We’re drowning in polls at the moment, and rumours of polls.

I’ve been writing in recent days about the futility of over-interpreting polls, and it’s also been suggested that the key to divining this election may lie in ancient Etruscan wisdom.

Yet, there is some worth in reporting from on the ground. I’ve been keeping a close eye on the contests in Queensland, and what follows is a poll-free guide to what’s going down. It’s not a prediction, mind.

A few general points are in order before getting down to the seat level.

Labor’s problems in Queensland — which are real — do have quite a bit to do with Kevin Rudd’s demise and the unpopularity of the Bligh state government. But not quite in the way usually discussed.

It’s more that the removal of Rudd reinforced perceptions of a self-serving and cynical Labor Party, looking for the electoral fix rather than the policy vision. Anna Bligh’s woes are about trust, not so much about the service delivery or government instability factors so important in New South Wales.

Secondly, some chickens are coming home to roost. Labor won in Queensland at state level in 2006 and federally in 2007 on the back of the promise that health and infrastructure could be fixed if only the partisan planets came into alignment. So part of the state parochialism factor is raised expectations from having Queenslanders as Prime Minister and Treasurer. There is a strong view that no one from Melbourne can understand the joint, and Peter Beattie used to get a lot of mileage from blaming southerners for population pressure.

Thirdly, Queensland is not Western Sydney. The age of Hansonism is past, and asylum seekers and immigration are not as salient in Brisbane’s suburbs. Making Sydney the centre of the political universe resonates with Rudd’s warning about the NSW-ification of the Labor party.

And there is a fair bit of residual affection for Rudd.

Having said all that, the government’s campaign in Queensland is being well run, and Wayne Swan’s local smarts are a big factor in that. The pitch to the marginals is a good one, and in many instances, the LNP is greatly hampered by poor candidate selection. This goes back to the time when Labor looked unbeatable, and some of the more promising up and comers decided to wait until the LNP’s “grandfather” provisions expired and sitting members could be challenged — in 2013.

So, to the seats.

At this stage Labor is poised to hold Brisbane, Bonner, Flynn, Longman and Petrie.

The huge central Queensland seat of Flynn is the most likely of these four to fall.

The wunderkind of the LNP, 20-year-old Wyatt Roy, isn’t favoured to take Longman where former state MP and incumbent Jon Sullivan is a canny campaigner, although the Longman MP may have done himself some damage with a gaffe about the medical treatment of children with disabilities last night, depending on how widely his remarks are reported.

Dawson, Herbert and Leichardt are toss ups, though I’d anticipate Labor winning at least one of these regional seats. Whatever Peter Beattie might think, the ALP could have done with a better candidate than former Townsville mayor Tony Mooney in Herbert.

Peter Dutton is set to hold Dickson, nominally a Labor seat, after looking a bit shaky in the first couple of weeks of the campaign. Andrew Laming will also hold Bowman for the LNP, despite its extreme marginality, because of Labor disunity related to preselection stoushing, and woes in the campaign. Resources have been pulled out of the Bayside seat.

Forde looks all right for Labor, but its newly created neighbour Wright — a notional LNP seat — might be a surprise, at least being run much closer than expected. The interesting “leafy western suburbs” seat of Ryan, where Michael Johnson was disendorsed by the LNP, could just fall to the ALP. It’s been ripe for picking for some time, and the redistribution has favoured Labor. Johnson’s standing as an independent is a wild card, though he has no chance of winning.

Of great interest too will be the strength of Andrew Bartlett’s vote for the Greens in Brisbane. If he could take it from about 12% to 20% or higher, he’d be doing splendidly. But my impression is that soft Labor voters in my home seat have been swinging back over the past couple of weeks. Despite some excitable commentary, Brisbane is nothing like Melbourne or Grayndler. The closest approximation to a Southern “inner-city lefty” seat is actually Rudd’s seat of Griffith, which he will easily hold. In Brisbane, the ‘burbs begin about five minutes’ drive from the CBD.

Whether or not Larissa Waters can break through into the Senate for the Greens is another intriguing question, but I wouldn’t put a bet on it.

To sum up, my feeling is that Labor will lose between three and six seats it holds or nominally holds. I suspect it’ll be about four or five, including Dickson and Herbert, one or both of Flynn and Dawson and perhaps Leichardt. All of these are regional seats, bar Dickson. I wouldn’t rule out one other Brisbane seat falling too, perhaps Forde or Bonner. But the worst case scenario of eight or nine is possible, if, I think, highly unlikely. If pressed, I’d plump for five Labor losses, though there’s a lot of fluidity and unevenness in the vote.

Labor’s good at closing in Queensland, and if the direct mail is working, I wouldn’t be surprised if fewer than five seats go.

If Labor can snatch Ryan (possible) or Wright (unlikely), then the equation for the net contribution of Queensland to the national ALP column changes. If there are any LNP gains higher up the pendulum, look to Moreton and Blair, though I think both are very long shots.

Overall, though, I don’t think the swing against Labor in Queensland will be sufficient to be a cause in and of itself of a national defeat. Sad as it is for a Queenslander to say, Labor’s chances of picking up seats in South Australia and Victoria and the picture in NSW are probably the key to that puzzle, if I’m right.

But it has been interesting to see more observers come around to what I’ve been saying for just over a fortnight — Labor has contained the swing against it in Queensland.

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd last night gave an interview to Phillip Adams on Late Night Live.

This morning, Brisbane’s sole metropolitan newspaper characterised his successor Julia Gillard’s response as an apology to Queenslanders for hurting their feelings.

It’s a funny way to characterise the reception of the Labor leadership change.

Rudd’s interview was dignified, self-deprecating and displayed a lot of character and humanity. The initial media response that his remarks would prove a “distraction” for the Labor campaign is surely a mischaracterisation, proving only that the bizarre script that has dominated much of this election continues to write itself in the face of changed facts.

Contrary to what the Niki Savvas and Janet Albrechtsens of this world might have us believe, Rudd’s not the sort of bloke to let himself be consumed by bitterness and regret. He’s no Mark Latham.

I said last night on ABC News 24′s The Drum that I didn’t think Rudd’s deposition was the sole source of Queensland Labor’s undoubted woes.

Labor has lots of problems here — the toxicity of an ALP brand contaminated by perceptions of Anna Bligh’s reversal on privatisation combining with a feeling that federal Labor had gone the same way as the state mob, obsessed with “announcables” and machinations. Queenslanders are also preparing to reverse our record of being one of the Greens’ worst states.

However, the ALP has been able to contain the swing against it in some of its marginals, if what I’m hearing is right. Particularly in regional Queensland and on Brisbane’s northern outskirts, a formidable marginal seat campaign is under way, aided by the quality of many of the members elected in the Kevin07 surge. My best guess is that, at the moment, Labor is looking at losing more like 4-5 seats rather than 8-10 seats.

Kevin Rudd’s words won’t hurt Labor’s chances. Far from it. But it’s about more than hurt feelings.

The ALP still has to demonstrate to Queenslanders that it’s capable of transcending the sound bite politics of a state administration. It’s doing a good job of addressing parish pump issues, in a campaign that feels very much like Fred Daly’s picture of concurrent local by-elections.

As I wrote in 2007, one of Rudd’s big virtues was that he was able to appeal to cosmopolitan Queenslanders sick of being dismissed as country cousins and to the still very real state parochialism that suffuses the place.

If he can now revive some of that spirit, and infuse Julia Gillard’s campaign with it, there will be an electoral dividend in Queensland.

Update: I’ll also be interviewed on ABC News Radio drive time at around 5.45pm.

Elsewhere: Tim Dunlop.

Week two of the campaign began with the lackluster leaders’ debate being overshadowed by Tony Abbott’s female relatives and a truly disgraceful focus on Julia Gillard’s private life by the press. It continued as it began: something like a cross between a reality tv show and the Lord of the Rings, with the Shadow of Sauron darkening any possibility of a conversation on policy. Political junkies poured over the possibilities of any number of byzantine theories on the identity of the Labor Leaker, and strangely, Mark Latham suddenly became a trusted media source. Tony Abbott just had to turn up every day to look good, escaping policy scrutiny as the focus was firmly on the government’s woes. Meanwhile, the polls showed signs of narrowing, but voters hoping to make an informed decision on the big issues facing the country could be forgiven for being decidedly un-enlightened by the alarums and noise of the horse race.

You can read more here.

Please consider this a roundtable to reflect on the second week of the campaign in toto. Specific comments on particular issues in the campaign, or recent developments, should appropriately be placed on posts devoted to those issues or on the most recent open thread.

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.

NB: Previous LP discussion of the leadership spill is here.

24-hour media cycle does no favours for our democracy

We are all New South Welsh-persons now.

Three Tweets encapsulated the extraordinary series of events which brought down a first term Prime Minister:

Daniel Burt:

“We live in fickle and disposable times.”

Richard Di Natale:

“Damn poll driven politics. Narrow one dimensional snapshots of a single point in time are meaningless.”

Jonathan Green:

“A certain smugness in the media at this coup by commentariat.”

Australians don’t pay anything like the constant attention to politics that suffuses the world of the journosphere, the political tragics, the commentariat. Or, of course, the world of Labor MPs and Ministers, many of whom were among the last to know that a coup against Kevin Rudd was in the works yesterday.

A lot of citizens will only be hearing now for the first time that Australia has a new Prime Minister. I’ve just had an email from a friend asking what has happened, and I won’t be the only one. My Facebook feed is full of people expressing shock that this could occur.

There was a significant moment on ABC tv this morning when Chris Uhlmann, asked about the public’s response to this sequence of unlikely events, could only answer that he didn’t know, and segue into a discussion of how Canberra public servants are feeling.

Australia is not contained in Canberra, not that Canberra is a bad thing. But the political class needs to remember that.

Much as those attached to the verities of the Westminster system might protest otherwise, it’s difficult for many to come to terms with the fact that an elected PM has been torn down.

And it will be particularly difficult if the plotters can’t get beyond policy wonk talk, process stuff, egos, and insider ALP obsessions. ‘The polls made us do it’, ‘Rudd was a bad chair of meetings’ and ‘Alister Jordan’ won’t cut the mustard.

Let’s make no mistake. It is a historic day for our country to have a female Prime Minister.

But it is also a historic tragedy that a first term Prime Minister, the first Labor leader to win a national election since 1993, has been politically executed by his own party. It’s a tragedy which will set a disturbing precedent.

Julia Gillard has become Labor leader at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons, and through the agency of the wrong people.

But let’s leave that aside. What does this event tell us about post-modern politics?

A few days ago, talk of a leadership challenge appeared to be the preserve of a bunch of urgers in the press gallery. No one outside the hermetic Canberra circle could have realistically expected what unfolded last night to occur.

After Kevin Rudd’s dignified and moving press conference today, the media couldn’t wait to get back to parsing the micro-details of his address. A pause for reflection on a very human moment might have been better than the ghoulish sights and sounds of the vultures circling his political corpse, and picking over the entrails of his remarks. It’s a very good argument against the relentless and dehumanising noise of the 24/7 media cycle.

Consider the comparison between the life cycle of the British New Labour government and Kevin Rudd’s 2 years and 5 months in office.

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s reformed spinmeister, has written persuasively of the propensity of the press to devour politicians. The charge that spin takes precedence over governing is an ironic one when made by those with a never satiated appetite for yet another event, a yearning for an always renewed narrative.

Tony Blair survived three victorious elections before making an exit whose timing was not of his own choosing. A massively unpopular war was one of the key reasons for his demise.

Kevin Rudd has not been permitted to face the people as Prime Minister. He looked quite shocked at the fact that his political demise came when it did, and with good reason.

Poll driven perspectives ignore the fact that polls reflect a static view of political reality, and the absurdity of demanding that leaders shape up or ship out according to the Newspoll timetable should be evident.

It’s damaging our democracy, and profoundly. We’re constantly being told, in the anodyne language adopted by the commentariat, that Labor needed ‘clear air’, and that Kevin Rudd couldn’t ‘cut through’. Yet no one has explained to me how a complex and sustained political argument could be prosecuted in the context of a media obsessed with the eternal present.

We might well pause to reflect on the irony that Kevin Rudd, whose performance today should forever negate claims that he’s a passionless robot consumed only by anger or ambition, was trying to do so – on the Resources Super Profits Tax. That was impossible, it would seem, in the face of a concerted campaign by the big battalions of industry, and those backroom apparatchiks whose utterances were amplified by the megaphones of the media.

Kevin Rudd was arguing for progressive reform, and because he couldn’t be seen to ‘back flip’, his leadership was the sole obstacle to those who believe they properly own our resources and our public sphere. He had to go, they pronounced, and the Labor party obliged.

If leadership, in both senses of the word, is what is at issue, we must ask ourselves whether we allow our leaders the space, and the time, to exercise their political craft as we would like to see it practiced.

In a single parliamentary term, we’ve now seen three opposition leaders and two Prime Ministers.

Much has been made of purported governance concerns: a ‘kitchen cabinet’ and faceless advisors distinguished only by the supposed callowness of youth. Yet the faces of the hit squad who destroyed Rudd’s leadership are hardly well known.

Gordon Brown also promised a return to cabinet government, and due process, after Tony Blair’s ‘government on the sofa’ was roundly condemned. Yet nothing changed. It may be impossible, in a world where an hour is a long time in politics, to govern at the pace of a slower era.

Julia Gillard, whatever her intentions, may learn that lesson quickly. And that any honeymoon will be short indeed. The opposition, and the media, have been laying down the lines of attack, in readiness for the latest twist in the political narrative they’ve arrogated themselves the right to script.

Rudd was right, in his address to caucus, to warn against the transformation of federal politics into the sordid realms of Labor politics, New South Wales style. Yet the ALP held power in the Premier State for thirteen years before its leader was overthrown.

If the AWU and Sussex Street types who orchestrated Rudd’s downfall believe that Labor can win only by attacking the Coalition from the right (which I’d have thought was barely possible with Tony Abbott as leader), and by throwing the leader overboard at the first sign of trouble, then they only have to survey the damage wrought in NSW.

In the United States, the United Kingdom, and in this Commonwealth of Australia, disillusion with politics as usual has been the abiding sentiment of the electorate over recent years. We should stop to consider whether the culture of constant obsolescence and the relentless drumbeat of narratives of the eternal now we’ve just seen make history, almost without knowing what it was doing, is good for any of us.

Will any future Prime Minister take the time to reflect, or have the courage to lead, knowing that a few marginal seat polls and a media firestorm can dissolve their legitimacy in the flick of an eyelid?

Most political observers agree that the Labor party was still odds on to win this year’s federal election. The events of the past two days ought to make all of us slow down, take a breath, and think about what our democracy really requires of us.

One of the central reasons Kevin Michael Rudd was elected the 26th Prime Minister of Australia was that he correctly identified a widespread public sentiment that the problems we confront go beyond the short term horizons of the political and media class. Whatever his failings, and for me, many of them pall beside the dignity of his exit from high office, we must now ask ourselves whether politics as usual allows any leader to wrestle with the great moral challenges of our time.

Because those challenges are not going away, even as the timescale of the Twitterverse and the 24 hour news machine rolls relentlessly on to another moment of the present.

Dr Mark Bahnisch is a sociologist and a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development. He founded the leading public affairs blog, Larvatus Prodeo.

NB: Previous LP British election coverage here.

Update: Interesting piece from Seumas Milne.

Gary Sauer-Thompson at Public Opinion has a handle on the politics:

So the Coalition’s strategy [of] messing with the system by throwing anything at the Rudd Government that comes to hand continues. It doesn’t matter about the contradictions –introducing a big tax when the promise is no new taxes—as it is about getting noticed and destabilisation with whatever-it-takes to oppose the Rudd Government on everything.

The strategy is to wedge Labor—”supporting big business over working families” is the new talking point— and to win back female voters who have been deserting the Coalition.

Trevor Cook asks whether Abbott is really a Liberal. Meanwhile, in The Age, Leslie Cannold disputes the claim that parental leave is solely a women’s issue and Julia Perry in the SMH examines who should pay.

I’ve built on the arguments I made in a post here yesterday in a piece for The ABC’s The Drum Unleashed to nail the canard that Abbott’s plan is more ‘generous’ than Labor’s policy, and set out my reasons why it’s not something progressives should support.

Today my daughter was playing with her pink superball while my son was asleep (it’s small, so she’s only allowed to get it out while he’s sleeping). I heard her mutter to her toys while brandishing the pink superball, “This is the Prime Minister, and if you do something he doesn’t like, he will bounce in your eye.” My husband has pointed out that she may have learned the concept from a book entitled Blossom Possum (beautifully illustrated by Rafe Champion’s late wife, as it happens). I have also tried to explain to her what a Prime Minister does, but given the actions of the superball, I’m not sure if she quite “got it”.

Anyway, after I posted this incident on my Facebook page, the post started off a string of reminiscences about people’s childhood political memories. It transpires that an amazing number of my friends just loved Bob Hawke when they were kids. I don’t know if that means my friends’ families were generally Labor-leaning, or that Bob had a special appeal which made him loved by kids? When my sister was a little girl, she loved Bob. One general election, she asked Dad who he voted for, and Dad teasingly said he voted for Andrew Peacock because the Liberals gave him a shortbread round (actually he’d bought it at the school stall at the voting booth). My sister sobbed and sobbed, and said, “Now the forests will die because you haven’t voted for Bob!”

Mark Bahnisch commented that when he was in Grade 2, he wrote a poem about Gough Whitlam. Then Mark and I decided that we should write a joint post about what everyone’s earliest political memories are. I remember that I never liked Joh Bjelke-Petersen as a child. In addition, with a child’s merciless observation, I noted his head was shaped like a peanut, and thus I thought it was extraordinary that he was an ex-peanut farmer. Like my sister, I also loved Bob Hawke when I was little.

Do you remember whether you liked particular politicians when you were young? Or did you dislike particular politicians?