The tears of Scott Morrison had barely dried after the election when the bad takes started flowing from the mainstream media. It’s a not unknown phenomenon. Overall, there’s such a demand for content that people who don’t have that many ideas have to pump something out. Added to that is the News Corp imperative to spin for the right, a factor now a part of Nine newspapers’ calculations.
But the contenders for the Bad-Take Brownlow this time round may have been a little crazier than usual. Both Terry McCrann and Gerard “Gollum” Henderson went with innumerate and logic-chopped arguments that what matters in a preferential system is first-preference votes, and Jacqueline Maley faithfully reproduced the opposition’s pitch about The New Peter Dutton: that we don’t yet know him. (To paraphrase Jason Clare on Tim Wilson on election night, that we don’t like him is not because we don’t know him, it’s because we do.) And on the ABC, Stan Grant, bless, said teal supporters were just like Trump supporters, in that both were angry. Very Hegelian, Stan.
But of course, the winner on points and on the red carpet has to be Peter Hartcher, who is not only a wonky vote counter and a poor analyst, but is happy to do such twice in two weeks. Readers of the Age/SMH were gobsmacked to see their senior political opinionista, in a piece denying the significance of the teal and Greens result, completely undercount their first preferences by comparing the 2022 running totals on the AEC website with the completed count from 2019.
Did he not understand the difference between a first count and a declared count, one wondered? He soon did. Twelve hours or so after Hartcher’s initial assessment that the Greens’ primary vote had only increased by 4000 votes, (“Those are the official AEC figures,” he had noted), Nine newspapers had to run this embarrassing postscript:
Some readers have argued that this article puts too much emphasis on the primary vote count in explaining some voting trends. This is a valid point because I’ve used the unfinished primary vote count for last week’s election and compared it to the finished count for the 2019 election. So it’s not a comparison of like with like.
Ya think? But wait, it didn’t matter:
Another way of analysing the results would be to use the parties’ percentage shares of the vote counted so far … If you use this approach, it leads to the same conclusion — Labor’s share of the vote is down a fraction, the Greens’ is up a little …
A little? The Greens’ primary vote was up by 1.9%, which is the whole of Labor’s two-party-preferred majority, and a 20% increase on the Greens’ 2019 primary vote. But to put it in the way it most matters, that is an increase of 300,000 votes. Not 4000. Hartcher was out by a multiplier of 75.
Why didn’t they simply correct Hartcher’s article, rather than offer a “postscript”? Because they can’t. To insert the true figures — that the Greens’ vote increased by a “mere” 300,000 votes — would have made a mockery of the whole piece. The article is wrong at its core, and the postscript simply doubles down on the error. The whole thing should be removed from the website on grounds of basic factual error.
Would this make you circumspect in future? Not if last Saturday’s column is any sign. In making his contribution to the new press gallery imperative — big up Peter Dutton, to keep in-party contacts and restore the political duopoly — Hartcher has reproduced without interrogation or investigation one of Dutton’s utterly bogus claims, to wit:
The Coalition lost votes not only to its left but also to its right. On his preliminary count, some 200,000 voters deserted the Liberals to vote for the teals. At the same time, 700,000 left the Coalition to vote for the smaller parties to the right of the Coalition such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Clive Palmer’s United Australia, says Dutton, citing internal Liberal estimates. The Libs fragmented support on both sides.
There’s 1.6-1.7 million hard-right minor party voters. The 700,000 figure is… what? Those votes that return to the Coalition? No, because those votes are not lost. Those votes that preference Labor? Well, not all of them, because some of them would have been Labor votes. You can see this in some outer-Melbourne seats — with minor right party candidates on offer, Labor’s primary fell. But its two-party-preferred vote was largely unaffected.
The only votes these can be are “diverted preference” votes of a specific kind, where you somehow manage to lose votes to a party to the right, that then preference Labor out of… protest, or sheer orneriness, or what? If Dutton or Hartcher can find 700,000 of those votes, and in even vaguely winnable seats, I’d love to see them.
But wait, it’s even better, because the figures are in error in an entirely different fashion. This election, the three “main” hard-right parties — One Nation, UAP and Liberal Democrats — ran in all 151 seats and won in none of them. The 1.6 million votes are from that exercise (and the 700,000 from somewhere within that). The 200,000 votes attributed to the teals are taken solely from the eight victorious teals, at about 30,000 votes apiece.
But community independents of various shades ran in about 40-50 seats. The total vote for independents was 760,000. I would suggest that about 500,000 of those votes (which include the victorious teals) were for community independents — i.e. sane progressives with pretty similar programmes to the teals, with some suburban and rural variation. So a mystery 700,000 “lost” Liberal votes compared to 500,000. Except that 700,000 is probably more like 100,000. Heck of a job!
Dutton’s a politician, and can say anything he needs to get an effect (he may also be as genuinely stupid as Mark McGowan suggests he is, and not understand the maths). But what is Hartcher’s excuse for running Liberal talking points without scrutiny?
And what are the Nine newspapers’ and the Age/SMH’s editors’ excuses for running these error-strewn pieces as flagship articles? Do they no longer care what goes in, or what scrutiny it fails to withstand? It is desperately sad to see.
Still, Peter Hartcher, respect! You managed to be wrong two different ways in one article, and wave through two different types of error in one opposition-provided figure in the other. No one comes close. The 2022 Bad-Take Brownlow is yours! Unless there’s been a mistake in the count…
