Talk:Post-election pendulum for the 2010 Australian federal election/Archive 1

Archive 1

Order of pendulum - very safe at top?

Visually I think it would make more sense to me the other way around - ie very safe at the top and marginal at the bottom.--Matilda ^talk 22:49, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

I disagree. It is done that way here and here as examples. Timeshift (talk) 02:03, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Having the most marginal seats at the top highlights those seats and that of course has its advantages - especially for the two example sites. Having it the other way around would allow one to actually judge how the parties compare in terms of number of very safe, safe, fairly safe or safer, ... seats held. That is the pendulum would highlight more clearly that the ALP has 9 very safe seats compared with the Coalition holding only 1 (and that two independent seats are in that cat too). Labor holds 28 safe seats and the coalition 14 and there is one independent safe seat. There are 17 fairly safe seats held by the coalition compared with 21 held by the ALP. The pendulum to me is more interesting if one compares ALP to the coalition on the basis of

Status of seat	ALP	Coalition
Very safe	9	1
Safe (incl v. safe)	37	15
fairly safe or safer	58	32
etc ...

Top down would highlight that the ALP are sitting on 58 seats that are at worst fairly safe compared with the coalition's 32 - that isn't so quickly visualised it seems to me in the other way. Otherstuffexists is an argument that is not necessarily the best - the purpose for those views in the examples may be to highlight the marginal seats - the alternative view oan highlight the stability of the ALP - the marginal seats are still apparent. --Matilda ^talk 04:48, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

• Here the Australian has done it the way I am suggesting: [1] - we can't do the curve but the visualisation of how the swing might work is better in this example than the examples given by Timeshift - as I said earlier - think the point for those examples is to highlight the marginal seats at the top - the point of The Australian's pic is to highlight where the swing will fall.
  - side note - In an article in advance of the last election [2], Mackerras predicted Bennelong would fall - in fact he claimed he had predicted the fall before McKew was a candidate on the basis of where the electorate sat on his pendulum. --Matilda ^talk 05:11, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I really don't think there are any issues with the current pendulum. It's an election for all seats, virtually all seats swung to Labor, so of course it looks like it's all Labor's way. It was the opposite prior to the election (though Labor had 3 very safe seats, technically the Libs dont have a single 'very safe' seat). And I don't think the marker to show many seats are needed is useful. If you read that the house has 150 seats, and the Lib/Nats have 64, they require an additional 12 for majority government. If someone wants to look at the pendulum and go by the 12 first in line, but to me that's not a wise decision, as swings are never uniform, but variations between the states tend to cancel each other out. The last pendulum did nothing like a uniform swing of seats, neither did the last or the last or the last. Timeshift (talk) 10:41, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Redistributions

i think its important to show the margins, corresponding to the new redistributions. Macarthur, Gilmore, Swan, Herbert, and Dickson are all now notional Labor seats. A full listing is here-- http://www.abc.net.au/elections/federal/2010/calculator/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by Supun47 (talk • contribs) 06:28, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

You really need to sort out what this page is supposed to be. If it was headed "Pendulm of results for 2007 election" it would be fine, though you would have to exclude Wright because it did not exist at the 2007 election. But it can't be the pendulum for the next election. What's your reasoning for including Wright at its estimated margin, but not every other electorate with a new estimated margin. And how can you have Wright while also including Lowe, Prospect and Kalgoorlie, all three of which cease to exist at the next election. Wright and those three electorates cannot exist on the same pendulum as they don't exist in the same Parliament. Why include Wright but not McMahon and Durack? You have 151 electorates on the pendulum, but there are 150 in the current parliament and 150 in the next. You cannot label this pendulum as the pendulum for the 2010 election because it just isn't, it is the results of the 2007 election. The 2010 pendulum will be the 2007 results adjusted for the redistribution. Your pendulum has to be one or the other, not a hybrid of the two. Your description of the pendulum is also wrong. You keep saying it lists seats in a 2-party preferred percentage order, but then you include various non-2-party results, such as Melbourne. The South Australian and NSW pendulums are infested with this confusion. It is fine to list seats by 2-candidate preferred margin if you like, but don't then have a heading that talks about seats being laid out in 2-party percentage order, which by definition requires a Labor versus Coalition margin. AntonyGreen (talk) 23:56, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

This pendulum is quite different to Antony Green's pendulum! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.225.52.134 (talk) 02:37, 15 April 2010 (UTC)