Larvatus Prodeo

Peter Van Onselen’s new role at Newspoll Central appears to be a second string Dennis Shanahan, adding a second dose of commentary on the almighty Newspoll a day after the master pronounces on how it is to be interpreted. Van Onselen’s special subject is the Liberal leadership. I can’t find him on line today, but the gist is… you know, maybe Malcolm’s not gone by Christmas, but he still needs to prove that he’s not having a third “dead cat bounce”. I imagine that Van Onselen’s value to the Oz is his Liberal connections, but that’s always something of a dangerous game – let’s not forget his breathless performance on Lateline a while back when he’d clearly had his ear bent by a few Libs and was more or less pronouncing that Turnbull was finished, all caught up in the dubious excitement of the brief Hockey speculate-a-thon.

It’s a similar style of proceeding to Imre Salusinszky’s; who, incidentally, looked almost disappointed that Nathan Rees had actually put a bomb under the endless round of destabilisation at NSW Labor conference. All those Chinese lunches and hot tips over yum cha about Della or Kristina Keneally, or someone, being Premier before the month or year is out or whenevs, gone to waste.

Much more astute was the commentary in today’s Fin Review and Crikey – Turnbull is being squeezed by a pincer movement – Minchin within and Rudd without. The commentariat should wake up to the fact that the truth is Labor would like to see Mal go – because he’s actually the most plausible opponent (and who knows what he could have done had he not been forced to lead such a rabble – including the Coalition’s false friends in the media among the troops in constant revolt).

No one else the Libs could put up against Rudd would have even a ghost of a chance.

… which leads me to the “honeymoon is over” theme. If indeed it is true that there has been a bit of a shift in the electorate’s mood (and as I’ve said recently, I think it’s too early to call that), the so-called return to normalcy is much more likely to be a result of relief that the effects of the GFC are finally past us, rather than any supposed “doubts” about Rudd or concerns about asylum seekers. Anyone who’s ever run a focus group can readily imagine how such “doubts” could come up, without having any massive significance. In fact, if you’re doing your job, you’d be asking the same questions about Turnbull. I smell a big rat on this particular media leak. And on the latter, I think it’s much more probable that it’s the messiness of Rudd’s message, and the sheer volume of ‘crisis’ rhetoric that’s likely to account for the blip, if that’s it at all.

The biggest failing of the public polls, unlike the parties’ tracking polls, is that they don’t ask any questions which would disclose the salience of issues and events to vote shifts. That’s why a lot of the hackneyed commentary is just that. If they did, of course, it would cost a bit more, and they’d need to know a bit more about stats to interpret them, and it would also forever destroy the myth that there’s some privileged insight political journos have.

But in the absence of access to such data, the more prosaic hypothesis is that voters want to see the government act on what it promised to do – bread and butter improvements in service delivery, primarily. The Rudd government, if not the commentariat, will be aware of this, and I’d expect a switch in the rhetoric very quickly after parliament rises for the year and the political shenanigans around the CPRS wear out their use by date as political fodder for beating up the opposition.

So – does this mean that Labor’s support is “soft” in the absence of something the government portrayed as a national emergency? Well, yes, sort of. Continue reading ‘Of honeymoons and polls’