I note that Brian Costar has been thinking along similar lines to me and Andrew Bartlett on the subject of the formation of the Liberal National Party. He’s put his finger on the key challenge for the Borg and his crew, who haven’t had any amalgamation bounce if today’s Galaxy Poll is to be believed:
The new party is almost certainly to be more conservative than the pre-existing Liberal party – especially on social issues – and this might not prove attractive to the urban middle classes, who are certainly more numerous in Queensland than when Bjelke-Petersen mis-governed the state. Unless the party can harvest Brisbane seats from Labor it will not win government.
Continue reading ‘Queenslandism II’
In another thread, commenter amused has written that:
The effect of not having to go out, and actually mix with the hoi polloi to do your reporting is becoming obvious, as is the effect on the quality of ‘reporting’ (if one call it that), of not having someone who actually specialises, and knows something about, the issues on which they report. It’s like having a agoraphobic write pieces on travels across the Gobi desert. It lacks the essential qualities of closeness to topic, and engagement with the experience: consequently it lacks conviction and credibility.
It appears that Labor speechwriter Dennis Glover has caught the disease of avoidable punditocratic ignorance, judging by his column in today’s Australian which largely consists of well-meaning advice to the Mining and Energy Division of the CFMEU.
Continue reading ‘Dennis Glover’s avoidable ignorance’
The Newspoll in this morning’s Australian shows the Greens polling 6 per cent of the primary vote, down from 7.2 per cent in the 2004 election.
Newspolls this year have consistently had the Greens vote fluctuating around the 5 per cent mark, and this has resulted in commentary in the Oz and some other Murdoch papers about a supposed decline in Greens support.
Allow me to present some evidence in support of an alternative hypothesis: that Newspoll, for whatever reason, is underestimating the Greens vote.
Continue reading ‘Newspoll and the Greens’
Dear Applicant,
Thank you for enrolling the the premier training course for NSW premiers to be. Past alumni have included Bob Carr, John Fahey, Nick Greiner, and Neville Wran. Morris Iemma is a current graduate whereas Barry O’Farrell is scheduled to do the course once David Clarke approves.
To further proceed with your application, please answer the following multiple choice question regarding cabinet appointments:
You have just won an election and are prepared to be humble. It is time to name the new and there is one position to fill. A particular faction has put forward a perennial backbencher for promotion on the basis of deal done elsewhere. Do you:
(a) Bravely ignore the factional jousting and appoint the best person to the job?
(b) Investigate the factional appointee to be sure there are no skeletons before even considering their merit?
or
(c) Ignore the scuttlebutt regarding allegations of domestic violence that has been around Macquarie Street for years concerning this particular MP and appoint him blindly in a case of factional appeasement even knowing that he had an affair with the wife of another new minister and once consorted with a known criminal(though cleared of any wrongdoing) thus causing a scandal that will involve the police?
Answers over the fold.
Continue reading ‘So, you wanna be a NSW premier?’
Let the post NSW election recriminations begin!
While Debnam has stated that he wants to contest the 2011 NSW Election, it seems that his deputy Barry O’Farrell has the same idea.
This is going to be a one hell of a factional battle. There is a feeling withing the Liberals that John Brogden could have won the election except for the far Right’s power plays. A sentiment echoed by John Hewson’s op-ed in today’s SMH.
O’Farrell will be setting himself against the dominant right-wing of the party. It promises to be an ugly fight for the soul of the NSW Liberals.
From today’s Crikey email:
Both the Prime Minister and Joe Hockey have rushed to deny that the NSW election result had anything to do with WorkChoices. Hockey has apparently attributed the Liberals’ poor performance to the power of negative advertising, begging the question of why advertising targeting WorkChoices would work at all, if there weren’t highly negative community perceptions of it to start with.
It’s commonplace to observe that there is little publicly available data on the impact of WorkChoices. In his 7.30 Report debate with Julia Gillard on 14 February, Hockey claimed that it would be too cumbersome a task for the Office of the Employee Advocate to analyse the effects of AWAs signed.
Tomorrow, WorkChoices will have been in operation for a year. The Victorian Government has just released new research examining the evidence that does exist on its impact. The full report, compiled by Professor David Peetz of Griffith University, can be downloaded here [link to pdf].
Continue reading ‘WorkChoices one year on’
I crawl out from under a day which started with tying coloured balloons to the gate of a local primary school and ended with a particularly boisterous victory party (praise daylight saving!) to deliver this analysis of last night’s results.
In a broad sense, many predictions proved correct - that the swing against the government was not uniform, but differed across seats and areas, and in some places - particularly the traditionally working class Western Suburbs - involved a swing towards Labor. Perhaps Merrick and Rosso’s sentiments weren’t far off the mark when they told Peter Debnam that the reason not everybody goes to the beach every morning is that some of them live in Penrith (for the record, Debnam is officially the Shadow Minister for the Western Suburbs).
However, several results demonstrate that certain trends have completely gone under the radar of most commentators - and perhaps, also, that over-analysis has distorted predictions. The decisions people made were, ultimately, much less complex than many had predicted. In fact, it largely appears most people have voted on local issues and based on their respect for individual local members and candidates. Fancy that!
Read on if, like me, you like to talk (and talk and talk) about these arcane things …
Continue reading ‘The NSW Election: The Washup’
I love the smell of voting in the morning. Or is that the sausage sizzle at the primary school just around the corning which doubles as the local polling place I can smell? I’ll soon find out as I wander off to cast my vote in Indifference 2007, the NSW Election.
4 years ago I worked a Greens both at Balmain Town Hall which was a lot of fun. The day concluded with the Balmain constabulary doing a very credible impression of the Keystone Cops relating to some argy bargy between the Liberals and an anti-war protester. This year, with my political party allegiance given to no-one, it is very much Hobson’s Choice per Mark.
If you are working a booth today for a party (doesn’t matter who), any stories from the grass roots? Otherwise general chitchat, local colour during polling day and psephological musings all welcome.
Update [by Kim]: The Poll Bludger is live blogging the count, and the ABC’s election website is here. You can also watch or listen to streaming coverage via the ABC website.
As an update to my Crikey piece on the NSW focus group research Graham Young and I conducted last week (cross-posted here at LP), here’s a link to an article Graham has written for On Line Opinion based on the same research.
The latest polls certainly suggest a re-run of the Queensland dynamic - based on the margins of winnable Labor seats, Labor should come very close to its result last time around. Note that Galaxy has a better record in picking state elections than ACNielsen, as The Poll Bludger observes.
While ideologues such as Kevin Donnelly deserve to be taken to task for the unique ability to condemn education policies via a quirky command of English, one of the battlegrounds on the NSW election illustrates an greater problem with public education. The lack of adequate school facilities due to poor maintenance.
When children go to school with blocked toilets, no hot water, poorly maintained classrooms etc they receive a message education is not a priority. When certain politicians talk of the need of teaching students the idea of ‘values’, they fail to realise that the students already being instructed in the worth of ‘values.’
That is not to say that ultra-modern, spic and span facilities will turn everyone into model students. But maintenance of basic facilities so as to not undermine essential personal dignities of staff and students is something that needs to be addressed by State and Federal government. It is just one component of the education debate but it is just as important (and often overlooked) as discussions on curriculum and teacher performance.
Not that I expect the winner of the NSW election to hold to any promises in this regard.
Cross posted on Modia Minotaur
It used to be customary to wait until after an election before starting to speculate on the makeup of the new cabinet, but like every other aspect of this year’s campaign, traditional notions of what happens, how it happens and why just seem inapplicable this time around, and I’m still not quite sure why.
Before speculating on the next NSW cabinet, I should note that, for a government that everyone expects to cruise comfortably to victory on Saturday, an extraordinary number of local candidates - in seats both marginal and safe - are expressing a genuine, non-agenda based pessimism about their individual chances. Usually, candidates have a rough idea of their prospects this close to an election. Many that I know of are so unsure as to their position that they would be no more surprised if they suffered a whopping defeat than if they won a crushing victory.
Thus, both possibilities should always be kept in the back - and perhaps the front - of the mind.
Assuming the government is returned, there will certainly be a significant reshuffle. Morris Iemma will want to make his mark on what was previously a mostly inherited cabinet, and one that is overdue a spring cleaning. He has reportedly been given full sway by factions for this job. Given various mooted demotions, as many as nine positions could be up for grabs (and ostensibly, an absolute minimum of four, given the departure of Sandra Nori, Milton Orkopoulos, Carl Scully and Bob Debus).
Continue reading ‘Shuffling the Deck’
From today’s Crikey email:
Incumbency, it seems, is the talk of the political town at the moment. Morris Iemma’s government in NSW seems set to repeat the Beattie and Bracks wins of last year, and when talk turns to the Howard government’s chances of survival, the strength of the economy and the Coalition’s ability to turn the spending tap on with abandon are perceived as Howard’s trump cards.
But, is this the full story? After all, a plethora of political scientists and pundits produced mathematical modelling in 2000 to prove that Al Gore couldn’t lose the election when the Democrats were presiding over such prosperity.
In fact, research conducted by Graham Young and me for The National Forum might tell a different tale.
Continue reading ‘Incumbency rules?’
In Australia’s climate change debate, the major sticking point between the Labor Party on one hand, and the Greens and environmental non-government organisations on the other, is over the role that “clean coal” technology can play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. State Labor governments and the Federal ALP are committed to developing clean coal technologies as a way of enabling Australia’s coal industry to continue to prosper whilst substantially reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The Greens and environmental NGOs maintain that “clean coal” is an oxymoron, are sceptical about the sustainability and economic feasibility of technologies such as geosequestration, and that achieving the required reductions in greenhouse gas emissions requires, in the words of Australian Conservation President Ian Lowe, that the world “burn a lot less coal”.
A good deal of confusion has entered the debate in terms of the temporal and spatial scale of the problem and possible solutions, and Australia’s specific national contribution to such solutions. On the one hand, ending Australian coal exports may have little effect on greenhouse emissions globally in the absence of action by our major customers to transform their economies on a carbon-constrained basis, as they will be able to source their coal from domestic sources or from other suppliers. On the other hand even the most optimistic proponents of clean coal technologies acknowledge that they are not likely to be making significant inroads into emissions from coal-fired power generation until at least 2020.
And there is the rub, at least as far as domestic greenhouse policy is concerned.
Continue reading ‘Until we have clean coal…’
This is a completely unreliable and probably meaningless poll for LP’s NSW readers. Is there any sort of swing on for the upcoming state election? “Swing” of course does not necessarily mean from Labor to Libs or vice versa. My guess is that there’s going to be a big increase in votes for the Greens and independents, but this is unlikely to translate into seats in the Lower House. It could, however, have an impact in the Upper House, with some chance of a Greens hold on the balance of power.
Is there anyone out there who’s planning to vote differently from the last state election and would you care to elucidate us on the direction of your swing and reasons for swinging?
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