People who bought at the height of the boom are simply running up and down on the spot paying off interest in the hope the price of their dwelling will rise and they can sell.

The difficulty in isolating any effect is that, as I have argued in several recent posts, direct questions about how issues affecting voting are so contaminated with answers from already partisan respondents as to be of little value, and that before December 2006 the polls were moving about in the ‘normal’ range (including the ACNielsen), despite the massive campaign against WorkChoices – probably the most expensive issue campaign in Australian history.

It’s probably one of the underlying factors as to why some previous Coalition voters now say they will vote Labor. There are several such possible reasons. But what is interesting me here, as a student of polling, is that elections force people to bundle a whole range of pluses and minuses with the two major parties, and something important has changed in their final calculation over the last 7 months.

The most obvious explanation is that though Rudd isn’t far ahead of Howard as preferred PM, leadership was a significant negative for the ALP, and take that out of the equation and their issue strength puts them ahead.

By the way Andrew why haven’t you looked and the link of Workchoices legislation and voting intentions..

JC work how many people can average 75K to service a ,loan for an AVERAGE home?

Assuming the cost of money 7% that $150,000 20 years ago was around $39,000 on present value estimate.

In that context $150,000 doesn’t seem that much.

Nielsen’s headline figure is difficult to credit from primaries of 41-39 though. 53-54% would be more plausible.

Newspoll and ACN were a bit inconsistent during October and November 2006. ACN averaged 41-39 to Labor, News the reverse… if Newspoll had shown ACN’s numbers Bomber might have survived. Sigh.

Which people doing the econometrics are you talking about? Andrew Leigh and Justin Wolfers wrote a paper in 2005 which updated the only recent academic study of this that I know, which found that low unemployment and inflation favoured incumbents. I don’t recall seeing any research on the interest rate question over time, though a least a couple of papers looked at it for 2004 in terms of seats which had lots of people with mortgages and surveys in which people were asked important interest rates were. They did not come up with your conclusion.

most people who do the econometrics find that good economic figures are good news for oppositions whilst rising interest rates are good for Governments. It is fascinating how the figures contradict what people think is the norm.