Squiz Shortcuts - Week 4 of the election campaign

Your Shortcut to… Week 4 of the election campaign

Between the death of Pope Francis, Trump’s tariffs, and back-to-back long weekends, it’s fair to say the election campaign has been fighting for air time this week, but don’t worry if you’ve tuned out over the past few days - that’s where we come in. So in this Squiz Shortcut we're here to bring you up to speed with:

• the latest policy announcements

• what happened in the third debate 

• and what the polls are saying

And we have some excellent questions from Squizers in Ask The Squiz, including how the group of independents known as the teals work, and what the deal is with early voting...  

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Squiz the Shortcut

Catch me up, what did I miss?
Well, not a whole lot… We're just over a week from polling day and it’s been crickets on PM Anthony Albanese’s website for most of the week. But he did announce some money for the Kokoda Track, and today he’ll give details about a $1.2 billion investment Labor wants to put towards building up a reserve of critical minerals for us and “like-minded” nations. And during the week, one of his team had something to say about penalty rates... 

Penalty rates - tell me more…
Minister for Employment Murray Watt announced that a re-elected Labor government would legislate to protect existing penalty rates in awards, which would effectively scuttle recent applications by employer groups across the retail, clerical and banking sectors to reduce entitlements for some workers in exchange for higher pay.

And how was that received?
Employer groups aren't happy and neither is the Coalition - its leader Peter Dutton pointed out that previous Labor governments have backed the Fair Work Commission to sort that out. 

Tell me about the Coalition’s plans
It’s been a bit late off the mark, but the Coalition has made a couple of significant policy announcements over recent days. One of those is its strategy for addressing domestic violence - if elected, Dutton says the Coalition will direct $91 million towards things like strengthening bail laws, criminalising the use of mobile phones to harass, and increasing the monitoring of offenders using electronic ankle bracelets.

Anything else? 
He’s also going big on defence. Dutton says the Coalition will commit an extra $21 billion between now and 2030 to lift overall military spending - that's almost double Labor's planned increase to the defence budget. 

What would the money be used for?
It’d help pay for a recruitment drive, the acquisition of more F-35 fighters, and to secure the AUKUS deal to acquire nuclear-powered submarines. Dutton said Albanese regularly tells Australians that we’re living in the most precarious period of history since the end of World War II, but when it comes to doing something about it, Labor has ripped money out of the defence budget. 

Has it really done that?
Well, Labor denies this - its current plan increases defence spending from $59 billion this financial year to $79 billion in 2029/30. But the Coalition says that's not enough given the challenges we face in our region, many of which are linked to China and its ambitions. 

That sounds like a big topic…
The Coalition says it's a landmark policy of this campaign, and it steers the conversation back towards national security which is traditionally a strength of the Coalition's... 

Got it. What happened in the third leaders’ debate?
The pundits narrowly awarded the win to Dutton over Albanese - the pundits being the 3 people on the panel. This one was hosted by Nine, and the panel was Deb Knight, Phil Coorey, and Charles Croucher - they represent the media company's radio, print and TV divisions. 

Did I miss anything?
It was quite a calm affair over the whole hour, but there was one part which made headlines where both men called each other a liar. 

So how can we know what’s true?
We got questions about that from Squizers after the first debate... Albanese said Dutton was lying with the claim that defence spending would be cut, while Dutton said Albanese was lying about the cost of developing nuclear energy, and that the Coalition has no plans to cut Medicare. So that discussion was a feature... 

Are there any other debates coming up?
Yep, there’s one more coming up on Sunday night on Channel 7. And as we head into the final week of the campaign, we thought we should have a look at the polling…

Ooh tell me what the polls are saying
There seems to have been a general commentary that the Coalition was ahead, and then fell behind at the start of April when you look at the 2-party preferred stakes. 

Back it up, what does “2-party preferred” mean?
Last week, we talked about preferential voting and how our preferences are distributed to candidates until someone gets past 50%. Two-party preferred is the percentage of votes after you count (and count, and count), knocking out the bottom candidate each time, until there are just 2 candidates left. 

OK, so does polling just happen within an electorate?
You can do it at an electorate level - so the individual races - but also at a national level when you're looking at across-the-board support. 

Who are the candidates that would mostly pop up?
At that local level, those 2 candidates are usually Labor and the Coalition, but more and more independent candidates are getting up there. At the national level, it's Labor and the Coalition. 

Right, then which level do the polls tend to focus on?
The polling that is published is all about the national numbers as a measure of how the parties are doing, and which of them has the best chance of winning government. 

Got it. So with that in mind, what are the polls saying now?
They’re saying Labor is leading on a 2-party preferred basis. Labor’s doing pretty well in the smaller polls for marginal seats too - those are the seats where the member won last time by a small number of votes. 

And are seats expected to change much?
Well it’s predicted that Labor will lose some seats and the Coalition will pick up some - but not enough to see Labor lose government. But, as they say, take it with a grain of salt...

Ask the Squiz

From Penny: How does voting work for the Senate and what happens when the dominant party with a majority isn’t the same as the one elected to the House of Reps?
Just to set this up - the Senate is the upper house of the Australian Parliament, also known as the House of Review and the State's Chamber. So let's start with how we elect our Senators. The states get 6-year terms, and the territories get 3 years. Because this is a regular run-of-the-mill election, only half of the Senate is up for election, along with the ACT and NT. And for voters, we're using a system called proportional voting.

So with preferential voting, one candidate is elected from each electorate and that's the person with the majority of votes. In the Senate, you're choosing more than one representative per area... So to be successful, you don’t need to be supported by the majority of voters in your state or territory; you need to receive a quota, which is a set percentage of the vote. And that's why we see more independent and minor party senators being elected to the Senate - it’s a system that supports that sort of outcome.

The next thing to clock is that the government of the day rarely has a majority in the Senate. It's only happened twice in our history - the last time was under John Howard between 2005-07. 

So there are a couple of things to note there. The first is that we Aussies are a cautious bunch, and that result is seen as Australians exercising their own bit of a check on power. And that's why, during the parliamentary term, a lot of political reporting is focused on what the Greens think, or Jacquie Lambie thinks, or Pauline Hanson thinks about the government's policies - because the government has to negotiate with them to get their legislation through the parliament. 

And over the last few years, with more of us voting for candidates away from the major parties in the House of Reps, it's a discussion there too, particularly if Labor or the Coalition don't have a majority and have to negotiate with the independents and minor parties for support...

From Tim: How homogeneous are the teals, and what’s their backstory?
The question about the independence of the teals has been a thing for years now... There have long been independents in the House of Reps - Bob Katter in Kennedy, Peter Andren in Calare, Cathy McGowan in Indi - they're 3 in recent times who can genuinely be described as community, grassroots representatives. But in 2019, the crowdfunding outfit Climate 200 was founded by Simon Holmes a Court. He's the son of Australia's first billionaire, Robert Holmes à Court, and he calls himself an “energy geek”. 

Climate 200 was set up to get progressive-minded independent MPs elected, and that saw it target the Liberal Party. Former PM Tony Abbott was an early casualty - he was beaten by Zali Steggall in Warringah in 2019. Then in 2022, Climate 200-backed candidates successfully targeted moderate Liberal MPs in 6 seats, which delivered one of the most serious challenges to Australia’s two-party system since Federation - and they became known as the teals.

So, are the teals a party? They say no... Climate 200’s website states that “it does not start campaigns, select candidates, speak for candidates, dictate policies, or have members. We simply give strong community campaigns a leg up with funding and support.”

If you’re wondering, “If they’re not a party, what are they?” put it this way - Climate 200 provides the candidates with a lot of financial support, a lot of campaign logistics support, a lot of polling support... And their brand of politics is from a consistent platform - action on climate change, transparency in government and politics and so on. But they do have their individual policies too - Allegra Spender in Wentworth, for example, has done a lot of work on tax reform. 

As for why they’re called teals - it's been interpreted by some journalists as a blend of the blue of the Liberal Party and green for the Greens - that's nothing formal though. Teal was the dominant colour for the campaign branding in Steggall's campaign in 2019, and it seems to have stuck.

From Sally: Can anyone vote early?
Yep - Australians have enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to vote early in recent elections. During the pandemic, it was even welcomed so that too many people didn't congregate at once... But there are some conditions for early voting - or pre-poll voting as it's technically known. 

You can check out the conditions on the Australian Electoral Commission’s website, but essentially you can only vote early (either in person or by post) if on polling day you are travelling or unable to leave your workplace to vote, sick or due to give birth, prevented by religious beliefs from attending on election day, etc... But it's not a rigorous process to check those things, and it's thought that more than half of our 18 million voters will vote early in this campaign. 

As for how it impacts the election results, well, it can be a problem for those campaigning because it means a lot of people are casting their vote before they have all the information. Anyone campaigning who thinks they have a full 5 or 6 weeks to convince people to support them has more like 3-4 weeks… And that's why there was a lot being said about the Coalition's missteps early in the campaign - there isn't a lot of time to muck around with.

Keep ‘em coming…

Keep sending us your questions about the election to [email protected]. You can ask us whatever’s on your mind about politics or how the election works, and we'll pick a few to answer next week.

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