Julian Leeser had an op-ed in the SMH yesterday calling for primaries to be introduced for Liberal Party preselections (his full paper is here). Party members could vote automatically in preselections, while other people could vote after paying a fee (to limit supporters of other parties voting for unelectable candidates).

I used to be against primaries, mostly on grounds of financial cost to the party and to the candidates, and the dangers of party divisions being on display during high-profile preselections. And thinking ahead to what would happen under a possible future presidential primary, we would not want the US system where the presidential campaign effectively runs for two years.

But overall I have changed my mind and think the Liberal Party should adopt primaries.

Both major parties need to increase their membership base, but particularly the Liberals who lack the institutional support Labor has through the union movement. The campaign against political donations is likely to have considerable success, at significant cost to Australian democracy in making politics even more one-sided. The Liberals have to tap into the 10% of the Australian electorate who say they strongly support the Liberal Party, plus the 20% who say their support is fairly strong (AES figures).
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All this week, The Age has been in campaign mode on corporate political donations. But the problem with their analysis (you don’t need to read it, or help from me, to guess what line they are pushing) was there in the very first paragraph on Monday:

CORPORATE donors to the Victorian Labor Party are almost invariably companies with lucrative public contracts or development, gaming or alcohol interests at the mercy of Government discretion. (emphasis added)*

Isn’t the problem, then, that businesses are at the mercy of Ministerial decisions, rather than that perhaps some try to minimise the risks posed to their income by sending a few dollars the ALP’s way? Wherever possible, governments should set rules of the game that are neutral between businesses, and let the outcome be driven by how they play by the rules, rather than by picking winners or playing favourites.

While it is improper to try to influence a tender outcome or property development approval with donations, there is nothing wrong with backing a party that proposes rules of the game that are consistent with how a business or other organisation sees the world. Renewable energy companies should be allowed to back the Greens, unions should be able to back Labor, and corporate Australia should be able to back the Liberals in their occasional tax cutting mood.
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Tony Abbott is an unrepentant conservative centralist. Giving some initial publicity to his forthcoming book Conservatism After Howard, he told journalists that he wanted the Constitution changed to give the federal government complete power to pass laws over-riding the states:

The electorate wants problems solved and they don’t want a treatise on why the relevant level of government can’t solve a problem because it lacks the power.

“The federal government is totally hamstrung by the legal authority that resides in the states. Where the federal government needs to take charge, it shouldn’t need to bribe the states to do so - and it only operates as long as the bribe is in place.”

Some new polling suggests that, with some regret, the electorate agrees with him. As a general principle, a slim majority supports the proprosition that

It is better for decisions to be made at the lowest level of government competent to deal with the decision.

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Today the Democrat Senators gave their last speeches, bringing their party’s 31-year parliamentary history to an end. That makes me feel rather old, as I attended one of the first meetings that led to their creation after Don Chipp left the the Liberals in March 1977 (in the days when it was Malcolm Fraser being denounced for abandoning small-l liberalism).

The ‘Committee of Concerned Citizens’ organised a meeting on 9 May 1977 in the Melbourne Town Hall. There were 4,000 people there, including me and my Dad (I was 11), with many more turned away. According to John Warhurst’s book Keeping the Bastards Honest, at the end of the evening Chipp declared himself committed to a new party. I can’t quite remember what I thought of it all, though obviously I was not persuaded to take the micro-party route.

While they won seats up until the 2001 election, the Democrats never found a stable constituency among the ‘concerned’ middle class. The Australian Election Survey questions on which party respondents voted for at the most recent and at the previous election always showed a lot of churn among Democrat voters. People would vote for them, but vote for someone else next time. But until 2004, they always picked up enough of the stray disgruntled vote to win seats.

The 2007 AES suggests that the vast majority of defecting 2004 Democrat voters went to Labor and the Greens, confirming that the party that had been born centrist died leftist. With Labor and Liberal fighting over the middle ground, there was no electoral room for a centre party between them.

Despite their wacky policies on some issues (eg higher education) I’m sorry to see the Democrats go. Politics is less a choice between good and bad than between better and worse, and the Democrats are better than the Greens, Family First, or that no pokies guy from South Australia.

The Australian Democrats, RIP.

As various opinion pieces have pointed out this week, the Liberals are playing high-stakes politics with their budget strategy.

They are going against the conventional wisdom that spending cuts are necessary to avoid future interest rate increases, and instead saying that there is a danger the economy could slow too much. Intellectually, I think this is a defensible position. The budget is a very clunky mechanism for macroeconomic fine-tuning, with its measures unlikely to have any significant effects for months and hard to change if they prove to be misjudgments.

Politically, however, the argument is too complex and risks further undermining the historic issue strengths of the Liberals.

The recently released results from the 2007 Australian Election Survey (a mail-out survey, which closed in March 2008) shows that while more respondents prefer the Liberals than Labor on interest rates, the margin has narrowed significantly since 2004. The 29 percentage point lead the Liberals had after the 2004 election had shrunk to 6 percentage points after the 2007 election. By not being seen to be strong on the interest rate question this is put further at risk.
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Since I last posted on political donations, the debate in NSW has escalated beyond disclosure to prohibition. The SMH was endorsing this route again yesterday. As usual, no serious consideration has been given to the likely consequences of such a move.

Arguably, in the Labor Party unelected party officials and conference delegates already have too much power over elected Labor MPs. They were trying again to exercise that influence at the NSW Labor conference yesterday. If ‘outsiders’ have less access to politicians, then the party insiders, in Labor’s case the unions, will have even greater relative influence. That is not to say that they will always get their way - politicians will usually be more concerned with the broader real-world and electoral implications of policy. But the insiders will proportionately get more of the decision-makers’ time.

But a ban on political donations won’t help political parties, even while it will help party power-brokers. Most of what parties do between elections is fundraising. Much of the social capital element of political parties would disappear without fundraisers. Already parties are suffering from not being able to give members enough to do, and this problem would worsen further if donations were banned. Parties would become quasi-state institutions, rather than being parts of civil society. Read the rest of this entry »

How does your demographic theory work with the “battlers” phenomenon? Was it merely transitory?

- asks commenter Leon Di Stefano.

I don’t think anyone has quite worked out how to define ‘battler’ in an easily defensible way. Peter Brent wrote a paper (pdf) a few years ago showing that Labor had always held on to its traditional seats in low income areas. But people much further up the income scale may still think of themselves as ‘battling’. Even in the top 20% of income earners, the General Social Survey finds a small percentage of people who have been unable to pay bills on time.

But claims that blue collar workers have swung to the Coalition have been easier to test. In the Australian Election Survey, data collated (pdf) by Murray Goot and Ian Watson shows that the Liberals did do better among blue collar voters 1996-2004 than they did 1987-1993, picking up 5% on average (Labor lost twice that, with blue collar voters going to minor parties as well as the Liberals). But except for 1996 Labor still had more blue collar voters than the Liberals.
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I have long been pessimistic about demographic trends in Liberal support. Last May Ian Watson, using data from both the Australian Election Survey and Newspoll, clearly showed problems for the Liberals in that their support was concentrated in older cohorts.

This week, Watson has updated the Newspoll part of his analysis, which confirms the pattern of results in previous studies. Of course in a year the Coalition was defeated that’s hardly surprising in an analysis based on voting intentions. When general swings are on they usually cut across all age groups. The yet-to-be-released 2007 Australian Election Survey, which by asking also about party identification can get beyond some of the transitory factors affecting election outcomes, will be more interesting.

With this proviso, they key figures in Watson’s analysis look at the voting intentions of people in their 50s. We can see the political effects as the dreaded Whitlam generation comes through, replacing more conservative voters born in the 1930s and 1940s (Watson’s data goes back to the 1987 election). A whole generation of Russells!

Fortunately younger Labor politicians are on average far more sensible than their Whitlam-era equivalents, so the effects on public policy shouldn’t be too serious. But it confirms that elections will be harder for the Coalition to win in the future than they were in the past.

Sinclair Davidson’s suggestion that the most formidable opponents of small government are conservatives rather than social democrats is interesting. I wonder whether this could lead to a realignment of Australian politics.

- commenter Winton Bates, in a comments thread prompted by a post on how the rich paid an increasing share of net income tax under the Howard government.

As I argued in my big government conservatism article, the Howard government turned into a conservative social democratic government. Like Labor before them, the Liberals under Howard used the proceeds of a broadly market economy to finance a large welfare state. Under Howard, welfare spread up the socioeconomic ladder, towards the universalism that social democrats have long wanted to create wider support for the welfare state. And by boosting the not-poor but not-rich middle class from taxes on the top 25% of earners, Howard helped keep overall income inequality fairly constant under his watch, despite growing inequality in market income.

It remains to be seen whether this is a medium or long-term ideological shift. At one level, Howard’s policies can be explained (though not explained away) by factors that are unlikely to be permanent. Politically, periods of prosperity are accompanied by greater pressure to spend more on government-provided services, so we are in the spend part of the tax-and-spend public opinion cycle. It is hard for governments without massive public opinion support for other reasons to resist such political pressures - especially when the necessary money is just flowing in on existing tax arrangements with no need to raise tax rates.
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If this morning’s Newspoll (pdf) on which party would best handle various issues is right, the Coalition’s policy change to support signing of the Kyoto protocol has seen it drop 10% to 15% as the party that would best handle the environment. That’s their lowest score on the evironment ever. Their decision to drop WorkChoices has seen their rating for industrial relations drop 7% to back where it was when the original WorkChoices was in force.

Their decision to defend the Howard government’s record on the economy has seen them drop 9% as the party that would best handle the economy.

Their unknown policies on a range of other issues have seen similar drops in health (9%), education (8%), water planning (7%), welfare and social issues (7%) and national security (11%).

So whether the opposition agrees with the government, disagrees with the government, or has no policies the results are much the same.
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