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Nicholson in the Oz

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August 25 An electoral defence of Paul Keating

On yesterday's Bulletin hatchet job on Keating by John Lyons. Leaving piggeries and CBA debt forgiveness to the experts. Locating the 17 percent interest rates in Keating's prime ministership (rather than his treasurership in the late 80s) was a neat trick. Former Senator John Button - presumably he's each and every of those unnamed former colleagues - gets a good run. 

Let's just look at the question "why did Keating lose the 1996 election?" The main answer is: that's what happens to 13 year old governments. The current government will be eleven years old at the next federal poll. If it wins that, which I doubt, it will, at the one after that, be where Keating was in 1996. Let's see how it goes then; the fact is that electoral gravity gets you sooner or later.

Received wisdom about that 1996 result - that it was a Keating-fuelled disaster - has the logical corollary that with someone else as leader (Kim Beazley or Gareth Evans perhaps? Can't think of anyone else), Labor would have won. Or perhaps they wouldn't have lost by as much. (The idea that Hawke would have won 1993 and 1996 is beyond belief; his vote was going down at every election, and at his last one in 1990 he scraped in with a two party preferred minority.) 

The Australian federal landscape is littered with big election results, and Labor's on the receiving end of nearly all of them. It's just the way it is. The 1996 loss was a shocker, Labor's worst - well, since the last big one, in 1977. It was also smaller than 1975 and 1966. (And it was smaller than the early nineties state Labor losses in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, and the NSW one in 1988.)

70 60 50 40 30

Above is a graph of federal two party preferred support and the resulting percentage of House of Representatives seats since 1949. (Only to 2001. As always, Labor red and Coalition blue.) You can see that vote-wise Howard's 1996 result was about the same as Hawke's in 1983 (0.4 percent higher, to be exact), but the proportion of seats was noticeably larger. But both are dwarfed by Fraser's two big defeats of Whitlam.

Would the 1996 result have been closer with someone else as Labor leader? I doubt it. On the 'yes' side the suspicion that he might slip loose again, as he had in 1993, probably galvanised some voters. But on the other, Keating was seen as a prick but a "tough" one who knew what he was doing. 

Either way, his loss wasn't the biggest in history or anything close to it.

August 22 Queensland byelections

Below is graph of Labor votes - two party preferred and primary - over the elections from 1992 when the Goss government was re-elected, through 1995, when it was tossed out (but hung on until a byelection the following year), to 1998, when Peter Beattie scraped in, thanks to One Nation wreaking havoc on the Coalition. This was followed by Beattie's two huge reelections in 2001 and 2004. Plotted both byelection seats and national numbers. Got most data from Adam Carr. (Redistributions allowed for by subtracting Adam's two party preferred swings. Labor's statewide 1992 and 1995 2pp I basically estimated from memory. Statewide primary dropped in 1998 but 2pp jumped - the One Nation factor.)

Not as illuminating as I had hoped, with both seats moving more or less in concert with state. I don't know Chatsworth but vaguely familiar with Redcliffe's (the suburb's) development from "battlersville" to in demand with large real estate increases. 

If there is a federal message it's the opposite to the most accepted one. If anyone can take encouragement from this it's Beazley, because it shows it's possible for an incumbent to get on the nose.

August 21 Humungous Queensland swings

A wake-up call for Beattie, although with last Newspoll on 50-50, it's hardly dire ... yet.

August 20 Enrolling the people, search facility and Queensland byelections 

• Several additions to my other site, including a shrine to the legendary South Australian Returning Officer William Robinson Boothby.

• For better or worse, I've added a search facility to this site (top left bar). This means all my scribblings, including the more embarrassing ones, are findable for all. It was free (to me), which means some ads for you.

• It's Queensland by-election day today, for two seats. Poll Bludger's been on to it. As usual with Queensland, optional preferential voting and the possibility of a high non-major party vote make it all unpredictable. Some say two party preferred isn't particularly meaningful in such circumstances, but the fact remains that he or she who wins the two party preferred vote wins that seat.

The results will be interesting in themselves, but more the repercussions, with Beattie finally appearing less than God-like. (The absence of a federal byelection involving both sides  since 2001 has enabled Howard fans to continue their fantasies. But how would the Simon Crean saga have played out if the Liberals had contested Cunningham in 2002 and, as would have been most likely, Labor had achieved a modest swing?)

August 16 Newspoll 52 to 48

Not much salvageable for Mr Beazley there.

August 15 My bets

Here are the bets I hold (to the value of about a hundred bucks each) with a certain online booking agency. All of the odds, I'm happy to say, have dropped since I took them (meaning I got a good price.) They are:

- Labor to win the next Federal election: $2.50 (currently $2.25)
- Brendan Nelson to be leading the Liberal Party at the next Federal election: $10.00 (now $7.00)
- Peter Costello to be leading the Liberal Party at the next Federal election: $3.00 (currently $2.75)
- Labor to win the next NSW election: $2.50 (dropped to $2.20 but not a currently available bet)
- Labour (Helen Clark) to form government after the NZ election: $1.80 (now $1.46)

My bet on Nelson, of $100, means I get back $1,000 including that $100 if he is indeed leading the Liberal Party at the next election. Now, I'm not saying that it's more likely than not that the good doctor will be our next PM, but I think 9 to 1 are pretty good odds. My Costello bet was a sort of insurance: because I strongly believe John Howard will bow out this term, I should end up ahead, either a little, if Costello succeeds him, or alot, if Nelson does.

And on Iemma to win in NSW, at this stage I think it more likely than not (about the same as would apply if Carr was still Premier), but if that changes, $2.50 (assuming the odds continue downwards) should give me enough leeway to hedge my bets and back a Coalition win.

On Labor to win the next Federal election, I put it at more likely than Iemma. I was, however, going to wait until much closer to the election before betting, but after witnessing the hoo-haah following Bob Carr's resignation - how the consensus quickly formed that the government couldn't survive without him - and the odds reflecting this, I thought I'd better get in while the going's good, before "the Master", he who is unbeatable etc pulls the plug. If things do start looking crook - eg caucus goes ga-ga again and installs, say, Laurie Ferguson as leader - I should similarly be able to hedge. 

Note: don't start betting on my example. For one thing I don't have a great financial record with these things; it's just a little entertainment.

Question time

I went to the first House of Representatives Question Time of the session on Tuesday. Wall to wall Dorothy Dixers, and Labor banged on about industrial relations. John Howard  looked nervous and cross. Kim slumped. The people sitting next to me thought Peter Costello's jokes uproariously funny. (What do you call a 'funny' retort that has nothing to do with the actual interjection?) Mark Vaile seemed to give his government credit for the favourable terms of trade. Matt Price sat next to Malcolm Farr. Peter Garrett wore a nice suit.  Indonesian and Korean parliamentarians, sitting in front of me (at different times), observed politely. One of the Indonesians appeared to find our PM very witty too. 

For information or entertainment, not much to recommend it.

August 4 Antony does Iemma

Green, that is, on developments in NSW. Here

August 3 Barry Iemma or Morris Unsworth?

Barrie Cassidy on Insider's last Sunday said that "Iemma" is Italian for "Unsworth", which was pretty funny and apt. Barry Unsworth, who became NSW Premier in 1986, was - like Joan Kirner and Carmen Lawrence - handed the very smelly tale end of a long reign and had to make the most of it. And like the other two, he became quite popular as Premier, and wasn't even particularly disliked (apart from rural folk appalled at his gun laws - as, it should be noted, was the then federal Opposition leader John Howard) when he got an electoral pasting in March 1988 from Nick Greiner. Greiner, like most opposition leaders, was a wimp and a whinger (and a frog to boot). Unsworth's problem was that he led a 12 year government. Iemma will also at the 2007 poll, but although the Carr government was showing signs of wearing out its welcome, the electoral buffer, as Antony notes, is huge.

I've taken some tables from the Newspoll NSW archive over 1986 to 1988. Note, Unsworth took over from Wran in late June/early July[?] 1986.

1. Satisfaction with Premier. Unsworth's initial numbers (July-Aug '86) are low on both sides of the ledger, as might be expected with someone new, but he makes ground, until early '88 when there's an election on horizon.

	SATISFIED	DISSATISFIED	UNCOMMITTED
	%	%	%
Jan - Mar 1986	48	44	8
Mar - Apr 1986	49	44	7
May - Jun 1986	48	45	7
Jul - Aug 1986	35	20	45
Sep - Oct 1986	38	36	26
Nov - Dec 1986	40	36	24
Jan - March 1987	51	32	17
Mar - Jun 1987	58	29	13
Jun - Aug 1987	55	32	13
Sep - Oct 1987	47	40	13
Oct - Nov 1987	46	45	9
Nov - Dec 1987	51	43	6
19-21 Feb 1988	38	51	11
15-16 Mar 1988	43	51	6
17 Mar 1988	43	48	9
	SATISFIED	DISSATISFIED	UNCOMMITTED
	%	%	%
Mar - May 1988	56	18	26
May - July 1988	52	35	13
Jul - Sep 1988	44	45	11
Sep - Nov 1988	48	43	9
Nov - Dec 1988	44	47	9

2. Satisfaction with Opposition leader: Greiner until March 1988, then Carr. 

	SATISFIED	DISSATISFIED	UNCOMMITTED
	%	%	%
Jan - Mar 1986	41	44	15
Mar - Apr 1986	45	40	15
May - Jun 1986	50	35	15
Jul - Aug 1986	50	36	14
Sep - Oct 1986	49	39	12
Nov - Dec 1986	45	40	15
Jan - March 1987	45	42	13
Mar - Jun 1987	43	44	13
Jun - Aug 1987	45	40	15
Sep - Oct 1987	50	36	14
Oct - Nov 1987	51	38	11
Nov - Dec 1987	51	41	8
19-21 Feb 1988	43	43	14
15-16 Mar 1988	47	40	13
17 Mar 1988	46	41	13
	SATISFIED	DISSATISFIED	UNCOMMITTED
	%	%	%
Mar - Apr 1988	38	44	18
Apr - May 1988	29	20	51
May - Jul 1988	31	28	41
Jul - Sep 1988	31	33	36
Sep - Nov 1988	36	29	35
Nov - Dec 1988	35	31	34

3. Voting Intention, the most important measure. Newspoll doesn't have two party preferred. Not much change with Premier changing hands (July 1986), but Labor plummets after that.

	ALP	LIBERAL/NATIONAL	AUSTRALIAN DEMOCRATS	THE GREENS	ONE NATION	OTHERS
	%	%	%	%	%	%
Newspoll Jan-Mar 1986	47	44	7			2
Newspoll Mar-Apr 1986	52	43	3			2
Newspoll May-Jun 1986	45	47	6			2
Newspoll Jul-Aug 1986	44	46	8			2
Newspoll Sep-Oct 1986	41	48	9			2
Newspoll Nov-Dec 1986	41	50	6			3
Newspoll Jan-Mar 1987	46	45	5			4
Newspoll Mar-Jun 1987	50	42	5			3
Newspoll Jun-Aug 1987	48	42	8			2
Newspoll Sep-Oct 1987	41	47	8			4
Newspoll Oct-Nov 1987	39	48	9			4
Newspoll Nov-Dec 1987	42	45	10			3
Newspoll 19-21 Feb 1988	36	51	8			5
Newspoll 15-16 Mar 1988	36	49	6			9
Newspoll 17 Mar 1988	39	46	6			9
	ALP	LIBERAL/NATIONAL	AUSTRALIAN DEMOCRATS	THE GREENS	ONE NATION	OTHERS
	%	%	%	%	%	%
Election 19 Mar 1988	38.5	49.5	1.8			10.2
Newspoll Mar-May 1988	33	52	8			7
Newspoll May-Jul 1988	37	49	8			6
Newspoll Jul-Sep 1988	39	50	7			4
Newspoll Sep-Nov 1988	41	48	7			4
Newspoll Nov-Dec 1988	44	44	6			6

4. Better Premier. Newspoll doesn't have earlier figures, but like Keating and Howard during 1996 campaign, a pretty even contest with the incumbent never behind.

	MR BARRY UNSWORTH	MR NICK GREINER	UNCOMMITTED
	%	%	%
19-21 Feb 1988	39	39	22
15-16 Mar 1988	40	39	21
17 Mar 1988	41	36	23

August 2 Opinion polls

Two polls today have the ALP in front: Nielsen shows 52 to 48, Newspoll 51 to 49. SMH and Age beat it up with a silly Bob Carr story (honestly, would there be anything more boring than Bob Carr as federal opposition leader?), while The Australian's headline is begrudging: "ALP ahead, but Beazley lags".

Mike Seccombe leads in SMH with "Bob Carr could walk into the federal Labor leadership and immediately present more of a threat to John Howard than Kim Beazley, the latest Herald Poll has found" - as if a poll could "find" such things - but concedes a few pars later that "Labor still enjoys a narrow 52 per cent to 48 per cent lead". Michelle Grattan begins with "Kim Beazley's approval rating is at its lowest ever and he badly trails Bob Carr as preferred federal Labor leader in a poll likely to cause fresh consternation in caucus", getting to Labor's four point lead half way in.

In a turnaround, Dennis Shanahan begins with "Labor has risen to its best electoral position for months ...".

All this carry on about a next to meaningless measurement. You might think that after the Latham experience -the highest approval ratings in Australian polling history - the penny would drop, but old habits die hard.

Latest Morgan: 50.5 to 49.5.

August 1 Nifty, Carr, Howard and New Zealand

Neville Wran reckoned last week that Bob Carr's biggest achievement was to keep winning elections. In the '80s Wran was want to say similar things about himself: that he really only set out to keep the 'Tories' out of power, and in that he succeeded magnificently. It's one way to look at it, but maybe not an inspiring one.

Bob and John: peas in a pod 

As people, they are very different. One (from what we hear) is witty, interesting and smart. The other ... is just smart. But politically Carr and John Howard are rather alike. Here are some of the ways:

• They've both been in a long time, ten years for Carr, nine for Howard. 

• They've both won elections with a touch under 49 percent of the two party preferred vote - 1995 and 1998 respectively. That makes them both lucky.

• Both are generally over-rated as politicians, and both probably know they are but are prone to flattery and so preen from time to time. 

• They are both prepared to give community anti-Muslim feeling a wee kick along when the need arises, and when each man does, he seems rather pleased with himself, as if it vindicates his place in the world, or perhaps he's getting away with something naughty.

• Finally, like everyone else I have no idea what Morris Iemma is like, and so at this stage am adopting the neutral position, putting NSW Labor's chances of surviving in 2007 at something slightly better than even - as they would be if Carr was still leading. I put the federal Coalition's chances of winning again at worse than even, and my deep suspicion remains that the Man of Steel will also give it away this term when he realises that he probably doesn't really have another win in him. But both Carr and Howard are just the sort of politicians to give a quiet cheer if their side goes down after they've left.

State Premiers

A recent Newspoll report had South Australia's Mike Rann as the country's most popular state premier, and Carr the least. Perceptive Oz readers would have noted that one is the shortest-serving premier and the other the longest. A good reason for the latter to leave. Peter Beattie (I think), despite being the second longest-serving, was the second most popular. Further evidence, perhaps, for the view that he's the only one of the crop of six worth getting excited about.

New Zealand - off the fence

At left is a fence. This is what I'm falling off (in slow motion) re the New Zealand election. From leaning towards a National win, I'm now anticipating another Labour-Green government. I'm not alone in this; recent polls and general expectation are moving that way too.

To be honest, I hadn't realised that the Clark government has only been in since 1999. (I was thinking 1997.) Six years isn't long. Also, while I noted that opposition leader Don Brash isn't Mark Latham, he might, on closer inspection, be John Hewson - susceptible to portrayal as an economic fundamentalist. On top of that, as Antony Green noted below, the prospect of a National-New Zealand First coalition is excellent material for a scare campaign. Like the One Nation effect in the Queensland election of 1998 and the Northern Territory's in 2001.

July 28 Bob does a Nifty

Like Nifty Neville Wran - and Robert Menzies - Carr's getting out while the going's good, but unlike Menzies there was some writing-on-the-wall. In the wake of the NSW Premier's resignation, a certain online booking agency is offering $2.50 for a Labor win at the next state election. A conflicting offer; Labor was possibly going to lose the next NSW election anyway, but it's tempting way to cash in on Carr's over-rated political skills. Many of his underlings would prove as astute, charismatic, take-charge etc as him.

Of today's state premiers, Carr has been there the longest, but at elections he's the least impressive - and this in the country's supposedly traditional Labor state. On thoughts of Bob for Canberra (God help us), I stand by this from The Age a couple of years ago. And on the idea that he proved an inspiration to the others: like the other Labor premiers, he's largely a beneficiary of circumstance. (That is, unless you believe the ALP - that decrepit organisation that produces nothing but dead wood federally - is miraculously blessed with eight political geniuses at state and territory level. Oh, and state Liberals are all lazy, out to lunch etc.)

July 27 New Zealand Election

Antony Green sends in the following:

"It was the last single member electorate election in 1993 that the Bolger government found itself without a clear majority, but it was under the new MMP system in 1996 that Winston Peters and his New Zealand First party gained the balance of power.

I can see why people compare New Zealand First to One Nation, but there are significant differences. Like One Nation, New Zealand First had an enormous appeal to older voters who pined for the more ordered country of their remembered youth. Peters himself has always represented Tauranga, the great seaside retirement town of the North Island . In the New Zealand context, one of the things older 'Pakeha' (white European) New Zealanders were resentful of was the granting of extensive land rights to Maori. The constitutional complications of why this occurred are very different to the situation with post-Mabo Australia , but the political impact was similar. Peters himself has also been happy to stir the pot with Asian immigration, which again has similarities with Australia .

The great difference is that Peters himself is Maori, and NZ First also had an enormous appeal to Maoridom. At the 1996 election, NZ First won the seats reserved for the Maori electoral roll, the first time the seats had left the Labour fold since the Second World War.

So Winston Peters headed a party supported by the odd combination of older Pakeha and younger Maori united only by the silver tongue of Peters. That the party fell apart over the following three years was not surprising.

What occurred in 1996 was that NZ First was enormously successful at garnering support from voters disgruntled at the Bolger government, but who weren't happy about voting for Labour. In 1996, Labour under Helen Clark recorded its worst result since the 1920s. But after the election, Peters started the process of negotiating with both sides over who would form the next government.

Negotiations then proceeded for the next SEVEN weeks. At the end of that period, Peters decided to announce who he would support at an evening press conference. Peters gave no indication beforehand of who he would support, not even to Bolger or Clark. At 7pm on the appointed evening, all media networks crossed to the press conference. Peters proceeded to talk. He continued to talk for a further 45 minutes before finally, with his final sentence, announcing he would support Bolger and the Nationals.

That was the difficulty NZ faced after the first MMP election in 1996. They had handed the balance of power to a political party with a conflicted electoral base, with a platform that consisted more of grievances than policy pronouncements, and headed by a leader vain enough to highjack 45 minutes of airtime for his own glory.

The next three years saw NZ First fall apart under these conflicts, Peters eventually forced out when Bolger was replaced as Nationals Leader by Jenny Shipley, Shipley securing her majority with several NZ First defectors. When Labor won in 1999, NZ First fell under the 5% threshold imposed by MMP. It returned several MPs to Parliament only because of Peters razor edge victory in Tauranga.

The history of Peters may become an important issue in the election campaign. Peters was a protégée of Rob Muldoon, a man who had little time for current Nationals Leader Don Brash. In government with the Nationals, Peters was reported to be much more at home solving the problems of government with Jim Bolger over a convivial evening scotch, something he could not manage with Shipley. Which makes you wonder how he would go trying to govern in partnership with either Helen Clark or Don Brash, a matching pair of leaders strong on intellect and ideology but weak on conviviality.

Current polls have shown a decline in Labor support, with NZ First the main beneficiary, the Nationals advancing in part because of the electoral collapse of ACT, a fervently free-market party to the right of the Nationals. The Maori land rights issue has also intruded on politics, with the Clark government acting to remove Maori land rights to the foreshore, leading to the formation of a breakaway Maori party which threatens Labor's hold on the seven Maori seats.

The foreshore issue has also helped the Nationals, Brash making a speech that tapped into Pakeha resentment at Maori rights, setting Iwi against Kiwi as they put it in New Zealand .

Two months till the election, and campaigns are very different to Australia . Clark and Brash will face off against each other regularly on television through the campaign, and there will also be a range of debates where the leaders of all the parties face off against each other. Nothing like the controlled campaigns that go on here.

On the evidence of 2002, voters know enough about the electoral system to realize Coalition is inevitable. But the fear of Peters and New Zealand First gaining the balance of power is certain to be played upon by Labor in an attempt to eat into National support. There may yet be considerable volatility in the opinion polls."

End of Antony Green's comments.

July 26 Kiwis to the polls - and change government, maybe

New Zealand PM Helen Elizabeth Clark has called an election, a two month campaign apparently. With the Opposition National party, led by Don Brash, ahead in recent opinion polls, a certain online booking agency has opened with the same odds for both, which is a pretty good starting point.

Pundits apparently - my knowledge will become less scant in coming weeks - are saying too close to call. With proportional representation (alright, mixed member), a hung parliament - the thought of which here kept our own Glenn Milne tossing and turning during our last federal campaign - is a certainty. That is, neither Labor nor Nationals will have an outright majority and so will need to depend on a minor party to form government.

The two largest of those are the Greens and New Zealand First. In 1996 NZ First leader Winston Peters (yes, he's still there) supported the National Government, possibly against the expectations of most of the party's voters. What might he do this time?

Now, there are probably people in the New Zealand who describe Clark as a "conviction politician!" and claim that she's reshaped the political landscape etc, but the Nationals wisely haven't bought into that and so didn't draft Mark Latham into the leadership. They therefore appear to have a pretty good chance of winning. That happens after a government has been in six years. 

But with horse-trading inevitable after the poll, it does seem to be anyone's guess ... at this stage.

July 19 Newspoll 51 to 49

In The Australian, plus stuff about something called approval rating, which some people seem to think is important.

A National ID Card and Four Year Terms

Aussies, we know, are susceptible to scare campaigns. More importantly, the country has no shortage of public figures with nothing better to do but run them. (In some countries they campaign against African poverty.)

In 1987 opposition leader John Howard campaigned against such an ID card, and it's easy to surmise he is today as interested in this as he is in a referendum on 4 year terms. (In 1988 he campaigned against that referendum too.)

Fixed three year terms would  probably be preferable to flexible four year ones; apart from all else it would take away an unnecessary advantage from the incumbent.

A dysfunctional commentariat

Unfair incumbency advantages lead to longer tenure, and when a government is in too long, people start behaving weirdly. Check this out from  Brad Norington in The Weekend Australian:

"THERE are few keener students of the Australian Labor Party than John Howard. He knows more about Labor's psyche, structure and history than most of his political opponents put together ....

At the 2001 and 2004 elections, Howard used his shrewd understanding of Labor and its constituency very effectively to steal traditional ALP voters.

While Labor struggled with its identity and direction, Howard infiltrated deep into the party's heartland, winning support from the mainstream aspirational blue and white-collar workers in outer suburban Sydney and Melbourne electorates."

Even Howard must blush at such a flow of unsubstantiated adulation. For the record: anyone who believes outer suburban four-wheel driving highly mortgaged "aspirationals" were ever ALP "heartland" is kidding themselves. 

July 11 The Thirty-four Seat Man? Pull the other one Roosters and Lemmings have something in common: an interest in downplaying their electoral prospects under former leader Simon Crean. Roosters because their shenanigans nudged him towards resignation, and Lemmings because of their December 2003 decision to elect Mark Latham. "At least he did better than Crean would have", they say.

So both sides comply in a conspiracy, and poor Simon has to bite his tongue in the face of statements like this from Latham biographer Bernard Lagan in the Age: "Simon Crean was on the brink of losing up to 30 seats when he was asked to go. Latham lost three."

Let's break that down. A thirty seat shift from Labor to Coalition would have given the government 113 out of 150 seats to Labor's 34 and three Independents. That's a whopping 76 seat government majority, easily the biggest in Australian history. (Howard's 1996 majority was about 40.)

We'll pretend that's believable. Now we ask: on what grounds might someone predict a loss of thirty seats? Unless they've taken multiple surveys in every electorate in the land, or are just sounding off/"intuiting the mood of the electorate", they must be anticipating a two party preferred swing that, in uniform terms, yields 30 seats. What would that have swing been? Eight percent. And an 8 percent swing on the 2001 result would give you 59 to 41.

Now, no published opinion poll ever came close to that. Crean's opinion poll performance, in fact, was usually better than Latham's actual election result of 52.7 to 47.3 . Newspoll never had the gap larger than 55 to 45 (and that probably understated the Labor vote; see also this ) and and he was sometimes (though not often) ahead of the government. The last Newspoll with him as leader had 50 50. 

Crean wasn't much chop as leader, but he was never as bad as they said then - and say now.

And on leaked internal Labor polling, there was this in the Fin Review a couple of years ago. (Postscript: Queensland swung to the Coalition by 2.2 percent last year, yielding one seat.)

July 5 Two opinion polls

Newspoll in the Oz: 50 50 from primary votes of 44 to 39

ACNielsen in SMH and Age says 46 to 54 from 40 to 41

Neither fits what Michael Costello called the prevailing media narrative last week. Barrie Cassidy put Costello's points to the Insiders panel and was met with some uncomfortable shifting but little else.

July 4 A Conga Line of Lemmings

Some folk will not rest until they've buried Beazley, possibly preferring an election loss to a Beazley Prime Ministership. (Similar charge used to be made re Roosters and Simon Crean.)

I've previously put the chances of Kim surviving until the next election at about 50-50, but Harry Quick's multiple spray last week probably tipped the balance towards a leadership change some time this term.

The Lemming position might be: they would prefer Julia but would settle for Rudd. Let's hope that, if their white-anting ever succeeds, they get their second choice, because apart from anything else, a Lemming-Rooster seesaw would be as destabilising as the old Howard-Peacock one in the Liberal Party.

One 'anything else' is that an Opposition leader from Queensland would be a splendid move.

The next election

Bryan (de) Palmer at Oz Politics disagrees  with my assessment of electoral gravity at the next federal election, as do his comment-makers. Let's face it, few people anywhere would agree with me on that. Charles Richardson from Crikey is "sceptical".

July 2 The Good Things About Mark

It's Mark-bashing time - not that he hasn't asked for it - but let's jot down some of the good things about his leadership. I don't go for that stuff about his being brave, that Labor finally "stood for something" under him or that he was a good communicator, but his leadership wasn't the unmitigated disaster I initially expected, and some of those mitigations were ....

• The 2004 election result wasn't the worst in history or close to it, as some are now saying

• He had a sophisticated understanding about making connections with the community that was more than the standard Simon Crean/Wayne Swan "stay on message mate, keep plugging away on health and education/government waste"

• Reading to Children - huge tick

• He was excellent in the debate, relaxed, on top of facts, revealing a lovely side to his personality. Head and shoulders above PM

• He knew the value of keeping quiet at times and remaining attractive at a distance (though maybe not sustainable when the campaign started)

• His own conservative instincts - on immigration, the dole, Reconciliation etc - didn't in themselves do him any harm with Australians, but putting them front and centre was a mistake. (Perhaps this was part of "triangulation")

See also musings on John Fawkner after 2003 leadership ballot..

June 30 Here's the full text at Margo Kingston Faulkner is Labor's historian, and his is a historian's analysis, with all the distilled truth and, perhaps, the over-reaching.

It seems there was one major factor in the 2003 Caucus vote Faulkner doesn't acknowledge: a weird strain of the Stockholm Syndrome, which went like this.

John Howard is an astoundingly successful politician, the most astute in Australian history. So good is he, with such a firm grip on middle Australia, that Labor needs another Howard, with the same prejudices and ruthlessness to defeat him. This man would, in glorious mud, blood and sweat, wrest that ground off Howard and lead Labor to glorious victory. One titan would topple another; the gladiatorial view of politics, it would be a sight to behold.

It was a condescending caricature of the Australian community which gave us all just about the dumbest, blokiest, phoniest political discourse in memory.

June 28 Last Saturday's Fin Review column

Here, is about how governments go from finding re-election incredibly easy to devilishly difficult. Also:

• Of course, many things contribute to election results, but the "neutral position" at last year's election was probably a Labor win; Mark Latham gave voters a reason to vote for Howard

June 27 "a towering figure in Australian politics of the 21st century"  Geoffrey Barker, AFR, October 9 2004

You've seen the talented, cut-through, take-the-fight-up-to-the-government politician, now witness the loyal, self-sacrificing party man. Dummy spits here and here; and we've still the memoirs to come! 

The Lad will be back on the IPA/CIS/Quadrant circuit in no time.

Fin Review piece on Saturday on how the odds stack against governments as they get older, which I'll post later in the week, with elaboration.

June 24 Reshuffle today

?