Category: Democracy & elections

Demo-familism

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

First right-familism, then left-familism, and now demo-familism, with Victorian multi-millionaire father-of-three Labor MP Evan Thornley proposing that parents get votes they can exercise on behalf of their under-18 children.

Given Thornley’s narrow victory in the 2006 Victorian state election I can well understand why he might want an extra three votes. But what are the in-principle arguments for his proposal?:

Families are currently underrepresented in our democracy. They pay but don’t have a say. A family of five or six has no more say in our democracy than a couple of two — yet their needs and potential contribution are greater.

“Electorates with large numbers of families can have up to 30 per cent more people in them than ones that don’t. As a consequence, issues of long-term concern to families like early childhood development, education and the environment don’t get the priority they deserve in our democracy.”

The idea of plural voting has a long history. In the 19th century John Stuart Mill favoured it, on the grounds that intelligent people would cast better-informed votes: Continue reading “Demo-familism” →

Does union power still frighten voters?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

Over at LP, Mark Bahnisch asks whether the government’s attack on union power under Rudd will work:

There’s an unexamined premise in commentary about this tactic of the Government – that unions are wildly unpopular. But how true is that? Unfortunately, there is no time series data on union sympathy. But there are three large-scale surveys conducted this decade that reveal some fascinating results.

Actually, there is time series data on union sympathy – I reported on nearly twenty years of fairly consistent questions in this 2005 article. On the the issues of whether unions have too much power and whether there should be stricter regulations of trade unions there is a clear decline in hositility towards unions. All the polls prior to 1990 (including earlier polls with different questions that I did not show in that article) showed between two-thirds and three-quarters of respondents thought that unions had too much power. This century, less than half of respondents have thought that.

This accords with changes in objective conditions. In the worst year of union havoc inflicted on Australian society, 1974, a staggering 6.3 million working days were lost to strikes. Continue reading “Does union power still frighten voters?” →

Has public debate been corrupted?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

If book buyers have a limit on how many ‘Howard’s suppressing free speech’ books they’ll add to their shelves, it’s a pity Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison’s Silencing Dissent reached the bookshops before David Marr’s His Master’s Voice: The Corruption of Public Debate Under Howard.

They cover similar ground (indeed, some of the same ground, with Marr citing the earlier book) and ultimately have similar problems, but Marr’s book is much the better of the two: whatever his faults, he writes well; and he retains a sense of perspective lacking in Hamilton and Maddison.

According to its editors, Silencing Dissent:

paint[s] a picture of Australian democracy in serious jeopardy….The longer term picture is even more worrying: authoritarianism can only flourish where democracy has been eroded.

But according to Marr:

For a decade now, public debate has been bullied and starved as if this was an ordinary function of government. It’s important not to exaggerate the result. Suppression is not systematic. … There are limits.

But, as with Silencing Dissent, it’s not clear that all the examples really tell us much about the state of public debate in Australia. Continue reading “Has public debate been corrupted?” →

The 1967 Constitutional referendum

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the biggest ever yes vote in an Australian Constitutional referendum. But what exactly were people voting for? One interesting argument of two recent books, a revised edition of The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution by Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, and Divided Nation? Indigenous Affairs and the Imagined Public by Murray Goot and Tim Rowse, is that confusion was as common then as it is now.

In the 1960s, many people argued that Constitutional change was necessary to give Aboriginal Australians citizenship, and that’s the interpretation still being put on it today. On ABC TV’s Insiders this morning we were told:

As hard as it is to believe in retrospect, just four decades ago, Aborigines were not counted as citizens.

Hard to believe, indeed, as all Aborigines had been citizens since 1948, and many (the ‘half-castes’) much earlier. Yet the citizenship claim was also made in the opening few minutes of tonight’s SBS documentary Vote Yes for Aborigines (though contradicted later in the programme). The common belief that Aborigines were given the vote in the referendum isn’t right either, and even the idea that they weren’t counted in the census isn’t strictly correct – the Bureau of Statistics did count them, but the number was ignored for certain purposes.
Continue reading “The 1967 Constitutional referendum” →

Coalition Senators under a Rudd government

~ Andrew Norton ~ 15 Comments

A long succession of very bad polls – with another reported today – has Liberals starting to talk about Opposition (I’m a pessimist; I started in January). One Liberal-supporting blog reader emailed me last week wondering about how the party would operate in the Senate under a Rudd government.

He was right that the good 2004 result would see the Coalition in less trouble in the Senate than the House of Representatives, but very optimistic that it would be in a position, on its own, to stop Labor legislation over its first term.

To do that, it would need 38 of the 76 Senators. Assuming that the 2 Senate places in each of the ACT and the NT will as usual go equally to the ALP and the Liberals/Country Liberal Party (in the NT), it will have the 21 seats it won in 2004. With half the seats in the six states going up for re-election, the Coalition would need to pick up 17 of the 36 seats up for grabs.

The one poll specifically on the Senate published so far suggests that the Coalition is assured of only 12, with perhaps another from Queensland – still four short. On some issues, Family First’s Steve Fielding will vote with the Coalition, but he still leaves them three short. With the Democrats due to disappear, the balance of power will be held by the Greens, who are well to the left of the ALP.
Continue reading “Coalition Senators under a Rudd government” →

Did the Budget really make people more inclined to vote Labor?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

Today’s Newspoll on the Budget response included the answers to the question:

Overall, would you say the Budget announcements have made you more likely to: vote for Labor/vote for the Coalition/neither?

Though only 12% of voters had rated the Budget as bad for the economy and just 14% of voters thought that they would be worse off as a result (that question is not in The Australian‘s tables, but you can get it from Newspoll’s website), 26% declared themselves more likely to vote Labor as a result, compared to only 19% of respondents who said that they were more likely to vote for the Coalition.

This does seem counter-intuitive and counter-other results. A Galaxy poll reported the previous day had found only 12% less inclined to vote for the Coalition as a result of the Budget and 16% more inclined. And both polls had the two-party preferred bouncing around in the margin of error (Newspoll putting Labor up, Galaxy down) rather than swinging decisively to Labor, as their 7 percentage point Newspoll-claimed premium won from the Budget would seem to indicate.

The trouble with these questions is that some poll respondents answer them strategically, intending to give the party they support anyway a boost. Unsurprisingly, when we look answers to these questions divided by ‘political support’, only 3% of Coalition voters say that the Budget was more likely to make them vote Labor and only 2% of Labor voters say that it was more likely to make them vote for the Coalition.

Newspoll’s ‘more likely to vote Labor/Coalition’ seems to prompt a partisan choice more than Galaxy’s ‘Has the federal Budget made you more or less inclined to vote for the Coalition’, perhaps because it expressly mentions Labor.

But either way I think the question is of little value, especially when it is asked of respondents who have already expressed a clear preference for one or other of the parties.

A separation of partisan power?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

A Newspoll in this morning’s Australian (can’t see a link, but it should be on the Newspoll website soon) explored whether voters see the federal structure as a way of distributing power not just between the States and the Commonwealth, but also between Liberal and Labor. At first glance, a plurality see benefit in such a division of power. 42% of respondents thought that overall it would be bad for Australia if Labor controlled both levels of government, while 37% said it would be good.

But a breakdown of such opinion according to party support suggests that this result has less to do with preferring a separation of partisan power than with concern about one’s own party. For example, 76% of Coalition supporters think that having Labor in power at both levels would be bad for Australia, compared to 22% of Labor voters. On the other hand, 60% of Labor supporters think that it would be good for Australia if Labor controlled both levels of government, compared to 9% of Coalition voters (That many? Perhaps they think that it would end blame shifting and encourage cooperation.)

This is unlikely to be just Labor voters, with their faith in the state, lacking concern with a division of power. We can see this from a question in the 2004 Australian Election Survey about a semi-analagous situation, the same party controlling both the Senate and the House of Representatives. With knowledge of the Senate outcome (the survey was conducted after the election) 56% of Coalition voters thought that it was better for the same party to control both houses, compared to 12% of Labor voters.
Continue reading “A separation of partisan power?” →

When do voters make their decision?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

In a post at his very useful Oz Politics Blog during the week Bryan Palmer said:

We know from past election studies that roughly half the electorate reports that it decided how to vote during the election campaign.

The source of this statistic is probably the Newspoll conducted after each election that asks voters which party they voted for and then follows up with ‘when did you yourself finally decide to vote for …. party?’ In 2004, 30% of voters gave various times in the last week, and another 19% in the last month (ie, during the campaign). That makes 49%. Similar numbers were recorded in the 2001 election (46%), the 1998 election (50%) and even the 1996 election in which the baseball bats had supposedly been out for Paul Keating since the ‘recession we had to have’ (43%).

The Australian Election Study comes up with generally lower, but still significant, proportions of late deciders. They ask ‘when did you decide how you would definitely vote in this election?’, and adding up the answers from ‘about the time the election was announced’ to ‘election day’ we get 38% in 2004, 41% in 2001, 51% in 1998, and 38% in 1996.

But does this exaggerate the impact of the campaign? There are a couple of reasons for thinking that we should put a lot of emphasis on the ‘finally decide’ in Newspoll and the ‘definitely vote’ in the AES.
Continue reading “When do voters make their decision?” →

In defence of political donations

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

With this week’s disclosure of political donations by the Australian Electoral Commission, the usual critics were having their say. As he did last year, Stephen Mayne used Crikey to attack what he sees as an inherently grubby process – people giving money to political parties, including (shock, horror) foreigners, something that seems to particularly upset political funding moralisers not otherwise known for their nationalistic views.

In The Age another regular, Melbourne University law lecturer Joo-Cheong Tham complained that:

Money allows some to speak much louder than others. For example, businesses and wealthy individuals are able to secure influence over parliamentarians through the purchase of political access. In the last financial year, both Tabcorp and Tattersall’s gave $10,000 to Progressive Business, presumably for membership of the organisation. Membership of this fund-raising arm of the Victorian ALP would have entitled them to attend closed-door ministerial briefings by Premier Steve Bracks and Treasurer John Brumby. Such secret meetings give rise, at the very least, to an apprehension of undue influence and corruption.

As with other leftist critiques of the political process, Joo-Cheong Tham’s work (you can see his perspective in more detail at the ANU Democratic Audit project) fails to see the bigger picture of the political process. These issues arise mainly because because of politicised processes – in the case of Tabcorb and Tattersall’s because gambling is heavily regulated, and Tabcorp and Tattersall’s rely on government patronage to keep competitors out. If anyone could set up a gambling outfit there would be no need to listen to tedious speeches at Progressive Business functions or to give them any money. There probably wouldn’t be any funding to disclose.
Continue reading “In defence of political donations” →