Rumours, anecdotes, observations, predictions … post whatever you want, sticking to civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.
For what it’s worth, having predicted a Labor win from the start, I’ll stick with that, and estimate that Labor will get 80 seats.
All through the long campaign, we’ve been waiting for Howard to reach into his hat and pull out the rabbit that will astonish the crowd and turn everything around. With the election only days away, this task seems to have been left to Andrew Robb, and a very grimy and bedraggled rabbit it turned out to be.
For those who’ve tuned out, Robb attempted to parlay the alleged technical ineligibility of ALP candidate George Newhouse into a mass disqualification of any candidate for whom an Internet search turned up a supposedly current public appointment. A dozen or so were named, and the claim was that voting Labor would produce a hung Parliament and weeks of limbo.
The smear campaign (that’s the Herald-Sun’s term, not mine) didn’t even manage a single news cycle before falling apart, as it turned out to be based on the shoddiest of research.
I’m reassured by the fact that this didn’t work, and even more that the Liberals tried it. This must mean
* They don’t have anything better in reserve
* They’re desperate enough to try something that was always likely to backfire
Of course, nothing is certain until the results go up on the board. But as Crikey and others have observed, it’s all very reminiscent of 1996 in reverse.
Update: Lots of people have covered this, but no one has surpassed Possum
And, now its the bottom of the barrel. Amusingly, Andrew Robb, who pushed the first smear had to play the “shocked, shocked” Vichy policeman on this one, denying that senior Liberals were involved.
Like most commentators, I’ve always taken Howard’s famous catchphrase “relaxed and comfortable” to have meant his government would avoid pursuing a radical ideological agenda, with the associated conflict and strife. I’m pretty sure this was how it was taken at the time, but of course that was before we learned the skills of parsing ambiguous sentences, and attuning our ears to high-frequency signals that have become so important under this government. It turns out that Howard meant pretty much the opposite of the interpretation that has become standard
This piece by Miranda Devine quotes Janette Howard as saying that:
her husband’s pledge in the 1996 campaign to make Australians “relaxed and comfortable” was meant to counter Keating’s history cringe, but the quote had been misinterpreted.
and indeed, the full quote, cited here by Carmen Lawrence reads
An Australian nation that feels comfortable and relaxed about three things: about their history, about their present and the future.
It sounded innocuous at the time but, in retrospect, it’s easy enough to see in this statement the seeds of both the History Wars, as noted by Janette Howard, and such later catchphrases as “We will decide who comes here and under what circumstances”.
There was a lot of speculation about the role of blogs and the Intertubes more generally would have in this election, mostly focusing on the political commentary role of blogs like this one. As it’s turned out, the campaign has been so soporific that neither blogs nor conventional media have had an awful lot to say about it. The stars of the show have been psephological blogs such as Pollbludger, Possum’s Pollytics, Mumble and Bryan Palmer. Showing the borderless nature of the blogosphere, one of the best such sites comes from the other side of the Pacific. Simon Jackman at Stanford has prepared a comprehensive pooled analysis of the polls which is well worth reading.
Another guest post, this time from Don Harding, who’s looking again at the apparent conflict between betting odds on a Labor win and those in individual seats.
Read More »
Last week the Prime Minister is reported to have said that economist Richard Blandy had estimated Labor’s plan to abolish Work Choices would destroy between 200,000 and 400,000 jobs. This claim has provoked a response from Australia’s (and one of the world’s) leading econometrician, Adrian Pagan. My one line summary: Blandy has derived this estimate by comparing levels, but has ignored the pre-existing upward trend in employment.
The full piece is over the fold – if there are any opinion editors among my readers, this would make a great contribution for the final week of the campaign.
Read More »
It’s now looking just about as certain as any electoral outcome can be that the Howard government will be defeated, and that the Federal Liberal party will join its state and territory counterparts in opposition, possibly for several terms to come[1]. Given that the economy is doing well, and that the Australian electorate is not obviously in a state of leftwing ferment, this (still putative) outcome needs some explanation.
One striking fact, despite having received an overwhelming mandate in 1996 for a policy of making Australia “relaxed and comfortable”, the Howard government, and, even more, their supporters, see themselves as being engaged in a “culture war”. An even more striking fact is that the other side in this culture war has been just about invisible, particularly in political debate. It’s hard to see either Kevin Rudd or his smooth and scrubbed counterparts at the state level as engaged in a struggle to undermine traditional Australian culture. Even the Greens, led by Bob Brown, don’t fit the bill. And this is consistent with my day-to-day experience. Maybe UQ is riddled with extreme cultural leftists, but if so, I don’t get invited to their parties.
Yet opinion columns, talk radio and the rightwing blogosphere are dominated by diatribes against what appears, in their telling, as an amorphous mass of political correctness, environmentalism, radical feminism and general hostility to ordinary Australians and their values, which supposedly dominates not only the Labor party but all of our major cultural institutions including universities, the legal system, the ABC and even, in many accounts, the commercial mass media in which these bloviators are writing.
The pursuit of the culture war is, in my judgement, one of the main reasons that the conservative parties have become increasingly unelectable.
I just got the edited highlights of Howard’s policy launch, but the commentary confirmed my impression that the main initiatives (tax-favoured savings accounts for homebuyers, rebates for parents of school students, money for childcare centres) were ripoffs of policies announced by Rudd earlier in the campaign. This kind of “me too, too, only more so” approach seems to be tactically and politically silly for a lot of reasons.
I’ve mentioned before that the fact that most bookies have Labor odds-on to win, while the Liberals are favoured in about half the individual seat markets (they were ahead in a majority until recently) seemed to create arbitrage opportunities. A nice piece by Tim Colebatch resolves the apparent paradox to my satisfaction at any rate.
The paradox is explained by the fact that of the 29 seats in which the odds are closest, the bookies have the Coalition as favourite in 23 and Labor in just six. The law of probabilities suggests that if Labor gets anything like the vote being recorded in the polls, it will win a lot more than six of those seats.
The only blemish in this explanation is that there’s no need to refer to the Labor vote in the polls. Given 29 seats that are nearly even-money, it’s reasonable to expect Labor to pick up at least 10, just on the basis of the betting odds.
Going to the more general question of prediction, 2007 has been a win for the polls in their contest with pundits and punters as to who provides the best prediction of election outcomes. Labor jumped to a winning lead in the polls as soon as Rudd replaced Beazley and has held that lead, with only marginal erosion ever since. The pundits and the betting markets have gradually come into line, but it’s hard to believe that they would have done so in the absence of the information provided by the polls.
Of course, it’s still possible that Howard will come back, as he has done in the past, but that will just prove all predictions wrong.
Does anyone know if this election is going to include an election policy speech in the traditional sense from Rudd or Howard (or has there been one that I missed?). In every election I can recall, the party leaders made a speech setting out their major policy commitments. With two weeks to go and the big money spent long ago, I’m wondering if this tradition has been abandoned.
John Quiggin 