When I first discovered FiveThirtyEight.Com (courtesy of Down and Out of Sài Gòn on one of the American election threads here at LP, if I recall correctly), I thought of Nate Silver as America’s Possum. Coincidentally, there’s a profile of Silver published in New York magazine which makes some very similar points about the emergence of a statistician doing psephological wonkery as an avocation into a major source of expertise and information on elections as an article sounding that theme from Monash University Journalism Professor Chris Nash in the new edition of the Pacific Journalism Review.
Just think what elections would be like without Possums and Silvers! If all we had to rely on for psephological goodness was the dead tree media…
This time last year, we were all feverishly anticipating the calling of the federal election, which was less than a fortnight away. Now, courtesy of the quarterly Newspoll geographical and demographic analysis we can track where and with whom the Rudd government has been travelling well and less well from January to September 2008 and compare the poll numbers with the election result in November 2007.
Possum has all the spiffy graphs.
As The Poll Bludger notes, there are two really interesting trends in the aggregate poll. First, the Rudd honeymoon is still very much alive for the 18-34 demographic (and it will be intriguing to see some good data on how Turnbull’s elevation shifts this - if at all - down the track.) Secondly, Labor is still doing poorly in the West, and has gone a fair way backward in South Australia. (Incidentally, the data supports the point Kim made here the other day about Labor trending upwards in Queensland federally while Anna Bligh’s state regime goes into a slump - albeit a slump which is still of election winning dimensions even if it’s not a Beattie style landslide. And federal Labor hasn’t been hurt in New South Wales by the implosion of the Iemma government.)
A lot of folks are attributing Labor’s performance in South Australia to the Murray-Darling basin issue. Again, it’s worth noting that Labor still has a primary lead of 3 points over the Coalition, but it is no doubt significant to see eight points knocked off its lead so quickly in the last quarter, after having been stable at 49% more or less since the election. I’d be interested to hear from South Australian LP-ers about what they think is going on.
If it is the Murray-Darling, this might say something interesting about the Rudd government’s ability to deal with relatively intractable problems through its preferred mode of governance. Continue reading ‘The state of Rudd Nation’
Remember how John Howard said after he lost his seat of Bennelong and the top job that he wouldn’t be providing a running commentary on politics?
He’s over in LA at the moment on his rounds collecting meaningless awards from obscure American right wing think tanks. If you happen to be in the neighbourhood, you could have attended a “gala dinner in Brentwood” with the PM - for only $1000 a plate. But don’t panic if you missed out! His reflections on “Remembering Munich: the Legacy of Appeasement” will be featuring as part of the American Freedom Alliance’s program for another couple of days. I’m sure we’re all proud that Howard has been selected as a recipient of the Winston S. Churchill Medal of Freedom.
While in California, Howard couldn’t resist giving an interview to media start up Pyjamas tv. You can watch it here. Streem reports:
During the interview, Mr Howard touched on the Iraq War, commenting that the media was hesitant to cover it because of improving conditions.
Really? While violence is down, the conditions for “winning the war” stipulated by the Bush administration are very far from being met, according to a very comprehensive article by Peter W. Galbraith in the New York Review of Books.
Earlier in the year, writing in On Line Opinion, I thought that Labor’s “Forward With Fairness” industrial relations policy was best interpreted as an attempt to entrench a new workplace settlement acceptable to all parties - and I still think that’s the Rudd government’s main game. However, it’s now becoming clearer that an element of union bashing is involved - the tired old Third Way game of establishing supposedly electorally popular distance from teh evil labour movement, and also that the “balance” being struck is tilted quite significantly in the direction of employers. Among other things, this explains the dissent in the ranks of unions toward the lacklustre public performance in holding Labor accountable from Sharan Burrow and Jeff Lawrence. It’s also becoming clearer - with the resurrection of demands for “statutory individual contracts” by Julie Bishop as a condition of Senate passage - that the model hasn’t succeeded in producing consensus.
Julia Gillard outlined the results of consultations and more of the shape of the policy which will be embodied in legislation soon to be introduced into Parliament in an address to the National Press Club yesterday. The transcript is here. Commentary is largely focused on the unfair dismissal changes for small business, and there’s a sample of the reaction in a good article summarising union and academic views in The Age. But equally important are the machinations going on in the Industrial Relations Commission over “modern awards”, where employers have been presenting what are basically award-stripping ambit claims, and some odd interventions from Gillard herself [the process was examined in a previous LP post by Senator Rachel Siewert of The Greens] and the rather weak protections for collective bargaining that have been outlined.
It’s all very well to say that Fair Work Australia will be able to make good faith bargaining orders, but if they’re only weakly enforceable, and if there’s no power to arbitrate in the face of, well, bad faith, then it seems somewhat of a fig leaf. The ongoing legal maneouvring Telstra have engaged in, which has just had a setback with employees rejecting a non-union collective agreement in a Commission ordered ballot, is a case in point. Differential pay offers (which have nothing to do with rewarding merit and performance and everything to do with de-unionisation), legal stalling, failure to recognise bargaining agents and “wait them out” negotiating are all weapons in the armoury of management strategy, and it’s far from clear from what Gillard had to say that these tactics couldn’t be employed by business under the new laws.
Continue reading ‘Julia Gillard and the unions’
When it appeared likely that the Libs might win in WA, much of the commentary focused on how a non-Labor state government would play havoc with Kevin Rudd’s “cooperative federalism”. As with so much political analysis around the traps, this is lazy commentary shaped by myths and cliches and not by reality. Rudd’s “ending the blame game” theme was always somewhat tentative - people seem to forget the stick and carrot approach never went away. Indeed, it was explicitly highlighted before the election with regard to health and the possibility of a Commonwealth hospitals takeover. Implicitly, it’s raised its head as “argy bargy” on issues such as IR, education and water, among others. The feds still have the power of the purse strings, and this and the fear of breaking ranks among Labor premiers, and being seen to do so, is a very effective method of shaping outcomes while maintaining the political high ground.
A possible Barnett premiership would shift the dynamics somewhat, but Barnett would still have considerable incentive to cooperate. Rudd’s template for COAG reform comes from the 90s when Liberal premiers such as Kennett, Greiner and Court worked with Labor premiers such as Goss and Paul Keating’s government.
It’s also worth remembering that Rudd’s “ending the blame game” promise was explicitly defined as a response to the “coast to coast Labor” scare. A Liberal state government or two would allow Rudd to sharpen the almighty Narrative some, as well as enabling him to adopt a somewhat tougher political persona, just as Labor will probably benefit politically from Liberal Senate obstructionism. It would be very far from the disaster some short sighted commentators with short memories seem to think it would be.
Here’s another don’t waste your $34.95 book review, and for many of the same reasons as Mark identified as failures in an earlier 2007 federal election tome from Melbourne University Press - Christine Jackman’s Inside Kevin07.
If anything, Peter Van Onselen and Philip Senior’s Howard’s End: The Unravelling of a Government is an even more tedious read. That might have been evident from the fact that even the now obligatory astroturf “news” stories about the book couldn’t find too much in the way of “shock! horror!” type “revelations” to excerpt, as I observed at the time.
The blurb claims:
In the tradition of Pamela Williams’ The Victory, Howard’s End analyses and makes sense of the result and its far-reaching implications for the people of Australia.
Well, that might indeed be a worthy aim, but the problem is that the book doesn’t do much analysis, and very little sense-making and if there’s anything in it about the implications for the people of Australia as opposed to the future of the Liberal party (such insight filled gems as “rebuilding the Liberal Party after the 2007 federal election defeat was always going to be difficult…”) I’ve completely missed them.
If political journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, this is apparently the first draft of the first draft. Through 192 pages, the book tediously recounts the events after Rudd’s ascension to the Labor leadership on an almost week by week basis. Mungo McCallum did much the same thing, but at least it was funny. If you’re looking for a reminder of the interminable “perpetual campaign”, then probably you’re pushing the tragic in political tragic a bit further than it normally should go, but you might do better to read Mungo, or indeed click on the archive of this blog. There’s only so much interest in reading exactly what John Howard announced about training policy on day whatever of the campaign, or what Rudd said in a press conference whenever in May. It reads as if someone’s sat down with a stack of newspapers and paraphrased the tedium of day to day political reporting.
But it gets worse. Continue reading ‘Howard’s End: not E. M. Forster but Van Onselen and Senior’
The graph is from page 101 of a Parliamentary Library paper on the 2007 federal election. It shows voting patterns disaggregated by electorates ranked in four socio-economic groups according to income.
As Brian Costar observes at Australian Policy Online, it doesn’t mean what you think it means - particularly if your perception of “Howard’s battlers” is that they’re all outer suburban. It’s an artefact of a correlation between voting patterns and low incomes in rural and regional electorates.
I haven’t had a chance to look at the full report, but I’m sure there’s lots of interesting stuff in there for the psephologically inclined.
Here’s an article close to my heart.
The best thing about the year in analogy is how diverse the comparisons have been. Almost simultaneously, Obama has been described as 2008’s version of 49-state winner Ronald Reagan as well as its incarnation of 49-state loser George McGovern–in fact, he’s been compared to every presidential candidate since World War II. A vote for John McCain has been likened to both a third term of George Bush as well as a first victory for the unelected Gerald Ford. The comparisons also don’t end at the border: Obama critics have derided him as the second coming of Canada’s Pierre Elliot Trudeau; McCain’s admirers see British titan Benjamin Disraeli when they gaze at the Arizona Senator. Meanwhile, the campaign they’re fighting gets equated with struggles as varied as the elections of crisis-afflicted 1860 and prosperity-tinged 1996. Prominent pundits at different points have managed to compare Obama to both parties’ candidates in the 1980s election.
Continue reading ‘On the meaninglessness of political analogies’
While it wasn’t quite as prominent as WorkChoices and climate change, Kevin07 did make some fairly ambitious promises for the health care sector as well. As the Pandora archive reveals,
“Whenever there’s a problem, the question of adequacy of funding for hospitals, automatically there’s a ping-pong match which erupts between the federal and state health ministers,” says Labor Leader Kevin Rudd. “I am committed to ending the blame game.”
At the time, they released a discussion paper, which mentioned a number of models for reforming the way health care was funded. But, since the election, there doesn’t seem to have been much progress.
Continue reading ‘Slow progress in health funding reform’
Last year I shared some thoughts on the state of political blogging in Australia. Trevor Cook has just examined the claim that the blogging phenomenon is “losing impetus”. I’m not sure that’s so, and coincidentally, I’ve just sent off a write up of the talk I gave at the Public Right to Know Conference at UTS last year, for a special issue of the Pacific Journalism Review being co-ordinated by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism. You can read it here [link to pdf].
Continue reading ‘The state of political blogging II’
Hunter S. Thompson, who’s repeatedly if repetitiously quoted in Christine Jackman’s Inside Kevin07: The People. The Plan. The Prize., would be turning in his grave.
I’m unable to think of any good reasons for parting with $34.95 for Jackman’s book, which is touted as the ultimate insider account of the Labor Party’s campaign strategy in the lead up to last year’s federal election. As noted previously at this blog, any juicy tidbits have already been extracted in the News Limited papers, and the non-story of Peter Costello’s alleged popularity is still rumbling meaninglessly on as I write. (Incidentally, the fact that quite a bit of research mentioned in the book showing Costello as electoral poison wasn’t selected for “news” stories tells a bit of a tale in itself.)
The book’s importance - insofar as it has any - lies in what is in effect an auto-critique of the standard of political journalism in contemporary Australia, in what its publication says about the strategies of university presses and particularly MUP, and in whether it actually adds fuel to the fire of the “hollowmen” narrative of colourless political apparatchiks it tries to counter. Let’s take those in reverse order.
Continue reading ‘Inside Kevin07′
There were numerous examples of the “exciting excerpt from new book on politics” thing around in the weekend papers, a phenomenon noted earlier here with regard to Peter Van Onselen and Phillip Senior’s Howard’s End. The Courier-Mail ran some underwhelming excerpts from that tome - the thrust of which appeared to be that Kevin Rudd sometimes reacted badly to some of the bombs lobbed at him last year (as in the Burke “affair”). That doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know at the time, and it’s probably unfair to judge the book as a whole on the basis of these excerpts. The marketing ploy seems to be to run a bit of copy which can be spun into something contemporary - another brick in the wall of the prevailing “media narrative”.
We also saw some similarly underwhelming excerpts in The Australian from Christine Jackman’s Inside Kevin07, which were then spun into news stories. Or rather, the bit about ALP polling on Peter Costello was. No one seemed to find it particularly stunning a revelation that ALP wonks were playing around with butchers paper when workshopping campaign themes.
The Costello story, of course, has played into current speculation about the Liberal leadership, and a campaign by certain commentators to tout his leadership credentials. But it actually highlights something very problematic both about the interpretation of polling by the media and the political class and these sorts of “first draft of history” journalistic books. Continue reading ‘The Great Pretender’
You could be forgiven for thinking that politics in this country is a combination of astroturf and the pursuit of financial advantage, if you draw a few dots connecting stories that have had a lot of play in the media over the last couple of days. First item in point, Peter Costello - his continuing on and off political career, kept alive by polls which show him as a more popular leader than Brendan Nelson (which reflects more on Nelson than on him, but more of that later), continues to fuel speculation because, reportedly, the corporate sector hasn’t placed the value on his talents that the public spirited former Treasurer regards as his due after his “service” to the nation has come to an end. So, Costello is reduced to living just on his parliamentary salary, and since that’s insufficient apparently, touting his ghost-written memoirs to the highest bidder. One of those bidders - for the serialisation rights - is Fairfax. And today we get in The Age a story from Michelle Grattan which notes that, but goes on to say, well, nothing. There’s no news in this news. As Richard Farmer comments acerbically in Crikey’s morning wrap up of the news:
Costello memoir gives clues to future – but Michelle Grattan can give us no clue as to what the clues are.
Meanwhile, the lguanagate story gets a lease of life from claims made by a former Belinda Neal staffer, Melissa Batten. Continue reading ‘Marketised celebrity politics, Australian style’
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I’ve often said that the best source for public opinion research around is the Australian Election Study. Some preliminary data has been released [link to pdf] by researchers Ian McAllister and Juliet Clark, presented in graphical form. The purpose of the paper is to enable assessments of changes in public opinion over time, with some of the questions forming a time series going back to 1969. I’ve only had a cursory look at the data, but one thing I wanted to focus on was the data from the 2007 election, particularly as it relates to issue importance and party advantage on particular issues. Basically, this is much better quality data than anything you’d get from Newspoll.
A detailed analysis isn’t possible in the absence of the raw data which would enable regressions and cross-tabs, but there are some interesting patterns in the data that are presented. The first point to make, one that’s made in the current political context ably by Possum Comitatus, is that leadership is much less important to voting intention than is usually claimed in the media. Since there have been long term declines in partisanship and therefore more votes up for grabs in any particular electoral cycle, the whole concept of party “ownership” of issues becomes much more important - hence all the attention focused last year on “economic management”. I’ve previously pointed out that the question in Newspoll on that measure was actually the wrong one - at least insofar as 2007 goes - because Labor polling found that “economic management for working families” was much more important, and it’s there that their advantage lay (as the opposition now knows well, because that’s where all their attack is focused). In this context, it’s also very significant to observe the finding that a majority of voters don’t believe anything the government does has much impact on the economy - what we might term the “globalisation effect” - something very poorly understood by political commentators, I’d suggest.
Last year, industrial relations jumped from 2% of respondents nominating it as the most important economic issue in 2004 to 16% and top position. Labor enjoyed a big advantage over the Coalition - 52 to 32, intriguingly reversing a Coalition lead (when the issue was much less important) in 2004 of 37 to 27. Continue reading ‘Issues and the 2007 election’
Former Howard Government minister Kevin Andrews and AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty seem to be continuing their attempts to blame each other for the Haneef debacle. You’ll recall a couple of days ago that a “source”, most probably Keelty or somebody close to him, claimed that Andrews had cancelled Haneef’s visa without bothering to tell the AFP. Now we have the bite back from Andrews. From the Oz:
FORMER immigration minister Kevin Andrews had no idea of powerful evidence of Mohamed Haneef’s innocence when he controversially revoked the visa of the then terrorism suspect last year. Mr Andrews will tell the Rudd government-ordered inquiry into the bungled case, which opens today, that Australian Federal Police did not inform him of evidence debunking allegations against Dr Haneef’s second-cousin Sabeel Ahmed - allegations that had led to the subsequent terrorism charge against the Gold Coast doctor.
These guys were supposed to be in charge of protecting us from Scary Terryrists - one, of course, still is. Thank your favourite deity that there seems to be so few actual Scary Terryrists in Australia, or we’d really be in trouble…
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