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A bloodbath it wasnt, even if that was the word the Sunday Telegraph chose for its front page. At the end of Saturday nights counting in the NSW election, the Coalition government had definitely lost eight seats in the Legislative Assembly, and possibly two or three more from among those still in doubt.

While the votes recorded a hefty swing away from the government to Labor and independents alike, the actual damage was relatively restrained, as if mimicking an election campaign and a polling night finale conducted with a friendly cordiality that you wish all politicians could adopt.

This was a change of government, but no wipeout. After ruling New South Wales for fifty-one of the seventy years between 1941 and 2011, Labor will resume control in 2023 with an agenda that has generated little excitement or alarm. Its leader Chris Minns, like Anthony Albanese, made himself a small target and let the anti-Coalition wave sweeping Australia do the rest.

At the end of the night, Antony Green estimated Labor had won 54.3 per cent of the two-party preferred vote a swing of 6.3 per cent declaring it has secured a majority in the new Assembly. While that is the most likely result, it was a bit premature, and yesterday the ABC withdrew it, and Green revised his numbers to list fourteen of the ninety-three Assembly seats as still in doubt.

My own list is a bit shorter. On my count, Labor has won forty-five seats just two short of a majority and leads in another four seats too close to call. The Coalition has won twenty-eight seats, and leads in another four that it will probably retain.

The Greens have held on to their three (Balmain, only just), the three ex-Shooters MPs easily held their seats as independents despite a nasty campaign by Clubs NSW against Murray MP Helen Dalton, who has spearheaded the push for gambling reform as did three others elected as independents in 2019. And teal independents hold narrow leads over Coalition MPs in two seats.

But we are only at half-time in the counting. In a reform we should probably welcome, the NSW Electoral Commission ordered that counting end at 10.30 pm on polling night, recognising that its staff had been working all day beforehand. And yesterday was free of counting. On the ABCs estimate, the votes counted for so far amount to just 50.2 per cent of enrolled voters.

About 90 per cent usually vote, which means 40 per cent of the votes are still to be counted. And the votes to come include the vast bulk of some 888,000 pre-poll votes, and up to 540,000 postal votes. As a rule, they usually lift the votes of the Coalition and Greens at the expense of Labor and independents and sometimes that changes results.

Antony Greens pendulum showed the Coalition going into the election with forty-six seats, Labor thirty-eight, with six independents and three Greens. So far the Coalition has lost eight seats, and ten others remain in doubt. Labor has relieved it of seven seats Camden, East Hills, Monaro, Parramatta, Penrith, Riverstone and South Coast while the mayor of Northern Beaches, Michael Regan, won the blue-ribbon Liberal seat of Wakehurst as an independent with a phenomenal swing of 27 per cent.

My list of seats in doubt includes three in which Labor leads the Liberals Terrigal (with 51.27 per cent of the two-party vote), Ryde (50.67) and Miranda (50.35) and three where the Liberals lead Labor: Holsworthy (50.80), Oatley (50.40) and Goulburn (50.33).

There is also the strange case of Kiama, where MP Gareth Ward, who is legally blind and albino, has been suspended from parliament and thrown out of the Liberal party after being charged with separate counts of sexual assault and indecent assault, both against other men. He stood as an independent, and Kiama Liberals ignored their official candidate and rallied behind him. The official two-party figures show him trailing Labor (51.90), but later first-preference figures suggest hes gone ahead.

Independents lead the Liberals in Wollondilly (51.73) and Pittwater (50.06), while the Liberals lead in Willoughby (50.69). My best guess is that postal votes will help the Liberals hang on to most of these ten seats, but Labor will win enough to end up with a majority of about three seats, similar to Anthony Albaneses majority in the House of Representatives.

The actual votes in the first half of counting were: Labor 37.1 per cent, Coalition 34.8, Greens 10.1, independents 8.8 and others 9.2. The high vote for others is worth noting, because unlike the federal and Victorian elections, there werent that many other candidates. Yet instead of the 2 or 3 per cent they polled in those elections, this time the minor candidates kept polling 5 to 10 per cent, sometimes more.

Preferences are optional in New South Wales, so they matter less and both the Coalition and One Nation made a point of urging their voters to just vote 1. Suit yourselves, guys, but preferences do help to win seats. If Labor wins a majority, it will certainly be due to preferences from Greens voters and others.

Its far too early to call the final outcome in the Legislative Council, but on the votes counted on Saturday night, the swing was big enough to give Labor a chance of being able to cobble together a majority of left-wing parties, including the Greens, Legalise Cannabis and Animal Justice, on key issues. But its more likely that the new Council will be evenly split between left and right.

In my view, this is not a result that calls for a lot of analysis. Democratic governments the world over tend to have a limited life span. As former Victorian premier Dick Hamer put it, Every decision you make, you make an enemy. And some will remain enemies until the day you die. Eventually, more than 50 per cent of voters will be persuaded that it is worth giving the other side a turn, and the government is out.

New South Wales has been generally a Labor state in our lifetimes. The turning point came two days after Australia entered the second world war: Labor MPs ganged up to overthrow the dictatorial demagogue Jack Lang and install the cautious, efficient and likeable Bill (later Sir William) McKell as their leader. McKell led them to a landslide win in 1941, and they stayed in power until 1965. Labor governments in Sydney tended to follow his example: play safe, sometimes play favourites and, above all, keep the voters on side. They are rarely radical.

Since 1941 the Coalition has had just three spells in power, of which this was the longest. The outgoing government stood out for its massive public works program, especially in Sydney, encompassing both roads and public transport, but also for the borrowings that funded it and for the relatively high turnover of leaders and ministers as a result of minor but damaging problems with the Independent Commission Against Corruption.

But it was a government of reformers. While its Coalition partners in Canberra failed to tackle climate change seriously, it was out front in leading the transition to a renewables economy. In recent months, its advocacy of a cashless gaming card enabling problem gamblers to set a limit on their losses had the potential to be the most important gambling reform Australia has seen. Unfortunately, Labor is under the thumb of the clubs lobby and plans to run only a token trial applying the card to 500 of the 90,000 poker machines in the state.

This was a government open to ideas and reform very different from the federal Coalition under John Howard and since, which, with its media partner Murdoch, has specialised in manufacturing issues it could use to try to wedge Labor (of which the phenomenally expensive nuclear submarines will be perhaps the most damaging long-term consequence).

All that said, the fall of the Perrottet government is a huge blow to the Coalition nationally. Its clear that the Liberal brand name has suffered from the miserable record of its nine years in federal office. Tasmania is now the only government left on its side, with Labor controlling every other government bigger than a local council. I covered this in some detail in an earlier article and wont repeat the argument here.

But its conclusion must be underlined. Since Daniel Andrews was elected as premier of Victoria in 2014, we have been in a pro-Labor cycle that has changed almost every government in the country, and shows no signs of slowing. The Victorian election, which should at least have given a start to the next pro-Coalition cycle, instead revealed a Liberal Party lost in the doldrums. Now a government that was arguably the best the Coalition has produced in this century has been thrown out of office.

This could just be cyclical, but I dont think so. The Liberals federal leadership requires a bold reformer, a young Menzies or Whitlam, to bring it back into the mainstream of Australias changing values. Instead it has Peter Dutton, a business-as-usual leader who has done nothing to reposition the party, and sees no need to.

Apart from households becoming poorer as prices grow so much faster than wages, no one issue dominated this election. The swing was erratic from seat to seat, but more or less statewide, although stronger in Sydney than in the bush. Even in the classic two-party contests, massive swings from the Coalition were recorded in some seats: 15 per cent in Parramatta and South Coast (two of Labors gains) and in Miranda (one of those it hopes to win) and 18 per cent in Kogarah, the southern Sydney seat of incoming premier Chris Minns. In the seven seats Labor has clearly gained, the average swing was 10.8 per cent.

Yet some seats, mostly in the bush, swung the other way. And the Coalition looks like retaining six of its eight most marginal seats. Upper Hunter (where Labor needed a swing of only 0.5 per cent) swung to the Nationals. Goulburn (3.1), Willoughby (3.3), Tweed (5.0), Winston Hills (5.7) and Holsworthy (6.0) all look likely to end up staying with their present owners, if only just.

There were some interesting outcomes in the count:

The teal independents just missed out. The federal election saw them win four seats in New South Wales and come close in several others. But while Judy Hannan (a former Liberal candidate who insists shes not a teal) looks well-placed in Wollondilly, the other four Climate 200 candidates in Sydney look likely to fall just short.

This reflects the real differences between state and federal Liberals on climate action and integrity watchdogs, as well as state laws that restrict funding for electoral newcomers. But it follows a similar outcome in Victoria, suggesting that some voters feel the teals are needed less in state parliaments than federally.

The Greens also missed out. They seem to have held their three existing seats although Antony Green still classes Balmain as in doubt but didnt come remotely close to winning any others. Their upper house vote was just 9.1 per cent, enough for two seats of the twenty-one, but crushing their hopes of winning a third. In only two state seats in Sydney are the Greens genuine contenders, compared with nine in Melbourne.

The southeast of the state, which voted en bloc for the Coalition in 2019, went almost entirely against it this time. The Liberals lost Bega last year at a by-election after Andrew Constance stepped down to run for the federal seat of Gilmore (and lose narrowly). Now they have lost South Coast and Kiama along the coast, while inland, the Nationals lost Monaro and the Liberals are trailing in Wollondilly.

Monaro could be a microcosm of the Coalitions years in office. Most of its voters live in and around Queanbeyan, across the border from Canberra. At the 2011 election, energetic young National John Barilaro wrested it from popular Labor minister Steve Whan. In 2015 Whan tried to come back, but lost narrowly. In 2019, without Whan to compete with, deputy premier Barilaro had a massive victory. But then he tried to move to Canberra, met strong resistance, declared war on koalas, publicly admitted he was struggling with mental health issues, and ultimately quit politics. On Saturday Whan returned to win the seat in a 15 per cent swing.

Speaking of the war on koalas, one of the most unusual contests was in Port Macquarie, a hot spot in the battle for lebensraum between developers and koalas. In 2020 the towns MP Leslie Williams quit the Nationals over Barilaros reckless and unreasonable behaviour and defected to the Liberals.

On Saturday the two Coalition partners faced off, and the Port Macquarie voters unambiguously chose their pro-koala MP over her National Party challenger. Lets hope that war is now over.

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The Liberals' best government loses office Inside Story - Inside Story

Otherwise, the results from NSW show it was pretty much a garden variety its time election. As of the latest count, the Coalition suffered a 6.8 per cent primary swing against it, almost all of which went to Labor and teal independents.

One Nation, which would typically profit from a disgruntled Liberal base, recorded a swing towards it of just 0.7 per cent to record a statewide vote of 1.8 per cent. The Shooters went backwards.

As moderate Liberal senator Andrew Bragg noted on Sunday: Obviously, weve lost a lot of seats to Labor and last time I looked Labor was a party of the centre-left.

At the last federal election, the Liberals were punished in moderate seats, not conservative seats, but there remains an entrenched determination among the majority that the party needs to become more conservative. This may be good for unity but at what point, if at all, will it seek to embrace the middle where elections are won?

The situation facing the Liberal Party is more dire than in November 2007, when, after Kevin Rudd defeated John Howard, every government, state and federal, was Labor.

The most senior surviving Liberal leader was then Brisbane City Council lord mayor Campbell Newman.

Following Labors election victory in NSW on Saturday night, the situation for the Liberal Party on paper is only marginally better.

While the mainland is again all red, both state and federal, Tasmania remains blue, making Premier Jeremy Rockliff the nations most senior ranking Liberal.

Not so long ago, when there was a change in federal government, voters would hedge their bets and vote differently at a state level. By the time Tony Abbott took back power federally six years after the Howard defeat, every state and territory except South Australia and the ACT had switched to Liberal rule.

This time, such a turnaround over the next six years is hard to envisage. The partys divisions are riven by a destructive factionalism, the base is shrinking and the major party vote is fragmenting, meaning it has to be earned, not assumed.

Since Anthony Albanese defeated Scott Morrison in May last year, Labor was re-elected in Victoria and won government in NSW.

In South Australia and Western Australia, the recently minted and super-popular Labor premiers Peter Malinauskas and Mark McGowan are going nowhere for a very long time. In WA, there are only two Liberals in the parliament.

Indeed, with NSW done and dusted, the next election of consequence is not due until October 2024, in Queensland. The Liberal National Party has a good chance of defeating a long-in-the-tooth Palaszczuk government, but thats about all there is to look forward to.

(The NT goes to the polls in August 2024 and the ACT in October. In the latter jurisdiction, Labor and the Greens have been in government for more than two decades and there is little prospect of change).

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese campaigned alongside Labors candidate for Aston, Mary Doyle, on Thursday, but said his party would be the underdog in the byelection.Joe Armao

In the interim, those in the Liberal Party looking for a glimmer of hope are focused on this Saturdays federal byelection in Aston, in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, where it will hope to hold the seat being vacated by Alan Tudge.

A government has not taken a seat from an opposition in a byelection since 1920 but if that streak is broken on Saturday, it will be a calamity for the Liberal Party.

Federal leader Peter Dutton is so unpopular he could not campaign in NSW. By contrast, on Friday last week, Anthony Albanese started the day in Aston and finished in Sydney.

There are five million people in metropolitan Melbourne. The Liberals hold just three seats there. That will be two if they lose Aston.

The psychological importance of winning Aston for the Liberals cannot be overestimated. A loss would be a hammer blow for morale. Duttons leadership would be spared by dint there is no alternative.

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For the Liberals, this is worse than 2007 - The Australian Financial Review

Its little known today, but a major driver of Henry Fords interest in machines was an aversion to work. And horses. Born into a farming family in Michigan, Fords migration away from the land was rooted in a desire to avoid the dawn-to-dusk toil that defined life for an overwhelming majority in the 19th century.

So, while Ford is most known for having democratized access to the automobile, its less known that Ford Motor Company also mass-produced tractors. 650,000 in 1927 alone. In his words, What a waste it is for a human being to spend hours and hours behind a slowly moving team of horses in the same time a tractor could do six times as much work."

Fords intimate knowledge of how machines multiply human productivity while reducing time on the job came to mind while reading Washington Post columnist Max Boots recent assertion that Russia is in a demographic death spiral. Who is the source of Boots pessimism, or optimism? Its none other than American Enterprise Institute fellow Nicholas Eberstadt.

Eberstadt is the leader of a strain of conservatives thoroughly convinced that the main crisis awaiting us is a consequence of people in more developed countries choosing to have fewer kids. Eberstadt is to demographic death spiral what Michael Mann is to catastrophic global warming. Both have flocks to feed, and feed them they do with narratives that actual market signals formed by actual information thoroughly reject.

The global warmist in Mann promotes an endless picture of the worlds coastal cities literally going under water, all because the people in the well-to-do parts of the world now avail themselves of cars, air conditioners, and other mechanized advances that make living so pleasurable today. The only problem with Manns preaching about the hell that awaits us is that human migratory patterns and pesky market prices disagree. At present something north of 45% of the worlds population lives in coastal areas, and the previous number is expected to grow.

In concert with this migration to coastal cities allegedly set to go under water is a rather evident surge in the price of real estate. Yes, you read that right. In the global locales that Mann and his warming crowd claim will be washed away, the cost of dwellings on whats set to be washed away grows and grows.

It makes you wonderabout Mann. Smart as he surely is, he cant possibly know more than the markets. And if you doubt the latter, he surely cant have anywhere close to the combined knowledge of half of the worlds population.

Which brings us back to Boot. Under the sway of Eberstadt, hes convinced that Russias birthrate of only 1.5 children per woman has it as previously mentioned in a demographic death spiral. Except that people are not static creatures. Theyre instead dynamic parts of an increasingly global whole.

The 1.5 Russian children per women being born today are entering a world in which every good and service produced within it is a beautiful consequence of intensely sophisticated global cooperation. To use but one of countless examples, Boeing airplanes are comprised of millions of intricate parts manufactured around the world. And that only tells part of the story.

To see why, think back to Ford and his fascination with machines. He yet again understood that machines multiply human effort. A man working today can do the work of hundreds and realistically thousands of men born when Ford was. Throw in technology that increasingly thinks for us, and its easy to see that the babies being born today will be the productive equivalent of tens of thousands born when Ford was in 1863.

Yet Boot thinks Russia days are numbered because of 1.5 children per woman? How much time did it take for him to read the fascinating report written by Eberstadt in which the demographic death spiral was bruited as a negative factor for so many developed countries, and by extension, the world?

The good news for Boot is that age 53, hes got time to make up for time wasted on a pessimistic assessment of the future that is mocked by markets (watch investment flows, including a surge of investment into low-birthrate countries like the U.S. and South Korea), machines, and simple common sense. Whats true for Boot is happily true for Eberstadt too, age 67. Indeed, with machines increasingly thinking for us, its only a matter of time before man aided by machines unlocks the secrets to ever longer life.

Its all a reminder that contra the pessimists, the only threat to people who populate the closed economy that is the world is a lack of freedom. Everything else will be taken care of by the very market forces that presently look disdainfully at catastrophic fear-mongering promoted by the dominant ideologies.

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Beware Liberals and Conservatives Delivering 'Catastrophic News ... - thepress.net

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that the Constitution did not guarantee a right to abortion, many expected the result to influence where students chose to enroll at college.

There were anecdotal reports of some students changing colleges, but the timing of the decision, in June, limited students from changing, especially at competitive colleges with strict May1 deadlines for responding to an offer of admissions.

This is the first year when the decisions students are making about where to enroll will be after that Supreme Court decisionand after a palpable coarsening of relations between conservatives and liberals.

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We wont know the impact for sure until after the May1 deadlines, or, for more colleges, until students actually enroll. But a new study from the Art & Science Group, being released today, found that nearly one in four high school seniors ruled out institutions solely due to the politics, policies, or legal situation in the state where the college was located. Further, the study found that this behavior was statistically true across liberals, moderates and conservatives.

In addition, Intelligent.com found that 91percent of prospective college students in Florida disagree with the education policies of Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and one in eight graduating high school students in Florida wont attend a public college there due to DeSantiss education policies.

Of those who arent likely to attend a public school, nearly half (49percent) say its due to DeSantis education policies. This group makes up 12percent of all prospective college students, including those who are in agreement with DeSantis education policies. Of students who are likely to attend a public school, 78percent are concerned his education policies will negatively impact their education, said Intelligent.com, a website focused on students.

The first thing about these studies is to gauge their significance. Most college students attend a college in their home state, and this has been the case for decades. And even states that send a lot of students out of state (say, California or Illinois) also import students. In fact California colleges (public and private) are 88.9percent made up of Californians, and Illinois colleges have 88.2percent of students from Illinois. Students who attend community colleges, the plurality of all students, stay close to home. And despite the extensive press coverage of the Ivies and the Universities of California, Michigan and Virginia, all which have tons of out-of-state applicants, they are not the norm.

David Strauss, a principal of Art & Science, which advises colleges on enrollment issues, said his study doesnt have a large enough pool to determine which colleges are in danger of losing students. He suspects that Harvard and Yale Universities (and similar institutions) will be fine with conservative students, just as they have been fine even if they are known for attracting liberal students. The problem will be colleges that are a few spots below Harvard and Yale on the (ever-changing) prestige index.

What should colleges do in this environment, especially colleges in Southern states that value their liberal (and Northeastern or Midwestern) students or colleges in New York or Massachusetts that value their conservatives?

Colleges ought to continue to advance their missions and their students, he said. And the college should make clear how they can help students by communicating their intentions.

For instance, if a college wants to offer funds for travel out of state to students who need an abortion that may not be available, the college should state that.

But he acknowledged that this was new territory for colleges.

Liberals were more likely than conservatives to rule out a college because of its location, but only by a small margin (31percent to 28percent). Moderates were 22percent, and 12percent didnt categorize themselves.

Other groups that were more likely to eliminate a college because of its location: LGBTQ students (32percent versus 21percent for straight students) and non-first-generation students (26percent versus 19percent for first-generation students).

In terms of where liberals and conservatives are ruling out colleges, liberals were most likely to be ruling out colleges in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Texas. But they also were against enrolling in Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Carolina and Utah.

Conservatives ruled out colleges in California and New York.

Among the quarter of students who ruled out a school in our survey, about a third (32percent) passed over schools in their home state on the basis of a political or legal situation they found unacceptable, the report said. Interestingly, students who identified as Republican were significantly more likely to make that decision than were self-identified Democrats. While we dont know for sure, this might make the most sense if many Republican students live in blue states, which tend to be heavily populated.

The top reasons cited by liberals for eliminating a college from consideration were location in a state that was too Republican, too conservative on abortion laws, that showed a lack of concern on racial equity, too conservative on LGBTQ laws, too easy to get a gun and showed an inadequate focus on mental health.

Conservatives cited states as being too Democratic, too liberal on LGBTQ laws, conservative voices are squashed and having laws that are too liberal on abortion and reproductive rights.

Likewise capturing a different kind of concurrence across the political spectrum: about one-third of both liberal-leaning and conservative-leaning students registered apprehension around the practice of free speech on campus, assuming that voices like theirs politically might be squashed at colleges or universities located in certain states, the report said.

The findings were based on survey research fielded in January and February 2023, and it covered 1,865 domestic high school seniors. Respondents were 62percent female and 62percent white. The average reported household income was around $93,000. Responses were weighted by income, race, region and gender so that findings represent the larger domestic college-going population. The margin of error for this population of students is plus or minus 3.5percent, Art & Science said.

All this leads us to conclude that many prospective students are paying attention to political issues, be they general, longstanding perceptions and/or new and particular initiatives, and that is manifesting in the decisions of about a quarter of them to eliminate specific colleges and universities from their consideration sets. Liberal-leaning students are more likely to see an array of specific priorities playing out alarmingly in many states throughout the South and Midwest, the report said. Conservatives seem focused on a broader context and a more limited number of particular political issues.

With political polarization on the rise, and all regions set to see declines in the number of high school graduates in coming years, lawmakers and campus administrators would do well to take student convictions into account as political change-making continues to infiltrate campus life. And importantly, as the regional student markets shift, institutions will likely need to pay particular attention to their individual and distinctive positioning in order to attract students in their market despite challenges posed by state social policies, the report said.

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The role of politics in where students want to go to college - Inside Higher Ed

With the next EU elections only one year away, ALDE Party and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom hosted an event on 21 March to take stock of the current situation for liberals and how they plan to address key challenges for Europe in the upcoming months.

The event was moderated by ALDE Party Vice-President Svenja Hahn MEP, and included Karin Karlsbro MEP and Member of the German Parliament & Coordinator of Transatlantic Cooperation at the German Federal Foreign Office Michael Link as speakers. The discussion focused on the EUs role in the world, trade relations, enlargement, security and rule of law.

In her remarks, Hahn said:

The EU is struggling to position itself in the fast-changing world. The autocrats of the world are supporting each other. The EU should ask itself, what are we doing?

Speaking on the importance of trade, Karlsbro added:

Its more important than ever that democracies stand together. If we really wanted, we could cooperate and exchange in a way that benefits the climate, the economy and people. If we compete in state subsidies and try to follow the road that Biden has now started, I dont know how we will end up. Liberals have to address this in the next election.

When it comes to European security, Link addressed the efficiency of sanctions imposed on Russia since Putins invasion of Ukraine:

My biggest concern is that we can do 11, 12, 14 sanction packages, that would not be enough. Too many important countries are sitting on their heads. We need to find ways to convince other countries to participate in these sanctions. Its not enough to go and lecture others on sanctions. We need to find ways for these states to understand whats in it for them. We need them to understand that it is in the interest of India and Brazil and to win them over by getting them more share in cooperating with the EU. Russia has a capacity to circumvent the sanctions and unless we get more countries to join us, they will continue to do so.

Hahn concluded the discussion by reflecting on the upcoming European Elections in 2024:

We have a very important election next year and we clearly have a lot of challenges ahead of us, but we are liberals and we are working to find the solutions by getting close to the people.

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Liberals discuss a stronger EU in the world - ALDE Party