Victorian Election Newsletter – Issue 2
14 November 2014:
With week two of the Victorian election campaign coming to an end, both of the major parties have spent the week focussing on winning votes in key battleground seats through a mixture of state-wide and local election commitments, media appearances by party leaders and campaign spokespeople, positive and negative television advertising, and grass-roots campaigning by candidates and teams of local party volunteers.
This morning’s Fairfax Ipsos poll suggests that at present Labor will win Government on Saturday 29th November, with Labor leading the Coalition 53:47 on a two-party preferred state-wide vote (based on preference flows at the November 2010 election). If this forecast is accurate, it will be the first time since 1955 that a Victorian government has failed to gain re-election for a second term.
The Department of Treasury and Finance Pre-Budget Update was released this week, outlining a downward revision to the May Victorian Budget position by $1.83 billion over four years to 2017/18. This was put down to lower estimates for land tax, a deferral of a $500m Commonwealth payment for the Western section of the East-West Link, and further pre-election spending since May. The Pre-Budget Update forecasts Victoria’s budget surplus to be $1.1 billion in 2014/15, growing to $3.0 billion by 2017/18.
Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews spent the week touring Victoria in his “putting people first” branded campaign bus, while elsewhere, Premier Denis Napthine used the week to lift off the back of his campaign launch held last Sunday in the must-win region of Ballarat, where the Coalition is looking to win the newly created seats of Wendouree and Buninyong.
The Coalition finished the week by confirming it will be putting the Greens party last in its preferences on how-to-vote cards, severely limiting the chance the Greens have of taking inner-city seats off the Labor Party, including the seats of Brunswick, Melbourne and Richmond.