My days as arguably Australia’s leading and occasionally accurate amateur psephologist are over!
I’ve torn down the shingle in my office and it’s been dumped unceremoniously in a commercial rubbish bin not far from my home (above).
I was left with no other option after yesterday’s column in The Bug where I predicted a narrow win to Labor in the Fadden by-election on the Gold Coast.
And to anyone who took a wager on that Labor win on my say-so, I give this solemn and iron-clad commitment: send me your bank details and password and I’ll consider reimbursing you to an amount no larger than $10. I did advise a very small wager at what would have been very juicy odds.
But can I just say a few words in my defence. I never actually ever believed Labor would win the Gold Coast seat. Yes, there’s my frank and startling admission that I sometimes write shit to achieve some pathetic level of notoriety. Who would have guessed, hey?
And I believe there were enough warning signs in that article that should have urged punters to be wary. I did hint that Fadden voters might be fucking stupid enough to be hoodwinked into voting on a totally unrelated and irrelevant state wide issue – laura norder generally and youf crime in particular.
So why is my shingle in the bin?
I certainly believed there would be a swing against the LNP, if for no other reason than Peter Dutton is a truly dreadful cunt who deserves to be punched about the head metaphorically at each and every opportunity.
But there were other factors I’ve wrongly given weight to. I’ve totally overestimated what I thought would be a certainty; that local voters would register their displeasure about having to vote almost two years out from the next poll and mark down their former MLA, the odious and obnoxious Stuart Robert for spoiling their Saturday.
And while I accepted that cost of living pressures on many Australians would be the other main issue for the poll, my ever-increasing gut guessed wrongly that we have not yet reached the stage where the Albanese government will start wearing the blame for that.
I would never, ever, have believed that in a field of 13 candidates, the LNP pick would at the end of counting be on 48.77 per cent primary vote, up 4.15 on May last year, with Labor down ever so slightly to 22.26 per cent.
The result reaffirms the normal trend of by-election results after the once-in-a-century shock of the Aston poll a few months back. And Peter Dutton’s mob is entitled to be fairly happy with the result, with a few caveats. The LNP was the only party that spent any real money on the contest, and the LNP’s candidate’s face sans pirate clobber was apparently everywhere.
Regardless, has any great harm been done if the federal issue of cost-of-living pressures has played a big part in this outcome? I hope federal Labor thinks it has.
The Albanese government came to power promising to leave no one behind, and 14 months later, those on Jobseeker continue to struggle well below the poverty line. That’s a very serious broken promise for mine.
Perhaps now is the time for Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers to do what they should have done a week after coming to power and discovering the state of The Crook from Cook’s cooked books – announced the abolition of the totally anti-Labor third-tier tax cuts and increase payments for the unemployed and some other sectors relying on government payments in truly tough times.
They would have long been forgiven for breaking that promise back then – a promise they will almost certainly have to break in the months ahead anyway if they’ve got any sense.
Don Gordon-Brown
PS: Goodbye, shingle. It was fun while it lasted.
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