The big Oz political news of the week was the flap over Mark Latham’s remarks on education, which echoed similar remarks by Bill Clinton and led to claims of plagiarism from the PM. Chris Sheil rightly describes this as a terrific beatup, but asserts that “the Coalition has won the day so far on this one”, while in the comments box, Sedgwick rates it a nil-all draw. I count it as a 2-0 win for Labor, with J. Howard doing all the scoring (own goals in both halves).

First own goal: Latham is shown on TV over and over, making commitments to education. He would never have got such publicity on the strength of the speech itself.

Second own goal: Rather than using one of his taggers, ideally a snarky journo or even a blogger, Howard went for the king-hit himself, thus casting himself in the classic negative role of the carping critic with no substantive policy to offer. Opposition leaders, by virtue of their position, find it hard to avoid this role – for a PM to take it on voluntarily is stupid.

As it happens, I can apply the taxi driver test to this one. I heard this on the radio going to the airport and the taxi driver (middle-aged and not obviously a lefty) said exactly what I thought “So What”.

An obvious logical objection, that doesn’t seem to have occurred to those debating this issue is that any politician who uses a speechwriter is automatically guilty of plagiarism. The implication, I think, is that the term has no real applicability in politics, except in cases where a speaker explicitly claims words as their own (the opposite of the situation in the academic world).

Update: There’s a bit more about this over at Catallaxy. Showing yet again that it’s possible to agree on particular points despite important disagreements on values, Andrew Norton agrees that the kind of plagiarism undertaken by Latham is a trivial offence if it’s an offence at all. On the other hand, writing in the comments thread, Geoff Honnor makes the point that Latham also scored an own goal by denying the obvious. I’ll restate the score as 2-1.

Further update In the comments thread, reader TJW suggests that the story began with Laurie Oakes, who certainly fits the billl as a snarky journo. If this is correct, Howard’s own goal looks even worse. He would have been sensible to leave it with Oakes, rather than to jump in and open himself up to the inevitable finding that he’d done just the same thing himself.

Among my various activities, I’m a member of the Queensland Competition Authority, which is responsible for regulating a range of private and public monopoly enterprises[1]. I’ve spent the day in and around Mackay, looking at railway yards and coal-loading ports. I’ll be back tomorrow with more posts, and responses to the lively comments threads.

fn1. Just to be on the safe side, I’ll mention that nothing written on this blog purports to represent the position of the QCA, the University of Queensland, the Australian Financial Review or anyone else for whom I might do some work at some time or another.

There have been quite a few interesting posts at Catallaxy recently, and I haven’t got around to linking them. I meant to post a response to Jason’s discussion of flat taxes, but haven’t had time to polish it yet.

Instead, I’ll link to Andrew Norton’s response to Alan Wood’s claim that the way to voters’ hearts is via big tax cuts (which includes a further link to Stephen Kirchner. Andrew and I have both discussed this previously, and we agree that Wood is wrong, though of course I’m happy about this and Andrew is not.

One point I’ll make is that Sol Lebovic is quoted, endorsing the Oz party line, and claiming that “while health and education routinely top the list of issues of concern to voters, they don’t swing elections unless there is a clear difference between the parties.” I think this is silly (obviously, there is a clear difference, since Labor is invariably more favorably disposed to public expenditure in these areas). More to the point, I think it’s very unwise for a pollster to run down his own poll results when they yield a conclusion that’s inconvenient to his employer, as Lebovic now seems to do regularly.

If the poll answers were genuinely misleading, the correct response would be to change the questions, the sample, or both. It’s clear that the kinds of changes needed to give the answers the Oz wants to hear would involve blatant rigging that would destroy Newspoll’s credibility for all time. So Lebovic is unwilling to tamper with the polls, but he is willing to tell us to ignore some of the results.