By Andrew West
NSW LABOR plunged to a historic low in Australian politics on Saturday. Its primary vote of just 25.5 per cent is the lowest since 1904, when it won 23 per cent and became the official opposition.
But one fact is even bleaker.
Labor is projected to hold just 22 electorates in the 93-seat Legislative Assembly; that is 23.6 per cent of the seats. In 1891, the year the Labor Party was founded at Unity Hall in Balmain, the Labor Electoral Leagues won 35 electorates in the 143-seat house; that is 24 per cent of the seats.
Almost 120 years to the day after it was formed, the once-great NSW Labor Party is crippled.
Analysis by the ABC election expert Antony Green (see table) shows the two-party-preferred swing against Labor of more than 16 per cent is the biggest swing recorded in any election, state or federal, in the past 60 years.
Until Saturday's humiliation the biggest swing was 14.6 per cent against the Victorian Labor government of John Cain snr in 1955. In Queensland in 1974 Joh Bjelke-Petersen and the Coalition scored a swing of 10.7 per cent against Labor, reducing it to just 11 members in the 82-seat parliament.
In South Australia in 1993 Labor lost office on a 9.1 per cent swing, winning 10 seats in the 47-seat House of Assembly.
The plight of NSW Labor compares unfavourably to even the British Labour Party at its nadir. In 1983 Labour under the leadership of Michael Foot won just 27.6 per cent of the vote, barely keeping its nose in front of the Liberal-Social Democratic Party Alliance.
But the result is not as bad as the 1993 general election in Canada, when the country's first woman prime minister, Kim Campbell, led the governing Progressive Conservative Party to such a debacle that it was left with just two seats in the 295-seat House of Commons. Their vote plummeted from 43 per cent to 16 per cent and, although the party rallied slightly in the following election, it in effect ceased to exist and the once dominant centrist Progressive Conservatives were later subsumed in a merger with a right-wing Reform Party.
But Saturday's election is worse, in two-party preferred terms, than the 1984 US presidential election, when the Republican Ronald Reagan won 59 per cent of the popular vote, and 49 of 50 states, to the 40.6 per cent and one state of his Democratic challenger, Walter Mondale.