Incidentally, I have had the view for some time that Kristina Keneally is a thoughtful and intelligent politician, whose talents are surely wasted in the abyss of NSW state Labor politics. You have to feel some empathy for her in face of the behaviour of the latest Minister to be forced to resign, the undistinguished scion of a mediocre Labor right dynasty.

Update: Just to clarify, in response to comments, the legislation is subject to a conscience vote, which explains why Keneally has discussed the relevance of her personal religious beliefs to her legislative judgement on this bill.

Today, we’ve seen one of the other standard tropes of campaigning – the claim that “leaked party polling shows…” or “senior party sources say their internal polling shows”…

Party polling isn’t automatically more accurate than published polls, although some tracking polls do have a level of sophistication in data analysis which enables some judgements to be made about which issues or events are moving votes, and how strongly.

But, to my recollection, this sort of tracking poll has only ever been published once – the Crosby Textor Oztrack 33, leaked to the media in September 2007.

The distribution list of internal party polling is tiny. Normally, no more than ten or so people would see it. That’s what made its use in leadership challenges to Kim Beazley and Kevin Rudd so controversial.

A good rule of thumb is to disbelieve any claims that party polling has actually leaked, unless there are firm numbers reported. An instance is polling in a couple of Bayside Labor seats in the 2006 Queensland election – where actual numbers were stated, and which I was able to confirm was accurate. However, the impression given by the Labor strategists was that this polling demonstrated a surprise late swing against Peter Beattie’s government.

In fact, it only meant that for purely local factors, Labor was doing badly in one or two seats despite being poised to win a host of others by huge margins.

So the poll numbers were truthful, but the spin was not not.

It’s a pretty standard last minute ploy – “impressions management”. It helps in focusing voters’ minds on the choice, and depressing the likelihood of a protest vote.

That’s what we’re seeing tonight, when there’s lots of reporting that Labor polling shows the party in more trouble in New South Wales than anticipated.

No details have been given.

But Julia Gillard duly talked about the unpopularity of the NSW government in questions after her closing National Press Club address, and that made it onto the tv news.

There’s every likelihood that Labor research does show the Keneally government is a drag on their federal vote.

But this is not a disinterested psephological observation, but a political intervention to try to improve Labor’s vote.

We also don’t know when this polling was done, or whether it shows movement towards or away from the ALP. Unlike the  published polls, we can’t place it in the context of a time series and compare it to other surveys carried out by the same pollster using the same methodology.

That’s worth remembering before people get too excited about poring over these latest entrails in an attempt to divine what might occur on Saturday.

Update: The details of the Labor internal polling have now been revealed by Channel Seven.

Elsewhere: Graham Young on why taking internal party polling stories seriously is for mugs.

Cross-posted at The Drumroll.

Is she right that there’s a knock on effect from public distaste for the Keneally and Bligh governments?

Yes, and no.

It’s easy enough to point to large swathes of the political cycle when voters opted for different parties at state and federal level. Neville Wran’s 1976 victory and 1978 ‘Wranslide’ book-ended a poor result for Federal Labor in NSW in the 1977 election. Peter Beattie’s rightly argued recently that huge numbers of Queensland electors favoured his government in 2001 and 2004 while giving John Howard a majority of federal seats in elections held in the same years.

What may be different this time around, though, is that federal and state issues are showing an increasing tendency to converge.

Both John Howard and Kevin Rudd, and now Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, have made traditionally state areas of responsibility – infrastructure, schools and health most prominently – their own business.

Peter Beattie and Kevin Rudd did a double step in 2006 and 2007, contending that health and transport in Queensland were being held back by federal neglect.

Of course, there have always been different swings in different states, but this year, arguably, the differences are looking as stark as they have been since 1990.

Again, it’s a bit too simplistic to write it all down to “unpopular Labor governments”. Bligh Labor is not unpopular for the same reasons as Keneally Labor – it’s more to do with the privatisation push than a perception of service delivery crisis. But Labor campaigners are reporting voters raising state issues pretty quickly on door knocks and at street stalls.

Compounding this blurring of responsibility between state and federal governments, I think, is the lack of an overarching theme and the absence of big picture issues in this federal race. It’s not that parish pump promises in marginal seats are anything new. But it is the case that, unlike in 2007, there’s nothing to really raise voters’ sights above the horizon of the everyday.

So we have a federal election which resembles state races more and more.

That’s why Labor really wants the focus of the last week to be on the economy and jobs. Hence Julia Gillard’s counter-challenge today to Tony Abbott’s proposal for another ‘town hall meeting’.

The national economy is one area where voters are very clear that the choice of government matters, much more so than whether there’s CCTV at the local railway station, or whether the local school got the price it wanted for a new school hall.

So we’ll continue to see, over this last week, a twinned focus on the local and the national – expect the Labor campaign launch in Brisbane tomorrow to heavily emphasise economic management.

Cross-posted at The Drumroll.

It’s not an insignificant thing to tear down a Prime Minister in his first term, a Labor leader who’s the first to win a federal election since 1993.

The problem with the poll obsessed apparatchiks is that their horizon is always the next poll. And they tend always to have a static assessment of the political situation.

In a situation like we face today, where it would seem a number of marginal seat polls have given unexpected momentum to a putsch dreamed up by so-called ‘hard heads’ in the ALP right, and talked up through the ‘media narrative’, I wonder whether any thought has been given to the need to persuade the public of the need to destroy a Prime Minister. Any thought that is, beyond simplistic reasoning that hardly goes beyond ‘Rudd’s the problem, so if he’s removed, there will be less of a problem’.

Paul Howes’ appearance on Lateline tonight indicates there isn’t much of a communications strategy within the Gillard camp (where his, and the AWU’s, tent is firmly pitched). The plotters will need to articulate something much more persuasive than ‘the polls made us do it’ and ‘Alister Jordan’s calling MPs offended Gillard’. The stupidity of the ‘Rudd disloyal to Gillard’ theme was apparent, and apparently Howes only belatedly realised that announcements that unions such as his and the HSU had swung their support to Gillard opened the way to the Kristina Keneally attack – a leader installed by faceless union bosses and party apparatchiks.

Indeed, that’s a theme Kevin Rudd astutely exploited in his press conference tonight [full text here].

Howes made nothing of any policy differences between Gillard and Rudd, and continually claimed that the Rudd government was a good government.

I don’t imagine that ‘we were goaded by Dennis Shanahan and Peter Van Onselen’s columns’ would be persuasive either. Unless this really is a “coup by commentariat”. Or Howes’ other line, which equated to a feeling of panic that Tony Abbott and the Coalition would defeat Labor.

Anyone who imagines that, if Julia Gillard is Prime Minister tomorrow, she will have no need to explain why she is, and Rudd no longer is, lives in a fool’s paradise.

It also won’t be long before Gillard’s reported reluctance to challenge is questioned. Did she really first become aware of moves which have obviously been in train for some time earlier this afternoon?

Antony Green has provided a compendium of useful and interesting information at this page of the ABC’s election website. At his blog, he analyses some of the political implications, and updates readers about where we can find results.

William Bowe has some further interesting background at The Poll Bludger.

The Twitter hashtag for the by-election is #penrith (though it also appears to be the hashtag for the NRL team, which might cause a little bit of confusion). I’ve previously assessed the Twitter debate in this post.

This is an open thread for predictions, links, reports and analysis.

Update: Live blogging of the result at The Poll Bludger will commence at 6pm AEST.

Elsewhere: Ben Raue at The Tally Room.

Update: Labor loses the seat on a -24.4% primary swing.

Reviews have been underwhelming.

The debate was apparently difficult to follow under the hashtag #penrithdebate, and the filtered stream shows that it wasn’t particularly illuminating.

A number of points can be made about this ‘innovation’:

(a) Twitter has a very small footprint among Australian social media users, and various surveys have demonstrated that most people who set up a Twitter account rarely or never use it. It’s also very far from being the micro-blogging or messaging platform of choice for teenagers, despite all the usual misunderstandings about “digital natives”. In Australia, as far as politics goes, it’s been taken to heart by political tragics and journos, whose widespread distaste for the blogosphere has been overcome by a medium where their ‘brands’ ensure that they’re easily able to hoover up the most followers.

I very much doubt any considerable number of Penrith voters were watching, or participating. To the degree that this sort of thing will have any electoral impact, it will only be insofar as it feeds into media and political perceptions.

(b) Although techno-utopians and the more excitable will claim that this is some sort of harbinger of the future, politicians are always much more likely to see social media aspects of campaigns as add-ons rather than core vehicles for messaging. For this reason, and because those who are Tweeting are a very select portion of the electorate, claims about direct democracy are also radically over-blown.

(c) Again, despite the stereotypical way various media platforms are discussed, newest isn’t always best. Anyone who’s followed any of Crikey’s election live blogs, which use software which enables the panel to be highlighted, and which update in a more elegant fashion, and which provide for a more detailed and focused discussion, might well conclude that an online debate might be more productive on a blog than via Twitter.

Elsewhere: Stilgherrian and Ben Eltham.

You know the script.

I’m not sure that we can be that definitive in either predicting no outcome or in assessing the subsequent politics.

Aside from funding incentives, a lot of the cards are still in the Commonwealth’s hand.

I’ve been most impressed with Kristina Keneally’s strategy throughout the manoeuvring around health. Her advocacy of what is essentially a single funder model, a pooled fund into which both the Commonwealth and states contribute, with the states hypothecating GST revenue rather than the Commonwealth clawing it back, seems to me to represent a compromise which comes very close to the original intention. And her presentation of the arguments has been assured.

She has an end in mind, and a path to that end.

By contrast, John Brumby’s intransigence seems to me to have a limited shelf life. A range of health experts have queried his claims about the superiority of Victorian hospitals, and in any case, the plan largely mirrors the Victorian system. Part of Victoria’s advantage is that its population is more concentrated over a smaller geographic space, allowing it to avoid the problems of coordination that states like Queensland, WA and NSW confront. He should also realise that his position is unsustainable in the longer term.

Brumby has to face his own electors, and deal breaking might get you so far with the admirers parochial tub thumping, but if there is no deal, Kevin Rudd will be lining him up as a duck in a row alongside Tony Abbott as an obstructionist. If he really wants a federal campaign, including a referendum, which would see him aligned with the naysayers on health (because that’s how it will be played), that’s his choice, but it seems to me to be poor political thinking.

I’m also not so sure that the conventional wisdom on the health referendum is right. Tim Dunlop argues it’s not. And it’s being reported that the referendum bills have already been drafted. So it’s quite possible to envisage a lose-win strategy for Federal Labor emerging out of a COAG defeat. But I think the forces for agreement have been underestimated.

NB: Previous discussion on LP here.

Update: The ABC is reporting that every premier bar Colin Barnett has signed up to the Rudd plan, including the cession of 30% of the GST to the Commonwealth. Barnett is negotiating one on one with Rudd. I think it’s a safe bet to say NSW’s strategy changed the game.

Update: More from The ABC. As I said in comments, I suspect Colin Barnett will come on board after one on one negotiations for “special arrangements” for WA.

The above, which translates as “not twice for the same”, is one of the fundamental principles of modern law. Once you’ve been tried for something, and that trial has reached a final verdict (either to convict or acquit), you can’t be tried for it again. And if convicted and sentenced, you can’t then have additional punishments heaped on you for the same offence.

The government of New South Wales has just announced its intention to abandon that principle, with plans to subject violent criminals to indefinite detention when their sentences are complete. So, despite being handed a finite sentence by judges, these prisoners will now be given an effective life sentence by political fiat.

This unquestionably violates the rights against retroactive penalties, double jeopardy, and arbitrary detention affirmed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (and as a party to the ICCPR and First Optional Protocol, Australia will no doubt become the subject of complaints to the UN Human Rights Committee as a result) . But it also violates the rule of law. It arbitrarily changes the rules after the fact, with retroactive effects. The result is not only arbitrary decisions – criminal sentences determined by the whether a politician can gain votes by squicking someone rather than the severity of the offence – but also that no one can rely on the law as a guide to their behaviour. When sentences are arbitrary, there is no deterrence. And when they are arbitrarily large, there is no incentive to accept them (which could be unpleasant for witnesses, or those tasked with enforcement. Sadly, such injustices never seem to come back on the politicians…)

This is simply a monstrous move, but Australia has no formal human rights mechanisms which would prevent it (New Zealand has the BORA, which would at least force the politicians to admit what they were doing – not that that seems to help). And so it gets chalked up as yet another example of why Australia needs a Bill of Rights…

That’s so beautifully kiwi. The Brits may be obsessed with hierarchy and deference and publicly displaying their loyalty to the unelected scion of an undemocratic institution – but we have better things to do. Like enjoying ourselves in the sun. The British royal-watchers call this “a distinct pro-republican feeling”, but its more that we just don’t give a damn – the monarchy is simply utterly irrelevant to our lives. Though from a republican view, that irrelevance is a two-edged sword; not giving a damn also tends to mean not giving a damn about getting rid of them. Hence the slow drift to republicanism; no-one cares about them, but no-one cares enough to finally sign the paperwork to get them out of our lives either…

I think that holds true in this Antipodean Colony too.

Our pollies only seem to revive the spectre of Republicanism when there’s a bit of political advantage to be gained.

Kevin Rudd, though, does want to have a beer with Prince William.

The Daily Terror comments:

The hype surrounding his arrival is similar to that of his parents’ visit to Australia in 1983 when hordes of royal fans lined the streets to see Prince Charles and Diana.

Not so far as I can see. It seems, rather, that it’s just a photo op for Kristina Keneally. And maybe KRudd, if he can get himself, uninivited, onto the Prince’s dance card.

I’m not going to repeat anything she’s written because it’s unnecessary, rather I want to talk about another thing I’ve noticed through all the exciting #spillage of the last week, and that’s the role of women in the events themselves. We’re really starting to see the effects of decades of pushing to get women accepted into all areas of public life, while at the same time we’re still seeing the effects of keeping them marginalised for so long.

This week, after Penny Wong negotiated a deal with the Liberal party on the ETS, we’ve had Sophie Mirabella’s exit from the front bench alongside Tony Abbott, triggering a mass walkout of further Liberal frontbenchers. We’ve had “loyal girl” Julie Bishop, who has managed to survive three leadership spills and keep her job. We’ve had the brave and principled senators Judith Troeth and Sue Boyce, who walked the walk when other Liberal Senators toed the party line. While all this unfolded, Kevin Rudd was overseas, leaving Julia Gillard to run the country, while the new opposition leader promises to stop flirting with her. And over in NSW, the ALP caucus voted to make Kristina Keneally their first female premier.

Meanwhile, Annabel Crabb made her ABC debut, becoming one of the go-to journos for smart, insightful political analysis, along with Samantha Maiden and Laura Tingle providing great information and analysis of events as they unfolded. And in another mini-spill, Sophie Black took the reigns and became editor of Crikey.

I’ve forgotten plenty of women, no doubt. I hope I have actually. It shouldn’t be possible to list all of the women involved in events this big.

So… to the Problems. Mirabella and Bishop are criticised for selling Australian women out in supporting Abbott. Keneally can be seen in the long tradition of Labor only making women their leaders when things have gone entirely to shit, further reinforcing the pressure for women to be nurturers, healers and uniters. Meanwhile Bishop is again criticised for playing a uniting role, lining up behind the three leaders democratically chosen by her party. I won’t go on, there are plenty of words to be found about how women are fucking up, some fair, some not.

But the Good Things! We have a new female premier to add to the list, and she’s not from the left. Another step further towards providing enough variety that they are seen as Premiers first, not Women Premiers, as if that’s some kind of category. We have female Liberal MPs putting their electoral and preselection chances at risk in order to stand up for what they believe in, be it Mirabella and Adams or Troeth and Boyce. We have Julie Bishop playing a clever factional game, making it almost impossible for her to be dumped from her spot as deputy leader. We have Ms Crabb, who is seen as one of the most insightful political analysts working today, and hardly anyone is putting the word “woman” or “female” in there. And yet we have Miranda Devine being given a platform to be as mad and wrong as the maddest and wrongest op-edder The Australian has to offer. And while Dr Cat is right about the lack of genuine understanding about what, exactly, Abbott’s women problem really is, it’s now just a given that you cannot win elections by completely alienating women.

I can’t find the exact quote, but Amanda Vanstone once said that women won’t be equal until a woman as useless as the most useless male MP can be elected. While we’re still at a point where women being in the spotlight at all is remarkable, the incredible variety of women we’ve seen this week should give us hope that we’re slowly reaching that point where women will be judged for the work they do, and not the work they do As Women. And hopefully along the way, we’ll all come to understand that men like Tony Abbott don’t have a problem because they don’t get “women’s issues”. They have a problem because they don’t get that women are people, and they are more and more reluctant to put up with anyone believing they are anything less than that.

Diablo Cody nails it:

K, here’s a problem that is holding back feminism and you see it on the blogs. We all hold each other up to an incredibly high standard in a way that men do not. Let’s say a woman directs a movie that’s not very good—everybody piles up on her. It’s, like, “No! You’re representing us! It has to be perfect!” And that’s not how it works! Women should be allowed to make bad movies. Good movies. Porno movies. Terrible made-for-TV movies. Women just need to be out there directing as many movies as men do. We don’t all have to be the model woman—what we need is to be more visible. We really, really are tough on each other.

As long as there are ludicrous opinion pieces being written, I’m going to celebrate that some of them are being written by women, and as long as there are both political ideologues and factional warriors lacking in any sort of policy beliefs at all, I’m going to celebrate that some of them are women, too. Here’s to Crabb and Devine; to Gillard and Bishop; to Mirabella and Troeth.