverse to their interests.

The 20% of Greens voters who put LNP ahead of Labor are probably converts from LNP on enviro or other issues where Greens are ahead of Labor and aren’t going to put ALP ahead of LNP no matter what. What would Labor prefer? That these people stay with the LNP?

Labor meanwhile is issuing a call to “put LNP last” which implies filling in all the squares, and is getting huffy about anyone who suggests variants. No doubt they are worrying about confusing the message. If they had not invested so much in confusing voters before (like Peter Beattie’s Just Vote 1 campaign) they would have an easier time now. Their attempts at portraying the Greens as spoilers are not matched by the historical stats.

Campbell Newman Running without a Seat

When The Australian described Campbell Newman resigning his mayoral position to lead the LNP’s parliamentary team from outside parliament as “Campbell Newman running without a seat” I waited for the professional cartoonists to take up the idea. They didn’t so here’s my attempt.

Strange things happen in Queensland politics but none stranger than this.

Campbell Newman needs a substantially bigger swing to take Ashgrove from Labor than his party needs to take the state. That means it is conceivable that he could fail to win a seat with the LNP winning. The LNP needs to clarify what this scenario means. Will Jeff Seeney become the state premier by default, as the “interim” leader? Will the party room hold an election for a new leader right after winning? Or will Campbell Newman continue to call the shots from outside parliament?

Only in Queensland.

And these clowns expect us to vote for them.

If only they would get their act together. Labor deserves to lose, but not to this bunch. The best option is a hung parliament with the Greens in the balance of power. That seems to be working reasonably well in Tasmania and in the federal parliament.

The Day it Rained Forever

I'm working on a new novel with the working title, The Day it Rained Forever. Here in Queensland, it is starting to feel a bit like that.

While the floods here are not causing the devastation the recent Pakistan floods caused, because the population is lower and we have good early warning systems, you nonetheless have to start wondering why one in hundred year events are happening so often.

While it’s wrong to label one event as evidence of climate change because climate is a long-term average of weather, one of the predictions of climate theory is that as the energy in the system increases (what is happening now), the hydrological cycle intensifies. That means bigger swings between drought and deluge, and more intense droughts and floods.

If you look at the history of flooding where I live in Brisbane, it looks as if things have actually improved since the big flood of 1893:

However, we need to take into account the completion of the Wivenhoe Dam in 1984, which has had a significant effect in mitigating flooding. We should have had a major flood in 1999, as you can see from the fact that Wivenhoe peaked at about 135%; the sudden drop-off arises from the excess being let out. The way a flood mitigation dam works is 100% is the normal water storage capacity and anything over 100% is the excess that would have gone into a flood. As soon as the possibility of flooding reduces, this excess has to be released. In a tidal river like the Brisbane, water can be released to coincide with low tide. Obviously there is a limit to this: if the dam approaches its true 100% (possibly 200%), there is no option but to release water even if the timing is not ideal.

Here is the overall history of the dam as far back as the official SEQ Water web site goes:

Note the peak in 1999, when the dam first performed its flood mitigation duties. The current peak doesn’t look too dramatic but let’s take a closer look:

Observe the spikes to the right of the curve, all over the 100% line. These are all occasions when the sluices were opened. Let’s see exactly how many spikes there have been to date:

Four so far, and no end to the rains in sight. Contrast that with only one occasion in the past when the dam sluices had to be opened since it was constructed. The latest peak is nearly 150%, much higher than the 1999 peak of 135%, illustrating that you need to look at the numbers rather than eyeball a graph.

Going back to 1893, the pattern then was a series of floods, with one big one that dominated the rest. We won’t see that pattern again in Brisbane because of the role of Wivenhoe, but without the dam, the current flood would be at least as bad as that of 1974, possibly at the 1893 level. Clearly, these “once in a century” events are happening more often than that.

None of this of course is evidence of climate change. It is however a warning. The level of climate change we have seen so far has added about 0.8°C to the pre-industrial global average. James Hansen, in Storms of My Grandchildren, predicts things become hairy with more than another 1°C of warming. He bases this number mainly on the threat of rapid disintegration of ice sheets. However, we should not expect that level of warming to occur without further intensification of the hydrological cycle. Flooding on this scale should happen more often. Exactly how much more often, and how much the variation between wet and dry will intensify, are open questions. Do we do the experiment? People with water above their roofs or even lapping at their floorboards may well say no. I certainly do.

Update: 10:30 am, 11 January 2011

I’ve just heard on ABC local radio, Wivenhoe is at 173% of capacity, despite all the major releases. Further releases that won’t cause flooding are no longer an option.

Update: 8:40 am, 16 January 2011

Since my last update, Wivenhoe was heading to 200%. The dam spills over the top of the wall at 225%, and is not designed to withstand that kind of spillage, so the gates had to be opened to the extent of flooding significant parts of the city. The peak level was 191% on the night of Tuesday 11 January 2011 (though this does not show up on the official dam web site because of the time of day at which the measurement is taken).

Now the flood waters have receded, the flood level was a bit below that of 1974, despite twice the rainfall in Wivenhoe’s catchment, so the dam has had some useful effect. I don’t know how the rainfall over the city itself differed, but that carried on for a long time if not very intensively. At very least that would have contributed to the flood by saturating the ground.

My own home was above the flood level, but homes only a few blocks away were inundated, despite being quite far from the river. Despite being several metres above flood level, the ground was so saturated that a little water seeped up through cracks in my garage floor (the garage is cut into the ground). This is a trivial problem compared with what others have endured, but illustrates how saturated the ground was when the Wivenhoe gates were opened fully.

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To help

• If you would like to contribute financially to helping out with flood victims, I recommend doing so via the state government web site.
• If you are in Brisbane and want to help, the best thing to do is to walk to your nearest flood site (with waterproof boots, strong gloves and any equipment you can carry).
• The city council is bussing volunteers around, but their strategy of mustering volunteers at sites far from the rail network means you may be stuck in traffic for a long time getting in, going to your work site, and getting home again. If you aren’t in a location where you can help, look into the council volunteer scheme.
• Volunteering Qld is also helping out but are currently overwhelmed with offers, so feel free to register with them to help out in the longer term but don’t expect to be used immediately.

Turmoil in Queensland major party politics

On 5 October 2008, Labor state member for Indooroopilly Ronan Lee jumped ship and joined the Greens.

Labor supporters have been quick to label this as an opportunistic move; in a state where the Greens have battled to win elections at any level, it's hard to see how this could be so.

I'd like to point out that the opposition Liberal National Party has a big problem. Inner city voters don't like the Nationals, and the Nationals are in control of the LNP. To anyone who says Lee should have resigned his seat: I hope you said the same about the LNP.

Views on comment sites are interesting. Some claim he is just jumping ship to protect himself against the shift away from Labor; that being the case, why didn't he join the second biggest party? There are many green-leaning Liberals in his electorate. It is hardly self-serving to join a small party that is struggling to win elections. At worst, it buys him another year in state parliament. At best, a lonely time in the next lower house with few if any members on his team. Anyone thinking he is taking the easy way out obviously has no clue how much harder members of small parties have to work just to keep up let alone to get ahead.

It's a hard adjustment to accept that there are some politicians with principles. Had I been a Labor state member, I would have had difficulty holding down my lunch let alone staying in my seat when Anna Bligh said not so long ago that Labor had such great environmental credentials, Greens would have no problem preferencing them.

If you are elected on the basis that you have certain principles and your party claims to uphold those principles but clearly doesn't, what do you do? Be honest and quit the party, giving up the perks of a parliamentary secretary and the possibility of being elevated to the cabinet, or stay on to become another Peter Garrett with a tight muzzle and a short leash?

Meanwhile the notion that the conservative side of politics stands for sound financial management has been ripped apart by the turmoil on Wall Street and, closer to home, the rates revolt in Brisbane where a Liberal (LNP now, I guess) administration is taxing unit owners out of their homes.

Anna Bligh has given the Greens a head start by claiming that her environmental credentials were so good, no Greens voter would have trouble preferencing the ALP. Tell the good people at the Mary River that. Tell the people at Felton who are threatened with having their farms ripped up for a coal mine that. Ms Bligh's first response was that this was a stange move, as only governments can protect the environment. Let me repeat my two-word response to that: Peter Garrett. She has also shot herself in the foot by making contradictory claims. On the one hand, Ronan Lee had never expressed any environmental concerns to her. On the other hand, he wasn't able to function as a member of a disciplined team. What does that mean? Either she was aware of his dissent from party positions, making her first claim nonsensical, or he was dissenting on some other range of undisclosed issues. And in any case, you do not appoint a loose cannon who is out of line with party principles as a parliamentary secretary, generally a precursor to elevation to the cabinet.

Interesting times, and Queensland politics is shaping up for a really interesting state election.