Tag Archive for ‘Coalition’ at Larvatus Prodeo

Tag Archive for 'Coalition'

The state elections and federal implications

Published

11 hours, 20 minutes ago

. 20 Comments

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’

Stop the press! Media narrative wrong!

Published

Mark

2 days, 19 hours ago

in Media, Politics and Polls

. 26 Comments

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.

Costello piles on

Published

Mark

3 days, 19 hours ago

in Politics

. 34 Comments

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.

Rudd’s ratings come down to earth; but he shouldn’t worry

Published

Mark

4 days, 16 hours ago

in Media and Polls

. 30 Comments

In comments on my thread on the failure of the Abbott parental leave thought bubble to halt a move back to Labor in the polls (and the reasons why), I observed that Possum’s observation provides further confirmation that it was probably private polling inspired in the first place:

Tony Abbott should consider himself a little lucky today with the Newspoll sample, as other unpublished phone polling that was in the field last week and over the weekend picked up movement more akin to Essential than Newspoll. So saying, it all comes out in the wash given enough time. (And no folks, that isn’t a Newspoll conspiracy, it’s simply normal sampling error – put it back in your pants).

So, I still think we’re seeing some movement back to Labor in public opinion, despite the apparent stasis in Newspoll.

Despite the fact that Abbott’s been having a dream run in the media (always seemingly ready to be amused and entertained with something or someone that can be represented as providing colour and movement), it’s actually much more difficult (and probably more unwise) to run the ’seize the attention’ opposition strategy than sometimes perceived. It has a pretty short use by date. And it doesn’t necessarily work; just ask Mark Latham.

I think that the true (if more prosaic) story about the narrowing of the party vote in the polls over the last few months is that it’s a return to partisan normality. Federal governing parties have very rarely enjoyed the sorts of overwhelming advantages state incumbents have had, and not surprisingly so, as the nation is a much more variegated and complex beast. That, and the perceived end of the GFC, leaves less room for Kevin Rudd to adopt the ‘above politics’ stance beloved of Labor premiers (and of ‘New Labor’ administrations more generally); or rather, it doesn’t succeed in hoovering up as much of the soft vote when the opposition unites behind a leader and rejoins the partisan game.

The spin on Newspoll this morning – in the absence of any movement in the two party preferred – was the banner headline of doom for Kevin Rudd’s approval ratings. That’s more or less a waste of newsprint. If we had a breakdown of the Newspoll figures, I strongly suspect we’d find that Rudd’s drop over the last few months has mostly come from Coalition voters. That reflects the perceived increase in strength of leadership and unity among Coalition partisans in the electorate; Rudd’s ratings are still higher by a significant degree than the ALP party vote, which implies that he’s still rated by undecided and soft voters; as does his advantage over Abbott and his commanding lead in the PPM stakes (once upon a time, of course, the all important indicator according to Shanahan and crew). I doubt, therefore, that he’s got much further to fall, all other things being equal, or that there’s any remaining drag effect in the party vote.

Coalition wedges itself on parental leave

Published

Mark

5 days, 9 hours ago

in Parenting, Policy, Politics, Polls, Sociology and Women

. 41 Comments

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’

So, how about that hospitals plan?

Published

Mark

1 week, 3 days ago

in Education, Government, Health, Industrial Relations, Media, Policy, Politics and Polls

. 7 Comments

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?’

Reaction to Abbott’s parental leave plan

Published

Mark

1 week, 3 days ago

in Feminism, Howardia, Media, Parenting, Policy, Politics, Poverty, Sociology and Women

. 59 Comments

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.

Unfairness and Abbott’s parental leave non-policy

Published

Mark

1 week, 4 days ago

in Economics, Feminism, Howardia, Industrial Relations, Media, Parenting, Policy, Politics and Women

. 144 Comments

A lot has been said about Tony Abbott’s parental leave speech yesterday and today on this blog, on these two threads. As I suspected would occur, most of the qualifications and the actual non-policy aspect of the policy were not reported in today’s press, and the general line was that Abbott’s scheme was ‘better’, because it offered income support for a longer period and at a replacement level of income, rather than the minimum wage.

That’s highly questionable – or rather, it would be ‘better’ for those who are already relatively advantaged, and worse for many who are not.

Let’s put some facts on the table.

Continue reading ‘Unfairness and Abbott’s parental leave non-policy’

Rudd’s health policy

Published

Mark

2 weeks, 3 days ago

in Federal Elections, Government, Health and Politics

. 63 Comments

Kevin Rudd has released his health policy at the National Press Club.

Essentially, it encompasses a phased takeover of responsibility for activity based hospital funding by the Commonwealth, with 30% of GST revenue to be diverted directly to hospitals. Funding would flow to individual hospitals, with local authorities being funded to treat individual patients, and the establishment of national standards of care.

Primary health care will become the sole responsibility of the Commonwealth.

Politically, it buys the Commonwealth a possible fight with the largely unpopular state governments, and appears to short circuit the state health departments, leaving them with residual functions for the less glamorous administrative functions of hospital systems. It also incorporates the local focus Tony Abbott has championed, with flexibility for clincal and funding decisions to be made at hospital or regional level. The Commonwealth would become, in effect, a regulatory and activity based funding body, rather than ‘taking over’ hospitals, but the threat of a referendum remains.

Subsequent announcements between now and the election will focus on extra beds, doctor and nurse training, support for GPs, and the introduction of electronic patient record monitoring.

The AMA is supportive; the Coalition opposed.

Detail of the National Health and Hospitals Network Plan can be found here.

Update: Bernard Keane observes at The Stump that the plan comes with a snappy slogan – “funded nationally, run locally”.

Update: Melissa Sweet analyses the announcement at Croakey.

Update: The transcript of Kevin Rudd’s Q&A at the Press Club is now available here.

Rudd unwhacked

Published

Mark

2 weeks, 4 days ago

in Elections, Media, Politics and Polls

. 61 Comments

Newspoll came in last night with essentially a status quo result, with both parties one point up on primaries (and the 2PP changing one point down each way to 52-48 because of a measured fall in The Greens’ primary.)

I doubt that Kevin Rudd ever expected the ‘whacking’ in the polls he trumpeted. Rather, this was part of the rhetorical structure of the weekend of apologies – convincing the public that he’d already taken his medicine, and that they should think again about the government’s virtues (which he, and Ministers, have used the sorry-fest to remind everyone of) and think harder about the Coalition. A very similar line has been working wonders for Gordon Brown of late.

In other words, rather than offering the proverbial commentary on the polls, Rudd’s remarks are part of a set piece of political manoeuvring aiming to draw a line in the sand, and to establish a contrast between the government’s new policy announcements (the national curriculum and health) and the opposition’s negativity. That’s potentially quite an effective play when everything we’ve seen of of Abbott et al over the last few weeks has been pure opposition.

Incidentally, I’d repeat the point I’ve made a number of times before – among all sorts of other influences, commentary on the polls has an underlying and perhaps unexamined premise that a Liberal majority is the natural state of affairs. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain the narrative of trouble and crisis when Labor is still comfortably ahead. It’s as if the Coalition ever overtaking Labor spells doom and destruction for the Rudd government. It would not. It’s worth underlining the fact that governments are often behind in the polls, and come back to win elections. John Howard frequently appeared headed for defeat in each electoral cycle after his first win.

Trevor Cook provides a useful reminder another point of comparison – to the Rudd opposition of the late Howard years.

Speaking of which, those who talked about Howard’s comments and policy changes around the time of the Aston by-election in 2001 were making the better comparison than the chorus of ‘Beattie reborn!’ songsters. The difference, of course, is that Howard appeared headed for a genuine whacking in early 2001, while Rudd is sitting pretty.

While we’re talking polls, I’d also recommend a squizzy at Possum’s fascinating tables on the Essential Research questions about the assessment of leaders’ attributes.

Barnaby befuddled

Published

Mark

3 weeks, 2 days ago

in Economics and Politics

. 92 Comments

I don’t think Barnaby Joyce likes to think he might be wrong.

He’s followed up yesterday’s ‘net gross debt’ clanger with an incoherent op/ed in The Australian today. It’s described by Dennis Shanahan in what appears to be a news article (news is what’s published by News?) as using “his homespun analogies and simple arguments”.

False analogies and basic misunderstanding might have been a better characterisation.

Joyce continues to be obsessed with defending his claim that Australia might default on debt.

But, in so doing, he seems to have no comprehension of the difference between sovereign debt and private debt.

Glenn Dyer in Crikey today:

Most of this foreign debt – in fact the overwhelming proportion of it – is private foreign debt raised by companies large and small, from our big banks, to BHP, to CSL, to Caltex, down to smaller companies with trade finance arrangements in place offshore.

Australia cannot “default” on this debt. Only the holders of that debt can default.

As Dyer goes on to point out, this debt is actually investment in income-generating assets. It’s the import of capital, and has nothing whatever to do with Joyce’s rant about ‘Labor spending’:

In other words, money we owe the rest of the world has been invested in productive assets and in creating wealth in the future, unlike the US and UK where it was used to finance housing and current consumption (some in Australia has been used for that purpose, but not the majority).

Barney doesn’t understand that point: we are borrowing from offshore to invest in assets (Gorgon LNG, iron ore mines, gold mines, infrastructure, Queensland coal seam gas) that will generate income in future years to both meet the interest cost and repay the debt.

We can pay our way. There is rising concern that the likes of Greece might have trouble doing so on a continuing basis. That’s why there’s a tinge of default about these countries, and not about Australia.

Barney apparently doesn’t get that, either out of political calculation, or plain ignorance.

Elsewhere: Brian Matthews in Eureka Street.

Torquemada in Lycra

Published

Kim

3 weeks, 5 days ago

in Federal Elections and Politics

. 32 Comments

Tony Abbott, we’re told, is “real”. Able to mix with the battlers (just like Joe Hockey, another product of the North Shore Jesuit Fathers, and just like yet another, Barnaby Joyce, the accountant in the Akubra), he’s “authentic”.

Kevin Rudd is real too. He really is a wonky, nerdy bureaucrat. Perish the thought that we would want to vote for someone who knew something about policy?

But why is it assumed that the persona doesn’t mask something else? Could Tony Abbott be the one spinning a web of symbolism? Wasn’t George W. Bush the candidate we’d rather have a beer with?

[Rhetorical questions in the mode of KRudd.]

Now, I haven’t read Tony’s tome. Be interested to hear from anyone who has. But, Geoffrey Barker has, and he wrote this in the Fin Review today:

Continue reading ‘Torquemada in Lycra’

Abbott takes a stand in defence of private health

Published

Mark

3 weeks, 5 days ago

in Federal Elections, Health and Politics

. 24 Comments

This week in Parliament Labor will gain another double dissolution trigger, as the Coalition has vowed to stop changes to the threshold for the private health insurance rebate. Labor will be keen to draw a parallel between this move and Abbott’s tenure as Health Minister, arguing that less money will be available for public hospitals. The ALP will also no doubt utilise Barnaby Joyce’s previous equivocal comments on the measure to ram home the point about fiscal indiscipline from the opposition.

Kevin Rudd’s health policy is likely to be the centrepiece of the government’s plan for re-election.

Meanwhile, writing at The Age, Kenneth Davidson provides a very good argument for not subsidising the private health insurers at all.

The politics of risk and uncertainty in an election year

Published

Mark

1 month ago

in Economics, Europe, Federal Elections, International, Markets, Politics and Sociology

. 36 Comments

Writing in Crikey yesterday, Guy Rundle described the Greek imbroglio as the second wave of the Global Financial Crisis:

So let’s try and make it as clear as possible — the second wave of the 2008 GFC has begun, and Greece is where it started from. The first wave was prompted by the collapse of a series of private investment banks, starting with Lehman Brothers. The second is starting with the deep problems occasioned by the indebtedness of sovereign nations using the broad security of the euro, to be entrepreneurial with their budgets. That’s entrepreneurial in a political sense — thus Greece’s centre-right New Democrats left the nation’s finances unreformed as a way of giving the illusion that the wave of post euro-entry prosperity was solidly backed. Instead the country has simply wildly over-borrowed from its future.

That much is Greece’s problem primarily, and Europe’s secondarily. It becomes a global matter when the degree of exposure of the global banking system becomes clear — hot on the heels of the last crunch, and with nothing resembling a real recovery in-between.

Writing in Crikey today, Bernard Keane concluded that things may not be as rosy as we’d thought in Australia:

The euphoria that Australia has avoided a recession is now giving way to the realisation that as the Government’s stimulus withdraws, there are real questions about just how strong the private-sector growth needed to replace it is.

And the threat from overseas, and particularly the impact of sovereign debt and sluggish economic growth on financial and currency markets, has placed a big question mark over external demand.

Continue reading ‘The politics of risk and uncertainty in an election year’

Newspoll and climate change opinion II; partisan affiliation, gender and age

Published

Mark

1 month ago

in Climate change, Politics, Polls and Sociology

. 62 Comments

As a supplement to Paul’s post, I thought it was worthwhile posting derived tables of the breakdown by partisan affiliation, gender and age, courtesy of Possum. As he says, “Those results are pretty interesting in and of themselves!”… particularly the variance by age and, to a lesser degree, gender.

Continue reading ‘Newspoll and climate change opinion II; partisan affiliation, gender and age’

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