Various News Limited scribes on the weekend opined (all speaking in the voice of Tony Abbott’s ventriloquist dummy – it couldn’t be more obvious) that Malcolm Turnbull had set himself the task of tearing Rudd down in order to win. And failed. [By the way, bad move according to the News punditariat - nothing at all to do with publishing fake Utegate emails on front pages - who are now touting the said Tony Abbott, who presumably is as pure as the driven snow and would never resort to personal attacks or absurd and false confected scandalising in the most unlikely event he became Opposition Leader...] In case you missed the various stories, Turnbull has “declared” the Liberals can win the next election. That’s a matter of total irrelevance to the actual dynamic of Australian politics, since the “influence” of the News Limited opinionistas now only extends to Liberal MPs (and, sadly, the ABC’s more recondite political correspondents).
There’s a bit of a problem with this meme.
In a (now) rare piece of relatively sensible and reality based political commentary, Lenore Taylor, formerly of the Australian Financial Review, wrote in The Australian on the weekend that the “personal destruction of Rudd” thing failed dismally for the serried ranks of Howardistas in government and – were she writing completely honestly she might have added – in News Limited in 2007.
She also neglected to observe that Dennis Shanahan was the most enthusiastic participant in this collective delusion. While Glenn Milne, one might conjecture, did the mud slinging antecedent to the putative glorious Howard re-election that never was.
Continue reading ‘News Limited’s partisan nonsense actually a disaster for the Liberals’
Newspoll Tuesday: Labor 56-44
Ok, in the parallel universe that is press reporting of polls, we get this from the West Australian:
Right. Yep. Because the natural order of things is that the Coalition vote should always be rising and its failure to do so is an aberration to be explained away by… stuff that happened in the same fortnight. Whatevs.
Meanwhile, Dennis Shanahan puts it all down to the waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for Costello to release his book. Which, by the way, the ABC is giving free publicity to by televising a National Press Club speech by the former Treasurer on the day of its release. What’s with that?
But note the common assumption that the Liberals should be gaining were it not for their leadership woes. Really? How do they know? Because they do. It’s not argued. But it’s there as the background assumption on which all the rest rests.
Elsewhere: For actual commentary on the poll, go visit Possum and the Poll Bludger’s crew in comments. The Poll Bludger also links to the rather interesting Essential Research poll (Labor 58-Coalition 42) which shows that there’s a 7% negative differential between state and federal ALP voting intentions among its sample.