Election 2016: Malcolm Turnbull claims victory

By Andrew Gibbons, University of Melbourne

One thing is already clear from the vote counting: there appears to be a move away from the major parties, particularly in the Senate.

Five seats in the House of Representatives are likely to be won by independent and minor/micro party candidates.

So why is the electorate disillusioned? Isolating specific factors without more data is difficult, but there is one plausible explanation, which you can read on Election Watch.

24 hours after polls closed there are still more ‘unknowns’ than ‘knowns’.

Really, the only ‘known-known’ is that the result – in the House of Representatives and the Senate – won’t be clear until after counting resumes in earnest on Tuesday.

Even then – as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said today – the picture might not take shape until the end of the week or beyond.

It’s worth remembering that if there is a hung parliament, it was 17 days until Julia Gillard was able to secure the support of enough independents to form government after the election in 2010.

In the meantime, the Australian Electoral Commission’s figures on the unfolding situation can he found here.

By Shaun Ratcliff, University of Melbourne

Has Eden-Monaro lost its bellwether status?

The party that has formed government has won this seat in every election since 1972.

Eden-Monaro is traditionally a bellwether because of its unique shape. Its traditional boundaries encompass the suburbs around Queanbeyan in NSW, on the ACT border. This area is basically spillover suburbs from Canberra.

The electorate also runs down the southern coast of NSW, including the coastal towns of Merimbula and Eden, and just inland the Bega Valley. To the west it moves around Canberra all the way to the Yass Valley on the other side of the ACT.

These areas, economically, culturally and politically don’t look like the rest of Australia (which is mostly suburban). The northern coastal part is Left-leaning sea-changers from Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne.

Merimbula is an old coastal town with middle-class retirees moving from the larger cities and Eden a more conservative working-class town built around a port, and saw and chip mill. The parts near Canberra are suburban, but lean Left because of, well, Canberra. However, they balance each other out. A boundary change has taken the division around the other (west) side of Canberra, bringing more rural (and therefore conservative) areas into the electorate.

The current member is Peter Hendy, who won the seat from Mike Kelly at the last election. Hendy was formerly a public servant and political advisor, before becoming CEO of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

In 2005 he was included in the Australian Financial Review’s Inside Power magazine as one of the most influential people in the Australian political system. This insider status may have been his undoing, with criticisms emerging that he spent too much time in Canberra and too little time campaigning in his marginal seat. This is reflected in his role as a key player in the plot to replace Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull.

His opponent in 2013, Mike Kelly, is contesting the seat once again. The sitting member between 2007 and 2013, before this Kelly had been in the military for 20 years as an army lawyer, serving in peacekeeping missions in Somalia and East Timor.

Hendy’s apparent absence from his electorate appears to have had an effect, with his two party vote dropping by 6.4 points, to 46.5 per cent, giving Kelly and the Labor Party the win.

It means if Turnbull is able to eke out a parliament majority, or cobble together a minority government, Eden Monaro’s 44-year winning streak is over.

By Shaun Ratcliff, University of Melbourne

The Liberals did not have a good election in Tasmania. After the 2013 election the Liberal Party held three seats in the Apple Isle, compared to one held by Labor and another (Denison) by independent Andrew Wilkie.

Since then, there has been a four-and-a-half per cent two party swing against the Liberal Party, which lost all its seats to the Labor Party.

The first of these to go was Lyons, which covers a large area of approximately 32,000 sq km in the state’s centre. This includes the central highlands in the west, the Meander Valley in the centre, and the east coast all the way down to the Tasman Peninsula in the south. It is primarily an agricultural area, with fishing, forestry, wool, dairy and beef, fruit, and wine making all major industries. Also important are hydro-power generation, mining and tourism.

This reflects the interesting mix of communities making up the electorate. There are some tree changers in the southern parts, including the area around New Norfolk and Bridgewater, closer to Hobart. Most of the rest of the electorate is very rural and somewhat conservative.

The sitting member was Liberal Eric Hutchinson, who won the seat from Labor at the last election.

Hutchinson was neither born in the electorate (rather nearby Launceston) or live inside it (he lives in Bass). Before being elected to Parliament he worked in the wool-exporting businesses. He won the seat against long-term Labor member Dick Adams with a swing of 13.5 per cent.

His Labor challenger this year was Brian Mitchell, who has long-term Labor affiliations but no political profile in the area.

The swing in Lyons was smaller than the state average but enough to knock off Hutchinson, with his primary vote falling by 2.6 per cent and his two party support falling by 3.7, leading to a Labor lead of 52.5 per cent.

It is possible the big swings in Tasmania were the result of the Coalition’s first two budgets. In Tasmania and Lyons the average income is lower than the Australian average. The unemployment rate is also higher than the Australian average. For a state so heavily reliant on federal support, cuts to education spending, for example, would have had an outsized effect.

By Andrew Trounson, University of Melbourne

The prospect of a hung parliament increases the risk of Australia having it credit worthiness downgraded, Grattan Institute chief executive John Daley warns.

Mr Daley said credit rating agencies are already worried that Australia isn’t doing enough to reduce its structural budget deficit, and that a hung parliament and a minority government will be interpreted as a sign that there isn’t the political will to reduce spending and raise taxes. He said the structural deficit is running at 2-3 per cent of Gross domestic Product, and is material enough to cause the ratings agencies real ongoing concerns.

“The big implication of the election result is that the credit rating agencies have an objective reason to be worried,” Mr Daley said.

“They have been making noises about disliking Australia’s budgetary situation and disliking the lack of political will or otherwise to deal with it. Those noises will now get louder,” he warns.

“If there is an actual downgrade, and that is a very real possibility, then the Australian government will pay more for its debt, Australian banks will pay more for their debt, and that will ultimately be passed on to Australians who will have to pay more for their mortgages.”

“There were few signs of political will to deal with the deficit when the government had control of at least one of the houses of parliament. Now at best a government will have only a tenuous hold on the lower house, and the Senate will be even trickier than the last Senate. So you would understand why a ratings agency would be more nervous about the ability of a government to make any of the changes needed to get the structural deficit under control.”

He warned that reducing the deficit requires tough and unpopular decisions on controlling the rise in health care costs and raising taxes in a way that doesn’t damage the economy or hurt the disadvantaged too much. He said a new government will also need to adopt policies to reduce the cost of housing in metropolitan areas and to increase the participation of women in the workforce. However, addressing both these issues will create losers as well as winners in a tight budgetary environment, and therefore are tough to do politically.

Mr Daley said the problem will now be made worse because any new government will struggle to persuade crossbenchers to back unpopular measures. Unlike a government, he said, crossbenchers don’t have the same responsibility for overall economic and policy outcomes. “It is governments that have to live with the overall outcome. Individual Senators have to live with the outcomes on a particular bill, but they tend to bear less responsibility for the overall outcome.”

“Not surprisingly, the policies that will help aren’t particularly popular. If they were popular someone would have done them by now,” he said.

Credit agencies Moody’s and Fitch both affirmed Australia’s Aaa and AAA rating following the May budget but both warned that the deficit made the country’s finances more vulnerable to external shocks.

By Shaun Ratcliff, University of Melbourne

Queensland has frequently been the key to forming government at the federal level in Australia, and the suburbs of Brisbane have a habit of swinging wildly between the parties.

Queensland broke the Keating Government and helped elect Howard with a large majority in 1996. Kevin Rudd’s popularity in 2007 also helped him win. So this was a seat important for both major parties – since 1987 the winner of Petrie won government.

Petrie is located in the outer northern suburbs of Brisbane, on the way to the Sunshine Coast. It was the Coalition’s most marginal at the 2013 election, held by first-termer Luke Howarth by just half a per cent. His Labor opponent is Jacqui Pedersen, a local who grew up in the beachside suburb of Redcliffe, which located in the electorate.

Petrie’s political importance was highlighted by Malcolm Turnbull’s appearance there on the first full day of the campaign to promote his youth jobs plan. Bill Shorten visited the electorate early, answering questions from Petrie voters for the Sky News People’s Forum in April. Popular Labor figures Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek also visited the seat to campaign.

A Galaxy poll published one week out from the election suggested Labor would take the seat, along with another coveted Queensland marginal, the regional division of Capricornia.

However, this may have given Labor false hope, with the current results indicating Labor will just miss out. The Labor Party actually saw a small decline in its primary vote, with the Liberal National Party’s primary vote actually growing by 3.5 per cent. This resulted in an almost flat two party result, with Howarth receiving 50.5 per cent of the total vote.

By Shaun Ratcliff, University of Melbourne

Like most other Australian federal elections, this one has been largely decided in the suburbs and regional centres. In particular, those around Sydney and Brisbane and up the coast of Queensland.

This is the reason both the Liberal and Labor parties launched their campaigns in western Sydney. It is a growing mortgage belt area with a lot of middle-income households with large mortgages, and plenty of voting power that can make and break governments.

Despite this, the result for the seat of Macarthur was a surprise. Sitting in the outer south-west of metropolitan Sydney, the seat covers the area around Campbelltown, covering a number of new (and fairly affluent) subdivisions and semi-rural areas covered by hobby farms and large blocks.

The area was once seen as a bellwether seat rivalling the famous Eden-Monaro. At every election between 1949 and 2007 the party that won Macarthur won government. This changed in 2007 when the Rudd-slide bypassed Macarthur, which re-elected Liberal Pat Farmer.

Farmer retired in 2010 and was replaced by Russell Matheson, but a recent redistribution changed the boundaries, bringing in more built suburban areas around Campbeltown, and the Liberal margin dropped from 11 per cent to about three.

Matheson reportedly considered running for preselection in the neighbouring (and safer) electorate of Hume, before deciding to recentest Macarthur at the advice of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

This time around the Labor candidate is local paediatrician Mike Freelander, who has a low public profile and no history in politics. This hasn’t stopped him from doing well, with the Liberal primary vote declining by 10.5 per cent and the Labor vote rising by 14.9 per cent. The two-party swing was 12.5 per cent, with a 60 per cent result in favour of the Labor Party.

This was strong across most of the electorate, with only a handful of booths won by the Liberal Party, mostly in the more rural parts of the electorate around the edges.

If the Coalition is unable to form government after this election, the loss of Macarthur will be one of the major reasons why.

Professor Robyn Eckersley, University of Melbourne.

What are the prospects for climate policy in the event of a narrow majority or minority Coalition government? The Coalition offered no new climate policies during the election campaign, and it did its best to keep climate change out of the limelight. We can therefore expect, in the short term, to see a continuation of the Abbott government’s Direct Action policies.

However, the Coalition has promised a review of its climate policies in 2017, ahead of the UN global stock take of national pledges under the Paris Agreement in 2018. In anticipation of this review, the government will come under increasing pressure to produce much tougher climate action. Polling during the campaign showed that a very clear majority of voters are concerned about climate change and want stronger action.

Under the Paris Agreement, the Coalition pledged to reduce emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2030. This pledge is among the weakest in the developed world. Yet the Coalition will not be able to meet it without significant additional funding to the Emissions Reduction Fund, which is not fiscally sustainable, or much tougher baselines under the Safeguard Mechanism’s baseline and credit trading scheme, which would undermine its rhetoric against a price on carbon.

Given the significant swing away from the Coalition, it is unlikely that Malcolm Turnbull will have the political capital to override the climate sceptics in his party and produce more credible climate and energy policies. However, if the Coalition retains power as a minority government, then it may have to succumb to pressure for reform from the cross-benches, depending on the final make-up of both houses of the Parliament.

By Professor Marcia Langton, University of Melbourne

Australians wait, and may wait for a week, for a government to be formed. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called a double dissolution and general election because the Government’s ABCC legislation was not passed. But the issue was rarely raised as the campaign revolved around other issues.

The protest voters – the high-wealth individuals concerned about superannuation and negative gearing changes proposed by the government, along with the ‘voiceless’ xenophobes who voted for Pauline Hanson’s crew, and the disillusioned who voted for other minor parties and independents – have brought the nation to a perilous situation.

If there is no clear outcome, and the major parties need to horse trade with minor parties and independents, voters who face critical issues in their everyday lives – Indigenous people and other vulnerable sections of the community, the ill who depend on Medicare and the seniors who depend on superannuation investments – will become the subject of what will look very much like a game of Texas hold’ em poker.

There are two clear outcomes that should bring some optimism to Indigenous Australians: the first Aboriginal member of the House of Representatives, Ken Wyatt (Liberal), retained his seat in the Hasluck electorate, and Linda Burney (ALP) won the seat of Barton to become the first Aboriginal woman in the House.

This is good news: Aboriginal voices in our Parliament – especially on both sides of the chamber – will raise and debate Aboriginal policy issues while limiting the apathetic, lazy and outright racist performances in the House.

They will also provide scrutiny on bills, and overcome to some extent the elephant and mouse ratio of power that makes us so ‘voiceless’.

The national priority of Closing the Gap on Indigenous disadvantage is at great risk, however. During this campaign, Indigenous issues barely rated a mention, with the only commitments being a $90m fund for Indigenous entrepreneurial activities from the Coalition, and promised funding for Aboriginal rangers and the First Australians Congress from the ALP.

The media coverage on these and a raft of critical policy issues was fleeting, contemptuous or non existent.

Both parties have maintained a commitment to constitutional recognition of First Australians, but Bill Shorten made a mistake by responding positively to a question about a treaty, thereby causing damage to the prospect of a successful referendum on the recognition question.

The understanding of the political class on the question of recognition has not increased during this longest of election campaigns. Tania Plibersek had the gall to say to me on Q&A that constitutional recognition and a treaty are not “mutually exclusive”, parroting Senate incumbent for the ALP in Western Australia, Patrick Dodson.

Dodson had said as much following Shorten’s gaffe, but has done little else to explain why campaigning for a treaty is a distraction from the critical matter of reaching consensus on the question to be put to Australians on the matter of recognition.

Debates about a treaty must wait until that is resolved.

The issue was not ignored by the Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition and more than an entire chapter of the report delivered to former PM Julia Gillard deals with the technical and other issues involved in treaties and agreements, whether constitutionally entrenched or not.

As a member of that Expert Panel and scholar of these issues for two decades, I am disappointed – to say the least – that the muddle-headed politics continues to jeopardise our best chance of winning an honourable and formal place for Indigenous people in the nation’s founding document.

If Malcolm Turnbull does manage to be returned as Prime Minister, one of the issues he has promised to deal with early on is marriage equality.

Given that his party’s right wing is likely to have been emboldened by the unclear election outcome, it may seek to influence the way the questions in the promised plebiscite are framed.

John Howard, as Prime Minister, skewed the questions in the republic referendum in order to minimise the chance of a yes vote.

So how might the plebiscite questions be framed fairly, and how might they be skewed?

Fair framing requires a neutral setting, and an even-handed question design. For example:

In current Australian law, only a union between a man and a woman is recognised as marriage. Should a union between same-sex couples also be recognised as marriage in Australian law?

To skew it, you could introduce ideas such as “tradition” and play on change-aversion in the community:

Traditionally Australian law recognises that marriage can only occur between a man and a woman. Should this law be changed to allow marriage to occur between same-sex couples?

You could also use terms such as “homosexuals”, which carry discriminatory baggage from the past, and create a contest with the status quo:

Should a union between a homosexual couple be recognised by Australia law in the same way as a union between a man and a woman is recognised?

The permutations are endless, but the test always comes down to framing and even-handedness.

One of the great examples of how to get the result you want was provided by the tobacco industry, which used to ask a series of three questions:

Do you believe in free speech?
Do you believe that companies selling legal products should be free to advertise them?
Tobacco is legal. Should tobacco companies be allowed to advertise their products?

(In association with Irving Saulwick, Denis Muller worked on the Saulwick Poll for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald between 1984 and 1994, and conducts a social and policy research consultancy.)

Dr Kevin Fergusson, University of Melbourne

The superannuation policies of the major parties heading into this election were never going to address the elephant in the room, namely that Australians’ savings just aren’t going to be enough to meet our aspirations.

And the prospect now of a minority government may mean there is even less room to manoeuvre.

Both the Coalition and the ALP went into the election with policies to increase government tax revenue by reducing superannuation tax concessions for the wealthy. The new Senate make-up can be expected to be sympathetic to such moves. But these policies fail to address the problem.

The big question for Australia and retirement income is whether the country can generate the wealth to support the retirement aspirations and living standards of a rapidly ageing population?

And at this stage there is a lot of doubt around that.

According to ABS data, our biggest export earners are iron ore, coal and education services. The outlook for iron ore and coal is for lower export returns, and any growth in international student income isn’t going to go anywhere near towards making up for reduced iron ore and coal earnings. So ultimately the whole debate on superannuation hinges in the tougher question of how Australians will generate enough wealth over next 10-20 years.

In the current low-return investment environment and in the aftermath of a commodity boom, Australia is experiencing a hit on its wealth. According to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, total assets for superannuation entities in the March quarter shrank by 0.6 per cent, or by some $8.7 billion, to $1.4 trillion..

For the year to March, the industry-wide rate of return for entities with more than four members was -1.5 per cent, and the five year average annualised ROR was 6.7 per cent.

Investment returns over the short and medium term also bode poorly for Australian superannuation funds.

According to data on from the RBA, as at 30th June 2016, 10-year Australian Government Bonds are quoted at a yield 2.12% p.a. For comparison, 10-year government bonds yield 1.84% in US, -0.11% in Japan, 0.15% in Germany, 1.43% in UK and 1.32% in Canada.

Central bank overnight rates are, for the month ended May 2016: 0.38% for US, -0.10% for Japan, 0.00% for the Euro area, 0.50% for UK, 0.50% for Canada and 1.75% for Australia.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Pensions Outlook 2014, “Economic stagnation compounds demographic pressure on pension systems.”

The level of an individual’s superannuation savings at retirement is driven by that individual’s income over their working life, salary inflation, the number of years worked and the long-term investment returns achieved by the superannuation fund. The adequacy of this accumulated investment to provide income in retirement is hindered by increasing life expectancies.

Broadly speaking, an individual’s income is correlated with Australia’s gross national income (GNY), namely the income generated by Australian owned assets. Data from World Bank shows that Australia’s GNY has increased at a rate of 6.3 per cent a year since 1962, but has recently declined.

According to the IMF World Economic Outlook:

“The baseline projection for global growth in 2016 is a modest 3.2 per cent, broadly in line with last year, and a 0.2 percentage point downward revision relative to the January 2016 World Economic Outlook Update. The recovery is projected to strengthen in 2017 and beyond, driven primarily by emerging market and developing economies, as conditions in stressed economies start gradually to normalize. But uncertainty has increased, and risks of weaker growth scenarios are becoming more tangible. The fragile conjuncture increases the urgency of a broad-based policy response to raise growth and manage vulnerabilities.”

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Pensions Outlook 2014: “Nearly all OECD countries were active in changing their retirement-income provision systems between February 2012 and September 2014.”

There is always a trade-off between adequacy of benefits and sustainability of the pension system.

One measure of adequacy is the net pension replacement rate, being equal to the ratio of the net pension entitlement to the pre-retirement income net of taxes and social contributions.

Countries with the highest net pension replacement rates for average-income earners are: Luxembourg, Netherlands, Turkey, Hungary and Austria, all being around 90%. For Australia the ratio is 65%, faring better than the US, which has a ratio of 45%.

The generosity of retirement arrangements is related to how wealthy a country is and the policies enacted by its government. Many countries’ pensions systems are in the same position as Australia’s. Possible solutions include encouraging more people to stay for longer in the workforce by raising the retirement age. Governments could also encourage the growth of a younger population through higher fertility rates and young migrants, because these are the people who will be paying the taxes of the future.

Addressing the problem also raises the question of whether we need to ensure superannuation funds are making strategic investments in Australia’s infrastructure and retaining ownership of the derived earnings.

However the fundamental challenge for any new government is to encourage wealth creation to replace the past commodities boom.

Superannuation is a long-term game and therefore we need long-term policies.

By Shaun Ratcliff, University of Melbourne

This was a rematch between former Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella and first-term independent MP Cathy McGowan, who led an insurgent campaign to take the seat by 439 votes in an upset win in 2013. It cost Mirabella her place in the Abbott ministry. This time around, McGowan may have buried Mirabella’s career for good.

This should be a solid and safe Coalition electorate. It covers the rural communities and small towns in north-east Victoria, from Kinglake in the south near the Melbourne suburbs to Wangaratta in the north and Rutherglen on the NSW border. In recent elections the Liberal Party was able to win the seat on first preferences and often gained a two-party preferred vote of 60 per cent or more.

The problem faced by the Liberal Party is that they selected Mirabella as their candidate. In doing so, they chose a candidate with few links to the community (or any rural area). She is a relative ideologue candidate, traditionally based in Melbourne where she was educated (St Catherine’s School in Toorak and then the University of Melbourne), and where she then worked as a lawyer after graduation.

Mirabella was dropped on Indi and spent most of her time before losing it in 2013 fighting political battles and chasing ministerial ambitions in Canberra. This would have been fine if she was a good fit for the electorate (and spent some time tending her backyard), so that her constituents felt she had their best interests at heart.

However, being an outsider in a rural area who was not seen as working for her voters, she lost their support. This became a problem when she was faced with the candidacy of local Cathy McGowan, who was born, raised and had lived in the area her entire life.

McGowan had worked as a staffer for an Indi Liberal MP during the late 1970s and early 1980s, as a regional councillor for agricultural industry association the Victorian Farmers’ Federation, was a former president of Australian Women in Agriculture and a recipient Order of Australia. Although it is important to remember that despite being a less than great candidate for the area, Mirabella only lost by 439 votes in 2013.

To further complicate the election the National Party decided to run a candidate this time, selecting Marty Corboy, a Family First candidate for the the state seat of Benambra in 2006, who said (apparently without trying to sound sexist) that “some people are rapt to have a man to vote for”.

Mirabella’s attempt to resurrect her political career has been on the rocks since April, when she told Sky News a local hospital had lost $10million in funding because the electorate voted for McGowan, suggesting she (and the Coalition) was happy to punish the area for not voting for her.

There was another hurdle in May, when Mirabella suggested her own party may be behind leaks against her, leading to speculation the Liberals weren’t serious about backing their candidate. Within days, the Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce seemingly wrote Mirabella off, declaring the race would come down to “Cathy and (Nationals candidate) Marty (Corboy)‘’.

This chaos and controversy surrounding Mirabella’s campaign appears to have taken its toll, with Mirabella’s primary vote dropping by 17.6 per cent. A lot of this was the result of the National Party’s decision to contest the seat, with Corboy receiving 18.2 per cent of the vote. McGowan appears to have taken advantage of her two and half years of incumbency, increasing her primary vote by 3.5 per cent. On a two-party basis the Liberal vote declined by 4.5 per cent, with McGowan’s vote growing to nearly 55 per cent.

More than 4 million Australians engaged more than 33 million times on Facebook on election night. So who created the most hype online?

Here are the two most engaged posts:

1. Greens Adam Bandt thanking his supporters:

2. Labor’s Sharon Claydon thanking Newcastle for returning her:

By Shaun Ratcliff, University of Melbourne

Situated in Melbourne’s inner south-eastern suburbs, this seat shows how the Greens appear to have misjudged their campaign and focused their resources in the wrong places.

Higgins is a diverse electorate. It covers a line of suburbs strung between the Monash Freeway in the north and the railway line to Dandenong in the south. These go from the inner-city neighbourhoods of South Yarra, Prahran and Windsor spaced along the shopping and dining district of Chapel Street, through the wealthy and treelined suburbs of Toorak, Armadale, Malvern and Glen Iris in the middle, to the more middle and working-class suburbs of Hughsdale, Ashburton and Carnegie in the east.

The urban Chapel Street suburbs in the east have a large gay community, in which both the Labor and Greens candidates are active. The former selected the interesting and Karl Katter (Bob Katter’s younger half-brother; yes, that Bob Katter). The latter have selected LGBTI and mental health advocate Jason Ball as their candidate.

The seat is currently held by Liberal assistant treasurer Kelly O’Dwyer, the most recent in a long line of prominent members to represent the area, including the Liberal treasurer Peter Costello and prime ministers Harold Holt and John Gorton.

The Greens may have believed their chances of winning the seat were higher for a number of reasons. The first was their win of the state seat of Prahran in 2014 Victorian election, the second O’Dwyer’s perceived gaff when discussing the use of changes to business tax deductions would make it easier for a cafe owner to buy a $6,000 toaster.

The mockery (at least amongst the twitterati) was vicious, but may have not been particularly informative about public opinion. As the Greens began to move into the electorate in a big way, with billboards and campaigners everywhere, they released fortuitously-timed polling by Lonergan that said Liberal Party would get a 10% pay vote swing against it in Higgins, and that the Greens vote would jump by nearly as much.

However, even at the time I rated their chances quite low. The parts of Higgins that fall into the state seat of Prahran are the best areas for the Greens in the electorate. Prahran also misses out on many of Higgins’ best areas for the Liberals, such as the wealthier and more suburban parts of Toorak and Malvern.

The Greens only won Prahran on 25 per cent of the primary vote and relied on a good flow of Labor preferences to do so. To have won again they would have needed to drive the Liberal first preference vote several points below 50 per cent and used Labor preferences to get a majority of the two party vote.

Although the Greens’ last-minute campaign appears to have paid some dividends, with their primary vote growing by nearly 10 per cent, this appears to have been mostly at the expense of the Labor Party.

The Labor primary vote share collapsed by nearly 9 per cent to an abysmal 15 per cent, while the Greens hit an impressive 26.4 per cent. By contrast, the Liberal vote only declined by less than three per cent and nearly topped 50 per cent on first preferences.

This suggests the Greens spent a lot of volunteer time and money cannibalising the Left vote. Perhaps they are playing the long game, planning to use this as a platform for the next election. However, the Liberals hardly campaigned in the seat this time and will likely be better prepared for a Greens challenge in the future. And with Batman so tight, the redirection of Greens resources to Higgins may have cost them that seat for little in return.

By Shaun Ratcliff, University of Melbourne

Inner city seats are usually safe areas for Labor (or Greens) candidates. They tend to be more diverse, younger and quite well educated (and in Sydney and Melbourne in particular include a few remaining working-class pockets).

In Sydney and Melbourne the Liberal Party struggles to do better than 30% in these electorates. However, in the other state capitals the inner-city area is smaller and the electorates that cover them often also reach into some affluent suburban areas that favour the Coalition.

This is the case with the seat of Brisbane. Here the division incorporates the CBD and the areas that favour the Labor Party and the Greens, such as northern New Farm, Fortitude Valley and Red Hill, near the city, and Kelvin Grove just to the north, where the main campus of the Queensland University of Technology is located.

Overall, Brisbane is actually one of the wealthier electorates in Australia, including a number of highly affluent and strongly Liberal/National supporting suburbs, in particular Ascot and Hamilton in the east.

The contest in Brisbane is writing political history, regardless of the result, with two openly gay candidates contesting, the first time Australia has seen this in a federal campaign.

The incumbent, Liberal MP Theresa Gambaro, retired and was replaced by former National Retailers Association CEO Trevor Evans. However, the seat has a strong Labor tradition and the ALP is hoping that army major Pat O’Neill will win it back.

Brisbane looked like a dead heat for much of the campaign, however a Galaxy poll published one week from polling day predicted the LNP will get across the line. The result in Brisbane, dubbed by The Guardian a ‘groovy’ seat, may be used to measure the popularity of Malcolm Turnbull among inner-city voters, as well as a measure of whether the ALP has been able to achieve a uniform swing of support that could deliver it government.

The Liberal National Party’s candidate choice appears to have paid off, gaining them a positive swing in first preferences, which went up by 1.8 per cent, almost winning a majority in their own right. The Labor vote actually went backwards by nearly four per cent, with the Greens jumping but almost five to 20 per cent.

On a two-party preferred basis, the Coalition won 54 per cent of the vote, up a per cent on 2013, making Brisbane a solid hold for the Liberal National Party.

Dr Mark Triffitt, The University of Melbourne.

The so-called protest vote in yesterday’s election was a seismic salvo that has sunk three ships in one go.

Australians voted for minor parties and independents in unprecedented numbers, resulting in the major parties recording one of their lowest combined primary vote percentages in living memory.

It has probably sunk the Coalition’s chances of gaining a secure majority in parliament.

It also sank Labor’s chances of gaining a narrow, unexpected win, while simultaneously inflating its two-party preferred vote to make its support appear more credible than it actually is.

And it has more than likely doomed Malcolm Turnbull’s short tenure as Prime Minister, even if final counting gives him a bare majority.

But to call it a ‘protest vote’ is a misnomer.

A protest vote suggests voters are giving both the Coalition and Labor a big whack so both parties see the errors of their ways.

It assumes, as a result, the major parties will reconnect with a disaffected public with meaningful engagement and polices that speak to genuine concerns, giving voters a reason to return the fold at subsequent elections.

But many who rejected the major parties yesterday won’t go back for two reasons.

First, the major parties will learn next to nothing from the result as they berate each other in the aftermath over campaign tactics and who has a ‘mandate’.

In fact, they’re more than likely to double down on their content-free, uber-managed version of political engagement because – over the past decade or two - it has become the only way the major parties know how to ‘do’ politics.

Second, yesterday’s result was an acceleration of a longer-term trend of voters moving away from the major parties.

This is because Australia’s major parties – like those in many democracies across the world - are seriously struggling to engage with an increasingly fragmented electorate with one-size-fits-all policy agendas based on 20th century ideology.

So voter support for minor parties and independents will only solidify and expand across Australia’s political system in the wake of yesterday’s result.

Swings to the Greens across inner metropolitan areas yesterday have laid the foundations for them to win more seats at the next election.

Nick Xenophon’s party has instantly entrenched itself in South Australia, with the real prospect of expanding its franchise in other states at future polls.

One Nation is back to fracture the conservative vote, while the overall Senate outcome shows it is now a permanently fragmented institution.

The days of the Coalition or Labor claiming a credible election mandate are pretty much over.

We have entered a new era where coalitions of minor parties and independents, backed by an increasingly fractious and unpredictable electorate, define our political landscape as the rule, not the exception.

By Associate Professor, Helen Dickinson, University of Melbourne

In the run up to the election, health policy was a key point of debate. A number of commentators have already suggested that Labor’s accusations that Coalition plans to privatise Medicare may have been instrumental in significant gains for Labor, particularly in Tasmania. Meanwhile, the Prime Minister has announced that the Federal Police will investigate text messages sent by Queensland Labor urging voters not to back the Prime Minister and his government in order to “save Medicare”.

Regardless, of what plays out as a government is formed, what is clear is that health will remain a hotly contested issue. With the political move to the centre in recent years it has been difficult to distinguish between traditional party positions. To some degree Labor have attempted to return to days gone by in presenting themselves as the saviours of Medicare.

Yet the outcome of this process is likely that there will be little hope for significant reform of the health system. This outcome will not leave any government with a clear mandate or render them willing to take on a substantial health reform process. Indeed, parties may feel that the greatest reward comes not through a positive vision for the future, but through scare campaigns and negativity. None of which offers much hope for substantive change.

In the run up to the election there was not much to divide the various promises of the parties on the health front. Both argued that they were committed to maintaining universal health services. Labor planning to do this through a cash injection into the system and by making savings on private health insurance. The Coalition committed to more limited investments, but with a desire to use existing resources more effectively (including those in the private health system). But what was missing in these election commitments was a clear sense of how the health system would be reformed in a significant way to ensure that we see the level of change that is needed to ensure that this performs as well in the future as it does now.

This election has demonstrated that people care deeply about their health system, but this will not result in politicians feeling courageous about taking on reform in a significant way. The fractured parliament that we will inevitably be left with will also make it more difficult than ever to pass legislation. No doubt we will see money freed up for various different agendas – and likely many of these will focus on interests of independents holding the balance of power. But none of this bodes well for those of us who wish to see Australia embark on a careful and considered reform of its health system.

Three new openly gay politicians will be going to Canberra following their election on 2 July.

All three politicians are Coalition MPs – Liberal Trent Zimmerman in North Sydney, Liberal Tim Wilson in Goldstein and LNP Trevor Evans in Brisbane.

Trent Zimmerman only became the first openly gay politician elected to the lower house in 2015 following the North Sydney by-election vacated by former Treasurer Joe Hockey.

There were several other openly gay candidates that were not elected including, Labor’s Sophie Ismail in Melbourne and Greens’ Jason Ball in Higgins.

We earlier reported that this election saw the rise of LGBTIQ politicians.

Malcolm Turnbull was the most “mentioned” leader on Facebook over the eight-week campaign. He was followed by Labor leader Bill Shorten.

However, Malcolm Turnbull’s strong coverage on Facebook took a dive throughout the campaign where he peaked at 80%. By election day, he was generating 69%.

Bill Shorten’s engagement rose from 32% at the start of the campaign to 40% by the end of election day.

Interestingly, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, whom is predicted to win a Queensland Senate seat, was the third most discussed leader on Facebook beating the more established Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce.

She received the biggest increase from 9% of Facebook election-related interactions to 30% by yesterday’s end.

Richard Di Natale stayed constant throughout at 9%. Barnaby Joyce increased only moderately in Facebook interactions from 17% to 19%. In the last days of campaigning

More than 11 million Australians use Facebook every day.

By Shaun Ratcliff, University of Melbourne

The electoral division of New England sits in the north-east of NSW and stretches from the Queensland border in the north almost all the way to the Hunter Valley in the south.

This is a federation seat, existing in roughly the same area since 1901. Along with much of the rest of northern NSW and southern Queensland, New England is a fairly conservative area and except for a brief stint between 1906-1913, it was continuously held by a politician from a right-of-centre part. From 1922 to 2001, the seat was always held by the National Party. However, between 2001 and 2013, it was represented by independent MP Tony Windsor.

A farmer at Werris Creek before entering politics, Windsor had been the state MP for the seat of Tamworth, which was entirely located in the federal electorate of New England. Born in Quirindi, just south of Tamworth, where he went to high school, Windsor has strong local links and won the state seat after missing out on a National Party preselection (in part) because of a drink driving allegation.

After supporting the minority Labor government between 2010 and 2013, Windsor’s position in New England appeared untenable, and he (ostensibly) retired from politics at that election, and was replaced by Barnaby Joyce.

Born in New England, but educated at the North Shore private Catholic school St Ignatius Riverview in Sydney (also attended by Tony Abbott), Joyce’s connection to the electorate is a little more tenuous than Windsor’s. He left the area after university and spent most of his adult life in Queensland, where he was an accountant before being elected to the Senate in 2004. It was only in 2013 that Joyce moved back to NSW and New England, to contest the seat for the National Party.

The move from the Senate to the lower house paved the way for Joyce’s election as Nationals Leader, but it has been a bumpy ride of Joyce. He and the government to which he belongs appeared to renege on a promise for more funding for a local hospital and the Abbott Government’s approval of the Shenhua Watermark coal mine in the electorate (over Joyce’s opposition) does not appear to have been popular.

This appears to have left an opening for Windsor, who announced his return to politics in March, citing coal mining and the NBN as some of his major concerns. His campaign was backed by the local chapter of activist group GetUp! which may be more of a hindrance than a help in this relatively conservative area.

Despite this, Windsor’s campaign looked competitive, with a Newspoll run just a fortnight before the election indicating Mr Joyce led Mr Windsor by only 51 per cent to 49 per cent on a two-candidate basis. Perhaps as a result of the close contest and high states (with the career of the Deputy prime minister on the line) it became a deeply personal and increasingly negative campaign. Despite the smears, New England remains one of the most intriguing races in the country.

However, it appears voters in New England have long memories, and Windsor was unable to recapture his pre-2013 popularity, winning only 29.7 per cent of the primary vote, which translated into 41.9 per cent of the two party vote.

He did well around the university town of Armidale, where he was winning booths with 50-60 per cent of the two party vote. However, he did not do well in many of the more rural parts of the electorate, where his support dropped into the 20s and 30s. As a result, Joyce was able to win on first preferences, with only a small 1.6 per cent swing against him. His two-party vote was 58.1 per cent.

By Shaun Ratcliff, University of Melbourne

Mayo covers the hills east of Adelaide, stretching south and east to the Fleurieu Peninsula and Kangaroo Island. Established in the South Australian redistribution of 3 September 1984, the division has only been represented by two members in that time, Liberal MPs Alexander Downer (1984-2008), and the incumbent Jamie Briggs since 2008. Downer is your stereotypical blue blood Liberal. In fact, he was the third generation of a Liberal Party dynasty.

Under these two Liberal politicians, the party’s hold on this area of market gardens, wineries and small farms has generally been strong. At the last four general elections the margin between the Liberal and Labor candidates has been between over to 10 per cent, with the Liberal usually receiving around 60 per cent of the two-party vote.

However, despite the hold the Liberal Party has enjoyed on the seat, this has been a frequently challenged dominance. When a third party representing a centrist or moderate liberal tradition emerges, Liberal candidates have often been given a run for their money.

The Australian Democrats in particular polled better in the area traditionally covered by Mayo than just about anywhere else in the country. They did particularly well in 1990 and almost won the seat in 1998. Ten years later the Greens again ran the Liberal Party close on preferences in a by-election when Alexander Downer retired from politics in 2008.

In 2016 it appears the Liberal Party have again been forced to defend what should be safe territory for the party, with this part of Adelaide one again flirting with a centrist political force, with the Nick Xenophon Team (NXT) replicating the gains made by the Democrats in the past.

However, in the months leading up to the election it was looking like an uphill battle for NXT. Polling in Mayo conducted in January indicated Nick Xenophon’s party was sitting on a primary vote of 15.4 per cent and unlikely to win the seat. Although single seat polls are often unreliable, later polling in nearby Hindmarsh and Sturt suggested similar results.

However, the travails of Liberal Jamie Briggs undoubtedly improved NXT’s chances in Mayo. In December he was forced to resign as Malcolm Turnbull’s Cities Minister for behaving inappropriately towards a female public servant while on an official visit to Hong Kong. The candidate from NXT is Rebekah Sharkie, who was actually a former staffer to Briggs and ex-Liberal Party member. A Newspoll taken a fortnight out from the election showed that this controversy may have hurt the Liberal chances in the seat, with Sharkie poised to win the seat on preferences.

This last set of polls was pretty much spot on. Briggs was clearly a deadweight on his party’s vote and his support collapsed by 16.7 per cent to 37.1 per cent, an embarrassment for the Liberal Party. Sharkie received 35.6 per cent of the primary vote, an incredible result for a first time candidate of a new party. On a two-party basis Xenophon’s candidate won with nearly 55.8 per cent of the two party preferred vote.

By winning this seat (plus probably three senate seats), Xenophon arguably has a chance to fill the niche the Democrats once occupied, and set up a centrist and moderate small-l liberal party (although with a distinctively illiberal interventionist policies on trade, industry and poker machines)

However, winning seats like Mayo is only half the battle. He also needs to avoid the fate of Clive Palmer, who achieved a similar outcome in 2013, only to see his party implode within two years. Xenophon needs to make the leap to establishing a sustainable party structure that relies on more than his personal popularity in South Australia.

Extraordinarily, it’s unclear this morning whether the Coalition or Labor will win enough seats to form government. It’s entirely possible neither will win an outright majority and there will be a hung parliament.

This the latest from the Australian Electoral Commission:

By Shaun Ratcliff, University of Melbourne

Batman is a diverse Melbourne electorate and the close result we see reflects this. When it was created it covered the inner-city neighbourhoods of Carlton and Fitzroy, but successive boundary changes have moved it steadily northwards. Today it includes Northcote, Preston, Thornbury and Reservoir. Located in Labor’s traditional heartland of north Melbourne, Batman has been in Labor hands for all but two terms since 1910, and without any interruption since 1969.

The seat is currently Labor’s safest (on a two-party count, with a 21 percent two-party margin. Unfortunately for Labor, this is not the count that matters in Batman. Against the Greens (who finished second in 2013), their two-candidate margin is 10.6 percent and closing. After the electorate of Melbourne, which the Greens won off Labor in 2010, Batman is the most likely to fall next if the Greens are to continue to expand their hold on House of Representative seats, and the result says a lot about whether they will be able to meaningfully progress their campaign to conquer inner-Melbourne and seats elsewhere.

Batman’s diversity gives it an interesting result. The median weekly household income is close to the Melbourne average. However, this hides the fact the southern neighbourhoods of Clifton Hill and Northcote, just outside the CBD, are increasingly becoming enclaves of well-educated professionals on good incomes. This is your classic hipster zone where coffee is single origin and fair-trade, and the Greens vote was between 40 and 50 per cent in 2013.

Moving north are suburbs like Reservoir and Kingsbury. There coffee is cheaper and crates are for packing goods and not for sitting on. These areas are traditional Labor areas with more working class jobs and larger migrant communities. The Labor Party tends to receive around 50 per cent of the first preference vote in these neighbourhoods.

Across the electorate the Liberal Party are also able to gain around 20 per cent of the vote, and their preferences make them potential kingmakers for the seat.

Batman has been a Labor stronghold for a century and it has been held by senior Labor figures since 1977. From 1996 it was held by Martin Ferguson, who was elected after six years as President of the ACTU. Ferguson served as a senior Labor frontbencher, and a minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments. He was succeeded at the 2013 election by David Feeney, who had been a senator and junior minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments.

Feeney has had a terrible campaign and has certainly been a drag on the Labor vote, which has dropped by about 10 per cent since 2013. First he was outed for failing to declare the $2.3 million dollar investment property he and his wife own in the electorate (which is rented out and negatively geared). Soon afterwards, he bombed during an interview with Sky News’ David Spears, where he couldn’t explain Labor policy. To compound this embarrassment, he then left his briefing notes behind afterwards.

Feeney’s opponent Alex Bhathal is contesting the seat for the fifth time. The gentrification of the southern part of the electorate has resulted in a growing Greens vote (although in 2013 Labor still won most of the booths). Feeney likely artificially increases the Green vote. He is a Labor backroom player from central casting. Not particularly appealing for young, well educated, idealistic progressive voters that live in the inner city neighbourhoods that make up the southern part of this electorate.

If Liberal preferences were going to Greens, they would have a real chance, and appeared very confident early in the campaign. Leaked polling appeared to support this confidence. However, when the Liberal Party decided to preference Labor, it made a victory harder (but not impossible) for the Greens. Since then the Greens seem to have moved resources to other seats, in particular Higgins and Melbourne Ports.

The decisions to focus on other electorates may have cost the Greens the seat. According to current AEC results, the Greens managed to gain 36.9 per cent of the primary vote, an increase of more than 10 per cent. The Labor primary vote fell by five per cent, to 36 per cent. However, the majority of the preferences from the Liberals 19 per cent of the primary vote went to Feeney, giving him 51.45 per cent of the two party vote, and victory.

By Cathy Harper, Editor, Election Watch, University of Melbourne

The key points of the 2016 Federal Election so far are:

It is unclear who will form Government. Both Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and the Opposition Leader Bill Shorten were upbeat as they addressed their supporters, declaring the fight wasn’t over.

The picture will not be clearer for days;

The Coalition held ground in Victoria and Queensland, but didn’t do as well as expected in New South Wales and there was a surprise big swing to the ALP in Tasmania;

Senate results are unclear, but there will be a significant cross-bench.

The Australian Electoral Commission data shows several seats in the balance. Almost four million Australians entered pre-poll votes, which will play a significant part in determining the result.

Andrew Hockley, former staff member of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and Director of External Relations at the University of Melbourne, says it seems “most likely the Turnbull Government will be re-elected, either with a tiny majority, or in a minority arrangement with one or more of the independents”.

Some notable results are:

New England (NSW) – Barnaby Joyce, the Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Nationals, easily won his seat despite a challenge from Independent Tony Windsor;

Mayo (SA) – One-time Cabinet Minister Liberal Jamie Briggs has conceded defeat to Fiona Sharkie from the Nick Xenophon Team;

The Greens have not won Higgins or Wills. Batman –the party’s best hope of a second seat in the House – was still in play but favouring Labor’s David Feeney;

Barton (NSW) – Australia will have the first Indigenous woman elected to the House, with Labor’s Linda Burney claiming victory;

Indi (Vic) – Former senior Liberal Sophie Mirabella failed to win back the seat from Independent Kathy McGowan;

Eden Monaro (NSW) – the bellwether seat looks to have blown its status as such, with the ALP’s Mike Kelly defeating the Liberals’ Peter Hendy.

The make-up of the Senate will take some time to be finalised.

Hockley says it seems “highly likely there will be a sizeable number of Greens, members of the Nick Xenophon Team and Independent members in the Senate’’.

“This will make the passage of contentious legislation difficult,’’ he says. “The joint sitting (which was to be called as part of Prime Minister Turnbull’s double dissolution process) seems likely not to deliver a majority for the government, which means the ABCC laws might not get up. This will be politically challenging for the new Prime Minister.

“The Senate will be a place of ugly rhetoric given that it seems likely Pauline Hanson, Derryn Hinch and Jacquie Lambie will all be elected.’’

Mr Turnbull called an early double dissolution election in an attempt to pass two bills that had been rejected by the Senate. It was widely believed his plan was to clear the decks and go to an election which would deliver the Coalition more certainty in the Senate. That appears unlikely to happen.

The Coalition was widely expected to lose some seats, but still expected to win. After all, it had a 19-seat majority and although Mr Turnbull’s popularity in opinion polls during the campaign had diminished significantly since he took over the leadership from Tony Abbott, he was coming off a very high base.

Addressing supporters in Sydney, Mr Turnbull declared he had “every confidence” the Coalition could form a majority government.

Hockley says Mr Turnbull may have to establish some kind of formal process with the cross-benchers in order to manage his legislative program, especially if he is trying to manage minority government.

“Will Turnbull have a mandate to pursue some of his less conservative agenda items such as same-sex marriage? Politically, it could pose an existential threat to him from the right of his own party.

“Whatever criticism Malcolm Turnbull may face from his own party over what will be seen as a disappointing result, the reality is that Tony Abbott would most likely have been trounced. The Coalition owes Mr Turnbull a debt of gratitude for rescuing it from a catastrophic defeat,’’ Hockley says.

Mr Shorten told his supporters the “Labor Party is back”, and that it’s “re-energised and unified”.

Hockley says Shorten has done surprisingly well with a disciplined, hard-working and consistent performance over a gruelling campaign period.

“He is unlikely to be challenged for the leadership anytime soon, and faces a situation in the Parliament that will suit him greatly. On the other hand, Labor’s primary vote is unsustainable over the long term and Mr Shorten has not fundamentally improved it,” Hockley says.

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We’ve followed the leaders of the four established parties throughout the eight week campaign.To honour the countless kilometres trekked, Election Watch is giving special awards to the tiresome travellers.

Both Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten’s “election hotspots” look almost identical. Despite this, Turnbull has visited more marginal seats than Bill Shorten. For a list of all the “Frequent Flyer” winners visit our winners page here.

Social media has brought voters unprecedented access to information, and with that unprecedented power to mobilise. Parties and their candidates have engaged voters through Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and apps on smartphones, tablets and computers.

But has it improved the political conversation? Dr Aaron Martin, of the University of Melbourne’s School of Social and Political Sciences, and Dr Denis Muller, of the Centre for Advancing Journalism, have different views, which you can read here.

The innovative political survey reached a new milestone today, surpassing 1 million responses.

Vote Compass is a civic engagement tool which plots voters personal views with the positions of the political parties. The tool has been developed in partnership with Vox Pop Labs, the ABC and political scientists at the University of Melbourne.

The results have provided a wealth of insight into Australia’s political landscape.

The most Right-leaning seat is Maranoa, in outback Queensland, while the most Left-leaning seat is Batman, in inner city Melbourne.

Plus, data has shown that voters are most influenced by a party’s platform (30%), stable government (23%), and the party leader (11%).

Vote Compass was first introduced into Australia in 2013 and also reached 1 million respondents.

Australia finds itself at a crossroads, with huge decisions awaiting the next government.

On Wednesday 29 June the Melbourne School of Government held a panel discussion with top political insiders.

One panelist labelled the marathon campaign as “long, laborious and lumpy,” forecasting a challenging “minority government”. Another said Victorian Senate candidate Derryn Hinch was ineligible to run because of prior convictions; although others dispute this position.

When asked about voter apathy, particularly for young voters, one panelist said: “If you don’t turn up, like in Brexit, or you put in an informal vote, or you don’t go and ask the tough questions online or in forums, then I think you lose your right to moan.”

Our panel included:

Peta Credlin (Former Chief of Staff to PM Tony Abbott)
Ben Hubbard (Former Chief of Staff to PM Julia Gillard)
Barrie Cassidy (Host of the ABC’s Insiders program)
Ellen Whinnett (National Political Editor, Herald Sun)
Andrea Carson (Lecturer in Media and Politics, University of Melbourne)
The event was moderated by Nicholas Reece (Principal Fellow, University of Melbourne)

Kevin O’Lemon, Whinging Wendy and now Fake Tradie – political ads can end up being one of the most interesting things you see during an election campaign.

To honour the great tradition of bad acting and oversimplified messages, Election Watch ran the inaugural Political Logies (#Pogies) for the Best Worst campaign ad of the 2016 federal election – and the results are in.

The ads were a mix of the effective and offensive. The University of Melbourne’s Dr Andrea Carson described one of the ads as “in poor taste’’, “badly timed’’, “not funny” and “advocates violence”. “It got attention for all the wrong reasons. It’s not how we do politics in Australia,” Dr Carson says.

Another video was described as the “ball-tearer of the campaign” by University of Melbourne Principal Fellow Nicholas Reece.

Want to know who won? See the results here.