There’s some good coverage of the South Australian and Tasmanian elections from Luke Walladge and Kate Crowley respectively at New Matilda today. In Inside Story, Brian Costar and Jennifer Curtin take a comprehensive look at the precedents for written agreements guaranteeing minority governments, a very timely topic given the negotiations that will take place between the Tasmanian Liberals and Greens.
Author Archive for Mark
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
Today’s Question Time saw some interesting tactics from the government; suspending standing orders to allow Tony Abbott to talk about health and hospitals policy. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who saw the debate, but from what I heard on the tv, it looked like Abbott was mostly in bluster mode, and Rudd quite assured. Clearly Labor believes that Abbott wants to talk about anything but health, and that his lack of command of the detail, and lack of any substantive alternative policy will work to the ALP’s credit.
So, the debate Rudd challenged him to on Tuesday will be interesting. It’ll also keep the media focus squarely where the government wants it to be for the next little while.
Elsewhere: Bernard Keane.
Elsewhere: Tigtog at Hoyden.
Update: The commentariat seems to be impressed by Abbott’s performance. By way of example, Samantha Maiden:
But the egg ended up all over Labor’s face as the Opposition Leader rose to the challenge, hurling abuse at Kevin Rudd.
Righteo, then.
Update: Bernard Keane in Crikey today:
If Abbott could spend Tuesday’s debate repeating yesterday’s dose and bagging the Government and explaining that he didn’t cut health funding, it’d be fine, but there’s now an expectation he must do more than criticise Rudd, that he must offer something positive. It obviously wasn’t in the Coalition’s planning to be producing a full-blown health policy at this stage. Rudd himself will presumably use the debate to make yet another of the many announcements about health funding that he promised back when he kicked off the health debate. If so, Abbott’s failure to produce something of substance will look particularly poor.
All of which is why, despite the alleged risks of debating your opponent, Rudd is happy to be doing just that.
Ben Eltham has a neat piece in New Matilda today comprehensively detailing the reasons why the ‘Rudd quaking in his boots’ story is tosh. He makes a very good point about the relative inattention given to the Essential Research poll compared to that other poll which always makes the News:
The Essential survey polled more respondents and had a lower margin of error than Newspoll, making it a more reliable gauge of current voting intentions. But the Essential poll didn’t fit the current media narrative that Kevin Rudd is losing his shine, so most outlets ignored it.
There’s another astute observation in Eltham’s piece:
It would help if the Coalition had spent the last two years developing viable new policies. But they haven’t. So Abbott is almost required to make policy on the run in the run-up to the election. This leaves Labor all sorts of opportunities for counter-attack.
While, as I suggested the other day, the polls are reflecting both a return to partisan normality in the absence of Liberal dissension and the continued inability of the Coalition to make inroads into the centre ground, the years of Liberal leadership wars are still having an effect. The Libs could have learnt something from the oft-repeated story of state conservative oppositions, one would have thought; leadership is not the magic bullet. Changing the leader, in the absence of anyone doing the hard slog of policy work, just leaves the latest bunny in the headlights holding the magic pudding.
That’s where Abbott is now.
Peter Costello’s written a bit of a spray about Tony Abbott’s parental leave scheme in The Age. Actually quite an amusing read.
I don’t know if The Great Pretender’s distaste will have that much impact in the Coalition ranks, but you’d have thought there’d be enough other reasons for Liberals to think twice about the wisdom of the Abbott experiment.
It’s been widely observed that Abbott’s business impost disables his ‘Great New Tax On Everything’ line, because – unlike Labor’s ETS, which hands out money to big business – it probably would be, as large companies pass on the tax to consumers.
I haven’t noticed anyone pointing out that the parental leave plan also contradicts the theme Abbott was developing against Rudd – that Rudd’s announcements were over ambitious and it was better to go with more incremental, smaller scale policy. This was the political logic of the ‘Direct Action’ slogan, and to my mind, it’s not a bad line of attack. But it can hardly be credibly pushed when, as Costello says, Abbott has taken the ‘my policy’s bigger than your policy’ road.
Then, there’s the fact that this ego driven strategy on Abbott’s part shifts the focus from the government back on to his own credentials and capability to be Prime Minister, which is pretty dumb opposition politics at this stage of the game. After the insulation debacle, the Liberals should have been reiterating their story about the government’s policy woes. Instead, they’re defending their own policy. Not smart.
Today’s Essential Research poll might show the reversal in the movement of the polls, which I suspected prompted Tony Abbott’s parental leave thought bubble last week. My view was that Abbott’s speech was a ‘crazy brave’ attempt to shake things up and respond to internal polling which was either showing the Coalition going backwards or, at best, failing to build on the momentum he’d displayed, in some measure, in public polls. There was some support for the view that it was polling driven in statements by Coalition MPs, and almost a week on, it’s certainly looking more and more like it was hardly considered policy which had been worked over for a long time, to put it charitably.
At any rate, as Possum observes, Labor’s lead in today’s poll is its best so far this year.
I think we can also see that Abbott’s parental leave announcement has been viewed very much through the prism of the parties’ images – which in themselves are composites of longstanding perceptions of party strengths and weaknesses, how the parties relate to social cleavages, and less long term assessments of competence and direction in office or in opposition. Policy tends to be mediated through this prism, rather than being an independent variable in its own right. In other words, few policy announcements – in and of themselves – are likely to be political game changers.
It’s useful, then, to counterpose two tables from Essential Report’s research [courtesy of Possum]:
As Possum also observes, the crunch is in the cross-tabs:
Among Labor voters, 61% supported the Government’s scheme and 15% supported the Opposition’s. However, only 37% of Coalition voters supported the Opposition’s scheme – 20% supported the Government scheme and 35% supported neither.
Continue reading ‘Coalition wedges itself on parental leave’
Since we don’t live by politix alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
An open thread, where at your weekend leisure, you can discuss anything you like.
Possum has obtained the polling conducted by UMR for six Queensland unions on the impact of Anna Bligh’s privatisation plans on Labor’s vote. It’s not good news for Bligh, and he suggests, not good news for Kevin Rudd either:
These figures suggest that the Bligh government’s asset sale plan will reduce the ALP’s two-party preferred vote share at the federal election in Queensland by up to about 2%. That is a significant impediment to Labor winning and retaining seats in Rudd’s home state.
His conclusion is interesting:
That level of generic political outlook suggests that not all is lost for Bligh. When combined with asset sales being the dominant issue that is chasing votes away from Labor, with the union movement agitating for the program to be overturned and with Bligh’s program spilling political consequences across into the federal election sphere — the option of a back flip with a triple pike on the asset sale program must be filling the minds of Labor politicians everywhere.
I suspect that the polling doesn’t properly disaggregate the influences of the actual privatisation decision and the perception that Bligh did an almighty turnaround from her election rhetoric, because the choice between the two options is not a particularly salient one given that they’re inter-related. So a backflip would undoubtedly be good for Rudd (or a bit of old-fashioned distancing, as he did with Peter Beattie’s unpopular council amalgamations). But I suspect the jury is still out as to whether Bligh could turn around her fortunes. Given that she’s not the most flexible politician in the world when it comes to changing course, a new Premier might be the answer for Queensland state Labor.
Writing in Crikey the other day, Eloise Keating suggested that “if Abbott wants to woo women, he should start with wages”:
Recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show Australian women earned just 82.5% of the average male rate of pay across the country in 2009. On average, a female worker would have earned more in 1985 — and will be $1 million worse off over their lifetimes than their dads, brothers and partners.
That rather understates the size of the problem, because that differential refers to full time earnings, and 57% of women in work were full time, with 43% being part time or casual in 2009. As the recent House of Representatives Standing Committee Report on Equal Pay, Making It Fair, observed:
In August 2007, the average mean earning from all jobs for women was $680 per week (compared to $1022 for male employees) partly reflecting women’s greater participation in part time employment. On a comparison of full time employment earnings, women on average earned $910 per week and men earned $1131 weekly.
The point I’ve been making in my commentary and analysis of the Abbott parental leave plan is that there seems to be a perception that women in the workforce are much better off than they actually are. Otherwise it would be impossible to conclude that income replacement was ‘generous’ or ‘fair’. My argument has been that the Coalition’s approach would further entrench existing inequalities. In that context, it was interesting to note the comments from Eric Abetz on the 7.30 Report tonight. Abetz was responding to a case which starts tomorrow in Fair Work Australia seeking to revalue the work performed (very largely by women) in the community sector. Continue reading ‘Coalition shows it doesn’t care about equal pay for women’
Tony Abbott’s performance in question time today, and the timing of his parental leave thought bubble more generally, suggest that his major imperative was to switch the topic of debate from health. That’s despite the Coalition running a very active scare campaign about hospital closures in the bush, but it’s probably because of the polling on Rudd’s initiative. I suspect also that it wouldn’t be going out too far on a limb to venture a modest prediction that that Labor might be headed for an uptick in the polls.
Some Coalition MPs have suggested that this plan came about so suddenly because Abbott had become privy to private party polling.
I strongly suspect that the Labor Party might have had a bit of a turnaround – perhaps related to the National Curriculum and health, and Abbott might be responding to that. It could also explain why he felt he had to release some ‘positive policy’. It could well be that his negativism has had an impact; I note that Labor Ministers have been reiterating the ‘Senate obstructionism’ line again this morning.
In short, on where the parties actually stand, one shouldn’t believe what one reads in The Australian.
Meanwhile, whether or not Abbott makes health a focus of his parliamentary attack, the Premiers continue to ponder the National Health and Hospitals Network. Kevin Rudd has wrought his own ambush, confident that there’s no political skin to be lost picking a fight with the states on this battleground. But that doesn’t mean that some of the Premiers haven’t been posing some good questions – interestingly, probably more from Kristina Kenneally than John Brumby.
And while the headline politics might have been the primary focus of media attention, some good work continues to be done on analysing the policy itself. I’ve posted some salient links over the fold. Continue reading ‘So, how about that hospitals plan?’
As noted, Abbott’s International Women’s Day announcement of a paid parental leave plan has created a lot of debate here on LP [read previous threads here]. And it’s attracted a lot of commentary in the wider blogosphere and media.
Gary Sauer-Thompson at Public Opinion has a handle on the politics:
So the Coalition’s strategy [of] messing with the system by throwing anything at the Rudd Government that comes to hand continues. It doesn’t matter about the contradictions –introducing a big tax when the promise is no new taxes—as it is about getting noticed and destabilisation with whatever-it-takes to oppose the Rudd Government on everything.
The strategy is to wedge Labor—’’supporting big business over working families” is the new talking point— and to win back female voters who have been deserting the Coalition.
Trevor Cook asks whether Abbott is really a Liberal. Meanwhile, in The Age, Leslie Cannold disputes the claim that parental leave is solely a women’s issue and Julia Perry in the SMH examines who should pay.
I’ve built on the arguments I made in a post here yesterday in a piece for The ABC’s The Drum Unleashed to nail the canard that Abbott’s plan is more ‘generous’ than Labor’s policy, and set out my reasons why it’s not something progressives should support.
The state elections and federal implications
In tonight’s counts, it appears clear that the ALP has narrowly held on in South Australia, containing the swing against the government to 1.7% in the marginals, with much of the state wide anti-Labor swing washing through safe seats, while Tasmania, as predicted, is up for grabs.
On the ABC’s latest figures, the Tasmanian vote split is 37.1/39.1/21.3 for Labor, the Liberals and The Greens respectively, with a 10-10-5 allocation of seats predicted. It’s interesting, in passing, to observe that The Greens didn’t come anywhere near as close to Labor’s vote as polls might have indicated, though nevertheless scoring a handy swing of 4.6%. The swing against Labor in Tasmania was -12.1%, compared to -7.4% in South Australia, where the great majority of the swing has gone straight to the Liberals, with only a small increase in The Greens’ vote of 1.6%.
I’m going to be very interested to see whether those members of the commentariat who were proclaiming that a Labor loss in one or both states would spell doom for Rudd, further embolden Abbott, and claiming that “state results have federal implications and feed into the psychological battle in Canberra” will now rewrite their scripts for tomorrow’s papers.
In truth, there is very little point pouring over state tea leaves to concoct a federal brew.
Continue reading ‘The state elections and federal implications’