It seems that the ALP still can’t lift a political finger in Queensland without the press wizards at The Australian heralding it as a sign of an imminent election. On Friday, they were writing about a “trigger” for a poll, and yesterday the launch of Anna Bligh’s social media campaign website and the announced retirement of Labor MPs Gary Fenlon (Greenslopes) and Speaker Mike Reynolds (Townsville) suggested that we “could be heading for the polls as early as tomorrow”. Looks like they’re wrong. Perhaps if you write a story like this every day, there will be one day between now and August when it will actually prove accurate?
One has to wonder about the depth of understanding of political mechanics and political logic required to write this stuff. While the process of preselecting new candidates for what are important seats – even if they’re Labor held – won’t be “protracted”, it still has to be done. And those candidates need a bit of breathing space to build a profile before a campaign.
And there’s not much point to having a whizzbang brand new shiny campaign website if it doesn’t get some traction and some traffic.
In any case, it’s probably of more interest to assess how effective Anna4Qld actually is. Graham Young isn’t impressed.
It is true to say that the dynamics factoring into the election date have altered since last year. The LNP’s decline in the polls now has them trying to fend off an early campaign, while previously they were rearing to go. But Labor’s not ready for one – Labor support is quite soft, representing more of a “lesser of two evils” factor in light of the daily drumbeat of stories reinforcing dissatisfaction with health in particular. Labor is well aware of the possibility that voters who won’t plump for the Opposition will vote for a Green or another minor party or independent candidate with no second preference, or simply vote informal or stay away from the polls. There’s a fair way to go yet before either party can be really confident. Which is an indictment of them both, needless to say.
Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett.
I’m betting on an April poll – enough time to embed your candidates but before a May Federal Budget. Bligh will want to hope not too many commodity sector jobs go as things like coal prices tumble. And that the sun comes out in the north.
Well, if the Australian – and probably, by extension, the mass media – like speculating about an early election, we can just add that to the Big List ™:
- Mainstream media speculations about a leadership handover in the Liberal Party, 1996 – 2008. (Never happened).
- Mainstream media speculations about the possibility of a double dissolution election every time the Senate rejected lower-house legislation. (Never happened).
- Mainstream media speculations about an early federal or state election, in just about any state, at any time whatsoever. (Rarely happens).
As a matter of fact, it seems just about any time the political cycle could possibly lead to a highly-unlikely-though-extremely-newsworthy event, the mainstream media will speculate about it. What’s that analogy they use about the clock that hasn’t been wound up? It’s still right for one minute of every 24 hour day? That certainly holds true for the mainstream media, too.
If I was Anna, I’d be looking at the Borgettes sitting on the roadsides every Saturday morning and chortling to myself… and then doing everything I could to make them keep thinking there was going to be an election. Maybe I’d time my election announcement just as the news came out that a wealthy supporter of the LNP was suing MPs, and I’d say what a disgrace it was that this man thought he could buy the election. Oh, the fun I could have, if I was Anna.
“Labor support is quite soft… lesser of two evils…Labor is well aware of the possibility that voters who won’t plump for the Opposition will vote for a Green or another minor party or independent candidate with no second preference, or simply vote informal or stay away from the polls.”
Plump? Tres evocative, onomatowhateveric, in describing the sound of a Tory vote being cast, wouldn’t be out of place in the Ruddish dictionary of archaic folksisms.
But to the substance: sounds like parliamentary democracy is on it’s last legs, a government that’s been in for 20 years with just a brief and accidental interregnum, an electorate that’s too scared to bring about change, an opposition culture that is becoming vestigial, irrelevent, shrunken from long-term uselessness, it’s a recipe for arrogance, hubris and tyrrany, not to say corruption, on the part of the effective dictatorship.
The fourth estate, itself threatened with impending irrelevence by evolving socio-technical developments, resorts to empty fetishist tropism.
Surely fer
“Early elections” (Federal as well as QLD) was definitely getting a good run round the traps from the middle of the week. IMO opinion, the QLD beat-up had more to do with attempts to put pressure on Bligh in the hope of increased sales an election would bring between now & the Federal Budget session and mortar up the cracks appearing in the Pineapple Party (esp between Nationals and small “l” Liberals who’ve yet to forgive the Nats for 1983), than a reflection of the “depth of understanding of political mechanics and political logic required to write this stuff”. Let’s face it, this is NewLtd’s “The Australian” we’re talking here.
There was a front page (Headline) article, not long ago in The Chronicle (Toowoomba District), indicating that the superannuation payouts of significant members of the government in some seats (including Toowoomba North where changed boundaries may threaten Kerry Schein’s seat) will be seriously diminished if Bligh goes before … August, I think. The article indicated that these members had been reassured by Bligh that they had nothing to fear.
I doubt the Budget will have a major impact on the electorate, especially in the current GFC. Most Australians go into debt to fund major purchases, like houses & cars, so the “Debt” dog-whistle doesn’t seem to be working as well as it used to – ask Malcolm Turnbull and his Liberals who were vainly blowing their heads off during the Stimulus Package debate. Floods have destroyed so much QLD infrastructure, people expect (with so little time since the 2006 cyclone) that the state might have to borrow to rebuild; moreover long-overdue infrastructure construction seems to be everywhere, so at least people are getting something for their taxes. The electorate might be able to tell the difference between federal & state issues; but I’m not sure they can between Fed & state money, especially when it’s pouring into state responsibilities, like roads, schools etc.
Addendum: Cathy Border, Channel 10, has just claimed “an election is imminent”.
…oops… (fer)tile ground for a new force or process, and a party to embody to emerge and grow into the moral power vacuum.
Except that sounds like it would need a lot of work, and the good faith to sustain it. And there’s not a lot of that to be found around the village, everybody, except the mad bad and dangerous, are a bit tired and not a bit scared.
The greens will save us? hahahahaha
“I’m betting on an April poll…”
April 4 is the only possible date in April. The 11th and 18th are Easter school break and the 25th is Anzac day.
After WA and the Ray Report, it’s really not likely they’ll have the campaign overlap with the school holidays, which rules out May 2 and 9. So after April 4 the next possible date is May 16, which is the Saturday immediately after the Cth Budget (I think? Second Tue in May?) The Qld Budget is due (I think) 2 June so if there were an election in late May I would expect the budget (and the budget session of Qld Parliament – all four days of it) would have to be postponed. Whether you think that would be a good look for the Government is a matter of opinion, but if you assume they don’t want to postpone the budget, then the earliest possible date for the election is July 4. Unfortunately that’s the middle of school holidays again and the first day after the holdays to issue writs is July 14 which would mean an August 8 election. That’s during the Ekka and the first post-show polling day is Aug 22. Then there’s a whole three weeks of unencumbered campaigning and polling days before the spring break starts on 19 Sept.
d
LOL @ Darryl…
I think election timings are best left to the journalists who understand these things.
I’m sure that Ms Bligh will call an election if they prod her with another two headlines. Three at the most.
I remember when I was at uni a local MP came to talk to us about the (professional) relationships politicians have with journalists. He said most journos know weeks before an election that it will be happening, but sometimes they don’t know the exact date. Perhaps The Australian is, like you suggested, hoping to accurately predict an election by predicting it so often.
More or less repeating what I said here, but trackback.
News flash: The Courier-Mail reports the election is so imminent it will be held IN 5 MINUTES TIME.
@ Lefty E:
Damn! I forgot to vote!
Darryl, that’s an interesting discussion of possible dates, but I recall that the Goss Government went to the polls on 15 July in 1995, which would have entailed the writs being issued some time in June.
Mind you, there is an argument that the calling of the election in July 1995 rather than November 1995 contributed to the failure of the Goss government and its supporters in some sections of the environment movement to fully overcome the difficulties it had created by aggrieving other elements of the environmental movement and the Greens. This is a somewhat involved story, but it highlights one of the risks involved in a government going to an election before it’s got all its ducks in a row.
Best political critique of QLD politics so far. Well done Mark.
Cheers, Steve!
Elsewhere: Andrew Bartlett.
More election prediction noise.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/02/18/2494567.htm
I have also been following the Courier Mail’s attempts to corral the Queensland Government into holding an early election and wrote some of my observations in the article “Courier Mail manipulates reporting of water recycling to demand early election” of 5 January. What the Courier Mail has implicitly stated is that they have an election out of the way, so that the Queensland Government, whoever it turns out to be, can quickly get on with the job with imposing ’solutions’ to the financial crisis, which are to its liking, but which will be unpopular with the Queensland public.
Foremost will be privatisation. Just as in NSW, Murdoch’s Australian newspaper clamoured, largely unsuccessfully as it turned out, to have the NSW Government privatise electricity, so, too can the Courier Mail up here be expected to do the same once the Government no longer feels answerable to the public for several more years.
In order to pre-empt a similar thing from occurring up here, I have, as an intending candidate in these elections, sent an open letter to both Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser asking them to put to the electors, any plans they may have to privatise any more of Queensland’s assets.
I intend to send a similar letter to Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg.
James Sinnamon
pro-democracy independent candidate for Mount Coot-tha
Sorry,the second sentence in my last post should have started “What the Courier Mail has implicitly stated is that they [want to] have an election out of the way”.
” the Goss Government went to the polls on 15 July in 1995, which would have entailed the writs being issued some time in June.”
The Budget date used to move around quite a bit. Nov 1992, Sept in 93 & 94 and 23 May in 1995. It’s been early June since about 2001 (I think). That’s the First Reading, which is the Big Speech and the order to print the Appropriation Bills. Little details like the actual passage of the Bill mean less in Unicameral Queensland.
I don’t doubt Anna could postpone the budget, but I suggest that would be a bad look in today’s wintery economic climes.
d
It’s official, the games have begun.
Well at least to the extent that Antony Green and the ABC have launched his Queensland Election 2009 site. Anna will be relieved that her seat has been declared Very Safe, with a margin of 18.4 percent. It’d a brave man, or one with nothing to lose, and a heap of fun to be had, who’d argue the toss with Antony, so here goes: Embedded in that notional margin of 18.4% over the Libs, who aren’t standing this time as such anyway, (a) is a fair swag of greens preferences which broke more than 3 to 1 in labors favour, and (b) from a fairly high donor base: in fact the lib only had it over the green by a margin of 260 votes on first prefs.
Given what’s happened since, the appearence of the FrankenLNPstein and
(aa) the surprising but significant and acknowledged congruence that has developed between Greens and LNP policies ( the 44c solar feed-in tariff, and opposition to the Traveston Dam) providing a reason for Greens voters to not preference Labor so generously (yes I know, ‘reason’ and ‘Greens’ in one clause, problematic); and
(bb) the fact that the LNP candidate is a rebadged national party uber-hack, who has already stuffed things up royally with her negelectiture to declairify donationage of 2 x $100,000 trifles, and getting caught out: (a lot of disgruntled post-amalgamation ex-Libs might denecessary their LNP vote in favour of a very non-feral Green, the very model of a serious and responsible post-partisan middle aged toiler with a mortgage up to here, just like them)
Ergo, counter to what the comforting notional preference prediction would indicate, there’s a chance, slight-to-goodish according to my augars, that it will go to preferences on the night, and it will be the green doing the harvesting of preferences from the LNP cards in the final count. Think Lindsay Tanner’s seat in Fed07: he went in with a notional margin of 21.1% over the Lib, things changed around preference distribution count 4, and Lindsay ended up with a very much slimmer 4.7% over the Green. So big swings do happen to labor heroes, especially in inner city latte belt seats, like South Brisbane.
I do note with some chagrin, and not a little “doh, of course, how blind of me”, I think I saw Ronan on the tube last night making noises about Labor having to work harder for Greens prefernces. IE he’s publicly still holding out to laborites the promise of the fatted Green prefernces goose, around which I detect the sulfurous waft of an appeal to the recalcitrant labor voters of Indooripilly, who can’t go all the way with Ronan it the change party polka, that he isn’t such a bad chap afterall and still quite deserving of their preferences, even they he’s a horse’s of a different color now. Which flies in the face of the afore-mentioned actual policy alignments between the LNP and Greens, and the chance of developing rational and strategic preference positions (at a moving forward party/party level, as opposed to temporary personal survival), with the as yet instar LNP.
Embedded in that margin is an assumption that it was the result of the last election. I have always tended to find that using the result of the last election is an excellent point to start your analysis of the current election.
But then maybe the result of the last election is merely a social construct, a contingent fact of history that should be ignored because it does not take account of what could have happened if a different sort of contest had occurred? Perhaps you would like me to start election night by hypothecating from some magically inferred result that didn’t happen last time as a beginning point.
Gimme a break!
By the way, think Lindsay Tanner and then factor in 70% exhausted preferences. See if that adds up.
As I’ve said about a million times, Anna Bligh wouldn’t be remotely worried about her own seat.
I’d also be proceeding on the assumption that neither the Greens nor the ALP will be allocating preferences anywhere – including in Indooroopilly, and that the exhaustion rate will be very high. It’s highly likely to be a first past the post contest, basically.
And even taking all that into consideration, the chance of hardcore LNP voters preferencing the Greens is only slightly more believable than the chance of hardcore Green voters preferencing the LNP. It just doesn’t happen in large enough numbers to consider, regardless of what some people might like to believe.
One could add to that the fact that the “hardcore LNP voter” is a mythical species. There are hardcore Nats. Aside from Santo and his mates, there are no hardcore LNP voters in Brisbane. Actual committed Liberals are probably not going to be LNP voters. They’re most likely to hold their noses and vote Labor, or vote informal. The large number of abstentions in the Brisbane Central by-election shows that the percentage of Liberal votes which would swing to the Greens is not that high.
I do hope that no one in the Qld Greens takes Danny’s analysis seriously. At this distance I don’t know if the Greens have a chance of winning either Inderoopilly or Mt Cootha (or even how to spell them), but I can certainly tell there is no hope in Sth Brisbane, and I hope the locals are acting accordingly.
“One could add to that the fact that the “hardcore LNP voter” is a mythical species.”
Yeah, I wrote “hardcore Libs” and then remembered that things are still different up there.
“Actual committed Liberals are … most likely to hold their noses and vote Labor, or vote informal.”
While I can’t help feeling that this is an optimistic view, nonetheless the substantive point that these people are going to vote 1 LNP 2 Green [3 ALP], or 1 Green [2 ALP] seems even less likely due to the factors you describe.
feral, I don’t think the Greens will be wasting much effort on South Brisbane.
Larissa Waters, who was their lead Senate candidate, is running in Mt Cootha. However, Andrew Fraser, aside from being Treasurer, is a good local member. A 21% primary for the Greens may be as good as it gets. The demographics, and shifts in the boundaries, have probably been working against the LNP, but I’d still be very surprised if Labor isn’t well out in front in Mt Cootha and the LNP in second place.
To be honest, I don’t think the Greens have a chance outside Indooro. And there I don’t like their chances, particularly now that Sarah Warner has been preselected for Labor. I think the most realistic goal the Greens would have in this campaign is party-building and profile building for the next Senate contest.
Depends who we’re defining as “committed Liberals”, Martin. Some prominent Libs – including a former party president – have indicated they’re voting Labor.
Outside those sort of circles, we have to remember that a lot of metropolitan Liberal voters have always despised the Nationals. Many, of course, have already peeled off to Labor – in 2001, 2004 and 2006. Wouldn’t be outside the bounds of possibility that more will follow, or another lot moving to Labor as some return to the LNP.
The other point to make is that the environment is likely to be little discussed in the campaign, and to have a low push factor in terms of issue salience. To the degree it does, no one is going to look much beyond the attack on the Borg for tree-clearing, etc, etc. Actual policies are of very little relevance on issues not ranked highly in the real world of voting behaviour.
Sarah Warner got preselection? Cool.
I like the QLD Greens chances of a Senate Seat in 2010 – but cant really see where they’ll win one at state level.
“Some prominent Libs – including a former party president – have indicated they’re voting Labor.”
Sure, but it’s the insiders that have the most complex motivations and so do the craziest things. (Which includes making public statements contrary to what they will actually do in the privacy of the ballot box, amongst other things.)
I can’t help feeling that regular voters that have stuck with the Libs for the last 3 obviously despise the ALP at least as much as they despise the Nats, and so are at least as likely to hold their breath and vote for the LNP than for the ALP. Maybe the informal/abstain vote will be up significantly, although for obvious reasons you can’t expect the kinds of figures seen at a LG election to transfer through to a state one.
“Wouldn’t be outside the bounds of possibility that more will follow”
No, certainly not outside the bounds of possibility. I just think it towards one end of the continuum of probability.
In any case I’m pretty sure we agreed up there that the analysis presented was both foolish and wrong
Qld election has now been called… surprise, surprise.
“It seems that the ALP still can’t lift a political finger in Queensland without the press wizards at The Australian heralding it as a sign of an imminent election. On Friday, they were writing about a “trigger” for a poll, and yesterday the launch of Anna Bligh’s social media campaign website and the announced retirement of Labor MPs Gary Fenlon (Greenslopes) and Speaker Mike Reynolds (Townsville) suggested that we “could be heading for the polls as early as tomorrow”. Looks like they’re wrong. Perhaps if you write a story like this every day, there will be one day between now and August when it will actually prove accurate?”
Oops!! Only took 5 days and after an emphatic statement that from Bligh that she would go full term. Things must have really gone pear shaped.
What’s this nonsense about requiring a mandate to meet the economic crisis? She has a mandate for a further 6 months and another budget. If she doesn’t know what to do the she ought to just resign and walk away. Any action now os going to be delayd another 4 weeks while pollies swan around the state.
Where is all the openness we have been promised? This whole chain of events should disgust every Queensland voter.
Hey fool, you must be feeling as foolish as your average lefty fool by now !
well missed , your non call of an early election
Oh yayz! Election trolls!
You might have missed the later post suggesting that the election would almost certainly be called this week:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/02/20/imminent-queensland-election-now-more-imminent/
I think I’ll close this thread now and redirect any further comments here:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/02/23/breaking-news-anna-bligh-calls-queensland-election/