Compare yet again: Australia and Canada

Last week I reported on two new entries in the autumn electoral calendar. Now, as local readers will be well aware, we have a third: Australia goes to the polls on 3 May. Unlike Canada and Portugal, it can’t fairly be described as an early election, although (for no obvious reason) it’s a couple of weeks short of the third anniversary of the last one, in 2022.

As sometimes happens, there’s a clear parallel between Canada and Australia. In each case it’s a centre-to-centre-left government seeking re-election; each was behind in the polls at the beginning of the year (just slightly in Australia, very badly in Canada); each faced an opposition led by a right-wing leader who traded on his Trump-friendliness – until suddenly, up against the reality of Trumpian government rather than the ideal, likeness to Trump ceased to be a selling point.

In Canada, the effect of that shift has been dramatic. Trailing by twenty points only a few months ago, the Liberals, led by new prime minister Mark Carney, now lead in the polls by nearly six points and are on track to win some 200 seats in the 343-seat House of Commons. That would be their best result since the landslide of 1993.* And there seems nothing that Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre can do about it.

What he wants is for Trump to somehow not be an issue. In Australia, which is naturally insular and where the United States is a long way away, that’s just barely imaginable. In Canada, where everything happens in the shadow of its southern neighbor, it’s utterly impossible. And as long as Trump is in the forefront of voters’ minds, both Poilievre and his Australian counterpart, Peter Dutton, are likely to suffer.

Although there’s been some movement Labor’s way, so far the polls in Australia are not showing the same large turnaround as in Canada. But they don’t have to: Dutton was never in a clearly winning position the way Poilievre was, so going backwards at all is probably more than he can afford. And unlike Poilievre, Dutton has to contend with a powerful media empire that (for reasons we’ve looked at before) is continually pushing him to more extreme places; his ability to take a moderate tack, even were he so minded, is more constrained.

Labor under prime minister Anthony Albanese starts with a notional 78 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives. Dutton’s Liberal-National Party coalition has 57, although three of its MPs are attempting to hold their seats as independents; there are four Greens and eleven others on the crossbench. Only a handful of the crossbenchers are sympathetic to the Coalition, so in order to be able to form a minority government Dutton would need to not just get ahead of Labor, but get well ahead.

A gain of, say, twelve seats from Labor would require a uniform swing of 3.6%, or a two-party-preferred vote of 51.5%. The Coalition may reasonably hope that the actual target is a bit less, particularly if it can win back a few independent-held seats. Either way it is certainly within sight, but it is moving in the wrong direction, and Trump-induced carnage in the world economy is unlikely to help things. The betting market now has Labor clear favorite at about 7-4 on, with the Coalition a bit worse than 4-3 against.

One should not discount Labor’s ability to shoot itself in the foot – a number of its members, for example, are trying hard to deliver the seat of Macnamara to the Liberals. Albanese has so far failed to achieve the sort of clarity on the Trump issue that Carney has. But he also has the advantage of being a first-term government; Canadian voters may at some point remember that the Liberals have been there a long time, but there is no corresponding imperative for change in Australia.

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* CBC remarks that it would be “the first time in its history” for the Liberal Party to win over 200 seats, but that’s a little misleading, since the size of parliament has increased over time. In 1993 it won 177 seats out of 295, or exactly 60%. It has done better than that on eight occasions, but they’re all a long time ago; the most recent was 1953, when it won 169 out of 265 (63.8%). In view of our regular strictures on the Canadian electoral system it’s worth pointing out that neither of those involved winning a majority of the vote – it has not done that since 1940.

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UPDATE, Sunday afternoon: It’s probably nothing I said, but it’s worth noting that in the less than 48 hours since I posted the above, the betting odds in Australia have shifted quite strongly in Labor’s favor – it’s now at 5-2 on, with the Coalition at 2-1 against, which implies about a 68% probability of a Labor win.

FURTHER UPDATE, Friday 11 April: The movement in the Australian betting market continues; by close of business today, Labor is in to about 7-2 on with the Coalition at 8-3 against. Oddly enough, Sportsbet’s odds on Canada are very similar (in fact slightly more favorable for the Conservatives than for our Coalition), even though the polling there for the Conservatives is still dire, trailing by 6.6 points.