We’re here.

Under all three preference scenarios, Rudd’s final week of polls had him in an election winning lead, despite the huffing and puffing of lightweights to the contrary.

That would make Rudd the first PM dumped by his party in Australia with that status as far as I can tell.

For those who haven’t been following the previous thread, where there was an interesting exchange about the polls, I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing a comment which encapsulates my view beneath the fold. Given that the debate here has been emotionally charged and fast moving, I’d like to put some observations on the record:

This is an interesting debate.

Responding to Corin @3 – I don’t think I made the claims you attribute to me.

I certainly believed that it was possible that this move would backfire in a big way. I still don’t think the jury is in on the question of how the fact that a plurality of public opinion (a large majority in Queensland), as measured by Galaxy, believe it to be a bad decision driven by panic will play out.

Initial polling evidence suggests this doesn’t influence voting intention.

But whether it persists, and starts to do so, is another question.

To me, what’s evident is that policy is key in all this. I think the ETS is a big factor in the swing to The Greens over the last little while. The fact that these voters appear to have returned to Labor to large extent can’t be taken for granted – if they were soft voters while indicating a first preference for The Greens, they probably still are.

The presentational aspects of leadership must have played a factor, but we also have to look to what was being communicated.

Gillard now has a window where the public is listening to what she has to say, but that also means that she will have to make some actual decisions which will inevitably tend to push some voters away. Obviously, the quicker she goes to the polls, the better, from that point of view, because the focus will be on Abbott during a campaign, and a campaign will tend to strengthen the partisan strength of the Labor vote.

Polls, as I have emphasised, are just a snapshot of opinion, and open to a variety of valid interpretations, and are not, in my view, of much predictive value, except very close to the election day itself. Those who’ve been reading for a while will know that I expressed concern about how the national primary would be reflected in the marginals and different demographics, about the robustness of preference flows, and about the low primary.

But I don’t think that what we know of the marginal polling suggests a disaster – it suggests the possibility of a loss, but that’s always there – and it’s crucial that we don’t know when those polls were taken.

There does appear to be evidence that Rudd was pulling things back.

More broadly, I don’t accept the decision should have been taken on the basis of the polls. I still think Labor figures are having difficulty justifying it (cf. Shorten on Qanda last night), and frankly, that Rudd was a poor manager of people and processes is not of great relevance to the public, though obviously it was a big factor in prompting the leadership change.

I thoroughly agree with Nickws that there is a problem of democratic legitimacy in all this, and that’s central to my concerns, as well as what it says about the Labor party. I also think there’s a huge problem with the ability of an ALP government to introduce long term and significant reform thrown up by these events, and a big issue with the influence of mining and corporate interests.

I don’t believe that I’ve displayed any animus against Gillard personally. I like her, and always have. I do have some animus against the apparatchiks and urgers.

LO’s point that Gillard will be more insulated against poor polling is an interesting one, but I wonder how far that extends. So far, as noted, the Murdochracy is full of praise for Gillard (and again, watching Albrechtsen laud her was rather nauseating). But I question how long this will last.

Oh, and I’m a Labor supporter, and have been all my life, though I find it very hard these days to keep the faith.

7095 posts, 309041 comments and counting since March 16, 2005; thanks to all my lovely fellow LP bloggers, commenters and readers!

I won’t be liveblogging it, because of the delay caused by the lack of daylight saving in Queensland. But here’s an open thread should you wish to comment.

No doubt there will also be a lively discussion on Twitter at #qanda. [And just a reminder that LP is on Twitter, and the new new Facebook, for that matter. If you are too, we'd love you to join us elsewhere in the social media-verse!]

Similarly, we’ve seen a classic case of the calling into being of a phantom public in all the emails and texts sent to Liberal MPs – polarised between categories (“denialists”, etc) which hardly have any resonance in most Australians’ vocabularies or lived experience. Yet it’s taken for reality, and it seemingly has had a real effect in that alternative universe that is the Liberal Parliamentary Party.

So what of the role of the media in all this?

With some exceptions, such as Laura Tingle on Lateline tonight (and, for that matter, Annabel Crabb the other night), the legacy media has intoned very predictable scripts (and as I’ve emphasised, forgotten an alternative one – “strong leader stands up to party dinosaurs and appeals over their heads to public” – which Malcolm Turnbull has been busily reinscribing).

Even in alternative media, such as Crikey, we’ve seen Bernard Keane (aside from his strange obsession with talking up virtues few others can see in Andrew Robb) swing from the standard “dead man walking” talk to “Turnbull is actually going to fight!”… why the latter was a surprise, I have no idea. I’d been suggesting some days earlier it was characteristic of his persona, and also politically rational. Yet the commentariat in their massed battalions seemed to anticipate his folding in the face of the Minchin putsch.

As Andrew Elder asked, could this be the week the journosphere failed?

Let’s not forget Turnbull may win on Tuesday.

What, then, of the frenzied expression of common press gallery wisdom?

Will the shorter Peter Van Onselen still be “Hockey can unify the party because he’s Minchin’s sock puppet”?

Perhaps the only “high level sources” they talk to are the ones who have an agenda. Like I said recently, it’s a bit like Imre Salusinszky having his fill of Chinese lunches at various eateries in and around Sussex Street and then retailing the latest goss on who’s going to overthrow Nathan Rees, only to find that Nathan Rees overthrew his detractors, and no journo saw it coming. Perhaps because something actually happened, as opposed to the endless non-event of leadership talk.

Sometimes politics doesn’t play to script.

Turning to Twitter, as Worst of Perth commented here, it’s been very interesting indeed. For anyone assiduously following this thing, it really has been the best real time news source, and quite amusing and fun too. It’s very well suited to these sorts of fast moving events, and the degree of inaccuracy and rumour is precisely the same as what makes it into the press and the telly. Not least because a fair bit of it is Sky News as it happens…

Interesting also to me has been the fact that a lot of the journos in Canberra who’ve been of greatest value are ones whose bylines are not well known. Maybe they’re working a bit harder than the tv stars and ubiquitous commentators?

On the other hand, as I’ve already alluded to, seasoned, intelligent and insightful commentators such as Laura Tingle prepared to buck the herd, whose work in the Fin Review is only available to those who spend 3 bucks on the paper, and who gets less air time than the show ponies, have shown their worth – as on Lateline tonight.

But, let’s get all this in perspective.

It’s also significant that while #spill is now the most popular tag on Australian Twitter, the fifth is #xmedialab – which is a discussion about a cross media conference that is on in Sydney at the moment. This medium doesn’t have much of a reach, and it has less of a reach than blogs, and slower moving media generally. And that may be because a lot of people are simply not interested in the scoop of the second (83 new tweets since you started searching).

At the same time, the core audience of political junkies, if Twitter is any indication, haven’t been clicking through to MSM stories at all. As Stephen Feneley commented at #spill, journos tweeting is a double edged sword.

That’ll be related to a shift where those who are most engaged around issues are finding their own spaces to interact, often private – lots of the old core of the web is shrinking as people highly attuned to particular communities of interest resort to discussing their own take on stories on social media sites such as Facebook without even looking at actual media reports, preferring to rely on others’ quick summaries of links through social distribution. Whether or not this becomes a wider trend is, at this stage, moot, but something is underway. But it replicates ancient social and cultural patterns – talking about stuff you’ve heard, which is different from silent reading, or even a more organised and structured discussion of what is read. The first is Twitter writ large.

Both practices have their value, but the assumption that reading and reflection is superior has had its day, unless it’s a normative pronouncement as opposed to a description of social reality.

So there may be a role for slow and fast in this fast moving media world. But slow needs to catch up, and fast needs to slow down and be more reflective if it’s to compete with the best of slow.

But that needs to be understood, and the limits of the publics who are both being invoked and created through these discourses have to be recognised too.

I will say that it is a bit of a worry that a heap of stuff that needs to have been factored in, including but not limited to the actual policy shift involved in the CPRS amendments, what’s happening elsewhere in the world in the lead up to Copenhagen, the new dimensions of climate change, and even what the government has at stake, has completely dropped off the radar. At LP, we’ve tried our best to keep that stuff in focus. But it’s been slim pickings anywhere else, with only a few distinguished exceptions such as New Matilda.

Some lessons need to be drawn from all this which transcend the tired dichotomies of legacy and social media, and I hope they will be.

Ps: LP can be followed on Twitter here.

Elsewhere: Axel Bruns at Gatewatching.

Update: The Newspoll results analysed tonight certainly suggest a disjunction between press commentary and voters’ sentiments, and indeed, the view from the Canberra political class and Liberal voters in the cities.

We’ve also revamped our Facebook presence, supplementing and eventually replacing our group with an FB Page. As many of you will know, pages offer better functionality – with wall posts appearing in people’s live feed. And they avoid the weird FB rule that you can’t be in more than 300 groups (what is with that?)…

So we’d love to see you in these other nodes of the social media thang!

Update: The Facebook page now has a simplified url. Find us here.

Heck you can’t avoid it now that it’s become the favourite plaything of the mainstream media. In fact it appears whole conferences are dedicated to Twitter – participants seemingly unable to talk about anything else.

As some of you may know I’ve been Tweeting my head off for a few years now, and jumping on and off the bandwagon. Now it’s become a part of the daily background hum.

I’m like a lot of web media workers for whom Twitter is now a work tool, but I also use it for a little bit of play, to inform and to annoy, to be annoyed and to be amused.

Lately it’s annoyed the crap out of me because the usual (and not so usual) social media suspects continue to overstate it’s importance. It’s not a replacement for anything, it’s an addition to something which already exists.

Tomorrow it may be fun again when sanity and perspective returns. Yes, the revolution will be Twittered but Twitter won’t be the trigger for revolution.

Anyway, like most technologies of change we eventually make our peace with it – mainly because it has an off switch and participation is voluntary.

My favourite use for Twitter? Search for breaking news and to capture the zeitgeist and as a back channel for important events. It’s made watching popular TV fun. Which by the way is where I think it’s real potential lies – integrated with TV as a live mass media watercooler.

For example, watching tonight’s Four Corners on the Liberal Party’s internal struggle with global warming and the CPRS while following the #4corners tag.

It’s also slowly replacing my RSS feed reader and the new lists feature is a great addition for new Twitter users looking to jump into the stream.

If you have a Twitter account you know what to do. If you don’t, we’re still here with the usual LP goodness.

It’s hard to conclude otherwise when the now compulsory comparisons of Julia Gillard et al with the North Korean regime are wheeled out once more, coupled with crazed elisions of a bunch of rather mild social democrats with Stalin and Mao, and paeans to the millions of dead, etc, etc. There’s a certain irony in one of the contributors accusing critics of writing conspiracy theory. Not to mention the argument, if that’s the word for it, that concern with narratives is evidence of postmodernism (evil!) sitting uneasily next to attacks on social democrats for not having a narrative. Anyone remember when the teaching of narrative history was supposed to be a touchstone of John Howard era approved political correctness? Contradiction piled on contradiction…

There’s lots more. Should you not wish to read all of the series, Gary Sauer-Thompson has devoted some time to analysing the introductory piece by Mervyn Bendle. Bendle contributes another article, damning Julia Gillard among others, complete with another clever pun in the title. I thought that was the sort of Derridean wordplay he despised. But anyway…

Related LP posts: Here, here and here.

Elsewhere: Catallaxy.

Update: Skepticlawyer.

I might have mentioned in passing here, and I know I’ve said on Facebook, that I’ve become interested lately in exploring some themes which don’t really seem to fit into the LP space, and also in a more personal form of blogging, and indeed, a more writerly form of blogging.

One of the issues I’ve been interested in discussing is the complex intersections of the religious, the spiritual and the social. That’s in part from a place based perspective – associated in particular with the continuing life of Saint Mary’s, South Brisbane – and in part from a radical Catholic position. In the process of so doing, I’ve been addressing some themes both personal and philosophical.

I’m not entirely certain the ‘one size fits all’ blog works for this sort of discussion. I’m also not interested in getting into an argument about the existence of God, or whether all religion is evil, or Richard Dawkins, or whatnot. That sort of thing might have its place, but it’s rarely conducted with much intellectual rigour, and it simply doesn’t do anything for me.

Anyway, I write this really just to highlight some of what I’m doing for the benefit of those who enjoy my writing and appreciate my perspective. There are actually crossovers between this mode of blogging and my political and sociological interests (it would be odd if it were otherwise – given that the personal is the political, and vice versa). It does seem to me that something has been lost in the massifying of the blogosphere – much of the personal element which was once its creative wellspring. In part, I think it’s been lost because of a certain masculinism (and sometimes even an anti-feminism). That personal tone is something of value and something I’m keen to revive. I’d be delighted if any LP folk wanted to check out what I’ve been up to at Angelus Novus.

I’ll also be blogging at BrisCulture more often from now on in. Now that we’ve held our first event, we’ll be utilising the blog more for substantive discussion and – among other things detailed in this post – for fostering a critical review culture, something that is largely absent in the Brisbane mediasphere. But more of that later.

In a lot of my past writing on blogging, I’ve identified the local as the space where blogs can have most impact, and I’m now practising what I’ve preached.

The image, which I’ve used as a header at Angelus Novus, is adapted under a Creative Commons licence from a lovely photo by eob on flickr. It shows Angeline Gragasin as the Angel of History in a Chicago play staged by National Headquarters, also called Angelus Novus.

So if you’re feeling in a nostalgic mood, or if you weren’t around way back when, you can check out the first two posts or have a look at a snapshot of where we were and what the place looked like on 21 February 2006, the first point at which the National Library’s Pandora archived us.