A bizarre set of results today from Westpoll, the headline figure showing Labor leading 54-46 on two-party preferred from primary vote figures of Labor 42 per cent, Liberal 35 per cent, Nationals 7 per cent and Greens 10 per cent. Alan Carpenter leads Colin Barnett as preferred leader 51 per cent to 28 per cent. If you believe the Westpoll results, you must conclude that Troy Buswell’s departure has been an unmitigated disaster for the Liberals, sending them from a 51-49 lead to a 50.2-49.8 deficit at the start of campaign to the fiasco indicated by the current figures. Stranger still are two individual seat polls. The Liberals are apparently set to seize the unwinnable seat of Morley, where they lead 51-49 from primary votes of 38 per cent for stop-gap Liberal candidate Ian Britza, 35.5 per cent for Labor’s Reece Whitby and 12 per cent for independent incumbent John D’Orazio. The point of this was to assess D’Orazio’s chances of retaining the seat after breaking with the ALP, and they were obviously not expecting such a result. In Nedlands, independent member Sue Walker languishes on 16 per cent compared with 47.5 per cent for Liberal candidate Bill Marmion and 23 per cent Labor’s Colin Cochrane. No sample size is provided for any of the three polls – we can guess the main poll was about 400, in keeping with the usual Westpoll practice.

UPDATE: Reader SeanofPerth reports a Galaxy poll of 800 voters in tomorrow’s Sunday Times shows the Liberals 51-49 ahead. This would be Galaxy’s first ever poll of Western Australian voting intention, which you can make something of if you like. The Liberal-Nationals vote is 46 per cent against 39 per cent for Labor. Report here; further results here.

With the Olympics out of the way and less than a fortnight to go until polling day, the Western Australian election campaign is on in earnest. The official Liberal campaign launch was held on Sunday – footage of Colin Barnett’s speech can be viewed here, but it doesn’t convey the highly Americanised razzamatazz that dominated the vision on the television news. The Liberals finally have their first television ads in business: this remarkably drab positive effort, and a rather more innovative negative one. There have also been two further additions to the party’s roster of radio advertising, both dealing with law and order, making for six negative ads out of six. Labor’s campaign has gotten equally grim after a sunny start.

On Monday night came the low-rating televised leaders debate, hosted by Channel Nine, in which 30 of the 50 audience members drove the worm and delivered a verdict of 17-13 in favour of Alan Carpenter. The worm tracked fairly evenly, favouring Barnett for the first half of the debate and Carpenter for the second. Carpenter got good responses on “left” issues including privatisation, GM food bans and uranium mining, and when he pointed out he had called on the Salaries Tribunal not to increase MPs’ pay. He also drew blood when criticising the Liberals’ lack of women candidates, and when saying they had done “nothing to prepare themselves for government”. However, he did best of all when responding to moderator Dixie Marshall’s silly question about the contenders’ greatest moral failings with a joke about the Fremantle Dockers, and proclaiming his love for Western Australia. Barnett did well invoking the shadow of Brian Burke and WA Inc, but Carpenter also succeeded in drawing Noel Crichton-Browne into the issue, and Barnett appeared to indulge in an impromptu strengthening of his position on banning cabinet members from dealing with him. Other good responses for Barnett related to housing, education and teachers’ pay, but the worm headed south when Troy Buswell was raised. Barnett did notably less well than Carpenter responding to Marshall’s concluding question.

Last week’s expectations management exercise by Labor has succeeded in talking down the Centrebet odds on a Liberal win from $4.25 to $3.50, but one news outlet that has loudly refused to play along is The West Australian. On Saturday, the paper reported that notwithstanding reports of five marginal seats showing a 7 per cent swing to the Liberals, “Labor insiders also said the polling indicated the swing would be reduced to a situation where Labor would be returned to government but would lose some seats”. The paper’s Robert Taylor had this to say:

With nothing apparently working, Labor got desperate towards the end of the week, claiming that its own polling showed the Liberals would win the election if it were held this weekend. That’s cynical. What Labor didn’t say was that although close, the polling still suggests the Government would be returned by a reduced majority and with two weeks to go, nightly tracking polls show the swing to the Liberals slowing not gathering pace.

The West sounds confident enough that we can probably infer Labor’s tracking poll paints a similar picture to last fortnight’s Westpoll and Newspoll, perhaps slightly worse than the latter.

UPDATE (28/8/08): Robert Taylor reports: “Nightly tracking polls conducted by both parties show the swing to the Liberals is down to around two per cent, half of what they need to claim government. The Liberals are tracking voters in eight marginal seats, Labor is polling in five But both see the same trend, and it’s a win to Labor … Labor sources said they expected losses to be contained to three or four seats, two of which, Darling Range and Bunbury, are held by Liberal incumbents anyway because of the one vote, one value redistribution. And Labor still has not given up on Albany and Geraldton, held by incumbent Government MPs Peter Watson and Shane Hill. Albany is said to have swung towards the Government in recent days. Both sides believe the Liberals have something of a stranglehold on Kingsley, held by Labor’s Judy Hughes. Ocean Reef, Collie-Preston and Riverton remain in play.

However, the momentum might yet continue to build: the big business “500 Club” has announced it will donate $400,000 to the party’s marginal seats campaign, bridging what was reportedly a massive gap between the parties’ war chests.

Now for an overview of the situation in those marginals, bearing in mind that a net loss of nine seats will cost Labor its majority and most likely produce a minority Liberal government. Let’s start with the seats ABC state political editor Peter Kennedy might have had in mind when he mused on last night’s television news: “Could it be that sitting Labor members have opted for the safer ends of their electorates and left the marginal seats for rookies?”.

Ocean Reef (Labor 1.6%): Labor’s members for Mindarie and Joondalup, John Quigley and Tony O’Gorman, would have done their party a very good turn if they had abandoned their existing seats in the crucial outer northern suburbs to tackle this less attractive new prospect. The seat has instead emerged as a contest between two newcomers, both aged 28: Labor’s Louise Durack, a social worker and organisational officer with the locally based Women’s Healthworks who was hand-picked by Alan Carpenter, and Liberal candidate Albert Jacob, a Joondalup councillor. Labor sources said they were “concerned” about the seat on the basis of marginal seat polling.

Mount Lawley (Labor 5.8%): Nearly two-thirds of the voters in this new seat come from abolished Yokine: perhaps Labor would have done well to keep its member Bob Kucera on board rather than dump him for preselection, leading him to quit the party and initially threaten to run as an independent (he has instead decided to retire). The seat will instead be contested for Labor by one of the highest-profile of Alan Carpenter’s hand-picked candidates, Karen Brown, former deputy editor of The West Australian and more recently director of former Labor MP John Halden’s lobbying firm Halden Burns. The Liberal candidate is Perth deputy lord mayor Michael Sutherland.

Jandakot (Labor 3.6%): The bulk of this new southern suburbs seat comes from the Liberal-held seats of Murdoch (which has been succeeded by Bateman, to be contested by Christian Porter) and Serpentine-Jarrahdale (whose Liberal member Tony Simpson will contest the radically redrawn Darling Range). Labor’s strength comes from smaller areas in the west of the electorate which have been acquired from the very safe seats of Cockburn and Willagee, both of which have maintained their identity. The member for the former is Energy Minister Fran Logan, who seems an unlikely vote-winner – he has been dubbed the “invisible man” of the campaign due to Labor’s unwillingness to bring him along to such events as yesterday’s wind power photo op in Albany. The member for the latter is Alan Carpenter. Should the Premier have boldly led by example, John Howard-style?

The following are must-wins for the Liberals in the metropolitan area:

Kingsley (Labor 0.0%): The northern suburbs seat of Kingsley was Labor’s only gain of the 2005 election, and had never been held by the party previously. It might be thought that Judy Hughes’s win for Labor was a one-off influenced by the fact that Liberal candidate Colin Edwardes was the husband of outgoing Liberal member Cheryl Edwardes, and also by the candidacy of Marie Evans (whose husband Richard Evans was member for the corresponding federal seat of Cowan from 1996 to 1998) under the “Community 1st” banner, reflecting local divisions in the Liberal Party. Hughes also suffered from the redistribution, which wiped out her 0.8 per cent margin by moving the electorate’s lowest-income suburb of Warwick into the safe Labor seat of Girrawheen. As part of last week’s campaign to dampen expectations, Labor claimed it had given up on the seat.

Riverton (Labor 2.1%): Labor member Tony McRae won the seat from Court government Workplace Relations Minister Graham Kierath in 2001 and survived an avalanche of bad press from The West Australian in the final days of the 2005 campaign, which memorably gave Colin Barnett’s costings debacle second billing to the news that Labor was running a dummy candidate. McRae suffered a more substantial setback during the current term when he was sacked as Environment Minister over dealings with Brian Burke’s lobbying colleague Julian Grill. The Liberal candidate is Mike Nahan, American-accented former executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs. Expect to hear a lot from Labor in the coming week about yesterday’s call from the IPA for privatisation of electricity generation and passenger rail networks. A Westpoll survey of 400 voters conducted during the first week of the campaign had the Liberals leading 51-49.

Swan Hills (Labor 3.6%): Labor’s outgoing 31-year-old member Jaye Radisich reportedly has ambitions for a future career in federal politics, but she might have lost a few friends in the party through her determination to abandon this crucial marginal seat in favour of its safe-as-houses neighbour West Swan. Alan Carpenter was determined that West Swan should go to his chief-of-staff Rita Saffioti, and Radisich quit rather than stay put. The seat will be contested for Labor by upper house MP Graham Giffard, who loomed as a potential loser in the game of musical chairs resulting from the reduction of North Metropolitan region from seven members to six. The Liberal candidate is Swan City councillor Frank Alban. Labor says its internal polling has it feeling “concerned” about the seat.

Now the must-win non-metropolitan seats:

Collie-Preston (Labor 0.9%): Collie-Preston merges Labor-held Collie-Wellington with Liberal-held Capel, and has thus emerged as a head-to-head contest between respective sitting members Mick Murray and Steve Thomas. As the map on my electorate page demonstrates, it is strikingly polarised between the intensively Labor-voting coal-mining town of Collie and the smaller town of Allanson to the west, and the strongly conservative agricultural shires of Capel, Dardanup and Donnybrook-Balingup. A former president of the Collie Combined Coalmining Unions Council, Mick Murray was Labor’s best performing candidate at the 2005 election, picking up a 6.7 per cent swing in Collie-Wellington after gaining its predecessor seat of Collie in 2001. Analysis of booth results reveals that this swing was overwhelmingly concentrated in Collie itself, whose five booths swung to Murray by 12.6 per cent compared with 3.9 per cent elsewhere. It can thus be inferred that the Labor margin is boosted by Murray’s popularity with a very particular constituency that has no representation in those areas that were formerly in Capel, where Steve Thomas can instead expect a sophomore surge following his entry to parliament in 2005.

North West (Labor 3.1%): Previously known as North West Coastal, this seat now extends inland to take in the mining towns of Meekatharra and Cue along with the Murchison pastoral area, cutting the margin from 3.7 per cent to 3.1 per cent. However, of more concern to Labor is the departure of sitting member Fred Riebeling, who has been demonstrating his vote-winning ways ever since he won the Ashburton by-election in the dying days of the Lawrence government in 1992. Worse still, the Liberal candidate is Rod Sweetman, who represented the area as member for Ningaloo from 1996 until 2005, when the abolition of his seat had him hunting unsuccessfully for opportunities in Perth. Labor’s candidate is Vince Catania, who has been a member for the corresponding upper house region of Mining and Pastoral since the 2005 election, at which time he was reckoned to be an inner-city blow-in.

The following have been sent from one side of the pendulum to the other by the redistribution:

Darling Range (Labor 0.8%): This seat derives just 15 per cent of its voters from the existing seat of Darling Range, the real successor to which is Kalamunda, which will be contested by Darling Range MP John Day (it has a notional Liberal margin of 0.2 per cent, but the early campaign Westpoll gave John Day a 54-46 lead). The new Darling Range takes half its voters from abolished Serpentine-Jarrahdale, and will accordingly be contested for the Liberals by its sitting member Tony Simpson. Labor’s candidate is Lisa Griffiths, described by the local Comment News as “the only woman in a group of six scientists in WA specialising in electron microscopy”.

Bunbury (Labor 0.9%): It was long anticipated that Bunbury mayor John Castrilli would gain this seat for the Liberals at the 2005 election, but he ended up winning by just 103 votes. Being slightly bigger than the other main regional cities, not all of Bunbury was accommodated by the electorate under the old boundaries, the Labor-voting southern suburbs of Withers and Usher being in abolished Capel. The absorption of those areas has given Labor a 1.5 per cent boost, but the Liberals are reportedly very confident Castrilli should be able to make up the difference. Labor has nominated Peter MacFarlane, director of the Margaret River Regional Wine Centre and candidate for Forrest at last year’s federal election.

Albany (Liberal 2.3%): The other two regional city seats have gone the other way from Bunbury because they have had to make up the numbers from surrounding rural seats. In both cases this meant territory where Labor had played dead to finish behind the Nationals, ensuring they defeated the Liberals on their preferences. Labor thus has a better chance of retaining the seats than the notional margins suggest, as indicated by Alan Carpenter’s visit yesterday to spruik renewable energy (which was reported thus on the front page of today’s West Australian). For their part, the Liberals are promising to build a natural gas pipeline between Bunbury and Albany under a public-private partnership. Labor’s sitting member Peter Watson faces sports physiotherapist Andrew Partington for a second successive election.

Geraldton (Liberal 3.5%): A similar story to Albany, Geraldton was won by Labor’s Shane Hill in 2001 and has moved to the Liberal column after expanding into rural territory from the abolished Nationals seat of Greenough. The Liberal candidate is local farmer Ian Blayney.

Roughies:

Joondalup (Labor 3.6%): Changes of government in 1983, 1993 and 2001 all involved mass transfers of seats in Perth’s volatile northern suburbs mortgage belt, with Tony O’Gorman gaining Joondalup for Labor on the latter occasion. The Liberals would surely be hoping to gain this seat if they wish for a repeat in 2008, but their candidate Milly Zuvela has a remarkably low profile, notwithstanding a stint on Wanneroo City Council late last decade.

Forrestfield (Labor 4.5%): A new seat with no sitting member, so the margin might flatter Labor, who have nominated Andrew Waddell, a former official with the Centre faction Transport Workers Union who has worked since 1999 with the Western Australian Industrial Relations Commission. Here too the Liberals have nominated a candidate without much of a profile, school deputy principal Nathan Morton.

Southern River (Labor 5.1%): This electorate has been substantially redrawn, the existing seat providing it with only 56 per cent of its voters (the rest come from abolished Serpentine-Jarrahdale), so perhaps sitting member Paul Andrews is not as secure as his margin makes him appear. The Liberal candidate is the Reverend Peter Abetz, pastor of the Christian Reformed Church of Willetton and brother of Tasmanian Senator Eric Abetz.

Kimberley (Labor 6.3%): I was tempted to put the 5.2 per cent Liberal swing at the 2005 election down to the one-off of Colin Barnett’s canal proposal exciting local hopes of job creation (it was first won for the Liberals in the late sixties due to the local popularity of the Ord River scheme boondoggle). However, a reader has suggested the snap election announcement has left Aboriginal voters in newly acquired Halls Creek and surrounding communities off the rolls, making the seat potentially of interest.

Kalgoorlie (Liberal 7.2%): A very rough roughie maybe, but worth a mention due to the departure of Matt Birney who won the seat for the Liberals for the first time in 2001 and picked up a 7.5 per cent swing against the trend of the 2005 election. The Liberals have nominated 27-year-old pastoralist Nat James, said to have been a surprise preselection winner over Kalgoorlie-Boulder Chamber of Commerce president Guy Brownlee; Labor’s Mathew Cuomo has rather more of a profile as a local lawyer. The race is further complicated by the entry of John Bowler, the Labor-turned-independent member for abolished Murchison-Eyre who remains popular locally despite being sacked as a cabinet minister in 2007 over dealings with Brian Burke and Julian Grill (the latter of whom preceded him as member for Murchison-Eyre). Local observers also aren’t writing off Nationals candidate Tony Crook.

Here’s two subscriber-only pieces I wrote for Crikey last week. The first is from Friday, and is showing its age only insofar as Centrebet is now offering $3.50 on a Liberal win.

For all that’s been said about the lessons of Northern Territory Labor’s near-defeat a fortnight ago, expectations that Alan Carpenter’s government will be comfortably returned in Western Australia are dying hard.

Saturday’s Newspoll showed 61 per cent of respondents expecting a Labor win, compared with 21 per cent for the Liberals. However, the poll put Labor’s two-party lead at just 51-49, and it was echoed by a 50-50 Westpoll result published the same day in The West Australian. This doesn’t seem to have impressed betting agency Centrebet, which has not revised its starting price of $4.25 for a Liberal win.

With just over a fortnight to go, Labor is taking to such perceptions with an axe. The process began on Wednesday when Alan Carpenter told television reporters his party faced a “knife-edge political situation”, and said he “always believed that we could lose”.

It was ratcheted up a notch yesterday morning when the ABC was told Labor had abandoned its most marginal seat of Kingsley to direct resources where it still had a chance. “Concern” was also expressed over Ocean Reef, Swan Hills, Riverton and Jandakot. The latter was particularly interesting, as just two weeks ago the party was trumpeting a 56-44 lead fuelled by gratitude over the Mandurah railway and Fiona Stanley Hospital projects.

Then came the real bombshell, courtesy of Geof Parry on the Channel Seven news: leaked polling across the five seats showed a swing to the Liberals of 7 per cent, which if consistent would give them 32 seats out of 59 along with another three for the Nationals. This was accompanied by findings that 57 per cent of respondents still expected Labor to win, while only 25 per cent thought the Liberals “ready to govern.

Later in the evening, a Labor candidate using a pseudonym wrote on my blog that the party’s strategy group was “cr-pping itself” over the data, which was “very real” and “not a tactic to scare voters”. Particular concern was expressed over the strategists’ failure to scotch the snowballing perception of Alan Carpenter as “arrogant” — a theme which has developed a life of its own since the early election was announced a fortnight ago.

When respondents to Saturday’s Westpoll survey were asked unprompted to name the single issue that would most influence their vote choice, fully 10 per cent responded with some variation on “Govt/Carpenter arrogance”. The apparent potency of this message has not been lost on the Liberals: the word “arrogant” appears twice, delivered with carefully modulated emphasis, in their latest 30-second radio advertisement.

Of course, the polling leak and accompanying talk of internal panic might just be a ruse to boost Labor’s winning margin rather than avert defeat. On the other hand, the shift to the Liberals recorded in last weekend’s polls was entirely consistent with the anti-Troy Buswell effect that was well understood to be at work in the preceding surveys. We have evidence now that is not merely anecdotal that the perception of arrogance is starting to bite. And those generous odds from Centrebet are still there for the taking.

The second is from Monday: I should add that Wendy Duncan is a better chance than I believed at the time, as she has done very well on the preference tickets.

The range of issues turned up by state elections these days (law and order, hospital waiting lists, water supply) is usually so narrow it can be hard to tell one campaign from the next. Two concerns which don’t often rate a mention are equal opportunity and sexual harassment.

It is an indication of the extraordinary state of affairs in the WA Liberal Party that Labor is pursuing these unconventional lines of attack in its first negative advertising of the state election campaign. Commercial radio audiences are being targeted with ads in which a young girl declares her aspiration to grow up in “a place where women have a voice in the community” and “a society which respects women”. An older female voice then breaks the bad news that the Liberal Party “boys’ club” has “only one woman running in their held seats”, and that “Liberal Shadow Treasurer Troy Buswell thinks it’s funny to play with a woman’s bra in public and to sniff a woman’s chair”.

The two issues are closely related. As well as making him poison in the eyes of women voters, Buswell’s heavily publicised indiscretions clearly presented a stumbling block to the party’s efforts to recruit female candidates. His emergence as leader in January also coincided with the departure of the party’s existing two women in the lower house. Shadow Tourism Minister Katie Hodson-Thomas announced her retirement plans before entering the party room meeting that confirmed Buswell as leader, having earlier complained he had subjected her to “inappropriate” remarks in the presence of male colleagues (she admits to regretting the decision now her long-standing ally Colin Barnett is back at the helm). Shadow Attorney-General Sue Walker quit the party a fortnight later, citing factionalism and her lack of “trust” in Buswell. Walker will attempt to hold her seat of Nedlands as an independent against Bill Marmion, who won Liberal preselection as the only male nominee in a field of four.

One failure at least could be put down to misfortune rather than carelessness. When Barnett announced his retirement in February, the unopposed preselection nominee for his blue-ribbon seat of Cottesloe was Deidre Willmott, policy director for the Chamber of Commerce and Industry and a front-bench shoo-in. Willmott of course was compelled to stand aside when Barnett returned to the leadership a fortnight ago, and could not be persuaded with alternative offers of an upper house seat or a shot against Sue Walker in Nedlands. She has now been appointed chief-of-staff to Barnett and will no doubt take his place in Cottesloe if the Liberals lose the election, although this is not openly acknowledged.

When nominations closed on Friday, it was revealed the Liberals had managed a grand total of six female lower house candidates out of 58. Current polling suggests this will translate into two elected members out of about 24, both marginal seat newcomers with no obvious claim to a position on the front-bench. The situation is only slightly better in the upper house, where the most likely result will be four Liberal women out of 15. The Nationals too are likely to emerge with an all-male complement of three or four lower house MPs plus one in the upper house, unless their existing female MLC Wendy Duncan can pull off an unlikely win in Mining and Pastoral region.

The best Barnett has been able to make of the situation is to offer a front-bench position to Liz Constable, the long-standing independent member for the naturally Liberal western suburbs seat of Churchlands. Constable has been a notable presence alongside Barnett on the campaign trail, despite not yet having had much to say relating to her nominated portfolios of public sector management and government accountability.

The Australian reports that Labor’s lead in this fortnight’s Newspoll is down slightly from 57-43 to 56-44. Kevin Rudd is down three points as preferred leader to 65 per cent while Brendan Nelson is up two to 14 per cent.

The latest weekly Essential Research survey shows no change in Labor’s long-standing 58-42 lead. Also featured is a national-level question on state voting intention which suggests collective primary vote support for the state Labor governments is 7 per cent lower than for federal Labor (40 per cent compared with 47 per cent), although Coalition support is only 3 per cent higher (38 per cent compared with 35 per cent). Further questions involve federal Labor’s performance on various individual issues, and attitudes to the balance of power in the Senate.

As well as being the first conducted under one-vote one-value electoral boundaries for the lower house, the September 6 Western Australian election will also be the first to have a half-Senate style “six-by-six” arrangement. The six-region system was instituted in 1989, but until now there have been two regions with seven members and four with five. Neither the old nor the new arrangement amounts to “one-vote one-value” – both evenly divide membership between metropolitan and non-metropolitan zones, though the respective enrolment is 935,539 and 258,335. This was the agreement that was reached when the electoral reforms were passed shortly before the May 2005 changeover that gave effect to the February 2005 election result, the lag owing its existence to a quirk of WA’s constitutional arrangements (the results of the September 6 election will similarly not take effect in the upper house until May next year).

Labor’s retiring president of the Legislative Council, Nick Griffiths, complained in May that Attorney-General Jim McGinty had “shut out progressive reform in the Council to get an increased chance of winning in the Legislative Assembly” by instituting a system which, “short of a Labor landslide”, guaranteed a conservative upper house majority. He blamed this on McGinty’s insistence on cutting a deal with the Greens rather than the Liberals, with the former counter-intuitively prompting for the retention of rural vote weighting (I’m told this was on the insistence of senior figure and former Senator Dee Margetts, who declared herself intent on protecting the interests of the Agricultural region she represented). To get the numbers the backing also needed the backing of an outgoing Liberal-turned-independent member, Alan Cadby. However, Griffiths’ argument seems to overlook the point that the then Liberal leader, Matt Birney, had dealt his party out of the game by refusing to negotiate, so that he could boast the purity of the impotent with respect to one-vote one-value to regional constituents, including those in his own seat of Kalgoorlie.

It’s clear that a different seat of Greens MPs would prefer a one-vote one-value deal for the upper house, and such a reform would probably be instituted if the election result gives Labor and the Greens a collective majority. However, the analysis below indicates that the best Labor and the Greens combined can hope for is half the numbers in the new upper house. A creative maneuver by Labor to implement one-vote one-value during the government’s first term without the “absolute majority” required for constitutional amendments was ruled invalid by both the Supreme Court and the High Court in 2002 and 2003, so such a result would plainly be inadequate. In any case, it’s more likely that the upper house result will deliver Labor and the Greens 16 or 17 seats out of 36 against 19 or 20 to various parties of the right. The latter includes the Christian Democratic Party and Family First, who between them are unlikely to emerge empty-handed and might win as many as three seats.

Below is an assessment of the situation for the Legislative Council election, based on some fiddling with Antony Green’s indispensible election calculators. Also outlined below are the upper house preference tickets which reduce the situation to its essentials.

EAST METROPOLITAN

The Christian Democratic Party are a chance of a seat here if the swing against Labor is just the right size. They will get preferences from Family First, One Nation and serial independent John D. Tucak, who between them were worth over 0.5 of a quota in 2005. If that’s repeated this time and the Liberal vote is up from 32.2 per cent to around 35.5 per cent, CDP candidate Dwight Randall will remain ahead of third Liberal Alyssa Hayden and pick up her vote as preferences, which will add up to a quota and deliver Randall the seat. If the Liberal swing is too high, the result will be three Labor and three Liberal; if it’s too low, it will be three Labor, two Liberal and one Greens. Candidates assured of election are Jock Ferguson, Ljiljanna Ravlich and Linda Savage of Labor (only the second of whom is an incumbent), and incumbents Helen Morton and Donna Faragher (East Metropolitan being the exception to the rule of poor female representation in Liberal ranks).

Family First: CDP; Nationals; Liberal; Greens; Labor.
Labor: Greens; Family First; CDP; Liberal; Nationals.
Citizens Electoral Council: Liberal; Nationals; Greens; Labor; Family First; CDP.
Liberal: CDP; Nationals; Family First; Greens; Labor.
Greens: Labor; Family First; Nationals; Libreal; CDP.
Tom Hoyer: Nationals; Greens; CDP; Labor; Liberal; Family First.
One Nation: CDP; Family First; Nationals; Liberal; Greens; Labor.
Richard Nash: Greens; Labor; Nationals; Liberal; Family First; CDP.
John D Tucak: CDP; Family First; Nationals; Labor; Liberal; Greens.
Daylight Saving Party: Greens; Liberal; Family First; CDP: Labor; Nationals.

NORTH METROPOLITAN

North Metropolitan contains the strong Liberal western suburbs, so there’s little prospect of the CDP overtaking their third candidate. Incumbent Peter Collier and newcomers Michael Mischin and Liz Behjat are thus assured of election. The question is who wins the third seat out of Labor number three Tim Daly and Greens incumbent Giz Watson. If there’s anything in the poll figures which have consistently had the Greens in double figures, Watson should be the favourite. Labor’s top two candidates are long-standing members Ken Travers and Ed Dermer.

Brian Peachey: CDP; Family First; Labor; Liberal; Nationals; Greens.
Citizens Electoral Council: Liberal; Nationals; CDP; Family First; Greens; Labor.
Christian Democratic Party: Family First; Labor; Liberal; Nationals; Greens.
Family First: CDP; Nationals; Liberal; Greens; Labor.
John Eyden: Family First; Liberal; Nationals; CDP; Greens; Labor.
Liberal: Nationals; CDP; Family First; Greens; Labor.
Labor: Greens; Family First; CDP; Liberals; Nationals.
Greens: Labor; Family First; Nationals; Liberal. CDP.
Douglas Greypower: Family First; CDP; Greens; Nationals; Liberal; Labor.
Eugene Hands: Greens; Liberal; Nationals; CDP; Family First; Labor.
Wally Morris: Nationals; Family First; CDP; Liberal; Greens; Labor.
Daylight Saving Party: Greens; Liberal; Family First; Labor; CDP; Nationals.
Christopher King: Family First; Greens; CDP; Nationals; Liberal; Labor.
One Nation: CDP; Family First; Nationals; Liberal; Greens; Labor.
Julie Gray: Greens; Labor; Liberal; Nationals; CDP; Family First.

SOUTH METROPOLITAN

It will be a pretty grim evening for Labor if they can’t manage three quotas here (their candidates are incumbents Sue Ellery and Kate Doust and newcomer Fiona Henderson), while the Liberals (whose top two shoo-ins are incumbent Simon O’Brien and newcomer Nick Goiran) aren’t so weak the CDP are likely to get a look-in. The question is who wins the final seat out of Liberal number three Phil Edman and Greens candidate Lynn MacLaren, who was briefly a member after filling a casual vacancy in late 2004. Edman will win the seat if the combined vote for the Liberals, CDP, Family First, One Nation and CEC adds up 42.9 per cent or three quotas. The first three collectively polled 41.0 per cent in 2005 (the CEC didn’t run), so the Greens might find the going tough.

Citizens Electoral Council: Liberal; CDP; Family First; Nationals; Labor; Greens.
Labor: Greens; Family First; CDP; Liberal; Nationals.
Christopher Oughton: Liberal; Greens; CDP; Family First; Nationals; Labor.
Christian Democratic Party: Family First; Liberal; Labor; Nationals; Labor; Greens.
Family First: CDP; Nationals; Liberal; Greens; Labor.
Eric Miller: CDP; Family First; Liberal; Nationals; Labor; Greens.
Liberal: Family First; CDP; Nationals; Greens; Labor.
Greens: Labor; Family First; Nationals; Liberal; CDP.
Nationals: Family First; CDP; Liberal; Labor; Greens.
Daylight Saving Party: Greens; Liberals; Family First; CDP; Labor; Nationals.
Steve Walker: Liberal; Labor; Nationals; Greens; Family First; CDP.
One Nation: CDP; Family First; Nationals; Liberal; Greens; Labor.

AGRICULTURAL

The Liberals are guaranteed two seats (Brian Ellis, who filled a casual vacancy in July 2007, and newcomer James Chown), Labor one (who won a seat in South West from number three on the ticket in 2005), and Nationals’ Avon MP Max Trenorden will have little trouble succeeding in his bid to move upstairs. Labor are likely to win a second seat for newcomer Darren West, but could lose it to third Liberal Chris Wilkins if there’s a big enough swing. The last seat is likely to go either to Christian Democratic Party candidate Mac Forsyth or Liberal-turned-Family First member Anthony Fels. Both are ahead of the Liberals on most tickets, including the Greens in Family First’s case. It’s likely to come down to whether Forsyth can either overtake One Nation or outpoll the combined vote for Fels, New Country and independent Shelley Posey. It’s surprisingly hard to construct a scenario where a third Liberal seat comes at the expense of either of these two rather than Labor.

Labor: Greens; Family First; CDP; Nationals; Liberal; One Nation.
Shelly Posey: Family First; CDP; One Nation; Nationals; Liberal; Labor; Greens.
Citizens Electoral Council: Liberal; Nationals; Family First; CDP; One Nation; Labor; Greens.
Liberal: Nationals; CDP; Family First; Greens; Labor; One Nation.
Greens: Labor; Family First; Nationals; Liberal; CDP.
Family First: CDP; Nationals; One Nation; Liberal; Greens; Labor.
Christian Democratic Party: Family First; Nationals; One Nation; Liberal; Labor; Greens.
Nationals: CDP; Family First; One Nation; Liberal; Labor; Greens.
New Country: Family First; CDP; One Nation; Nationals; Labor; Greens; Liberal.
One Nation: CDP; Family First; Nationals; Liberal; Greens; Labor.

MINING AND PASTORAL

Much depends here on the destination of the 5.9 per cent recorded in 2005 by the independent John Fischer-Graham Campbell ticket. This region is not traditionally strong territory for the Nationals, but they have a dream run on preferences and Wendy Duncan has at least some chance of overtaking third Liberal Mark Lewis and winning a third conservative seat. There is likely to be a parallel contest for a third “left” seat between third Labor candidate Jim Murie and Robin Chapple of the Greens, who was a member here from 2001 to 2005. Certain winners are Labor’s Jon Ford and Helen Bullock, respectively an incumbent and a newcomer, and Liberal incumbents Norman Moore and Ken Baston.

Greens: Labor; Nationals; Family First; One Nation; Liberal; CDP.
Nationals: CDP; Family First; One Nation; Liberal; Labor; Greens.
Labor: Greens; Family First; CDP; Nationals; Liberal; One Nation.
Christian Democratic Party: Nationals; Family First; One Nation; Liberal; Labor; Greens.
Liberal: Nationals; Family First; CDP; Greens; Labor; One Nation.
Citizens Electoral Council: Liberal; Family First; One Nation; CDP; Nationals; Greens; Labor.
Family First: Nationals; CDPl One Nation; Liberal; Greens; Labor.
One Nation: Nationals; CDP; Family First; Liberal; Greens; Labor.
Daylight Saving Party: Greens; CDP; Liberal; Labor; Nationals; One Nation.
New Country: Family First; CDP; One Nation; Nationals; Liberal; Labor; Greens.

SOUTH WEST

Unless there’s a fairly solid swing against Labor, this should split three-all between left and right. If there’s a third left seat, it will go to either John Mondy of Labor or incumbent Paul Llewellyn of the Greens (Labor incumbents Sally Talbot and Adele Farina are assured of election). If the right win four, three will go to Liberal (incumbents Robyn McSweeney, Nigel Hallett and Barry House, who all won preselection ahead of former leader Paul Omodei, who refused to stand and fight for the lower house seat of Blackwood-Stirling) and one to Liberal-turned-Family First member Dan Sullivan, unless the Nationals perform very strongly in which case their candidate Colin Holt might edge ahead of Sullivan. If they win three, the third seat will be down to Sullivan and third Liberal Barry House.

Nationals: Family First; CDP; One Nation; Liberal; Labor; Greens.
Family First: CDP; Nationals; One Nation; Liberal; Greens; Labor.
Labor: Greens; CDP; Nationals; Family First; Liberal; One Nation.
Christian Democratic Party: Family First; Nationals; One Nation; Liberal; Labor; Greens.
Elaine Green: Family First; CDP; One Nation; Nationals; Liberal; Labor; Greens.
Greens: Labor Family First; Nationals; One Nation; Liberal; CDP.
Citizens Electoral Council: Liberal; Nationals; Family First; CDP; One Nation; Labor; Greens.
Liberal: Family First; CDP; Nationals; Greens; Labor; One Nation.
One Nation: CDP; Family First; Nationals; Liberal; Greens; Labor.
Filip Gugilemana: Family First; CDP; Liberal; Nationals; One Nation; Labor; Greens.
Daylight Saving Party: Greens; Liberal; Family First; Labor; Nationals; One Nation.
New Country: Family First; CDP; One Nation; Nationals; Nationals; Labor; Greens; Liberal.

Roy Morgan’s latest face-to-face survey of 1799 voters has Labor’s lead up to 57-43 from 55-45 a fortnight ago. Labor is up 1.5 per cent on the primary vote to 47 per cent, and the Coalition down 2 per cent to 37.5 per cent.

Other stuff:

• I appeared yesterday before the Perth hearing of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters’ inquiry into the federal election, where I argued the increasingly problematic STV Senate system should be replaced by good old-fashioned list system PR with seats allocated using the New Zealand-style Sainte-Laguë formula. Not a chance in hell of this happening of course, but as Homer Simpson would say, at least I’m out there doin’ stuff. Perhaps I would have done better to have fallen in behind the Greens’ Commonwealth Electoral (Above-the-Line Voting) Amendment Bill 2008, which I hadn’t given due consideration as I wrongly believed it required full numbering of above-the-line preferences. When told it was optional preferential, I instead argued it would amount to a New South Wales-style de facto “largest remainder” system, with the potential to produce disproportional results: for example, parties which get 1.5 and 0.6 quotas on the primary vote could win one seat each despite the former party having won well over twice as many votes (as Antony Green puts it, methods like Sainte-Laguë ensure that “each MP represents roughly the same number of voters”). However, I now see it requires that a minimum of four boxes be numbered, which might solve or at least alleviate this difficulty – although there remains the likely problem of a higher informal vote. I remain open to persuasion on any of these points, and might yet make a supplementary submission.

• The Electoral Commission of Queensland has finalised its boundaries for the state redistribution. The new electorates which were named Macrossan, Samsonvale and Dalby in the original proposal will instead be named Dalrymple, Pine Rivers and Condamine.

• Christian Kerr of The Australian reckons blogs, and “polling blogs” in particular, contain “paranoia about certain journalists, certain newspapers (and) certain pollsters”. What a thing to say …

The Australian Electoral Commission has unveiled the proposed new boundaries for Tasmania. More to follow.

• Call it expectations management if you will, but Labor is sending out strong signals that it is in big trouble despite what the betting markets think (Centrebet continues to offer $1.18 for Labor and $4.25 for Liberal). Yesterday Alan Carpenter spoke of his party being in a “knife-edge political situation”. Geof Parry of Seven News has today been told internal polling shows Labor headed for defeat on the back of a 7 per cent swing, although two-thirds expect them to win. The ABC was told the party had given up on its most marginal seat of Kingsley (although local resident Bogart writes in comments that he has “received calls and stuff in letter box last night”), and is “concerned” about Riverton and Swan Hills (with respective post-redistribution margins of 2.1 per cent and 3.6 per cent, and a prematurely outgoing sitting member in the latter case), as well as the new seats of Ocean Reef (notional margin of 1.6 per cent) and Jandakot (3.6 per cent). The latter comes as a surprise, as Labor was earlier trumpeting polling showing it ahead 56-44, and should presumably have cause for optimism due to the Fiona Stanley Hospital and Perth to Mandurah rail line.

• Upper house voting tickets were lodged on Monday, and can most easily be perused at ABC Elections. A lot more on this shortly. The Nationals have predictably backed off from their threats to preference Labor ahead of the Liberals depending on the reception to its push for 25 per cent of mining and petroleum royalties to be invested in regional areas. However, they have put Family First and the Christian Democratic Party ahead of the Liberals, which could yet turn up some interesting results. Surprisingly, the party is fielding candidates in all three metropolitan upper house regions. Their lower house card can be read here, though it’s hard to make sense of if you can’t put names to parties.

• The Greens are directing preferences to Labor in most places where it matters, but are offering open tickets in Morley (where ex-Labor incumbent John D’Orazio is running as an independent), Mount Lawley, Pilbara and Kimberley (despite its female indigenous incumbent). They will preference the Nationals ahead of the Liberals in Wagin and Central Wheatbelt, but are yet to declare their hand in Blackwood-Stirling and Moore.

• Monday’s West Australian released further results from last week’s Westpoll survey, providing unprompted responses to the question of “key issue in voting decision”. It indicates the meme of Alan Carpenter’s “arrogance” has caught on, with 10 per cent listed as nominating “Govt/Carpenter arrogance”. Other responses were 19 per cent for health, 12 per cent for law and order, 11 per cent for environment, 10 per cent for education and 10 per cent for “cost of living/economics”.

• The leaders’ debate will be held on Monday, the day after the Olympics closing ceremony, and screened as part of an hour-long edition of Channel Nine’s A Current Affair. Nine will reportedly have to air it unedited after the event as it lacks the facilities to screen it live.

• Antony Green concurs with Peter Brent’s assessment that Saturday’s Newspoll should have put Labor’s lead at 52-48 rather than 51-49, and provides much detail on minor party preference flows at the 2005 election.

• The surprise early election announcement has resulted in a dramatic drop in the number of candidates, from 375 lower house candidates in 2005 to 161.

• Click here for audio of my appearance on Jennifer Byrne’s program on News Radio on Tuesday. Readers in the fashionable end of town can enjoy more of my media tartery in the latest edition of Western Suburbs Weekly.

• Joe Poprzeczny’s State Scene columns for WA Business News generally deserve wider coverage, so here’s an extract from his assessment in last week’s issue. I personally am standing by my existing assumption that any minority government will be a Liberal one, unless John D’Orazio or John Bowler get up in Morley and Kalgoorlie:

To begin analysing the possibilities it’s important to keep the number 30 in mind, because that’s how many seats a side must win in the 59-member lower house to form government … However, even if one or two seats in the ‘quite solid’ category tumbled into the Barnett dilly-bag, there are others outside the 29-seat category that could go the other way, that is, fall out of the Barnett dilly-bag into the Carpenter-McGinty sack. Consider the Barnett-led camp’s following problems. The first that needs highlighting within those remaining 30 seats is that four - Wagin, Central Wheatbelt, Moore and Blackwood-Stirling - are set to be won by the Brendon Grylls-led Nationals, which leaves Mr Barnett only a possible 26 seats remaining. Moreover, Mr Grylls has made it clear that he and his three lower house colleagues aren’t interested in being ministers. In other words, forget dreaming about another conservative coalition …

Mr Barnett, even if he does well, by which State Scene means if he wins 26 seats, would at best only be able to form a minority government, one relying on the four Nationals who wouldn’t join him in coalition. And it’s here that an entirely new factor - one that’s so far been overlooked - walks onto WA’s political stage. Let’s say Mr Carpenter wins all his impregnable-to-quite-solid Labor seats, giving him 29 seats, one short of being able to form government. And let’s say Mr Barnett wins the remaining 26 minus the four National seats, which is far from certain. What would that mean? Firstly, it puts the Nationals in a potent position to start talking turkey, as they say in the bush, on which side to support and under what conditions. Secondly, when it comes to offering the power to form a government surely WA Governor Ken Michael would feel under some obligation to offer the majority party - in this case Labor - the first offer of the Treasury benches since they’d have 29 MPs, to 26 non-Laborites plus the four Nationals …

Among those 26 seats are several that Mr Barnett is likely to have great difficulty winning, if indeed he even stands Liberal candidates. State Scene puts no fewer than six into this group. They include the three held by Independent Liberals - Janet Woollard, Liz Constable and Sue Walker. True, efforts are being made to coax them across, and he may succeed in one or two cases. But only a brave person would predict all three women can be counted on to offer him full and unconditional backing. This qualification may not trim the 26-seat number down to 23 seats, but it certainly means the 26 figure is far from rock solid. Moreover, many Liberals have been viewing the two provincial seats of Geraldton and Albany as set to fall into their dilly-bag. That, however, remains a brave prediction with their current Labor incumbents - Shane Hill and Peter Watson, respectively - far from easy marks. And there’s another problem; the seat of Kalgoorlie, which Mr Birney isn’t contesting. Although many see Kalgoorlie as being Liberal on the basis of the past two elections, that’s a brave claim since those figures reflect Mr Birney’s two performances. With Mr Birney now out of the race, and with sacked Labor minister, John Bowler, contesting Kalgoorlie as Independent Labor, it’s quite likely to go to him or Labor candidate, Mathew Cuomo, rather than to a Liberal. If Mr Bowler wins Kalgoorlie he’d be able to negotiate himself into becoming lower house speaker if Labor found itself with only 29 seats. And the Liberals are far from assured of winning Collie-Preston that’s being contested by their frontbencher, Steve Thomas, who faces a tough fight.