There were numerous examples of the “exciting excerpt from new book on politics” thing around in the weekend papers, a phenomenon noted earlier here with regard to Peter Van Onselen and Phillip Senior’s Howard’s End. The Courier-Mail ran some underwhelming excerpts from that tome - the thrust of which appeared to be that Kevin Rudd sometimes reacted badly to some of the bombs lobbed at him last year (as in the Burke “affair”). That doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know at the time, and it’s probably unfair to judge the book as a whole on the basis of these excerpts. The marketing ploy seems to be to run a bit of copy which can be spun into something contemporary - another brick in the wall of the prevailing “media narrative”.
We also saw some similarly underwhelming excerpts in The Australian from Christine Jackman’s Inside Kevin07, which were then spun into news stories. Or rather, the bit about ALP polling on Peter Costello was. No one seemed to find it particularly stunning a revelation that ALP wonks were playing around with butchers paper when workshopping campaign themes.
The Costello story, of course, has played into current speculation about the Liberal leadership, and a campaign by certain commentators to tout his leadership credentials. But it actually highlights something very problematic both about the interpretation of polling by the media and the political class and these sorts of “first draft of history” journalistic books. Continue reading ‘The Great Pretender’
You could be forgiven for thinking that politics in this country is a combination of astroturf and the pursuit of financial advantage, if you draw a few dots connecting stories that have had a lot of play in the media over the last couple of days. First item in point, Peter Costello - his continuing on and off political career, kept alive by polls which show him as a more popular leader than Brendan Nelson (which reflects more on Nelson than on him, but more of that later), continues to fuel speculation because, reportedly, the corporate sector hasn’t placed the value on his talents that the public spirited former Treasurer regards as his due after his “service” to the nation has come to an end. So, Costello is reduced to living just on his parliamentary salary, and since that’s insufficient apparently, touting his ghost-written memoirs to the highest bidder. One of those bidders - for the serialisation rights - is Fairfax. And today we get in The Age a story from Michelle Grattan which notes that, but goes on to say, well, nothing. There’s no news in this news. As Richard Farmer comments acerbically in Crikey’s morning wrap up of the news:
Costello memoir gives clues to future – but Michelle Grattan can give us no clue as to what the clues are.
Meanwhile, the lguanagate story gets a lease of life from claims made by a former Belinda Neal staffer, Melissa Batten. Continue reading ‘Marketised celebrity politics, Australian style’
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Federal election 2007,
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Health,
Industrial Relations,
Media,
Polls,
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I’ve often said that the best source for public opinion research around is the Australian Election Study. Some preliminary data has been released [link to pdf] by researchers Ian McAllister and Juliet Clark, presented in graphical form. The purpose of the paper is to enable assessments of changes in public opinion over time, with some of the questions forming a time series going back to 1969. I’ve only had a cursory look at the data, but one thing I wanted to focus on was the data from the 2007 election, particularly as it relates to issue importance and party advantage on particular issues. Basically, this is much better quality data than anything you’d get from Newspoll.
A detailed analysis isn’t possible in the absence of the raw data which would enable regressions and cross-tabs, but there are some interesting patterns in the data that are presented. The first point to make, one that’s made in the current political context ably by Possum Comitatus, is that leadership is much less important to voting intention than is usually claimed in the media. Since there have been long term declines in partisanship and therefore more votes up for grabs in any particular electoral cycle, the whole concept of party “ownership” of issues becomes much more important - hence all the attention focused last year on “economic management”. I’ve previously pointed out that the question in Newspoll on that measure was actually the wrong one - at least insofar as 2007 goes - because Labor polling found that “economic management for working families” was much more important, and it’s there that their advantage lay (as the opposition now knows well, because that’s where all their attack is focused). In this context, it’s also very significant to observe the finding that a majority of voters don’t believe anything the government does has much impact on the economy - what we might term the “globalisation effect” - something very poorly understood by political commentators, I’d suggest.
Last year, industrial relations jumped from 2% of respondents nominating it as the most important economic issue in 2004 to 16% and top position. Labor enjoyed a big advantage over the Coalition - 52 to 32, intriguingly reversing a Coalition lead (when the issue was much less important) in 2004 of 37 to 27. Continue reading ‘Issues and the 2007 election’
Former Howard Government minister Kevin Andrews and AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty seem to be continuing their attempts to blame each other for the Haneef debacle. You’ll recall a couple of days ago that a “source”, most probably Keelty or somebody close to him, claimed that Andrews had cancelled Haneef’s visa without bothering to tell the AFP. Now we have the bite back from Andrews. From the Oz:
FORMER immigration minister Kevin Andrews had no idea of powerful evidence of Mohamed Haneef’s innocence when he controversially revoked the visa of the then terrorism suspect last year. Mr Andrews will tell the Rudd government-ordered inquiry into the bungled case, which opens today, that Australian Federal Police did not inform him of evidence debunking allegations against Dr Haneef’s second-cousin Sabeel Ahmed - allegations that had led to the subsequent terrorism charge against the Gold Coast doctor.
These guys were supposed to be in charge of protecting us from Scary Terryrists - one, of course, still is. Thank your favourite deity that there seems to be so few actual Scary Terryrists in Australia, or we’d really be in trouble…
Today’s Opposition Organ reports that the eminent indigenous academic, Professor Marcia Langton, believes that the Indigenous 2020 Summit Stream, consisting of people selected by the Federal Government, was uninformed and unrepresentative, and failed to adequately address policies to secure the learning, health and economic future of indigenous children.
However, Professor Langton’s views are reported in a way which implies that she is also opposed to the creation of an elected indigenous representative body to advise on policies.
As Mark mentioned a few days ago, the establishment of such a body is also opposed by Warren Mundine and Wesley Aird. Yet Mr. Aird was also highly critical of the Summit Stream, suggesting that its outcomes would be as “predictable as a Zimbabwean election”.
Continue reading ‘Marcia Langton says whitefella government’s handpicked advisers got it wrong’
Macquarie University researchers Ben Spies-Butcher and Shaun Wilson have released results of a study they’ve done into the results of last year’s election. They’re interested in whether a large third party campaign (specifically the Your Rights At Work effort directed by the ACTU and its affiliates) influenced the election. This is what they got up to:
We develop a linear regression model based on the seat-by-seat results, and the swing against the Howard Government (two party preferred) recorded in each. This approach uses statistical correlation to test whether there is a relationship between particular features of a seat (for example, its age composition) and the anti-government swing recorded in that seat. A particular advantage of this type of model is that it can separate out the effects of different factors.
Continue reading ‘Explaining the swing’
“A defeated army learns quickly,” so the saying goes, “but only if it realises that it has been defeated.”
The evidence of today’s morning broadsheets suggests that some battalions of Australia’s intellectual Right are learning faster than others.
In the Opposition Organ, Tony Abbott’s sock puppet, in the course of a snarky column on Robert Manne’s edited collection Dear Mr Rudd, repeats the tired line that last year’s Federal election represented some kind of Culture War victory for the Right. The OO editorial is virtually identical in substance and style.
Writing in The Age, John Roskam of the Institute for Public Affairs takes quite a different view. According to Roskam, the Liberal defeat of 24 November has become a rout:
Continue reading ‘The Right’s ragged retreat’
Word is about that John Howard marked the election loss with a party at The Lodge that cost the taxpayer $1100. Disheartening is the folllowing piece of information:
Documents released to The Daily Telegraph show the farewell fling at The Lodge on November 28, hosted by Mr Howard, included $548.18 worth of alcohol, said by one source to be “top shelf” wine.
I’m sure that many of you are just as outraged by this as I am. $548.18 spent on top shelf wine is simply deplorable, disgraceful even. Jeez, by myself I’m sure that could polish off more than $600 bucks of good quality wine in a sitting (though standing could be an issue afterwards). Imagine the bash if Amanda was still around.
And so it ends with not a bang, but the soft plop of a cork being removed from a pricey bottle of red and an early finish to ponder life out of power.
Then again, maybe the cellar was bare.
From today’s Crikey:
During the election, I thought one occasion on which Kevin Rudd displayed a bit of passion was in his most wonkish interview of the campaign, talking to Tony Jones about the importance of the public service and good governance. Opposition leader Rudd promised that Labor’s decisions on policy would be “evidence based”, but the evidence belies that so far.
Richard Farmer wrote in Crikey on Wednesday:
So far the Labor Government has maintained that its promised $30 billion of tax cuts is safe as it scrambles to find a host of spending programs to cut. Far better, and certainly much easier, to blame Peter Costello for misleading everyone before the election about the true state of the impact the world financial crisis on Australia. Scrap the tax cuts for all but the lowest paid and get it over with.
Amen to that. All the evidence suggests the tax cuts are a waste of money and will only fuel inflation. And Farmer is hardly alone among commentators in calling for this, and in coming up with a plausible political justification should the government not be able to think one up by itself. If promises have to be kept at all costs (no matter how inflationary), there’s also the possibility of doing a Keating, and delivering them via super, which the actual Keating has suggested.
The problem is wider than the tax cuts.
Continue reading ‘Evidence-based policy?’
One thing that’s become very clear from the US election season is that there’s a distinct appeal in change and freshness (and yep, they’re empty cliches and let’s hope some substance fills them out). But we might have observed that already from our own election campaign, or indeed Nicholas Sarkozy’s win in France where he ran against his own party and predecessor and business as usual. It’s also a dilemma for Gordon Brown, whose biggest challenge is squaring the circle between experience and change - the horns of the same dilemma that caught Hillary Clinton in its traps.
Poor old Guy Rundle was lampooned a while back for having the audacity to suggest that conservatives in the public arena in Australia had to find at least some point of contact with reality in order to continue to have influence. But he was right. It’s interesting to see some American right wingers, including former Bush acolyte David Frum, realising this - which you can read about in this review by Michael Tomasky (who isn’t confident that the factions that control the GOP will actually take any notice), and this column today from Daniel Finkelstein, a former adviser to the British Tories. As Andrew Elder remarks, the Reaganite right and their antipodean counterparts just don’t get that the public would rather pay for basic services efficiently delivered through tax than often infefficiently and expensively delivered through the private sector:
… there is the waning appeal of small-government rhetoric. In the 1970s, speeches about government being the problem, not the solution, resonated. Now this language is much less potent politically. Government remains often inefficient and too large, but winning support to change it is harder. Conservatives need to show that they can run government, providing services, not merely talking about shrinking them.
And the American right, or at least sections of it, is starting to realise that just blathering on about tax cuts has also lost its appeal. It didn’t win Howard the election, did it?
Continue reading ‘“The times will suit me” or “The times they are a-changin”?’
Bill Clinton alleges Obama has been the subject of some kind of media deification. Again, there’s another interesting parallel with the Rudd campaign - the “where’s the scrutiny?” line being pushed by his political opponents (though in the case of Kevin07, I think he got heaps of it). In the case of Obama, his good press is no doubt facilitated by the symbolism of his candicacy, and let’s face it, a lot of his candidacy is about symbolism. Not substance. And the substance, such as it is, is tilting right as he tacks to the centre to capture the votes of Independents and Republicans in open primaries.
There’s always something a bit illusory about candidates who run on platforms that can be reduced to soaring rhetoric and to calls of “come, let us reason together”. If change, which has become the buzzword of the race, seeping into the GOP’s debate as well, is what is wanted, then inevitably people won’t be united. Tackling endemic problems such as healthcare and climate change in the US would actually involve enormous stoushes with well entrenched vested interests, and an awful lot of division, and sound and fury.
Continue reading ‘(Bill) Clinton v Obama’
You can really understand the force of the phrase “political tragic� when you reflect on how many Australians would have wanted to spend the weekend before Christmas reading Glenn Milne’s thoughts on the Rudd cabinet, or the weekend before New Years’ Eve reading Kevin Donnelly’s latest effusions on the grave threats to educational standards. That is, of course, no reflection on these two fine gentlemen of the press. No doubt the fault, if fault there is, lies with the country, not with these eminent writers.
So, just as Stephen Conroy was probably hoping to do with his net nanny state announcement, summer holiday torpor provides a convenient opportunity for the news dump.
The political skills of the Liberal Party may be a tad frayed, but are probably still robust enough to realise that dumping on your former Dear Leader and washing your dirty linen in public is unedifying for, well, the public. So it was the holiday season, when the news cycle stops riding so fast, that saw just about every man who used to be in Cabinet (though not Malcolm Turnbull’s dog) open up to certain favoured journos and provide their very own “first draft of history� (and naturally Paul Kelly was one of the magic circle). In this instance, on the APEC leadership shenanigans.
Continue reading ‘It was Newspoll wot lost it’
I’m not sure if Quadrant is now under the editorship of Keith Windschuttle (whose 60s adventures are in the news today) or whether P.P. McGuiness is still in the chair. But their leader writer doesn’t appear to be such a Howard-hugger as you might have expected:
Howard’s behaviour throughout 2007 can only be characterised as hubris, and he can only be personally blamed for this. Whom the gods would destroy … This is a pity, since the former prime minister’s record remains permanently stained, and his record in government only able to be discussed through this defect.
I wonder if Howard still thinks this way?
Its free and sceptical spirit has contributed enormously to intellectual and political debate in this country. It has displayed in relation to each of the great philosophical challenges that have come along through their domestic manifestations here in Australia in my lifetime a tenacity towards principle, a consistency in advocating basic values and beliefs, and a broad-mindedness and an eclectic gathering of people from different backgrounds that does this magazine and the values that unite it great credit indeed.
As to the “free and sceptical spirit”, what’s quite bizarre is that the Quadrant crew appear to be the only mob left in Australia who actually believed and even more bizarrely, still believe, Howard’s dire warnings about the sky falling in under Rudd. You might well be sceptical as to whether this constitutes an enormous contribution to intellectual and political debate in this country. But - in a free market sense - I suppose that’s up to its tiny readership and its sponsors in the nanny state Australia Council to judge. Hang on…
Continue reading ‘Then… and now’
’tis the season to catch up on the reading that you don’t get the time or inclination to do during the rest of the year. I’ve certainly had a chance to plough through a few books.
Judith Brett’s Quarterly Essay on Howard’s demise is out, and it’s very much in her typical style. Psychoanalytic interpretations of the electorate, and to some extent the leaders, abound. One assertion that I found considerable room to quibble with, however, is her claim that the seeds of Howard’s political demise were sown with the ascension of Rudd to the Labor leadership. While we’ll never know, I suspect Labor would have had a pretty fair shot of winning this election with Beazley - or Julia Gillard - as leader. Perhaps the scare campaign about union influence might have more effect given a Gillard leadership; perhaps the It’s Time factor wouldn’t have been as great if Beazley had still been in charge. And Brett, in an almost throwaway manner, states that Andrew Bolt has been crucial in keeping Victorian working-class votes in conservative manner. Does Bolt really have any great influence on swinging voters, or does he just preach to the converted, a shock jock of the print world? In any case, there is one particularly good reason to read this issue of QE: an extraordinarily insightful and beautifully-written piece of correspondence at the back. I agree with every word the author wrote…
Continue reading ‘Holiday reading’
I caught part of Brian Loughnane’s address to the National Press Club on ABC wee-small-hours last night because I was having one of those can’t sleep a bloody wink nights again. In fact, I caught the whole of Loughnane’s speech then piked out on watching the question and answer session after the third or fourth questioner.
In his introduction to Loughnane’s speech, NPC President Ken Randall said Loughnane would give an insider’s view of how the Liberal Party campaign had failed, based on recent Liberal Party post-election polling. What Loughnane delivered was roughly 50% spun analysis - that is, something that purported to be analysis but sounded more like the Liberal Party’s continuing attempts to push their “the voters were just bored with us” line, this time dressed up with a few cherry-picked figures about key demographics. The other 50% was just a re-affirmation of Liberal ideology mixed in with some pretty egregious claims about promises Labor had made to win the election, and the coalition’s obligation to hold Labor to those promises.
Continue reading ‘Determined Not to Get It’
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