With Anthony Albanese still drip-feeding hints about the election date (despite major parties having already swung into campaign mode), it seems bookmakers can’t wait any longer, with Sportsbet opening markets on the next sworn-in government, the type of government formed and several key electorates.
When it came to the recent US presidential election, punters were more accurate than pollsters. But if the markets are to be believed, Toto the cavoodle will soon be scampering out of The Lodge.
Betting odds in Australia are commonly expressed as a dollar figure, i.e. if an outcome is paying $2, one would receive $2 for every $1 staked. At the time of writing, Sportsbet’s markets are favouring the Coalition to form the next government, offering $1.61 over Labor at $2.25, and preferring a Coalition minority over a majority, $2.80 compared to $3.10. A Labor minority government is paying $2.63, and a Labor majority government — the stated goal of Anthony Albanese — is paying $12.
While Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has said he is open to negotiation (albeit not with the Greens), the prime minister has said in the event of a hung parliament that Labor “won’t be entering into any coalitions”. The latest possible date for a simultaneous half-Senate and House of Representatives election is May 17, which means the latest possible time for the dissolution of Parliament and issuing of election writs is around mid-April.
The majority of markets currently offering odds on individual seats are safe electorates. In NSW, the five markets open are on Blaxland (held by Education Minister Jason Clare), Watson (Home Affairs, Arts and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke), New England (former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce), Grayndler (Prime Minister Anthony Albanese) and Warringah (independent Zali Steggall).
Some key battleground seats have interesting odds. In the inner-Melbourne marginal seat of Macnamara, where incumbent Labor MP Josh Burns sits on a 0.4% margin against the Greens, Labor is $1.83 favourites to retain the seat, with the Greens (represented by former Higgins candidate Sonya Semmens) paying $2.37.
In the similarly marginal Tasmania seat of Lyons, which stretches across the state from Hobart’s northern fringe to just south of Launceston, the Coalition has $1.52 odds to take the seat from incumbent Labor MP Brian Mitchell, with $2.62 offered to retain.
Psephologist Dr Kevin Bonham told Crikey that betting odds were “overrated”.
“There are some people out there who have this belief that the market never lies, but this belief persists no matter how many times it is proven to be false,” he said, pointing to the 2019 election where Scott Morrison’s Liberals won against the odds, in such a surprise to betting companies that Sportsbet paid out early on a Bill Shorten and Labor victory, losing at least $5.2 million in the process.
“They’re not that reliable, but they are interesting to keep an eye on, particularly for things where you don’t have anything else concrete.”
Asked whether betting odds reflected a potential male skew given the nature of betting demographics, Bonham agreed, saying, “In some elections, when you’re well out from the election, there seems to be a bit of a Coalition skew, based on the people who are betting on elections — they’re more likely to be Coalition supporters and they tend to bet accordingly.”
“There’s been times in state election lead-ups where the money has been quite close to even when it was completely obvious that Labor was going to win the election.”
On whether the Albanese government’s continued slide in the polls and dire betting odds meant curtains for Labor’s term of government, Bonham said it was too early to make those judgements.
“In terms of the history of elections, federal governments that are only a little bit behind at this point, that’s not normally a problem, they quite often recover … so at this stage, just looking at the history of where the government is at, you wouldn’t say that that was a bad thing, you wouldn’t say that their position is hopeless,” he said.
“But what is difficult for them is that, to me, they haven’t shown any ability to increase their vote so far. It’s just gone downhill through their term, which is interesting and different to previous governments that have done these last-minute rallies.”
Bonham noted that headline markets flipped significantly in favour of the Coalition following the election of Donald Trump in the US “for no other reason other than that Trump had won”, but that Trump’s election also resulted in “a lot more discussion of just how badly incumbent governments are going around the world in the past 12 to 18 months. So it’s not so clear that it was just people over-reading the Trump election.”
Professor Simon Jackman, a data scientist and honorary professor at the University of Sydney, published his research into the accuracy of betting markets in the 2022 election, noting that while Sportsbet’s markets did accurately predict the 2022 election outcome, unlike in 2019, several key data points showed the weaknesses of betting markets as a predictive tool.
Sportsbet markets, per Jackman’s research, did not predict the Greens winning three seats in Brisbane, and noted that surveys by YouGov pollsters in each seat outperformed betting markets, predicting four more House of Representatives races than Sportsbet odds.
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