ReachTEL has published results of an automated phone poll of 2922 respondents across the country which has the Coalition leading 51-49, down from 52-48 in the immediate aftermath of the leadership change, from primary votes of 39.3% for Labor (up 0.5%, 45.4% for the Coalition (up 0.3%) and 8.3% for the Greens (down 0.4%). ReachTEL shows Kevin Rudd with an unusually narrow 52.4-47.6 lead over Tony Abbott as preferred prime minister, but the knife is nonetheless turned on Abbott by a result on voting intention under a Malcolm Turnbull leadership which has the Coalition lead at 58-42. Turnbull is also favoured 65-35 over Rudd as preferred prime minister.
DN
OK
In any case, when climate change and overpopulation cause global water and food shortages, we’re going to wish we were back at a time when our selfishness was by choice :P.
[Psephos, I wasn’t aware our judiciary were meant to be swayed by public opinion. That’s the role of politicians. If they are swayed enough to conclude that they don’t like what the legal system does, they should change it.]
Of course the judiciary is swayed by public opinion. Specifically, by the opinion of their peers. In the days when the judiciary was drawn exclusively from the public schools, it was opinion at the Melbourne Club that counted. Since the 70s, there has been a big change in the composition of the judiciary. Now half of them listen to the Melbourne Club and the other half listen to Phillip Adams. None of them pay much attention to the Australian people. On this issue, both right and left-wing elites tend to share the same elite opinions (vis Malcolm Fraser). It’s this bipartisan elite contempt for the views of the Australian people that fuels right-wing populism.
DN
‘In any case, when climate change and overpopulation cause global water and food shortages, we’re going to wish we were back at a time when our selfishness was by choice’
The wealthy will still be able to be selfish while AGW rolls along. Isn’t that the whole point of life, regardless of the circumstances?
Socrates@1991
Perhaps a further strengthening of the changes might be to offer those intercepted the choice of return to one of their transit countries or proceeding to PNG?
That would remove a lot of pressure off PNG and make it possible to cope with larger numbers.
[Not sure if the English version of Aljazeera that we see in Australia is the same as the Arabic version seen in the Middle East but boats & PNG figure prominently in the most viewed stories in the “Asia Pacific” section.]
Using Google Translate, there is a similar story in the Arabic edition aimed at the Middle east. The story is reaching the places where many boat people originate. Whether or not Aljazeera is permitted in Iran, the message will get through.
[1993
Psephos
Some bludgers may recall that a few weeks ago I posted an analysis of the rigging of the Malaysian election at my website
http://psephos.adam-carr.net/countries/m/malaysia/electioncomment.txt%5D
I do recall this, Psephos, and was wondering to myself just where things are heading for Anwar. He has been fighting for many years now.
Anyway, well done. The Malaysians need all the help they can get.
Psephos@1993
My esteem for you has been further enhanced.
Good stuff!
Boerwar:
I loved Penang as well when I was there about 15 years ago. I had so many enjoyable experiences with the locals, and where I learned that curries are a totally acceptable breakfast food!
That trip I also befriended an Arab woman who was holidaying with her husband and children – they were staying in the hotel suite a couple of doors down from me. She had to wear the whole head to toe black, including face veil, and couldn’t go swimming in the pool despite the heat and humidity. She had to sit around the pool in her black garments in stifling heat.
When her husband found out about our friendship I never saw her again. I saw him and the kids almost every day, but never saw her. She was around my age too. Talk about totally different worlds.
Dang you, DN.
…your proximity exposes me to your darker emotional aura. keepyer distance, bitte…..
JV
[But Emeritus Law Professor sprocket thinks he’s overlooked stuff 🙂 :
Pity he doesn’t cite S51 of the Constitution or the Migration Act.]
In Legal Institutions 101 I learnt the international conventions are not worth the paper they are printed on.
Australia is a sovereign nation, and the Constitution and Parliament make our laws. If the Commonwealth can make laws for immigration (s51), then the Migration Act provisions which specify that “unlawful non-citizens” who arrive outside “the migration zone” can be sent to “an offshore processing country”.
The High Court set a number of conditions which an “offshore processing country” must meet – Malaysia didn’t – I can assure you that PNG does.
Any challenge to the PNG deal will fail.
bemused
‘Perhaps a further strengthening of the changes might be to offer those intercepted the choice of return to one of their transit countries or proceeding to PNG?’
Transit countries would be ticklish but the option of going home is active and has been taken by lots of people. I imagine that it is fundamental to the success of the Raskols Cargo Cult Solution that many, if not most, boat-borne asylum seekers never end up in Manus at all. They just hop on a plane and fly home.
Boerwar, we’ll have to be selfish, we won’t have the choice not to be.
whatever happened to these damaging rudd ads, which the liberal party were putting on the tv and air waves
they seem to disappear , ad Abbott does when he gets ask questions
Confessions, how insufferable for that woman…..
confessions
Risky social business…
I take it those anti rudd ads , didnt hit the mark ?
DN
‘Boerwar, we’ll have to be selfish, we won’t have the choice not to be.’
Tosh. We always have choices.
Ultimately the Australian people is sovereign in Australia. If a government’s efforts to deal with illegal immigration are frustrated by the courts, a referendum to strengthen the Commonwealth’s immigration powers would pass overwhelmingly.
I am looking forward to the ‘Kevin O’Coconut’ ads…
uh… wait a minute…
Oh just go along with my drama won’t you?
Reduced choice then :P.
[Confessions, how insufferable for that woman…..]
It’s certainly not a life I could’ve lived, that’s for sure.
Bob!
ever with the cutting querie…..
Dunno.
In fact every liberal party ad, has disappeared
It’s very heartening to have the ALP moving their policy positions towards those of the Coalitions. I wonder how much more of it will happen before Election Day.
DN !
izatso?
Posted Saturday, July 20, 2013 at 7:05 pm | PERMALINK
Bob!
ever with the cutting querie…..
Dunno.
——————
The newsltd hacks were telling people these anti rudds ads were going to be damaging
I guess they didnt to who though
Bob, see off this imposter, ask him a Cutter !
CC
Under Rudd, any policy is possible provided it passes all the thresholds for good policy:
‘Will it add to Kevin Rudd’s personal power?’
I guess they didnt say to who though
Only half my dark is insincere, izatso, don’t worry.
Good evening Bludgers
I’ve been travelling non-stop for a couple of weeks and haven’t had much time to post on here.
I am amazed at the policy changes announced over the past couple of weeks. I suspect that – on the whole – these represent extremely good politics, but their policy worth is pretty dubious. As I will attempt to explain.
1) Removal of the fixed carbon price: surely excellent on political grounds, but a shame in terms of how it takes the pressure off Australians to change their consumption patterns away from greenhouse gas-emitting forms of energy production. As someone who has closely followed the science and is convinced that climate change is a desperately urgent problem for humanity comparable to that of the rise of fascism in the 1930s, I was happy about rapidly rising electricity prices. I would also like to see petrol prices rise rapidly as well (which they have been lately, but not because of government policy). I am beastly careless about what such price rises mean for “working families”. From my point of view, the whole point of this exercise was to make the prices of these things to go up dramatically, to encourage the market to offer alternatives. So this policy change is a backward step for mine.
2) The FBT changes re motor vehicles. The big problem with this – both politically and, to some extent, in terms of policy – is that, like the mooted superannuation tax changes earlier in the year, the politicians who announced this change don’t really seem to have a good grasp of how it will impact people. These days, company cars are not just the preserve of highly-paid executives: a large proportion of the workforce – including many relatively lowly paid workers – have novated lease vehicles which they use predominantly for private purposes (remembering that driving between home and work does not necessarily represent a work-related purpose in terms of FBT).
These changes will immediately remove the benefit of novated leases, and will thereby have a greater impact on the less well-paid. The executives will still be ok: most of them still have their cars provided by their employers, who will also no doubt be prepared to pick up the now higher FBT bill for them.
The hardest hit will be the aspirational voters who I think Labor should be doing everything it can to embrace. So this policy change is actually bad politics IMO.
But I still think it’s good policy. The idea that half the population should pay (through tax concessions) for the motor vehicles of the other half seemed to me to be absurd. Given the greenhouse gas crisis, we shouldn’t be subsidising private motor vehicles in any way, shape or form: we should be encouraging more people to use public transport.
3) The PNG solution. As a political move: totally brilliant. As a policy solution to the problem of unauthorised boat arrivals: completely ludicrous. The High Court, the Greens and (to their eternal shame, at least in my eyes) the Coalition rejected a really promising policy solution in the form of the proposed Malaysian agreement. Assuming that it could have been gradually scaled up (which I understand was the working assumption on both sides), this would have delivered an outcome in which unauthorised arrivals could have been sent from Australia to a multicultural society with a growing economy and, consequently, a need for the labour and skills of the asylum seekers. Furthermore, a substantial proportion of these asylum seekers are themselves Muslims, who could be expected to fit reasonably well into the majority Muslim community of Malaysia. In exchange for taking these people, Malaysia would get to send to Australia a significant number of asylum seekers from their camps: people whose need for resettlement in a first world country are typically far more urgent than that of the people arriving in Australia on boats.
Instead, we now will send people to PNG: a socially-divided country, riddled with corruption, and with a stagnant economy that struggles to find meaningful jobs and an adequate standard of living for many of its own people. What sort of worthwhile future could the people we send there hope to make for themselves? As far as I can see, none whatsoever. But apparently it’s all going to be OK because, unlike Malaysia, PNG has signed the convention on refugees. You bloody beauty!!
So I guess we won’t be seeing the likes of Joe Hockey bursting into tears at the thought of young men being sent from Australia to live in PNG.
I don’t blame Rudd for calling the bluff of the Coalition and the High Court on this. I’ll be interested to see what sort of convoluted legal logic the High Court comes up with now to try to stop people being sent to PNG. I have little doubt that they will come up with something: for the past few decades, the judges on the High Court have been consistently producing what one former Solicitor-General described as “results-oriented decision-making” in relation to asylum seekers. (As I understand it, one would have to be a lawyer to fully appreciate what an insulting way that is of referring to the pronouncements of learned judges!)
My dream scenario is that the High Court would stymie the PNG solution and then both parties would agree to support a referendum to clarify that the Australian Government has the power to send asylum seekers wherever it likes. And then we can bring back the Malaysian solution……
Kevie O’ ???
talk not of our leader thus, enemy in th’camp.
Collingwood about to get boned by Gold Coast
[It’s very heartening to have the ALP moving their policy positions towards those of the Coalitions. I wonder how much more of it will happen before Election Day.]
Rudd’s announcement was not a move toward’s the Coalition’s position. Rudd is proposing to resettle genuine refugees is a country which is a signatory to the Refugee Convention. The Coalition’s policy to tow boats out to sea (which is both unworkable and almost certainly illegal under the Law of the Sea Convention), to dump people on Nauru (which is not a signatory), and to bring back TPVs (which were ineffective last time). Abbott and Morrison’s policy laziness on immigration has now been fully exposed.
Briefly
OK
So you are saying that there are factors involved in this election that are difficult to predict?
So you have used things like; applied maxims, probabilities in circumstances, probabilities that are contradictory, probabilities that are difficult to compute;
that are really so vague and broad in meaning that it does not make real practical sense, but may make you sound like intelligent.
Fine, I’d stick to using it with the economy, you’d have a better chance getting away with it 😉
DN. what ? oh…. what side were you posited ?
[2025
Psephos
Not even the judiciary would be stupid enough to hand over a basic element of our sovereignty kit to foreigners.
Well, I fear they might, actually. That’s why I think we will probably end up withdrawing from the Convention. I wish Rudd well trying to get it revised, but as with everything in the UN system, there are too many vested interests involved.
We do have a serious problem with the domination of the higher levels of the judiciary (the Federal Court in particular) by left-liberal elitists contemptuous of public opinion]
I think this is misleading, and under-estimates the nature of legal training and practice. To a large degree, this consists of identifying, defining and asserting the rights of individuals within the law, as matters of principle; and on protecting the ability of the judiciary to find and apply legal rights and remedies. This is not about public opinion. It is about the very particular rights of individuals.
Judges do not have to worry about public opinion, and that is a very good thing. They can focus instead on protecting the humble against the arbitrary misuse of power and on limiting the discretion of the already-powerful.
Obviously, courts can err. But to attribute this to left-liberal elitism is really to dismiss centuries of independent thought, scholarship and reasoning. Whenever this line of argument is raised, I think of the Mabo decision – a triumph of judicial wisdom over legislative populism if ever there was one.
Peter van Onselen @vanOnselenP 47m
It’s funny how so many Libs can’t see the difference btw opposing Pacific Solution BEFORE Nauru signed convention verses AFTER, like PNG…
Retweeted by John McTernan
izatso, I’m on the bleeding heart side.
Menir barber. you owe me a scroller.
glad you’ve caught up.
excellent wheeze, think ?
[2086
Centre
Briefly
OK
So you are saying that there are factors involved in this election that are difficult to predict?
So you have used things like; applied maxims, probabilities in circumstances, probabilities that are contradictory, probabilities that are difficult to compute;
that are really so vague and broad in meaning that it does not make real practical sense, but may make you sound like intelligent.]
Would you prefer it if I pretended to be a dumb fuck like you?
MB
You have not seen those Rudd ads because they were no good.
The Opposition has been totally outplayed by Rudd and they can’t make up their mind what to attack – ball or man/policy or Rudd?
So much for their “war gaming” Rudd’s return.
Dn. I did shy off the puddle at yer feet, a bit.
congratualtions phes,
re the election watch
but that’s different polls I suppose
sprocket, have more resp…. o, never mind.
[to dump people on Nauru (which is not a signatory), ]
Oops I think Nauru is now a signatory. But as we’re seeing at the moment, it not physically capable of being a resettlement destination.
confessions@2028
Evidence please!
briefly !
Briefly
Ooohh penalty for swearing.