This morning, in response to the Galaxy Poll [see analysis here], Prime Minister Gillard warned that voters in Queensland and New South Wales needed to distinguish between her government and their unpopular state Labor regimes.
Is she right that there’s a knock on effect from public distaste for the Keneally and Bligh governments?
Yes, and no.
It’s easy enough to point to large swathes of the political cycle when voters opted for different parties at state and federal level. Neville Wran’s 1976 victory and 1978 ‘Wranslide’ book-ended a poor result for Federal Labor in NSW in the 1977 election. Peter Beattie’s rightly argued recently that huge numbers of Queensland electors favoured his government in 2001 and 2004 while giving John Howard a majority of federal seats in elections held in the same years.
What may be different this time around, though, is that federal and state issues are showing an increasing tendency to converge.
Both John Howard and Kevin Rudd, and now Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, have made traditionally state areas of responsibility – infrastructure, schools and health most prominently – their own business.
Peter Beattie and Kevin Rudd did a double step in 2006 and 2007, contending that health and transport in Queensland were being held back by federal neglect.
Of course, there have always been different swings in different states, but this year, arguably, the differences are looking as stark as they have been since 1990.
Again, it’s a bit too simplistic to write it all down to “unpopular Labor governments”. Bligh Labor is not unpopular for the same reasons as Keneally Labor – it’s more to do with the privatisation push than a perception of service delivery crisis. But Labor campaigners are reporting voters raising state issues pretty quickly on door knocks and at street stalls.
Compounding this blurring of responsibility between state and federal governments, I think, is the lack of an overarching theme and the absence of big picture issues in this federal race. It’s not that parish pump promises in marginal seats are anything new. But it is the case that, unlike in 2007, there’s nothing to really raise voters’ sights above the horizon of the everyday.
So we have a federal election which resembles state races more and more.
That’s why Labor really wants the focus of the last week to be on the economy and jobs. Hence Julia Gillard’s counter-challenge today to Tony Abbott’s proposal for another ‘town hall meeting’.
The national economy is one area where voters are very clear that the choice of government matters, much more so than whether there’s CCTV at the local railway station, or whether the local school got the price it wanted for a new school hall.
So we’ll continue to see, over this last week, a twinned focus on the local and the national – expect the Labor campaign launch in Brisbane tomorrow to heavily emphasise economic management.
Cross-posted at The Drumroll.
Well, its an interesting post, on a quick scan.
Certainly most of this readership would concur with the aspiration that state electorates should punish their governments rather than federal ones for state problems.
However, its llkely that state governments have long suffered in funding, regardless of the consumption tax Howard brought in.
But to what extent do state governments adhere philosophically to the neolib ideology and seek to deflect their own enthusiasm for small (weak) government (government by developer)by blaming the feds?
Quiggin and others have demolished the Bligh privatisation push and in NSW the corruption within planning and development is legendary.
And it is here that Mark makes a delicate category mistake, in contemplating the public’s hostilty to privatisation, because the electorate in Queensland were offered privatisation by the Libnats and postively rejected it, against Bligh’s explicit promise of no further privitisation ( which as just folk like Quiggin have demonstrated, is an economic furphy at best).
The issue wasnt the sconomic one, the electorated both in QLD and earlier NSW already rejected privatisation emphatically for the shady alibis for misapropriation they were.
It was the malevolent bad faith and naked treachary and deceitfulness involved in putting forward bad policies that only benefitted a minority, at the expense of a common wealth and then trying to impose them after, the public had specifically, rejected them.
It followed the same egregious pattern in NSW, where once again a keystone election promise against an ideologically driven neolib push for privatisation, was aso arrogantly thrown in the faces of electors, long denied an authentic form of infrastructure development.
As we already had discerned, with Tasmania, as to what happens with weak government- a cabal of interests gets control to rape a resource at the people’s expense for quick bucks, immune to accountability and censure; once hidden behind a wall of pps and commercial in confidence.
Rereading it, the underlying expectation for Labor voters is of a party of informed of something deeper than mere capitalist grasping.
Labor presents itself as the party of policial vision, yet has seemed come to operate as a shopfront for precisly those interests innamicable to the notion of the community interest.
If the feds are as uncaring and corrupted as the state labor politicians, who appear to have no sense of public consciousness at all beyond a capacity to recognise public consciousness as a block to their back room deals with merchant bankers and developers, it is here where the rupture occurs, because if Gillard, Brumby and the rest are no better and have no vision than parochial politicians, what the differentiation between Labor, and Howard and Abbott, who make no effort to hide their objectives, but valorise proto fascism as a “good”.
Thats 3 good posts.
In another place, as you well know, Paul Walter, I opined that if she were to survive, Ms Gillard should take Senator Arbib behind the change sheds and castrate him. Perhaps (after prompting from one or two others in that place) in the presence of certain others.
I think (irony, Irene, irony) it’s called Federal intervention. About time it happened in NSW to these obscene opportunistic descendants of the Rum Corps.
When a state government has been in office long enough there are enough issues around the place to offend almost all sectional interests one way or another. At a wide angle Labor in NSW is way too close to developers and are on the nose at local as well as state level. One of the problems for the Feds is the proximity of key NSW Labor figues to the current PM and the way she got there. It looks familiar if you are a NSW elector. It appears to me that this is not a case of the electors being confused about state and federal Labor. It is more a case of more of the same at the Federal level of what we have been experiencing at a state level and in particular what looks like failure to actually deliver. I mean the belly laugh in NSW at mention of completion of a rail link, any rail link, would have been audible interstate. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still vote Labor in NSW because the Libs are a truly strange brew of libertarian anti-statists and Christian fundies whose only policy is slash and burn at the public sector. The problem is that the public sector, especially transport, is so bloody dysfunctional that there is no user loyalty engaged in protecting it. That’s rail, bus, hospital, education and others. The voters here can’t wait for the next state election and there may well be an element of ph*ck ‘em all in their voting. BTW: I read on Crickey that one of the Sex Party’s rejected election slogans was just that: ph*ck ‘em all. Pity, really.
HD, it’s one thing for agents, formations etc to tinker about the superstructures, that can have all sorts of fun value like a giant sand box for the vanities that is our system as currently operative. The state in itself is benign, there is all sorts of human interaction, from personal relationships down to blokey blokes and gals playing “corporate takeovers”.
But what Kennett, Keneally, Bligh, Cameron (UK) and co have done is an egregious violence to the text: an assault on the very bases of community, reactionary out of ignorance and bad faith.
Am not malicious toward these people themselves, they are merely ill,for want of a better word, most of them.
By analogy, you have a puppy that is prone to weeing on the floor. You don’t take it personally because it is not capable of better. But if you’re sensible, you put the puppy somewhere it isn’t going to widdle on something valuable.
An unpleasant feeling, to wonder if you are being sold out: I just want to understand how they think, if they are sociopathic, or what?
The thing that terrifies me about the NSW Libs at both State and Federal level is the seriously unholy alliance of Opus Dei and Hillsong (and the latter’s wannabes).
Paul I wrote a long post responding to you you but realised I was probably talking to me, so I canned it.
Doesn’t matter how they think Paul.
They are doing wrong, people are getting hurt.
Things have gotta change.
Yes, 4:
Back to the store in the packet-bags they came in.
The groupers are much at the core of this slightly daft, antique Manichean religion, “Americanised” Jet Jackson version of the world. Even in Howard’s day they had aheard of them, cross-party, wondering about fed parliament like construction-site buffaloes- think no further than Kevin Andrews.
10, sorry “herd” for “heard” in last sentence.
HD, here is where the population debate inclusion of Dr Perera in the QA, as a as acompetent stastistician and theorist but also as gentle reminder of that dark grey world beyond our borders where billions go without, so, Sustainability: yes.
Immigration under the right pre-circumstances in place prior: yes ( rather than those that corrode this ).
A MASSIVE transformation with western psychic values, realigning us with people as represented by Dr Perera, the perspective that allows for the “mean” or sense of proportion that recognises the absurdity of a 0.2% of our (typical western) budget on foreign “aid”: YES.
Therefore, we move to sustainable development cutting wastage of valuable resources, if not for deeper reasons, and perhaps use again prior to exchange value, where humanely necessary?
I wonder at the priority of new sport stadiums in western cities when a thousand places the size of Dili cry out for basic social infrastructure.
But not climate change. Gillard has explicitly stated that the federal government will not be contributing to the generation of electricity from renewable resources, but is leaving it totally to the states.
Yes, 11. A basic assault.
Nurses are over/worked and underpayed.
Somewhere right now nurses are getting yelled at for being late with meds,holding there bladder because they have been to busy they cant pee.
ight now a nurse is getting puked on and missing there family because they are taking care of yours.
In the minute it took you to read this a nurse in your state are saving lives.
Love and appreciate nurses and ask the political leaders why are they not paying them what they are worth.