Peter Dutton is breathing a sigh of relief after holding the seat of Fadden in Saturday’s byelection.

Should he be cheering?

The morning after showed that byelection campaigns, in the lead up and in the aftermath, are mainly contests of expectations management.

Mr Dutton’s deputy and, Canberra speculation suggests his rival, Sussan Ley, hailed Saturday’s victory in the Gold Coast seat as a “strong endorsement of Peter Dutton (and) of our team”.

By contrast, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles dismissed it as a “lethargic” showing on Mr Dutton’s home turf in Queensland.

Above average?

The question of who won in Fadden might not be so simple.

Relative to trends shown in opinion polls, and the average result in a seat held by an opposition, psephologist Kevin Bonham scores it as a modest win for Mr Dutton.

“Fadden comes out as an above-average result for the Coalition by this standard, and (is therefore) similar to the byelections in Bob Hawke’s first term,” Dr Bonham wrote.

“Aston by comparison was a shocker.”

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Swings go against governments in byelections so much that they have in recent years tended not to contest those in seats held by oppositions.

(Mr Dutton’s recent loss in Aston, where votes swung to Labor by more than 6 per cent was a once-in-a-century drubbing).

The average swing towards an opposition when competing for a seat it already holds is about 1 per cent.

The Liberals are, on current counting, enjoying an increase of about 2.5 per cent on two-party preferred terms.

A veteran of Liberal Party state and federal campaigns calls that a victory, especially because – unlike previous polls in Queensland – they lost no votes to One Nation.

“Ten years ago this would be a break-even result but after everything that’s happened to those poor bastards it’s a huge win,” John Macgowan said.

(Aside from the Liberals’ position in the national polls, a robodebt royal commission final report last week slammed outgoing MP Stuart Robert; he quit days after its publication was announced).

On primary votes, the Liberals are up by nearly 4.5 per cent.

But One Nation is down marginally, while the Greens are down 4 per cent.

Voters inclined to go for either or Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party, which did not contest this poll, helped the Legalise Cannabis party score  7 per cent on its debut, spokesperson Craig Ellis claimed.

Mr Ellis reckons it’s a constituency that cuts across normal political divides.

“It’s a working-class drug,” he told TND. 

“(Our voters are) Boomers who think it’s ridiculous cannabis is still illegal.

“(But) we’re also landing those who might be (called) a protest vote or (supporter of) ‘anything but the majors’.

As many as 25 per cent of voters may have stayed away, which strategist Simon Welsh from Redbridge says depressed the turnout of Greens and Labor voters.

“The worrying sign for the Liberal Party is that it is a neutral result,” he said.

Cost-of-living issues were biting hard, he said – and yet “the needle hasn’t really moved”.

The LNP reportedly spent about $600,000 on the campaign, an amount perhaps only slightly higher than usual for a byelection in a seat as safe as Fadden.

Outspent

But it still appears to have been a lopsided contest of resources.

“If anything, the LNP underperformed against the historical average,” Treasurer Jim Chalmers told ABC on Sunday.

“That’s after spending more than half a million dollars on the seat, which we think was probably at least 10 times what Labor spent on the seat.”

It’s not known if the Treasurer’s implied budget of $50,000 for Labor’s campaign was a figure of speech or a real estimate of the party’s campaign coffers (and, if the latter, whether it includes the usual public funding given to parties to contest elections).

The sum could suggest a modest outlay indeed, given major parties receive up to $3.20 a vote from the electoral commission just for fielding candidates.

(When Labor ran stone-cold third in the Wentworth byelection in 2018 and attracted an absolute total of less than half-as-many votes, its public reimbursements ran to nearly $25,000.)

One Nation adviser James Ashby told TND the party’s vote had held strong in a crowded field, given its budget had only been a “fraction” of its major party rival.

“The Legalise Cannabis party have done very well, however the truth is it has been at the expense of the Greens,” he said.