Mark Latham has a piece in the Review section of today’s Fin, excoriating the policy convergence that has characterized the election campaign, and Australian politics more generally. The catchphrase that’s caught media attention is “a Seinfeld election, a show about nothing”.

I generally agree, though I’ll note that, to complete the case, Latham needs to do a bit of convergence of his own, arguing that the election doesn’t matter as regards climate change because the big powers will decide everything. I disagree. Howard’s status as Bush’s most reliable ally makes this one of the rare occasions when what Australia decides will make a difference.

A “gaffe” in Australian politics normally consists of speaking the truth when it is politically inconvenient. So, are Peter Garrett’s remarks that Labor would “change it all” after the election a “gaffe” in this sense, as suggested by the reporter in question, a joke, as Garrett said, or something in between.

My view is “something in between”. That is, there is no secret plan to junk Labor’s promises, but a lot of people wish there was.

In most elections, parties make promises, to secure electoral support, that they would rather not keep, either because they regard them as bad public policy or because they reward interest groups that are not seen as actually deserving such rewards. This election has seen plenty of that from both sides, with the biggest single example being Labor’s decision to match Howard’s tax cuts. Most Labor supporters would regard this as a bad promise in several ways. First, large advance commitments of this kind are bad macroeconomic policies. Second, it would be better to allocate more money to services like health and education. Finally, the tax cuts mostly reward the upper income groups that are the natural constituency of the Liberals.

Following the last two changes of Federal government, the incoming party fabricated a crisis and junked their inconvenient (“non-core”) promises. Much though I dislike a lot of the (com)promises Rudd has made, I hope Labor does not do the same. Democratic processes are more important then getting the best policy outcome in the short term.

Over the fold is an excerpt from a Fin article I wrote in September, suggesting that, despite the “me-too” nature of the campaign, the outcome will make a difference. I think the analysis is still right, except that the ferocity of the government’s anti-union campaign has shifted the ground a bit. If the government gets back in, even with a narrow majority, they will clearly feel justified in pushing through their maximal anti-union agenda. Conversely, the unions now know they have to stick with Rudd come what may, and he has an obvious interest in demonstrating his supremacy. So I suspect he’ll give them nothing more than the minimal changes that have been promised.
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Lots of commentators have been surprised by the magnitude of the swing against the government in the opinion polls. Given that the economy is going well, and that on most issues divisions between the parties are not all that sharp, why should people change their votes? There are a number of potential reasons, including the increased salience of climate change and the fact that Rudd is a more attractive leader than any of his recent predecessors.

But one fact that doesn’t get so much attention is that much of the swing to Labor is coming from changes in the population of voters, rather than in changes of mind among voters. It’s well known that the Liberals have more support among older voters, and that Labor gets strong support from young voters and recent immigrants. But no-one seems to have drawn the obvious implication. If no-one changes their mind between elections, Labor gets an automatic increase in support as young people and migrants are enfranchised, while Liberal voters are more likely to pass away through old age (I’m not sure about Australians who move overseas and stop voting as a result).

How big is this swing? My rough guess is that we’ve added a million new voters since the last election and lost around half a million. If we assume two-thirds of the new voters go for Labor, and two-thirds of the departed supported the Liberals, that leaves the Liberal vote unchanged, but adds half a million votes for Labor, equal to a bit over 4 per cent of the total number of voters. Since the number of voters has increased, that should be reflected in, roughly, an increase of 2 percentage points in Labor’s share of the 2PP vote, and a decrease of 2 percentage points in the Liberals.

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Not long ago, Tom Switzer (opinion editor for the Oz) was claiming victory in the culture wars at a Quadrant dinner (hat-tip to reader Jason McDonald). Now, Greg Sheridan is conceding defeat, at least on the assumption (now nearly universal) that the Liberals are heading for defeat. Unsurprisingly, both of them focus a lot of attention on the ABC, though Sheridan’s list extends to the media in general (News Limited? PBL?) and (a kind recognition that we still exist) universities.

The most striking feature of both articles is that they seem stuck in the fights of the 1990s, over political correctness, multiculturalism and so on. There’s no mention at all of climate change, and hardly any of Iraq (Switzer notes in passing that he opposed it). Yet if you want to explain the failure of the right wing in the culture wars you can’t go past these two cases. In both cases, having chosen sides, the right treated facts as being either utterly irrelevant or as talking points to be trumpeted or denied according to political need. In both, they hung on, time after time, to positions that had long since ceased to be defensible. These are tactics that worked reasonably well in culture wars and history wars, since there’s rarely any final reckoning. But in the case of Iraq and climate change, reality has a way of obtruding.

Looking at the disagreement between the two, Sheridan is much more focused on the Liberal party, and on control of institutions. He recognises that the attempt to impose control from the top has failed, though he persists with the silly “elite” terminology in which a university lecturer is a member of an elite from which, say, the CEO of a major company is excluded.

The other big difference is in the implied view of Kevin Rudd and, implicitly, of other centrists like Clinton and Blair (or, more relevantly now, Gordon Brown). They are clearly not leftwingers, and in that sense, the culture warriors can declare victory and go home. On the other hand, although their commitment to the social democratic strand of liberalism is so thin as to be almost invisible at times, they are clearly in a different category from the US Republicans who carry the rightwing flag in the global culture wars.

I don’t have much of a reputation for accurate election predictions[1],[2], but I’m going to call this one for Labor. Short of something unexpected and uncontrollable by either side, I can’t see the Libs pulling this out of the fire. I think it’s just a matter of waiting out the remaining month.

[1] A week out from the 2004 election, I thought the position was in Labor’s favor, and even on the day I thought the odds close to 50-50, so I wouldn’t base large-scale betting-market investments on my judgement if I were you.

[2] By contrast, I think I’ve called the Iraq war pretty well, but that’s another story.

The government got its bounce last week, but it looks to have been of the dead cat variety, with the latest Newspoll (taken before the debate) showing Labor ahead 58-42 on 2PP. Of course, the usual warnings about margin of error apply to both this poll and the previous one. There’s nothing to suggest, with any certainty, that there has been any movement away from the average of 56-44 that’s prevailed all year.

The big problem is the perception that the government has fired off all its big guns and achieved nothing. We’re already seeing backdowns on a bunch of issues (Turnbull on nuclear power for example), but they’ll need more than this, or another bounce, to stave off the view that disaster is inevitable. it might not be too late for Howard to pull back a few points by ratifying Kyoto, but he needs to do something quickly.

Now the one and only debate is over, and both sides have launched the bulk of their policies (there are presumably some last-minute goodies, but the big money has been spent), what are we going to do for the next five weeks? The Policy Speeches could normally be relied on to inject at least some interest, but not when the policies get announced in the first week.

After the endless pre-campaign, five more weeks of pointless stumping about will have people turning off in droves, I imagine. If it weren’t for compulsory voting, I suspect we’d see a big drop in turnout. Normally, boredom is good for the incumbents, but I’m not sure how it will play out this time.
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