Tag Archive for ‘Kevin Rudd’ at Larvatus Prodeo

Tag Archive for 'Kevin Rudd'

The state elections and federal implications

Published

23 hours, 24 minutes ago

. 47 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’

The Great Health Debate

Published

Mark

3 days, 1 hour ago

in Health and Politics

. 70 Comments

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.

Stop the press! Media narrative wrong!

Published

Mark

3 days, 7 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.

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

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Mark

5 days, 4 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, 21 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’

Polls show privatisation hurting Bligh, and Rudd

Published

Mark

1 week, 3 days ago

in Federal Elections, Politics, Queensland and State/Territory Elections

. 8 Comments

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.

So, how about that hospitals plan?

Published

Mark

1 week, 4 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?’

Health and hospitals and the polls

Published

Mark

1 week, 6 days ago

in Health and Polls

. 8 Comments

We’ve had close to a week of public debate on Kevin Rudd’s health and hospitals plan, and today’s Nielsen poll shows resounding majorities among every demographic and voters of all parties for the proposition that the Commonwealth should take more responsibility for funding hospitals. Over the fold, I’ve borrowed a table from Possum to illustrate the results.

What should be of most concern to the Opposition is the very large number of their own voters who support such a policy. It might, of course, be objected that support is soft, but that ignores the fact that this plan was launched on the basis of reinforcing well entrenched public attitudes about the failures of the states in hospital management; attitudes Tony Abbott would have been well aware of when he frequently proposed a Commonwealth takeover as Health Minister.

No doubt it will also be claimed that support will ebb, as with the ETS (though it still has majority approval). But the introduction and selling of this plan has been very different – a high profile announcement, followed by a media blitz – much more akin to a budget. And interest groups which will resonate positively with public opinion – doctors, nurses, have reacted supportively.

Continue reading ‘Health and hospitals and the polls’

Abbott’s (grey) army

Published

Mark

1 week, 6 days ago

in Polls and Sociology

. 59 Comments

Via Possum, a couple of interesting charts to ponder.

These graphs below the fold show the movement in the net approval rating of Kevin Rudd and the Opposition Leader (Turnbull, then Abbott) over the last six months. As Possum notes, the youngest demographic is most disinclined to change their positive view of Rudd or their negative view of the Liberal leader, and the oldest demographic most inclined.

So, what’s going on here?

For a start, the ‘Gen Y sees through Kevin Rudd’s spin’ narrative is clearly wrong.

Continue reading ‘Abbott’s (grey) army’

Government: Don’t feed the trolls

Published

Mark

2 weeks, 2 days ago

in Authoritarianism, Crime, Ethics, Feminism, Life, Media, Politics, Race, Sociology and The Web

. 24 Comments

The last couple of weeks have seen a fair bit of furore about those intertubes. Anna Bligh wrote to Facebook about the defacing of a couple of memorial sites for a child and a teenager who’d been murdered in Queensland. Nick Xenophon suggested an Internet Ombudsperson, a suggestion Kevin Rudd applauded. There’ve also been numerous controversies about high school students posting racist groups, or offensive ones (for instance, effectively calling for attacks on sex workers). All this no doubt warrants condemnation – but it’s also worth observing that only a certain subsection of offensive content (usually involving children in one way or other) comes to the attention of the media and politicians. Little outrage is directed to the much larger subset of racist groups on Facebook (which don’t happen to be set up by high school kids), or the everyday misogyny that permeates much of the online space.

There’s no doubt that there are problems with Facebook’s method of dealing with offensive content. But the fundamental errors in this debate are twofold:

(a) Social networking sites are far more akin to phone networks than a traditional publishing model. A huge multiplicity of users constantly and simultaneously post content. Unlike talking on a phone, it leaves a permanent trace, but it’s a much better analogy;

(b) The direction of causation is the wrong way round. It’s not that the internet encourages people to do dumb and wrong things. It’s that people do dumb and wrong things, and they do them on the internet too.

The noise coming from politicians, and the ’solutions’, make one wonder whether they understand at all how social networking works. Part of the problem is one very easily resolved through taking more responsibility on the part of group creators for the little bit of the internet they set up, and using privacy and content management tools intelligently.

There’s an interesting take on all this from Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia, from whom I’ve borrowed the title of this post, and for a deeper examination of the issues, I’d also recommend the Oxford Internet Institute’s report on balancing freedom of speech and child protection online, which seeks to find some common ground between interlocutors who often seem to talk past one another.

The reception and implementation of the National History Curriculum

Published

Mark

2 weeks, 4 days ago

in Culture, Education, History, Howardia and Politics

. 26 Comments

A while back, Kevin Rudd proclaimed the history wars over. He may have been right, at least insofar as the combatants left on the field are looking decidely ghostly; witness the non-event of the launch of Keith Windschuttle’s latest tome. Yesterday’s grapeshot over the history curriculum will, likely, not be followed up by another offensive – the Coalition, and the usual suspects, will move on to criticising the government’s health announcements.

Yet the influence of the Howard-era battles remains – and its most significant legacy might be the fact that history is embedded in the national curriculum at all. This is a major shift from its folding into SOSE (Studies of Society and Environment) at P-10 levels in many states.

In an interesting piece for Crikey today, Tony Taylor looks at the reception and implementation of the history curriculum: Continue reading ‘The reception and implementation of the National History Curriculum’

Rudd’s health policy

Published

Mark

2 weeks, 4 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, 5 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.

Kevin Rudd’s political contrition

Published

Mark

2 weeks, 6 days ago

in Media and Politics

. 56 Comments

Kevin Rudd has flicked the switch to contrite over the insulation kerfuffle, and his failure to deliver the health overhaul on time.

For his pains, he’s received a kicking from just about the entire Canberra press gallery.

Take your pick: Phillip Coorey, Dennis Shanahan, Glenn Milne, Michelle Grattan.

Given that the self-same press gallery has spent the last fortnight or so demanding that the government take responsibility for its many sins, one wonders what else Rudd was supposed to have done?

The default position appears to be to characterise Rudd’s mea culpa as ’spin’.

All this is probably predictable. What might be more significant is that a number of the journos in question appear to have elicited quotes from Ministers expressing scepticism about Rudd’s strategy. That’s something I don’t recall having seen during this term.

John Quiggin’s Agnatology and the end of ideology

Published

Mark

3 weeks, 2 days ago

in Activism, Culture, Feminism, History, International, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology

. 30 Comments

There’s been a bit of word play on another thread about John Quiggin’s discussion of the coinage of the term ‘Agnatology’ to describe “the study of the manufacture of ignorance”. There are resonances between his diagnosis of the political right and Geoffrey Barker’s take on “bogan politics”, discussed on LP early in the week. What hasn’t attracted so much comment is Quiggin’s view on ideology.

The long struggle of left and centre-left parties to maintain their relevance in the face of the resurgent market liberalism of the late 20th century gradually eroded any belief in the possibility of a fundamental transformation of capitalism, to the point where such ideas no longer receive even lip-service, let alone serious and sustained attention. Instead, these parties have found themselves lumbered with the task of managing the mixture of social democratic and market institutions that emerged from the conflicts of the 20th century, tweaking them sometimes with market-oriented reforms and sometimes with marginal new interventions. This is broadly consistent with the ‘end of ideology’ story.

[Incidentally, I think there's an interesting story to be told about the right's turn to the manufacture of ignorance, and its new-found populism - having to do with, among other things, profound social changes - but that's a tale for another time.]

I recently read Donald Sassoon’s magisterial One Hundred Years of Socialism. Sassoon tracks the history of the European left, and while there’s much to take away from his discussion, one conclusion to be drawn is that the project of social democracy lost its transformative edge because of its reluctance to make institutional changes – both in governance and in the broad field of political economy. Where such changes were made, and where there was a hegemonic cultural space for social democracy, as in some of the Nordic democracies, social democracy, even at the height of neo-liberal reaction, retained a strategic capacity to think long term about the shift to a different form of society.

It’s sometimes argued that the left won on the terrain of culture, and lost on the terrain of economics. There’s some truth to this, but not much comfort can be taken from it, because the social shifts towards a greater liberty to choose one’s style of life largely bubbled up from below, rather than being intended by left parties (in which there’s always been an authoritarian stream matching that of conservatives). And the post-materialist politics of liberation has shown a remarkable capacity for co-optation into consumerist capitalism, mistaking civic for collective action, as Nina Power has recently remarked.

It’s also somewhat questionable that Australian Labor has ever really had a strategic and transformative dimension. There’s good reason for the ideological distinction between labourism and social democracy.

Quiggin concludes his post: Continue reading ‘John Quiggin’s Agnatology and the end of ideology’

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