Tony Abbott should consider himself a little lucky today with the Newspoll sample, as other unpublished phone polling that was in the field last week and over the weekend picked up movement more akin to Essential than Newspoll. So saying, it all comes out in the wash given enough time. (And no folks, that isn’t a Newspoll conspiracy, it’s simply normal sampling error – put it back in your pants).

So, I still think we’re seeing some movement back to Labor in public opinion, despite the apparent stasis in Newspoll.

Despite the fact that Abbott’s been having a dream run in the media (always seemingly ready to be amused and entertained with something or someone that can be represented as providing colour and movement), it’s actually much more difficult (and probably more unwise) to run the ‘seize the attention’ opposition strategy than sometimes perceived. It has a pretty short use by date. And it doesn’t necessarily work; just ask Mark Latham.

I think that the true (if more prosaic) story about the narrowing of the party vote in the polls over the last few months is that it’s a return to partisan normality. Federal governing parties have very rarely enjoyed the sorts of overwhelming advantages state incumbents have had, and not surprisingly so, as the nation is a much more variegated and complex beast. That, and the perceived end of the GFC, leaves less room for Kevin Rudd to adopt the ‘above politics’ stance beloved of Labor premiers (and of ‘New Labor’ administrations more generally); or rather, it doesn’t succeed in hoovering up as much of the soft vote when the opposition unites behind a leader and rejoins the partisan game.

The spin on Newspoll this morning – in the absence of any movement in the two party preferred – was the banner headline of doom for Kevin Rudd’s approval ratings. That’s more or less a waste of newsprint. If we had a breakdown of the Newspoll figures, I strongly suspect we’d find that Rudd’s drop over the last few months has mostly come from Coalition voters. That reflects the perceived increase in strength of leadership and unity among Coalition partisans in the electorate; Rudd’s ratings are still higher by a significant degree than the ALP party vote, which implies that he’s still rated by undecided and soft voters; as does his advantage over Abbott and his commanding lead in the PPM stakes (once upon a time, of course, the all important indicator according to Shanahan and crew). I doubt, therefore, that he’s got much further to fall, all other things being equal, or that there’s any remaining drag effect in the party vote.

Rudd’s more fundamental problem is that a key characteristic of his political personality is proving unsustainable over a long period. For all his talk of taking tough decisions and being willing to risk unpopularity and awareness that there are no magic solutions, a key element of the Rudd personality is the assurance that he shares voters’ concerns on pretty much any issue raised with him and wants to do something about them. Rudd’s instinctive reaction on virtually any issue is to express concern, without committing to any specific action, or without any follow-up.

It stood him in good stead in the lead-up to the 2007 election, where he was able to express concern about issues like petrol and grocery prices and thereby convey that he was on the same wavelength as voters, who felt themselves hard-pressed despite the economic boom. No one ever lost votes telling well-off Australians that they were doing it tough and needed help.

As a means of catering to the selfish obsessions of voters, it was highly effective against John Howard, who was far more reluctant to suggest that governments could or should be in the business of pandering to the most micro-concerns of voters. Howard preferred simply to throw money at them at let them work out how to spend it.

The reflexive expression of concern without demonstrated action on the issue is no longer working as a tactic because it can’t be sustained over the long term. Eventually voters start to wonder what the Government has specifically done. A pattern emerges of concern expressed, but not acted upon.

When it comes to fulfilling its election commitments, this Government has been rather more obsessive about doing so than most. The Opposition can try to pick out promises it claims were breached but Rudd doesn’t come close to the systematic breaching of promises by the Howard Government in its first term – most of which, incidentally, were justified by fiscal circumstances, even though Howard like Keating knew perfectly well just what a dire state the Budget was in before the 1996 election.

But being able to tick off election commitments on a list masks the fundamental truth that Rudd oversold himself as being cognisant of voter concerns and willing to address them, in a way that Howard, even at his Big Government worst, was never prepared to do. There’s a credibility gap that can’t be addressed no matter how often Rudd recites his list of kept promises, a feeling that he is less than what he offered.

It’s not necessarily fatal. Voters were perfectly aware John Howard lied and twisted his own words to suit his purposes but kept electing him anyway, confident in the job he was doing. There’s no reason why Rudd shouldn’t manage the same, especially with his successful management of the financial crisis behind him. But only if he can overcome his addiction to pandering to voters and convince voters Green Loans and foil insulation aren’t symbolic of his Government’s competence.

Keane compares Rudd to John Howard. I think the difference here is slightly overdrawn; Howard was famously prepared to give an opinion on almost everything, and the ‘culture wars’ saw a determined attempt to politicise differences in social values and to stigmatise the choices individuals might make, as well as making institutions and major aspects of national culture both the province of state action at the national level and leverage for partisan differences.

Kevin Rudd treads much more softly in this domain, but his preparedness to express concern and to intimate that ‘something should be done’ is a song sung in a similar register.

The projection of empathy, as Keane says, worked wonders for Rudd in the 2007 campaign, but the common theme here might be playing to the statist political culture of many Australians; the sentiment that the government should be tailoring policy to their individual circumstances twinned with the paradoxical preparedness to live and let live and to judge others’ choices. We don’t appear to have much of an impulse to take responsibility for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, preferring to grumble that state policy isn’t configured to give us all that we so richly deserve.

That culture can form the basis for a social democratic model of collective welfare and state action to facilitate individual opportunity, but it can also become a degraded desire for the state to act instantly on our individual plights.

It’s here that the micro-managing urges of Kevin Rudd come into play. Despite his background as a diplomat, I think he’s been most shaped by his experience as a Queensland bureaucrat. And what we have in governance Rudd-style is the parish pump politics of state level service delivery writ large. Grand plans come down to the ground level of tricky problems of implementation, with big picture objectives reduced to bite sized policies whose national scale still means there’s endless scope for things to go wrong (think Myschool as metonym and placeholder for the education revolution, or the roof insulation programme as climate change politics).

Tony Abbott, of course, would be very much the same in practice – an interferer, a straightener, a centraliser.

And we also have politics, state Labor style; the art of the permanent campaign, and playing to the proverbial kitchen table.

At federal level, of course, the first administration to really indulge in the dark arts of spin was John Howard’s.

I remarked on my ‘vision thing’ thread that Paul Keating’s example is the template for what not to do for the Rudd government, just as Whitlam’s was for Hawke. There’s no doubt that the Keating government’s experience of dissonance between ‘big picture’ politics and the everyday lived experience of voters has been a powerful warning for Rudd. I’m surprised that’s not noticed more often.

But Keating also believed that the national government had a higher role to play than the quotidian concerns of state administration – that a PM shouldn’t be involved in or comment on every issue, and that it didn’t matter so much if he wasn’t on the news every night. It was probably the case that his focus was the wrong one, and should have been on economic issues, and there’s endless evidence that his own path to the Prime Ministership shaped his approach for the political worse (‘Fixed economy and integrated Australia globally? Tick! Bored now – onto the plane of the symbolic’); but that doesn’t mean that Keating’s core conception of federal power and politics was wrong.

But I don’t think Kevin Rudd has it in him to be a Paul Keating of any stripe.

It’s a similar style of proceeding to Imre Salusinszky’s; who, incidentally, looked almost disappointed that Nathan Rees had actually put a bomb under the endless round of destabilisation at NSW Labor conference. All those Chinese lunches and hot tips over yum cha about Della or Kristina Keneally, or someone, being Premier before the month or year is out or whenevs, gone to waste.

Much more astute was the commentary in today’s Fin Review and Crikey – Turnbull is being squeezed by a pincer movement – Minchin within and Rudd without. The commentariat should wake up to the fact that the truth is Labor would like to see Mal go – because he’s actually the most plausible opponent (and who knows what he could have done had he not been forced to lead such a rabble – including the Coalition’s false friends in the media among the troops in constant revolt).

No one else the Libs could put up against Rudd would have even a ghost of a chance.

… which leads me to the “honeymoon is over” theme. If indeed it is true that there has been a bit of a shift in the electorate’s mood (and as I’ve said recently, I think it’s too early to call that), the so-called return to normalcy is much more likely to be a result of relief that the effects of the GFC are finally past us, rather than any supposed “doubts” about Rudd or concerns about asylum seekers. Anyone who’s ever run a focus group can readily imagine how such “doubts” could come up, without having any massive significance. In fact, if you’re doing your job, you’d be asking the same questions about Turnbull. I smell a big rat on this particular media leak. And on the latter, I think it’s much more probable that it’s the messiness of Rudd’s message, and the sheer volume of ‘crisis’ rhetoric that’s likely to account for the blip, if that’s it at all.

The biggest failing of the public polls, unlike the parties’ tracking polls, is that they don’t ask any questions which would disclose the salience of issues and events to vote shifts. That’s why a lot of the hackneyed commentary is just that. If they did, of course, it would cost a bit more, and they’d need to know a bit more about stats to interpret them, and it would also forever destroy the myth that there’s some privileged insight political journos have.

But in the absence of access to such data, the more prosaic hypothesis is that voters want to see the government act on what it promised to do – bread and butter improvements in service delivery, primarily. The Rudd government, if not the commentariat, will be aware of this, and I’d expect a switch in the rhetoric very quickly after parliament rises for the year and the political shenanigans around the CPRS wear out their use by date as political fodder for beating up the opposition.

So – does this mean that Labor’s support is “soft” in the absence of something the government portrayed as a national emergency? Well, yes, sort of. But what needs to be recalled here is that Rudd has always been determined to maintain a large lead in the polls, and thus prepared to lose a few points during a campaign. In part that’s a reflection that his own campaigning skills (as opposed to political skills) aren’t the best ever. It also builds up a cushion for all sorts of fires to burst out, compensates for regional and state based weaknesses (and drag by unpopular Labor administrations).

It’s a classic State Labor strategy.

It may not – in the different environment of federal politics – lead to a landslide 2nd term victory (though it might). It does rest on keeping the opposition irrelevant, and making them bear all the brunt of looking political and petty. So far it’s working. It works in part because most of the parliamentary theatre – of so much interest to Liberals and media alike – is perceived negatively by the electorate, if not ignored entirely. Rudd’s victory was a victory for a strategy which recognised that people were sick of John Howard, in part because he got too political. That strategy is still in place. If Turnbull is toppled, it’ll only reinforce its success.

In other words, the obsessive focus of the media on the minutiae of the political cycle, and the constant reporting and inciting of leadership divisions and rumblings in Liberal ranks, plays into Rudd’s hands, rather than “putting the government under scrutiny”. If you actually wanted to go looking for some real political problems the Rudd government would not want people to read about, you wouldn’t have to look too far.

So, what’s going on in Queensland? Anna Bligh’s own numbers were down while Labor’s vote surged, to a point above where it was at the last election (which was won very handily indeed). It’s possible that Bligh herself is suffering a little because she doesn’t fit the mould of the “strong leader” which has always stuck to Queensland Premiers, and which Peter Beattie re-invented. Conversely, there may be a bit of a flight to safety effect in the party vote with the economy slowing. However, here we come across one of the conundrums that haunt the analysis of polling. Queensland Labor types have been suggesting that private polling (which I haven’t seen) has Labor’s vote still on the up but not at such quite stellar heights and Anna Bligh’s numbers better than in Newspoll. I suspect they’re telling the truth, but with these things, as I’ve also said before, the interpretation of the public polls shifts political discourse and in particular the strategy and morale of the opposition.

The Borg is presumably on holidays, because former Liberal leader and current LNP deputy Mark McArdle has been trundled out to make the LNP’s excuses:

Acting Opposition Leader Mark McArdle has described 2008 as a tough year.

“We have come from a Coalition into an LNP – that took some time and effort,” he said.

And therein lies the rub. It wasn’t as if the constituent parts of the LNP were policy powerhouses before the amalgamation. Now they’ve got over the hurdle of their new party (which looks very much like the Nats with the Santoro faction tacked on), very little has been heard from them in a positive sense – two more or less unfunded policy announcements which fell apart on close inspection almost immediately. Supposedly Lawrence Springborg is trying to appear statesmanlike to counter his previous image as a nitpicker. But the LNP is looking more like a rather empty personality vehicle (few shadow ministers have any sort of public profile) at a time when the political stars are aligning closer to where Labor would like them to shine.

Oh and the early election talk? My mail is that Anna is playing with The Borg’s mind.

Update: New post looking at Antony Green’s analysis of the redistribution, and underlining the huge nature of the task that the LNP has to win.

Update: This post has also been published by Crikey today.

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”.

Consider what would happen if we were to see a poll showing similar figures for Labor in Queensland. I don’t think that’s at all unlikely. The “political narrative” about Anna Bligh and Lawrence Springborg would instantly change. A whole range of events now in the past – Beattie’s reign, the formation of the LNP and others – would be coloured in quite differently on the interpretive palette. And this would change the reality of state politics.

The truth of polls and the interpretive work that goes into “explaining” their results is that what we are dealing with is the manufacture of social facts rather than scientific certainties. There’s a “truth effect” at work which shifts or creates a new situation. It’s worth keeping this in mind at all times when thinking about how polls affect the political landscape.

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:

Voters clearly see benefits in balancing a federal government with state and territory governments of the opposite political complexion.
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“All the state governments are suffering from the same thing,” ABC election analyst Antony Green said yesterday.

“They no longer have the federal Coalition to run against,” he said. “They have to stand on their own two feet and can’t blame John Howard any more.”

“The Victorian poll shows it’s competitive and Labor can come back. The NSW ratings are terminal, unless Rees can leverage his popularity into votes.”

Any moderately careful reading of this passage would disclose that Green is not making the point which has been seized on as the current all purpose iron law of politics. What he’s in fact referring to is the fact that Labor governments find it harder to make excuses for poor performance on infrastructure and service delivery. Peter Beattie made much of the fact that Howard hadn’t come to the party in 2006, and the focus groups Graham Young and I conducted showed this message resonated. In turn, Kevin Rudd very successfully argued in 2007 the same thing in Queensland – implying that governments working in co-operation could turn things around, but not immediately. That, in turn, suggests that there’s a chance that Howard’s ghost is still available for Anna Bligh to run against in 2009 – because voters know there are long lead times for infrastructure and improvements in services, and the economy may also provide some sort of alibi. Different dynamics, and versions of this one, will be operating in other states. As Green points out – in direct contradicting the spin that his quote is woven into – Victoria’s circumstances are different to those of the putrid NSW Labor regime. Fixed terms allow governments to frontload unpopular decisions, and that’s what Brumby has been up to.

By the way, these comments aren’t intended to suggest that the state governments are all bright and shiny and the fount of all things good. I think Peter Beattie deserved in many ways to lose in 2006 – precisely because of a lack of foresight until quite late in the piece in improving service delivery and attending to infrastructure. What I’m trying to do is suggest that the analysis we’re being told is “common knowledge” is in fact wrong, and reflects neither actual voter behaviour nor some logic of politics, but is itself derivative of a partisan political strategy.

Elsewhere: Possum points out another gaping hole in the commentary on these polls – the fact that almost 30% of respondents in NSW are choosing to indicate a preference for neither major party, and that the same effect is present in more muted form in Victoria. That’s what’s worthy of analysis!