Bloodbath

Wow. What a night.


There are far, far too many things to talk about from last night, so I'm not going to pretend to do any of them justice. Let's just list the interesting stuff and then watch how things pan out over the weeks and months to come.


- The Greens. It looks like no extra seats in the Upper house. The Coalition will not need their votes to pass anything (given that they will probably have enough if Coalition, Shooters and CDP vote together). Looks like Labor will hold Balmain and Marrickville. Not a good result.


- The Coalition performance in safe Liberal seats. Lets look at the north of the harbour in Sydney. In Ku-Ring-Gai, 72% first preference. In Davidson, 74%. In Pittwater, 72% I don't care who the "other side" is - more than 70% first preference is an amazing number.


- The Labor performance in safe Labor seats. I haven't been through and counted myself, but I understand that there was only ONE seat where Labor won without needing to go to preferences (Liverpool). I mean, seriously. ONE. By contrast, the Coalition will have over 40 in the same category.


- Some of the swings. The biggest was Bathurst at 36%. ALP primary there down from 54% to 21%. That's 60% of the people who voted for you last time voting for someone else.


- NOT ONE seat swung to Labor. Not even one. Not even Penrith, won last year in a by-election, held while Labor was at its lowest (or so we thought), after the sitting member had to resign after ICAC got stuck in, with a swing then of 26%. Just incredible.


- The only good numbers for Labor - hanging on to Marrickville, and presently favoured to hang on at Balmain. In Balmain, Greens, ALP and Coalition each polled over 30%, so still nip-and tuck. The winner may just be decided by which of the three finishes third and then distributed preferences.


- Keneally resigned. It was always difficult to predict what would occur post election for the Labor leadership. Pre-election she refused to confirm her intentions, but it was difficult to see how she could possibly be the right choice for next time round. I think she showed some good sense in resigning - she must have known when she took the job that her position was always going to be an "interim" one.


- Robertson got up. As I type, the 2PP in Blacktown is 54/46, so he got up pretty easily in the end. Who knows whether his push-polling made a difference, but the overwhelming reaction on Twitter appeared to be along the lines that he is worst possible choice. Having said that, the next leader will never be Premier - the Coalition will have at least 8 years. Maybe Labor will look at the effect Abbott has had Federally and want someone to cause some chaos for a few years before they put someone realistic up there for 2019. We're going to see a lot more of that Keating letter.


- 2019 must seem a long way away if you're a Labor loyalist.


- And finally, I tipped 21 seats in @sspencer_63's sweep. Current ABC projection is 22. I can feel it in my waters, I'm going to win this one…


That is all. Now we wait to see what kind of shadow cabinet Labor can cobble together from what is left. Keneally said she would be on the backbench, but if she is she will be pretty lonely back there...

Betting on it

There has been some interesting chatter recently about the betting market for the NSW election.  I always take very careful note of what the betting agencies are offering - after all, they more than anyone have no partisan interest, and the amount of money they have riding on the result means that the odds they offer are (presumably) untinged by emotion or sentimentality.

It is in the bookmaker's interest to make sure that the actual favourite is priced as the favourite - if not, it is likely they will loose money.

The one thing that must be borne in mind, however, is this.  Once a bookmaker takes a disproportionate amount of money on one "runner", they will shorten the odds to prevent a monetary loss.  This does not necessarily mean that the prospects of this runner are any better than they were a day ago - but because the bookmaker now wants to discourage betting on this runner, they will shorten the odds.

Whilst the betting company has no sentimentality, the betting public certainly does.  For example, I would expect that when Australia plays in a sporting event the Australian betting public bets more on Australia than, say, a bookmaker in the opponent's country.  Consequently, all things being equal, the odds on an Australian win should be shorter with the Australian bookmaker.

Having said that all that - I doubt it makes a huge difference for political betting, although divergent odds on different major betting company websites suggests that that view may be premature.

Anyway.  I've made a spreadsheet on google docs which you can see here: http://bit.ly/gdecpv

It lists the NSW electorates, names the current member's affiliation, and then lists the winner as predicted by Sportsbet.com.au.

Frustratingly, Sportsbet is only offering odds in 38 electorates, and they're listed in black in the "Sportbet tip" column.  It's not even only the "close" competitions that are in the market - of the 38 markets, 8 have one runner where the odds offered are $1.05 or less.

I've filled in the remaining 55 electorates using Anthony's Green's tips and some guesswork, and they are all marked in red. Surprisingly, there are some very tight competitions that are not on the Sportsbet market - there 7 seats presently held by the ALP with a margin of 10% to 15% that have no market.  

Of those 7, six are left in the ALP column.  One (Kiama) is left marked for the Coalition because Anthony Green said so, apparently because a redistribution makes it s bit more Liberal.

So, what did this spreadsheet reveal?  When the Sportsbet market is combined with my guesses, the ALP win 26 seats, the Coalition win 61, the Greens win 2 and 4 seats are won by Independents.

Of course no one expects a uniform swing - Kogarah has a margin of 17.7% and Sportsbet tips it to move to the Coalition, whilst Toongabbie with a margin of 14.5% is tipped to be retained by the ALP.

That said, if we get out Anthony Green's Election calculator out and plug in numbers, what swing spits out the ALP winning 26 seats?  Roughly, 12.2%.  That's about a 60/40 two party preferred split.

Even if I move all 6 of the 10% to 15% ALP seats into the LIB column and make it 67 to 20, the swing is still less than 15%

60/40 a shellacking, by any measure.  Probably too much for Labor to be back in power in 4 years time.  But the swing "predicted" is still far less than the numbers we're seeing in the polls, which which have tipped swings of as much as 18%.

Of course the only poll that matters is the one carried out in polling booths on 26 March.  But I think we learn far more looking at the Sportsbet market than we ever will looking at a Newspoll.