Antony Green’s election site is up.
By the way, if you were tempted to believe the Shanahan spin that “Key states, bush warm to Howard”, please be reassured that they’re still quite coolish. Possum has all the graphs you need. Basically, slight swings towards the Coalition from a very high Labor vote in the last quarterly aggregated Newspoll in a few regions and demographics don’t tell some sort of remarkably different story from the “national polling” as he alleges. Take Queensland for example. The only thing you need to know is that Labor was on a very low 42.9% 2PP in 2004. Add the 9.1% swing Newspoll is showing and you get to 52%. That makes it sound like Labor and the Coalition are reasonably evenly poised in the Sunshine State, but it’s the Coalition that has all the seats to lose, and their vote’s fallen from the very high 57.2% which was the basis for their winning a big swag of seats last time. A 9.1% increase in the 2PP vote for Labor on a uniform statewide swing would see ten Liberal and National seats fall. It is vaguely possible that the Libs could reverse this trend, but however late the election is delayed, it would need a rather spectacular turn around in momentum.
Possum is truly an amazing blog. It should be more well known amongst the journos out there.
Thanks Guido, but if it was anymore well known by journos, I’d have to get a silk on retainer to deal with the plagiarism.
There’s some lazy, cheeky buggers out there in treeware land.
Be good to see you join the Crikey crew for the election campaign proper, Possum:
http://www.crikey.com.au/Election-2007.html
And don’t worry too much, most of the journos never seem to take notice except when they denounce us as “cosseted academics”, “biased leftists”, etc, etc. Officially take notice that is.
I’m looking forward to it Mark.Although I do feel a little isolated being (I think) the only nom-de-net on the roster.What ever happened to the old nom de plume I ask?
Oh for the days of Hillary Bray!
Some of the journos are funny, even if they’re intellectual pickpockets.
Considering the real circulation figures of some of the daily’s, I reckon their disdain of the bloggers is just a bout of traffic envy
Mark et al:
Assuming the election does take place and is not delayed by any deus ex machinegunnus or other extraordinary influences …. I shall be looking at the election, not from a 2 Party Preferred basis but from the perspective of Liberal-Labor-Nationals versus The Rest.
I do hope the next Parliament has enough of The Rest to give it at least the potential to appear capable of becoming democratic. The 41st Parliament has already made its mark on Australian history; let’s hope the 42nd one will start the climb out of the sewer ….
Yeah, they don’t stack up wonderfully well in fact when it comes to readership!
Possum Comitatus:
L-O-L
[way, way off topic] I was just about to ask Hilary Bray if she was related to former Chancellor of Griffith Uni., Sir Theodore Bray, when all was revealed …. life is full of little surprises, isn’t it?
Just a note to say thanks for those in the ‘sphere who make the effort to call it in pseph detail, and especially seat by seat.
While we do the punditry thing with much fervour and fun, being informed by often nothing more than wit no matter the suffix (maybe sheer, brilliant, dim, and fuck?), to have this analysis provided with generosity of spirit is fabulous and appreciated.
When it’s all said and done this time around, another level will have been reached regardless of the result, and that’s seriously worthwhile.
..prefix; the word suffer came to mind. Apologies; and pleasured thanks again.
Possum Comitatus:
Just take plagiarism as a complement.
You know what work you have done yourself …. and so to do the “intellectual pick-pockets” who use it …. because they haven’t got anything worthwhile of their own
[A bit off-topic, again - I was lucky/unlucky enough to be directly involved in a few events that have since become well-known/notorious/whatever during which I took several photos with my own PRIVATE camera and still have the negatives. Every so often, MY photos turn up unattributed in publications. Most likely, one of my companions at the time borrowed my negatives without telling me so as to run off a swag of happy-snaps for himself and his pals]
I want to know who does the casting for the Liberal Party ads. is O.J. Simpson going to be in the next one?
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/proworkchoices-ad-pulled-from-air/2007/09/22/1189881836973.html
This is material the Chaser won’t be able to leave alone.
Stephen Hill:
Thanks for that link. If a couple of former criminals have now found honest employment in acting then good luck to them. Hope they get a lot more acting jobs. After all, isn’t giving someone who made very serious mistakes a FAIR GO one of the core “Australian Values”?
Having said that, there is no way in the world that I myself would believe that the criminal backgrounds of the actors were not known to those behind the ads, directly or indirectly, formally or informally …. and that there was not a hope that sufficient people in the general community would recognize and remember the former lives of these actors and then confuse that background with the role the actors were playing in the advertisements.
Get ready for an extremely dirty election campaign: Barefaced defamation, monsterous lies, forged documents, frame-by-frame video montages of events that never happened …. enough to make even Josef Goebbels weep.