You could be forgiven for thinking that there is no such thing as Australian federal politics any more. Nothing budges in the polls. As Possum reminds us:
Remember when a party getting 55% in a poll created headlines of impending doom for their opposites? To show just how blase we’ve all become lately, 97% of all polls taken during the Rudd government have shown the ALP to be on a two party preferred off 55% or greater. Even if we just use the phone polls, 91.2% of all phone polls have shown the ALP to be on a TPP of 55% or greater.
Poll after poll, these extraordinary results roll in and we all just go “Oh yes, there’s another one“.
Landslides have become normal. [My emphasis]
The commentary, and the shadow boxing goes on… But surely the whole theme of “this happened, and that happened, and this paper highlighted GOVERNMENT WASTE and Malcolm Turnbull’s approval rating moved by 3%” completely misrepresents what’s actually occurring, because its premise is that people are paying some attention to the Canberra political game. I suspect a lot of us are enjoying a rather protracted holiday from it all after a surfeit of political scares and alarums during the Howard years.
But the opposition, I suppose, can’t just go and take a long ski-ing holiday in Europe. And Joe Hockey has actually announced something that vaguely resembles an election agenda – a promise to slash public spending (he says $14 billion, but Bernard Keane thinks his figures are wrong and it’s more likely to have to be 30 or 40 to reach his GDP share target). It’s the logical corollary of the ‘debt and deficit’ mantra, at any rate.
No doubt there will be a claim that this will lead to lower interest rates. Hockey, and Turnbull, must recall that Kevin Rudd actually succeeded in linking Howard’s profligacy with interest rate hikes. But I suspect that the Labor stimulus has established itself in the public mind as virtuous and/or necessary, and I also very much doubt any “interest rates will always be lower under the Liberals” line will have any purchase, or anything that reminds people of that.
What I think is actually going on is that the Coalition is trying to regain ownership of the ‘economic management’ card. To some degree, for that to work, there’s still a need for economic bad news. But it kinda only makes sense as a long term game plan – in other words, a two term strategy. I don’t think massive spending cuts in and of themselves are going to be electoral gangbusters next year.
Of course, it might just be random, coming from this mob. Outsourcing political strategy to newspaper columnists is one other reason why there’s precious little in the way of a contest in federal politics at the moment.
Update: The Liberals’ two hour strategy.
I also very much doubt any “interest rates will always be lower under the Liberals” line will have any purchase.
Well, quite – especially since they’re so much lower “under” Labor. The Libs havent finished paying for the Howard years, not by half. That petard will hoist for two elections yet.
I personally reckon the ALP should run that line just to shit the Libs: “Interest rates: historic lows under Labor” and “Dont go back to high interest rates: Vote ALP”. “Libs= Hi interest rates!!” etc
Fun as that would be, LE, it might be a bridge too far.
OTOH the “ALP created the modern Australian economy” line line is eminently defensible and its use by Rudd is not before time. I hope they continue it.
Turnbull’s hysterical reaction to it is probably because he knows it’s true.
One of the more laughable claims was the line being run by Turnbull and Hockey asking Rudd what he was doing to ‘reduce upward pressure on interest rates’.
Given that the most likely source of ‘upward pressure on interest rates’ right now would be a recovering world economy, Rudd could legitimately say he was playing a modest part in fostering the conditions in which there would be such pressure by underpinning the Australian economy with stimulus spending, along with the rest of the industrialised world.
If the coalition aren’t stupid, or possessed of the belief that most people who might vote Liberal are stupid, they are doing a remarkable impression …
That comment by Empty that Rudd sounded like a CP General Secretary extolling the virtues of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat simply made him sound like a total loony, especially when the thing Rudd was boasting about was underpinning private business and consumer spending …
It’s the theme of the week, it would seem. “Right wing dissent is being quashed”. Planet Janet is always a good barometer. It’s imported from America like all the rest of the right’s bright ideas, and it doesn’t make any sense.
Eek! The Socialists are taking over. Not.
That its fun should be enough for a bit of parliamentary banter Martin! The fact that its primarily about global trends didnt stop Howard! What a tremendous goad!
Interest rates, lower under labor.
Interest rates, lower under labor.
Labor: Keeping Interest rates lowwwwwwwwwww.
This:
http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/09/03/i-told-you-so/
is what I would be pasting around the place if I was the ALP.
You may have seen it, if not check it out, the visual image is superior in impact to stacks of words and stats.
It’s imported from America like all the rest of the right’s bright ideas, and it doesn’t make any sense.
At least Janet hasn’t hit peak wingnut yet. Wait until she comes up with the bright and original idea of “Rudd’s Death Panels”…
Easy to say borrowing is good before the bill arrives, and Rudd will make sure he calls the election while it’s still easy.
“I suspect a lot of us are enjoying a rather protracted holiday from it all after a surfeit of political scares and alarums during the Howard years.”
As they say, a change is as good as a holiday… in this case it really was. I think the above is true.
Too right. The Howard govt was such a goddamn drama queen.
Come off it, Down and Out. Planet hit peak wingnut about 5 years ago.
Challenge Hockey to identify where these massive spending cuts are going to come from.
Either he won’t, in which case he’s a lightweight, or he will, in which case he’s a heartless Tory who wants to pick on the poor and downtrodden.
Reflecting on the title of this post, I think it’s stretching the definition of ‘strategy’ to apply it to anything that the Coalition is attempting at the moment. Indeed, one of their serious flaws appears to be that they mistake their very poor tactics for a strategy for re-election.
After all, they would only attempt to ‘reclaim’ ‘economic management’ if they thought there was any danger that it was perceived to be lost from them in the first place. I’m not convinced, from what I’ve heard, that they yet quite believe it.
That said, it would appear that every time Joe Hockey opens his mouth it’s to let loose another howler. No wonder Malcolm Turnbull’s taken to evoking ‘John Howard and I’ when listing his achievements: if ‘The Howard Years’ showed us anything, it was that at least in those days Hockey kept his opinions private.
@13 – Yep. He’d actually have to be hacking pretty severely into “middle class welfare” to get cuts of that size. You really couldn’t get away with an asterisk “efficiency savings” claim.
Didnt they just block 1.9b in savings by opposing means testing of the private health insurance rebate?
On that, the ALP should adopt the Greens position: pass the means test on the rebate, yes, but dont ALSO charge higher income earners an additional medicare levy if they dont have private insurance.
The goal is to encourage all income levels having a stake in the public system, not to penalise any refusal to opt out.
“OTOH the “ALP created the modern Australian economy” line line is eminently defensible and its use by Rudd is not before time. I hope they continue it.”
I can see why the ALP should want to do that. It’d be true, too.
But it must enrage Teh Left to see their (mainstream) party claim, publicly, wholeheartedly and – most importantly – credibly, the Australian neoliberal project as their own. The current position of Teh Left seems to be that the modern Australian economy = increased casualisation and reduced job security, a lower share of output for labour vs. capital, a hollowed-out manufacturing sector, ballooning trade and current account deficits, debt-driven consumption, deregulation-driven financial instability and a lopsided investment profile based largely on digging stuff out of the ground.
BBB
The other irony is that the Libs created the modern (i.e. middle class) welfare state.
It’s kind of a relief that the one-term strategy has died.
The one-term strategy was based on four main assumptions:
1. The election of a Labor government was some sort of clerical error on the voters’ part,
2. The performance of individual Labor ministers, and collectively as a government, would be so bad that any shortcomings of the previous government (see 3. below) would pale by comparison,
3. the previous Coalition government had not died in the arse, and
4. Even if 3. above were the case, the frontbench and party room are so reinvigorated that voters can’t resist the Coalition.
Brendan Nelson held to all four of these – so did Andrew Peacock and Billy Snedden. I bet Sir John Latham did too, but I’ll defer to those who know the Scullin years better than I.
The idea of a deficit that pushes up interest rates will take time to kick in as a strategy. I was in the Liberal Party in the early ’90s and could not believe, in amongst stratospheric interest rates and double-digit unemployment, that the ALP would have a leadership war and install Keating – but that’s what they did, and they did not lose the following election.
I suspect this strategy assumes that by the middle of the following term, interest rates will be on the way up and other effects will make themselves felt on the economy and on people’s lives. You can see the Liberal ad campaign, in whatever media exist five years from now:
TOLD YEZ.
VOTE [1] LIBERAL
I also suspect that the Rudd Government will trim their sails to the prevailing winds such that the deficit ceases to be an issue, or that the deficit is worked down as revenue raises as a balanced approach to orchestrating economic resurgence – thus rendering this policy redundant and ineffective at the next election bar one.
While it’s important to retain perspective (if you were Malcolm Turnbull’s political strategy adviser, what the hell would you be suggesting at the moment?), there does seem to be a fair amount of stupid going on in the Coalition.
I suspect Mark has hit upon something with his comment on the right’s prediliction for importing ideas from their US counterparts. The whole “Debt! Scary!” thing has been relatively effective there as an argument against health care reform. But it just doesn’t have traction here any more – government debt hasn’t made a good scare campaign since the early 1990s.
On RWDB scare campaigns, great to see Obama on the front foot at the joint sitting. Calling it like it is: that feverish load of old toss the right has been carrying on with would indeed have been laughable – if it wasn’t so utterly cynical.
Robert @ 20, you’ve anticipated my thoughts after watching the 7.30 Report tonight. I guess it’s not hard to seem calm, low-key and confident in contrast to Malcolm’s strident braying. That’s how the PM came across. Good to see him telling it like it is on interest rates too, no trying to take credit for keeping them low!
What an idiotic line for the Coalition to take. Do they really think the public will see the Reserve Bank lifting them from emergency low levels as a negative for the government? When I hear Hockey running that line I am not surprised, but surely Turnbull should know better. Is he being entirely cynical (and stupid) in hoping the Coalition can run the interest rate scam again?
“if you were Malcolm Turnbull’s political strategy adviser, what the hell would you be suggesting at the moment?”
A career in anything else but politics. Seriously.
I was going to write some sort of concern troll stuff about the genius of the Coalition but after listening to Tony Abbott’s discription of Julia Gillard where he described her as having a “shit eating grin”…. words just fail me.
The Coalition. Keeping it classy since their loss…
Listening to the ABC radio news reporting (again and again) Turnbull bagging the Government on the economy and reading The Australian wingnut commentary on how the Liberals can win the economic management argument and ultimately the next election, it is gobsmacking how smoothly lockstep the entire campaign is (Liberal, Oz, ABC), and how incredibly childish and naive.
Polling is consistently showing that nobody cares (if they ever did, except in relation to home mortgages). Talk about yesterday’s heroes and smelly old socks. The electorate does not care a toss whether the market still has a headache but is in recovery or whether borrowing rates are up or down a fraction of a percentage point. Most voters were given one thousand dollars to spend a few months ago. That was nice, next?
There is a fascinating political argument going on in the US about health care, and a shadow debate happening here about the medicare rebate. To the extent that this is reported and discussed at all here, its all about whether Obama is losing popularity, and whether we have another TRIGGER!!! for a double dissolution that might give Malcolm a few more sleepless nights.
Gah, when is the press gallery going to lift their game and report the real political debates in this country. Tip to journos: its not all about Malcolm’s chances at the next election, or whether the Liberal Party can win the economic management argument, or about the health of that creature of fevered imaginations called “the market”….
Exactly. There is not a shadow of doubt that the ABC is deeply involved in this orchestrated ‘campaign’. I want to know who is the orchestra leader, and why the band members (with one or two exceptions) fall so easily into line.
Just listened to AM where Turnbull got yet another free kick because he called Rudd ‘the Bradman of boring’. They think this is news analysis? They think it’s going to endear him to the Australian people? The whole thng is so bizzare.
‘the Bradman of boring’.
Yes, he’ll survive a short burst of Turnbull from the Northshore end.
but … but I thought Bradman was boring?
And, since when has Malcolm been genuinely been interested in cricket? If he thinks being a Howard clone will make him our next PM – Hey, Malcolm, once upon a time there was this ABC journalist named Maxine McKew who ran against John Howard in his seat of Bennelong and ….
Wouldn’t Malcolm be bowling to ‘the Bradman of boring’ from the Paddington end?
I think Australians under Treasurer/PM Keating became economic literate to a basic extent. Therefore they have a rough understanding of counter cyclical fiscal policy. They have a good understanding of how the economy is functioning on a personal level and they understand how the world economy is functioning. So they believe the Government should be putting money away for a rainy day, and they know when it is raining. So when the GFC struck, they new it wasn’t just raining but it was bucketing down and they understood the need for dramatic action, they also understand that despite the cuts in interest rates, and the fiscal stimulus, things are just travelling at the moment. The Liberals are being seen as a bunch of economic wackos because there adherance to an economic ideology that people see as creating the current problems. The future test for Labor is when people finally believe the crisis is over and they do need to wind back their expenditure, which middle class welfare programs will they jettison.
Update: The Liberals’ two hour strategy.
Lefty E@27
Bradman ceased playing FC cricket nearly a decade before I was born and nearly two decades before I was aware that cricket was relevant to the culture. Still, his stats don’t recommend him as boring by the standards of cricket. His average test century was, IIRC, completed at a rate of about 75 runs per 100 deliveries, and since he managed a test century on 29 of the 80 occasions he went to bat in a test and half of those times exceeded 169 runs …
Perhaps Empty merely meant Rudd was a champion of boredom but liked the alliterative and cultural qualities associated with adduction of Bradman’s name. He might have used Baudrillard of boredom, but most would have thought he was posing or some sort of intellectual. In Australia, at least amongst “Howard’s Battlers” it’s believed you get points for pig ignorance and scorn of learning, espoused hatred of elites etc which raises the question why Tuckey isn’t running the party.
I think it’s amusing that in the course of one week Turnbull has paired Rudd with Stalin and Bradman. Who is next?
Heh!
Robert@20: debt was still an effective stick to beat Labor with in both 1996 and 1998 (and never mind that Labor got 51% of the vote, they still lost).
tssk@24: as I pointed out elsewhere, Abbott has done himself damage with that remark. His opponents will forget it but his supporters won’t. He’s buggered his own narrative and has no future.
Mark: I would point out that I was onto this last July (“Minchin and Abbott work toward Rudd second term” 25.07.08), but that would be blatant self-promotion and we can’t have that.
I loved seeing Abbott on Q&A last week when the indigenous writer, Tara Jean Winch told him that someone had sent her a copy of ‘Battlelines’ and she was using it as a drink coaster. The look on his face was classic.
Personally I thought that comment by that woman was a bit off, trying a bit too hard to look cool and over the course of the show she seemed like she was a bit out of her league.
Any word on how well (if that’s the word) Battlelines is selling? There was great anticipation for The Costello Memoirs, and almost daily updates on how it was selling – run out of stock here, in remainder bins there – but not a word on the supposedly more intellectually hefty work by someone who appears to have a future. I’d never heard of Tara Jean Winch but I suggest she’s outselling Abbott.