Coalition Senators under a Rudd government

May 21, 2007 ~ 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.
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Labor and same-sex relationships

April 30, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

At its conference last week, the ALP endorsed national legislation

which [would] allow same-sex couples to register their relationship and secure legal recognition of their relationship in areas such as property rights and superannuation benefits.

As usual, the idea did not please everyone:

The national secretary of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, Joe de Bruyn, said the Tasmanian scheme [on which the policy is modelled] gave same-sex couples the same status as married couples, which would demean and undermine marriage. …

He said the policy would be poorly received in suburban Australia and would make it harder for the Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, to win the 16 seats that Labor needed to defeat the Howard Government.

We’ve discussed the rather difficult-to-detect logic of the first claim before, and some newly unembargoed questions from the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2005 enable us to consider the second, at least if we consider it a near-equivalent to civil unions.

The overall result, with 48% of respondents being in favour of civil unions, was consistent with two other polls on the issue, which registered 45% and 52% support. As is common with questions on this subject, there was a big ‘neither agree nor disagree’ response of 19%, suggesting that this is still an open debate for many people. A third are opposed to civil unions.
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The PM’s left-leaning campaign rhetoric

April 11, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

The Parliamentary Library has published a new monograph by Maurice Rickard called Principle and Pragmatism: A study of competition between Australia’s major parties at the 2004 election and other recent federal elections (you can tell they aren’t commercial publishers, can’t you?). It has lots of interesting material derived from the Australian Election Surveys and also an analysis of campaign launch speeches to gauge ideological positions and shifts.

Rickard uses the Manifesto Research Group categories to code each sentence in the campaign speeches and to classify them as ‘left’ or ‘right’. Unsurprisingly, he finds that the major parties are close to the centre but in the places we would expect, with Labor just to the left and the Liberals just to the right (though with the Liberals closer to the centre overall).

The chart that most interested me (on p.68, for those who download the publication) was the division of issues into economic and non-economic. This shows that since 1998 the Liberals have moved to the right on economic issues and to the left on non-economic issues. Their campaign rhetoric is consistent with strong spending increases on health and education, and the overall philosophy of ‘big government conservatism’, with growth-oriented economic policies used to finance a large welfare state.

As I have argued before, the big question is how viable this is as a long-term political strategy. Despite the Liberals’ rhetorical and policy shifts on non-economic issues, public opinion still favours Labor on these matters. And that’s with the benefit of being in government and actually implementing big-spending policies. If the Coalition loses the 2007 poll, will voters believe Opposition promises, or fall back on long-standing stereotypes of the political parties? The danger, as has happened in the states, is that the Liberals will just look like a less sincere and less competent version of Labor.

Why is Labor the preferred party on water resources?

February 12, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 23 Comments

Today’s ACNielsen poll in the Fairfax broadsheets has a ‘best party to handle’ issues question I don’t think I have seen before, and which could be just as worrying to the Coalition as the 58%-42% two-party preferred result. This was which party is best to handle water resources, which Labor led 48% to 34%. That’s well under the 40% who said in 2004 that they tend to identify with the Liberals, and close to the Coalition’s core support of around one-third of voters.

Purely on an issue basis, it’s hard to see why Labor has a strong lead on this. Water has little history as a federal issue, and not much more (at least in recent times) as a state issue, so there are not strong party stereotypes to fall back on, as there are on issues such as health, education, and tax. But if you had to think about it in the context of the governments who have been responsible for water, ie the state Labor governments, you’d have to say that their long-term performance (except perhaps in WA) is in the poor to mediocre range. In Victoria, the Bracks government’s strategy seems to be limited to killing off gardens and shorter showers. When Newspoll asked Victorians during last year’s election which party would better handle water management, Labor was nevertheless ahead, but only 38% to 32%.

As Malcolm Turnbull theatrically told Parliament last week, thanks to severe domestic water restrictions bucket back is afflicting pensioners as they carry water from their showers to their gardens. You don’t have to be raving right-winger to think we can do much better than this policywise (some ideas today from Professor Q). And whatever the merits of the PM’s $10 billion plan for the Murray-Darling Basin, it had been more prominently in the news than any suggestions from the Labor side.

It’s hard to tell without repeat polling, but this result could just be the flow on from the enthusiasm surrounding Kevin Rudd – that voters don’t actually have real views on which party federally would best handle water, but they are feeling positive toward Labor at the moment and so when asked they say ‘Labor’ rather than say nothing. Another possibility is that this is a case of issue association – that because water seems related to the environment, and Labor is way ahead on that (60% to 26%), Labor seems the more obvious answer to this question. Unless the drought breaks between now and the election, the Coalition had better hope this poll does not reflect solid opinion.

What happens to the Liberal Party if it loses? (Part 2)

January 29, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

By the end of 2007, it is possible that the Liberal Party will be out of government throughout Australia. As I noted in part 1 of this post, this has led some people to forecast its demise as an organisation. Like political parties around the world, the long-term trend in Liberal membership is down. But unlike political parties in many other parts of the world, the major Australian political parties have retained large support bases, people who tell pollsters that they ‘generally think of themselves as’ Liberal, Labor, or whatever.

Quite surprisingly, given all that has occurred since, a larger proportion of the electorate generally thought of themselves as Liberals in 2004 than they had in 1967, the first time the question was asked and a year after the Coalition’s biggest ever share of the two-party preferred vote, at the 1966 federal election. 40% were Liberals in 1967, 41.5% in 2004. Because Country Party/National Party identifiers have shrunk from 7% to 3% of the electorate in that time the proportion of Coalition identifiers is down slightly, but the Liberal Party itself has held up very well (though fewer voters overall class themselves as ‘strongly’ preferring their party, with 29% of Liberals strong supporters in 1967 and 21% in 2004). Labor is down 5 percentage points, from 37% to 32%. There was a lot of talk in the 1990s about the rise of minor parties, but in reality the two major parties have proven to be highly durable.

Though Liberal-leaning voters cannot be taken for granted – more on that below – they are a good foundation on which to build towards a majority. While Liberal infighting may damage the party’s electoral prospects, the large Liberal support base shows why it is still an institution worth fighting over. Norman Abjorensen may be right that in theory there is scope for realignment in Australian politics, but in practice the voters aren’t likely to pay enough attention to make it work. The Liberal brand has value, independently of who its key figures at any given time are or what it stands for at any given election. Most people who have voted Liberal at recent state elections will vote Liberal no matter how unimpressive the party’s performance. The trick is in getting enough non-aligned voters and weak supporters of other parties to vote Liberal to secure victory.
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Should graduates get a special first home buyer grant?

January 24, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 34 Comments

In his Melbourne University speech yesterday, Kevin Rudd used an argument Jenny Macklin had long made against student debt:

Since 1996, the debt burden for university students has increased from $4.5 billion to nearly $13 billion. How can a young person build a deposit for a home if they are carrying a massive education debt?

Leaving aside technical objections – the size of student debt is irrelevant to annual repayments, which is what affects ability to service a mortgage – conceptually why should graduates get this kind of special treatment?

According to an ABS survey, the vast majority of university students give as the main reason for their current study as something to do with work. The same survey shows that graduates earn significantly more than other people – about half as much again, on average, as someone whose highest qualification is Year 12. The gap is even larger for the typical household breadwinner, the male partner. On my rough calculations (the data I have is not broken down by age, and does not take account of family benefits) male graduates are still about 40% ahead of males with Year 12 only even after tax and HECS repayments are deducted. Compounding the income gap, a majority of graduates aged less than 45 who have partners are with someone who also has a degree.

So though graduates are caught up in the general home affordability problem, they remain in a relatively strong financial position compared to the rest of the population. By easing financial burdens relating to student debt, Labor would be giving the people least in need of extra assistance to buy a home an added boost – a special first home buyer grant for the privileged. Worse, the extra cash would be used to further bid up house prices, worsening affordability for others. And this is from the egalitarian party?

What happens to the Liberal Party if it loses? (Part 1)

January 20, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

In the last week, the prophets of Liberal doom have been out making their predictions. Kim Beazley – who knows all too well what happens inside parties when they lose elections – was first:

If Mr Howard lost, “there is a serious question mark over the future of the Liberal Party”. Labor would win the NSW election in March and Mr Howard would remain the only governing Liberal. “After some years of Labor state governments, Liberal oppositions are still struggling to get a third of the seats in state parliaments.”

Mr Beazley noted the state Liberal branches were already in poor shape and if Mr Howard lost the election, the Liberals would not govern anywhere. “They lose the election, they lose Howard and people are going to question the survivability of the Liberal Party,” he said. “They haven’t got much of an organisation. They are very vulnerable to being out of office and all sorts of lunatics and crazies can take over the Liberal Party, and they will.”

On Friday, Norman Abjorensen gave hope to Age readers:

It is by no means inconceivable that the party that under John Howard has so dominated the political stage for more than a decade and through four election wins could simply fall apart in the event of a loss at this year’s federal election.

How could this happen? Just as the former Soviet Union simply collapsed because there was nothing holding it together, so too will the Liberal Party if it loses the only asset it has – federal office. The party, as a whole, is in a parlous state; the state branches are weak and demoralised, and true power resides in the federal secretariat in Canberra and the Prime Minister’s office.

He went on to draw parallels with implosions of non-Labor forces prior to the modern Liberal Party’s formation in the mid-1940s, and suggests a possible re-alignment in Australian politics in the Liberal Party’s wake.

Though the detail changes, this is an argument that has been around since the 1980s, and has three inter-related components: philosophy, organisation, and electoral base. These are hard to separate entirely: what the party stands for affects who votes for it, who its activists will be, and whether there is any common purpose keeping it together and focused. On the other hand, parties seeking office need to work within the electoral status quo, which means adapting to the views voters hold, even if these are not favoured by activists. In this post, I will focus on organisational issues.
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The political case against big-government conservatism

January 13, 2007July 21, 2021 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

I’ve posted regularly on the Howard government’s big spending habits. While I think much of this spending is unwarranted on policy grounds, it’s going to be hard to resist while Liberals still believe that it works politically. In this morning’s Weekend Australian I outline an argument as to why big-government conservatism isn’t a viable long-term strategy for the centre-right (there’s more detail in my Policy article).

The argument has parallels with the mummy party/daddy party thesis. Voters view political parties in stereotypical terms, seeing Labor as stronger on ‘welfare’ issues such as health, education and social security, and the Liberals as stronger on tax, defence and immigration (Newspoll’s list is the most accessible). Like most stereotyped views they are not completely immune to reality, but as the general public often has a poor grasp of actual trends they tend to form judgments based on their general perceptions of the parties, rather than their real record or (for Oppositions) their alternative policies.

This is one reason why despite increasing spending more quickly than the Keating government on education, health and social security over the last few years, and at a considerable rate by any standard, the Coalition still trails Labor as the better party on these issues. Using the Australian Election Study measure, the Coalition has recovered some of the ground lost as they cut the Budget deficit in the mid-1990s, but they are not back to their 1996 position. And as I say in the Weekend Oz:

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Living standards under WorkChoices

January 7, 2007 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 4 Comments

According to the Newspoll on WorkChoices, a third of workers think that it will make them personally worse off. But another question from the same Newspoll, reported by The Australian yesterday, suggests that this is not spilling over into general perceptions of how people think their living standards are trending.

In response to the question

Do you believe your standard of living in the next six months will improve, stay the same, or get worse?

17% of respondents thought it would get worse. It’s not exactly the same sample – only people with jobs were asked about WorkChoices’ personal effects. But though in the total sample 47% thought that WorkChoices would be bad for the economy, it confirms that WorkChoices has not triggered any substantial degree of pessimism about their own living standards. Though 17% thinking their living standards will decline is higher than the 12% recorded in December 2004, that was lowest level Newspoll has yet found. In the more than twenty years Newspoll has been asking this question, only half a dozen times has the public been less pessimistic than now, and most of those polls were in the two years from June 2003 to June 2005. And the 17% of pessimistic respondents in the December 2006 poll is lower than the 21% found in the June 2006 poll.

As The Australian’s report noted, the main reason for the decline over the last 6 months is that Labor supporters are less pessimistic. There is a long history of partisan pessimism in response to this question. Supporters of the Opposition party tend to be more negative than supporters of the government (though presumably partly because people who think their living standards are declining are less likely to support the government). That’s still true here, but there has been a significant change since June last year – Coalition living standards pessimists went up from 12% to 14%, but Labor living standards pessimists went down from 31% to 19%. Though an election is more than six months away, perhaps the positive start to the Rudd/Gillard leadership has Labor supporters feeling better about the world.