Ken Parish essentially sums up my views on the prospect of Kim Beazley being returned as Labor leader. I’ll just focus on one point. The argument that, “given the current focus on foreign policy issues we need someone with a strong background in these issues” is refuted by experience. The 2001 election was fought on foreign policy issues, and Labor was crushed. Another election on foreign policy would be a virtual rerun, especially as the subtext of the Beazley campaign is that he would ensure that “you couldn’t fit a cigarette paper” between Labor and the government on Iraq.

I also think the current assumption of an inevitable Liberal victory is not soundly based. The government may have a big lead, but public support is far from enthusiastic, and could be eroded rapidly by an economic downturn or (less severely, but still substantially) by a bad medium-term outcome in Iraq.

Update I should emphasise that any decline in the government’s popularity is unlikely to be sufficient to deliver Labor victory by default – the only strategy Beazley has. Crean did not make a good start on presenting an alternative, wasting his first year on meaningless internal party reforms. But he has shown more signs of trying to do something positive since then, and I think could produce something worthwhile in response to the next Budget (possibly his last chance, if a double dissolution is held).

Quite a while ago, I posted on the apparent willingness of the Bracks government to keep a promise to reform the electoral system for the Victorian Legislative Council, even though this will probably mean they will lose control of the Council at the next election (a few years away, but it seems a pretty good bet that Labor will win in the Assembly and therefore continue in government. According to Paul Strangio in the Age, the legislation has now been passed. Dr Strangio is a bit upset that there hasn’t been much jubilation about this (perhaps people have something else on their minds right now) so I’d like to say that I, for one, am jubilant, not only about the substantive reform but at the possibility that political promise-keeping may be coming back into favor.

Although it took place eons ago in blogtime, I haven’t got around to commenting on last weekend’s New South Wales state election until now. The result is a striking one, giving another landslide victory to a government that’s looked pretty tired at times in the last few years. It seems to me that Labor has become the natural party of government at the State level in Australia, simply because people want more public expenditure and services and don’t think the Liberals will deliver them. The fact that the Federal government raises most of the revenue while the states do most of the spending (and that most voters aren’t really aware of this) means that this factor isn’t as significant at the Federal level. Even so, without Tampa and other foreign policy crises, the Howard government would almost certainly have lost in 2001.

In quite a few recent state elections, the combined Liberal-National vote has been near, and sometimes below, 33 per cent. This is a critical value in a preferential system (for overseas readers, this is the same as an instant runoff). As long as a party can hold its vote above 33 per cent, it is guaranteed of finishing first or second in the primary vote, and cannot be displaced by a third party. Below 33 per cent, and the possibility of a wholesale loss of seats to a new party becomes real. This happened with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in Queensland in 1998, but the fortunate implosion of Hanson’s party gave the Coalition another chance.

As an aside, the other crucial figure in relation to three party contests is 25 per cent. If you have less than 25 per cent of the ‘three-party preferred vote’ you can’t win. Either you finish third and are eliminated, or you finish second, but the first-placed party already has more than 50 per cent.

According to this ABC report about half the refugees involved in the bogus ‘children overboard’ incident have now been allowed into Australia. The number of people accepted would have been much larger if not for the fact that, after they arrived, the Taliban government in Afghanistan was overthrown. I don’t suppose this will change anybody’s mind, but maybe some people will feel a tiny twinge of conscience about the things they said and the lies they chose to believe.