Numbers don’t lie as preference votes sink Liberal ambitions

There are lessons for the Centre-Right in the Pembroke poll result, says Alistair Graham

WHEN Liberal Party state director Sam McQuestin said “While it is a simple fact that our tactics against Mr Chipman achieved their intended aim of driving his vote below that of our candidate” ( Mercury, November 17), I was reminded of the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail — fighting is not the same as winning.

Now the Electoral Commission has published the formal results of the Pembroke by-election, and as someone of a Greiner-esque warm, dry and green disposition, I thought it might be worth going over the evidence to see just how silly McQuestin’s approach was and to draw out some lessons from the numbers for Centre-Right electioneering in Tasmania.

It is true the Liberal candidate got more primary votes than independent Doug Chipman, by a margin of 56 per cent to 44 per cent.

It is also true that the ALP candidate got more primary votes than the Liberals — interestingly, by exactly the same margin. It is also interesting to note that the Liberals consistently outpolled Alderman Chipman in every polling booth in a remarkably uniform showing across the electorate. And the ALP did likewise against the Liberals, losing to them only in the Tranmere and Lindisfarne booths.

On the face of it, the Liberals were in a strong position before the allocation of preferences but everything from this point on went against the Liberals — and predictably so. To make up lost ground, the Liberals needed a substantially stronger preference flow than the ALP.

As the cut-up of preferences from poorer polling independents and from minor parties (Greens and Shooters) proceeded, accumulated preference flows to the ALP exceeded those to the Liberals by a margin of 73 per cent to 27 per cent (and the margin for Ald Chipman was almost as bad for the Liberals at 69 per cent to 31 per cent).

Lesson No. 1: After loyal Liberal voters had done as admonished, there was remarkably little sympathy left for the Liberals among the rest of the electorate who’d voted for independents and minor parties (even the Shooters’ preferences went 26 per cent to ALP, 15 per cent to Libs).

Perhaps this was no surprise when the Green vote was cut up, with preferences flowing 59 per cent to 9 per cent in favour of the ALP (Al d Chipman got 28 per cent). The killer, however, was that when Ald Chipman’s vote was cut up, the ALP won 47 per cent to 42 per cent (11 per cent exhausted). Hold onto this thought for a moment: most Chipman supporters preferenced the ALP ahead of the Liberals. To win, the Liberals needed a preference flow to them of at least 73 per cent to 27 per cent — they lost very badly.

Lesson No. 2: Any assumption that most of those voting for Ald Chipman were in any way natural Liberals and would preference the Liberals over the ALP was misplaced. He’s a popular mayor and so has a constituency of his own.

Winning from second place on primary votes is not unheard of but obviously needs those voting for the third candidate to notably prefer the second candidate over the lead candidate.

Lesson No. 3: You can’t win a three-cornered electoral