Politics in the long election campaign

14 weeks is a long time in politics

Are the sharks in his own party circling Morrison? Leaks of cabinet tactics suggest that at least one minister is out to damage his authority. Karen Middleton, writing in The Saturday Paper, describes Morrison’s strife in trying to get his way in New South Wales pre-selections: Inside the Liberal Party’s open warfare.

In an interview on ABC Breakfast yesterday, Malcolm Turnbull acknowledged that Morrison is being undermined from within his party, but he believed a coup against Morrison to be unlikely.

Labor must be torn between relishing the spectacle of a destabilised and flustered Morrison, and fearing that a coup could see them facing someone more palatable to the electorate.

There is time for a coup. On 26 June 2013, when Labor was trailing badly in the polls (around 45:55 two party, the same as the Coalition is now trailing) Kevin Rudd took over from Gillard. Labor lost the election 10 weeks later on 7 September.

Barring the remote possibility that Morrison goes only for a half-Senate election, the latest date for a federal election this year is 21 May, in 14 weeks.

History doesn’t repeat but it often rhymes.

Barnaby’s character reference of Morrison

Most media have been excited by Barnaby Joyce calling Morrison “a hypocrite and a liar”.

In itself that’s hardly newsworthy. Who has not made some offhand disparaging remark about their boss?

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald James Massola provides the context of that remark, including a full quote that goes beyond the immediate invective:

He is a hypocrite and a liar from my observations and that is over a long time.

I have never trusted him and I dislike how he earnestly rearranges the truth to a lie.

That’s not an angry outburst, for which an apology may help heal the relationship. It’s a considered statement by an experienced politician who’s been a member of parliament for 17 years. Even Michelle Grattan, renowned for her “on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand” approach to politics, sees it as a grenade under Morrison. “It feeds into the already well-fertilised narrative about the prime minister’s character” she writes.

Has the Coalition realized that people actually like public broadcasting?

The government took many people by surprise when Communications Minister Paul Fletcher announced that it has locked in $4.2 billion for the ABC and SBS over the next four years.

Is the government responding to concerns by urban Liberals, spooked by recent opinion polls? Or is this an insurance against the increasing likelihood that we will have a Labor government, acknowledging that ABC journalists always hold the government to account.

Writing in The Conversation Alexandra Wake of RMIT University and Michael Ward of the University of Sydney analyse the government’s funding commitment to the ABC: The ABC’s budget hasn’t been restored – it’s still facing $1.2 billion in accumulated losses over a decade. The funding announced by the government restores indexation, but it still locks in the real cuts of earlier years.

It’s still a hard slog for public broadcasting. Quality broadcasting is an expensive business, employing highly-skilled people. As an early mover the ABC has made good use of information technology to reduce costs, expand its services and improve the technical quality of those services, but those gains are now largely realized. From now on costs will be driven largely by labour costs, which will rise faster than inflation. CPI indexation is still a squeeze on labour-intensive enterprises.

The other issue in the religious discrimination bill

The press, Coalition dissenters, and Labor focussed on how provisions of the religious discrimination bill would have applied to transgender students in religious and other single-sex schools.

On the ABC’s Religion and Ethics Report Renae Barker of the University of Western Australia, a specialist in the relationship between the state and religion, explains the issue at the heart of the bill. That is the idea that certain speech that can cause offence, distress, or discomfort can be privileged if it is based, in good faith, in religious belief.

Identifying what is meant by “religious belief” is difficult. Does that include everything in religious scripture, such as some of the far-out passages in the Christian Old Testament? Religious beliefs extend well beyond the doctrines of religious institutions. Every religion involves some degree of individual interpretation: to what extent do those individual interpretations constitute “religious belief”? She reminds us that a mere two hundred years ago slavery was justified in Christian teaching, for example.

A fundamental problem with the bill was that Australia has no constitutional provision or even a community consensus about what “free speech” entails. The government tried to introduce this legislation into that policy void. We should settle the broader question of free speech before we get into details of how to deal with speech based on religious beliefs.

There were many other issues in the bill, including the rights of states to legislate in the area of racial or religious vilification. As for the rights of transgender students, the issue would cause no difficulty if we had effective sex-discrimination provisions that would see the end of single-sex schools – atavistic institutions that can foster aggression and misogyny in boys and young men, and submissiveness in girls and young women.

Cleaning up grants programs – a guide

The New South Wales Audit Office has released a report Integrity of grant program administration.

For anyone looking for examples of political corruption, there is plenty in the report, including the finding that 96 percent of funds allocated under the state’s $252 million Stronger Communities Fund went to Coalition-held seats. That’s a matter for people with an interest or stake in New South Wales politics, where corruption seems to have been a problem since around 1788. Sloppy administration of regional grants has already done its political damage in contributing to the downfall of premier Berejiklian.

Of relevance to all state governments, and the Commonwealth in particular, is its list of recommendations for a model of grant administration that:

Opinion polls

After a drought over Christmas there has been a flood of opinion polls. Presumably they will keep on flowing until the election.

The extremes are the Essential poll, pointing to a slim 51:49 two-party lead for Labor based on  William Bowe’s calculations, and the Morgan poll, pointing to a whopping 56.5:43.5 lead for Labor. In between is the Resolve Strategic poll, which, according to Bowe, indicates a 53:47 two-party lead for Labor.

Because much rests on assumptions about the distribution of preferences, and because there are large sampling errors in estimating support for small parties, it’s more reliable to look at primary vote support rather than two-party estimates.  These are shown in the table below.

If we consider the Newspoll support for Labor to be an outlier, these polls confirm a general pattern: Labor has picked up a little since 2019, while the Coalition has lost significant primary support.

The Essential Poll disaggregations confirm the findings of other polls: Labor is well ahead among younger voters and behind among 55+ voters; Labor leads significantly among women, particularly younger women, while among men aged 55+ there is solid support (around 50 percent primary vote) for the Coalition.

In view of the Coalition’s one-seat majority in 2019, and adverse re-distributions, if the Coalition is to have any chance of forming majority government again it must gain some votes from people who didn’t vote for it in 2019.

The regular Essential Report lists a number of issues of concern to voters, and for each asks if the way the Coalition has handled these issues has changed people’s likelihood of voting for them. They divide the respondents according to how they voted in 2019.

The results are shown in the table below, and it’s not good news for the Coalition. Its policies relating to climate change, cost of living, handling the pandemic and managing the relationship with China have turned off people who voted for them in 2019. On other issues losses and gains match closely.

That is one reason, in its campaigning, the Coalition will focus on personal attacks on Albanese and the people around him, rather than dealing with the issues. It is already arguing that one should not vote for the opposition because the opposition has less experience in government – the classic “continuity” rationalization used by dictators ranging from Hitler to Xi.