Another night before Christmas

Doubts the election is quite as imminent as all that, and a slightly dated poll result showing business as usual pre-budget.

Or maybe seven nights. According to Anthony Galloway of the Herald Sun, “speculation intensified yesterday about whether Mr Morrison will call the election tomorrow for May 11, or wait until the end of next week for a May 18 poll”. The latter would suit me better, if he’s reading. Liberal sources say the Prime Minister might be considering holding off “in the hope of a poll bounce after this week’s Budget”, which would be optimistic of him.

Also in the paper today is a rather unusual bit of opinion polling from YouGov Galaxy, which was conducted pre-budget – last Monday to Thursday, to be precise – from a large sample of 2224. The interesting bit is that Labor leads 53-47 on two-party preferred, discouraging the notion that the New South Wales election might have changed anything. However, the larger purpose of the exercise is to burrow down into voters’ perceptions of the party leaders, taken to include Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer as well as the usual suspects. I don’t find this stuff particularly interesting myself, but there’s a lot of detail in the report linked to above, if you can access it.

UPDATE: The poll appeared not to provide the usual forced response follow-up for the initially undecided on voting intention, thus includes an undistributed 8% “don’t know”. The remainder went Labor 34%, Coalition 33%, Greens 9%, One Nation 8%, United Australia Party 3% and Australian Conservatives 2%. Excluding the don’t know component, this becomes Labor 37%, Coalition 36%, Greens 10% and One Nation 9%.

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.

1,277 comments on “Another night before Christmas”

Comments Page 14 of 26
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  5. So if someone with cancer gets a bill from a public hospital from now on can you just quote the PM saying it is all free???

  6. Nicholas – thank you for your response to my post.

    “It was not well understood by the people who set up the Eurozone.”

    The construction of the Eurozone was and is one of the more disgraceful episodes in EU history, and the process used contrasts unfavourably with the rather lucid process at Bretton Woods.

    The chronology appears to be:
    1 – Bretton Woods understood the fiscal recycling requirement in a monetary union
    2 – MMT terminology emerged, describing the same
    3 – The Eurozone formulation ignored both 1 and 2.

    1 came before 2, and so MMT cannot claim to have identified the issue. It might claim to have clarified it, but the current confusion over MMT suggest that that too is not the case

    “Ultimately I have come to judge economic theories by their usefulness at framing and explaining the world, not their mathematical elegance. For me an economic approach must help me understand the world, and provide me with some useful insights (preferably about my day job – investing). On those measures let me assure you that MMT thrashes neoclassical economics, hands down.”

    The unjustified predominance of ‘mathematical elegance’ in economics is well known and mostly it is poor mathematics (or poor applied mathematics) rather than some deficiency in mathematics as a discipline. As Norbert Weiner said in 1962:

    “Thus the economic game is a game where the rules are subject to important revisions, say, every ten years, and bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the Queen’s croquet game in Alice in Wonderland, which I have already mentioned. Under the circumstances, it is hopeless to give too precise a measurement to the quantities occurring in it. To assign what purports to be precise values to such essentially vague quantities is neither useful nor honest, and any pretense of applying precise formulae to these loosely defined quantities is a sham and a waste of time.”

    Mathematicians (such as Wiener) have known from the start that this mis-application of mathematics by people such as Paul Samuelson and the Chicago School* is “a sham and a waste of time”, though they failed to predict the damage that would be caused.

    It’s possible that the nascent ability to get at and process the data (via computing and machine learning) will change this, and certainly there is a new wave of data driven economics principally at MIT and Harvard who pursuing this. Several of the MMT scholars are data driven too, though as far as I can see they lack the necessary sophistication (I think their data driven retrospective studies of the Treasury/Fed money movement only suggest causality, rather than demonstrate it to a scientific standard)

    *Of course Samuelson and the Chicago School reached completely different conclusions, revealing that at the basal level they were more or less just making it up!

  7. I keep hearing this Liberal refrain of “debt and deficit” about former Labor governments, but total crickets when it comes to the fact the actual size of LNP government debt has doubled in the last 6 years of government.
    All the hoo-ha about “being in the black” is total cobblers in that one can liken this to having made enough money this year to pay this year’s bills, but in the meantime doubled the mortgage.
    Also total crickets after Uncle Colin left something like $38 billion of debt in WA before he was swept away. It’s Labor trying to sort out this fiasco.
    It is an absolute urban myth that the Liberals are better money managers than Labor but it is one they delude Joe Public with and worse, delude themselves.
    I know it doesn’t really matter, but the total waste of money Morrison indulged himself in, by so-say setting up Christmas Island again for a detention centre, then taking a ego-trip out to the island and then closing the whole island only underlines his shallow, used-car salesman persona.
    I think the polls have got it right – arrogant and smug.
    I am inclined to add sanctimonious, but then this is just a personal opinion.
    The Liberals and their hayseed mates do know how to pick some shockers – Abbott – Turnbull – Joyce and now Morrison.

  10. I doubt too many people care if Morrison sees the GG this week or next week. School holidays and Easter will be on most minds.

  11. Don’t know what to make of the polls as it has all been a bit fluid in the last 3 weeks or so. Put me down for 53-47 and this for any polls at this point.

  14. Steve777: “Emperor William Shorten I. That’s got a nice ring to it. And of course the Australian Empire is greater in geographical extent than most of the great empires in history, even in population. And that’s before the conquests.”

    Yes and I hope the New Zealanders realise that their pathetic 120 years of avoiding rightful incorporation into the Federation will shortly be coming to an end.

    Time’s Up Jac – Kaiser Bill’s here!

  17. Torchbearer @ #655 Saturday, April 6th, 2019 – 9:39 pm

    So if someone with cancer gets a bill from a public hospital from now on can you just quote the PM saying it is all free???

    Any treatment I have ever had in a Public Hospital has been free.
    Day surgery and other procedures in a Private Hospital have had significant costs attached.

  18. Zoid – “I know I just thought it was funny because it’s true.” Yes, also a good summary of some of the discussion of economic theories on this site.

  20. LR: 54/46 for Newspoll and 55/45 for Essential please. Should be more after the GRASPer’s week of pathetic chaos, but another week of full Mordor while ScuMo empties the till will see it so.

  24. Anyone who cares enough to sit through the budget and reply would give ALP the tick.
    54 – 46 for Labor, 53 – 47 essential.
    L/NP Govt has no money. Any spend will be farewell surplus. They are now going to pay for their hopeless performance since Hockey and Abbott arrived on the scene. The cost of that plebiscite and those RCs, CI and Company tax cuts will now see them ‘cut’.

  29. I wonder if voters just tell the door knockers what they want to hear so they will just fuck off and leave them to enjoy their weekends in peace.
    I remember a red shirt down at Pt Lonsdale market a few years ago, quite an elderly plump lady she was. Organisers escorted her away due to her being such a pest and annoying the patrons.

  31. On predicting the Eurozone crisis years in advance:

    In order to judge how correct MMT was in its predictions, of course, we have to understand what went wrong in the Eurozone. Our argument was that separating fiscal policy from currency sovereignty would raise questions of solvency that would constrain ability of fiscal policy to expand when necessary. That was the basis of all these arguments: Godley, Goodhart, Bell/Kelton, Forstater, and Wray. But there was an additional angle: how would the crisis begin? Would it be a recession that no individual government could resolve by fiscal stimulus? Would it be chronic current account deficits of some member states (to the benefit of Mercantilists like Germany or the Netherlands)? Or would it be a financial crisis? Well, how about a Trifecta: all three at once?

    I think all readers of NEP understand the problems raised by recession—so there is no need to go into that one in detail. As individual nations faced a downturn, their budgets would move sharply to deficits that would rise further above Maastricht criteria; markets would react with higher interest rates that would in turn raise deficits further in a vicious cycle. OK, that happened. And then, of course, we also found out that (Surprise! Surprise!) governments had already been manipulating accounting so their deficits had always been higher than supposed.

    NEP readers are also familiar with the current account story—easily understood through the lens of Godley’s sectoral balance approach. The best work in this area has been done by Eric Tymoigne, Daniel Negreiros Conceição, Scott Fullwiler, and especially Rob Parenteau (who has enriched a model introduced by Paul Krugman). I won’t expand on that right now—but a current account deficit must be offset by a combination of a domestic private sector deficit and/or a government deficit. Since these are not sovereign currency issuing governments, private and government deficits can both lead to problems. (To be clear, it is much more than a current account problem, as Rob shows. Any EMU nation can be blown up by its banks even while running a current account surplus. This is the “financialization” or “Money Manager Capitalism” story—probably more than 90% of cross-border finance has nothing to do with the current account, and it was that part of finance that blew up countries like Ireland and Spain. I’ll explain that elsewhere in a response to an entirely confused and specious anti-MMT diatribe by Sergio Cessarato.)

    Finally there was the financial crisis angle. So far as I know, Warren Mosler was the first to fully understand this. He was harping on it for as long as I can remember—long before the 2001 article quoted above.

    (I have recently become aware of a 1998 paper by P.M. Garber (1998. “Notes on the Role of TARGET in a Stage III Crisis.” Working Paper 6619, Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research. June.) that explicated the problems created by the clearing mechanism. I covered that over in my GLF blog two weeks ago. A troll responded that MMT had never before paid any attention to the EMU, and (wrongly) cited the “1992” article by Godley as evidence that we simply stole the idea from him.)

    But Warren had long argued that a very likely path to crisis would come from a bank failure. With no equivalent to Washington to come to the rescue, each individual nation would have to bail out its own banks. That would add to government debt, cause interest rates to spike, and lead to a run out of banks that could not be stopped. Except by the center—the ECB—which was not supposed to do anything of the sort.

    Hello!?! That’s where we are, folks.

    Judge for yourselves. Greatest prediction of the past 20 years? Probably not. But certainly our understanding of how “modern money” works helped us to see the underlying problems. Our main claim is now commonplace—almost no commentator now fails to refer to the problems created by separating fiscal policy from the currency. When we wrote this back in 1997-99 at the launch of the misguided experiment, we were ridiculed as fringe nay-sayers. We’re still ridiculed as fringe, of course, even though our main argument is now as mainstream as it can get.

    http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/07/mmt-the-euro-and-the-greatest-prediction-of-the-last-20-years.html

  35. taylormade says:
    Saturday, April 6, 2019 at 10:32 pm

    I wonder if voters just tell the door knockers what they want to hear so they will just fuck off and leave them to enjoy their weekends in peace.
    I remember a red shirt down at Pt Lonsdale market a few years ago, quite an elderly plump lady she was. Organisers escorted her away due to her being such a pest and annoying the patrons.
    _____________________
    When you hear that Bludgers who live a little closer to crazytown than most of us, like Briefly and C@t, are out campaigning it does make you wonder what influence they are having out there. As a candidate you’d really want to vet your people thoroughly, but even then you are not seeing how they react with people on the street. You’d have to think that the chances that a bad encounter influencing a vote was more likely than the opposite.

  36. On predicting the Global Financial Crisis years in advance:

    Remember the comments made by Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas Jr (University of Chicago) in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association:

    My thesis in this lecture is that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: Its central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades. There remain important gains in welfare from better fiscal policies, but I argue that these are gains from providing people with better incentives to work and to save, not from better fine tuning of spending flows. Taking U.S. performance over the past 50 years as a benchmark, the potential for welfare gains from better long-run, supply side policies exceeds by far the potential from further improvements in short-run demand management.

    So the ‘business cycle’ was dead and all that governments should do was to further privatise and deregulate.

    At the time, the private debt buildup and the pursuit of fiscal surpluses was leading to a perfect storm. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists wrote about the impending crisis even during the 1990s – it was not a matter of if, but when and how bad it would be.

    The mainstream with their were blithely unaware.

    Those modern New Keynesian models typically didn’t even have a financial sector in them because they didn’t think ‘money mattered’.

    It is clear that the mainstream of my profession spend their time propagating a macroeconomics literature that has zero predictive content. We know that because Robert Lucas was wrong – the business cycle was far from dead and just four years later the financial system collapsed and we are still picking up the pieces.

    It is no surprise that the mainstream macroeconomic models didn’t predict the crisis – their macroeconomic models assumed stability, did not have financial sectors (banks etc) built into the models, and were underpinned by the biased view that free markets would optimally self-regulate.

    That is the approach that appears in all the mainstream textbooks in macroeconomics.

    Our textbook will take a completely different approach.

    And it is not surprising that the first point of call for governments in late 2008 who were facing the meltdown of their entire financial and production systems was the so-called outdated approach that MMT economists advocate.

    The policy makers didn’t turn to DSGE New Keynesian models – they used an approach that is outlined in our textbook.

    One could never understand the last 25 years of Japanese economic history using the approach taken in mainstream macroeconomics textbooks.

    One could never understand wage developments in the real world using a rational expectations NAIRU approach which is embedded in all mainstream macroeconomics textbooks.

    It is no surprise that they didn’t see the GFC coming and couldn’t explain how to get out of it.

    But the neo-liberal Groupthink is so strong and the denial is so pervasive that these characters go through their careers with blinkers on.

    http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=35294

  37. Jolyon Wagg says:
    Saturday, April 6, 2019 at 10:37 pm

    Haha Nath…here’s a tip: troll not lest ye yourself be trolled
    _______________
    troll away my friend. I stopped being upset when Collingwood lost when I was 12 🙂

  39. I’ve run various trials of doorknocking. In one area I doorknocked, the booth result was nearly 10% better than the surrounding booths. When I campaigned for local council, I knew (from experience) that door knocking doubled my vote – I knew I was going to lose the last campaign because I was working full time and couldn’t get out there.

    You rarely get to talk to many people, mostly they’re out. It’s the fact you tried to contact them that counts.

  41. Collingwood won’t win the premiership playing chip, chip, chippy.
    At least De Goey played ok after costing his team last years flag. Should have flown with McGovern instead of hanging back looking for the easy over the top.

  44. Davidwh says:
    Saturday, April 6, 2019 at 10:43 pm

    I enjoyed it when Collingwood lost in 2002 and 2003
    ___________________
    Where is it exactly where you live in Queensland?

    🙂

  46. taylormade says:
    Saturday, April 6, 2019 at 10:44 pm

    Collingwood won’t win the premiership playing chip, chip, chippy.
    At least De Goey played ok after costing his team last years flag. Should have flown with McGovern instead of hanging back looking for the easy over the top.
    ________________
    You;d be the only person blaming De Goey for that loss.
    I’ve seen Collingwood win two flags in my lifetime. Not exactly a bountiful harvest, but it could’ve been alot worse. Imagine being a St.Kilda supporter!

  49. 53 47 for me both polls. Pretty sure we’re getting Ipsos too but not even going to go there other than to predict that the Greens vote will be way too high.

  50. Honestly though, many people take the football too seriously. I have seen quite a few punch ups at the MCG in my time and it is quite pathetic. I also don’t like the recent policy of bunching up supporters in big sections, Soccer style. I always enjoyed going with a friend who supported the opposite team, in a mixed area without any lunatics. A bit of passion is fine, but these alcohol fueled aggressive morons are a menace.

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