Back in the 1970s, when the idea of analyzing voting and poll results in terms of the “two-party preferred vote, it was a major advance. Even though Australia has had preferential voting since (I think) 1921, it was poorly understood, to the point that when a candidate or party with plurality of votes lost on preferences, it was seen as a source of justified grievance (not helped by the fact that both the DLP and the Australian Democrats were splitoffs from a major party that aligned mostly with the other major party).

But that was in the days when Parliaments (or at least Lower Houses) were almost invariably made up solely of members of the major parties. Just as in the 1970s, the facts have changed but concepts haven’t caught up with it. Even though it’s now very common for the government to have a minority of seats, and such governments have worked very well, pundits still treat this outcome as an aberration, a “hung Parliament”. This is reflected in the continued use of the two-party preferred measure, which presumes that the last two candidates in any electorate, after preferences are distributed, will be those of the major parties. So, for example, Green votes for Adam Bandt are allocated between Labor and Liberal parties and used to forecast the election outcome, even though Bandt’s preferences will never be distributed.

There are various ways this could be fixed. The ideal one, in my view, would be to replaced “two-party preferred” with a seat-by-seat allocation of votes to “two most preferred”. That would need big samples to be reliable, but there are a variety of techniques that could be used to mitigate the problem.

The big benefit of this is that we could then see whether or not the poll was predicting an outright majority for one party. Assuming equal luck in marginal seats, a poll giving more than 50 per cent of the “two most preferred” vote to one party would imply a majority of seats for that party.

My reading is that most of the current polling yields a deliberative (or, as our pundits persist in describing it, “hung”) parliament as the central estimate, with enough error to allow either side the chance of majority. Given the likely alignment of independents and Greens a deliberative parliament would probably allow the formation of a Labor minority government. That raises the thorny question of the relationship between Labor and the Greens, which I will deal with in another post if I get time.

For once I feel pretty happy about my predictions: a Labor win in a class war election. Have your own say on this or any election-related topic.

The (presumably) forthcoming double dissolution will raise many issues. But most of them can be summed up as the defence of Australian institutions that have been under attack by radical extremists. I’m referring to such institutions as the ABC, CSIRO, the weekend, public education, the union movement, the fair go and our natural environment. Mention of any of these is enough to raise a derisive sneer from the radical rightwing apparatus that dominates much of Australian politics, most obviously the supporters of Tony Abbott who (ludicrously) call themselves “conservatives”. Turnbull promised something better but he is campaigning against all the institutions I’ve mentioned. It’s time to tell those who want to undermine our way of life in the name of free market ideology and rightwing tribalism where they should get off.

Rather inconveniently for the government, it had no sooner dismissed calls for more tax revenue from the usual lefty suspects (including me), when Moody’s came out with a warning that the much-loved AAA credit rating couldn’t be saved with expenditure cuts alone*.

Scott Morrison came back with a line that must have sounded like a good idea at the time. On the one hand “of course there will be revenue measures in the budget”. But, unlike Labor “additional revenue would be applied to reducing the tax burden in other parts of the economy”

That sounds good if you say it quickly enough. But let’s put some specifics in there. It seems clear that “revenue measures” means higher tobacco taxes. and “reducing the tax burden in other parts of the economy” means cuts in the company tax rate and the budget repair levy. So, Morrison’s budget message is

we’re going to tax smokers to fund cuts in company tax and tax relief for top income earners.

Good luck with that.

Of course, Labor is also planning higher tobacco taxes. But they will be able to say that they are using the revenue to fund better health services. And, of course, Labor has been consistent while the tobacco hike will be another backflip for the LNP (unless they get cold feet and do a double backflip, as seems entirely possible).

I’ve given up betting on elections after being unable to collect my winnings when Intrade collapsed a few years back. But for those so inclined, I’d recommend a look at Sportsbet, who are still offering 3.5 to 1 against Labor supplying the next PM (minor aside: most scenarios for so-called “hung” parliaments would lead to this outcome)

* I’m not a believer in ratings agencies, as I’ve said many times, and I don’t think a AAA rating is particularly meaningful. However, the core input to the rating is an estimate of future budget balance, so it’s not all that surprising that Moody’s, looking at the same data, have reached the same conclusion as I did.

Until quite recently, any discussion of income inequality in Australia was met by howls of “class war” from the political right. Particularly under Abbott, the right wanted to fight on culture war issues, while treating economic policy as a matter of competent management, in which the conservative parties were assumed, by default, to be superior.

Suddenly, however, it appears we are going to have a class war election, largely because of the choices made by the Turnbull government.
Read More »

With the ebbing of Turnbull triumphalism, it’s become evident that the forthcoming election may produce, as in 2010, a House of Represenatives in which neither Labor nor the LNP has an absolute majority. Such an outcome has been common at the state level for some time, and is the norm in upper house elections based on some form of proportional representation. It has proved entirely consistent with stable governments, productive legislation and full-term Parliaments.

Yet commentators persist in calling this a “hung Parliament”, at least when it appears in the lower house. By analogy with a “hung jury” we might suppose a “hung Parliament” is one that proves incapable of reaching a verdict on who should form a government or what legislation should be passed. We have plenty of experience to show that this is not the case.

If we take the jury analogy seriously, it’s worth extending it to the case where the Parliament contains a majority committed to obeying whatever order it receives from the Prime Minister of the day (or, perhaps, the Cabinet). We have plenty of terms for juries and courts that work in this way, none of them complimentary: ‘packed jury’, ‘kangaroo court’, ‘frame up’ and so on.

Those are unduly harsh metaphors when applied to majority governments. But the experience of Queensland, the only Australian jurisdiction without an (invariably ‘hung’) upper house, suggests to me that the cause of good government is greatly enhanced when Premiers cannot rely on a pliant majority to push through whatever laws they like. Admittedly, we’ve had some really good independents, most notably Peter Wellington. But even independents I would never want in government have proved useful as a check on the overweening power of the executives.

So, in the cause of linguistic improvement, I offer the term ‘deliberative Parliament’ for a legislature that actually considers legislation rather than casting votes as ordered by the leader of the day.

The LNP, with Turnbull as frontman, will be campaigning on the Abbott government’s record and policies. Apart from a few symbolic and rhetorical shifts (the re-abolition of Knights and Dames, for example), Turnbull has neither deviated from, nor added to, Abbott’s policy program.

There’s a notion being pushed in the media that a big win for the LNP would constitute a mandate to “let Malcolm be Malcolm”. This is nonsense. A mandate isn’t a free pass. It is, literally, a command, to implement the policies on which you have campaigned [1]

Turnbull can’t campaign on Abbott’s policies, then say he has been commanded to implement his own (whatever they might be). So, unless he breaks with Abbott before the election, he might as hand back the job to someone who really believes in the program he is proposing.

Update 25/3 Turnbull has obviously been stung by Abbott’s attack, and is spinning some minor course adjustments (explicitly dumping some policies from which Abbott had already resiled) as a major break

fn1. The mandate idea is most powerful in a bicameral system with an unelected or highly unrepresentative upper house. In Australia, the unrepresentative aspects of the Senate (equal state representation and long terms) are matched by the spurious lower house majority produced by single-member constituencies. So, senators have just as much a mandate to block legislation they have campaigned against as the government has to push it forward. The Double Dissolution is, of course, the way we can resolve this.

Apparently, we are likely to have one, unless the Senate passes the legislation to reinstate the Australian Building and Construction Commission. I predicted a month ago that the Turnbull government will lose office, and I’m more confident now (though far from 100 per cent) than I was when I made the prediction. So, I’ll leave it at that, and open the topic up for discussion.