I didn’t do much for my reputation as an election tipster with my assessment of the Australian election. But I was just about spot-on in my pre-election prediction, posted at Crooked Timber that,
Whatever the outcome, I expect it will be treated in the international press as something of a referendum on the Iraq war
whereas, in reality, the issue barely came up.
On cue, here’s Glenn Reynolds complaining of inadequate coverage of
an Australian election that was run in no small part as a referendum on the war
Admittedly, Reynolds isn’t “the international press”, and, as he complains, some papers got the story right rather than printing the fantasy he would prefer, though many others have taken the “referendum” line. But his words are so close to my prediction that I feel entitled to a bit of a gloat. Heaven knows, we haven’t got much to gloat about in Australia this week.
More on this from Tim Lambert .
John Quiggin 
Your prediction about FTA and PBS amendments has also surfaced as well. My understanding was that the PBS amendments would have problems with WTO rules as well, can’t discriminate against particular industries. Is this correct?
If legislation has to be amended will be interesting to see Labor and Latham’s position.
I was just going to post on this, but don’t have time yet. More soon.
Howard was “on a hiding to nothing” as regards the electoral referrendum on the war. Thinking only of the materialist hip-pocket nervy HoR conjectured:
Howard won but did not make an issue of the war. The War was not an electoral plus for Howard, the AUS electorate is able to call a mess when it sees one. So he cannot really claim that the electorate positively vindicated his pro-war stance.
OTOH, if Howard had lost the election then we would never have heard the end of the “War Discredited by Public” line from the Left. So it was heads they win, tails he loses.
But the Howard-haters vocal anti-war stance was an electoral minus for the Broad Left. It alienated people who disagreed with Howards bad political means but agreed with his good policy ends.
Nothing was going to shut up the Not-Happy-John crowd. The electorate punished this section of the Left in the Senate. No wonder they have disappeared from sight.
In that sense, the Senate results were an adverse refferenda for the antagonistic sections of the Cultural Progressives. A more protagonistic direction for Cultural Progressives is indicated.
John:
I watched a couple of fairly lengthy reports on the BBC World TV channel last week, and another on CNN, that made it patently clear to its viewers that the Australian federal election was very little to do with the Iraq war and everything to do with the economy, education and health care. Do these sources count as ‘the international press’ or are you just talking about the written press? I wouldn’t have thought that Rupert M’s or K. Packer’s media outlets would have been citing it as a war referendum either, especially after Packer Jnr’s comments pre-election.
Jack
Perhaps you should find someone representative of the Leftwing Howardhaters etc and direct your comments to them, rather than to me.
I made it clear before the election that Iraq hadn’t been a major issue and my election analysis was devoted almost entirely to domestic issues. I even set up a special posts for you (and the GM debaters) to stop comments threads being hijacked by disputes about Iraq, East Timor etc.
Having specifically said the election wasn’t about Iraq, I don’t think I could have claimed the opposite, in the event of a Labor win, without anyone noticing the inconsistency;
Before the election, when the polls were neck-and-neck, the somewhat Leftist NYT declared that:
After the election, when the scale of Howards relaxed and comfortable victory was clear, the same paper reported that:
Talk about spin-doctoring ones each way bets.
Jack, you’ve been pushing this line ever since the election result, and it’s still wrong. The Greens did fine. As I’ve pointed out here, the real problem is the disintegration of the Democrats, and thus their ability to pick up the “keep the bastards honest” vote from people who didn’t really share their core beliefs but supported them explicitly to keep the Senate out of the hands of the government of the day.
As Quiggers has pointed out, Family First, the runaway success story of this election, don’t seem to be quite as Rethuglican as some of us feared. At first glance, they seem quite progressive on Aboriginal reconciliation, fair treatment of asylum seekers, and so on (as any Christian who takes the New Testament seriously should). In fact, on these issues at least, they seem pretty close to the “not-happy-John” crowd. They will undoubtedly have an unhealthy interest in what goes on in other people’s bedrooms, but that’s an issue for another day.
A large number of very prominent Australians put an enormous amount of effort into trying to turn the election into a referendum on Iraq and related issues and the ALP were fellow travellers in this effort. Having not got the result they wanted, it is a little too covenient to suddenly dismiss Iraq as having been irrelevant to the result, since they were the only ones arguing that the result should be decided on this issue.
If the electorate prioritised the economy, it is because the anti-gvoernment posturing over Iraq had no credibility or ressonance.
I am not defending the war in general, or even Howards policies towards it. My critical comments were not directed at Pr Q, more at the readers of this comments box. In fact I specifically singled out the “Not-Happy-John” crowd for culpation.
In fact FWIW, before the election I came to the same conclusion as Pr Q: the election would be focused on domestic issues, with LN/P economic prosperity trumping ALP social equity. The NYT got a good quote on this:
What I am saying is that vocal anti-war statements, and anti-Howard, statements made by Cultural Progressives did create an anti-Left (but not pro-war) electoral backlash in the Senate. The shock swing to the Right in the Senate is the 800lb psephologic gorilla in this election.
In the Senate The Centre-Right/Right (LN/P,FF) now have majority power, and the Centre-Left/Liberal-Left (ALP, DEM, GREEN) are in a minority, for the first time in 24 years. Surely this momentous event deserves some comment?
My the Great Convergence hypothesis argued that Howard’s mainstream construction of cultural conservatism, and economic statism, allowed Latham and Howard to bring renegade Liberals (Hansons ONs and Chipps DEMs) back into the major party fold.
My mistake was to assume that DEM voters would swing Left to Latham-ALP, rather than Right, to Howard-LN/P, in the Senate. I attribute this swing as a mainstream reaction to negativistic Cultural Leftism.
Have I got my sums wrong? Or is my interpretation wrong?
Does anyone else have another hypothesis to explain this momentous event? Or am I to be left sounding like the worlds loudest crank as I bang on about it? Perhaps we should all just pass over it in polite silence.
Stephen, my response to you is the same as to Jack. Direct comments like this to the people concerned, not to me. As I have already pointed out several times, I stated before the result was known that it would not be a referendum on Iraq.
I think Reynolds was right when he made the point that the election would be covered quite differently by the international press if the result had gone the other way.
But that would have been wrong too. I clearly recall Latham several times described this election as a ‘referendum on Medicare’, and seemed pretty uninterested in pushing the Iraq debate along. Howard was equally reluctant, pushing the ‘economy’ and ‘interest rates’ line.
It’s interesting to note that the election model of Yale University’s Ray C. Fair is predicting a 57.5% of the majority vote share to Bush.
http://fairmodel.econ.yale.edu/vote2004/index2.htm
This model has done well in prediciting previous election results so it will be interesting to see what effects the Iraq War might have on the result (maybe none of course if it has merely polarised the US community about 50-50 either way!)
I hereby explicitly affirm as Pr Q’ was correct in saying that the election not a war referrendum. I said as much myself, before the election.
Let me reframe the question, keeping war and personalities out of it. This is not about the War, it is about the political sociology of former Wets in the Senate.
I am trying to figure out what happened to the renegade Liberal Party votes that split from the LIBs in the decaying period of the Fraser Governement. ie Chipps DEMs and Hansons ONs. These voters have been homeless since Chipp took the LIB-Wets out of the LIBs in 1977 and the NFF-Dries kicked the rural socialists out of the Country Party in 1980.
It was clear to me before the election that the renegade LIBs were going to revert to the major parties. But which way would they swing: LIB or ALP?
About half the ON vote (=1.5% primary vote) reverted to pre-Hanson type and gave their votes to the LN/Ps. This accounted for about half the LN/P SEN vote increase. (The other half of ON went to feral right wingers and FF?)
Before the election the GREENS & DEMS were soul buddies swapping preferences. I inferred from this, and Doctors Old Wives Tales spread by the Press Gallery, that most DEM voters were trending Left. Silly me!
One thing we know for sure, the Senates Centre of Ideological Gravity has shifted to the Right. More than half of the ex-ON plus ex-DEM vote trended LIBs, giving the LIBs three extra Senators – a ten percent increase in representation.
The collapsing DEM vote split two ways: about half of it (=2% primary vote) went Far-Left to the GREENs. But about half of it (=2% primary vote) went in a more cultural conservative direction. Whether this is for material or moral reasons is not conclusively demonstrated.
Why did half the collapsing DEM vote swing Right, to the LN/P, rather than the Centre-Left/Left, to the ALP/GREENS? This is the big unaswered question of the election.
I speculate that the ex-DEM right wing LIB voting was a reaction to the virulent Cultural Progressive anti-Howard campaign. Perhaps I am wrong about that interpretation. Maybe ex-DEM voters were really materialistic hip-pocket-nerve LIBs all the time. Or maybe moderate moralistic DEM voters went Centre-Left, to the ALP, and materialistic aspirational ALP voters went Rightwards, to the LIBs?
At least I am drawing attention to the anomaly of the median tending liberal-Lefists, and “Keep the Bastards Honest” Senate counte-valencers, have given the Howard, the biggest lying right wing bastard of the lot, control of the Senate -for first time in 24 years!
Anomalies are there to be explained, not explained away. Surely the question deserves serious analysis instead of falling back on ad hoc rationalisations (luck, scare campaigns, bungled preference deals, campaign errors)?
The economy was clearly the main factor determining the outcome of the election and the interest rates adds were extremly effective in misleading people. That said, the war in Iraq was clearly a factor in an indirect sense. Labor’s opposition to it contributed to the general unease in the electorate about Latham’s anti-Americanism and his ill-advised comments regarding Bush. Furthermore, the general mindless anti-Americanism that is prevalent throughout academia (or at least large sections of it) ensured, along with other ideologies excesses, that the Labor party has had little constructive input from this quarter when it comes to policy formation. Many on the left appear to have learnt nothing from the ideological excesses of the cold war.
Also predictably, even though pretty well every single person who followed the campaign except Tim Blair says that Iraq wasn’t a major issue, Reynolds concludes that everyone is out of step except Blair.
Apologies to JQ for getting offtopic, but we might be getting somewhere here.
I disagree. I very much doubt the old Liberal wets that went to the Democrats have drifted back to the Liberal Party. The Libs have continued to their move to the right since they departed, both on economic and cultural grounds. In fact, longer-term, the Liberal Party is going to have a big problem with its remaining wets; there’s only so much that group will tolerate.
My guess is that the people who *have* drifted back to the Liberal party in the Senate were those who voted Democrat explicitly as a check on the power of the incumbent government. These people are conservatives in the original meaning of the word; they don’t want change of any sort. They probably vote conservative in the House; they were never going to vote Labor, nor were they ever going to vote Green. Most of them probably never thought that Howard would get a Senate majority (or close to it).
So if one leftist blogger says the election wasn’t about Iraq and two rightist bloggers say it was, then according to Instareynolds, who wasn’t here to witness the election firsthand, the rightist bloggers are self-evidently correct. But then we’d expect him to say that.
I wonder what Reynolds makes of the assertion by John Howard himself that Iraq wasn’t a major issue. Presumably he’d say Messrs Blair and Jericho were still right and knew more about it than the PM did.
Jack,
I’m amazed to discover you floating your theories on JQ’s blog when you were already running the same idiocy @ Catallaxy. You didn’t bother to respond to my post there, so maybe you’ll do me the courtesy of replying here.
Here’s what I said:
“Jack,
Once again you’ve blown an issue out of proportion with inflated theorising.
Yes, the left have been defeated, and yes it is their fault.
No, it has nothing to do with “AUS border-protection and US alliance-consolidation” or “Cultural Progressivism and Accountability”. These were minor issues in the campaign platforms of the ALP, Dems and Greens, and, frankly, you don’t have any more insight into the voters’ views than anyone else.
What we do know is that the collapse of the “Cultural Left” in the Senate is attributable to:
1) the pathetic electoral performance of the Dems under Bartlett and their no-show campaign;
2) the superior organisation and appeal of the Greens, which has resulted in them attracting votes that used to go to the Dems; and
3) the emergence of a well-organised right-wing minor party (FF) that simply played the preferences game better than their left-wing opponents.
As usual, you’re reading far too much ideological motivation into grubby politics.”
Fyodor at October 13, 2004 02:36 PM reinforces his growing reputation as a know-nothing blow-hard:
Fyodor, I would not be calling someone an “idiot” someone whose electoral & policy predictions were better than yours. Also it is not “courteous reply” eliciting to talk that way.
After the 2002-3 budget I was notedd that Howard was using the GST to engage in pork-barrell socialism. Earlier than that I predicted housing values would determine his HoR electoral fortunes.
Regarding my methods: I aim for theoretical generalisation and empirical corroboration. This can lead to spectacular flops, or some useful scores.
Regarding your points about voter-party alignment in the Senate: as usual, you construct an elaborate rationalisation that misses the point. All the accidental and incidental partisan moves that you describe would only effect the organisational composition, not ideological position, of the minor parties in the Senate.
What you have not explained is the fundamental shift of the Senates centre of gravity to the Right – first time in 24 years. Specifically, what happened to half the DEM Wets?
To cite a striking fact, which Fyodor’s statements seem to be rather free of, lets track the Right political fortunes over the Howard years. In that period, the parties of the Left/Centre-Left (GREEN, DEM, ALP) have suffered a seven percent adverse swing:
1996 got 50.2% of the vote
2004 got 45% of the vote
Got the picture?
In 1996 the Senate, even after the in extremis anti-Cultural Left back-lash, was solidly in Centre-Left/Left hands. In 2004 its in the hands of Howard and FF. Analyse that.
Further to your point about my know-something blow-hardiness, FWIW I sensed alot of resistance to the Cultural Lefts anti-Howard campaign over the past three years. Instinctively, I felt the potential for backlash in the Howard-hating line. Intellectually, I bought the Doctors Wives line. Worthy though they were, this amounted to a token form of “conspicuous compassion”.
One thing that cannot be denied and which I spent much time arging against: This election was a refferendum on JWH’s personal MO. Cultural Leftists spent an inordinate amount of time vilifying Howards character and his brand of cultural conservatism. This even went to the extent of former Liberal Brahmins wanting to have Howard charged with war-crimes.
Cultural Progressives ran a moralistic campaign which singled out Howard for special abuse on account of his violation of due process. The result is that Cultural Conservatives now own the Senate for the first time in a generation and Howard is now accountable only to himself.
Who is looking like an “idiot” now, Fyodor?
Trying to be as dispassionate as possible in the light of a most unwelcome election result, I think it is true to say that in relation to Australian involvement in Iraq:
1. Moral/juridicial arguments against involvement convinced very few habitual coalition voters to vote against the Coalition.
2. Geopolitical/moral justifications for involvement convinced very few habitual Labor/progressive voters to vote for the Coalition.
In other words, Iraq changed very few votes.
But Iraq did have the effect of hardening opinion for and against the Coalition, most notably for and against Howard. In this case, it was mostly FOR Howard.
Australian participation in the Iraq adventure allowed Howard to:
1. Give credence to his claim of steadfastness.
2. Argue that in the choice between truthfulness and trust, the voters should choose trust. Howard performed a remarkable trick in establishing a taxonomy of lies.
1. Lies told about past events in a distant place (Iraq under Saddam) should not concern voters. Australians should all “move on”.
2. Lies told about past events in Australia (the interest rate record) have a greater emotional tug than the historical truth. Australians should all fixate on this “truth” which transcends the evidence.
3. Lies told about actual future intentions (how much of the drunken sailor’s tab will actually be paid) serve the purpose of protecting vulnerable private interests (residential equity mainly) from the envy and vengeance of others. Australians who recognise this, it was implied, know that Howard is on their side.
But here’s the ironic kicker. If Australia had really committed to the putative reconstruction phase in Iraq rather than rush off to some pressing policing engagement or other in the Pacific, and if Australia had sustained, let us say, 25 casualties in Iraq, then Howard may have been less capable of insisting on the persuasiveness of his taxonomy of lies.
But this didn’t happen, and herein lies the genius of John Winston Howard. In relation to Iraq, of course, Bush and Blair have no interest in truthfully stating the level of Australian commitment. Howard has gone one better than Harold Holt: he can claim with impunity that he has gone “all the way” when in fact he has already “cut and run”.
Jack,
Thanks for the belated, albeit fiery, response. For the record I didn’t call you an idiot, but remarked that what you were saying was idiotic. There is a difference, which you didn’t apply to your ad hominem attack. I’d also suggest you give over on the intellectualism onanism. Three days of triumphalism is quite enough – it’s deserved, but getting tiresome.
Back to the point. The facts are as I stated them: 1) Dems crushed; 2) Greens up; 3) FF up on very effective preferencing.
Your data is helpful, but you neglected to mention that over the same time period, the Coalition only increased their share of first preference votes from 44% to 45%. That doesn’t suggest any definitive shift from the Left to the Right to me. I think all we can conclude from the results is that the Dems have imploded and been out-played on preferences.
Your arguments that “… the Howard-haters vocal anti-war stance was an electoral minus for the Broad Left…” and that …”the electorate punished this section of the Left in the Senate…” are quite simply unfounded, and based more upon your theoretical legerdemain than the facts.
Your follow-up argument that this election was in some way a referendum on Howard’s is also blissfully fact-free. As others have said, neither the right nor the left focused on those issues in the election. The campaign centred on buttery stuff like interest rates, health and education.
You’re quite simply making this stuff up, as you yourself acknowledge: “I SPECULATE [my emphasis] that the ex-DEM right wing LIB voting was a reaction to the virulent Cultural Progressive anti-Howard campaign. Perhaps I am wrong about that interpretation.” Yeah, perhaps.
That’s the nub of it. You just pulled this theory out of your fundament and floated it with no facts to back it up. Don’t get stroppy when people point this out to you.
Re international news coverage of the election: it seems Howard managed to get on the cover of America’s National Review. John O’Sullivan’s article in today’s Australian includes, in its print version (not its online version), a reproduction of this cover pic.
In relation to Jack and Fyodor’s discussion of Senate trends, the change from 1996 to 2004 in the vote for the main centre-left parties is as follows:
Party 1996 2004
ALP 36.15% 35.48%
Democrats 10.82% 2.04%
Greens 1.66% 7.50%
Total 48.63% 45.02%
(NB: These are percentages of all votes, not percentages of formal votes.)
The decline in the centre-left Senate vote therefore represents a combination of the stagnation in Labor’s vote with the collapse of the Democrat vote, which has only partially been offset by the rise in the Green vote.
In terms of why this has occurred, I think we can easily think of factors in the Democrats’ demise which were more important than a voter backlash against cultural leftism. As for Labor’s stagnation, I recall that Jack, a few weeks ago, described Latham (I think accurately) as a cultural conservative, with the obvious implication being that Latham’s leadership marked the reassertion of cultural conservatism in the Labor Party. Themes which can be regarded as specific to a cultural leftist agenda were generally absent or deprioritised in Labor’s policies and campaign.
The concern about Howard’s (and Blair’s and Bush’s) lack of accountability and disregard for due process in relation to the justification for the war, and other issues, is not an original idea of the contemporary cultural left. It is a long-standing theme of democratic and constitutional political theory going back to classical antiquity. Where I think Jack probably has a point is that framing criticisms of Howard’s actions in terms of his alleged bad character does nothing to educate the voting public about the broad principles of democratic probity, rule of law, respect for democratic institutions, etc., which is what was really at stake. But to honestly discuss these issues would be risky and probably not yield a partisan advantage for Labor, as the tendency to unchecked, unbalanced, unaccountable and unscrupulous Executive government is a bipartisan phenomenon in Australian politics, and this would not have gone unnnoticed by voters in certain States.
As a general comment on the theme of “Monday’s experts” on election outcomes, the bulk of public punditry on elections is not an attempt at scientifically analyse the outcome and the reasons for it, but to seek vindication of one’s pub theories or confirmation of one’s prejudices, shift blame in order to protect one’s own backside, or attract attention by saying something which is newsworthy solely by virtue of its novelty rather than its explanatory power.
The main point for rusted on ALP supporters to bear in mind, with the train wreck of Federal Labor, in this type of discussion is- The voters were the same voters who voted in Labor govts in every State and Territory in the country. You can slag them off as being dumb-assed McMansion ignorants swallowing all Howard’s lies if you like, but ask yourselves where does that leave you?
Labor presented a united campaign behind a new face who supposedly scrubbed up well in the debate with a tired old stager. At 65 Howard was ready to leave according to the pitch and at the very least, seat warming for supposedly less popular Costello. Labor ran a reasonable campaign on its purported strengths of fully costed education and health expenditure and tax cuts for the majority under $52000. The economy was in good nick with a healthy surplus and if the voters wanted to punish the govt for the Margo Kingston, Philip Adams, Andrew Wilkie, Brian deegan, 43 concerned citizens, Scrafton, John Valder, UN, Kay and Duelfer Reports, Not Happy John, Bob Brown rent-a-crowd feral view of the world, then here was their golden opportunity. Guess what the punters who voted Labor in the states said to all that? They said rubbish! Very happy John and Co and carry on the way you have been, especially with our help in the Senate.
Now one thing all the voters were being told by the pundits in the lead up to the election was how well the Greens were going to poll, particularly in the Senate. With everyone(including Prof Q) anticipating this glorious event, for the first time the media openly scrutinised the Greens policy platform. My take is that when that happened the voters, particularly Democrats, fell in hard behind Howard. That is the sort of train wreck federal Labor has to deal with now. If it doesn’t change track, it is headed down the same road to electoral oblivion as the Democrats.
Fyodor at October 13, 2004 05:39 PM tries to go head to head and immediately falls flat on his face:
Balderdash. You, and every other Lefty in the blogosphere and mainstream media, spent half your time talking about Howards lies, inhumanity and undue processes. The ALP ran hard on it (remember the 27 lies pamphlet) and the Cultural Progressives (GREENS, DEMS) ran even harder. Fyodor, going by his scatological hyperbole, seems keen to explore orificial origins. So I suggest he try this steaming pile of pundritry on for size.
Regarding hard facts: again Fyodor plays fast and loose with the numbers. In actual fact, in 2004 the total nominally Right wing primary vote in the Senate nudges on 50% – not, as misleadingly claimed by Fyodor, 45%:
Major parties of the Mainstream Right (L/NP) got 43.3%;
Minor Parties of the Political Nationalist Right (ON, The Nats., CLP) got 3.3%;
Minor Parties of the Cultural Moralist Right (DLP, CDP, FF) got ~3% of the vote.
The nominally Right wing 2004 SEN result is about four percent higher than it was in 1996. And, surprise, surprise, the flow of preferences from the RWDB machines will probably give the Howard a bare majority in the Senate. Isnt it amazing when 1 + 1 = 2?
Finally, Fyodor still dances around the crucial question: why, in 2004, did half the DEM vote lurch to the Right – back to the LIB fold?Or, to put it algebraically, the SEN primary vote, from 2001 to 2004, swung as follows:
BROAD LEFT: ALP +1.1%; GREENS +2.6%; DEMS -5.2% = NET -1.5%
BROAD RIGHT: LN/P +3.3%; ON -3.8%; FF/CDP +2.9% = NET +2.4%
Some significant portion of the Broad Left vote must have lurched to the Broad Right. This seems part of a broader, Howard-era, decline in Cultural Progressive (DEM/GREENS) parties:
1996: 10.8% + 3.2% = 14.0%
1998: 8.5% + 2.7% = 13.2%
2001: 7.2% + 4.9% = 12.1%
2004: 2.0% + 7.5% = 9.5%
Sure, ALP and LN/P have been stealing some ecological policies. But the trend looks clearly like the Decline of the Wets.
My point in all this is not to go on a triumphalist “I was right about Howard and psephology” victory lap around the internet, (well alright it was a bit). Mainly it is to try and get get people to look at the breakdown, secular trend and reasonable interpretation of the Senate figures. This is the BIG story.
OK maybe my “anti-anti-Howard backlash in the SEN” theory is not proven. Perhaps the materialist hip-pocket-nervy trend in the HoR overcame the traditionally moralist heart-on-the-sleeve voter sentiment expresse in the SEN.
But my theory has two things going for it: consistency with objective observations (see above) and coherency with (my pet) subjective interpretation (SEN is moralistic, rather than materialistic).
It flabberghasts me that pundits, not a few of them Left, continue to clutch at ad hoc straws on this trend. Some of the answers are staring them in the face, but they prefer to look elsewhere.
Jack, a straightforward explanation is that a significant part of the Democrat vote in their salad days was from people at the centrist end of the centre-right which saw the Democrats in the Senate as a hedge against potential Coalition excesses. As the Democrats have declined in credibility and electability and no other significant party of the liberal centre has emerged to replace them, such voters, when faced with the choice between crossing over to the Left (Labor, Greens, Socialist Alliance, etc.) or moving into the solid core of the broad right, have chosen the latter. The only issue this leaves outstanding is whether such voters were ever cultural progressives in the first place.
Or it could be Paul that most of the Democrats, who had by then been polarised left by Meg Lees acceding to a GST, split to Labor and the Greens, while a larger number of past Labor voters(footy mums) swung to Howard. This despite the reverse doctors wives effect which was clearly observable in many SA electorates. The position of Labor could be worse than you think. You have to wonder how the doctors wives might swing next time, if Iraq goes well, the detention centres are empty and Howard has retired.
J-Stro, most of your analysis is unfalsifiable post-hoc gobbledegook. But you haven’t been alone on that regard.
Serious, was there any definitive exit poll asking people “what was your main reason for voting such-and-such”? Since we don’t have that, of course, the field is clear for everyone to put their two bobs worth in.
I am intrigued by the assumption that, looking at votes in successive elections, we can derive the knowledge that particular blocks of votes moved from here to there. Are there any empirical studies on this?
I would not be surprised, for example, to learn that those who vote for the Democrats in scussesive elections are a fairly different set of people each time. It’s always seemed to me to be a sort of safe haven for people who are grumpy about their usual party for the time being and then go and park themselved somewhere else for a while. This probably explains why Democrat second preferences have always had a pretty large Liberal component.
On top of all of this, between elections people die, turn 18 and move on and off the electoral rolls. On top of this again a reasonable percentage of people don’t vote even if enrolled – the partisan composition of this group may well change markedly between elections.
All that an election result can tell us is a snapshot of the people who voted at that time. It is likely that a comprehensive analysis of the difference in voting between elections would reveal a very complex set of changes which, I suspect, would fail to fully support any of the theories currently being advanced, even though it might give some of them some marginal credibility.
On a different tack, is there any evidence if the talk of “elites” actually means anything much in voterland? It seems to me to be much like a conceit of the “right”, roughly equivalent to ideas on the “left” like wars always being about oil. I rather think most Australians have a fair dsidain for bullshit whether it comes from academics, captains of industry, politicians, unionists, farmers or just about anyone representing any sort of interest. On average, I suspect it plays pretty evenly over the political landscape. And in general most people find ideologues of the right just as irritating as those from the left.
Graham at October 13, 2004 10:10 PM regards my interpretations, and disregards my observations:
Most of my analyses were done before, not after, the election ie the prediction of the Major Party convergence and the criticism of obsessive Howard-hating as counter-productive to the Left. This is pre, not post, -hoc analysis.
The Decline of the Wets thesis is based on objective facts, namely Major Party convergence and Minor Party Cultural Progressive decay. There is a convergence of the Major Parties around a philosophy of economic statism and cultural conservatism. There is also a secular decline in the Cultural Progressive Minor Party SEN primary vote.
If you wish to deny that then you are living in the Left-wing fantasy land occupied by Chris Shields. When reality finally dawns one is presented with the spectacle of embitterment that is Alan Ramsey. Not a Good Look.
Interpretations of complex subjective data always risk being unfalsifiable. But, after I came up with the Decline of the Wets theory, I checked the secular tendency of GREEN/DEM voting patterns. The post-Howard downward trend in Cultural Progressive vote is consistent with the theory. I count that as a falsifiable passage.
Most of the exit polling is based on HoR voting behaviour. Such exit polling as has been done suggest low interest rates and high housing values were the main reason to vote LIB.
I concede that a right-wing materialistic, rather than right-wing counter-moralistic, explanation of SEN voting patterns is possible. But then there is the upsurge in Christian Moralist parties to explain. And the puzzling failure of the GREEN party to pick up the homeless DEMS.
As for “gobbledygook”, what part of “Enough already with the electorally counter-productive Howard-hating” don’t you understand?
The big problem to explain is that, over the past generation, there has been a strong tendency in swinging Major Party voters to vote counter-valently for a Progressive Minor Party in in the Senate.
What happened to that tendency? I believe that moderate DEM voters, many of whom were ex-LIBS, were spooked by the vitriolic Howard-hatred of the GREENS et al. That is why they voted LIB and why the GREENS vote was so disappointing.
No one else has even bothered to note, let alone come up with a coherent explanation for, this historic change in SEN voting patterns. Something fishy going on, I sense bad faith and intellectual cowardice in certain disgruntled sections of the Left (not Pr Q).
Paul Norton at October 13, 2004 09:03 PM at least recognises the anomaly requires explaining:
Now thats more like it! The two key partisans in the Minor Party Great Convergence were both led by renegade ex-LIBs: the Chipp DEMs and the Hanson ONs. Both parties have folded and most prodigal voters have returned to the LIB fold.
Were that many of the DEMs really so Culturally Progressive?
And were that many of the ONs really so Culturally Regressive?
If not, then this only supports the awful truth that I have been edging to all this time: Howard saw the opportunity of the Great Convergence and has made himself King of the Vital Centre. Which means that he will be around for alot longer until someone knocks him off the high middle ground.
Paul Norton at October 13, 2004 06:30 PM makes a good point on an apparent anomaly:
It is true that I have characterised Latham as a Cultural Conservative. He also stayed true to this characterisation in the Campaign.
Latham, by being a non-Wet, avoided an ALP primary vote decline in the SEN. He took a “small or innocuous target” on social issues. He avoided talking about refugees, terrorism and war. In short, he was the anti-Wet.
In fact, the ALP SEN primary vote increased by 1%, as predicted by the Decline of the Wets theory. (Although the ALP appear to have lost a few SEN seats due to bad luck in close races and adverse preference flows.)
On FF, Ken Parish and Jason Soon see them as much more malign than they are painted on this blog, an opinion with which I agree. No doubt Steve will accuse me of not being a true ‘secularist’ for this again, the last instance of which still has me scratching my head in puzzlement.
A valid point you make Graham, although one thing is crystal clear. If the histrionic criticism of Howard to date had any reasonable validity, we should have expected a very different result than the one that has left the Howard critics scratching themselves.
My own view is that these critics have made the mistake of calling someone a liar, when he implements policy they don’t like. Personally, I think it would be nigh on impossible, over an 8-9yr term of office, not to change tack or put the best spin on an unforseen hurdle or plain stuffup, when you are constantly facing a barrage of criticism via an attack dog media. We will always concentrate on the mistakes(read lies) of an incumbent, rather than those of the critics. Howard lies about a GST, but the opposition never lied about rollback. He lied about WMD, but opponents never lied about Stalingrad or millions of refugees in Iraq. Children overboard lie, but no opposition lie on bipartisan support for tough on illegals now. Labor will threaten the economy and your mortgages or Howard will dismantle Medicare and so on.
Some of Howards critics may say, look to other countries for moral guidance on right and wrong. The UN with its Food for Oil scandal and record in Rwanda and now Darfur. You’ve heard the line that some can’t hold their heads up high on their OS hols, because of our treatment of illegals. Perhaps they can now that the EU has adopted offshoring of illegals in North Africa, with the help of recently enlightened critic of the West like Ghaddafi. If it’s good enough for the seat of culture Europeans, it should be good enough for Antipodeans eh what?
In the end, if not the voters now, then perhaps history will judge. If in the medium term Iraq turns out to be a reasonably civil democracy like say Indonesia, albeit with the odd Bali, how will history judge Howard? Perhaps we are now voting for the greatest PM some of us will ever know?(chuckle) OTOH perhaps the muddying of hands with real policymaking is all too hard and we should do a Senator Faulkner and retire to the backbench luxury of the critic. Keeping the bastards honest. Perhaps it’s not good enough to settle for the fallibility of a mere mortal and like some over at Back Pages we should seek out perfection in NZ. I do hear there are plentiful cheap seats due to the larger volume of traffic heading this way.
Jack,
Backpedal all you like, but your waffling, ranting argument that the senate result showed a significant ideological shift from left-wing minor parties to the right-wing major parties is plainly weak and unfounded.
Paul Norton took only one paragraph to present a vastly more coherent explanation for the strength of the Coalition in the senate: the Democrats imploded and preferences were screwed up. ’nuff said.
Fyodor,
I have not back-pedalled from my central thesis: the Cultural Progressive forces are in secular decline.
You think one par says it all? If you want a succinct numeric precis of the Cultural Lefts Howard-era misfortunes try this sentence on for size:
Thats what all your brilliant and incessant Howard-hatred and Progressive Pee-Cee fantasies got the Cultural Left: a loss of one-third their vote.
The ALP managed to hold their electoral ground in the SEN by electing…drum roll…a cultural conservative as leader. Latham made a point of not dwelling on two of Howards more dubious policies: the deceitful US alliance-consolidation and brutal AUS border-protection – mainly because of the toxicity of Howard-hatred.
You still evade the central electoral question: Why did the imploding DEMs swing Right, to the Howard-hateful LIBs, and not Left, to the Howard-hating GREENs, with whom they swapped preferences? All this blather about preference misadventures, Howard’s luck, State issues, scare campaigns, Murdoch press etc only diverts attention away from the trend which denies the political intelligence (and affirms moral benevolence?) of people such as Fyodor.
I concede that an alternative explantation of the shock SEN vote is that materialistic hip-pocket-nerve concerns about interest rate may have trumped moralistic heart-on-the-sleeve issues. But there must be some explanation for the secular decline of the Wets in the SEN that goes beyond campaign-specific incidents and accidents.
I suggest that this convergence of to the Centre-Right in the SEN indicates a reversionof ex-LIBs DEM and ON) to moderate cultural conservative. If so, then this proves Manning Clarks point about the default cultural conservatism of the AUS mainstream.
Over the second half of the nineties there has been a cultural conservative sea-change underway, and Howard has tapped into it. Miranda Devine (of all people!) has a better handle on social trends than Fyodor with all his pathetic bluster and false bravado:
But all is not lost for the Left. As I noted, more than a year ago, Howard has conceded that economic rationalism must give way to economic statism. If Leftists had any political nous they would be running on that.
But Fyodor prefers to stick his head in the sand rather than admit that he has profoundly misread the mood of the nation. His continued intellectul ignorance guarantees continual political failure.
Jack refers to the Green vote as “so disappointing”. For me the Green vote was the only aspect of the election result which wasn’t disappointing. We increased our vote from around 5% to 7.5%, and have increased our parliamentary representation, in the face of a lot of very adverse attention during the campaign and a gang tackle on Senate preferences. If this is a disappointing result, I’m agog with wild imaginings about what a satisfying result would look like.
However, sober realism about the task we face, rather than wild excitement, is what is called for. Our policies, taken as a whole, include a lot of commitments which will require careful and sustained explanation and argumentation if they are ever to become anything like the majority view of the electorate, which are deeply confronting to entrenched views and feelings of many voters, and/or which are deeply unsettling to established interests and established ways of doing things. Some of them may even be wrong! In this light it is the worst kind of romanticism to imagine a rapid growth in the Green vote to something like major party status, and extremely naive to think that all sorts of political actors won’t seize on the opportunities which our actual policies present (let alone the fictions of the Murdoch tabloids) to foment hostility and discourage potential Green voters.
This is not entirely a bad thing for us, given the troubles which have beset some overseas Green parties which have experienced an early bubble of electoral support and parliamentary representation on the basis of ill-informed or irrational shifts in voter sentiment, only to experience implosions and subsequent recriminations when certain uncomfortable facts became more widely known.
A question for Jack.
I think that a good society must be based on the principles of the equality and liberty of all its members, uncompromised by ascriptively based inequalities of gender, race, sexuality and disability, and the existence of relations between people which are based on these principles or rationally defensible on that basis.
I also think that a good society is one which optimises social and economic goals within the solution space defined by ecological and biophysical possibilities and limits, and that there are rational grounds for believing that Australia and the world are currently outside that solution space.
Do these beliefs make me a cultural progressive or a cultural conservative?
Jack,
Take your hand off it. The “pathetic bluster and false bravado” is all yours. You start off proclaiming your successful divination of a new political movement, and end up admitting that you’ve simply floated unfalsifiable speculation.
You’ve already conceded that, “…an alternative explantation of the shock SEN vote is that materialistic hip-pocket-nerve concerns about interest rate may have trumped moralistic heart-on-the-sleeve issues…” but you’ve yet to concede the blindingly obvious point that the Dems have collapsed as a political party, and this is what drove the senate result.
Your explanation of the Dems collapse as the result of some ideological shift in the populace is unfounded, incorrect and totally ignores that party’s idiosyncratic failures and the Greens’ cannibalisation of their voter base.
A final point: please stop calling me a lefty, as I’m not. Nor am I a “progressive Pee-Cee fantasist”. The fact that I keep pointing out your mistakes and puncturing your over-inflated self-regard does not make me your straw man, so keep your ad hominem histrionics out of this discourse.
Dearie me:
Miranda Devine
“[Howard] has tapped into the mindset of their generation which has seen the fallout of the baby boomers’ beloved social revolution: child abuse, broken families, the destructiveness of unchecked pornography and promiscuity, youth suicide, social breakdown, farcical political correctness on university campuses. The children of divorce and hippiedom are looking for social stability and resent attempts at indoctrination by leftist teachers.”
We don’t get to read a lot of Miranda down here in Melbourne. (For that matter we haven’t seen or heard a lot of Alan Jones either.) It’s amusing to read what passes itself off as social analysis elsewhere.
If she’s right then all you ageing PC, porno-perving hippie freaks up there in Sydney appear to be in the pole position for the forthcoming auto da fe.
On the other hand, might it possibly be the case that she is going a bit beyond the evidence when she relishes the prospect of a real-life version of “The Stepford Wives”?
Fyodor at October 14, 2004 12:02 PM mounts a very shaky high horse to dispense some gratutitous advice on improving the civility of dicourse:
Look whos talking! If I had a dime for everytime Fyodor spewed vitriol on Howard, me et al then…I’d have alot of dimes.
Fyodors reaction to my innocent Naked Emperor calling psephologic disclosures is curiously over-heated. Me thinks he doth protesteth too much.
This is diagnostic of Fyodor’s mentality, which appears to crumble when a little analytic and numeric pressure is applied. When things go do not work out as expected he flails about in a desperate scramble for some convenient excuses. This is indicative of, what Lakatos calls, a “degenerating scientific research program” that goes with a collapsing political settlement.
BTW, of course my prediction of a secular trend towards cultural conservatism is falsifiable. If the Broad Left (ALP, GREENS, DEMS) pick Howard-hating leaders and run hard on progressive cultural policies (Reconciliation, Republic, Refugees, Republican-bashing) that pander to the Not-Happy-John crowd then my theory will have been refuted. Wanna bet that wont happen?
I predict that you will find Bob Brown engaging in less ideological grandstanding and focusing more on key ecological issues.
Two stark facts buttress my hypothesis that the parties of the Cultural Left are in secular decline:
Latitudinally: The DEMs, everyones favourite liberal progressives, have imploded and most of their vote went must have gone to cultural conservative LIBs or cult-con-lite Latham-led ALP.
Longtitudinally: The Cultural Left parties have lost one third of their SEN primary vote over the Howard years (1996-2004).
On the subject of my rhetorical style I concede that I have a tendency to beat my own drum occasionally. It goes with a tendency to self-flagellate. Exhibitionism is the common denominator, but no blogger is free of that.
On intellectual merits I prefer to let the record speak for itself. My predictions on the tendency of Minor Parties to lose their share of the vote to the (more Cultural Conservative) Major Parties is here. My predictions on the sign of the 2004 HoR result is here. My prediction on the Howard-led growing popularity of the cultural conservative tendency is here. My prediction on the LIB’s economic statist tendency is here. I will leave it to readers to asess which of us has a more reliable grasp of AUS policy and political tendencies.
On political grounds, Fyodor’s situtation is dire. He ran on Howard-hatred and has no-one to blame but himself, which perhaps explains the vitriolic and vindictive tone of his replies.
Stepehn Kirschner lifts the lid on Leftist self-impalement:
Paul Norton at October 14, 2004 11:40 AM presents a reasonable mans credo and asks plaintively:
Paul Norton is simply declaring himself for the Enlightenment. Me too. Whether an Enlightenment person should call themseleves conservative or progressive depends on whether we are far away or close to these goals.
My reading of AUS political culture is that we are closer to the Good Society than many people realise. Hence a little bit of cultural conservatism is empirically justified on results. I think the Great Convergence in partu ideologies is a sign of cultural health.
Also, many cultural progressive nostrums, touted widely over the past generation, are plainly false. The degradation of Aboriginal society under the impact of free use of drugs and unconditional welfare is the most tragic case in point.
Various nonsenses that have been run by multiculturalists, feminists and Republicans also need to be re-examined in the cold hard light of day. So going further in the “progressive” direction would not be progress.
Judgements on progression or conservation must always be relative, given the contingency of evolution. I have found it useful to characterise dispositions on the direction and speed of change thus:
Reactionary
Reformist
Revolutionary
One conservative quote, about what constituted progress, stuck in my mind:
My own political philosophy, FWIW, would be called technological pragmatism. We should use our sci-technological and socio-insititutional organisations to advance the moral goal of extending and enhancing human-like life. I therefore favour:
utilitarianism for institutions (unconscious entities such as corporations, nations etc)
humanitarianism for indviduals (conscious agents eg persons, higher order animals)
Invariably there are trade-offs in this pursuit of progress. I tend to sympathise with Kolokowskis advice to the unknown International: How to be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist:
libertarian capitalist in industrial production ;
egalitarian socialist in political distribution and
communitarian nationalist in cultural identification.
A very big question is the scale of the utilitarian institution: eg municipal, state, federal, regional, global.
Another big question is the identity of the humanitarian individual: do we include robots, or animals?
These problems have not yet been sorted out.
Jack,
Looks like this debate has ended, and you lost it. You’re only playing the man because you’ve dropped the ball. See you next time.
Fyodor,
I will concede intellectual defeat, in my prediction that SEN Cultural Progressive parties are in secular decline, when you manage to re-write the history of the past three federeal SEN elections. And explain why half the, supposedly Howard-hating, progressive DEMs voted for the lying and manipulative racist repeller of the Tampa and militarist invader of Iraq.
Perhaps Fyodor’s false confidence in victory stems from his facility in historical revisionism. Flushing facts down a memory hole seems to be a speciality of his.
However, Fyodor cannot change reality. Howard won the elections. His predictions were on AUS electoral and policy valencies have been refuted.
On the broad, world-historical scale, “The Decline of the Wets” continues. (See Fukuyama’s The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order for the socio-biology of this process).
Howard has realised this process and capitalised on the fact that “the times suit him”:
There are fewer Wets in the ALP, since Latham got to be leader. And now there are fewer Wets in the Parliament. I do not rejoice in this process, merely observe it dispassionately.
My advice to Liberal-Left Wets is to promote a positive agenda, like the Da Lai Lama. Not engage in negativistic orgies of Howard-hating, like Fyodor.
Tomes of his Howard-hating ideology are now lying destined for Glebes remainder bins. His psephological model is superficial, contrived, amd lacks predictive power. Like his cultural ideology it has been consigned to the Dustbin of History.
Fyodor may hope to get some consolation from all this by pretending things were otherwise and shooting the messenger. All I can say is “Good luck in your scavenging”.
Electioneering redux
Yeah, we’re all tired of the election last Saturday by now, but eh. John Quiggin found Instareynolds pondering the results, claiming it was “run in no small part as a referendum on the war”, then musing thusly: Australian blogger Tim…