Politics
The Coalition’s new team
In one newspaper five journalists, with no evidence of collaboration, without partisan bias, have written about the economic incompetence of Angus Taylor and his so-called “shadow cabinet.
Five articles in last week’s Saturday Paper independently converge on the inability of Angus Taylor and the men – and some women – he has around him, to resurrect the Coalition as a political force.
The editorial – Taylor made party – is scathing:
Taylor is famously lazy. His decade in parliament is untouched by achievement. He rose quickly and without consequence. His contributions have been mostly to scandal. The euphemism that would best describe him is unnecessary.
The headline of Jason Koutsoukis’s article is “I can’t cope with this shit”: Liberals confront Taylor’s chequered past. “This shit” refers to a Liberal MP’s reaction to Taylor’s inspirational rallying call to his caucus, the high point of which was about loyalty to the colonial-era flag. (A flag that has been commandeered by the extreme right, from white supremacists through to black-clad Nazis.) Reference to Taylor’s “chequered past” is about highly questionable deals involving tax havens, land clearing and the sale of water rights.
Karen Barlow writes about the Liberal Party’s gender problems: Jane Hume on Liberal Party “misogyny”: “Plenty of those blokes supported me”. Barlow explains the significance of Charlotte Mortlock’s resignation from the Liberal Pary. Mortlock had founded a group aimed at increasing women’s participation in the Party, but left in disgust at the way Ley had been treated. Mortlock may appear again on the political scene as a teal candidate.
In his article about climate change policy, specifically on carbon border adjustment mechanisms – Labor pitches its next carbon battle – Mike Seccombe suggests strongly that Taylor doesn’t understand the basic economics of carbon pricing and the competitiveness of trade-exposed industries.
Paul Bongiorno writes about The Liberal Party’s hard-right turn on immigration. To quote his main message:
Surely it is time for some reality in the immigration debate. Hanson is not the first populist to push policies that are superficially attractive but economically disastrous. That the Liberals are tempted to follow suit is deeply worrying.
The most pithy comment is from John Hewson’s article Last days of the Liberal Party, which starts:
As a former leader of the Liberals, I am very sad to write in these terms, but I fear the party is in its final days or, at the very least, will not govern again in the foreseeable future.
Although all articles are the work of professional journalists (Hewson had a stint as a business journalist), it’s hard not to identify a little Schadenfreude in their style, as they witness the demise of a party that has done so much damage to Australia’s economy – at first slowly under John Howard, and then quickly under Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison.
But what from here? A lazy Labor government, confident that it can remain unchallenged for the next two or three elections? A Farage-style fascist takeover in response to an economic catastrophe?
Some are talking about a new centre-right party. Sussan Ley had that chance last year, and didn’t take it – maybe because Labor has already secured the centre-right ground.
Why should we be constrained by thinking about parties as the essential building blocks of our Parliamentary democracy? In the same edition of the Saturday Paper Richard Denniss writes Why a teals party is a bad idea. He presents the strong arguments against their forming a party, concluding:
Australia needs more voices speaking clearly on behalf of more communities. Independents aren’t perfect and they aren’t for everyone, but they play an important role. It would be a pity to lose the diversity they are now starting to offer – but I suspect the major parties and the fossil fuel industry would love that.
One Nation’s supplemented team
Polling experts have used published data to find who’s behind the surge in support for One Nation, revealing some surprises.
Who’s supporting One Nation
Polls suggest that One Nation support is not only high; it is also volatile. William Bowe’s BludgerTrack, which filters out most of the statistical noise in the polls, suggests it is now around 25 percent – compared with 23 percent for the Coalition and 30 percent for Labor. But that may be different tomorrow.
A team from the ABC Story Lab has been studying polling data to pull together what we know (and don’t) about One Nation’s rapid rise in the polls.
The shift from the Coalition is attracting most attention, but One Nation is also drawing support from other sources, including Labor and independents, but these are probably the single-issue independents who pop up on ballot papers, rather than the “teals”. Kos Samaras says: “There’s an element amongst that One Nation cohort now that just wants to burn the place down, turf the two-party system out the door, up-end the system”.
Age is a factor in One Nation support: 11 percent of poll respondents aged 18 to 34, compared with 22 percent of respondents aged over 55, say they are “more likely to support One Nation”.
Surprisingly support for One Nation is not just a “Queensland thing”: it’s close to the same in all states. But it is a “bush thing”: in inner metropolitan regions it is 10 percent, in outer metropolitan regions it is 17 percent, and in the rest of Australia it is 24 percent.
Support for One Nation is strongest among people with low incomes, but the variation by income is not great. Surprisingly One Nation enjoys relatively high support among people with incomes above $200 000. Are these rich libertarians who hope that One Nation is the only party truly committed to wreck political and social institutions that keep a lid on inequality? In this context the authors note that Gina Rinehart is a friend and supporter of Pauline Hanson. However we interpret these figures, they do not support the idea that One Nation represents only the aggrieved poor left behind by the system.
The strongest variable correlated (negatively) with support for One Nation is schooling. Among those who didn’t finish Year 12 One Nation support is 24 percent, and at the other end of the schooling scale it’s only 9 percent among those with postgraduate qualifications. These figures would probably correlate closely with locational indicators.
The attraction of One Nation’s policies
The Essential poll released last week has questions about respondents’ openness to One Nation. The poll’s methodology seems to be sound, but it’s hard to believe the finding that 25 percent of people “would definitely vote for One Nation” at the next election, and that a further 33 percent would be open to vote for One Nation. These poll results will be tested at the Farrer by-election. By a fortiori reasoning, if One Nation cannot meet these expectations in Farrer, they won’t be able to meet them anywhere.
The polling figures also confirm a significant gender divide: men like One Nation, in spite of the gender of its founder.
That is the only party of the Essential report that refers specifically to One Nation, but there is also a set of questions about support for particular policy proposals – 8 in all.
I draw attention to just two statements, because they seem to be strong beliefs on One Nation’s otherwise policy-thin platform.
The first statement is “Protecting Australians from overseas competition”: 71 percent support, 3 percent oppose. Even Coalition voters are strongly in support of protection (67 percent).
Memories of the days of tariff protection – unaffordable clothing, cars, and appliances, deadly assembly-line jobs – must be fading. And we don’t seem to be paying much attention to the negative impacts in the US of Trump’s tariffs.
The second statement is “Limiting the number and/or backgrounds of people migrating to Australia each year”: 60 percent support, 14 percent oppose.
It’s a strange statement, because we do those things – what’s on the mind of those 14 percent who oppose the idea? Perhaps they believe that this dreadful “Labor” government has an open-door approach to immigration.
Of interest are the partisan differences: One Nation voters are the most inclined to agree with the statement, followed by Coalition, Labor and Green voters.
Those two questions have a distinctly Trumpian quality. The response on protectionism suggests that Andrew Hastie has picked up a mood in the community. There was a time when the Liberal Party stood for free trade – indeed it arose out of the free-trade vs protectionist divisions of last century. It is now the party of populist opportunism.
Renewable energy is where support for Trumpian policies falls down. The statement “Supporting the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy” has 49 percent support, 21 percent opposition. Support for renewable energy varies strongly and predictably by voting intention.
Spare a thought for pollsters
Electoral opinion polling has become increasingly difficult for many reasons: the surge in support for One Nation is only one of them.
Life used to be so easy for pollsters. Think of the 1975 election, when 53 percent gave their first preference to the Coalition, 43 percent to Labor, and the remaining 4 percent could be safely ignored by pollsters. There were telephone books with addresses providing a sample base and the bias of households without phones could be corrected with a few doorknocks.
The pollster’s old friend
How life has changed. In last year’s election the combined first preference vote of the two old parties was only 68 percent. Only 11 of the 150 House of Representatives electorates were won on first preference. Then there were those pesky independents picking up substantial support in particular electorates. The pollster’s category “other” could be picking up an avid animal lover, a strong adherent of the Waterlily Rockbound Party, or a popular well-connected liberally-minded candidate.
Since that election life has become even harder for pollsters, because strong evidence has emerged that the Liberals and the Nationals may indeed be two separate parties. And of course One Nation has made the most of divisions in the right.
All this makes calculation of a TPP rather difficult. Writing in Inside Story Murray Gott of Macquarie University goes through all these issues in detail: Polls and the remaking of the political right.
The fundamental problem for pollsters is that representation is based on outcomes in particular electorates, while polls are generally nation-wide. Nation-wide polls can give the impression that the next election may finish up as a Labor-One Nation TPP contest, but even if the One Nation vote holds up this is unlikely to be the outcome except in a very few seats: the final TPP outcome will almost certainly be a Labor-Coalition contest, and unless something very unexpected happens, Labor will gain more seats than the Coalition.
The problem of polling for independents remains. In national polls it is not possible to pick up the electoral consequences of changes in support of regionally concentrated parties or groups like the National Party or the teals. Also estimates for groups with low nation-wide support are subject to high margins of error: that’s a hard mathematical constraint.
Unsurprisingly pollsters are picking up annoyance with both the old established parties, but to what extent is the One Nation vote solid, or just a way of registering a protest?
If we click on William Bowe’s Poll Bludger we don’t find the clarity we might once have hoped for. That’s not because of his methodology: his BludgerTrack is of extremely high quality in its methodology. Rather it’s that the electorate is restive and confused. It is fairly clear that One Nation has taken votes from the Coalition, probably mainly from the National Party, and that it has started to gnaw into Labor’s support. But that’s only part of the story.