 Griffith University's independent expert data informed analysis of campaign 2019. On this week's show we look at more of our seats to watch, the seats of Bonner, Capricornia and Longman. Then we take a look at the Senate race. So much has been discussed over the course of the campaign. The Senate is going to be intriguing and we don't know how long it's going to take to get there in terms of a result. And finally the campaign itself, the strategies and techniques used to influence your vote. All that ahead in this week's edition of Below the Line. Let's look first at the seat of Longman. John, you've been following this closely. Susan Lamb is the incumbent. She won the seat from Wyatt Roy. Tell us what's going on in this marginal seat that has had the by-election recently. Yes, it's very interesting for a number of reasons. It's had six parliamentary terms, four to the Liberals and two to Labor. It's now got really a first-time member even though there's been a by-election in there. The margin at the 16 election was 0.8. And one of the reasons for that was she got a lot of One Nation preferences, which she probably won't get this time around. The by-election was stronger, brings it up to about 4%. But Labor played a very, very strong campaign there. There was every leader from anywhere in Australia was in Longman campaigning to hold that seat because it was very iconic or a litmus test for the short leadership. So this time it's a different case. I think the LNP probably have a stronger candidate. He's not a political machine, Aparachik. He's a local retail merchant, quite well known in the area. Longman's quite split and divided between your retirees who live on the coast and then the strong Labor strongholds around the basically around the freeway around the Bruce Highway in those areas. And I think it's going to be a tight contest. I think a number of people, Longman was left off the list and we haven't seen a lot of senior labor people in the electorate, Nora Dixon, which is next door. So I think she's fighting on her own. She's running around the campaign with a mobile office and getting some attention. A lot of people say they haven't seen the Liberal candidate. But remember, most of the other candidates, there's about nine candidates in Longman, most of them are right-of-center. And so most of them will probably drift their preferences. Like the UAP will drift their preferences back to the LNP. So it will be a tough contest for Labor to hold. Yeah, a very tough contest for Labor to hold and such a diverse electorate as you pointed out. Extraordinary population growth, those congestion challenges. But I would have thought that for young commuters, young families, issues of childcare, some of the housing affordability policies that Labor has brought out. How do you think some of the policy issues will play? Jenny, I might throw to you on that. It's hard to say just because there's been such a strong scare campaign from the LNP side of politics. You would think it would have some appeal. You'd think that Susan Lamb would appeal to that demographic she is of that area and of that age group. So on the policy front, I think that Labor has a lot more to offer to that electorate than the LNP. So it'll come down to the... But we had some earlier polls from Dixon, which is the next door seat. And their three main areas was cost of living, which was about a 60% concern, followed by health, and then followed by sincerity in government, trusting government. Education was way down. Health is a big employer in one moment. I think it's the biggest single employer. It's a very big employer. And it's a very feminized employer. So it will resonate in the area. But congestion is another issue for that electorate. Well, Tracey, I was going to come to you on the sort of the gender question in that seat, because Susan Lamb is running, there's almost... And they had a young member in terms of Wyatt Roy. How do you think the My Mum moment last week, some of the other sort of gender dynamics, Scott Morrison's late kind of effort to enlist the female vote? For the voters of Longman, do those things matter? Well, I think it's been really interesting seeing the reaction on social media about the own goal by the news court people who actually put out that press release about Shorten's mother. Whether that resonates with the voters of Longman ahead of those other issues, those real life factors that I think all the electorates and people in those sorts of electorates are dealing with. But I think it's one of those things that builds on the concern that the LNP doesn't work well with women. So I don't think it's going to be a major factor, but I think it's again one of those other kind of emblematic pointers that this is a continual problem. And people will remember the seat of Longman was the catalyst for the Queensland LNP-led push against Malcolm Turnbull. But it seems those leadership issues have really dissipated in this campaign. Let's move on then to the seat of Bonner on the other side of the river. Tracy, you've been taking a look at the seat of Bonner. Tell us all about it. Bonner is held currently by the LNP's Ross Vaster on 3.4%. Vaster has held that seat well. He won it in 2004, held it till 2007, was voted out with the Rudd government's massive landslide win, and then again reclaimed it in 2010 and has held it ever since. It's an in-at-east Brisbane seat. It covers some of it's like the port of Brisbane, Wynnum, Manley, Tingalpa, Carrandale, Mount Gravatt. So it's got that kind of some industrial areas, but also a lot of suburban areas in it. And I think once again the same kind of factors that play out in in seats like Dixon and things like that play out here. Childcare pressures, some transport, particularly rail transport issues have been happening there. It's interesting though, when you look at Vaster, who is a conservative liberal, he supported the Dutton push. He voted against the same-sex marriage plebiscite where his electorate voted 62% in favour of it. You know, I'm not sure whether that will resonate this time around with the voters, but what I have heard from people on the ground there is that the LNP president seems to be quite reduced. Like they're not seeing this huge LNP presence in the electorate this time around. And there's a couple of seats where they really do seem to, and I mean this is both parties are having to decide and we talked about this last week, where they spend their resources. But they really do seem to have almost conceded, Ford. Is this a bit the same? You know, I think if the swing to Labor goes the right way, I think it's definitely one to watch. Great. Well, I mean, you know, in lots of ways the issues are very similar to others that we've talked about. You know, gentrification, the mortgage belt, you know, retirees and some of those. I mean these, you know, one of the big issues of the campaign I think, and we might come to this later, is how do you hold these incredibly fragmented and diverse constituencies together and those differences are only becoming greater? Thoughts on that? It's interesting because, you know, a decade or 15 years ago you would have in Brisbane, you know, Labor seats and Blue Ribbon Liberal seats. And I for a long time lived in Brisbane Central, which was a Labor seat, now it's gentrified and this has happened all over Brisbane and it makes it very hard to call and it's not going to wind back. So they're always just going to be split 50-50. Gentrification is a factor but so also is the fragmentation of the parties. I mean we've gone from having, you know, in the 60s and 70s, effectively about 10 parties and most of those didn't count. We had the Democrats riding in the 70s and the like. We've now got something like 60 parties, standing in the center, and it's fragmenting on the right. So we've got very few parties on the left, the greens possibly. Occasionally we've got some progressive element, you know, more or less an independent. But the vast majority of the tail of the parties is on the right wing and that's fragmenting that vote and they're appealing to various components of that. So things like overseas migration is a big issue in Dixon and Longman and yet it's not a electorate particularly affected by that. So here's an issue that's resonating but it's not actually that empirical in the ground. Yeah, it's fascinating. The independence and small parties in Bonner? There's six candidates in Bonner. I think the ones to really watch that will be in competition with Baster is the Labor candidate and the Greens candidate. Both have stood in state electorates before so, you know, foot for state. So they have recognition, main recognition. So there's some recognition there. They're the main ones, I think, that will be in competition to him and he's preferencing the Labor Party third. And this has been something on the tickets and the material that I'm receiving in Brisbane, the United Australia Party getting the second preference. There's no party names of course but there's just the names of the candidates and that's how it's going to be strategically targeted. Which brings this journey to the sea to Capricornia in the mining heartland of Queensland, you know, where there's been so much focus, wafer thin margin, Michelle Landry, Michelle Landry who doesn't seem to be able to keep the leadership of the National Party kind of on a leash when she does media commentary or answers questions. Could anyone at the moment? Could I? I guess so. But she does seem particularly undisciplined in that stuff, doesn't she? What's going on in Capricornia? Labor were optimistic. I'm hearing that they're getting concerned. The Capricornia was one of those seats, Queensland seats, six months ago that was going to roll Labor into power and it's trickling away as we speak. So Michelle Landry won it in 2013 and then again in 2016 but it had been a long-term Labor seat. So it's one of those mixed Queensland seats where you have, you know, a rural city in Rockhampton and then it goes into the hinterland, big coal seats. So there's a strong Labor vote in places like Collinsville and Dysart and Morrinbar and then you get the agricultural pastoral areas around Claremont which is a strong LNP vote and then split down the middle in Rockhampton. Do you think the miners will still vote Labor? Because I suspect quite a lot of them are now tradies and they will be looking to the importance of coal and regional development and that might split and that insulin that Capricornia has is now massive. It nearly goes halfway across the state. Well Labor's candidate Russell Robertson is a third generation miner from Morrinbar. So Labor has picked the candidate for that seat. He signed the pledge. So hopefully, I mean, you just couldn't have, you know, a left-leaning woman in that seat, I don't think. I think they've got the right sort of candidate. It's tricky because there's nine, you know, nine candidates and you have the full run. What is in play there? Not necessarily in play in other seats is the Cater Australia party. So they actually gained 7.1% of the vote at the last election. You know, there's been very little talk about them in the national coverage has there, but they were such a force in the state campaign and they really have, you know, I think been much more disciplined and better organized than the other minor parties and we saw that in the minority Queensland Parliament. And on the latest news poll, they're polling way more than Palmer. Palmer is in other, not even as a separate party. So where will their preferences go? And 11% in Queensland now in seats like Longman, they've got 17% at the last by-election and really run very little of a campaign. And how do they, how do their preferences split? Well, their preferences will split for largely for the LNP. Remember last time in 16, one nation probably made a political mistake by always voting against sitting members. They didn't look at who the sitting member was and whether they could live with that sitting member or what. They just voted against that. That affected all the sitting members votes. It dragged percentages off all the sitting members, which is why we saw some like 15 or 16 seats change hands in that election. So Jenny, you said that, you know, Labor's hopes in Capricornia are dwindling. And this is always the way, isn't it? So much hope I think we can see. It kind of gets back to the closer to the actual polling day. What accounts for that? It is one of those Adani seats. And I do think that the caravan of hope or whatever it was called was really a turning point for a lot of people in those central seats. And we've discussed this before, but really it, I think it just put a lot of people off. They don't want to be told how to vote. And I think from that stage, it's just come back a bit and the preferences, as John says, will actually support Michelle Landry. Most of those parties, except for the Greens, will probably preference her. And the Greens only had 4.7% of the vote at the last election there. So it's not going to get laid. Which just tells you, doesn't it, about the sort of extraordinary disjuncture, as we talked about last week. And I mean, you know, there'll be a temptation for people to say, oh, you know, Queensland parochialism or whatever. But it really does, I think, crystallise the extraordinary economic differences and drivers in different parts of Australia. And for me, that's just, you know, really a barometer of those differences. And it's a different election depending on where you are. And the major parties try and straddle that by running two campaigns, one for, you know, inner city Melbourne and one for central Queensland. And you just can't do that in this day and age. Not in a year of social media. And it might have worked once when, you know, you just had your person on the back of a truck talking about your electorate, but not anymore. No, I don't think it worked so well. Which brings us to, of course, what I think is going to be the most watched contest on Saturday night, voting in the Senate. We're going to take a look now at the whole issue of voting in the Senate, how to go about doing it, and how to direct your preferences, whether you vote above or below the line. What is voting below the line? There are two options for filling out your white ballot paper for the Australian Senate. You can vote above the line, based on the party, or below the line for individual candidates. Above the line, number at least six choices, or if voting below the line, you must number at least 12 choices. Either way, you can choose more than the recommended number. And the more you choose, the better. If you don't fill out enough boxes, there's a chance that the parties can decide where your vote goes. Due to above the line voting, some senators are elected with very low personal votes. In 2016, one nation senator Malcolm Roberts took his seat after receiving just 77 below the line first preference votes. He was later replaced by Fraser Anning, who only received 19 votes. They won their places based on the number of votes for their party. Understandably, places high on the party's Senate ticket are highly coveted by politicians chasing one of each state's six Senate seats. When voting for the Senate, consider voting below the line. The number of candidates might be daunting, but it gives you more say about who makes up this powerful House of Parliament. So there's been a huge focus on the Senate, but really, what's going to happen when you confront a ballot paper with 83 names on it? How should you go about approaching your task as a voter? Our chief explainer, Jacob Dean, takes a look. The Senate is a really important chamber in the Australian parliament. It's not where we decide who forms government, that happens in the House of Representatives. But we traditionally think of the Senate as a House of Review, because senators have the opportunity to scrutinise bills or proposed legislation, and they also have the opportunity to hold the government to account and to question ministers. That makes it really important to think about who gets elected into the Senate. Because they hold their positions for six years, they're in there for a really long time, and it means it's important to really make sure that the person that you vote for really reflects your views and your interests. The way that senators are elected operates a little bit differently to the way that we elect members of parliament into the House of Representatives. Broadly, the Senate operates on a proportionate model, which aims to allocate seats in the Senate according to the percentage of voters who want that particular party or that candidate. We've got 12 senators per state and two senators for each of the ACT in the Northern Territory. In a regular election, or a half Senate election, six of those senators in each state go out for election. That means that each seat that's up for grabs is worth about 14% of the vote, and so that's the quota that parties will be aiming for in order to win one or more seats in this election. That quota is really important for major parties, because they typically can expect to receive 30 plus percent of the vote, so they'll be hoping for two, maybe even three seats each, if they're lucky. But it's also really important for minor and micro parties as well, because they might struggle themselves to reach that 14% threshold, but with preferences from other smaller parties, that might be enough to get them over the line. A good example of that was Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party. In the 2016 election, because it was a full Senate election following the double dissolution, the quota was halved, so they only needed about 7% of the vote. They got 9% overall, which meant that they were able to hold two seats in the Senate. But this time around, if they got a similar number, that wouldn't reach the threshold at all, they wouldn't qualify for any seats. Despite the challenges of meeting that 14% threshold, we do see a lot more minor and micro parties contesting for seats in the Senate rather than the House of Representatives, because the 14% threshold is much easier to reach than the 50% threshold for a seat in the House of Representatives. It's been really interesting the past couple of elections to see just the plethora of micro parties, single-issue parties and independent candidates, all competing for a protest vote against the established or major parties. We see a lot of parties, especially on the right wing of politics, really springing up to try and capture voter dissatisfaction with the major parties' policies around some working class issues, around immigration. And what's going to be really interesting in this election is to see how those parties compete for what is a similar voter base. In Queensland, there's 83 candidates seeking elections, so the voters are going to be confronted with a really big choice on their hands and a huge number of parties who they probably have never heard before. And their task is going to be to pick amongst them to decide who should get the Senate seat. What's really important for voters is to do a little bit of research before they go into the polling booth to work out which parties do or don't align with them. It's not always possible to tell just from a party's title or logo what their main policies are. A good example of this is the Sustainable Australia Party, which sounds like a very left-wing progressive party that's pro-environment and might pitch itself as an alternative to the Greens. However, when you dig down into their policies, yes, they are for environmental protection, but one of their key proposed strategies for doing that is to reduce immigration numbers. A lot of people who would be tempted to vote for environmental sustainability are likely to sit on the left end of the political spectrum and are probably going to be pro-immigration. And so the party's policies wouldn't align with that voter's values. Accordingly, it's really important for voters to carefully research who they would like to vote for and to make sure that those parties align with their own values. So, John, the last election, it was a double dissolution. And the dynamics are very different at a half-Senate election. Talk to us about what we can expect to see this time and how those technical aspects contrast between the double dissolution and a half-Senate. Well, the way we count in the Senate is we have a proportional vote and we've had that since the 49 election. So that means everybody in Queensland votes for the same list of senators which is different from the lower house where you vote for your local constituency member. So that's one thing. But the way we count when it comes and we look at a Queensland electorate serve about three million, we're looking at a quota because there's six senators standing this time of around about half a million each. So the way we work that out is a formula by how many electors are in your state, voting as a whole, not split up and then plus one. So you've got to get that quota. So that's about 14.3 percent of the vote. So any candidate in the Senate or party who gets 14.3 gets one. If they get 28.6, they get two. If they're getting to the 30s, they've got a quota left over. They don't have quite a quota. And then what happens is from the bottom, we pick up the votes of the lower candidates who moved on parties who finished last and we eliminate those and count their preferences back in to see who eventually gets a quota. That's why usually with a six seat Senate election half Senate, we find four people get elected pretty soon and we know that probably by Sunday Monday. And then there might be a week or 10 days before we find the others because there's a very, very complex preference flow about who drops out first. If you and I were going and you're three votes ahead of me, I will drop out and my preferences will go maybe to you or to Jenny. So that's the way it goes. So it's bottom up for those last two positions. So that's why it's quite complicated. And the other big difference with the Senate is the change in the rules in the last time, making above the line six votes or up to six votes and below the line 12. So if you vote above the line, the parties allocate your preferences, not you. So they've already. I think that's a crucial point for people to understand. The parties have recorded their preferences in with the electoral commission and they're available in the booths. If people turn up to booths, they're available there. You can look at them. So if you want to vote, say, green, you can look at where the greens will be allocating their subsequent party votes. What that means, say, for example, that the Labour Party and the LNP is that if they get more than two quotas, which they will probably will get, their preferences Labour's will probably get a greener. And then the LNP may get UAP up because it's the party who's allocating the preferences in the lower house. Yes, we get how to vote cards, but you in the booth determine your preferences. You don't have to follow the cards. You can make your own up as long as you number the boxes. But in the Senate, you don't have to follow the cards either if you vote under the line. Yes, but the party. So the rule change around that this time, Tracey, is something I think you should explain for people. But under the line, in Queensland it would be less than 10% and the only two places in Australia where it's about 20% is the ACT and Tasmania where they're used to a hair clerk voting for the individual candidate. Sure, sure. But I think perhaps these changes where instead of if you vote below the line, in the past you had to fill out every single square. Nowadays you only have to fill out a minimum of 12. So you can vote 12 below the line and be absolutely guaranteed to know that that where you put your 12 votes is the preferences that will be counted. And I think that people will be motivated about that this time after the Fraser Anning 19 primary votes kind of question, or at least people who are very engaged in politics. Jenny, we've seen this extraordinary fragmentation, particularly on the right of, you know, and many of those candidates brought to us by Paul Inhance and actually at one time or another in the past. How well do the candidates running for the Senate understand the House's role, do you think? I don't, not very well. So Jacob mentioned that the Senate is a House of Review and what it seems to me happens is that there's a real disconnect between being part of a protest party or one issue party and what the Senate actually does. So the Senate does a lot of very kind of technical detailed review of legislation and can make amendments and then you can send it back to the House of Representatives. So these people arrive there without really an understanding. They see it as a platform for their views, but that is really not the day-to-day work that they'll be doing in the Senate. So you end up by getting some of those Paul Inhance and Stunts with the Burke or whatever, bringing it back to her issues because she doesn't have an opportunity in the Senate to talk about those issues. But I think that what drives them into is a transactional style of politics. So whoever wins. And unpack that for people because, of course, if as some of us think there could be a minority parliament on Saturday night, this transactional style, there's a platform created for the transactional style. Yes, so whoever wins will have to deal with this kind of probably controlling group in the Senate. And what they like to do is to, and it's a bit like American politics, where each vote you kind of, you do a deal. So, all right, well, I'll support this piece of legislation, your budget or whatever, if you agree to reduce funding for the ABC, which again, I think is one Paul Inhance and Stunt. So you're locking your issues onto a piece of legislation that might even be kind of related to that legislation. And so you get this thing where you're kind of doing these transactional deals. So whoever comes into government, I think needs to be careful not to go down that path because I think that's a big danger for Australian political life. Two quick points. One, a lot of the Senate work is in committees. So a lot of the time, you know, they're not sitting in the chamber in committees and that is hard work. And, you know, trying to work out compromises and negotiations. And a lot of these, the micro-party people aren't on board and often they don't turn up, they don't volunteer for that. And the second point I'd make is that if you look at the Senate vacancies, the ones who are coming up, that is half the senators who got elected in 16 stay and half, and the territory people come up, the next result is likely to be one gain for labour, one loss to a liberal. And the big questions will be whether Sarah Hansen Young in South Australia gets back and whether Palmer gets here or whether One Nation gets here. Well, the point is well made about turning up doing committee work and so on because Palmer found it very difficult to turn up in the House of Representatives. And one has almost never seen One Nation or minor party people on Senate estimates, which is of course one of the most important committee processes that the Senate goes through. I just wanted to touch quickly before we move on. We've almost got a generational change in the major parties, some very controversial dis-endorsements of Senate-along-term senators. Admittedly they are getting a bit long in the tooth. Barry O'Sullivan and Ian McDonald, who never goes quietly, no matter whether it's into the ministry or whatever. And then on Labour's side, of course, people like Claire Moore, who are leaving after along, and Cameron. Yes, of course. Oh, Doug Cameron, you're talking, yes, sure. So, you know, some big names leaving the Parliament. And of course, in New South Wales, we're seeing Jim Mullen, who's in an unwinnable spot, you know, almost campaigning independently. All right, well, does anybody want to predict what the Senate's going to look like? Oh, no. Oh, God, go on, John. Have a go. I think the crossbench, that is the non-coalition, non-Labor, is probably going to be about 18. I think they're going to lose a couple. They've lost Glyneholm already, and I don't think the Liberal Democrats will get that place back in New South Wales. They'll probably lose one more. So it's touch and go, whether, say, one nation gets back in Western Australia. And what a Palmer's prospect. I think it's quite good. I think quite good, mainly because... More ahead of one nation. Yeah, I think in the ballot, although his polls are going down at the moment. He's peaked too early, peaked in the middle of the campaign. And it may be going to PG. Yes, that's right, that's right. An urgent error. I think if he gets around eight or nine, he will survive by LNP preferences. By LNP preferences. And then that's, of course, something that Labour has really ramped up in this last week. But one nation will also be fighting for that place. If they get 11% or 12%, depending on preference flows to then, that's going to be quite competitive, and it might be a neck and neck struggle between one nation and... And it doesn't allow them... We think the Greens will pick up one. Probably will with later. And with Larissa Waters. I mean, Waters is reasonably well known. Yeah, definitely. I think so too. Yep. Co-JPT leader? Co-JPT leader, yeah. Of course, campaigns can be incredibly unpredictable, and leaders always need to have up their sleeve the potential to have a diversion. That is sometimes known as the dead cat strategy. Jenny Menzies explains. Political parties like to control media conversations, particularly during election campaigns. However, sometimes they lose control of the narrative and resort to desperate measures to shift attention. One such strategy is known as throwing a dead cat on the table, also known as a dead cat strategy. The team describes a maneuver to regain control by throwing a more shocking issue into the mix, distracting people from the topic. The party wants to avoid. Everyone becomes fixated on the dead cat, and the issue that was causing the party grief will fade into the background. This kind of diversionary tactic becomes critical in the heightened atmosphere of an election campaign, but it only works if the right elements are in place to shift the opponents from their preferred ground to your ground. Firstly, the dead cat must be a topic that is irresistible to the media, something tantalising and negative that will appeal to their audiences. Secondly, it must also be something of general interest and easily understandable. Thirdly, it can't be done by the leader, but instead should be offered up by more junior minister or shadow minister. While a dead cat strategy might be the best way to avoid debate and derail the opponent's momentum, it can also be risky. Photos can be put off by negative campaigning, and as much as you might shift the focus in the short term, you never know when a dead cat might be thrown in your direction. You know, we're getting close ourselves to the end of this grand final edition. Yes. And it would not be responsible for us not to really have a look at the campaign itself. It's been a really dirty and unpleasant campaign, which we expected, very negative, very personal, and actually the rhythms of it so disrupted by these extraordinary pre-poll figures that are now up around 2.7 million, is that right? The latest numbers. So Tracy, attack ads, misinformation, scare campaigns. We've seen it all, Anne. Sum it up for me, please, in terms of the tactics and strategies of both sides. It's no wonder that people get completely fed up with politics. With this campaign, people that care about the issues and actually want to find out information, they've really got to look for it, because if you just look at the ads and things like that, there isn't a great deal of this is what we're going to do. It's more about this is what they're going to do, and that's going to be really bad for you, particularly on the LNP side, I have to say. It's been all about higher taxes and yet not really explaining, apart from on the very odd campaign launch day, where he did actually announce very quickly his new payments for young people and first home, reducing the deposit needed to 5%. It's been a very personal political leader, and on the LNP side, you haven't really got a sense of the team. There's been no, the environment minister is missing in action, isn't coming out to discuss anything. And I can understand in a way, because of all the issues that they've had leading up to this and the instability there, why that might be the case. But nonetheless, it's been a very Morrison led show. Which considering his recognition was actually pretty poor, he's a risky strategy, but he's campaigned very well. I mean for what it is, he's campaigned very well. I think he's a very good campaigner, and I think he gets out and meets and greets, and I think he's quite personable like that. But most politicians are when you meet them in person. I think the big difference in this election from say the last one is we've often had people running for the Prime Minister's office, and remember a lot of people do vote presidentially, and we run campaigns presidential. We've had leaders we've liked, Bob Hawke would be a good example of that. We've had leaders we respected, even though we didn't particularly like them. Paul Keating, John Howard might be in that category. And we knew what they stood for. And we knew what they stood for, and there was a substantial proportion of the electorate who liked Turnbull. This time we've got two leaders who we neither like nor respect, and that's turned the campaign very negative. We don't usually have negative campaigns. America has ignored extraordinarily negative campaigns. Well Tony Abbott arguably had a negative campaign. He had a very damaging campaign on Labor at the time with his three, you know, three-word slogans. It's kind of where the Rock really set in, I think, you know, in lots of ways. He's, you know, he's complete that negative, yeah, three-word slogans. I've seen one positive campaign, and that was from LNP. I've seen one positive campaign message broadcast. All the rest have been negative. So Jenny, inevitably after the campaign, there'll be the party post mortems. Not that I ever have confidence that they learn anything from them, but putting that to one side, there'll also be the review by the Joint Standing Committee of Electoral Matters which reviews the conduct of elections. Pre-poll voting, I think, will have to be a major issue in that review. What do you think it should look at in light of what we've seen this time? The pre-polling is interesting because that's actually been kind of escalating for the last couple of elections. So it, but it's reached peak this time and it will have to be looked at because it's such a large lot of resources by the Electoral Commission and all the parties to try and man all those pre-polling booths for three weeks. It's hard enough to man the booth on election day. I think on the kind of the wash up from the campaign, it's interesting the two different campaigns. I see Labor's as a very military sort of campaign. You can see that they've looked at the terrain and they've eradicated any issues. So they said someone go and see, you know, Hawkeye and Keating and get them together for a cup of tea and someone has to see, you know, Julia and Kevin because they have to sit together. So they've looked to the horizon and tried to smooth all that over. Whereas with Scott Morrison, he hasn't even tried to paper over those cracks. He hasn't tried to get people together in the room. So he's, he's out there as a solo performer whereas Labor has really pushed the team, the team. Sorry, go ahead. I was just wondering, perhaps that's because though it's relatively recently that the cracks appeared in comparison to Labor who's had a few years to kind of get over themselves a bit. And I just think they have been strategic. They've looked out there, they've decided to do a policy rich campaign, which probably might be the first one since about John Huston and Fight Back in 1990. And may well prove to pick up the same kind of approbrium that that went with that because it's exposed them to, you know, being a big target instead of a small target has created some difficulties for them with different constituencies. Yes. But I think they have made a number of constituencies angry. But I think there's been a calculation by people like Chris Bowen and Jim Chalmers that these people didn't vote for them anyway. So there is anger out there amongst these groups. They're just hoping that the goodies they offer, the free goodies they offer to the rest of the electorate will pull them over the line. The other big thing that might come out of a review is campaign funding. Absolutely. We've tied it up to some extent the campaign funding from donations and stuff. And that is meant to be the citizens making a contribution to the political parties. We give them public funding once the election's over by how many votes they'll get. But this election we've seen Palmer spending 55 million of his own money. He's not asking for donations. It is a personal investment to get it into politics, to get it to buy seats or to buy influence. He will get some of that back for his deposits for a lot of his candidates and he will also get some funding for the votes. So the issue is will the main parties who are a cartel, will the main parties actually try to restrict or prohibit how much we can spend. Total limits on spending. Because a lot of people think he's wasting a lot of money. He's not really doing much for democracy. And the public funding we give is to re-contest the next election with your administration. Is he going to re-contest or is he just going to pocket it? Like Paul enhanced it for me. Yeah, sure. And I mean, I guess, you know, for me what's really interesting about this campaign donations piece is we don't have real-time donations in the Commonwealth. We have them in Queensland at the state election and at council elections. You can actually see and we've made reforms so that that's the case. Yeah. Many of us, you know, understood from our research with liberal party operatives that they were very skinny in terms of funding. There actually seems to have been a big influx of money and it'd be very interesting to know where that's come from. On the left, you know, there's a lot of concern about get-ups, fundraising capacity and so on. So I think real-time donations has got to be the elephant in the room, hasn't it? Yeah. Apart from pre-poll voting of what needs to be considered. Final observations. Tracy. Oh, I think it's going to be a very interesting night on Saturday night. I think I hope in a way that this, you know, that the Labor Party are not punished too much for being brave because I think it's really important that we hear about what they plan to do and they've seemed to have moved from the shorter term, you know, three-year electoral cycle thing to a much longer term for some of their policies. They're actually looking at out, you know, up to 10 years, I think, in some of the policies and certainly the climate change things that, you know, people ostensibly care about. So I think, you know, hopefully that will be encouraged because I think it's better for democracy if all the major parties who have a real chance of being government actually can articulate what they're going to do next time, not just campaign on what the other fellow, you know, might do, but this is what I intend to do going out. Yeah. And I think, you know, Morrison's lack of an agenda has, you know, well, it's in the budget papers, you know, has been their defense, but then they pull something out of the economic team that hasn't been to cabinet in terms of that right thing. The economy is the strongest card. Yeah. But by far, I mean, it really doesn't have much else. To run on. Well, stop the boats and the economy. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing is, in terms of the campaign, we've seen an enormous focus on the leader, far more than in previous ones. There's always been the leader for a minute, but the media has just been obsessed with that leadership and I don't think that's changed many votes. And then below that, we've seen a very intense seat-by-seat fight. Now, I think that's probably in Australia down to about 20 to 25 seats. In some seats, the parties have given up. They're not spending any resources. They're not even handing out, you know, the normal things that come in your letterbox with fridge magnets and the like. Just, they're not spending the money because they've conceded they're not going to win that seat. And then the third level of the campaign is this social media stuff, which is almost out of control. People making up fake news, all sorts of things, you know, the Chinese are going to catch us in Australia and all this kind of stuff. And of course, the parties have suffered from that because they've elected candidates, often in seats they didn't expect to win, who've got these nutty views out there and they've had to dis-endorse them. And in a couple of seats, one Labour and one on one Liberal, they've had a candidate who had a really good chance of winning and they've had to dis-endorse them. And so we're seeing that in Melbourne and Lyons. And maybe Morrison trying to get them to, you know, declare before polling day is a mistake and we know how Abbott blew it in 2010 in terms of the negotiations. We've seen that before too. Jenny, final observation? Well, following on from what John said, I think I can remember when Julia Gillard was elected and it was a minority government and there was a lot of kind of shock because we weren't used to that in the federal sphere. I'm also at the State. I think, again, this is going to be very close. It could be a hung parliament. But I think it also kind of shows the end of an era where big swings were available to parties. You'd push one out and you'd have a huge majority. You'd hang onto that for a couple of terms and then it would swing back. Again, that's still happening at the state level. It seems to have disappeared from the federal arena and I think it will give something for political scientists to think about for some time to come. Nicely done. Well, that is about it for the grand final edition of Griffith University's Below the Line. My thanks to the panel, to our explainers and, of course, to our talented production team and crew. It's been a lot of fun. All it remains is for those of you who haven't pre-poll voted to turn out on the 18th of May to be glued to your televisions to see what happens and to exercise your democratic right and we encourage you to do that in an informed way.