Greens leader Bob Brown has accused The Australian of trying to wreck the alliance between the Greens and Labor. We wear Senator Brown’s criticism with pride. We believe he and his Green colleagues are hypocrites; that they are bad for the nation; and that they should be destroyed at the ballot box. The Greens voted against Mr Rudd’s emissions trading scheme because they wanted a tougher regime, then used the lack of action on climate change to damage Labor at the election. Their flakey economics should have no place in the national debate.

Something to file away any time you read anything from the Murdoch press on the topic.

And even more people would have seen it last night on the show itself, which we know from ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s tweet today was watched by 1.57 million viewers, compared to 95 000 viewers for Sky’s Rooty Hill “town hall” event.

The ad has an after life too, all over Twitter, the blogosphere, and the online versions of newspapers.

The ABC says its editorial policy precludes allowing The Greens themselves to run the ad, but it’s already paid big dividends for the third party, I’d suggest.

(And no doubt, it’s all good promo for the makers of the ad, Republic of Everyone too.)

But he cautions:

The first thing to mention about these polls is what they don’t measure. As a result of them being in the field on Thursday night in the case of Galaxy and both Thursday and Friday nights in the case of Nielsen – they wont be measuring a proper voting intention, but instead measuring an initial public reaction. We’ll have to wait for a week or so for the phrase “Prime Minister Gillard” to sink into the public brainspace before we can start to get a confident grip on the voting intention fallout.

As a result, don’t be surprised to see quite a large variation in polling results over the next polling cycle.

Of great interest also is the fact that a majority of Galaxy respondents believe that the ALP made a bad decision forced by panic, with a larger majority believing that Julia Gillard shared responsibility with Kevin Rudd for decisions of the Government.

I still don’t think that the ALP has made a persuasive case for the manner and speed with which Kevin Rudd was removed as PM. Interviews with Nicola Roxon and Chris Bowen on successive nights on Lateline show this. People can recite the verities of the Westminster system all they like, but the reality of presidential campaigns in modern Australian politics is that electors feel they are choosing between candidates for PM as well as parties. There’s a lot of evidence that there is real hurt and shock at the way in which Kevin Rudd met his political Waterloo in the electorate, a sentiment acknowledged by Julia Gillard herself.

Retrospectively validating the decision through the evidence of two polls must be tempting for Labor figures, but I’d return to my earlier point about polls representing a snapshot of static public opinion. And my argument about the dangers of staking everything, including the weighty matter of who should lead our country, on the next poll.

The leadership change may have brought those voters Possum characterises as “skeptical partisans and ordinarily soft voters back into the fold”. But the underlying reasons why those voters left Labor haven’t gone away. The rhetoric from Gillard and others in the ALP holds out inconsistent hopes – for a ‘tougher’ or a more humane line on asylum seekers and “border security”, for an end to a divisive tax debate and for mining companies paying a fair share of taxation, for action on climate change and for a deferral on an ETS until there is “consensus”.

At this stage, disillusioned voters can take their pick as to whether they believe Gillard will move government policy on the great issues of the day in their preferred direction. But not everyone can have what they want, and these circles simply can’t be squared so as to render disparate voting groups simultaneously happy for very long. The government must act, and must decide, and which way those decisions go will be the true test of Julia Gillard as Prime Minister in the lead up to an imminent election.

NB: Previous discussion of the Labor leadership challenge on LP is here.

Elsewhere: Mumble, What The People Want.

Elsewhere: Guy Rundle:

Gillard’s wave of support derived from becoming the first female PM, and Labor at that, will not long survive a rightward turn on asylum seekers, and other ‘necessary’ manouevres.

Update: Newspoll is out, showing a small increase in the 2PP to 53-48, but a rise of 7 points in the Labor primary vote, largely at the expense of The Greens.

Dennis Shanahan proclaims that only he and “hard heads” know how to interpret polls, but Peter Brent thinks not.

Elsewhere, Graham Young details the latest National Forum qualitative polling on Julia Gillard.

Update: [by Kim] Essential Research has Labor on 54-46 2PP. Bernard Keane points out that the sample is a rolling one, so it shows that Kevin Rudd was already pulling Labor’s primary vote up and attracting voters back from The Greens.

So, watch this space on the NSW Election Commission site for the final preference count, to be uploaded on Thursday.

In the meantime, we can consider the figures for the count on the night.

The Greens’ primary was 12.6% and other non-major party candidates received a total of 12.1%.

On the two party preferred vote, the ALP’s vote rose 9.3% and the Liberal vote 15.4%.

What we don’t know yet is how many votes were exhausted (NSW, like Queensland, has optional preferential). But, clearly, the preference flow from The Greens isn’t anything like the 80% from the 2007 federal election factored into Newspoll.

Note that I’m not suggesting that this by-election was determined primarily by federal factors, but that it might provide some sort of indicator of what occurs with a higher non-major vote in a situation where the Labor party vote drops substantially.

I’d also observe that a 35% primary for Labor, as in today’s Newspoll, if reflected at an election, would include votes for Labor in safe seats. If Labor’s primary was in the low to mid 30s in marginals, they’d be in a very poor position. A caveat there is that, as in the SA election, it’s possible to target marginals and produce a swing different from the general one.

But I’m still very concerned about the strength of the Labor primary vote we’re seeing in all recent polls.

The idea is that there’d be no need for handouts or compensation to rent seekers, and that households and businesses could be compensated according to their needs. The article notes that a full range of market based solutions was never really contemplated, because the international momentum had previously been towards a production based ETS.

Despite the near absence of any reporting in Australian media, and its dissonance with the ‘narrative’, Copenhagen was not without result, and there will still be advantage in, and pressure for, Australia to establish a carbon price.

I’m no expert on the design or implications of these sorts of mechanisms, and I’d welcome input from commenters who can elucidate the nature of a consumption based ETS.

Politically, I’ve been commenting for some time that it’s highly likely that the Rudd government will seek to put something substantive in place on climate change before the election. The challenge will be to explain away the backflip on the CPRS in a more convincing manner, and why a replacement model wasn’t proposed earlier (and here The Greens’ support for an interim Garnaut Carbon Tax should have been leveraged).

Kevin Rudd is said to be disillusioned with the purported strategic geniuses from the NSW Right (Mark Arbib, Karl Bitar, Bruce Hawker, Graham Richardson, et al) whose bright idea it was to dump the CPRS in the first place. This mob never met a focus group they didn’t run in fear from, and their sole solution, aside from policy cave-ins, is leadership change. Worked well for the NSW government, didn’t it?

A substantive ETS which avoids some of the political and policy problems of the CPRS would be just the tonic the government needs, and would usefully focus attention back on Tony Abbott’s ‘Direct Action’ tokenism and denialism. But the challenge will still be to fix the mess already made with the CPRS, which has been exemplary of the government’s tendency to shoot itself in the foot.

Elsewhere: Richard Green at Troppo.

On the slightly calmer side of the fence, analysts have continued to point to the fact that:

the minority Greens have gained more than the Coalition from the fall in support for the government and Green preferences will eventually flow back to Labor…

A lot of the assumptions people have been making about the prospective outcome of this year’s election, however, might be wrong.

Let’s deal with them in turn:

First, we have to question what Possum calls the “ALP Protected Left Flank Hypothesis”. This is something I commented on in an earlier post, and if you haven’t read Possum’s superb and analytically rich post on Greens preferences, you really must.

The hypothesis Possum refers to underlies the sorts of commentary we see all over the place (and the example above from Geoffrey Barker at Inside Story is just that), and it would seem, the strategic thinking of ALP apparatchiks and consultants:

This theory relies on the assumption that there are a fixed number of left leaning voters that nearly all give the ALP their two party preferred vote. According to the theory, as left voters move from the ALP to the Greens, the ALP primary vote goes down, the Green primary vote goes up and the rate of Greens preference flows to the ALP increases as a result of these ex-ALP-come-Greens voters sending their two party preferred preferences back to Labor in very substantial numbers.

But this is not, he argues, what the polls have actually been showing:

as the Coalition primary vote has increased, so too has the size of the Greens preference flows to the Coalition – from a low of 15% in November through to a high of 32% this month. In functional terms, the observable relationship between the Coalition primary vote and Greens preference flow is the same as the relationship between the ALP primary vote and Greens preference flows – as the generic popularity of a major party increases (measured by the size of their own primary vote), the size of the preference flow they receive from the Greens increases as well.

The only real difference between the ALP and the Coalition in this regard is the actual base level of Greens preference flows each party starts off with as a minimum level – with Labor probably starting from a minimum of around 60% and the Coalition starting from a minimum of around 15%.

A substantial number of Greens voters – at least around 20% – appear to be swinging voters in terms of their preference allocations, behaving just like voters that swing between the major parties, except they do so with their preferences.

Possum concludes:

As we see from the Nielsen data, increased generic popularity delivers primary votes and preference flows. If a party is popular generally, that popularity also becomes reflected via increased Greens preferences.

Secondly, state based polls recently have been absolutely dire for Labor, and if the ALP vote is as weak as Galaxy in Queensland and Westpoll in WA indicate, then there are also implications for the composition of the Senate (if these polls are accurately measuring voting intentions, then they would translate into a Labor loss in the House of Representatives, as indicated by Nielsen last Monday).

I was initially inclined to discount Westpoll on the grounds of its small sample size, but I’m not so sure now after reading William Bowe’s analysis at The Poll Bludger:

The catch is that with a sample of just 400, the poll has a margin of error of about 5 per cent. However, it accords with the 63-37 result from WA in the most recent Nielsen poll, which would have involved a sample of about 150. If you add the two polls together, the margin of error comes down to about 4 per cent. At the lower end of that range is a swing against Labor of 4 or 5 per cent, which is what last week’s Brand poll pointed to if you distributed preferences as per the 2007 election.

Bowe goes on to make the important point that such low levels of ALP support also imperil the party’s vote in the Senate, and therefore change the calculations of what happens in the Senate more generally.

So, thirdly, we shouldn’t be assuming a Senate where The Greens hold the balance of power, because that is predicated on what Bowe now calls the “unsafe assumption” that Labor will win the election, and that Labor’s numbers in various states will improve, and the Coalition’s fall.

There are two factors here:

(a) The fight for the last spot often necessitates a flow of preferences from the major parties after they have attained quota; if Labor polls poorly in Senate primaries, there might not be sufficient preferences to elect a Green in the sixth spot in some states, if that candidate doesn’t attain quota;

(b) If the Coalition’s primary vote improves, and Labor’s continues to be at dire levels, the chance of the Coalition holding its own, or even picking up another seat or two, improves concomitantly.

Senate polling is rare and unreliable, but it’s obviously wrong to just proceed on the basis of previous assumptions made about the Senate outcome, if the picture in the House of Representatives is a prospective Labor defeat.

In short, things are not looking good.

The government’s response to the Nielsen poll yesterday was to point out that Tony Abbott stands a realistic chance of becoming PM. As Richard Farmer rightly observes, the key here is in the win expectations in the polls, which are dropping for Labor. If public perceptions do shift to a belief that the Coalition can or will win, the focus on Tony Abbott will be intense. This is one of the sole factors – the likelihood of a flaky alternative leader coming to office – which saved Labor in a difficult Queensland election.

Tony Abbott is one of the least plausible Coalition leaders to present to the electorate as an alternative PM.

But, as Guy Beres points out, the overwhelming negativism of federal politics is in itself a problem for the ALP. I’m sure that the noise and thrust and counter-thrust of the current RSPT debate is itself driving voters away from both major parties. He’s right that Rudd Labor needs to get on the front foot. I agree that outlining a path back towards an ETS would be a very good start. Labor’s current plight is not just about messaging or communication, but also about policy.

But, if there’s anything in this article by Peter Van Onselen and Matthew Franklin in The Australian about a purported desire among unnamed Labor MPs and strategists to move rightwards, that should be quashed immediately. The only named pundit, aside from Bruce Hawker, is John Black, a former Labor Senator whose electoral predictions have been wrong time and again.

But Hawker’s advice, which has a lot of pull among the ALP’s apparatchiks, is similarly wrong, and misunderstands profoundly the nature of the drift of the vote away from Labor. Whatever youth activists on Q&A may think, it’s not just young voters concerned about climate change shifting, and indeed Labor’s, and Rudd’s ratings are holding up much better in younger voting demographics. This is a piece of conventional wisdom which is flatly wrong, as is the suburban focus group lowest common denominator strategy favoured in Sussex and Peel streets. Anna Bligh’s current plight should be evidence of that.

Indeed, the polling driven nature of the ETS backdown was precisely the problem – an absence of political leadership, and a surrender to political calculation, and the nerves of apparatchiks.

A lot of what’s being written at the moment stems from a fundamental failure to understand both the reasons for The Greens’ surge and the sorts of voters who are shifting.

It’s also absurd to suggest that Rudd is doomed.

Gary Gray should know better:

Asked about Labor’s plunge in polling, Mr Gray said: “It is very, very difficult to get back from these situations. (John) Howard lived in a dream that he could; (Paul) Keating lived in a dream that he could.”

Yes – in their last term in office.

But John Howard and Hawke/Keating Labor were often behind mid-year in election years. It’s correct to point out that Rudd’s ratings, as both PPM and satisfaction, are nowhere near outside the normal range. It’s just that his fall from grace has been so quick and so drastic.

Trevor Cook is correct to suggest that recent electoral history shows Labor’s prospects of winning are not nugatory, and to say that more than one journalist should be aware of that.

Nevertheless, a primary in the mid-30s is dangerous. If it translates into low primaries in marginal seats, no flow of preferences from The Greens will be sufficient to get the ALP over the line in many instances. And Nielsen’s figures on second preferences do demonstrate that a lot of voters crossing to The Greens are not necessarily the same left leaning electors who, in much smaller proportion, voted Green in 2007.

While there is some misunderstanding in the public mind about the operation of preferences, it seems even less clear to some that a second preference vote is not equivalent to a first preference where the party receiving the second or later preference drops below a certain level of primary. In a hypothetical electorate where the Liberals poll 43%, Labor 36% and The Greens 10%, the Libs would be favoured to win, even with a strong preference flow towards Labor. If current polling were replicated on election day, there’d be quite a few of those about.

So Labor needs to rebuild its primary vote, and not just rely on tarnishing Abbott and appealing for Greens preferences. It won’t do that by a move to the right.

Elsewhere: Bernard Keane:

As for Labor, while everyone inside and outside the government is blaming poor communication for much of its current predicament, no messaging, however brilliant, is going to cover the gaping hole where the CPRS used to be. It needs a new, convincing climate change policy, and not just one built on half-baked energy efficiency measures that at best simply fund businesses to save money for themselves and at worst repeat the ludicrously costly per-tonne emissions abatement measures achieved under the Howard government’s many “greenhouse challenge” programs.

This is a view shared by a number of government MPs. Particularly given it has not escaped notice that 2010 is on track to be the hottest recorded year yet. Climate change may yet feature strongly in the election, and not just as the reason why Lindsay Tanner might lose his seat to the Greens.

Elsewhere: Ben Eltham on the “Not Happy, Kevin” effect and an excellent piece by Possum analysing Greens preferences.

He draws on data from a survey conducted by Sydney University political science PhD student Stewart Jackson presented at the 2009 Australian Political Studies Association conference, and on an analysis of AES data by Macquarie University sociologist Ben Spies-Butcher. “Labor-Greens swingers” include many who were strong Labor identifiers and they have views on economic questions further to the left of existing Greens voters. Conversely, Tietze argues that Jackson’s survey, which contrasted attitudes between Greens members who’d joined prior to and after 2000, suggests a shift to a more party centred rather than social movement picture of the tasks of The Greens. I was surprised to see that Jackson found that 14% of the latter identified as ‘right wing’. 52% of the recent members disagreed with a proposition that their party should move leftwards.

Tietze is clearly one of those Greens activists who would agree with that statement.

What he’s unsure about is whether The Greens in toto are in fact a social democratic party, and his use of the data suggests that party members are less to the left than many of its supporters. He also sees a gap in the party’s ideology:

In their book The Greens, the most complete statement of Australian Greens ideology to date, Bob Brown and Peter Singer develop a compelling description of ecological and social crisis. These crises are caused, they argue, by a flawed value system – so, for example, out-of-control consumption and waste needs to be tackled by a new ‘Green ethics’. Despite radical language that attacks many aspects of neoliberalism, Brown and Singer make no recourse to systemic structural analysis. Even the greed of the rich is painted as individually irrational and shaped largely by incorrect ideas.

The conceptual absence of class or social constestation beyond descriptions of injustice and irrationality results in a curious silence about issues of power. Because Brown and Singer see Green ethics as universally applicable, they implicitly expect that the state will implement the radical reforms they propose. The corruption of past radicals in the ALP is portrayed as a matter of individuals being bought off, professionalised and shielded from accountability and not as a result of the inherently conservatising nature of engagement with the capitalist state and parliamentary system.

I’d note that I’m just summarising rather than necessarily endorsing Tietze’s critique, but I’d be very interested indeed in hearing from Greens members and supporters on it.

I’m with Possum – there’s something a tad unusual about this result for both the ALP and The Greens, as there was for the recent Newspoll where Others had unexpectedly surged ahead. It suggests sampling error. Essential Research, also out yesterday, also has a 2PP figure of 51-49, but with the primary vote much more closely matched, and The Greens on 9.

However, as Andrew Bartlett says, it does make intuitive sense. Neither major party is exactly covering itself in glory at the moment.

Both Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott are sliding further into negative territory:

On the satisfaction rating front – Abbott and Rudd continue their slide into public disapproval, with Rudd’s net satisfaction moving down 6 from minus 12 to minus 18, while Abbott loses 9 going from minus 3 to minus 12.

In the intervening period, I’ve been surprised that so little attention has been paid to the negotiations between Senator Penny Wong and Senator Christine Milne on behalf of The Greens, which began last week. I’ve sought to emphasise that there are possibilities of Senate passage via a Liberal floor crosser (perhaps Judith Troeth, who is retiring) and Nick Xenophon. In any event, I’ve argued that there are political benefits for Labor in staking out a new position which could demonstrate the desire for immediate action, and perhaps take a different bill to a double dissolution.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that the media would ignore these developments, but I’ve also been surprised at the attitude of a number of commenters on several threads, which seems to assume that Labor’s posture is somehow frozen in stone.

So, in light of all this, I was very interested indeed to hear Bob Brown give a very articulate and well argued interview to Tony Jones on Lateline tonight where he discussed these negotiations, and revealed that he had also been talking to other non-Government Senators.