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December 2 Garbage?
A couple of readers have interpreted post below as me calling Insiders
"garbage", which is kind of understandable now I look at it again. But
that wasn't what I meant, nor that the folks involved speak garbage in general.
It was just an observation of people reading all sorts of rubbish and then
regurgitating and perpetuating it.
Glad that's cleared up.
November 27 Insiders:
Garbage in garbage out
Sunday morning, the Insiders panel has only just started, and
immediately two furphies are thrust upon us: from Fran Kelly - that Howard has
particularly won over young voters; and Barrie Cassidy - the old chestnut
'Howard's Battlers'.
Then later in the 'Talking Pictures' segment, Mike Bowers reminds Tim
Fischer of when he 'increased his majority' in 1998.
These things are sent to try us I suppose, but gullible
Labor MPs in particular should cover their ears.
Pedant's
corner: the Pittwater 'swing'
It's not important, but really there was no '27 percent swing' to
Independent Alex McTaggart yesterday in Pittwater. For that to be true, he would
have had to have gotten 29 percent at the last election; of course he
didn't even stand. If there was a swing, it was 56 percent, which was his two
party preferred vote.
By similar token, the fact that it was previously an extremely safe Liberal seat is
not important, because that 'safety' was against the ALP. When independents win seats, it's often in a previously
safe seat
for one party - vis a vis the other major party. See Michael Organ
(actually a Green) in
Cunningham in 2002 and Phil Cleary in Wills in 1992. Both safe Labor seats, and
safe Labor seats again - against the Coalition at least. As Poll Bludger notes,
however, it's unusual for an independent to lead the primary vote on their
initial win, but for an example of that we can cite Peter Andren in Calare,
1996.
From the NSW Electoral Office's
site, McTaggart beat the Liberal Nicolaou 40 to 38 on primary votes and 56
to 44 after preferences. Brogden's 2003 primary vote was 60%.
Digressing ...
I haven't been following this byelection, but without checking, I'm pretty
sure Bob Ellis's run against Bronwyn Bishop in Mackellar
in March 1994, covered some of the same parts of Sydney's north. Ellis
didn't win but did better than the Labor candidate at the previous election, and
this, quite irrationally, spelt the end for Bronny's Liberal leadership
ambitions.
Here's a blast from the past, a Newspoll survey from Jan '94, when John
Hewson was still Liberal leader:
Which one of the following do you think is the best person to lead the
Liberal Party?
Answer: Bronwyn Bishop 48; John Hewson 34.
Same question in October '94 with well-known side-splitter Alex Downer
heading her Maj's opposition: John Howard 20; Downer 18; Nick Greiner 14; Bishop
13; Peter Costello 10; Hewson 9.) Three months later Howard was leader.
November 22 Newspoll
54 to 46 and Nielsen 58
to 42[!]
There's the difference between the Federal ALP and state Liberals/Coalitions (re
below).
In Newspoll
in the Oz, first preference votes are 42 to 39
percent with Greens on 7. Steve Lewis concludes chin up:
"As
his Liberal Party colleagues wait for Mr Howard to declare whether he will
retire before the next election, he can count on the strong backing of voters
when it comes to a two-horse contest with the man he has beaten twice before."
(Just a thought, but perhaps inserted from on-high so as not to jar with the
opening par of this
editorial.)
Nielsen, (SMH
and Age)
is from primaries of 43 to 37 and Greens on 10.
Here's the table. But this
will probably help Labor more at the next election than IR ('watch the
regions'), although it's difficult for them to play; can't promise to buy it all
back.
November 21 Schadenfreude
dressed up as concern
Glenn Milne reports
federal Coalition "fears" over their state counterparts' almost blanket dire
electoral chances. His sources are human, and so discern specific reasons in each of the
six jurisdictions - they're not as hard-working, united or politically astute as
the Federal Libs - but most probably in 5 years time it'll be the self-same Federal
MPs who are an irrelevant rabble, standing for nothing, incapable of organising a piss-up in a brewery,
etc.
Glenn lumps the Federal ALP's election chances with all the state Libs, but
the big difference is that while the federal Opposition is often ahead in
the opinion polls, and never behind by a mile (two party preferred), the same
can't be said for any of the states (with the possible exception of NSW). In SA,
notwithstanding Mr Robins' commentary below, the poor Libs are going
down-down-down to Chinatown next March. Cover your eyes, it won't be pretty.
November 20 Election
2006 South Australia
Belated posting of commentary on SA
Election sent in by reader Phil Robins a few weeks ago.
November 19 Mr
Morgan's opinion poll: another carry on (by me) about preferences
Big Gary Morgan is, by all accounts, a delightful fellow and wonderful lunch companion.
On occasion he runs for the Melbourne Mayoralty, and his
hobbies include a polling outfit.
Mr Morgan's outfit's final opinion poll in the 2004 election recorded excellent
(vis a vis the actual result) primary vote numbers but went ga-ga after
preferences (see the last part of this).
Morgan has since adopted the Newspoll strategy of allocating preferences as they
flowed at the last election (60.5 to Labor, 39.5
to Coalition), rather than extracting them from the horse's mouth as he had done
for decades. (Something like 'which of the major parties will eventually get your
preference?' Actually, he does still ask the question, and publishes the
results, but doesn't use them for his headline two party preferred.)
Anyway, his latest
has the Coalition back in front 51 to 49.
But Morgan and Newspoll both should take a leaf out of Galaxy's book (as I
understand it) and allocate them as they flowed per minor party. That way you
can differentiate between a Green vote and, say, a One Nation or Family First
one. If he did that, he'd have a headline of 50 to 50,
which would be 'too close to call'.
Queenslanders?
Speaking of Family First, a few weeks ago Fairfax's Good Weekend
magazine carried a puff piece on Kevin Rudd. Now, we all knew that Rudd is
a Christian, but it was a surprise (to me) to learn his intention of
harvesting the religious vote.
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In support of this, Rudd stated that a Family First-Liberal preference deal
had cost Labor 3 to 5 lower house seats at the last election. This is utter,
absolute poppycock. [Update: no it isn't.]
I've long gone on about the desirability of a Queenslander as ALP leader,
because it is a large state with a small state mentality. Well, a reader points
me towards the bleedin' obvious, which I'd overlooked - the example of Bill
Hayden. The Queensland swing to Labor at the 1980 election, when he was leader,
was only about the national average, and put the state on a meagre 46.9
after preferences.
So I'm withdrawing my Queensland thesis, and replacing it with a version
that involves just one person:
Peter Beattie. They should still bring him down. And I've gone off Rudd because
he tells fibs about the importance of religion in electoral behaviour.
November 12? Danna
Vale? A subbing error?
According to the blurb underneath this
Age opinion piece it is indeed the 'Liberal MHR for Hughes and former
minister for veterans affairs.' But she wouldn't write anything like this, would
she? [Update: it was indeed her.]
November 11 2
December 1972
Gough Whitlam's 1972 win included a large swing in NSW and a huge one in
Victoria, the latter, history tells us, from his seeing off left-wing
troglodytes like Bill Hartley. Tasmania also put in a big effort, but the other
three states swung to Billy McMahon (although Qld yielded a net seat to Labor).
It was a mixed bag, and was off the back of Whitlam's 1969 swing of almost 7
percent (with a positive component in every state).
Still, with a primary vote of 49.6 percent (which John Howard could only
dream of) and a comfortable two party one of 52.7 (a little under Bob Hawke's
53.2 percent in 1983 and Howard's 53.6 in 1996) it was a clear vote win. But
crook boundaries and Labor's tendency to waste votes in places like western
Sydney (Whitlam had also won both the primary and two party votes in 1969) meant
a modest nine seat majority in the 125 seat house.
1975
One of many unusual things about 1975 election was that Fraser was the PM,
so the usual incumbency v opposition stuff that I go on about all the time
doesn't apply.
In A Certain Grandeur, Graham Freudenberg reckoned that had there
been no Senate funny business at all after 1972, the most likely course of
events would have been a one term government, tossed out in late 1975. Economic
conditions were seeing off administrations the world over, he said. (Government
chaos would have contributed.)
Maybe. Or not. We also shouldn't buy into the accepted 'Fraser would have definitely
won the next election had he just waited' school of thought, because we've seen
too many turnarounds of 'sure things'. (2001 comes to mind.) Let's replace
'definitely' with 'probably'.
November 9 Tony
Smith, Chairman of JSCEM, in The Age
Responds
to Hughes and Costar from last
week. The Libs have been trying to close the rolls on the issuing of the
writs ever since they got in in 1996, but until now the Senate wouldn't let
them. Also, the AEC had always opposed it, and no previous Electoral
Commissioner, including the Liberal appointee Andy Becker, would even agree that
the week's deluge was too much for the AEC to handle. But under new honcho
(who's been in for a few months) AEC is running dead on the issue.
Here's
the Committee's report.
Photo ID
One possible sleeper in the report that's caused little mention is that the
AEC should encourage people to take their driver's licence to the polling booth
on election day, but not make it mandatory. [Recommendation 30, 5.163, chapter
5]
A complex message to spread, and a recipe for confusion, surely. Some
people, thinking it's mandatory to take their licence along, won't vote if they
don't have one, or don't have it with them on polling day. (If you think that's
pessimistic, we already know that, no matter how many ads are run telling people
to 'number every square', there's always a few percent who don't get it. A few
percent is a lot.)
What's the point of it?
November 8 Newspoll
in the Oz 51 to 49
From 41 to 39
primary support (online version doesn't show Greens etc), but depending on the
Green vote, that 2pp looks if anything a tad conservative for Labor. [Update:
Green support is 8 percent, one up from last year's result. Newspoll treats all
non-major party votes the same when distributing preferences, not discriminating
between, say, a Green vote and a One Nation one, but a sensible reading of those
numbers gives a comfy Labor win, at least 48 to 52.]
November 7 2005
A
wily political animal
On ABC's Insiders yesterday, regular couple of minutes of an 'average
Australian' featured a retired pharmacist. As often with people who don't follow politics
incessantly, his political observations contained uncluttered truths. (In other words, I agreed with him.)
The first was that, paraphrasing, "everyone knows John
Howard is a consummate politician, he always gets the politics right [ok, I
don't agree with that assessment], his record shows it .... but I don't think
the PM should play
politics with national security." Bingo. That's the downside to having every commentator
- friend and foe - up your backside proclaiming you
the wiliest political operator ever to walk the earth: it becomes easier and
easier for people to assume you're playing politics.
He also thought Howard go would early next year, which sounds
believable. March is the tenth anniversary, but the important record - becoming second
longest serving PM - was hit over a year ago.
[Update: here's
the ABC's transcript, but if you listen to the
video you'll find that "I don't think his past attempt ..." [which
doesn't make sense] should be "I don't think he's passed
attempts ...". Relevant to first point above.]
November 3 JSCM
disenfranchisement
Brian Costar and Colin Hughes in the
Age on closing the rolls and other matters.
Informal
voting in 2004
A couple of weeks ago AEC released
its report on informal voting at the 2004 election. I've only had a browse
through so far, saving it for summer reading. Here's just one table, showing the
seats with highest and lowest
informality levels.
If two contributing variables to informality
are high NESB voters and OPV at the state level, then no surprise that the
highest levels of informality are all western Sydney seats.
(Greenway also had another variable: a large number of candidates.) More
surprising that Victoria almost fills the other category. Ballarat's 'high'
socioeconomic index looks curious too. All reasons to read the whole thing.
A voter's card?
Came across this
(new window) proposed voter's card contained in a 1914-15 Royal Commission into
electoral administration. Every voter was to have one and it would be stamped at
polling booth. Relevant to recent JSCEM report; obviously the suggestion wasn't taken up.
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October 30
Shonky advice: wheere d'ya geddit?
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Showing he'll recruit anyone to the anti-Beazley cause, Unca Alan Ramsey in SMH
indulges adman John Singleton on Kim Beazley's spinelessness on security legislation,
refugees - and everything else.
Singo spoke to the Fabian Society on Wednesday, and people
are hanging off his words, as if, you know, he's a true believer who wants to see Labor win.
Back in the '80s, when the ALP gave Singleton and Rivkin their advertising accounts, no-one was under any illusion that either man
was a Labor supporter. It was
just a paying gig, a NSW mates network thing - Richo, Barron and all that.
Ok, so Singleton has since cultivated a Labor-ish identity, at the races with
Hawkie and so on, but that's just part of the image isn't it?
But back to Alan:
"Some
of what Singleton told Wednesday night's audience: The 1998 election was
"the one Beazley let get away". With Howard trying to sell his 10 per
cent GST, Singleton thought Labor would rerun the advertising campaign Paul
Keating had used to destroy John Hewson and his 15 per cent GST in 1993. When
nothing happened, Singleton rang, "in despair", and was told, no,
"we're not doing any of that, we're going to concentrate on Kim's
positives". At which point Singleton paused and looked around the room, and
his audience roared with laughter."
Actually, during the 1998 campaign Singo was running an anti-Labor,
multi-million dollar business funded gig to re-elect the Howard government. His pro-GST ads were all over the
telly; why would the ALP have told him anything about
their tactics?
Singo is either full of it or has no political nous, failing, like Alan, to
recognise a simple fact: winning an
election from opposition is a wholly different exercise to doing it from
government. The two are almost diametrically opposed. Little point in harking
back to Hawke and Keating in the '80s and '90s; the election to draw lessons from is 1983, when Labor
took office.
Similarly, if federal Labor wants to emulate state counterparts, they need to look at Bracks, Carr et al the
successful opposition
leaders, not the Premiers. Confuse one with the other (and their perceived
public personas are always different) and you get into all sorts of fantasies,
nonsense about conviction politicians!, mistaking the authority
bestowed by the office with inherent gravitas, and believing the pretender has
to ape the incumbent. From there it's a small step to the lunacy of the
Latham leadership - "let's put in our own John Howard, someone with the
same narrow view of Australian-ness and a similar chip on his shoulder.
That should do it!"
Yes, I do repeat myself.
October 25 The
polls
Newspoll in the Oz
and Nielsen in Age
and SMH
have Labor ahead 54 to 46
and 52 to 48 percent
respectively. It being un-Australian to describe anything other than a hapless
Labor party and all-conquering PM, it's Fairfax this time who is most grudging.
Louise Dodson:
"The Herald Poll is not good news for Kim Beazley - to put it mildly."
Results here.
Nielsen pollster John Stirton also indulges in a little Sol-like
soothsaying, finding it "unlikely that Labor will continue to achieve the
preference flow necessary to stay ahead of the Coalition". Pollsters and crystal
balls, an unnatural mix, but he's possibly saying the preference flow looks a
bit iffy. It's true that a more likely 2pp from those primary votes is about 50
50. But it's also possible that Nielsen's 2pp is
more accurate than its primary. (Unlike Newspoll, they actually ask for the
danged thing.)
But let us recall Nielsen's accuracy
in the final survey of last year's campaign. [Big tick.]
October 22 Correction
to Clinton v Perot
A reader has corrected me on October 19 post on Clinton and Perot and Bush
Snr in 1992. See here.
October 21 More
on South Australia (and Carmen)
Returning to South Australia, it appears Mr Kerin remains opposition leader. A couple of
points.
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As we know from past experience, the winner of any election instantly
becomes a hero, and the loser becomes a, well, Loser. If there's a change of
government, then from being a vaguely
annoying, carping presence on the nightly news, new Premier suddenly has
gravitas, popular with middle Australia, a wily politician the likes of which
we'll never see again etc and hits the front as PM/Premier. The latter we can
see most starkly in situations where the defeated premier hangs around to occupy
the "worst job in politics". Rob Kerin did that in 2002, and went from leading
Mike Rann as preferred Premier 50 to 30 to trailing him 28 to 43. See Newspoll
extract. The same, though less dramatically, with Joan Kirner v Jeff
Kennett in 1992-3, and Rob Borbridge hit the same skids after losing in 1998.
The one exception was Carmen Lawrence in WA 1993-4. After losing the
election and becoming opposition leader, she remained preferred Premier against
Richard Court right up until resigning to go federal the following year. See Newspoll.
Then she received a rare pro-government byelection swing when she went to the
federal seat of Fremantle. Carmen is the only current caucus member who could be described as
having "it"; another, out of caucus, might be Peter Beattie.
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But back to South Australia, and the election due in March next year. It will be the last in the current crop of Labor administrations to proceed
to step II of the three stage (so far) process: (I) being elected ever-so-narrowly,
perhaps relying on independent(s); (II) get re-elected in a landslide; then
(III) get re-elected in a landslide. In a couple of cases these landslides have been record-setting. God knows why it's happening, but
it possibly has something to do with the Howard government, plus of course all
that prosperity that's around these days. NSW and Qld have done stage III, while
Vic, Tas, WA, NT and ACT have done stage II.
SA proceeds to Stage II next year. Stage II results have ranged from a
modest 53 to 47 (WA) to
59 to 41 ( Northern
Territory) two party preferred. Opinion polls show the Rann government comfortably ahead (unlike the WA Gallop one, which was behind at this stage), the only way is up really,
and so the most likely result is something closer to NT - another whopping Labor
win. It won't be pretty: Liberal blood galore, the ALP taking seats it
never had before, opposition frontbenchers and promising up-and-comers losing their
seats. Depressing post-mortem for the demoralised Liberal rump which no longer
knows what
it stands for, a preening and schadenfreude-ing John Howard helpfully explains that they
really haven't put in the hard yakka. The media discovers deadwood and so on. SA Labor, meanwhile, has oodles of
talent and Rann is a hero.
So all you aspiring SA Labor politicians, get yourself the candidacy of a seemingly
hopeless seat. You never know your luck.
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