Newspoll has Labor up to 57 from 55 last time (within the moe) and Nelson flatlining at 14% PPM. Commenters at the Poll Bludger’s thread predict that it will be spun by News Limited as a cri de coueur from the public for the imminent return of Peter Costello the Great Pretender. Probably.
Update: [by Mark] You can read about the additional questions asked about liberal leadership, Peter Costello, climate change and support for an emissions trading policy at Possum’s place.
The related poll on climate change shows that women are more rational than men. Fifteen per cent of blokes think climate change is not happening compared with just 9 per cent of women.
The polls can no longer be dismissed as a honeymoon effect for Rudd, not after 8 months. It’s hard to define what the “it” is, for an opposition leader, but whatever it is, Nelson hasn’t got it. The upcoming contest for the leadership could be interesting in that there may be multiple contenders.
Turnbull — he’s got the presence; he’s got the confidence, but he’s also got the perpetual enmity of a significant section of his own party, who will die in a ditch to stop him.
Costello - the Hamlet of the Liberal Party, he dealt himself out by walking away after the election. He thought he’d walk in to a high powered corporate job, but the business world is hard-nosed and decided he had nothing to offer them. If he puts his hand up, he’d be saying his colleagues he’ll condescend to take the job because he hasn’t got a better offer from the corporate world. The Liberal party is desperate, but not that desperate.
Hockey - his avuncular image hides to some extent a nasty streak that is both wide and deep, which means he’s well qualified for the job. Straddles both factions. Could be in with a show, but his Palestinian heritage will count against him.
Abbott - might to try to ride the wave of revival currently enjoyed by reactionary Catholicism, post WYD.
Bishop (Julie, not Bronwyn) — in her favour is the novelty factor that she’s a woman, and from the Party’s strongest state. Against her is that she’s as dumb as dog shit.
Update: [by Mark] You can read about the additional questions asked about liberal leadership, Peter Costello, climate change and support for an emissions trading policy at Possum’s place.
Spiros,
Apart from disagreeing with your assessment of Julie Bishop’s intellect, Joe Hockey is a solid member of the moderate Group-ing in the parliamentary party and of Armenian ethnic heritage. I don’t think being either a Palestinian Arab or an Armenian are impediments to leadership in the Liberal party.
I was going to link to the tables but it kept crashing my Firefox - you can find them via Possum’s post if your browser is robust enough! A lot could be said - not least that The Oz are paying more to commission extra questions to keep their beloved “media narrative” fueled - but I was interested to see Nelson scoring better among women than men - Ute Man must be unconvinced!
Paul Norton drew attention to the question: “Is climate change occurring?”
I’d like to draw attention to this other question: “Cause of climate change?”
Do you believe climate change is not caused by human activity?
TOTAL YES 3%
Male 3%
Female 4%
aged 18-34 1%
Aged 35-49% 2%
Aged 50+ 6%
ALP supporters 2%
Coalition supporters 7%
*************
One trusts that the Coalition shadow ministry, and Professor Andrew Bolt, take a very careful look at these very low numbers.
If Bolt is trying to increase sales of the OO by spruiking sceptical views on AGW, he is aiming at a tiny target audience!!
cheers
Tonight’s news will be fun.
Problem is the hold of Howard nostalgia and culture war fantasies (whose latest version is apparent on global warming) over much of the Liberal base, many MPs and the conservative media elite. Hence the anybody but Turnbull push that has seized on Costello.
Antonio
Some evidence of your assertion of intellect would be appreciated.
Just one example would be enough to cause an awful lot of people to think again I reckon.
Also, if workchoices was a good example of Hockey’s moderation…
The anti-intellectualism of the LP has opened a great divide between it and the business world where you just can’t get away with the stupidity on show in recent times. So long as they can’t be expected to out think the other lot they’ll continue to remain a poor value bet in terms of donations, and thus the cycle will continue. They’ll need to resort to ideology to attract better membership, but all the signs say they’re becoming the party of evangelical Christianity.
It’s not the group I’d be turning to for intellectual content.
Antonio, while Hockey is a member of the moderate faction, he is not unacceptable to the Right.
“I don’t think being either a Palestinian Arab or an Armenian are impediments to leadership in the Liberal party.”
Name one Palestinian Arab or Armenian who has succeeded to any leadership position in the Liberal party, of any description, anywhere, any time.
I was ruminating on this whilst walking to work on a beautifully clear and fine Brisbane morning. Global warming first burst onto national and global political agendas in the late 1980s, and the ideological counter-offensive by elements of the Anglosphere Right (especially in the US and here) began in 1988-89. Thus belief or disbelief in AGW came to be framed as a keystone of the opposition between TEH LEFT and the Right in the very period of the collapse of communism, and the Right’s resultant leap to the triumphalist conclusion that because TEH LEFT was wrong about communism, it absolutely had to be wrong about every other cause it supported or was perceived to support. Clearly, a large part of the Right remains locked into this mindset, and has great difficulty considering the science, the economics or the politics of global warming outside of the paradigm of “End of History” triumphalism.
11 Paul Norton.
Spot on Paul. Also linked is the mindset is that if you strongly support something then you’re credible per-se. It’s the ultimate position in valueing the individual over the group, and yet it relies on the mass of the group for it’s ultimate credibility. Talk about twisting logic to suit your purposes…
Spiros,
“Name one Palestinian Arab or Armenian who has succeeded to any leadership position in the Liberal party, of any description, anywhere, any time.”
Not quite sure of your logic here. The ALP has yet to install an Icelander as parliamentary leader, does that mean that being an Icelander is an impediment to leadership in the ALP?!!!! I have yet to come across any commentary in the MSM that writes off Hockey’s chances based on him being ethnically Armenian or from the Palestinian area!!!! Whatever Hockey’s flaws, being Armenian is not one of them.
Onimod,
Leaving aside the fact that she made partner at ClUtz, I think given that Julie Bishop defied Howard, beat one of his best mates in the 1998 Federal election, spoke against the mandatory detention policy yet still managed to get onto the front bench and roll back some of Nelson’s more bizarre Higher Ed policies shows that she isn’t entirely stupid or devoid of tactical nous.
Also, to be fair, bear in mind that Howard dumped Workchoices on Hockey’s lap after Andrews bungled the “marketing” of it. Hockey at least introduced the fairness test.
“The ALP has yet to install an Icelander as parliamentary leader”
Not federally, but Jónas Hallgrímsson was the Labor Party’s Tasmanian leader between October 1931 and June 1933.
Antonio - as I’d expect. Comparisons showing moderation against extremist positions are hardly stand alone points of credibility. Also suggesting that the pinnacle of law also correlates with intelligence is a bit of a stretch.
If you’re prepared to state ‘not as bad as the last guy’ on your resume then good luck to you.
Spiros - if you are looking for conservative Arab-Australians politicians, there’s always Bob Katter Senior. Got to be Minister of the Army too.
Yes, but he was in the Country (now National) Party, which has always been more cosmopolitan in outlook than the Liberal party.
And he was Afghan rather than Arab.
If you’re looking for conservative Arab-Australian politicians, the Victorian ALP gave us Steve Bracks, whose family is from Lebanon.
The Katters are Lebanese. Afghans have yet to make their big debut in Australian conservative politics.
Having done my homework I do believe Leinad is right. I was relying on something I read at least a decade ago which suggested that Bob Katter Snr. was of Afghan ancestry.
Paul N,
Correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t it old Joh that referred to Katter Snr as “that Afghan”?
Antonio, I can’t really answer that question one way or the other. I don’t recall reading it in the article in question, but memory tends not to be totally reliable after a decade or more.
Is the Afghan/Icelandic question OT?
If not, why not examine the ethnic ancestry of all Federal and State parliamentarians. Aboriginals in NT parliament?
Victorian ALP MPs include Italian, Greek, and a few from Asia I think. Bracks family was in Australia for several generations berfore Steve’s ascendancy.
Does the ALP have more Southern European and Asian MPs than Libs or Nats? If so, why? If not, why not? Let alone Hispanics from South America, Germans, French, etc. Africans?
I recall that Neville Bonner was a Liberal. I’m not sure that the Nationals are less Anglo-Celtic-ally focussed than the Libs.
Joh was Danish via NZ, wasn’t he? My very word, those Danes and those Afghans… troublemakers to a man. cheerio, just off to feed the chooks.
Paul Keating once referred to him as “the camel driver”.
OK, Armenians aren’t OT, so here goes.
Decades ago I met a young Armenian, in his twenties. He was consumed by the story of the Armenian Genocide. I was puzzled not to have heard of it, though the Turks at Gallipoli had featured in our secondary school curriculum. Apart from occasional mentions in the MSM of the controversy in Turkey and the EU over that genocide, the next mention was last year, when a statue was completed in a small rural Victorian town, commemorating an Aussie hero. He had helped Armenians after WW1.
They don’t get much press.
I follow politics far more closely than the average voter, and I have never heard Hockey’s putative ethnicity raised once. It is NOT an issue, at least out in voterland (no idea how it plays inside Liberal HQ).
One of the interesting aspects of poll results on global warming is that if you consider them in the light of the stated, known and reasonably suspected positions of many politicians, business leaders, media commentators, thinktankers, right-wing intellectuals, etc., greenhouse scepticism and greenhouse denialism would seem to have much greater support at an “elite” level than at a “mass” level, and the Coalition is therefore at risk of wedging itself from a potentially decisive section of its voting base. The hypothetical equivalent on the other side of politics to the Coalition’s travails on this issue would be if the Federal Labor Party was seriously considering deducing its economic policy from reading Green Left Weekly. (No offence intended to Paul Burns and others.)
Paul Norton,
There’s also the usual misunderstanding of scientific progress, scientific hypotheses and science’s position on the “knowable”. As posters on another thread indicated, science does NOT claim perfect knowledge or perfect theories.
A statement isn’t scientific unless it is (in principle) falsifiable.
History is littered with scientific theories that were the best guess of an era and were later modified, improved, or discarded. Those theories were the best they had, and were later found incomplete or false. But in MANY areas we stupid apes have to use the best available knowledge (not only in science); we have no other choice.
I’d like to see the MSM teach Scientific Methods 101, as an adjunct to the AGW debate, but I won’t be holding my breath.
Indeed, it is the utter ignorance of scientific method that really makes the denialists stand out, and not in a good way. How often do we hear them say that the theory that greenhouse emissions causes climate change hasn’t been proved, as if it is a mathematical theorem, capable of logical proof?
Gerard Henderson recently had a go at the credentials of Robin Williams (of the ABC Science unit) to speak about climate change, on the grounds that Williams’ degree is in biology, not climate science. Maybe so, but anyone with a degree in any science will know about the process of how scientific theories are tested and falsified, how scientific knowledge is accumulated, and when a scientific theory is settled. This, as much as the content of climate science, distinguishes the people who know what they are talking about, from those who like Andrew Bolt who are merely blowing smoke out of their arse.
I would have thought biology was very germaine to climate change science. Mass extinctions and all that.
“very germaine to climate change science”
You mean to feminism, right?
But is germaine germane to anything, these days?? just askin’
… but the nickname “Germs” must be germane to biology at least, I’d have thought.
Spiros, your image of smoke issuing forth from Professor Bolt is one I could have done without. But I’ll keep an eye on “Insiders” just to check. It’s important to use empirical observations.
Andrew Bolt exists entirely to entertain the left intelligentsia and give them someone to ridicule now that poor John Howard has been hounded out of the court, and given that no-one can dislike Brendan. The right must feel slightly put out by the whole thing.