I haven’t had much to say about Australian politics since the election. That’s because I see the Turnbull government as a nullity, which will achieve nothing however long it survives.

Turnbull’s first substantive action since the election (in fact, since the election was called) only confirms me in this view. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to a TV program, the Four Corners report documenting appalling abuse in a juvenile detention facility in the NT. Rather than considering any coherent attempt to consider and address the issues, Turnbull offered the most clichéd possible response “when in doubt, call a Royal Commission”. He made it lazier still, by proposing that the Commission focus on this single facility, and has now reluctantly agreed that it should look at the NT as a whole.

For once, I’m in agreement with the Oz. We already have a Royal Commission looking at institutional abuse of young people, which could easily have its terms extended to cover this.

More importantly, we don’t need any more Royal Commissions to establish that institutions are failing young people in trouble. The real issues are much more intractable than finding and punishing some abusers.

To start with, there’s the fact that, throughout the country, services for young people in trouble are chronically underfunded and overstretched. If Turnbull had announced that the money he was planning to give to corporations would be used to help young people instead, that would have been some genuinely decisive action. But that would be politically impossible.

Still, at least in the case of youth services, it’s obvious what needs to be done. The bigger problems of social breakdown and family crisis are much more complicated and difficult to handle. But these aren’t the kinds of question that can be handled by a press release or a Royal Commission.

Malcolm Turnbull went to the election warning against the instability of a “hung” Parliament and a minority Labor government. It’s now clear that the most unstable outcomes within the range of possibility are those where the LNP forms a government with 76 seats (working majority of 1) 75 or 74 (presumably relying on Bob Katter and/or Nick Xenophon for confidence votes). The knives are already out for Turnbull, and there are at least three potential successors in the wings, all convinced they could do a better job than Turnbull or either of their rivals. So, any understanding Turnbull might reach with independents is liable to be overturned at any moment.

On the Labor side, the rules changes introduced by Kevin Rudd make it just about impossible to remove a sitting PM, and there is, in any case, almost no appetite for a change. So, if Labor manages 72 seats or more and forms a minority government, there’s a good chance that the government and parliament could run its full term.

It’s too late to influence anyone’s vote, and I doubt that many of my readers are in much doubt as to which way they will go, so I’ll return to one of my favorite topics, the relative predictive power of polls and betting markets. Most of the time, comparing the two is a tricky exercise, since the odds in betting markets and those implied by polls tend to converge as the election nears. Not this time, however. The polls have remained at or near 50-50 throughout the campaign, with the additional complication that 5-10 seats may be won by independents or minor parties. Yet, as of a couple of days ago, the LNP was paying $1.08 for a dollar bet, implying a winning probability of around 90 per cent.

In classical statistical terms, that means that, if the LNP loses (does not form a government) the null hypothesis that the betting odds are correct can be rejected with 90 per cent confidence, which is commonly considered good enough for social science work. Unfortunately, things don’t work the other way around. If we disregard markets, the chance of an LNP win is probably a bit above 50 per cent, so a win for the LNP wouldn’t prove anything one way or the other. For that, we’d need a case where the polls strongly predicted a winner, while the markets were even money or going the other way (the key concept here is the “power” of the test).

In an important sense, anything less than a clear LNP majority would constitute a rejection of the betting market hypothesis. If the majority is small, then the outcome will inevitably have been decided by a few thousand random votes reflecting unpredictable chance.

Anyway, we’ll see soon enough.

A report in the UK Sun (Murdoch, but directly quoting a government minister, presumably accurately) quotes UK saying that “senior politicians in [Australia and South Korea] had called [seeking trade deals with the UK] in the past 48 hours“. If that’s true, it seems like a spectacular breach of the caretaker conventions.

From Wikipedia, the relevant part of the conventions

The Government ordinarily seeks to defer major international negotiations, or adopts observer status until the end of the caretaker period.

The 2016 election is remarkable in two ways. First, more than at any time in the past 20 years, the two parties have presented strongly opposed policy platforms reflecting underlying ideological differences on economic policy, symbolic (bankers vs unionists) and substantive (upper income tax cuts) class issues, climate policy, equal marriage and more. On the other hand, having set out these differences, the parties have run campaigns that are (because of the eight-week duration) twice as vapid and uninspiring as usual. None of the big issues have been debated seriously.

Most notably the pretext for the double dissolution, the ABCC bill, has barely been raised. It’s obvious enough why Labor would want to avoid arguing about allegations of union corruption, whether those allegations with or without merit. On the LNP side, the $100 million handed to Dyson Heydon and his Royal Commission has so far (AFAICT) failed to produce a single conviction for any act of union corruption, while a number of prosecutions have fallen over in more or less embarrassing circumstances.

Unsurprisingly, the polls have barely moved from the deadheat position they were in at the beginning of the campaign. Perhaps more surprisingly, with a week to go, both betting markets and media pundits are uniformly convinced that the government will be returned with most predicting a narrow majority. Given the random element in any election, making a strong prediction of a narrow win is nonsensical. There are always half a dozen seats where random, unpredicted factors emerge on election night. So, if you think a narrow win is the most likely outcome, you must impute a significant probability to a narrow loss. If the government does not get a majority, this fact will suddenly be discovered with an air of profundity. If it does, the pundits and punters will congratulate themselves on their instinctive connection with the mood of (51 per cent of) the Australian people

The election campaign has brought into focus the long-standing problem of how Labor and the Greens should deal with each other, which became critical after the 2010 election. Both parties have made a mess of things this time around. Rather than go over that ground, I’m going to give my view on how they should work in the future.

First, both parties need to realise that they are part of the same centre-left movement. For Labor that means giving up the idea that the Greens are a temporary irritant that will go the way of the DLP, if they are abused and/or ignored long enough. For the Greens, it means abandoning Third Way rhetoric suggesting that they represent an unaligned alternative to a two-party duopoly.

In electoral terms, the starting point for both parties should be an exchange of preferences in all seats, with the LNP last. That starting point doesn’t preclude changes in the case of particularly objectionable (or particularly good) candidates, but it does rule out the kinds of negotiations we’ve seen so many times with the LNP or with conservative minor parties. It also rules out the fake piety of Green “open tickets”.

Such a policy would be good for the centre-left as a whole, but it would also benefit each of the parties to adopt it unilaterally. The alleged hardheads who negotiate these deals have repeatedly bungled them, while creating division and attracting bad publicity.

Equally important is the question of how the parties should work in Parliament. The most important is the case that emerged in 2010, with Labor needing Greens support to form a government. My reading of that episode is that both parties were harmed by the conclusion of a formal deal, and that a coalition with Green ministers would make things even worse. Instead, the Greens should support Labor on confidence votes, and negotiate on all other legislation on the merits.

An approach like this would enable the Greens to influence policy in positive ways, while not tying them to Labor policies they regard as unacceptable. For Labor, the obvious benefit is that they could form a government while maintaining a formal position of “no deals”. For the centre-left as a whole, the policy outcome would be better than that from a Labor government with a tame majority.

… who’s totally dissatisfied with the coverage of the likely election outcome. Every article I’ve read seems to be along the lines of the following deduction

1. Labor can’t possibly win the 21 net seats it needs for an absolute majority
2. (implicit) Any outcome other than an absolute majority for one major party or the other is inconceivable.
3. Therefore, any outcome other than an LNP majority is impossible and inconceivable.

Obviously, the problem is with implicit step 2. As Inigo Montoya remarks to Vizzini, in the princess bride (a constant user of the term “inconceivable”) “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”.

As far as I can tell, it is entirely possible that the next Parliament will include 10-12 non-major party independents (two to four Greens, up to three Xenophon, three current independents and perhaps two more). Of these, three or four would hold seats taken from the LNP, meaning that the government can only afford to lose about 10 seats to Labor before we get to a deliberative Parliament. Of the non-majors, there’s only one (Bob Katter) who could be regarded as a reasonably safe vote for the government.

Maybe the pundits have taken all this into account. But, if so, I’ve seen no evidence in what they’ve published. It’s still two-party preferred and what I’ll call the “fallacy of the excluded middle” in everything I read.

Although I’ve been involved in economic policy debates for most of the last 40 years, it’s not often that I can point directly to a substantive outcome, in the sense that a policy proposal I’ve generated is implemented, or at least adopted by a major political party. There’s nothing surprising in that. There are lots of people involved in the policy process, and most successful policy proposals reflect the efforts of many people, combined in such a way that it’s hard to tell whether any one person mattered.

But I was happy to see this proposal from the Labor Party to allow state governments to collect criminal fines through the tax and welfare systems (as with HECS debts and child support), rather than jailing defaulters as at present. This was idea I put forward in a paper with Bruce Chapman, Arie Friedman and David Tait, back in 2004 (paywalled, unfortunately).

As is argued in Labor’s press release, there would be obvious improvements and cost savings, as well as the avoidance of unnecessary suffering for people who can’t afford to pay. But for me, the change in collection mechanism is of interest mainly because it makes possible more radical reforms.

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Four weeks in, and with the two parties neck and neck, this ought to be an exciting point in the election campaign. But thanks to Turnbull’s trickiness* of calling a double dissolution requiring eight weeks of campaigning, it’s anything but. Still, it seems like a good time for some horse race commentary, partly repeating what I’ve said before.

* First, taking the horse race analogy seriously, the behavior of betting markets is as if two horses had run neck and neck in a dozen minor races, but one was still the overwhelming favorite for the big done. To spell this out, the polls have been virtually level pegging for many weeks, but the betting markets have barely moved. On past history, the two will converge by election day. If, as I expect, that means the betting odds will move towards the poll, this campaign will count as a major piece of evidence against the idea that markets are good aggregators of knowledge. And, of course, the converse is true

* Second, the likelihood of a deliberative Parliament, with neither major party having a tame majority is increasing all the time. That’s a good thing in the abstract; how good depends on whose votes turn out to be critical

* Third, the one consistent trend has been the precipitous fall in Malcolm Turnbull’s standing across a wide range of measures. Whatever happens on election day (short of a surprise LNP landslide), I don’t expect Turnbull to be PM a year from now.

* To be sure, Julia Gillard’s attempt to hold on to her leadership by calling an election eight months in advance makes Turnbull look moderate. But that was an absurdity doomed to fail, as it did.