I had a paywalled piece in Crikey yesterday giving my immediate post-result impressions, which offered observations such as the following:
Unexpected as all this was, the underlying dynamic is not new, and should be especially familiar to those whose memories extend to Mark Latham’s defeat at the hands of John Howard in 2004. Then as now, the northern Tasmanian seats of Bass and Braddon flipped from Labor to Liberal, with forestry policy providing the catalyst on that occasion, and Labor performed poorly in the outer suburbs, reflected in yesterday’s defeat in Lindsay and its failure to win crucial seats on the fringes of the four largest cities. There were also swings to Labor against the trend in wealthy city seats, attributed in 2004 to the non-economic issues of the Iraq war and asylum seekers, and touted at the time as the “doctors’ wives” effect.
So far as this blog is concerned though, other engagements have prevented me giving the post-election aftermath the full attention it deserves. I will endeavour to rectify that later today, so stay tuned. In the meantime, here is a thread for discussion of the situation. Note also the post below this one, dedicated to updates and discussion on progress in the late count.
pithicus @ #934 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:05 pm
I thought he was a vaccine? 😯
Tristo @ #947 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:13 pm
uh huh. Going to the polls without any policies is another misperception. They got policies alright. Just kept them to themselves.
C@tmomma @ #948 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:14 pm
lol
ItzaDream @ #918 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 4:54 pm
The ABC deserves all that’s coming to it. Jennett was practically wetting himself on Saturday night.
Problem is the likes of Sales and Jennett won’t be the ones to suffer.
Sales to a safe Liberal seat and Jennett to follow Simkins into a Minister’s press office.
Are major parties now so reliant on polling that the hierarchy no longer bothers
to consult their MPs – you know, those bods elected to represent the people? Surely
a raft of backbenchers would’ve been up Shorten et.al like a rat up a drainpipe if
they’d been receiving heat from their constituents with regards to franking credit
or negative gearing changes – or climate change policies for that matter.
Either an enormous number of affected people were keeping their true feelings about
these reforms to themselves, or feedback bubbling up from the ranks was being ignored
or discounted, perhaps due to the supposed comfortable margin. Shorten/Bowen wanted
enough budgetary room to enact their own reforms, instead of simply continuing the
existing deficit.
This bid for fiscal rectitude was to counter the L-NP claims that Labor can’t control
a budget (though doing so didn’t stop those claims), but thanks to Coalition framing
they wound up boxing themselves in anyway – by becoming the party that would steal
your hard earned money. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. A serious and sustained
push back will be needed to break this cycle.
Quoll says:
Monday, May 20, 2019 at 4:55 pm
“So the PB ALP grunts think joining with RWNJ on blaming Greens and indigenous people for the circumstances they face? That’ll work eh. It has worked so well in recent elections.”
How many indigenous people went on the Anti Adani Parade? This is more virtue signalling. How many greens supporters actually go and spend time in Aboriginal Communities to find out what their life is like?
The issue is privileged white elites with middle class lifestyles (with all the carbon pollution inherent in that) going into disadvantaged white communities and telling them they know best.
This is not an indigenous rights issue and it is disingenuous (and revealing) to suggest that it is.
100% fake news.
You’re talking about a thing from 7+ years ago. The article referenced in your fake-news microblog was not written by “the Democrats” (or even, Americans). And the people who wrote it publicly disavowed any notion that they were making that proposal (or any sort of policy proposal), also 7+ years ago.
@Salk
Jeremy Corbyn is not an anti-Semite, Jeremy Corbyn has for his whole career has been a very consistent anti-racist and anti-imperialist. Yes he is naive in being buddies with the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah. But is he is an Anti-Semite?, the answer is no.
The British Press absolutely detest Jeremy Corbyn. Because he is an existentialist threat to their interests. Hence why he has been subjected to an endless smear campaign since he became Labour leader. I believe now that Bill Shorten has been subjected to the same sort of smear campaign by the News Corporation media.
AM
Agree…except that anything more than three words is a level of detail that will overwhelm large chunks of the electorate.
@ItzaDream
ScoMo is in no doubt just as much of a right-wing nut as Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott. He is just shrew enough not to appear to be a right-wing nut job. My American friends when they hear about him, consider him as our Donald Trump.
Just Quietly @ #949 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:18 pm
Labor should just get out of the climate change debate. Leave it to the Greens Party.
briefly says:
Monday, May 20, 2019 at 5:01 pm
Well said mate.
Between the self righteous greens voters (“don’t blame me I vote green and live in Melbourne”) and angry labor voters (“the ignorant f–ks will get what they deserve”) the progressive vote is not looking real flash here.
Time for some self reflection and listening. Either that or Libs forever.
Jolyon Wagg @ #956 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:19 pm
The words are not the issue when those words will be twisted to suit the LNP agenda and you do very little if anything to counter it, because, well you don’t seem to mind losing that much.
Quoll, again for what it’s worth, I do not blame the Greens for Labor’s drubbing. We deserved it. I think we are fortunate not to have lost more seats. We have been an echo of the Gs. We need to write our own tunes from now on. We will.
The Labor approach to climate change must be centred on the needs and expectations of working people. From now on hopefully it will be.
Rex Douglas @ #958 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:21 pm
Labor should never ever follow your advice,
Jackol: “If any of my comments before the election are being referenced I would say that my argument was that having this comprehensive ‘big target’ strategy was a good thing because while it might make the election harder and closer than it would otherwise have been it worked toward the longer term goal of rebuilding trust in the ALP and the system…The polls screwed the ALP, and the ALP is entirely responsible for their own failure in this regard, but still – the polls screwed them into thinking they were doing ok and that their election platform and leadership team and campaign style, in the public gaze for years, was being tolerated by the voting public. They were flying blind and ended up plowing into a mountain that they should have known about (if their information gathering was remotely accurate) but didn’t.”
My posts before and during the campaign were along the lines that I saw Labor’s package of tax policies as a large and unnecessary risk, and that they should have dropped, or at least modified them at the time Malcolm was replaced by ScoMo. As the campaign wore on and the polls remained highly favourable for Labor, I began to think that either a) Labor’s tax policies and continuous rhetoric about the “big end of town” had unexpectedly struck a chord among aspirational voters in the marginal seats or b) voters were so over the instability of the Liberal leadership that they were prepared to overlook the tax policies and vote for Labor anyway.
As it turned out, both of these hypotheses were totally wrong. Labor’s tax policies had gone down as badly as I had thought they would and, instead of being 1.5 percentage points ahead, Labor was actually close to being 2 percentage points behind.
But the failings of the pollsters don’t provide much of an excuse IMO. The Labor leadership must have realised the high risks involved in trying to win government from opposition with a big target tax strategy. Quite a few of them are old enough to clearly remember the 1993 election.
Labor members and supporters have every right to be really angry with the people who stuffed up so badly this golden opportunity to win government. History shows how difficult it is for Labor to win government from opposition at the Federal level. This election was a wonderful opportunity. The leadership’s stubborn persistence with their ridiculous tax package was an ill-disciplined piece of pure self-indulgence.
Key party figures failed to master their briefing about the measures. When asked about his policies on superannuation, Shorten couldn’t seem to remember them. When put under pressure to defend the removal of imputation credits, Bowen struggled and struggled and then more or less threw his hands up in the air and suggested that people who didn’t like it should think about voting for the Coalition.
The policies did not represent a coherent set of reforms: they were a grab bag of measures which lacked any guiding strategy about retirement incomes. That’s because they were devised by the Grattan Institute which is strongly (and, in my view, irrationally) opposed to superannuation being accessible to ordinary people.
The data and advice the Labor leaders got from the Grattan Institute and other sources was consistently poor. The figures on who claimed dividend imputation credits through SMSFs and how much was claimed were never updated to take account of the impact of Turnbull’s measures in 2017 which limited the size of individual super holdings to $1.6 million: when Shorten announced the policy, he claimed that some SMSFs were claiming up to $2.5 million in such credits, which had been possible before Turnbull’s 2017 measures, but this was no longer the case.
It was a policy mess, and exemplified the risk of oppositions trying to devise complex changes to taxation policy without the benefit of Treasury advice.
And to promise to take these credits away from no fewer than 1.17 million people without any grandfathering was close to political suicide. FFS, even the Greens could see that suddenly taking large amounts of income away from elderly people who have no ability to go out and earn any more would be desperately unfair.
Until I saw Penny Wong’s face at around 6 pm on Saturday night, I thought that Labor had gotten away with this insanity. But it turns out that they hadn’t.
“Scomo is in no doubt just as much of a right-wing nut as Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott. ”
I concur . Happy clapper often = rwnj.
Prediction. 2022 will be full on racist dog whistling.
I am sure the Greens’ 1 lower house member and 9 senators will be very effective.
ItzaDream @ #945 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:16 pm
If they try this it will blow out the budget. $10,000 per card/recipient going to Indue which is run by an ex Nats leader. Plus the blowback it would generate would be enormous.
@pithicus
The racist dog whistling has already started with Tudge’s comments about remote Aboriginal communities.
@laughtong
The cashless debit card will be targeted so that the political consequences are minimized. I expect it will be limited to those Centrelink receipts under 35 on payments other than the Disability Support Pension.
briefly @ #957 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:23 pm
Climate change is an issue you can’t have a bob each way on. All in or run dead on the issue.
I hope Labor has learnt that lesson.
“@Salk
Jeremy Corbyn is not an anti-Semite, Jeremy Corbyn has for his whole career has been a very consistent anti-racist and anti-imperialist. Yes he is naive in being buddies with the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah. But is he is an Anti-Semite?, the answer is no.”
Really ?
Considering a number of Labour MP’s walked out on the Party last year, sighting his inability to deal with anti-semitism within his own party as one of the reasons for their split, the fact that at least 40% of Britians Jewish community have stated that they will seriously consider leaving , should he become PM, then I suggest that the Bloke has serious issues that he needs to address.
Just Quietly @ #953 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:18 pm
Surprise it is both an indigenous rights and climate change/global heating issue.
I didn’t think holding two concepts in your mind was beyond the kin of most educated Australians.
As for the future of coal and power prices, and some interesting thoughts on predictions
https://reneweconomy.com.au/climate-change-is-the-root-driver-of-electricity-prices-27979/
One part of ITK’s business is forecasting electricity prices. Our motto is “ all forecasts are wrong but some are useful”.
Our hero is Steve Bradbury and our mantra is “maintenance leads to insight”.
When we get right down to it we forecast electricity prices in a different way to most others. We start with a view that supply will be forced into the system and work out the price from there.
We start with this foundation because we think that electricity policy will be driven by decarbonization – not just in Australia, a minor contributor even to Scope 3 emissions, but globally. Most people just don’t get the scale of change.
Previously we’ve remarked that the global wellhead/minemouth annual production of oil, gas and coal is about US$ 3.5 trillion per year and, in our view, half of that, is likely to go away in the next 15 years.
Of course, if you are not a greenie or a scientist, that is such an extreme view that you certainly won’t be taken seriously. If you are a Chinese coal generator or policy maker what you see is so much wasted investment in coal generation over the past 15 years as to be totally unthinkable.
@YBob
I am not denying the problems of antisemitism in the British Labour Party. However I don’t believe Corbyn personally is antisemitic. Also the Tories have a problem with Islamophobia in the party.
laughtong
Blowing the budget is fine as long as the money goes to maaaates.
People in need? No way that’s evil socialism.
I call bullshit on PVO.
mb
It was catastrophic.
Briefly
I disagree….the Labor approach to climate change must be centered on the science.
Rex Douglas says:
Monday, May 20, 2019 at 5:27 pm
briefly @ #957 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:23 pm
Quoll, again for what it’s worth, I do not blame the Greens for Labor’s drubbing. We deserved it. I think we are fortunate not to have lost more seats. We have been an echo of the Gs. We need to write our own tunes from now on. We will.
The Labor approach to climate change must be centred on the needs and expectations of working people. From now on hopefully they will be.
Climate change is an issue you can’t have a bob each way on. All in or run dead on the issue.
I hope Labor has learnt that lesson.
The lesson to be learned around here is to pay no heed whatsoever to the Lib-kin.
@Rex Douglas
I blame Labor’s loss on the inability of the party to communicate effectively about its politics and how the election campaign was waged. They should also focus on the shambles which the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government has been.
Also, Labor wasn’t bold enough on climate change, it should have developed comprehensive policies to adjust the nation to the much-needed decarbonisation of the economy, which is needed to combat climate change. This would have to involve investing new green industries providing good, paying secure jobs, especially in jobs starved areas such as Central and North Queensland.
There was an opportunity to tie in Aboriginal sovereignty with achieving ecological sustainability for the continent. Since we need Aboriginal sovereignty and the restoration of their land management practices which were lost with colonization. In order to achieve combating the serious ecological problems this continent is facing.
Well, there goes one of Lib’s promises.
https://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/morrison-win-sparks-sharp-lift-in-wholesale-electricity-prices-20190520-p51p7t.html
Tristo @ #975 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:34 pm
I agree. It will be fascinating to see if the new Labor leadership goes that path in the new parliament.
Story related to a friend of mine by a former Queensland cop just the other day:
The former cop once worked under senior officer Peter Dutton. They arrested six Aboriginal youths suspected of something (not remembered by my friend) and took them to a police station. Three of the youths were charged and detained. No charges were laid against the other three.
So what did Dutton do?
Instead of dropping the three who weren’t charged off at their homes, he drove miles into the hinterland and left them there to walk home.
The ex-cop who told the story lost all respect for Dutton , labelling him a racist and hater of coloured people.
@YBob
I am not denying the problems of antisemitism in the British Labour Party. However I don’t believe Corbyn personally is antisemitic. Also the Tories have a problem with Islamophobia in the party.
Corbyn is not doing anywhere near enough to tackle anti semetism for my liking, and, with respect, I think I’ll take the Jewish Community in the UK’s word on Corbyn over yours, just because their are some islamophobes in the Tory party, which equally repugnant does not negate that.
briefly @ #974 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:34 pm
Well, I don’t know who they are, but if they suggested Shorten was the wrong horse to back as Labor leader then they were right.
Tristo @ #957 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:20 pm
That’s no news to me I’m afraid.
Seriously? Can we quit with the unverifiable internet fake news? If you don’t have a link to a reputable source don’t bother posting it.
There are plenty of reasons to despise Dutton on what he does as a minister.
Rex Douglas says:
Monday, May 20, 2019 at 5:21 pm
So, you’re now advocating against action on climate change.
“If they try this it will blow out the budget. $10,000 per card/recipient going to Indue which is run by an ex Nats leader. Plus the blowback it would generate would be enormous.”
As Dan said, that’s all good as long as the money goes to the “right” people. No such thing as a deficit under the Libs.
Jolyon Wagg says:
Monday, May 20, 2019 at 5:32 pm
Briefly
The Labor approach to climate change must be centred on the needs and expectations of working people. From now on hopefully it will be.
I disagree….the Labor approach to climate change must be centered on the science.
From a scientific point of view, what will be will be. Causes will have their effects. We can understand this and make predictions and develop explanations. Without any doubt, there will be very great costs associated with climate change. We have to ensure these costs are equitably distributed, and likewise we have to ensure that any gains from adaptation to change are also equitably distributed.
Climate change is an economic issue and therefore has social justice dimensions. If we do not attend to these dimensions, there will be no response at all….as we have seen in the Lib reactions so far.
As I keep saying, we need to know what went wrong in Queensland and WA before we start deciding where Labor went wrong. From some vox pops (I know!) I’ve seen, it’s action on climate change and links to the Greens which were the concerns (because job losses) rather than anything to do with franking credits, pensioner taxes, or whatever.
Trying to work out the mindset of people who live hundreds of kilometres away is about as academic as it gets.
@Rex Douglas
Under Anthony Albanese’s leadership I doubt it, his strategy is likely going to be socially progressive and economically neoliberal. Labor is going to be squeezed by both an increasingly Trumpian Liberal Party and the Greens (if they adopt an ecosocialist platform).
zoomster @ #987 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:41 pm
A good start would be a crisis meeting with the Queensland CFMMEU to sort out whether Labor should be all in on climate change policy or run dead.
“I disagree….the Labor approach to climate change must be centered on the science.”
Can we do that once we’re in government? Before that, can we not tell people we’re going to get rid of their jobs?
Offering someone hope of a different, probably lowering paying job, is never going to counter the threat of losing an actual job.
BTW, prior to Saturday I would have been fairly disgusted with what I’m now posting.
Jackol says:
Monday, May 20, 2019 at 5:40 pm
+1
lizzie @ #985 Monday, May 20th, 2019 – 5:41 pm
Good idea, off you go Joel. 😆
@The Toorak Toff
That story pretty much conforms to Peter Dutton’s character.
“A good start would be a crisis meeting with the Queensland CFMMEU to sort out whether Labor should be all in on climate change policy or run dead.”
Pretty much agree. I think not quite run dead, but they should only address climate change in terms of the handouts.
New industry here, free solar panels there. Never a word against mighty coal.
The ALP has gone after mining twice now, this election and the mining tax. Neither time payed off.