Rise and fall

With today’s consumer price index figures said by analysts to make a Melbourne Cup interest rates hike extremely likely, Crikey offers another round of Roy Morgan data mining, this time ranking electorates in order of respondents’ various economic concerns. Morgan has also aggregated its September polling to provide state and country/city breakdowns. Also in the mail today is the latest Reuters poll trend, a weighted aggregate of Newspoll, ACNielsen and Roy Morgan. It shows essentially no change from the October 10 result, with Labor on 56.6 per cent of two party preferred (up 0.1 per cent) and 48.6 per cent of the primary vote (down 0.1 per cent), and the Coalition primary vote steady on 39.1 per cent.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

460 comments on “Rise and fall”

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  1. I get the distinct impression that somebody here has been working overtime on his fertility clinic donations tonight.

    Good night Glen. May all of your dreams be as dry as your politics.

  2. #
    413
    Glen Says:
    October 25th, 2007 at 12:06 am

    The Governor General should sack Rudd if he does this…he’d only be doing it for political gain…

    Sorry Glen, Kerr died years ago mate.

  3. I have been reading the various readers’ blogs on this topic on the websites of the various Australian newspapers. There is the usual mix of pro-Howard and pro-Rudd comments (30/70 ish), and I noticed a singularly interesting little fact: I found someone who had commented across several papers.

    I found Macca of Ipswich on the following blogs:

    The Australian
    The Brisbane Courier-Mail
    The Adelaide Advertiser.

    Ironically, in the last, he was accusing Young Labor of spamming the boards with pro-Rudd comments. Given that his sole contribution has been to praise Howard to the skies, decry any notion of any sort of LP failure in Government and make up fanciful stories about the ALP, I find his “comments” to be hypocritical in the extreme.

  4. Charles @409:

    “Possum Comitatus could you explain to a poor ignorant engineer why the reserve bank increases interest rates when inflation gets out of hand.”

    I’ll bite.

    Say you have a fixed (ie you can’t earn more) budget of $100. $30 for your food, $30 for your fuel, $30 for your mortgage, and $10 for luxuries.

    Your mortgage goes up to $40. What do you do? Assuming, for the nonce, that you can’t economise on fuel or food, obviously you’ll cut your spending on luxuries. This is the idea, in an ultra-simplistic way, of raising interest rates to control inflation.

    Inflation, as you no doubt realise, is the growth in prices over time, and is generally caused by consumers competing for scarce resources, bidding the prices up in the process. A good example at the moment is housing! Some of it is unavoidable in the domestic sense (eg inflation due to movements in the price of oil). However, demand for consumables, electronic goods etc are sensitive to people’s disposable incomes – hence, if you take away people’s disposable incomes, they can’t compete for goods and therefore the tendency to ‘bid up’ prices for these goods is ameliorated. Also, peoples’ tendency to use credit to finance purchases (eg plasma tv on the VISA card) is lessened.

    It’s obviously more complex than this, but this is the basic linkage between interest rates and inflation.

  5. Sean @ 457
    ….
    I don’t think too much reliance should be placed on the Westpoll results. There is no anecdotal sense in WA of a swing in favour of the government and the 2004 result was a real high-water mark for them here. I think these seats are difficult to poll: they are nearly always finely balanced and small changes in assumptions about sample weighting can easily give you varying “results”. The Liberals are not up to running a strong campaign on the ground and the factors that are Rudd-positive nationally will be positive in WA. My prediction is a swing to Labor – not big, maybe, but big enough to make it possible for Labor to pick up seats and defend their existing ones.

  6. On the RBA and interest rates, there is a further factor that will be in the mind of the economists at the RBA – the need to depress future inflationary expectations. They will be very mindful of the need to let players in the economy know that a generalsied rise in prices will not be allowed to take hold. Governments, businesses, unions, households will all be given the message that inflation will be dealt with before it takes hold – loose fiscal policies, price and wage hikes, credit-driven spending will have early consequences in terms of higher rates.

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