Autopsy turvy

Amid a generally predictable set of recriminations and recommendations, some points of genuine psephological interest emerge from Labor’s election post-mortem.

The public release of Craig Emerson and Jay Weatherill’s report into Labor’s federal election campaign has inspired a run of commentary about the way ahead for the party after its third successive defeat, to which nothing need be added here. From the perspective of this website, the following details are of specific interest:

• Labor’s own efforts to use area-based regression modelling to identify demographic characteristics associated with swings against Labor identifies five problem areas: voters aged 25-34 in outer urban or regional areas; Christians; coal mining communities; Chinese Australians; and the state of Queensland. The variable that best explained swings in favour of Labor was higher education. However, as has been discussed here previously, this sort of analysis is prey to the ecological fallacy. On this basis, I am particularly dubious about the report’s suggestion that Labor did not lose votes from beneficiaries of franking credits and negative gearing, based on the fact that affluent areas swung to Labor. There is perhaps more to the corresponding assertion that the Liberals were able to persuade low-income non-beneficiaries that Labor’s policies would “crash the economy and risk their jobs”.

• Among Labor’s campaign research tools was a multi-level regression and post-stratification analysis, such as YouGov used with notable success to predict seat outcomes at the 2017 election in the UK. Presumably the results were less spectacular on this occasion, as the report says it is “arguable that this simply added another data point to a messy picture”. The tracking polling conducted for Labor by YouGov showed a favourable swing of between 0.5% and 1.5% for most of the campaign, and finally proved about three points off the mark. YouGov suggested to Labor the problem may have been in its use of respondents’ reported vote at the 2016 election as a weighting factor, but the error was in line with that of the published polling, which to the best of my knowledge isn’t typically weighted for past vote in Australia.

• An analysis of Clive Palmer’s advertising found that 40% was expressly anti-Labor in the hectic final week, compared with only 10% in the earlier part of the campaign. The report notes that the Palmer onslaught caused Labor’s “share of voice” out of the sum of all campaign advertising fell from around 40% in 2016 to 25%, and fell as low as 10% in “some regional markets such as Townsville and Rockhampton”, which respectively delivered disastrous results for Labor in the seats of Herbert and Capricornia.

• It is noted that the gap between Labor’s House and Senate votes, which has progressively swollen from 1% to 4.6% since 1990, is most pronounced in areas where Labor is particularly strong.

Other news:

• The challenge against the election results in Chisholm and Kooyong has been heard in the Federal Court this week. The highlight of proceedings has been an admission from Simon Frost, acting director of the Liberal Party in Victoria at the time of the election, that the polling booth advertising at the centre of the dispute was “intended to convey the impression” that they were Australian Electoral Commission signage. The Australian Electoral Commission has weighed in against the challenge with surprising vehemence, telling the court that voters clearly understood that anything importuning for a particular party would not be its own work.

• The ABC reports there is a move in the Tasmanian Liberal Party to drop Eric Abetz from his accustomed position at the top of the Senate ticket at the next election to make way for rising youngester Jonathan Duniam. The Liberals won four seats at the 2016 double dissolution, which initially resulted in six-year terms being granted to Eric Abetz and Stephen Parry, and three-year terms to Duniam and David Bushby. However, the recount that followed the dual disqualifications of Jacqui Lambie and Stephen Parry in November 2017 resulted in the party gaining three rather than two six-year terms, leaving one each for Abetz, Duniam and Bushby. Bushby resigned in January and was replaced by his sister, Wendy Askew, who appears likely only to secure third place on the ticket, which has not been a winning proposition for the Liberals at a half-Senate election since 2004.

• Andrew Clennell of The Australian ($) reports that Jim Molan is likely to win a Liberal preselection vote on Saturday to fill Arthur Sinodinos’s New South Wales Senate vacancy. The decisive factor would appear to be support from Scott Morrison and centre right faction powerbroker Alex Hawke, overcoming lingering hostility towards Molan over his campaign to win re-election by exhorting Liberal supporters to vote for him below the line, in defiance of a party ticket that had placed him in the unwinnable fourth position. He is nonetheless facing determined opposition from Richard Shields, Woollahra deputy mayor and Insurance Council of Australia executive, who was runner-up to Dave Sharma in the party’s hotly contested preselection for Wentworth last year.

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.

1,909 thoughts on “Autopsy turvy”

Comments Page 36 of 39
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  3. For the first time ever, there has been a catastrophic fire danger forecast for Sydney on Tuesday.

    That is the highest level of bushfire danger, and homes are not designed to withstand fires in this level.

    The NSW Rural Fire Service says high temperatures, strong winds and low humidity is forecast for the Greater Sydney and Greater Hunter areas.

  5. Stephen Koukoulas
    @TheKouk
    ·
    5m
    You know ‘traditional’ economics is arse up when the impact of these bushfires will be a positive for GDP. The fiscal response, rebuilding, money spent fireproofing in future etc
    It’s time we supplement the current measures of the economy with meaningful new ones

  6. The irony of the bushfires in NSW and Qld is that it will force the Government to loosen the purse strings to invest in infrastructure to restore public facilities. It will probably end up being a nett good for GDP.

  8. GG

    Indeed. It’s why there has been campaigns/movements to use a different measure of societal well being and progress.

    Joseph Stiglitz:

    GDP is not a good measure of wellbeing – it’s too materialistic

    Why focus on production of goods, rather than on health, education and environment?

    ust under 10 years ago, the international Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress issued its report, Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up. The title summed it up: GDP is not a good measure of wellbeing. What we measure affects what we do: if we measure the wrong thing, we will do the wrong thing. If we focus only on material wellbeing – on, say, the production of goods, rather than on health, education, and the environment – we become distorted in the same way that these measures are distorted; we become more materialistic.

    We were more than pleased with the reception of our report, which spurred an international movement of academics, civil society, and governments to construct and employ metrics that reflected a broader conception of wellbeing. The OECD has constructed a better life index, containing a range of metrics that better reflect what constitutes and leads to wellbeing. It also supported a successor to the commission, the High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Last week, at the OECD’s sixth World Forum on Statistics, Knowledge, and Policy in Incheon, South Korea, the group issued its report, Beyond GDP: Measuring What Counts for Economic and Social Performance.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/03/gdp-wellbeing-health-education-environment-joseph-stiglitz
    ——-
    Greens in Australia and overseas understand the need to replace the GDP with a better measure.

    Many of the social and environmental issues the Greens seek to tackle lie outside the measurability of gross domestic product (GDP). So what’s the most viable alternative to this problematic measure of a country’s progress?

    https://greens.org.au/magazine/if-not-gdp-then-what

    ——–
    Greens in the UK, 2015:

    Beyond GDP: Greens spark debate on a better measure of progress

    The suggestion that there’s more to life than growth at all costs caused a furore, but many economists agree

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/31/abandon-gdp-growth-at-all-costs-green-party-furore

  9. C@t

    There is someone on Twitter getting excited because Armagedon is here, after a few pseudo religious words that don’t make any sense. But there you go!

  10. lizzie,
    I was going to say something earlier about Scott Morrison likely being sanguine about it all because it signals the End Times, or somesuch, but then I checked myself. Maybe I shouldn’t have? 😐

  11. E. G. Theodore
    Sunday, November 10th, 2019 – 3:41 pm
    Comment #1669

    I suspect that wherever there are spivs there will also be wankers!

    Latest scores —

    Apropos of not much. The idea that Australia does not need fire fighting assistance from other countries denies the reality that we can learn from each other and create useful bonds.

  13. Everybody, keep Mari in your thoughts, she’s going through the fires up in Port Macquarie, as well as my parents in the same neck of the , burnt out, woods.

  14. Greensborough Growler says:
    Sunday, November 10, 2019 at 5:32 pm
    The irony of the bushfires in NSW and Qld is that it will force the Government to loosen the purse strings to invest in infrastructure to restore public facilities. It will probably end up being a nett good for GDP.

    Of course that needs to be discounted by the value of lost production and sales in the affected regions. I suppose some economist has calculated the effects.

  20. In Victoria everyone is on board to support a container deposit scheme. Guess who is not – the State government and, the hotels and gaming lobby, the Australian Hotels Association.

    ———
    Secret state: Victoria cans access to stance on container deposit scheme

    https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/secret-state-victoria-cans-access-to-stance-on-container-deposit-scheme-20191102-p536rz.html

    The Andrews government has refused to release high-level documents that might help explain why Victoria is the only state or territory in Australia without a container deposit scheme or a plan to introduce one.
    :::
    It also comes as The Age and other media outlets campaign around excessive government secrecy and the public’s right to know. A call for reform of FOI laws is an important part of the campaign.
    :::
    The government’s ambivalence about container deposits has baffled many observers, given widespread support from within its own ranks and from community and the waste industry groups.
    :::
    But the one major and strident opponent to a CDS is the hotels and gaming lobby, the Australian Hotels Association. In its 2017-18 report to the Registered Organisations Commission, the AHA listed advocating against a container deposit scheme in Victoria as a campaign priority.

    The AHA is known to be concerned that a CDS would lead to an impost on beer drinkers when the cost of managing the scheme is passed on. Senior Andrews government insiders have expressed similar concerns.

    The Age does not suggest the AHA is the key or even a major influence on Labor’s position.

    However, in government and Labor circles the association is regarded as a potent lobby, with the ear of Premier Daniel Andrews in particular. The AHA is also one of Victorian Labor’s biggest financial backers.

    The scourge of political donations and powerful vested interests influencing policy.

    Dragging its heels for years, the Andrews government is now under pressure it can not ignore.

    The devil will be in the detail.

  23. Meanwhile overseas:

    Two dead as Cyclone Bulbul slams into eastern India and Bangladesh

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-10/two-dead-as-cyclone-bulbul-makes-landfall-in-bangladesh/11690764

    A strong cyclone has made landfall in Bangladesh, killing two people and forcing hundreds of thousands of people to move into shelters across the low-lying delta nation’s vast coastal region.
    :::
    Its path included the southwestern Khulna region, home to the world’s largest mangrove forest, the Sundarbans, which straddles the Bangladesh-India border.

    Government officials and scientists worry the aftermath of the cyclone could accelerate the coastal erosion of the ecological jewel.

    Up to 1.8 million people were expected to be evacuated by Saturday evening, said Enamur Rahman, Bangladesh’s junior disaster management minister, and more than 5,000 shelters had been prepared.

  24. Usual pissant partisans been Labor warriors on PB yet again. Almost as useful as ScoMo himself.

    Total fire ban Mon and Tue now

    Tuesday looking worse than Friday currently

    World heritage rainforest in NSW is being destroyed as you type.

  25. An Australian economist called Philip Lawn has been working on an alternative to GDP. It is a measure of economic activity’s net contribution to wellbeing. It is called the Genuine Progress Indicator. GDP is a gross measure; GPI is a net measure. GDP conflates valuable activities with harmful activities; GPI separates them out. GDP ignores inequality; GPI takes inequality into account by recognizing that an extra dollar of income to a low income person achieves a greater welfare gain than an extra dollar of income to a high income person.

    GDP counts only marketed economic activity. Some of that activity can be considered a benefit, but some should be considered a cost to be avoided. GDP conflates the two. More crime requires more police and more security devices that add to GDP, but it’s not something we want more of. Likewise for air and water pollution, serious illness, divorce, inequality, and a range of other factors.

    One measure that has been designed to separate the two is the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). GPI starts with Personal Consumption Expenditures (a major component of GDP indicative of discretionary spending) but weights it by income distribution (because a dollar’s worth of income to a poor person creates more welfare than a dollar’s worth of income to a rich person).

    As far as GDP is concerned, inequality does not matter and the fact that most of the income gains over the last several decades have gone to the top 1 per cent is just fine. Then GPI adds a few things that are left out of GDP because they are not marketed (like household labour and volunteer work) and subtracts a bunch of things that should be considered costs rather than benefits, including the costs of crime, family breakdown, pollution, resource depletion, and ecological damage. There are 26 elements of GPI all denominated in dollars that can be summed to give an estimate of the net contribution of economic activity to wellbeing.

    Mind you, GPI is still not a measure of overall societal wellbeing. It misses several things, including the positive contributions of social and natural capital to wellbeing that would need to be included to create an overall Sustainable Wellbeing Index.

    But GPI does estimate net positive economic activity and that should be a more important guide to policy than the gross economic activity that GDP measures. Remember Kuznets’ warning that “goals for ‘more’ growth should specify of what and for what.”

    The advantages of GPI over the many other alternatives to GDP that have been suggested include firstly that it is relatively easy to estimate using available data; secondly it can be estimated for historical periods giving time trends; and finally, since it is denominated in dollars, it is easy to compare with GDP.

    GPI has been estimated for more than 17 countries and many states and territories, including a recent study of all 50 US states. The US states of Maryland and Vermont have adopted GPI as a policy tool and several other states are considering doing the same.

    A recent study we’ve been involved with through the Wakefield Futures Group compared the GPI of South Australia for the period 1986-2016 with the rest of Australia. It found that while South Australia lagged the rest of the country in terms of GDP growth, it did much better in terms of the GPI.

    https://www.policyforum.net/achieving-genuine-progress-australia/

  27. Quoll,
    Now is not the time to come on PB, when PB alumni’s homes are being threatened in those fires, to be your normal loudmouthed dickhead self.

  29. ‘citizen says:
    Sunday, November 10, 2019 at 5:53 pm

    Greensborough Growler says:
    Sunday, November 10, 2019 at 5:32 pm
    The irony of the bushfires in NSW and Qld is that it will force the Government to loosen the purse strings to invest in infrastructure to restore public facilities. It will probably end up being a nett good for GDP.

    Of course that needs to be discounted by the value of lost production and sales in the affected regions. I suppose some economist has calculated the effects.’

    Not too hard, I imagine. Most of the country burnt recently had already essentially stopped producing anything much at all because of the drought. I dare say that one reason we are not hearing about very large numbers of cattle being lost is that many of them had already been liquidated by the drought. Tourism might be affected. But there will be good opportunities for salvage logging.
    The other issue could well be that, if a very heavy drought-breaking rain carries the ash beds into reservoirs then the water could become highly toxic. Ditto rain that cleanses the sky and/or washes fire debris off your roof into your water tank.

  31. ‘Up to 1.8 million people were expected to be evacuated by Saturday evening, said Enamur Rahman, Bangladesh’s junior disaster management minister, and more than 5,000 shelters had been prepared.’

    If that is a junior disaster, I would hate to see a senior disaster.

  33. Ch 7 news just now has Morrison in Taree. Doubtless the aim is to boost perceptions of Morrison’s generosity and sympathy for the victims.

    However the effect was spoilt somewhat by vision of him posing for selfies and signing autographs.

    Perhaps the occasion was arranged to limit the crowd to ‘sympathic’ people.

  34. Nicholas

    fyi

    What is ‘ecological economics’ and why do we need to talk about it?

    https://www.dailybulletin.com.au/news/49607-what-is-%E2%80%98ecological-economics%E2%80%99-and-why-do-we-need-to-talk-about-it

    https://anzsee.org.au/2019-anzsee-conference/

    Ecological Economics: Solutions Now and In the Future, 24–26 November 2019, RMIT University, Melbourne, Swanston Academic Building (RMIT Building 80)
    445 Swanston Street, Melbourne 3000

    Escalating impacts of climate change and ecological crises create urgency to address significant local to global environmental and social problems — degrading forests and agricultural land, polluted inland waterways and oceans, and dislocated social and cultural systems. This ANZSEE 2019 conference explores appropriate approaches and techniques for re-balancing the human–nature interactions that are central to the study and practice of ecological economics — solutions now and in the future.

  35. This article in the Los Angeles Times (leading headline) describes the toll that the massive run of bushfires in California is taking on firefighting efforts:

    Growing fire threat makes California departments reluctant to help each other

    As catastrophic windblown blazes strike with more frequency, California’s system of mutual-aid firefighting is cracking, with fire chiefs sometimes reluctant or unable to assist.

  36. Boer

    A friend of mine described a fire just like that – a paddock which looked like bare earth burning fiercely. He’s a seasoned fire fighter (one of the local controllers) and said it was the scariest thing he’d ever seen.

  37. Boerwar @ #1781 Sunday, November 10th, 2019 – 6:13 pm

    ‘Up to 1.8 million people were expected to be evacuated by Saturday evening, said Enamur Rahman, Bangladesh’s junior disaster management minister, and more than 5,000 shelters had been prepared.’

    If that is a junior disaster, I would hate to see a senior disaster.

    Does it matter? On the EGT scale of human dispensibility, A Bangladeshi must surely rate even lower than an Indian 🙁

  38. Fires in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands are ripping through the biodiverse region, consuming an area the size of London in just the past 10 days, burning some animals alive and sending others fleeing.

    Key points:
    Multiple animals have been burned to a crisp including fish and crocodiles
    One of the major rivers in the area, The Paraguay, is at a 20-year low
    The fires are being called “unprecedented” and have burned through an area the size of London in 10 days

    The inferno in the world’s largest tropical wetlands is the latest environmental disaster facing Brazil, coming after a mysterious oil spill that is afflicting beaches in the northeast, and August fires that raged in the Amazon region.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-07/worlds-largest-wetlands-burning-down-in-brazil/11683584?pfmredir=sm&sf223115546=1

  39. Morrison gets his man into the Senate.

    Molan, co-author of Operation Sovereign Borders, received 321 votes to 260 in the ballot to replace Arthur Sinodinos. He will be up for re-election in 2022.

  44. Morrison has a proven track record as a userer, self promoter and a twister of truths and the LNP at the Federal Party level voted for this exaggerated poser.
    With a little help from the MSM and the conjugated ABC, enough disinterested bogans in the burbs and elsewhere decicided “how good is this” and gave sway to the likes of Palmer et al to get the fruit of their malicious advertising money that presented the nation with Morrison and the blatantly lawless ministry.
    The PB bubble reacts by maintaining a vidual for the widowed remnant of fairness and democracy. PB fights among itself.
    The Federal LNP is free to promote the use of harmful poisonous materials, build dams for non existent amounts of water, offer the promise of unlikely jobs and opportunities and feathernest without restriction.
    It’s hard not to believe the voting public have any idea other than the size of their ute and a win on the unregulated poker machine at their largely self regulating local conglomerate masquerading as a club.
    You’d reckon the insurance industry would get behind a move to abate the ravages of climate change other than donate to the re-election of their mates in the LNP and try desperately to avoid paying out on claims from the aftermath of the fires.
    This is the place we find ourselves as a result of the miracle election. Attack Shorten, the unions and their very successful industry superannuation funds and a mindless mass of indulgent dollards follow, believing in another property boom as the saviour of their ills.
    “Stop the World: I Want to Get Off. Thanks to Bricusse and Newley.

  45. Nicholas, I studied environmental economics with Phil Lawn at Flinders Uni over a decade ago. His mentor was Bill Mitchell. He used the example of Exxon Valdez which boosted the GDP of Alaska as a classic example of how inadequate GDP measures were. One of the most interesting lecturers I had the privilege to study under. And a really nice bloke. Glad to see others appreciate his work.

  47. Quoll – if you find the company or discussion here ‘worthless and contemptible’ (dictionary definition of ‘pissant’) why do you come here?

  48. “Molan, co-author of Operation Sovereign Borders, received 321 votes to 260 in the ballot to replace Arthur Sinodinos. He will be up for re-election in 2022.”

    Just what the Federal Parliament needs, another authoritarian right-winger.

  49. So that’s twice Molan has joined the Senate, neither time due to a Senate election.

    Is that some kind of record?

  50. ‘Steve777 says:
    Sunday, November 10, 2019 at 6:33 pm

    Quoll – if you find the company or discussion here ‘worthless and contemptible’ (dictionary definition of ‘pissant’) why do you come here?’

    Self-validation.

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