Labor looks set to win the 2007 Federal Election in a landslide.  Here’s why, along with a predicted final seat count.

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We now are at the halfway point in the election campaign and whilst I've noted before that election campaign polling can be more volatile than the pre-election period, it's all we have to go by, so this is what it shows.  Pollsters used are A C Nielsen, Newspoll and Galaxy.

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The latest newspoll is out and already we can hear cries of a re-invigorated Coalition. Is there any truth to these claims? Is this anything more than statistical noise? For now, a brief look at what these numbers mean in the context of the previous Newspoll results. Read on for graphs.

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Is Australia mature enough to be a democracy?

Dr Adrian Liston
The Australian National University
and the University of Washington

Under the system we inherited from the British, Australia is a pseudo-democracy. It was a compromise of the time, where the elites had a fondness for the ideals of democracy, but were still rather worried about what would happen if everyone was involved in the process...

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We now have a complete summary of the first round of election campaign polls.

This is a weighted average of the results which takes into account the sample sizes.  The TPP is allocated to the ALP @ 75% of the Green vote and 45% of the Others, which translates to 62.7% of the preferences.

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There is a commonly held perception that for the ALP to win the 2007 Federal Election, they must gain somewhere in the vicinity of 51% of the Two-Party Preferred (2PP) vote.  This perception is based on the 1998 result, where Kym Beazley exceeded 50% 2PP, but did not win.  Recent election results have indicated that the electorate has changed, and the result will not be this way in 2007. 

By analysing past election results, from 1996-2004, we can use probability formulae to predict the potential result for any given seat, and count up the predicted seat wins for each party, based on these past results.

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We now have a large bank of polling data in 2007 and it's very interesting to compare the patterns with the lead up to the 1996 election. (see tables below)

In 1995, 10 months of polls combined, compared with what was actually achieved in the election, was within 0.1% of the L/NP primary vote (47.1 vs 47.0), 0.3% of the ALP primary vote (38.4 vs 38.7), and 0.2% of the two party vote.  Extraordinarily accurate.

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