No one would every accuse the LNP leader Lawrence “the Borg” Springborg of being poll driven, would they? I mean… surely it’s a coincidence that the latest Galaxy Poll on state voting intentions found Labor leading strongest on transport and the LNP releasing a transport policy for Brisbane commuters the same day?
The said policy is an amalgam of the undercosted, weird (extra carriages on trains which won’t fit on the station) and possibly unfeasible, according to the government. But in the grand tradition of governments, Labor are claiming they were already thinking of the most apparently popular bit of the Borg’s train agenda, and may well steal it, but they wouldn’t be doing that because they were already… etc. The neatness of this trick is that the government can actually do something about what the opposition can only talk about, and at the same time it provides some dangerous incentives for the LNP to remain a policy free zone.
But, leaving aside the politics for a moment, The Borg’s initative is to have free fares for early and late commuters heading to and from the CBD by rail - from 6am to 7am and from 6pm to 7pm. The idea - supposed to reduce overcrowding on peak hour trains - is said to have been borrowed from a Melbourne iniative, which is what Labor are now saying they’ve been looking at for some time. Any Melbs folks care to tell us Quincelanders how it’s worked out in practice?
Getting back to the politics, Springborg combined his announcement with the launch of his own new form of transport - a campaign bus called “The Borg Express”. The visuals suggest part of his problem - the very self-centred (or if you prefer, leadership focused) nature of his campaign. I haven’t seen any qualitative polling on this, but I’d strongly suspect the LNP doesn’t have much of a brand, and the worst of both the Libs and the Nats might be haunting its image. The Borg has a lot riding on his own self-presentation, and the LNP must be hoping all the eggs in this particular basket don’t break as The Borg Express wends its way around.
Even if you’re not a local, you might have noticed that it’s been raining in Brisbane a lot recently. Anna Bligh’s taken advantage of fuller dams to execute a backflip on recycled water and to delay the Traveston Dam. These were two issues that the LNP had been making some running on lately, in the first instance aided and abetted by a quite disgraceful campaign about the supposed dangers of water recycling in the pages of, you guessed it, The Australian.
I think the first is bad policy - and it doesn’t give us much hope that Bligh is capable of either holding her nerve in the face of political shenanigans or of practising what she preaches about infrastructure and long term planning. It’s certainly not difficult to envisage the dam levels dropping back down in a few years time, and the whole point of this plan was to ensure continuity of water supply in such an eventuality. The work that has already been done has effectively been wasted.
Traveston is a different kettle of fish. In my view, it was always ill thought out and I’ve long thought it was mainly there to serve as a wedge between Brisbane voters and the Nationals before the 2006 election. I was surprised that Beattie ever went ahead with it after it had played its political purpose. In theory, the change to the scheduling of environmental mitigation measures is a good thing, but environmental concerns as well as its dubious contribution to water supply should actually have seen it canned rather than delayed.
Writing in Crikey today, Richard Farmer appears to think Bligh has executed a cunning political maneouvre. I can’t see it. Continue reading ‘Bligh’s big water backdown’
The Poll Bludger has the numbers on the latest Nielsen poll for Victoria. Labor leads on the 2PP 55-45.
The Age trumpets this result as Victorian Labor “defying the national trend”. No doubt other papers are saying the same - I haven’t looked.
I’ve been arguing for a while that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that there is a national trend against Labor, and that in fact thinking about disparate polls in seven different jurisdictions with differing political histories, cultures and current circumstances as constituting a trend makes little sense. My contention for a long time has been that elections are unrepeatable and singular events and that epistemologically we can know much less about electoral behaviour and find grounds for prediction with much less certainty than we think. Political behaviour follows few laws and a lot of conclusions reached after the fact are questionable.
But there is a sort of reflexivity feedback loop built into the way we think about politics and the way polls are reported. Particularly at state level - where polls are few and far between - one poll which struggles to form a series can have a large impact on perceptions, and thus the interpretations of the public and the press and the morale of politicians and “momentum”.
Continue reading ‘The truth of polls and the epistemology of politics’
This morning the Queensland Liberal-National Party’s latest television advertisement hit the airwaves, jostling for our attention with Amber Higlett’s early news show on Channel Nine. The ad can also be viewed here.
The ad features Laurence Springborg declaring his pride in presiding over the formation of “the LNP” as the first step towards “change in Queensland”. Said change will include things to do with schools, employment, housing and hospitals, and also making Queensland a place “where roads are planned for future growth”.
Two interesting things strike me about the advertisement.
Continue reading ‘Don’t mention the Nationals (or the Liberals, or the environment)’
I’ve written before about why I think that the “media narrative” masquerading as psephological analysis that there’s some sort of automatic fall in support for state Labor parties because of some putative desire among voters to have different parties governing at different levels. I suspect the proximate origin of this meme is actually the “wall to wall Labor” scare the Liberals ran in last year’s election. As Kim was suggesting the other day, this is a political tactic that normally indicates despair among incumbents, and it’s completely wrong to assume it reflects some sort of psephological law or reality in voting behaviour. Anyone familiar with the political science literature knows that attempts to demonstrate any posited strong correlation between state and federal partisan choices over time falls down very quickly - even in New South Wales where it’s long been political myth that the strongest case can be made. In part that’s because there are two few cases of actual partisan change in elections over much of the postwar period - something that becomes immediately apparent when you think about the fact that the federal government didn’t turn over at all between 1949 and 1972.
There was another outbreak of this guff on Monday in The Australian, apropos of quarterly newspolls in New South Wales and Victoria. There was the usual news story and two op/ed pieces to ram home the point. It was intriguing to see the frame applied to the comments of ABC election analyst Antony Green: Continue reading ‘Labor states on the nose!!!’
As noted here and here in comments, there’s an extremely interesting development in Queensland state politics today - Indooroopilly MP Ronan Lee has defected from the ALP to join The Greens.
Lee has been something of a maverick during his time in Parliament, causing both Peter Beattie and Anna Bligh a few headaches, and having switched factional allegiance from one right wing faction - the Old Guard (”Labor Unity”) to the other - the AWU (”Labor Forum”). He might have expected ministerial promotion, particularly if Anna Bligh had had the determination and the support to put the broom through Cabinet that is needed - rather than just talking about “renewal” - but has had to content himself with the position of Parliamentary Secretary to the Attorney-General. Lee has been a very active local member, as his website demonstrates, and a position of some independence with regard to his party (Lee’s election paraphernalia and office signage have radically downplayed his ALP affiliation) must have assisted him in retaining a very marginal seat in traditional Western Suburbs leafy Liberal heartland he first won in 2001. Lee has also been outspoken on environmental and transport issues, and recently took a swipe at Anna Bligh for not being serious about green issues.
Lee’s defection is not necessarily unexpected, and as Dennis Atkins notes at Party Games, may not be unrelated to the difficulty of holding Indooroopilly if the LNP vote does improve in Brisbane. Continue reading ‘Indooroopilly Labor MP Ronan Lee joins Greens’
The other day I pointed to ludicrously misreported Galaxy polling showing federal Labor improving its vote in Queensland. Yesterday, the other bit of the Galaxy Poll was published in the Courier-Mail showing state Labor going backwards in Queensland. (Although actually, it only shows this if the comparison is with February - the last three polls show the 2PP bouncing around 52% for Labor and the margin of error isn’t stated. But as usual all the focus is on preferred Premier - where, of course, Anna Bligh is still ahead - but not by so much.)
Richard Farmer has pinged what the national News Limited polling pundits haven’t noticed - the movement in inconsistent directions (although the trend in both cases is weak) shows that their current narrative of “balancing” Labor’s federal dominance by turning on state Labor.
Incidentally, Lawrence Springborg shouldn’t get cocky (heh! bad pun!) about all the good news from the meejah. Continue reading ‘Left right hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing’
I’m planning at some stage in the reasonably near future to write a longish post about Anna Bligh’s prospects (and I wouldn’t comment on Mike Rann’s, not being a resident of South Australia, and thus I don’t think able to assess them with any authority). But there’s a bit of an indicator of the trend from Newspoll which finds a dead heat in South Australia (50-50 down from 54-46 in the last quarterly poll) and only a slight advantage to Labor in Queensland (51-49 down from 55-45).
However, I don’t buy the whole “balancing state and federal governments” argument. States have political cycles of their own which are substantially independent of federal swings of the pendulum. In Queensland, changes of government are very rare, with only six since 1915. That might give you some idea of why Peter Beattie hung on in 2006 when by rights (and he knew it) he should have lost. And the LNP is still looking quite messy. Aside from the internal shenanigans associated with the Nats takeover, Lawrence Springborg has made a couple of big mistakes by not following up on his teaser campaign with any substantial policy in areas such as infrastructure, health and education and by going relatively silent since his great conservative union was kinda consummated. The Borg is now back in a no policy, carping oppo leader zone - with internal rumblings. So I think 2009 in Queensland is still Labor’s to lose.
Continue reading ‘Labor takes a hit in the polls in Queensland and South Australia’
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The latest issue of Griffith REVIEW - Hidden Queensland - touches on a number of subjects close to my heart. In framing the issue, editor Julianne Schultz opens her introduction with a quote from a “well-connected insider” who expressed puzzlement in the lead up to the 2007 federal election - what did he know of Kevin Rudd and the rest of the crew from the North who might soon be moving into the Canberra corridors of power? Had they been from Melbourne, Sydney or “even Adelaide”, they’d have been on the radar. But what had been happening to transform a bastion of illiberality into the new centre of the “reforming Centre” in the two decades when he hadn’t been looking?
Continue reading ‘Hidden Queensland: Griffith REVIEW’
Whatever the merits of shale oil it seems that the Queensland Government has come to its senses by banning shale oil developments in the Whitsundays, and everywhere else for that matter, and specifically a plan to dig up 400,000 tonnes of the muck to see whether anything useful could be done with it.
The locals should be immensely relieved, in spite of foregoing 3000 jobs. Imagine that! A Queensland premier foregoing a resource development with 3000 jobs attached!
If you read the linked articles the shale oil monster has not quite been killed dead and I don’t think this means that Anna Bligh has finally “got it” in terms of the urgency of dealing with climate change mitigation. The notion that we can deal with the rapidly emerging problem in a leisurely way runs deep. In an interesting post last week Barry Brook tried to identify some of the deep irrationalities that prevent the necessary action from being taken.
Continue reading ‘Coming to terms with climate change’
Denying former Liberal leader Bruce Flegg the shadow treasury spot as payback for his opposition to the amalgamation wasn’t a good start for Lawrence Springborg’s vision of the LNP as one happy Pineapple Party. Now it’s being revealed that some moderate Liberals are urging others to stay within the tent only for time being, while in some federal electorates in Brisbane - particularly Rankin - almost all members of the former Liberal Party have refused to join the LNP. If The Borg can’t convince his own ostensible troops in the capital of his bona fides, it suggests his chances of picking up the metropolitan seats he needs for victory rely only on his own charisma and pr efforts. Perhaps the rebranding of portfolios such as “food security” and “housing accessibility” demonstrates his (so far empty) vision for the future? And didn’t he mean “housing affordability”?
But it’s not all happy campers on the Labor side of the aisle either. Anna Bligh’s own left faction has chafed at her call to re-endorse Police Minister Judy Spence, whose seat of Mount Gravatt was abolished in the recent redistribution. The left’s Ros Mclennan, an independent teachers’ union official, has put her hand up for pre-selection.
From my point of view I’d be glad to see Spence go. She’s a “law and order” Minister of the most egregious kind, and as far as most people can tell, her agenda and the Police Union’s can’t be distinguished in any meaningful sense.
So Anna Bligh’s own faction has challenged her to make her rhetoric of renewal a reality, and to clear the frontbenches of non performers. The fact that this is being aired in public, and that it’s happening at all, is not a good sign. Continue reading ‘Liberals find Pineapple Party prickly, while Labor factions are on the move’
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’
Bernard Keane has a pretty good take on the latest machinations on the Pineapple Party, where The Borg has resolutely refused to allow any compromise on the presidency issue, leading some Liberals feeling (correctly) that the whole thing is just a Nationals takeover. He’s also right to highlight the influence of the Santo Santoro faction, who have now transferred their machinations to the Liberal National Party, since they were unable to achieve their aims in the Liberals. That’s very bad news potentially for the merged entity, because that mob are masters of the art of sacrificing electability for self-serving power grabs.
Where Keane’s article isn’t quite so astute is the claim that:
At this point, they may be relying on Nationals intransigence to wreck the deal.
Continue reading ‘Pineapple Party latest’
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