Two polls from Morgan, which as ever moves in mysterious ways. Without question the headline finding is the face-to-face poll of 1832 respondents conducted over the previous two weekends, showing a healthy spike in Labor’s two-party lead to 60.5-39.5 from 57.5-42.5 at the previous such poll. The 574-sample phone poll was probably conducted to get more bang from their buck out of some other survey they were conducting for some other reason. It shows Labor’s lead at a more modest 57-43. Furthermore:
• Northern Territory MP Alison Anderson, on whose whim (along with fellow independent Gerry Wood) hangs the future of Paul Henderson’s floundering government, has advised that Tuesday will be nothing less than “the biggest day in Territory history”, which should alarm survivors of Cyclone Tracy and the 1942 air raids. Tuesday was to be the day Anderson would make known her attitude to the government’s future, but it’s presumably been brought forward a day now that Speaker Jane Aagaard has agreed to a request from Anderson, Wood and the CLP for parliament to resume on Monday. Notice will then be given of a no-confidence motion on Friday, which if successful – and given the pitch of Anderson’s rhetoric, any other outcome would be an enormous anti-climax – will result in either a new election or an immediate transfer of power to the Terry Mills-led CLP. The procedure for such a motion was established late last year in legislation establishing fixed four-year terms, which like similar legislation in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia provides for an escape clause in the event of no-confidence or blocked supply. As Antony Green explains, it thus marks a test case for the aforementioned states, which have never experienced such a situation in the fixed term era. If the motion passes, the parliament will have eight days to back an alternative government, after which the Administrator will have the authority to issue writs for an election which the Chief Minister will be obliged to advise. The government’s ongoing crisis reached its current pitch on Tuesday when Anderson quit the ALP – not as she foreshadowed due to dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of an indigenous housing program, but because she blamed Henderson for an allegedly racist article about her and other indigenous MPs in Saturday’s edition of the Northern Territory News. The same day saw Arafura MP Marion Scrymgour return to the Labor fold after two months of independence, leaving the numbers at Labor 12, CLP 11, independents two. While Anderson’s tone of certainty might be taken as a clue, Wood’s precise attitude remains unclear: although of presumably conservative sympathies, he has expressed concern at the CLP’s readiness to govern, and was quoted this week saying an election was “certainly an option”. Anderson tells The Australian her gauge of the public mood is that there is “a push for an election so that they can teach Hendo a lesson”.
• Talk of John Della Bosca challenging Nathan Rees for the New South Wales premiership has focused attention on the theoretical prospect of a leader sitting in the upper house. While dismissive of the rumours, Imre Salusinszky of The Australian muses that Della Bosca “could serve a symbolic first 100 days in the Legislative Council and hope to have gained sufficient traction by that point to make the switch feasible”. He also notes that in the current environment, no lower house seat is so safe for Labor that Della Bosca could be guaranteed to win a by-election even if a sitting member agreed to make way. The Sydney Morning Herald reports party operatives hope Della Bosca can assume Bankstown from Tony Stewart by forging a deal in which Stewart receives an apology for his sacking over an incident involving a staff member last year, for which he is suing the government. Another Herald report mentions Riverstone, where John Aquilina has said he will not contest the next election. Della Bosca’s home patch, Gosford, is deemed unsuitable in part due to the lingering local unpopularity of his wife Belinda Neal following the Iguana’s episode, but also because it is too marginal and sitting member Marie Andrews would be unwilling to make way in any case. The Herald reports that a move to Bankstown “could pave the way for a graceful exit from politics for Ms Neal”, who is unlikely to retain preselection in her Gosford-based federal seat of Robertson. It will be recalled that when Barrie Unsworth was parachuted into Rockdale at a 1986 by-election to assume the premiership upon Neville Wran’s retirement, he suffered a 17 per cent dive in the primary vote and came within 54 votes of defeat. In May, Malcolm Mackerras wrote an article in The Australian decrying what he saw as the outdated convention that places leaders in the lower house, complaining that “New South Wales has Nathan Rees as Premier when John Della Bosca should be premier”, and suggesting the federal Liberals “should replace Julie Bishop as its federal deputy leader with Senator Nick Minchin and explicitly not ask Minchin to transfer to the House of Representatives”.
• Christian Kerr of The Australian notes the British Conservatives have “turned a PR disaster into a triumph” by conducting an American-style open primary to choose the successor to one of many MPs disgraced in the country’s expenses scandal. Having done so, the party has given “everyone in the constituency a stake in the success of their candidate”. The New South Wales Nationals have decided to hold such a vote in one yet-to-be-chosen seat for the next state election.
• Antony Green comments on the potential availability of various double dissolution triggers, and on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bill in particular, where the Coalition appears to be playing a good hand with its apparent plan to oppose it at the second reading.
• Danna Vale, Liberal member for the southern Sydney seat of Hughes, has announced she will quit at the next election. The margin in Hughes was cut from 8.6 per cent to 2.2 per cent at the 2007 election, and by Antony Green’s reckoning the redistribution proposal unveiled yesterday will further reduce it to 1.1 per cent – less than a sitting member’s personal vote is generally reckoned to be worth. No word yet on who might be up for the tough task of keeping the seat in the Liberal fold.
• The Victorian Parliament’s Electoral Matters Committee has published a report recommending that consideration be given to adopting the weighted inclusive Gregory method for surplus transfers in upper house elections, as opposed to the (non-weighted) inclusive Gregory method currently employed both in Victoria and for the Senate. Under weighted inclusive Gregory, which was introduced in Western Australia at the last election, the system achieves mathematical perfection of a sort with every individual vote cut up and distributed among the final quotas at equal value. The inclusive Gregory method saves time, but it means individual votes which are used in surplus transfers more than once in the count are inflated in value on the second and subsequent occasions. Usually only small handfuls of votes are involved, but like anything these could be decisive in the event of a close result.
• The abolition of Laurie Ferguson’s Sydney seat of Reid threatens an interesting Labor preselection for one of the seats which have moved into its turf: Parramatta, Blaxland and McMahon, as Lowe has been renamed. Antony Green has composed what promises to be a headline-grabbing post noting that the New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australian redistributions (only proposals in the first two cases) have between them given Labor a notional boost of five seats. Those wishing to discuss these matters are asked to do so on the New South Wales redistribution thread.
100
As I explained earlier in America almost all the elections are at once so all the election campaign advertising demand is clumped together and the laws of supply and demand dictate that this drives the price of advertising up compared to what it would otherwise be. The ridiculous number of elections in America does not help the situation either. We do need to do something about the costs of elections anyway. Free broadcast time on all television and radio stations for all parties of significance that do not hire advertising on television and radio (the thing that the High Court ruled unconstitutional was the total ban on paid advertising).
Tom, the partisan point of everything you suggest here is so blatant that you must think we are really stupid not to see it.
* You want 14 Senators per state because that would lower the quota and make it easier for the Greens to win seats.
* You want the upper houses to have more power because that would give Green upper house members more power.
* You want upper house and lower house elections held on different days because that would create a “by-election effect” for the upper house election so the Greens could win more seats. (As the DLP did in the 1960s.)
* You want redistributions rigged to produce nice inner city seats that Greens can win.
* You want the taxpayer to pay for Greens campaign advertising.
I don’t blame you for having this partisan wishlist. We all have partisan wishlists – I would like the franchise restricted to paid up members of trade unions. But please stop this childish pretence that this things are all somehow in the public interest. They are in the partisan interest of the Greens, and nothing else.
Anyone care to hazard a guess as to what Malcolm’s first QT question will be on Tuesday? Plus how long before someone interjects “did you write that one”?
How come the Liberals have no policies?
I think Labor will be make some references to integrity, trustworthiness and honesty – all the areas Turnbull struggles with in the polls.
Will anybody miss me now I’ve made the decision to spend more time with my family?
[How come the Liberals have no policies?]
Glen
I am sure the Libs have lots of policies, they just can’t decide on any. 😉
102
14 Senators per state would also have helped the Democrats and would reduce the chance of their being an ALP government and the Coalition have half the Senate.
Upper houses having more power is useful when they are elected democratically because they can act as a more useful house of review.
An upper house is more likely to be an effective house of review if it is not controlled by one party or coalition.
If the undemocratic divide and conquer electoral system is kept (which I oppose) then major areas of Greens support should not be divided in two just because of a creek.
Australia would be a better place if the major parties did not need to go after the corporate dollar to get the funding to campaign.
You don`t really think that the franchise should be restricted to trade unionists do you? Are you even a member of a trade union? As I demonstrate above these policies are not just in the interests of the Greens.
“Will anybody miss me now I’ve made the decision to spend more time with my family?”
Yes.
[You don’t really think that the franchise should be restricted to trade unionists do you?]
Absolutely!
[Are you even a member of a trade union?]
Of course I am.
[As I demonstrate above these policies are not just in the interests of the Greens.]
Bollocks.
My guess is the Liberal QT theme for next week will be “waste and mismanagement” in the Stimpacs.
They will say the Govt. overstated the GFC and that the $300+ billion debt is badly targeted. They will quote Ms Bita from the Australian as proof.
Psephos
I didn’t hear or read anything directly on the Lisbon vote – although I understand that other Europeans are more than a little concerned. The one observation I would make is that the politics in Ireland right now is very, very volatile. The pharmacists were on strike because of cuts to Government subsidies for medecines. Thomas Cook workers were holed up in a Thomas Cook office over a dispute about payouts. The farmers were frothing that there would be 12,000 less farmers by the time the proposed cuts in farming subsidies worked its way through the system. The pub association was moaning about the continuing closure of pubs. There will be thousands of garda and teachers lose their jobs. We saw housing developmments abandoned half way through. The single biggest issue is a proposal to set something called NAMA which would essentially take up scads of toxic bank debt. The tab is potentially in the order of 100 billion euro. For a country with only three million voters that is a lot of Government debt. To top it off news came through of some fairly free snouting at the luxury trough by the people’s representatives. Not quite as imaginative at the Brit MPs’ efforts but still enough to get the Irish blood up.
Two Party reps of the ruling mob left the party while we were there over cuts to cancer treatment. If they vote against the Government it is out of Government.
The Liberal QT theme next week will be whatever the Murdoch press tells them it should be.
[As I explained earlier in America almost all the elections are at once so all the election campaign advertising demand is clumped together]
Sure, but I think there are OTHER reasons to regulate expenditure on elections, which means political parties just won’t be allowed to buy as much advertising, so this shouldn’t be an issue.
[How come the Liberals have no policies?]
Because as soon as they start adopting policies it will just mean there are more things for them to argue with each other about.
The Liberals would be well advised to keep well away from economic policy next week as the IMF has got nothing to help them.
http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pn/2009/pn09101.htm
[Upper houses having more power is useful when they are elected democratically because they can act as a more useful house of review.]
The Australian senate is elected democratically.
I would support a system that puts the entire Senate up for election at every election. This would lower the quota, but it would ensure that the representation of the senate is synchronised with the government. I think it was silly that the Rudd government was elected, but had to face a coalition majority until the new senate took over.
[Australia would be a better place if the major parties did not need to go after the corporate dollar to get the funding to campaign.]
So this would mean allowing political parties to receive more public funding, which is opposed by the Greens and Family First, i.e. the deciding votes in the Senate.
[The Liberals would be well advised to keep well away from economic policy next week as the IMF has got nothing to help them.]
Remember it was the IMF the Liberals were quoting when they said Treasury’s growth projections for 2011 – 2013 were too optimistic.
The problem the Libs have with policy at the moment is that on the three big questions of the day – the economy, IR and climate – Labor’s policies are both correct and supported by the voters. So the Liberals have three choices:
* Agree with Labor
* Disagree with the voters
* Say nothing
These are not very enviable choices. They have chosen to say nothing, and instead to rely on the Murdoch press to find new bogus “Rudd scandals” for them to use as diversions. We see with emailgate where that leads, but they have no choice.
110
Which union?
I wonder whether it’s Grech’s high profile that has him staying in the psych ward for the length of time he has? He’s clearly up to having chats with Fielding. I’d love to be at the clinical review. “Why is he still here?” “Because the media are camped at the doorstep.” “Send him home via the back door.” “Can’t, he’s threatened to go straight to the media and complain we booted him out when he’s still sick.”
Christopher Pyne should be sacked, I hope he loses his seat in 2010.
He’s a shocking Manager of Opposition and he’s released not one education policy since taking the shadow education ministry…he’s a low flyer IMHO.
“How come the Liberals have no policies?”
At this stage, especially given their current position, nobody in their right mind would release anything…
Liberal meme of the [next] week? According to Phillip Coorey SMH:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/going-down-down-down-20090807-ecyv.html?page=-1
116
The Senate system is democratically elected except for the malapportionment and that thing Melbcity/Democracy at Work goes on about. The system of half Senate elections means that there is the whole new mandate/old mandate. If the Half Senate elections where held separately then there would be less likelihood of a government or opposition majority.
No it does not necessarally mean that there would be extra public funding. The system I proposed would mean that the radio and television stations would have to give free advertising to the significant parties. This would only cost the government some lost advertising time on SBS unless the SBS broadcasts were taken out of time used by ads for SBS programs. Fielding only rejected the avertising law because the government would not agree to a $10,000,000 spending cap per party.
Apropos of the various statements which have been made by journalists etc. implying that Mr Turnbull, in accepting the titbits put in front of him by the singular Mr Grech, was only doing what any politician would have done, it is worth recalling the story recounted by Heather Henderson, daughter of Sir Robert Menzies, in her letter to the April 2008 edition of Quadrant:
“When my father came to office in 1949 a senior public servant came to see him and paraded his Liberal political sympathies. My father said to him: “What you have said makes you of no use to me. I cannot work with you again.” The word soon went round. My father looked to the public service to provide non-political professional advice and respected it for doing so.”
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6459/is_4_52/ai_n29434543/
Menzies, of course, wasn’t a merchant banker.
I am intrigued by the concern of some politicians saying the high cost of running elections is a reason not to remove corporate donations, lower disclosure limits etc.
Surely we could readily revert to spending about half as much money on elections and everyone could be happy – especially voters in marginal seats bombarded with constant letters etc. Similarly Commonwealth MPs seem to be over provided with expenses judging by some of the spending which goes on.
HSO
I was thinking the same thing – most people with a major depressive disorder are not treated as in patients (unless they are likely to harm themselves).
Why are his medical team allowing him to talk to journalists and politicians? Surely this would not be helping him recover from his illness?
“We’ll just have to start demanding they wind back the stimulus spending.”
Take a wild guess what 80+% of ‘Tradies” will think of that. The Government’s Stimulus projects have been the only client in town, for months.
[ Glen
Posted Saturday, August 8, 2009 at 5:43 pm | Permalink
How come the Liberals have no policies?]
Labor has policies because the union movements control over labor is now about zero. Labor is now a party of technocrats. They set policy for technocrat reasons (green papers and white papers have a purpose) the old cultural wars are nothing more than something to beat the Liberals over the head with..
Within the Liberals the right wing nutters may be for it, but fighting on social view that belong in the dark ages isn’t a winner. There are still enough sane member within the party to realize that, so no policy there.
The coal miners don’t want action on climate change (can’t work out why, Australia isn’t their market), however business in General wants action because it will lead to change, change is an economic opportunity, smart business people want to start making plans, they want the ETS to happen.. The smart pollies realize this but the parties full of cultural worries that want to fight over things the electorate doesn’t care about, or even believe in, no policy there.
IR was fixed up by Keating, Howard made a mess of it thinking the things that mattered in the 70,80’s still mattered, they don’t. Once again you have the sane and insane that want to worship Howard. No policy there.
The right wing nutters are destroying the Liberal party because policy wise it is frozen, on the one hand you have the sane that believe no policy is better than insanity from the right, on the other, the nutters that want to bring in policy that will not get them elected, and there is nothing the party can do about it.
ru, it depends on severity and degree of risk as to whether you get admitted with a major depressive disorder. However, what is surprising to me is how long he’s been there. It’s got to be over a month by now. It’s going to blow the length of stay KPI out the window, that’s for sure.
Next QT?
For MT there’s only one way from here and that’s up
He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who takes a back seat after he gets belted all over the shop
He’ll come up with something, that’s for sure
Will it work? who knows?
No doubt we’ll be talking about whatever that might be, come Wednesday
He was self admitted, so I suppose that means it’s up to him when he leaves. (Do self-admittees pay all their own expenses? Can the doctors tell them they’re fine and boot them out?)
According to an article in today’s ‘Age’ he originally treated the hospital as a sort of guest house, popping in and out at whim, until the journos realised he was doing this (reading between lines of the report).
So it seems he’s treating the psych hospital as a sort of sanctuary.
[Christopher Pyne should be sacked, I hope he loses his seat in 2010.]
LOL! Same here. If he wins it is quite possible he will run for deputy leader again after the next election.
[The system of half Senate elections means that there is the whole new mandate/old mandate.]
Which I think is stupid and should be gotten rid of. Every election should produce a completely new senate that takes over immediately.
[The system I proposed would mean that the radio and television stations would have to give free advertising to the significant parties.]
Surely the Government would have to compensate radio and TV stations accordingly, which means a defacto public funding increase.
[Fielding only rejected the avertising law because the government would not agree to a $10,000,000 spending cap per party.]
More likely he rejected it because he doesn’t want the fundamentalist wackaloons that control his party outed.
The Federal Liberals are a sad joke, though of course this is not new. Having dismally failed to deal with the obvious decay of the Howard regime, they have been equally useless ever since their long-overdue defeat in 2007. Now stumbling around in opposition, it is obvious the Liberals have always had just two policies: the first one is to postpone facing up to things as long as possible; the second one is an emergency defense to be invoked when the first policy has failed, and this is to then do absolutely as little as possible.
This is their reflex style: postpone and then dodge. It is little wonder they are in several minds about things at once and equally less remarkable they have conceded their leadership to a grandstanding jester like Turnbull.
[How come the Liberals have no policies?]
A bit of an philisophical question for a Saturday night.
zoomster, you can’t admit yourself to a public ward in Victoria and I thought he was in a public ward. Could be wrong. If it’s private then it gets complicated by what private cover he has and what gap there might be, and so on. Certainly in public wards, you’ll get booted out as soon as you’re stabilised.
Grog
I am so disillusioned with the current state of the Liberal Party.
They are a complete joke. John Howard would be ashamed of the rabble they’ve turned into.
How come the Liberals have no policies?
Well they have done nothing to deserve any policies, for a start. Where is the evidence that they have thought again about the issues? Where are the signs of fresh thinking and new vision for the future? The thing is, with so many fogeys – of both old and young persuasions – in their midst, new policies are going to be nothing but trouble for the Libs.
[John Howard would be ashamed of the rabble they’ve turned into.]
John Howard partly caused the problems the party is now having. Costello is right on this point, the Liberals have the cult of the leader whereas Labor has the cult of the party.
ShowsOn how does that square with the cult of Whitlam, the cult of Keating the cult of Hawke and the cult of Rudd???
Glen, as much as I know you admire John Howard, the Party now is pretty much the same mob he joined, lead and then took to defeat.
And then there is the cult of Curtin, the cult of Chifley, the cult of Carpenter, the cult of Cain, the cult of Beattie, the cult of Goss and cult of Bacon. How many cults does it take to make a movement? Is there a plural of the noun: a host of cults?
Really, the LIbs want a Menzies-like saviour: someone to rescue them from the inevitability of political mortality.
There’s some pretty charts and interesting comment from the Reserve Bank here:
http://petermartin.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-reserve-bank-sees-it-in-pictures.htmlhttp://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pn/2009/pn09101.htm
Whitlam reformed the party in order to win the 1972 election.
Keating knew he had a better chance of winning in 1993 so he convinced the party to get rid of Hawke.
Rudd knew that Labor’s brand had improved and was slightly ahead of the Liberals in polls, but he realised that Beazley was holding the vote back, so he convinced the party to get rid of Beazley.
Add to these examples the following hand overs:
Carr to Iemma
Bracks to Brumby
Beattie to Bligh
Lennon to Bartlett
Martin to Henderson
Iemma and Bligh went on to win elections (Henderson kind of won), Brumby is surely favourite to win the next Victorian election.
Compare this to Howard who repeatedly refused to hand over to Costello even though he tried to gain a 5th term by telling everyone he would retire!
Glen @ 140 – The difference is that the “cults” (as you call them) of Whitlam, Hawke and Keating represent a certain nostalgia on the part of their various supporters, but it was never the case when they were in power that everything they did was automatically assumed to be right. The Liberals are paying the price now for the “four legs good, two legs bad” attitude that represented political philosophy for much of the class of ’96.
My preferred cult is the Dunstan Sect, of South Australian fame. Possibly one of the greatest little governments of all time. Magic. Brave. Beautiful.
We run a very good deprogramming scheme for defectors, Glen. You’d very soon forget all that evil brainwashing they put you through, and become a useful member of society again.
“Can the doctors tell them they’re fine and boot them out?”
Yes they can and it happens daily(People with charges pending try this all the time)
Usually they then go find a GP and say “I want to die or I’ll kill myself and get referred back to Canb Psych, it doesn’t work. Canb Psych is the Ultra John West for the Mentally ill.
They reject everybody,almost, every time
I can assure you, if your name wasn’t “*G” you’d be on the street by 3pm
Hmmm i dont think I could take your Labor Left members Adam.
I’d prefer to become bitter about politics for the time being lol!
Still I can drown my sorrows with a Tory NT Government next week 😀
[Hmmm i dont think I could take your Labor Left members Adam.]
But you’re willing to associate with religious wackaloons like Kevin Andrews and David Clarke?