Today’s Essential Research poll might show the reversal in the movement of the polls, which I suspected prompted Tony Abbott’s parental leave thought bubble last week. My view was that Abbott’s speech was a ‘crazy brave’ attempt to shake things up and respond to internal polling which was either showing the Coalition going backwards or, at best, failing to build on the momentum he’d displayed, in some measure, in public polls. There was some support for the view that it was polling driven in statements by Coalition MPs, and almost a week on, it’s certainly looking more and more like it was hardly considered policy which had been worked over for a long time, to put it charitably.
At any rate, as Possum observes, Labor’s lead in today’s poll is its best so far this year.
I think we can also see that Abbott’s parental leave announcement has been viewed very much through the prism of the parties’ images – which in themselves are composites of longstanding perceptions of party strengths and weaknesses, how the parties relate to social cleavages, and less long term assessments of competence and direction in office or in opposition. Policy tends to be mediated through this prism, rather than being an independent variable in its own right. In other words, few policy announcements – in and of themselves – are likely to be political game changers.
It’s useful, then, to counterpose two tables from Essential Report’s research [courtesy of Possum]:


As Possum also observes, the crunch is in the cross-tabs:
Among Labor voters, 61% supported the Government’s scheme and 15% supported the Opposition’s. However, only 37% of Coalition voters supported the Opposition’s scheme – 20% supported the Government scheme and 35% supported neither.
Continue reading ‘Coalition wedges itself on parental leave’


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