- Posted by Ad astra on March 11, 2010
It’s probably not possible to accurately define the ‘Canberra Press Gallery’; in this piece I’m referring to the journalists who get to ask guest speakers at National Press Club events most of the questions, and those who report on federal politics.
Judging from what members of this group say in newspaper columns and on radio and TV news and current affairs programmes, their role seems to be four-fold – to report the facts, to interpret them and express an opinion, to predict, and ‘to hold politicians to account’, a task the group has assumed with some relish. This piece attempts to tease out these functions and assess how professionally Press Gallery journalists are doing their job – just for a change holding them to account. It will also argue that the bubble in which many Press Gallery journalists live has so divorced them from the electorate that they no longer correctly represent its values, beliefs and feelings.
It is acknowledged that there are some political commentators who do their job professionally and are respected by their audiences. We know who they are and admire them.
Reporting the facts
Information is derived from a variety of sources: parliamentary debates and QT, ministerial announcements, official press conferences, unofficial ’door-stops’, press releases, arranged interviews in private or on radio and TV, corridor and restaurant conversations with politicians mostly ‘off-the-record’, whispered bits and pieces, scuttlebutt, and of course the whistleblower’s email.
The quality of the information is highly variable. Although video clips or audio recordings of actual utterances must be the most authentic, this information source can be grossly misleading when cherry-picked to make a particular case. Likewise, quoting actual words in columns can be authentic so long as the quote is accurate and complete and the context is stated. But we all know that selective editing can distort or seriously mislead. We see it every day. We see it in the bootstrapping that has come to characterize much of what purports to be well-informed reporting. While it is usual to place words actually uttered in quotation marks, this does not always occur, leaving the reader wondering who said what, and what the journalist is saying.
Unofficial conversations are often used by journalists to embellish their pieces. ‘Informed sources’, ‘usually reliable sources’, or simply ‘sources’ are quoted while carefully preserving their anonymity. Readers have no idea how authentic these tidbits are, how accurately and completely reported, the questions that were asked, the context, or their origin. Was the ‘source’ another journo down the corridor or one in the favourite drinking hole? Often these so-called ‘sources’ are the ones that give rise to the bootstrapping Bushfire Bill described in the last piece.
In my view there is no place in worthy journalism for this; once I see it, I doubt not only its accuracy but also the journalist’s motives, and discard it as useless. It is a refuge for lesser journalists of which there are too many in the Press Gallery.
The whistleblower’s email has an appeal to journalists near the bottom of the pile. We all remember the infamous Grech email and how it was manipulated by News Limited’s Steve Lewis. This past weekend we had News Limited’s scuttlebutt supremo, Glenn Milne, with his very own email which he represents as coming from an authentic whistleblower, salivating at the prospect of inflicting damage on the Government. Do these journalists understand in what contempt they are held by those who believe in decent reporting?
On the fundamental task of presenting the unadulterated facts, many in the Press Gallery do poorly. Not because of their disconnectedness with the electorate – but because they so often present the facts inadequately, and too often disingenuously.
Interpreting the facts and offering an opinion
This is where journalists have the chance to insert their own views about the meaning of facts and events. The pure opinion piece usually can be identified for what it is, but most articles, or radio or TV commentaries are less easily identifiable as opinion. There is often a mixture of facts and opinion that cannot easily be unravelled. So when an opinion seems to be on offer, it is not always easy to know whose it is. Why can’t journalists preface their opinions with ‘in my opinion’? Moreover when their opinion is offered, consumers need to know on what it is based – the facts as presented, what others are saying, what the voters are saying, what interest groups are saying; or is it simply their own unique view based on their experience and inevitably governed by their biases.
Sometimes opinions are based on well-conducted polling on important issues, carried out mostly by newspapers or research houses. Sometimes focus group studies or party polling inform journalists’ opinions. These are at least supported by verifiable data, but when the opinion is not based on polling, on what is it based? Is it based on any intimate knowledge of what the electorate thinks? Not likely. How would they ascertain public opinion other than through polling? More likely it is based on chatter inside the Press Gallery bubble where groupthink operates so strongly, where expressing a contrary view is inimical to all except the most self-assured, where only the egotistical will go out on a limb to be the most macho journo around, and where what the editor thinks or what the proprietor wants influences what is reported.
When journalists’ opinions are so disconnected from public opinion, what value are they? It is only on those rare occasions where journalists are sent out to sample, albeit unscientifically, the opinion of the man in the street such as in the ‘Your Shout’ segment on the ABC’s Insiders, that the people’s views are actually heard, and even then the poor sampling and the way the questions are posed influences the answers, sometimes rendering them worthless.
My assertion is that much of the opinion expressed by Press Gallery journalists reflects their own idiosyncratic views, and although sometimes based on substantial experience, does not accurately reflect the view of the people.
Let me give an example. In Chris Uhlmann's Apologetic PM: absurd or genius? on The Drum on 5 March, he lists the ‘fixes’ the PM promised: grocery prices, petrol prices, the hospital system and education, climate change and environmental improvements, and goes on to opine: “Judged against those marks it's easier to see how a focus group or two might be toting up the scorecard now and marking the Prime Minister down. On almost all of the benchmarks he set - and the ones that matter to punters - he is in the red. It's also possible that the PM had atomised his message across so many fronts, and had become so hard to understand, that he left the impression of saying nothing much at all.” From where has that opinion come if not from Uhlmann’s thoughts? Was it based on a careful collection of punters’ opinions such as in focus groups? Not likely. He seems to be guessing what focus groups might be thinking. It is this style of journalism that sounds so well-informed and plausible that it is regarded by many as worthwhile opinion, which it is not.
A commenter on Uhlmann’s blog, James Mahoney, tellingly responded: “There's been quite a frisson this week over this apology and lots of puzzled frowning and beard pulling and pondering about why he did it. And over-reaction....Perhaps electors will view the apology differently from the commentariat and actually say, 'Goodonya Kevin for having the guts to admit you have been a bit dodgy on the performance thing.' Imagine the angle had he not said sorry: Rudd's too arrogant to admit it when he makes a mistake. All part of the news cycle really, isn't it? Can't win if you don't; can't win if you do. The only certainty in the news cycle is that whatever you do (or say) will be beaten into this day's angle. What is really needed is some real in-depth analysis and maybe even a break-out from the dominant paradigm of the Parliamentary Press Gallery that ensures reporters and commentators don't stray too far from what they think the competition will write. That is, whatever politicians do or say needs to be bagged. Maybe it does - but not all the time.”
That is just what this piece is asserting.
Predicting
Press Gallery journalists have assumed the mantle of making predictions. Although this is the most hazardous of all their roles, they enjoy it most. It gives them a feeling of being sage, or being kingmakers or destroyers of political careers. They enjoy nothing more than having their wise predictions come true.
Yet it is in the dangerous field of prediction that they are most likely to be relying on mediocre data or none at all, hearsay, whispered asides in corridors, the ‘good oil’ from insiders, or just their gut feelings. How often have you seen Glenn Milne, who would die for a prescient prediction, declaring the Rudd Government will be a ‘oncer’? Now Fran Kelly has likewise chanced her arm. To be able to say – ‘you heard it first from me’ is a glorious feather in the journalistic cap. Dennis Shanahan declared that Peter Garrett was ‘finished’ and predicted his sacking – wrong on both counts. Several others insisted ‘Garrett must go!” no doubt confident in their prediction that his career was over.
When such predictions are made by known anti-Government journalists it’s hard to know whether these are well-based predictions or just wishful thinking.
In any case, this piece asserts that predictions by the Canberra Press Gallery are too often not based on hard and verifiable data, not based on an intimate knowledge of the voters’ opinions, but on hunches, on hearsay, on groupthink, on what suits their political or ideological position. It is ironic that the journalists who are the most self-opinionated, most judgemental, seem to be the ones who rely less on evidence than their own idiosyncratic viewpoint.
Holding the Government to account
This role has been taken on with enthusiasm by the Press Gallery. They seem to feel entitled to question everything the Government and the Opposition does and says, as if we the people have appointed them to act on our behalf. We haven’t, they just assume that is so. So we see aggressive, at time belligerent and discourteous questioning of our political leaders, especially if they are antagonistic to them generally, or over the issue under consideration. 3AW’s Neil Mitchell and the ABC’s Jon Faine are classic examples on radio, and Kerry O’Brien and Tony Jones on ABC TV. At the recent National Press Club meeting when the PM announced the hospitals and health reform plan, we saw two of our better journalists asking questions inappropriate to the occasion. In the midst of the most important announcement about health for decades, Paul Bongiorno asked how the Government could administer the health reforms if it couldn’t run an insulation program, and Karen Middleton asked Rudd a question about his communication style. Did they imagine members of the public wanted them to ask such silly questions that distracted from the purpose of the event, or was this just journalistic bravado?
In holding to account, do they work from verifiable information? Sometimes, but sometimes they have little hard data to back their questioning. Do they seek the public’s opinion before pressing their points? No, they just assume we want them to pursue the line they take. We don’t. They have drifted away from what the people really think and feel, confined as they are in the Press Gallery glass house where they hear echoes reverberating around the walls and interpret them as public opinion. It is not.
In summary, what this piece proposes is that the Canberra Press Gallery has lost touch with the man in the street, and because it has limited means of communicating effectively with the public, it has limited ways of validly representing the public’s views, hopes and aspirations, their desire for change, and their opinion of the Government’s and the Opposition’s policies and actions. In my view the chasm between the people and the Canberra Press Gallery is widening, and that is why we get such mediocre and unrepresentative journalism from so many of them.
By all means feed us the facts, and give us your considered opinion. But when you do, make it clear it is your opinion, and tell us on what it is based. If you feel inclined to predict, please make it clear that’s what it is and not divine inspiration, and do tell us how you came to your prediction. Finally, if you feel compelled to ‘hold the Government or the Opposition to account’, show us how they are meeting or not meeting expectations, and whose expectations they are. But please do not assume they are the public’s expectations unless you have evidence that this is so. We want to be informed, but not indoctrinated by your ideology, your unsupported opinions or your uninformed predictions.
Visitors, what do you think?
- Posted by Bushfire Bill on March 6, 2010
If Kevin Rudd thought Insulgate was going to go away with a mea culpa, he was wrong. Note that I refer to ‘Insulgate’... the beat up, the bootstrap, not the reality-based situation.
We have seen recently the first (and perhaps the last) attempts at factual examination of the death and fire statistics in the insulation industry. Possum started it off in Pollytics. There was also an independent report in The Australian Financial Review last week analysing OH&S statistics. The Age chimed in on Wednesday with another piece (which borrowed some of its points from Possum, with appropriate acknowledgements).
These have been like water off a duck’s back as far as the rest of the media is concerned. They’ve got their meme, and they’re sticking to it. There appears to be a wilful refusal to consider an alternative point of view, even if only to rebut it. As far as the media is concerned, the factual situation of the Insulation Stimulus Plan is established. Anything else is irrelevant to the main story.
What is ‘the story’? The story is not necessarily that the government provably botched the Insulation Stimulus. The story is that the media have decided on the story. Without an external factual reference, one which is presented in rational context, the media’s coverage can only be self-referential: they are writing up what each other thinks about the Rudd government. They are bootstrapping.
At the heart of this is the oft-quoted concept of perception being ‘everything’ in politics. You hear it trotted out regularly, as if it’s not only some kind of law of nature, but rightly occupies that status. We are seeing at the moment a momentous battle between fact-based reality and pure perception. For ‘perception’ read: ‘opinionation’. Opinionation has become more important and easier to manufacture than messy facts, which if they don’t, or might not fit the meme, are ignored.
Recently on The Poll Bludger there was one commenter who was in twitter communication with a young gallery journalist called Latika Bourke Bree Roberts, who works for radio station 2UE network DMG. It was fascinating (in a scary way) to read Bourke's Robert's points of view. One of her twits (perhaps an appropriate description in her case) was that she believed she didn’t need to read the Minter Ellison Report. Here we had a parliamentary press gallery participating journalist actually saying she didn’t need to read fundamental source materials on which she was basing her criticism of the government.
(Note: a commenter pointed out I had the name wrong. Apologies to Latika and the opprobrium is transferred to Bree)
While this may be her problem to some extent, we can say with certainty it is definitely Rudd’s problem too. Journalists and columnists are just making up the news as they go along. For politicians, if that practice gets too out of control they’re in dangerous waters.
Two examples: an AAP story regurgitated on the Herald site on last week told us of ‘thousands of electrified roofs’. A few days before, this figure’s early ancestor was ‘up to 1,000 roofs’ extrapolated by Greg Hunt from a surveyed figure of 17 roofs out of 700 early on in the bootstrap’s progress. Dennis Shanahan turned it into a solid ‘1000 roofs’ and by the time AAP had finished with it, it had become ‘thousands of electrified roofs’. The figure must have been made up. How else could 17 actual roofs become ‘thousands of electrified roofs’?
On Thursday an article in The Australian referred to Greg Hunt having "scores" of complaints (i.e. minimum 40, with the implication of more than that) from Insulation ‘victims’ about installation that did not ever take place and therefore needed Federal Police investigation. The actual figure? From Greg Hunt’s mouth: ‘at least a dozen’, later confirmed at 13. The Australian just made it up.
Why is the media doing this?
Because they can.
Kevin Rudd has given them permission.
Last Friday Rudd conceded their view that politics was all perception by admitting to just about everything they had said about him and his government. He admitted the Health program was nine months late when that was not the case. He demoted Garrett, thereby legitimizing all their crazy accusations about the Insulation Stimulus plan after the fact. He wrote off the GFC response as ‘context’. It was as if Rudd retrospectively pardoned them for their sins.
The idea was put about that he did this to clear the decks of Insulgate. But it was too late. In the last couple of days every second journalist has asked him the same tedious question: “If you completely botched Insulation, how can we trust you to do Health properly?”
They were lining up to put it to him. They know he won’t answer the question by saying:
“Gosh! You’re right! How can we be trusted to get anything right. Thanks for making me realise that!”
... but the sting is in the question, not the answer. It is a taunt that they know he must put up with. That stupid, pointless enquiry of the Prime Minister has become, overnight, a mandatory rite of passage for any self-respecting journo. If Rudd had tried to clarify the facts, to put them in context, he would have been accused of having a ‘glass jaw’, or ‘coldly dissecting the tragedy of four young lives lost’. As the articles that tried to establish the facts were ignored, Rudd would have been vilified as a shabby excuse-maker. He was not prepared to take on this fight, but I believe he should have been.
More dangerously for Rudd, the unanswerable question, the gotcha du jour, has become the basis of much of the opposition to the Health initiative. Rudd is like a skydiver, plummeting towards earth, who cannot open his emergency chute because it is tangled in the flapping wreckage of his main canopy. The bootstrapped Insulation fake scandal has become the seed of the coming Health fake scandal. We have been told Rudd has bet the farm on Health being a winner. And who will be judge of whether it is successful? The same people who either don’t bother to read or wilfully ignore reality, relying instead on their own groupthink version of events... the same people Rudd has oxygenated.
Health, in the time interval of 48 hours has become ‘all disaster, all the time’. Of course, there are many who think it is a great concept, a first, a historic reform. The 7.30 Report the other night had a serious, informative interview with three stakeholders who were in sometimes cautious, but nevertheless broad agreement that it was a sound idea and an encouraging start. But we are not hearing from them anymore.
Instead, now we’re hearing that nurses are objecting, local hospitals will be summarily closed, taxes will have to be raised, the states are in revolt, it is taking too long, it is too hasty, it will cost too much money, they aren’t spending enough, it is too complicated, it is simplistic and lacking in detail and, of course, if they can’t do insulation, how can they do health?
To my mind Rudd made a bad decision to go through with what is called his ‘mea culpa’ on the weekend. It has only encouraged his enemies to go harder, and to use his retrospective legitimization of their fairy stories as now rock solid proof they had gotten it right all along. I predict it won’t take long until the next big policy release is received with, “If he can’t do Insulation or Health right, how can he do anything?” The new bootstrap will build on the established one.
Rudd’s giving into the media’s confected claptrap – seemingly just to make it go away – is ultimately a recipe for the abrogation of government. Achievements don’t matter, analysis of reality doesn’t matter: only bootstrapped opinions and perceptions, carefully seeded by an antagonistic media, matter. Rudd’s mea culpa may well lead to disaster, used as the raw ingredient for a feast of fiction, cooked up in a lazy nihilist kitchen by cynical chefs whose party trick is to spit in the soup and brag about it amongst themselves.
In my opinion the government had the media battle won last week, but they panicked and sought to buy off their enemies with a cheap and (worse) unnecessary concession. Insulation would have been forgotten by now, a distant bleat by an Opposition bereft of ideas, clinging to their one possession like dogs with a bone. Rudd has allowed them to get away with murder when he almost had them in the bag. This is why so many commentators called his Insiders mea culpa ‘extraordinary’. They couldn’t believe their luck.
However, it’s perhaps not a total defeat. There may, and almost certainly will come a time when the public will have had their fill of negativism and of Tony Abbott on dirt bikes doing the Action Man thing. One more near-miss traffic accident or lost-in-the-wilderness stunt and he’ll become a laughing stock, if he isn’t already. The public will want to see performance, not circus tricks. There is also the possibility that, given free rein by Rudd, the media will go too far, that their closed-loop fantasies will finally become so ridiculous that they won’t pass the laugh test. Maybe Rudd wants to gee-up the troops, to shake them out of their poll-based complacency. I recently saw one hypothesis that Rudd was deliberately making the choice between himself and Tony Abbott as Prime Minister starker, to focus the public’s mind. There are any number of theories as to how this is a brilliant Machiavellian tactic which will deliver an even more glorious election victory.
But, in my view, Rudd’s needless surrender, made at the point of victory, has nevertheless set the clock back. It has taken the nation’s attention off the merits of new and much-needed Health policy and has allowed the media to frame everything in a gilt-edged, bootstrapped fairy story about how roofs catching fire, metal staples and toxic batts have somehow brought the nation to its knees... no matter how remote the connection.
The saddest thing is that it has served to re-enshrine the position of an ailing mainstream media’s perception as paramount in our political discourse, as opposed to a balanced discussion of verifiable fact. In today’s media reality is not the story. The story is the story. Rudd gives this monster a new lease of life at his, his party’s and his supporters’ peril.
Well, that’s what I think. How about you? I’m hoping somebody out there can convince me I’m wrong.
* Note: Lacing methods in the graphic are from the excellent Ian's Shoelace Site ... where you can find out not only why your shoelaces are always unravelling, but you can also drive yourself nuts trying to copy the techniques illustrated! A visit to the site by those out there who are shoelace challenged is highly recommended... or just check it out if you want to have some fun reading about something seemingly completely trivial on the one hand, but (when you think about it) quite important to everyday life on the other.
- Posted by Ad astra on March 2, 2010
We all know how the media can engineer a beat-up on almost any issue, but can anyone recall a more flagrant beat-up than we’ve seen around the Government’s Home Insulation Program?
It’s hard to determine whether this beat-up is groupthink gone ballistic, with almost everyone swept along by the media-generated frenzy, or whether it is serving another purpose – to demean the Government and those in it associated with the program, as part of a more widespread attack on the Rudd Government. As so often is the case, it is probably both.
The events that have given the program a bad name are incontrovertible. Four who were installing insulation funded by the scheme have died – three of electrocution and one of heat exhaustion; many houses have had fires that have been associated with insulation installation – the exact number is uncertain; and some of the insulation has been substandard or incorrectly installed. Moreover, some installers have been shown to have doubtful qualifications, and some appear to be shonky operators who are in it for the money rather than providing a quality installation. We also know that because the program was structured so that Government funding passed directly to the installer rather than the householder, the way was open for scams and fraud by unscrupulous operators, and the quality control function, instead of being exercised by the consumer, relied on monitoring at a state level.
It is these facts that have been propagated endlessly by the media embellished with the tragic overtones of deaths, fires, poor workmanship and rackets. No one has minimized the tragedy for the affected individuals, their families or the community. Such tragedies ought to have been respected; the fact that the media and the Opposition have exploited them ruthlessly is reprehensible.
Most of the media has gone along with the line that the Government is to blame for the deaths, the fires and the shoddy workmanship. It has insisted that ‘someone has to take the blame’ and what better target than a Government already in the media’s sights. It insists someone must be punished, indeed it implies that such punishment is necessary to salve the pain of those affected. The prime target was the responsible minister Peter Garrett, with his department not far behind and of course the Government and the PM as the ultimate targets. When Garrett was relieved of responsibility for winding up the program and initiating its replacement, but still remained a Cabinet minister, that was not enough punishment for the media and the Opposition, not enough pain inflicted on Garrett to sooth the pain of the victims. While in criminal matters it might be possible to understand victims wishing to see perpetrators who have personally inflicted on them pain and damage, physically punished in ‘an eye for an eye’ manner, it is harder to understand why victims of this program require punishment to be meted out to someone so remote from the ‘scene of the crime’.
This is the media stream that has been aimed like water cannons at the public and the Government. We’ve seen and heard the details endlessly, along with heart-rending stories designed to add a highly emotional element to the story. I’ll refrain from repeating these stories here – you know them well enough.
Has any journalist shown the guts to expose the other side of the story, has any journalist had the patience to garner the salient facts and reveal them to a public already made sceptical by the torrent of adverse coverage day after day? Yes, there have been just a few, a few to whom we should be grateful. Sadly much of what they have had to say has not appeared in the MSM; rather it has been exposed in specialist publications or less read papers.
In response to the Opposition’s invoking the principle of ministerial responsibility to insist that ‘Garrett must go’, Bernard Keane of Crikey wrote on 12 February Foiled logic: under Garrett rule, most ministers have blood on hands. He said inter alia: “The crazy logic of the pursuit of Garrett is that he must take responsibility for the actions of everyone who has received Government funding, no matter how irresponsible they are in their own actions or their oversight of those for whom they’re responsible. To take up Greg Hunt’s point about Westminster accountability, in the days when such principles meant something, a program like the insulation program would have been implemented by bureaucrats. That is, Government employees would have fanned out across the country, entering homes, climbing into ceilings and installing the stuff. It would have been done with remorseless bureaucratic efficiency, house by house, street by street. Fortunately, Governments don’t work that way anymore. There are no standing armies of road builders or PMG workers or engineers. Programs are outsourced so that the private sector can do them, ostensibly more efficiently, certainly for lower cost.
”Somehow, though, Garrett is apparently responsible just as if an army of his bureaucrats were crawling through ceilings across the land. We've changed how we build infrastructure, but the political and media rhetoric is of another age. Responsibility has been transferred to the private sector, but not the political risk.
“This is another symptom of the great Australian conviction that governments are responsible for making their lives risk-free, that if something, somewhere goes wrong, regardless of whose fault it actually is, the Government is to blame. Done your money in a too-good-to-be-true investment scheme? Blame the regulator and the bank that lent you money. Mortgaged yourself to the hilt only to discover interest rates are going up? Blame the Government. Kids overweight? Blame the Government and the advertisers.”
In similar vein Keane wrote on Crikey on 23 February in The problems are bigger than Garrett. He concluded: "Somehow the workplace deaths of four men have nothing to do with their employers who had a legal obligation to provide a safe workplace, and everything to do with a Labor Government program. Apparently it’s not the shonks' fault that the Government made money available and they rushed to take advantage, possibly putting at risk their employees along the way."
Fearless blogger Possum Comitatus of Crikey’s Pollytics began the rebuttal of the notion that house fires had increased under the program with Did the insulation program actually reduce fire risk? on February 24 that begins "Has the Garrett insulation scheme actually reduced the rate of installation caused fires? It’s a strange thing to say – well, it’s strange if you don’t think about it too hard. What we often forget is that Garrett’s insulation program dramatically increased standards in an industry where there were previously very few." He concluded: “Under the Garrett insulation program, the rate is 1 in 11,828 – a much smaller rate of fires than what existed before the program.” You’d need to read the whole analysis to understand the maths. In his Crikey piece he says: “Let us be clear: the insulation scheme was only shut down after the Minter Ellison document became a pivotal issue, suggesting that Garrett not only failed to read a document back in April 2009 that seemingly highlighted every problem - both real and imagined - that has come to pass in the scheme, but that if he had read the Minter Ellison document and acted upon it, if he had followed the advice of Minter Ellison, homes would not have burned, people would not have died, the scheme would not have failed. It was definitive proof, so the media narrative went, that Garrett was a poster boy for ministerial incompetence writ large.” Keane concluded: ““This Minter Ellison Risk Register was a report that, according to The Australian, ‘warned of an “extreme risk’ of house fires, fraud and poor quality installations”. On top of these frightening risks, The Australian stated that, “Peter Garrett was kept in the dark by his department about warnings it received that the home insulation scheme should be delayed for three months because of ‘extreme risks’.” Possum finishes: “The only problem here is that this – and I mean all of this – is complete and utter bullsh-t.”
How much airplay did this well-argued rebuttal get in the MSM? None that I saw.
In the February 27-28 issue of The Weekend Australian Financial Review, Geoff Winestock wrote in Insulation fears: more hype than actual fires: “Data from fire brigades and workers compensations supplied to the Weekend AFR casts doubt on opposition claims that the ceiling insulation program has caused a significant jump in the danger of house fires and industrial accidents, especially after adjusting for the massive jump in insulation use....Based on data from fire brigades in NSW, Queensland, South Australia and metropolitan Melbourne, the only ones with comparable data, the Weekend AFR has found that there were 115 house fires in 2009 that were caused by faulty insulation. That may sound like a lot, but it was only slightly higher than the 75 house fires caused by faulty insulation in 2007, before the scheme was operating. In the meantime, about 1.5 million houses have been fitted with insulation compared with an average of about 60,000 installations in 2007. In terms of fires per installation, the risk has fallen dramatically.”
He goes on to say: “There are no statistics on whether installers were electrocuted before the program began, but it has always been dangerous work.”
The deaths are subject to coronial inquiry, but that has not stopped the media from concluding that the Government’s program is to blame and that Garrett is culpable, or as the Opposition asserts, he is guilty of ‘industrial manslaughter’.
Has any of the above been replicated in other papers, or been featured in the electronic media? Not that I’m aware of – but please tell me if it has.
To add fuel to the already blazing insulation fire, house fires have been attributed to the installation of solar panels. In Crikey on 18 February in Garrett fingered over dodgy solar panels, but story 'a beat up' it was stated, inter alia: “The ABC’s ‘investigation’ into solar panel installations has fingered the embattled environment minister for putting about 2000 homes at risk of electrical fire by incorrectly installing the panels. Garrett’s fortunes - already under fire over deadly home fires sparked by roof insulation – ‘appear to be going from bad to worse’ the AM program declared this morning. But the firm charged with auditing solar panel installation - and used as the key source in last night’s Lateline story - calls the concerns a ‘beat-up’ and points out most were installed under the Howard Government. A spokesperson for the Clean Energy Council (CEC) told Crikey ‘people are making it more political than what it is’. Of the thousands of solar panel installations sparked by the rebate scheme, none have caused a home fire.”
On February 19 Keane wrote in Peter Garrett and the perpetual present of politics. "Here’s some examples of our political journalism mired in a sort of ‘perpetual present’ in which what happened two days ago, let alone two years ago, is forgotten. And how once journalists get the smell of ministerial blood in their nostrils, the old higher brain functions start switching off and the pack instinct kicks in. When Tony Abbott suggested last week that Peter Garrett could be charged with industrial manslaughter in NSW over one of the four deaths related to insulation installation, he should have been laughed out of town. Coming from a former health minister - how many people died from medical errors in Commonwealth-funded care then, Tony? - it was particularly absurd.”
Ross Gittins was one of the few MSM journalists to write a contrary view on the insulation program in the SMH in Libertarians silent on insulation bungle. He says: “The government says one good thing to emerge from the disaster is that the insulation installation industry is now tightly regulated. It reminds us that deaths occurred in the industry before the subsidy was introduced, that employers had the usual duty of care to their workers and that the industry is covered by state occupational health and safety legislation. But libertarians have never been enthusiastic about occupational safety laws and have long disapproved of licensing arrangements, which they believe are used by the industry to restrict supply. And whatever happened to individuals accepting responsibility for their own affairs? What happened to caveat emptor and civil remedies? Isn't any of the blame to be shared by cowboy businessmen?”
On 26 February Bernard Keane seemingly in exasperation wrote on Crikey in Dear media -are we all vented now?
“Dear Mainstream Media
"Feeling better now, are we? Finished your raging about the Government? Or does there yet remain some spleen unvented about ‘insulation debacles’, ‘bungling Ministers’ and of course those four deaths that you couldn't care less about but that provide such a handy hook for efforts to bring our highhanded, manipulative and arrogant Prime Minister down a notch or two?”
The whole piece is worth a read.
There may be others with the courage to take a contrary view to the bulk of the MSM and the electronic media, but I have seen few. Please post any other you know in comments.
As Bernard Keane said: “...once journalists get the smell of ministerial blood in their nostrils, the old higher brain functions start switching off and the pack instinct kicks in.” He’s right. What we have seen from most of those who have commented in the MSM and on radio and TV is a disgraceful disregard for the truth, an obsession with destroying a minister with spurious assertions, and an unremitting attack on the Government and the PM. Their pieces have been devoid of many of the salient facts, poorly argued, filled with contaminating emotion, laced with vicious sarcasm and vitriol, and of a journalistic standard that disgraces what ought to be an honourable profession. Worst of all they seem unconcerned that they have thereby brought their craft into disrepute to such an extent that people are avoiding their columns and their outlets and looking to the Fifth Estate of the alternative media and the blogosphere for truthful content and balanced opinion.
What we have witnessed over the last fortnight is a grotesque Great Big Home Insulation Program Beat-up.
During QT in parliament and last night on Q&A we saw Peter Garrett explaining the actions he had taken over the insulation scheme. Did he sound convincing to you, did his actions seem reasonable, his arguments plausible? Or did he sound like a typically devious politician?
What do you think?
- Posted by Ad astra on February 25, 2010
Bushfire Bill’s last piece A Triumphant Return or the Last Hurrah? and the many comments it attracted, exposed many instances of second-rate journalism, leading me, and visitors, to ask “What has become of journalism in this country?” This piece attempts to tease out how such journalism has become so harmful an influence in our society.
But let’s begin by acknowledging that there are many fine writers who grace the profession of journalism, who write well-researched, informative and factually accurate pieces, who express balanced opinions based on those facts, and who distinguish clearly between fact and opinion. They are what we expect journalists to be. They are not the problem – it is that they are diluted by so many who are careless with the facts and at times downright dishonest, slipshod in drawing conclusions from them, arrogant in making far-reaching predictions from their sometimes limited knowledge and experience, and subject to personal or institutional bias that seriously distorts their writing. It is to those that we should address the question: “So you think you’re a journalist?”
Ask a hundred people what a journalist does and most will say that they write articles in newspapers; some might say they write opinion pieces and editorials. Some might include those who prepare and deliver radio and TV news and current affairs, and a few might add in those who write in the online media, even perhaps blog editors. I refer to all of these. If you ask members of the public what they expect of journalists, what would they say? The cynical among them might say – not much.
‘Journalist’ comes from ‘journal’ which in turn is derived from the Latin diurnalis, from diurnis ‘daily’. The implication is that daily events are at the core of most journalism. But journalists also collect and disseminate information about people, trends, and issues.
Where has journalism gone wrong? In this piece let’s stick to political journalism.
Just look at the articles that have appeared about the insulation issue. Again and again writers have simply not got their facts right. Bushfire Bill has exposed many of these inaccuracies in the last piece on The Political Sword: A Triumphant Return or the Last Hurrah? If you haven’t read his critiques, scroll down to February 23, 9.46 am and 2.35 pm, and February 24, 12.32 am.
Getting the facts right seems to be fundamental to proper reporting, but as BB points out, too often when the facts don’t fit their preconceived notions, some journalists simply distort them or just make them up.
Next, while interpreting the meaning and import of the facts is a legitimate function of journalists, they ought to distinguish clearly between fact and opinion, which so often they don’t. Don’t they realize that the interposition of qualifying words, which on the face of them seem not to be ‘opinion’, are indeed opinion. I refer to words used in the media to describe, for example, the Government’s Home Insulation Program: failed, flawed, botched, debacle, scandal, disaster, fiasco, catastrophe, crisis, tragedy, calamity, farce, fraudulent, mishandled, scrapped. Peter Garrett is described as embattled, beleaguered, finished. As soon as journalists use these words to describe the program or its authors, and are not simply quoting others, they are inserting their own value judgement. And by using this technique the fact that it is their opinion is concealed. It is part of what BB describes as ‘bootstrapping’, where an assertion, true or otherwise, is made which becomes a self-perpetuating ‘truth’ as each iteration of it reinforces the previous one, somewhat like negative feedback in audio systems that eventually reaches screaming pitch. The more iterations the more valid the comments seem to be. BB gives several examples in his comments on February 20 at 1.12 am and February 23 at 9.46 am. This phenomenon is seen over and again both in the printed piece and in the spoken commentary. What right do journalists have to insert their views in this way? What entitles them to influence public opinion, when all they are offering is their own opinion, and without revealing it is their own opinion? Who do they think they are? It would be different if they prefaced their condemnatory remarks with: “in my opinion”, because then it would be clear that it was only their opinion. But instead, by subtly inserting these pejorative words they surreptitiously insinuate that this is a widely held and spreading opinion among not just the pundits but the population at large. It is as pernicious a technique as that used by authoritarian regimes. If they don’t realize that, they should get another job where they would do less damage.
As BB asserts, too many journalists seem to start with a preconceived agenda and write in a way that converts their beliefs into a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Enough of the background, let’s look at some actual examples. As it would take several pieces to dissect and expose the many instances of faulty political journalism, I’ll confine myself to just a few. Dennis Shanahan has been the subject of several critiques on The Political Sword. Newspoll through Shanas’ Magic Looking Glass, More of Shanas’ Magic Looking Glass? and earlier Dennis Shanahan is at it again, and BB has appraised him in recent posts. No more needs to be said. The pity is that Dennis is Chief Political Editor of our premier national newspaper The Australian. We’re entitled to have better balanced, less biased critique from such a senior and experienced journalist. Even worse, he seems to be part of what appears to be a sustained anti-Rudd campaign by The Australian and indeed News Limited papers in which several of his colleagues are involved.
I could waste valuable space by critiquing Piers Akerman, Andrew Bolt and Glenn Milne, but I won’t. You will have made up your minds about the standard of their journalism long ago.
Occasionally a writer goes so far over the top that one is left wondering if the article is some sort of sick joke. Such a piece was written by Paul Sheehan in the SMH on February 22: How Rudd the dud dropped Australia in the alphabet soup . I suppose it was meant to be a smart-aleck appraisal of the Rudd era written for those who loathe him, but it destroyed its credibility by listing only what Sheehan sees as the Government’s failings, with not one mention of a single achievement. Under ‘G’, not surprisingly all he lists is ‘Grocery Watch’; no mention of the ‘Global Financial Crisis’ from which the Rudd Government shielded the country. But what do you think he had under ‘D’? You’ve guessed it, ‘Debt and deficit’. Does Sheehan believe that thinking people will swallow such grotesquely biased writing? The rusted-on supporters will cheer, but who else will? This is puerile writing that does not deserve a place in a reputable newspaper. If you’ve got the stomach, read it and judge for yourself.
What about ‘Our ABC’? Reasonable people might expect more from this supposedly neutral and balanced source. Insiders last Sunday was an improvement on previous editions which had showed signs of becoming tabloid. At least it was prepared to discuss the view that The Australian was showing persistent bias. David Marr brought this out and even Fran Kelly agreed, although she previously has insisted that Kevin Rudd should not openly complain about this and instead should just ‘sit there and take his medicine’. With her years of experience in the field, Fran seems to be assuming the mantle of political guru. While giving the Government credit for its management of the GFC, she nonetheless confidently asserted that the Rudd Government was ‘in a hole’, ‘in trouble’, and might be ‘a oncer’. Does she expect viewers to respect her opinion, expressed with such assurance, without qualification? As expected, Piers Akerman did nothing but heap scorn on the Government’s head, which evoked gentle ridicule from David Marr. Why they still use Akerman on Insiders is a mystery. His responses are consistently biased and predictable. What can he possibly contribute to the balance of the programme?
Our ABC now has an online news service that on the face of it seems to be deriving much of its material from the MSM. It seems just as prone to journalistic distortion as the rest of the media. Here’s just one example: Coroner probes Yothu Yindi death after Rudd visit by Phoebe Stewart on 22 February insinuates that there was more than a temporal connection between the death in mid 2008 of a 26-year-old man who played the didgeridoo in the band Yothu Yindi, and a visit by Kevin Rudd. The article states: “The ABC understands the man died not long after he had taken part in a dancing ceremony for Mr Rudd during a visit to the community for a cabinet meeting.” What is that supposed to mean? What is the implication? Why was it written this way? This is such poor journalism that it ought not to endorsed by Our ABC. I wonder whether my protesting email will evoke a response.
Enough examples – one could go on and on. The essence of this article is that much of the media in this country has become disappointingly poor and seems to be getting worse – so bad that commentators like Bushfire Bill believe that the MSM is steadily losing its impact, losing its credibility, losing its audience, and is now having its last hurrah. It is no longer the maker and breaker of politicians and political parties, and resents its lost prowess. Media proprietors too are becoming concerned about their loss of influence.
So as consumers of what the media offers, the challenge we’re entitled to address to substandard political writers is indeed “So you think you’re a journalist?”
What do you think?
- Posted by Bushfire Bill on February 19, 2010
On Friday, Tony Abbott, whom I have already spotted as a serial confessor of sins, made another confession. It was startling in its frankness. To quote the ABC online story:
“Mr Abbott ... told the Examiner he disliked the ‘Captain Catholic tag’ that had been ascribed to him.
‘The only one of the Ten Commandments that I am confident that I have not broken is the one about killing, and that's because I haven't had the opportunity yet,’ he said.”
He lacks only the ‘opportunity’ to kill a fellow human being? Otherwise that would be on his list of sins? Can Abbott be serious thinking that this utterance won’t be taken and pulverized by a hostile media?
Unfortunately, the answer seems to be, ‘Yes’.
Go back a few months to Kevin Rudd’s ‘Fair shake of the sauce bottle’ episode. AA wrote a good piece on it: The sauce bottle saga with lots of links. Journalists went on about The Sauce Bottle Saga for a month or so. George Megalogenis, in an article entitled This bloke act is doing our head in was terribly upset:
“PM, mate, you made your name in two sets of lounge rooms: the everyday and the elite. You looked like a cheery quiz show contestant on Seven’s Sunrise and a brainiac on the ABC’s Lateline. Between those two men is the real Kevin.
Sometime soon you will have to find that person, or risk becoming the punchline to a national joke. You know, the one about the nerd who pretended he was a bloke.”
So, for uttering a fairly commonplace saying, the Australian College of Political Opinionistas went to town on Kevin Rudd, hammer and tongs. The clincher in all this was that most of the coverage was derisory, or outright derogatory.
By contrast almost every word of Tony Abbott’s recent pithyisms and off-the-cuff verbal spoutings are accepted as showing that he is ‘the real deal’, someone who ‘tells it like it is’, speaking in plain terms that Everyman can understand.
Abbott, playing up to this depiction of him, has been getting bolder of late. He has accused the government of bribing free-to-air TV stations (only to refuse to elaborate the next day). He gave the women of Australia fatherly advice on maintaining their virginity, but was not quizzed at all on his own forays into the virginity (and unmarried pregnancy) business when he was a university student. He has accused Peter Garrett of ‘industrial manslaughter’ (a crime which Abbott believes should never have made it into law on moral and economic grounds). And now, as if his accusations against Peter Garrett were a dress rehearsal for The Big One, in his zeal to confess his sins Abbott’s brought out the 5th Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not murder’. His stated attitude towards this prohibition is, ‘There but for the opportunity go I.’
I accept that Abbott was probably a little pumped up by the excitement of the campaign trail. The compulsive confessor of sins waxed broadly on sex, on penance, and on the Ten Commandments during the same interview. He quoted his Jesuit mentor, one Father Costello, as telling him that Lent didn’t have to be all gloom and doom. It was ‘much better to do something positive in Lent than to give something up.’ All good stuff. I suppose then the mood took him over, leading him to go the whole hog and make his homicide statement.
I believe it’s fairly certain that if Kevin Rudd had said he’d broken all the Commandments, except the one against killing a fellow human being (and that only for lack of opportunity) it would signal the end of his political career, and rapidly. He would be vilified for either the bare words themselves, or for being flippant about murder. We would be told that such statements were un-Prime Ministerial, that they showed ‘a lack of judgement going to character’, that he was feeling the strain, that he was overworking himself. Victims of crime would be produced, tearfully denouncing the Prime Minister for saying what he said. Correlations between his words and our policies regarding Afghanistan and the Bali-9 would be exposed. Sniggering jokes would be made about the four deaths under the insulation stimulus plan. We would be reminded in detail of Rudd’s allegedly foul temper. He would be depicted as unstable, a bomb ready to go off. Dennis Shanahan’s tut-tutting from his Sydney office would be heard in Melbourne. If Rudd could be condemned by Dennis for not playing Abbott’s traffic accident near miss correctly, then what would he do with a Rudd statement on not having the opportunity yet to kill people? By contrast, we would be reminded that Tony Abbott was the Genuine Article, waiting in the wings for his chance. There might even be a call or two for an early election.
In fact, if Rudd had said any one of a dozen things that have come out of Abbott’s mouth in the past few weeks, he would have been roasted alive by the media. Abbott can’t claim (like Milne does) that he ‘doesn’t want to be the Prime Minister’ in this case, as an excuse, because that’s exactly his goal. So why are Abbott’s casual pronouncements reported almost universally positively, or at worst neutrally, and Rudd’s reported almost universally negatively? Do the media think they are so strong and in control of the national agenda that they can spin any utterance any way they like, according to their political agenda?
The history of the past three years in Australian political life has revolved around the public studiously ignoring the most vehement anti-Rudd messages produced by the media. You will all know the long list of ‘Get Rudd’ schemes – the supposed ‘myth’ of his hard-done childhood, Scores-gate, Ute-gate, Long Tan-gate, The Weeping Flight Attendant, the hypocrisy of his wealth, Fair Shake Of The Sauce Bottle-gate, the Stimulus ‘Debacle’, and many, many more. Yet Rudd and Labor have soared in the polls. The last poll Labor lost was in August 2006. Before that it was June 2006. There never has been a run of polling popularity like it, and all of this in defiance of the media’s best attempts to turn public opinion around.
But just recently we have seen a slight trending down in Labor’s figures and those of the Prime Minister. There has been a slight trending up of the Coalition’s figures and an approval rate for their latest leader that is at last not in the teens. A whole legend is being spun around these paltry, few statistics. Rudd has lost the plot. His government is on the way out, a oncer.
Abbott has produced only bullet points and thought bubbles, un-costed wish lists masquerading as ‘policies’. His Finance spokesperson, Barnaby Joyce has arguably been damaging to both the Coalition cause and to the nation’s fiscal reputation. He persists in plugging the line that we cannot repay our debts, yet he is given the merest slap on the wrists by an adoring media (they tell us he needs a little more discipline only). Joe Hockey waxes and wanes between ‘The Rudd Recession’ and ‘The Recession We Never Had’. Greg Hunt excruciatingly tries to sell a dog of a Climate policy that we know he doesn’t believe in. Julie Bishop is the Invisible Woman, rousing from her Shadow Foreign Affairs torpor only to try to scuttle relations between Australia and China.
The media seem to believe that, at last, this is a triumphant return to the status quo, where they tell us what to think and how to vote. The tactic of wall-to-wall Abbott and 24/7 Good News about the Coalition has finally paid a dividend. They’re going in harder and harder, even resorting to boot-strapper interviews with each other! Rudd is depicted as embattled, tense, making mistakes. These all go to his fitness to be Prime Minister. His ministers are shown up as either bumbling machine men, troglodytes, or trophy ministers, unsuited – any of them, without exception – to their high offices.
An alternative theory - mine - is that the public have built up an immunity to the media's increasingly bizarre attempts to justify both their own antics and those of conservative politicians; that this is the media’s (and particularly the Murdoch media’s) Last Hurrah - and that the media know it. It may well be that what we are seeing now in the polls is just a blip, a minor victory in a backwoods battlefield, bought at high cost both to the media's credibility and to the nation’s political sanity.
In a political world where the seriousness of Climate Change can be passed off as ‘just politics’, where cheap stunts involving pink tou-tous, acres of lycra, hairy ‘man rug’ chests, ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’ statements, and undersized budgie smugglers are depicted as serious indications of the ‘genuineness’ of the Coalition’s senior personnel and their message, where opportunistic TV coverage of a near-fatal traffic incident is presented as ‘proof’ the Prime Minister is disconnected from the people, and where the media are indulging in a witch hunt for yet more youthful corpses to prove that the most successful GFC response in the world was actually an abysmal failure, they have squeezed out just a couple of in-house polling percentage points from a distracted public.
An outdated media losing its grip has been an ugly thing to watch. If this is truly a battle for influence, a final battle for the ascendency of the Old Media over the minds of what it sees as its bovine readers and viewers, then expect no prisoners to be taken. Things will only get worse. More and more stunts will be played out. We will be gravely informed of the ‘political symbolism’ of Abbott shenanigans and of the ‘ineptness’ of the Prime Minister and his government. My feeling is that it can’t go on too long, because even now some of the edges are starting to come off the edifice as our media’s Fonzi Fonzarellis prepare to jump the shark.
We’ve had allegations of ‘industrial manslaughter’, the Shadow Treasurer in a ballet dress, the Shadow Finance Minister talking down our nation’s ability to pay its sovereign debts, near-miss traffic incidents blown up to national significance, Coalition moles in the Public Service giving false evidence (which was then further faked by the Daily Telegraph), the rantings of Ackerman and Bolt on Insiders, a sexually disgraced Shock Jock brought back onto the air to lecture Rudd on morals, and a seemingly endless series of derogatory analytical articles on the Prime Minister’s every uttered syllable. And now we have the Ten Commandments brought into play (but don’t call Tony ‘Captain Catholic’).
The circus has truly come to town. But, what do you think... is it really a Triumphant Return, or just The Last Hurrah?
- Posted by Ad astra on February 18, 2010
If you thought Dennis Shanahan was squeezing the last drop of good news for the Coalition out of this week’s Newspoll, as suggested in the last piece on TPS Newspoll through Shahas' Magic Looking Glass, take a look at his analysis of the Important Issues survey (pdf) that accompanied that Newspoll. You’ll find it in his two pieces in Wednesday’s Australian: Protest poll flags rush to Coalition and Coalition making inroads in all areas.
His theme is announced in his headlines and the opening paragraphs: “The Rudd government just lost its comfort zone, its ability to argue that everything will be fine because of its success in avoiding recession and that its lower polling is just Tony Abbott's media honeymoon. Voters have declared they prefer the Coalition, once again, as economic managers and have rushed towards the Coalition on climate change, water conservation and the environment.” and “The Coalition has recaptured popular leadership on the economy from the Rudd government, which seems to have lost political gains made on economic management during the global financial crisis as the fear of recession in Australia passes and unemployment peaks.”
Having set the scene with words like “Voters ...have rushed towards the Coalition” and “The Coalition has recaptured popular leadership on the economy...” he proceeds to amplify his claims. Referring to the Important Issues as seen by voters, he says: “The economy has also dropped dramatically as the top priority in an election year, being overtaken by health and education as the Coalition makes inroads into Labor's leads on all key issues, including climate change, the environment and water management.”
So let’s look at the figures.
In the first table, the Important Issues, the economy has dropped from first to third and is now rated 74 on the importance scale, down from 83 a year ago, but about the same as two years ago. Should this come as a surprise – a ‘dramatic drop’ as Dennis would have it? A year ago the country was in the midst of the GFC from which it is now emerging. The variation in the level of importance portrayed in the survey is exactly what one would expect. I suppose Dennis was trying to make the point that any advantage the Government thought it might have had in managing the GFC successfully is being eroded because of its fall in importance in the electorate.
In the table on who is best on economic management, 40% of those polled said Labor and 45% the Coalition. Dennis describes Labor’s rating as steady but in fact it has gone up one point from 39%, and the Coalition’s rating has gone from 40% to 45% during the last year. We know we should not get too excited about small movements in ratings, but Dennis is happy to attribute significance to them when it suits his argument. But look at the five ratings for the Coalition after the October 2007 rating (the first listed): 53, 44, 44, 43, 40, 45, and for Labor 29, 37, 34, 39, 39, 40. After the 2007 rating there’s not much movement there for either party; the Coalition has recovered 5% from a year ago, but is close to its rating for the two years before that. Does this set of figures warrant the comment: “...the public has started to move away from Labor on economic management”?
Let’s take a quick look at the other figures, that range over the period October 2007 to February 2010: On health & Medicare, education, the economy, water planning, welfare and social issues, national security, the environment, climate change and industrial relations, the Coalition's ratings were 32, 32, 45, 31, 27, 43, 27, 30, 33 and Labor 47, 40, 36, 51, 37, 34, 35, 49. You may find it easier to look at the tables. Labor is ahead on all except the economy and national security.
On handling climate change (over the period July 2008 to February 2010) the Coalition rated 18, 22, 19 and 30, and Labor 45, 37, 38 and 35. Labor is ahead but not as much as in previous years because the Coalition's rating has gone up by 11% in the last year. No doubt the Coalition will take heart from this and see it as endorsement of its Direct Action plan, at least in part.
Do take a look at the individual tables for health & Medicare, education, the economy, water planning, welfare and social issues, national security, the environment, climate change and industrial relations that extend over six surveys from October 2007 to February 2010. What is striking is how consistent the ratings have been over the years. There certainly have been small changes in the areas of water planning and the environment in the Coalition’s favour and in management of the economy. Labor is ahead of the Coalition on every aspect except the economy and national security, areas in which the Coalition has always rated well with the electorate. Dennis concedes this near the end of one of his pieces when he says: “Voters still rated the Labor Party as better able than the Coalition to handle all the electoral issues except the economy and national security -- traditionally Coalition political strengths.” Anyone reading his article to the end might have been surprised after reading the negative headings and comment that preceded that concession, and mystified by his conclusion: “This is a protest poll.”
Of course what Dennis is asserting is that there is movement away from Labor to the Coalition on so many parameters that this represents a significant turning way from Labor. It is true that the Coalition has made gains; as Dennis puts it “On every main electoral issue, including health and education, support for the Coalition rose and Labor's fell or remained static to put the Coalition in its best position since the 2007 election” He asserts that it is this movement that accounts for the changes in voter preference rather than the advent of Tony Abbott. The question is how significant the movements are given the MOE of plus or minus 3% for this survey of 1151 people. Dennis attributes major significance to them.
For those of you inclined to a deep statistical analysis of this data set, do take a look at Possum’s thorough piece on Crikey, The pitfalls of Better Party To Manage. His piece seeks to interpret the movements in the figures. Towards the end he says: "Perhaps long term relative changes in which party is best perceived to manage a given issue, perhaps we can identify if issues cease to become a strong issue for a party over a long period of time. Any sharp jump in value for a given issue that is above and beyond that achieved by other issues in that poll is also something that would be meaningful and worth taking a second look at. But for ordinary poll to poll movement, we can’t actually pull much pointy end value out at all because large parts of the variation are simply a function of generic approval of the party leaders."
So where does the truth lie? Is Dennis’ narrative a true reflection of the figures? Do his words match the figures? While it cannot be said that Dennis’ statements are inaccurate, do they paint the same picture as do the figures? Is this another example of how the mindset of the author, one that seems to be searching for positives for the Coalition and negatives for the Government, has over-ridden the objectivity that poll analysis requires, and has lead him once more to extravagant language? Is this more of Dennis seeing poll results through his Magic Looking Glass?
You be the judge. What do you think?
- Posted by Ad astra on February 16, 2010
There we were last night, political tragics scouring our computer screens looking for signs of what the latest Newspoll might show. Two weeks ago Newspoll showed a significant closing of the gap between Labor and the Coalition to a TPP of 52/48. The same result occurred last October, but because two weeks later it was back to usual levels, it was labelled an outlier. The question was whether the recent 52/48 was an outlier or pointing to a trend.
It has now become a habit of The Australian to herald the outcome of its Newspoll the night before. Two weeks ago there was an announcement on its website well in advance of the publication of a brief account of the result, which was adverse to Labor. Since some queried whether an advance announcement was a bad sign for Labor, the tragics looked last night for this portent. They were astonished to see on the Pollytics website ‘Newspoll at 9 pm’, and wondered what that unprecedented timing meant – was it a sign of disaster for Labor? It turned out to be a hoax, was quickly revealed to be so, and the tragics turned to The Oz website looking for the signs, pressing F5 regularly. But since there was no advance announcement of the time that Newspoll would be out, they reasoned that maybe it was not too bad for Labor.
Eventually, somewhere around 10.15 pm, the Dennis Shanahan summary appeared with the striking headline: Rudd hits a new low: Newspoll. In five paragraphs he pointed out that “Kevin Rudd's personal voter appeal was at its lowest since he became Labor leader more than three years ago”, that Labor's primary vote had “...dropped below 40 per cent for the first time since 2006”, “...its lowest since Kim Beazley was opposition leader”, that “...the Coalition has managed to hold its primary vote at 40 per cent for a month for the first time since the 2007 election loss”, and that support for Labor's emissions trading scheme had ‘slumped’: “In September last year, support for the CPRS was at 67 per cent but last weekend dropped to 57 per cent and those against the CPRS rose from 22 per cent to 34 per cent.” All these statements were factually accurate. He ended with a flourish: “While satisfaction with the Prime Minister is at a new low for him as leader, voter satisfaction with Tony Abbott's Liberal leadership has reached a new high.”
Pretty grim stuff for Labor and exhilarating for the Coalition! But the numerical data were scant. No TPP figures, no indication of how much Rudd’s ‘personal voter appeal’ had fallen, no figures about Tony Abbott’s ‘voter appeal’, no PPM figures; in fact the only figures were those quoted above. This left us tantalized about how bad the situation might be for Labor, and how good for the Coalition.
Then along came Lateline where Leigh Sales announced that Newspoll was ‘good news for the Government’. After reading Dennis’ piece, surely she must have made a mistake, inadvertently substituting ‘Government’ for ‘Coalition’. But no, after a tedious half-hour wait for the segment, she told us that the Government had gone up one percentage point, and the Coalition one point down to give a TPP of 53/47, reversing the recent downward trend. Given the MOE, no one with statistical nous is going to give too much credence to this small change, but since the media is not constrained in this way, giving as it does undeserving emphasis to such small movements, why was it that Dennis chose not to mention the TPP, the one aspect favourable to Labor?
Moreover, while Dennis’ assertions about Rudd’s ‘voter appeal’ are correct as far as they go, why did he chose to omit the actual figures that put the changes in perspective. Rudd’s satisfaction rating is 50%, the same as two weeks ago, and his dissatisfaction rating is up 2% to 40%. Compared with last November Rudd has certainly dropped from a net satisfaction rating of 22% to 10%, but satisfaction still sits at 50%, the sort of approval John Howard enjoyed through much of his incumbency. In the PPM stakes Rudd has dropped 3% to 55% since the last Newspoll, while Abbott has gone up 1% to 27%, just half of Rudd’s rating.
In the morning’s paper Dennis fleshes out the figures in his piece: Newspoll: Rudd hits now low. The tables accompany the piece.
On the subject of climate change Newspoll shows 73% believe it is occurring – only 22% don’t, compared with 84%/12% in July 2008; 94% believe it is caused by human activity, down from 96% in July 2008; 57% are in favour of the CPRS and 34% against, compared with 67%/22% in September 2009 and 72%/21% in October 2008. While there has been a significant fall in support for action and specifically the CPRS, support remains quite high. Dennis assesses the situation thus: “But the Newspoll survey has shown opposition is growing to the ETS, although Australians overwhelmingly want action on climate change.”
Dennis paints a more sinister scenario for Labor in his supplementary piece The trends begin to run against Labor in today’s Australian.
So what do we make of Dennis’ appraisal, so gloomy for Labor? Why did Leigh Sales say the poll was ‘good news for the Government’ and introduce that segment with “The Government appears to have halted the Tony Abbott-led resurgence for the Opposition, according to the Newspoll to be published in tomorrow's Australian newspaper. The Rudd Government has improved its position by one point on a two-party-preferred basis to be now standing at 53 points, up from 52 a fortnight ago, while the Opposition has slipped a point to 47.”? I notice though that the transcript header today is “Coalition's poll resurgence continues”, which seems to be at variance with her words. Why did the ABC use that heading?
We all have our biases, which influence the way we interpret events. We even interpret the hardest of hard data differently. But our interpretation does reveal those biases. So we can speculate about Dennis’ biases from what he writes. Why did he omit information from last night’s summary that might have given a more balanced perspective, for example the TPP? It would have taken only a few extra words. Readers might be excused for deducing that he wanted to paint as poor a picture for Labor and as optimistic an image for the Coalition as was possible from the Newspoll results.
Is it an example of Dennis looking at the Newspoll results through his own Magic Looking Glass that enables him to see almost every piece of information as a plus for the Coalition and a minus for Labor; that enables Newspoll results to mean whatever he wants them to mean? Lewis Carroll would have been proud of him.
What do you think?
- Posted by Bushfire Bill on February 12, 2010
There has been a lot of pussy-footing around the deaths of four workers involved in the Insulation part of the stimulus package. Three have tragically died as a result of electrical shocks and one from heat stroke. Whether they were working for licensed or otherwise reputable home insulation firm or were employed by 'shonks' (fly-by-night carpetbagger operators in for a quick killing) is unknown and, apparently, immaterial. Peter Garrett is guilty of something - Tony Abbott today said the specific crime is 'industrial manslaughter' - and must resign. Or so the media meme goes. Apparently Garrett is 'fighting for his political life', despite contraindications of this from his boss, Kevin Rudd, because the political journalists say he is. And when the opinionistas go to the trouble to say Garrett is potentially fatally wounded, then that in itself is proof of the severity of his wounds. These people do not exaggerate lightly.
Elsewhere in Queensland, a sparrow farted in the morning. This caused a dog to bark, which in turn caused a cat to run up a tree. A small branch of the tree came off and caused a boy on his bike to swerve. The boy was run over by a car driven by a woman who worked for an insulation company. For this too, Peter Garrett is guilty and should resign. Ridiculous? Yes, about as ridiculous as Abbott’s gross assertion that Garrett would have been guilty of 'industrial manslaughter' in NSW, if the incident had occurred in that state and if he had been a company director employing the deceased installers (false in both cases, by the way).
Tony Abbott, in his new-found career as Judge, Jury and Executioner in the Industrial Court (who knew?) has spoken. We have no body of relevant evidence, nor even an outline of the broad circumstances of the fatal incidents, but take 'Straight Talkin’ Tony’s word for it: Garrett is guilty. In Parliament today Tony shrilled, 'Mr. Speaker, this is about death.'
Tony should know. When he was Industrial Relations Minister, in 2002, Abbott had this to say about proposed 'industrial manslaughter' laws in Victoria and Queensland. In an address to the Queensland Industrial Relations Society, titled In Praise Of Bosses (and the jobs they bring), he said this:
"There are three essential problems with industrial manslaughter legislation as proposed: first, it treats workers like children by failing to recognise that workplace safety is a shared responsibility between employers and employees; second, it shifts the workplace safety emphasis from prevention to punishment; and third, it introduces a new type of vicarious liability into the criminal law...
"The 'industrial manslaughter' mindset casts the employer as habitual villain. As a society, we need to demonstrate our abhorrence of slip-shod safety procedures and industrial short-cuts but we should also beware of the tendency to be wise after the event and seek scapegoats rather than solutions. One workplace commentator likens industrial manslaughter to convicting passengers of culpable driving. It’s not inconceivable, say employer groups, if a drunken fork-lift driver seriously injured fellow employees, that the boss could be guilty of a criminal offence while the company could not sack the worker at fault.” Link.
We can see why Tony singled out NSW (and not Queensland) for the scene of Garrett’s alleged crime. When he was Minister, as we can see from the above link, Tony specifically told those in Queensland responsible for Industrial Relations in that state that he thought an industrial manslaughter law was a non-starter.
Elsewhere, in September 2003, Abbott opined: "Legislation as draconian as industrial manslaughter legislation is much more likely to produce an epidemic of buck passing." Link.
.... except where there’s a chance to pass the buck onto Peter Garrett, and then our 'Straight Talkin’ Messiah is all ears. Being 'wise after the event' is suddenly all the rage again.
Perhaps Tony has seen the light? Perhaps he is now as accepting of the reality of industrial manslaughter as a workplace crime as he was of the 'political reality' of ETS legislation? In the Straight Talker’s case, you never know.
It seems Abbott’s attitude to treating workers 'like children', the shift of workplace safety from 'prevention to punishment' and the onerous burden of a new vicarious liability upon bosses (who bring us all those jobs) has changed. His newfound admiration for strict industrial laws couldn’t be hypocrisy, because, with Tony Abbott, you always know where he stands. He is merely a conviction politician who seems to have changed his convictions, or as Tony would put it 'his considered opinion' is different today to what it was then.
Could I interpose the word 'crap' at this point?
The only problem with Tony’s analysis is that Peter Garrett was neither the employer nor the regulator in any of these cases, but why let that get in the way of a good headline? Presumably, in some future Straight Talkin’ World of Tony Abbott as PM (hold on to your stomachs) any federal government minister will be liable to be charged with a felony crime, involving imprisonment of up to 25 years, if a worker in any government-funded scheme, no matter how far divorced from the minister’s actual control, dies in the course of their employment.
No doubt, intrepid journalists will do the same small amount of Googling that I did prior to writing this article in researching their own grave pieces (10 minutes' worth), and they will resolve the apparent hypocrisy of the Straight Talker’s position for We Of The Mob. Those off-the-cuff comments of Tony Abbott's will be exposed for the self-serving hypocrisy they are. Perhaps our opinion leaders should start out by delving into the history of Health in recent years, especially when Tony Abbott was Minister, to see whether anyone died as a result of the pullback of funds that occurred under his watch. Or maybe there might be some Iraqi citizen, missing loved ones killed by Australian bullets in a vain pursuit of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' who have a beef with the government of which Abbott was a senior member. SIEV-X anyone?
Tony, when even a mere sparrow farts in Queensland, you never can tell how long and how far the smell will waft and linger on.
- Posted by Ad astra on February 9, 2010
It was never going to be easy to sell the Government’s CPRS. It is a complex plan to cope with a very complex problem – anthropogenic global warming. But as recent events have muddied the debate about carbon mitigation, the Government’s task is now even more difficult. So far it has not done a great job in selling its CPRS, perhaps distracted by its attempts to get the legislation through the Senate that would have succeeded but for Tony Abbott’s toppling of Malcolm Turnbull, and the Copenhagen saga. Ironically, in a speech in parliament yesterday it was Malcolm Turnbull who described lucidly what the CPRS was designed to do, more so than Government speakers.
CPRS and ETS will be used interchangeably in this piece.
Here are some of the issues complicating the debate:
Climate change sceptics/deniers have grown in numbers and loquacity. Whereas previously they could argue that climate has been changing for centuries and what’s happening now is just part of a natural cycle and has nothing to do with carbon dioxide or human activity, now they can reinforce their position by reference to instances of mistakes in the report of the UN International Panel on Climate Change, the ultimate and until recently unchallengeable authority on the science of climate change. Instances of sloppy, even deceptive science, and incorrect predictions based on poor documentation in the fringe literature or by inexperienced scientists, have also been cited. This has been grist to the mill for those who seek to tear down the validity and reliability of climate science and those who work in it. Well-funded globe-trotting climate change denialists are in full flight and attracting enthusiastic audiences to their heavily promoted performances.
Most members of the public have little interest in the scientific foundation of climate change and scant time to sort it out for themselves. So if they have an inclination to scepticism, these occurrences quickly confirm their suspicions that global warming is a hoax. This is despite the mountain of peer-reviewed scientific evidence in reputable journals that go to make up the first part of the IPCC report which provides such convincing evidence of AGW. It is in the second and third parts of the report that attempt to predict the consequences of global warming that some errors have been found, just a few despite the strident publicity that the sceptical press has given them.
The Opposition has several sceptics among its numbers who have seized on these errors to confirm their views: Nick Minchin, Wilson Tuckey, Cory Bernardi, Dennis Jensen, Andrew Robb, and of course Tony Abbott himself, who seems to waver between ‘absolute crap’ denial and reluctant acceptance of the need to take out some insurance against the possibility global warming might be happening.
Although among the general public there are an increasing number of sceptics, the proportion who want something done about climate change is a still a solid majority, and while support for an ETS has declined significantly, in this week’s Nielsen poll 56% still favoured an ETS while 29% opposed.
The other factor muddying the waters is the Coalition’s abandonment of bipartisanship and the introduction of a new policy that promises to solve the global warming problem with a ‘Direct Action Plan’ that on the face of it seems to cause little pain, is not ‘a great big new tax on everything’, is purported to be less costly than the Government’s CPRS, and uses ‘natural’ methods such as tree planting, sequestration of carbon in soil and algal synthesis, all laudable. It all sounds too good to be true, and it is according to analysts and yesterday none other than Malcolm Turnbull. But that will not stop many voters from giving it a tick.
When presented with a choice between the Coalition plan and the Government’s ETS, 45% of those polled by Nielsen preferred the Coalition plan and 39% the ETS. Yet when asked to choose between the Government’s and the Coalition’s approaches to climate change, the results were the other way around: 43 per cent chose the Government’s approach and 30 per cent the Coalition’s. Pollster John Stirton thought ‘the apparent contradiction probably reflected voters' low level of understanding of the schemes’. In Pollytics, Possum has done a more complex analysis of the answers to the Nielsen questions that will be of interest to those interested in the detail.
The selling of the CPRS therefore has to take into account not only the complexity of climate change, the scepticism surrounding AGW, the complexity of the proposed ETS and the way it will affect people, but it also has to counter the simplicity of the Coalition plan which has popular appeal to those who don’t wish to delve into the details and who don’t want to pay out of their own pockets to achieve success. Few will question the effectiveness and the real cost of the Coalition plan because it is via taxes - just so long as it’s easy to understand and seemingly painless.
So what are the messages the Government needs to promulgate?
First, it needs to convince the sceptical that global warming is real and that if left unchecked will irreversibly change the planet and all life upon it. The hard-core deniers are probably beyond persuasion.
Next, the Government needs to convince the people that the situation is urgent. What looks to be a long way off is so easy to ignore. So the Government needs to show that significant changes are already occurring all around the world, and how acting now will not only begin the process of reversal and avert calamity, but will cost less in the long run.
Then it needs to convince the public that humans are such a significant cause of global warming that it is their activities that must be curtailed to begin to reverse the adverse trends.
Next it must convince everyone that acting independently of the rest of the world is the way to go, that it will minimize costs and will give our industry a head start in creating renewable energy and the technology that reduces emissions, such as CO2 sequestration. There is a strong and persuasive argument that Australia should not go first and jeopardize its economy. Countering this will take a lot of effort. But suggesting the rest of the world are laggards and will eventually have to catch up, might appeal. Unfortunately the Government has used the ‘we’ll do no more, no less’ mantra so often that acting ahead of the rest of the world is now more difficult to sell.
Then the very basic messages about what the ETS is designed to do can be promulgated, namely limit carbon emissions, heavily penalize those who pollute so that they seek to pollute less, and compensate households for any increase in living costs that arise.
Finally, the Government needs to contrast its ETS with the Coalition’s Direct Action Plan and convince the people that the Coalition’s scheme is short-term, unlikely to achieve any mitigation of carbon emissions, is costly, and that it is the taxpayers who will pay the polluters to reduce their pollutions.
When one looks at the strength of the arguments that the Government could mount, it seems like a lay-down-misère, but it isn’t – it is probably the most difficult task for the Government in 2010.
Simplicity is essential in transmitting messages. So let’s try to draft some understandable but brief promotional lines. Please try your hand too.
On the reality of AGW
Global warming threatens our future
It is happening now
Human activity is causing it
We must act now before it’s too late
Acting now will reduce the cost
Acting now will boost our economy and create jobs
Acting now will give Australia a head start
The rest of the world will have to catch up
On the basic CPRS messages
The Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme:
Sets a limit on carbon pollution for the nation
Penalizes polluters, who pay heavily for polluting
Will reduce pollution
Will compensate households for any increased costs
Does not use taxpayer’s money
If the Government believes it needs to counter the Opposition plan:
The Opposition's Direct Action Plan:
Will allow polluters to go on polluting
Does not set a limit on pollution
Will not reduce pollution overall
Will use your taxes to pay polluters to pollute less
Will be very costly to the budget
Will not compensate you for increased household costs
All of these messages could be embellished by images that reinforce the message, and voice-over that adds impact if they are used in TV ads.
There’s a start anyway. I realize some of you will likely disagree with some of the premises that underpin these lists and no doubt will express your disagreement; you may want to change some of wording. But I hope you will try to improve the messages or add some if I’ve missed any out.
For what it’s worth, the final list could be sent to the Government as the view of bloggers on TPS.
Let’s have your suggestions.
- Posted by Ad astra on February 5, 2010
While someone as fit as you would usually have a slow heart rate, I expect your heart quickened when you read this week’s Newspoll, showing as it did a narrowing of Labor’s two party preferred lead since you took over, down to 52/48, but perhaps it skipped a beat when you saw that Kevin Rudd’s lead as preferred prime minister stubbornly remained at 32 percentage points.
The fact that the Morgan face-to-face poll published last week carried the heading ALP strengthens lead after Summer holidays and showed a TPP of 58.5/41.5%, an improvement for Labor, and Essential Research Report the day before Newspoll showed a 56/44 TPP, the same as the two previous weeks, seemed not to dampen enthusiasm for this Newspoll result. Newspoll seems to be the ‘preferred poll’ of the pundits, particularly at The Australian, which understands it so well ‘because it owns it’. The fact that in early November there was another Newspoll 52/48 that bounced to 56/44 two weeks later and was therefore considered ‘an outlier’, has not deterred supportive journos from making a mountain out of the latest poll, not contemplating for a moment that this poll too might be an outlier. You probably saw its preliminary findings the night before. Have you noticed that if The Oz has results favourable to the Coalition coming up, there’s plenty of advance notice on its website – otherwise we have to wait patiently.
You may have derived some cheer from today’s Morgan face-to-face taken over the last two weekends of January that shows Labour down and the Coalition up, back to where they were at the year’s beginning, but your excitement may have been tempered somewhat by a TPP of 56.5/43.5, around Possum Pollytics all pollster trend for the last couple of years, quite different from Newspoll’s 52/48.
So enjoy – this is likely as good as it gets.
If the Newspoll was a true reflection of what the public thinks of your ascent to leadership we need to ask how this is so.
Over Christmas you had plenty of free air; Kevin and Julia and most ministers were having ‘a well-earned break’, something for which we should be grateful with a frantic year ahead. You even got a spread in Australian Women’s Weekly that ‘humanized’ you as a family man ready to give advice on moral as well as social and political issues. Perhaps it was this uncontested exposure that seemingly enhanced your connection to the people. Perhaps it was your policy pronouncements that attracted attention. There weren’t all that many and they were mainly contrary, but maybe they helped. Your promise to solve the problem of global warming, or should it be ‘alleged warming’, with a tax-free easy-to-understand scheme in which everyone is a winner, so attractive to those who wish climate change would go away, might have been a factor. Or maybe it was just the force of your personality. A recent Finnish study has shown that whether the elector liked or disliked a politician was more influential in deciding how to vote than was their policies. Democracy is a wonderful beast. Why bother with well thought-through policy if personality is the magic tool?
So the end-of-year break was a welcome opportunity for you to get started, free of a contest. Now that the political year has begun, welcome to the real world of politics as leader, something no doubt you’ve already discovered is quite different from being a shadow minister or even a minister.
Some journalists regard you as a fight-hardened and very smart political operative, not to be underestimated. They say that would be a big mistake. They portray you as someone who will ‘take the fight up to the Government’, a portrayal which your pugilistic nature would endorse.
As we look for evidence of this smartness we wonder why you appointed Barnaby Joyce as Shadow Finance Minister. You regard him as Australia’s best ‘retail politician’, whatever that means. If you mean he has a smart turn of phrase, you’re probably right, but his preoccupation with clever one-liners is detracting from his real job, in which his accountancy skills are a poor substitute for an understanding of national finances. Barrie Cassidy pointed out that he is behaving like a court jester. Yet he is in politics, not vaudeville. His performance at the Press Club this week was not a great start, and his foot-in-mouth media appearances have engendered confusion instead of confidence. Was it smart to put him up against one of the Government’s best performers, Lindsay Tanner, who already is running rings around him? Maybe he’ll improve; maybe he’ll learn his job; but he may turn out to be an albatross around your neck. Already you have had to hose down comments from him that the Coalition may cut public service jobs and the foreign aid program to fund its carbon mitigation scheme.
Was it smart to bring back on the front bench old-timers from the Howard era? That suggests a return to that era, so convincingly rejected by the people a couple of years ago.
After rejecting the Government’s CPRS after initially advocating that the Coalition pass it, you promised all the details of a plan of your own that would not be ‘a great big new tax’, but would solve the climate change problem with almost no pain to anyone. Was that smart? This week you delivered, but details were missing. You promised all would be revealed, but when your announcement was made, funding arrangements were missing, details which you now say will be revealed ‘well before the election’. By now your plan has been dissected and found wanting by Government, which insists it will increase not decrease emissions, will cost more, will provide no compensation for families, and does not reveal funding sources. Columnists are saying likewise. Was it smart to promise a detailed carbon mitigation plan when only a few weeks over the end-of-year break were available to do what Ross Garnaut and the Government took over two years to accomplish? Have you discovered what you accuse the Government of so often, that talk is easy, but action takes time and effort? Have you noticed that the mantra ‘great big new tax’ which you believed was such a PR winner is being countered by the Government’s description of your plan – ‘a climate con-job’? I wonder which one will stick harder?
Perhaps though you felt you were smart enough to front up with a partly developed policy without costings and lacking any information about where the bucket of money to encourage polluters to pollute less would come from. Did you expect the public to accept your thesis that the greed and the social conscience of the polluters would bring them into line and persuade them to pollute less? Perhaps you felt ‘business as usual’ for the polluters would appeal to them, but did you believe the public would swallow it?
Perhaps you felt you were smart enough to convince the people, struggling with the complexities of the Government’s CPRS, to warmly embrace a simple plan, especially if it caused almost no pain, no matter if it was ineffective. Did you believe the people would pick simplicity over efficacy? Comments by some journalists on air suggest that might be so. But that belies the inherent commonsense of the Australian public – they know a con when they see one. Lenore Taylor nails it in The Oz when she says in Initiative is about votes, not carbon: “This is a climate change plan to get Tony Abbott through to the next election, not a serious plan to refit the Australian economy so that it emits less carbon.”
Perhaps you hoped for some supportive comments from the media. You were not disappointed. Predictably, The Australian obliged with banner headlines Abbott’s cut-through climate plan. In contemporary politics, ‘cutting through’ seems to be the most salient operative endeavour. I suppose that means being understood by the people. The author of the article, Matthew Franklin, went on to support you with “...most business groups have backed the plan, agreeing with the Opposition Leader’s assertion that it is ‘cheaper, simpler, and more cost effective’ than Labor’s proposed carbon emissions trading scheme.” You know you can always rely on The Oz. Of course, as Franklin knows and acknowledges in another article, most business groups have not backed the plan; even some of those that have expressed interest, such as the National Farmers Federation and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, want more details before committing themselves, as does the Business Council of Australia. He should be more careful and consistent with his assertions.
Looking back to last year, for better or worse, you jumped into the ring, a place you’ve always coveted, or more correctly you were pushed into the ring by your seconds (good old Nick and Eric), and having recovered from the surprise of being chosen as the contestant to take on the champ, you’ve been throwing punches wildly, just like you always have. You may feel you’re ahead on points so far, but time will tell how many rounds you survive. When you have to move beyond domestic boxing to international bouts you may find that tricky, especially after Barnaby’s comments about cutting foreign aid. How do you propose to convince the public you can handle international bouts and perform competently on the world stage?
The life of a leader is not easy – ask Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull. You and your Coalition colleagues seem to feel though that so far the bout is going well, that Newspoll and the bevy of sycophantic journalists are right. But if the first few days of real bare-knuckle politics are a guide, critics might conclude that unless you can lift your performance substantially, unless you can, Johnny Howard style, pull a few live rabbits out of the hat, you should enjoy this week’s Newspoll - you will likely find that right now is as good as it gets.
What do you think?
- Posted by Bushfire Bill on February 1, 2010
Watching the 10 Network’s So You Think You Can Dance on Sunday night reminded me of the political season about to begin this week.
The ikonic show, about undiscovered wannabees who, enraptured by high hopes of stardom and fame, enter a multi-stage dance competition – with us as intimate voyeurs of their every move - tells us a lot about human hope.
There was the plain, frumpy girl who believes Jesus is with her at every step. The lithe, enchanting young aboriginal man whose mum’s indifference to his dancing caused tears all around. The thirty-something hoofer who has been around the traps and is destined to stay trapped. The conga line of untrained hip-hop shakers and rollers with their limited talent no match for their unlimited energy. The semi-professionals, expecting to make it easily into the finals. The Hard Judge, the Mother Judge, the Cooly Professional Choreographer Judge. Hopes and expectations dashed. Dreams come true. Life in the raw, or as raw as a heavily edited commercial television show can present it: the Life Struggle, through the medium of movement, youth and expensive SMS voting fees.
On the political side of this metaphor we have seen the surprise elevation of Tony Abbott, a wildcard candidate, to the leadership of the Liberals, by one vote. The Glamour Boy, Malcolm Turnbull, has been voted off the show. The once fresh-faced newbie, Rudd, is now regarded as the stodgy old incumbent, araldited into the same seat as Howard, never seen in budgie smugglers, rarely out of a suit. His routine, especially in the Climate area, trashed with the disappointment of post-Copenhagen days, could do with some sprucing up as the bare-chested, lean-and-hungry challenger takes the fight to him. Abbott is flanked by the glamourous Ice Maiden, Julie Bishop, and the once-jovial but now permanently grumpy Joe Hockey who mocks every move Kevin Rudd, his former TV friend, makes.
The Liberals and Nationals, thrown out of a previous series in the grand final, decimated by the shock desertion or expulsion of senior members – Costello, Downer, Vaile, Howard, Nelson, Brough – have reinvented themselves as the underdogs, running a low budget campaign to steal the public’s hearts with honesty and true grit. Kevin, on the other hand, jets about the world like a Little King (how dare he use the Prime Ministerial plane for overseas jaunts?). He rarely utters an un-convoluted word according to his critics, who are many and mostly angry. The implication is that he is a phoney, couldn’t lie straight in bed. But you have to admit, the man has talent when it comes to winning the People’s Choice Award.
Abbott is a flawed character. He preaches against extra-marital sex, yet he fathered a child, then deserted both the baby and the mother, only to find that the baby never existed. Whether this is worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy or a comedy I cannot decide. He is a religious zealot who has a habit of sinning and then, in good Catholic tradition, confessing publicly. He is the whiskey priest, flunked out of the seminary for the green fields of Oxford and politics. By contrast, Rudd’s one known foray into the underworld, the Scores Incident, was so surprising to the voters that it saw his ratings shoot up, presumably in delight at the possibility of a glimmer of raunchiness in his character.
The common thread between each side of politics is that they both think they can dance.
Tony told us the other day that government is easy. You just make a promise and stick to it. You take a line and then abide by your decision. It’s a dangerous tack to sail for Tony, who has never been known to stick to any policy in his political life or, more to the point, has rarely been seen saying the same thing to any more than one group of listeners at a time. His waverings on Climate Change have wandered from True Believer, to pragmatic acceptance, to 'It’s crap', to his current position: although he doesn’t believe action on climate is necessary, he proposes to fix our environment by spending no money, using volunteers and 'incentives'. I can see the Hard Men of the coal industry dutifully falling into line on that one.
Kevin, despite the misery of Copenhagen, in the face of continuing revelations of flawed climate science (even if only here and there), is sticking to his guns. There are too many eggs in the basket of ETS to abandon it now. If he did so it would likely signal the beginning of the end of his government. Tony has given the public an out, an excuse to reject action on Climate Change. Sure it’s an impossible dream, but this is Reality TV, not reality. Kevin’s performance on Climate, supposedly his strong suit, has been technically difficult and reasonably well-executed, but is starting to be seen as too clever, lacking panache.
Never mind his brilliant performance in the GFC round, where he danced rings around several challengers in a largely impromptu performance that saw Australia come out on top of the world. Never mind the lowest interest rates in decades, the best prospects for infrastructure, comparatively modest unemployment, an about to re-boom economy, Kevin’s government is still seen as the least preferred Economic Managers compared to the Coalition. It makes you wonder what else “Good Economic Management” is about if it is not about these things. According to Essential Research the voters believe the parties who would have had them out of work, their schools without infrastructure spending, their industries fending for themselves and who told us first there was a Rudd Recession and then there wasn’t... are the savants of economics. Go figure! I guess it’s all about presentation on the night.
Which brings us to the media, stacking the studio benches with loud adoring fans, spruiking a miracle Coalition resurgence in a loud attempt to try to cover up for policy holes and inconsistencies you could drive a debt truck through. To get around Tony Abbott’s predilection for inventing policies on the run, for making it up as he goes along, they have invented the myth of the “Conviction Politician”. Tony Abbott is man who believes in what he says, at the time he says it, no matter how many times he contradicts himself. This isn’t political cynicism on Tony’s part. It’s a genius for improvisation. The conservative Papist, whose sins (long forgiven by a supportive press) prove merely the morbidity of the flesh, is up against a government that is given only grudging praise for its great successes so far, and whose Prime Minister is mocked and condemned for the slightest falter, be it fairly shaking a sauce bottle (instead of sucking it), or swearing at a poor young flight attendant. Rudd’s government is supposed to have defeated the GFC and kept all its promises, while all we have from Tony Abbott is promises to produce glittering prosperity from the Magic Pudding of 'budget savings'. Never mind that 'budget savings' means a sharp curtailment of social welfare, infrastructure and spending on other government priorities, the Conviction Politician will see us through... somehow. We can worry about that later.
So, as we exit the preliminaries and get to the series proper, junkies on both sides will eagerly await the Reality TV show called Question Time. They will hang off every word and nuance, forgiving on the one hand, condemning on the other. The wannabee from two seasons ago has become the solid favourite. The reactionary Catholic man we thought we all knew as an opportunistic hypocrite, preaching what he never practised, has been reinvented as the plain-speaking saviour of the nation. On the sidelines it will be a fascinating exercise in whether the media, deprived of the river of gold of government advertising (a promise kept, but rarely referred to), still have the clout they believe they should have.
They all think they can dance, but can the fat lady sing?
- Posted by Ad astra on January 28, 2010
We all accept that Australia’s population is ageing. Demographic evidence shows that life expectancy at birth is now 78.9 years for males and 83.6 years for females. These figures are from the CIA World Factbook 2009 and from the 2006 revision of the United Nations World Population Prospects report for 2005-2010. Although there is a suggestion that with the growing epidemic of obesity, type II diabetes and cardiovascular disease, future generations may be the first to not enjoy the same longevity as their predecessors, we will have an ageing population for the foreseeable future.
This piece begins to address the ageing issue. No doubt much will be written about it, although to date the MSM has not given it much attention. Much of what appears below is drawn from Government documents heralding the Third Intergenerational Report: Australia to 2050: Future Challenges that will soon be released by Wayne Swan. This post is offered to furnish some facts and figures, to offer some opinions, to encourage debate, and to kindle ideas about how this country should address the ageing challenge.
The First Intergenerational Report 2002-03 was released by Peter Costello in May 2002 with the 2002-03 federal budget. The Second was released in April 2007. The Third Report will describe the challenges facing Australia over the next 40 years, the result of the demographic changes resulting from the ageing of our population. It is hereby acknowledged that much of the following is extracted from an advance notice of that report:
The bare essentials
Today there are 22 million Australians; by 2050 it is estimated there will be 36 million – reflecting natural population growth and a continuation of migration trends of the past forty years.
Today, 14 per cent of Australians - one in seven - are over the age of 65; by 2050, 23 per cent – almost one in four - will be over 65.
The ageing of the population is expected to reduce the workforce participation rate from around 65 per cent now to around 60 per cent by 2050. This will lead to changes in the ratio of the number of people of working age (and paying taxes) to those aged 65 and over: Forty years ago, in 1970, the ratio was 7.5 people of working age to every person 65 and over. In 2010, the ratio is 5 to 1, and in 40 years' time, in 2050, it is projected to fall to just 2.7 people of working age for each person aged 65 and over.
Thus Australia faces higher costs in catering for the aged, yet slower economic growth as there will be fewer workers.
The report projects that average annual growth in real GDP per person will fall to 1.5 per cent over the next 40 years, in contrast to an average increase in GDP per capita of 1.9 per cent per year over the past 40 years. Therefore average family incomes will grow at a slower rate than in recent years.
The Government believes it must act now to counter the projected decline in economic growth in the years ahead by enhancing productivity growth and workforce participation. By lifting productivity and participation, a higher rate of economic growth could be achieved. A Treasury analysis shows that if average productivity growth was lifted back towards the 1990s mark of an average 2 per cent per year - up from the 1.4 per cent to which it declined in the decade just passed - this would produce enormous benefits: Australia’s economy would be $570 billion bigger in 2050 and on average, every man, woman and child would be $16,000 better off a year in 2050.
The advance report, used by Kevin Rudd in announcing its advent, asserts that: “It is productivity growth that must play the central role in building Australia's future economic growth. Productivity is about how we use labour, capital and technology across the economy. It's about working smarter - rather than working harder, or working longer. Productivity depends on all of us - workers, businesses and the Government - but the Government plays a vital role in facilitating long-term productivity growth.”
Productivity – the crucial element
The report continues – “To lift productivity we need broad economic reforms” , as follows:
First, Treasury projections suggest we can increase productivity by building 21st century infrastructure. An increase in the public infrastructure stock by 1 per cent would lead to an increase in output by around 0.2 per cent, and improving the efficiency of our energy and transport infrastructure could increase GDP by nearly 2 per cent, the equivalent of around $75 billion or $2,000 per person in today's dollars.
Second, we can increase productivity by building a highly skilled, highly trained workforce. Improvements related to education and training - early learning, higher education attainment and increases in numeracy and literacy - could raise aggregate labour productivity by up to 1.2 per cent. If we could boost GDP in 2050 by 1.2 per cent, that would amount to around $45 billion in today's dollars - or the equivalent of around $1,200 for each Australian.
Third, we can increase productivity through microeconomic reforms - such as the reforms the Government is prosecuting to build a seamless national economy. National Competition Policy and related reforms during the 1990s increased Australia's GDP by 2.5 per cent. Further microeconomic reforms can build on this achievement and continue to lift GDP and productivity. Tackling social exclusion can also contribute to increasing workforce participation and productivity growth by removing barriers to work and improving skills among the most disadvantaged, such as Indigenous Australians, unemployed youth and the homeless. These measures would also help the 2.6 per cent of Australians - around 570,000 - who were left out while the nation reaped the benefits of the mining boom in the past decade.
The downside of an ageing population
The report then sounds a more sombre note: the challenge of the ageing of our population to the sustainability of future budgets. Unless the Government can achieve higher levels of productivity growth and workforce participation, we face either generating large, unsustainable budget deficits into the second quarter of the century, or reducing government services. The report asserts that the task has been made more difficult by the aftermath of higher budget expenditure during the past decade, which has locked in a permanently higher spending base. During the growth period of the 2000s, the average real growth in government spending increased to 3.8 per cent compared to an average 2.5 per cent annual real growth in spending during the growth period of the 1990s.
The Government insists that it is committed to a medium-term fiscal strategy that will deliver a permanent structural improvement in Australia's public finances so that by 2049-50, the Budget outcome is projected to be around 3.5 per cent of GDP better off – that is $130 billion in today's dollar terms.
Let’s look at some of these data:
The projected population growth to 36 million is applauded by some but others are appalled and assert that Australia cannot support that number. But to restrict population growth, natural growth would need to be discouraged, not something some religious groups would approve, or migration restricted. Since immigration has given this country great impetus and prosperity, restricting it sharply might prove to be counterproductive. You can see fertile grounds here for partisan conflict.
The uncomfortable truth about which little can be done is that the proportion of those over 65 will jump from one in seven to one in four by 2050, and that for everyone over 65 there will be only 2.7 wage earning tax payers in 2050, whereas now there are 5.
Clearly the productivity of those who are working will need to rise to support the over 65s, many or most of whom will be retired and on welfare.
Improving productivity
Hoping to avoid criticism for expecting people to work harder and longer, the Government suggests instead that they work smarter. That is good advice, and is one way of lifting productivity. Another is to have more people participating in productive work.
Retirement age
Australia would have more people in work if we had a higher retirement age. Can we afford to have a retirement age of 65? Already there are moves to lift it to 67, starting in 2017 and completing the change by 2023, a very modest rise over a long period. Since 65 was set as a retirement age a century ago when longevity was much less than it is now, would it not be reasonable to raise it to say, 70, and to raise it faster. For those doing heavy physical work that might be a big ask, but if graded diminution in physical effort was accompanied by shorter working hours or a shorter working week towards the end of the working life, would there not be many who would welcome the opportunity of continuing to be productive and earning. During the GFC business showed it was willing to make such flexible working arrangements to avoid sacking workers. Those doing less arduous work might leap at the opportunity of avoiding retirement for a few more years. Many professionals are already working well beyond the statutory retiring age and loving it. Governments are too reluctant to address this issue; the fact that Tony Abbott has given some support to it might embolden Kevin Rudd to re-consider this matter.
Up-skilling the workforce
Productivity can also be raised by up-skilling the workforce. This needs to begin in pre-school and continue as far as each individual wishes to, and is capable of going. That will lead to smarter working. The advent of super fast broadband will open up opportunities for smarter working, and possible vastly different working opportunities. Could not more opportunity be taken for working at home some or all days of the week, using fast broadband for rapid communication? Videoconferencing is becoming commonplace; it could substitute for workplace meetings and conferences. This would reduce wasteful travel time, unclog our roads and reduce air travel.
Workplace patterns
Although politicians will be unwilling to even mention these measures, could not work patterns be made more efficient by restricting such time-wasting habits as attending to personal email and engaging in social networking during working time, having frequent smokos that now requires workers to leave the workplace, spending too much time chatting around the coffee machine (not about work, but cricket and football), partaking in long lunches that sometimes leave employees alcohol affected, taking ‘sickies’ simply to use up sick leave, something the self-employed eschew. This might sound rather puritanical, but can we afford to preserve such workplace ‘sacred cows’ when we’re facing the crisis of an ageing population. Many workers really do need to work harder and longer.
Infrastructure
Infrastructure improvements in rail, roads and ports will improve efficiency and productivity by removing bottlenecks, something the Government keeps emphasizing. This takes time to stoke up, so the faster these progress the better.
Microeconomic reforms
The microeconomic reforms that are underway are designed to make business more efficient by removing red-tape, unnecessary restrictions, conflicting rules and interstate blocks, and streamlining business across states and regions. COAG is already addressing this, but as is the rule with bureaucracies, progress is slow.
Health care reform
The health care system is another major area where improved efficiency is needed and where major cost saving could occur. After sixteen months of data gathering and deliberation the Hospitals and Health Reform Commission has delivered a report with over a hundred recommendations that will be implemented starting this year. Nicola Roxon says she has almost completed negotiations with the states. Hopefully state bureaucrats will not obstruct progress.
Tax reform
The Henry review of taxation promises to reduce the complexity of taxation and transfer payments, and thereby reduce the cost of administering them.
The consequences of failure
Unless these measures can improve productivity, increase participation and lower costs, all those who pay tax will be faced with higher taxes, or reduction of government-provided services, neither of which anyone would applaud. The alternative – increasingly large budget deficits, is unacceptable.
The object of this piece is to stimulate debate on the crucial issue of how to cope with Australia’s ageing population.
Please tell us what you think. Let us have your ideas.
- Posted by Ad astra on January 25, 2010
Bushfire Bill struck a respondent chord when he argued the case that the Liberal Party had earned the label ‘The Grumpy Old Party’. In commenting on this piece, Bilko said “...a pervasive state of denial afflicts the Coalition”, and Michael said the same when he wrote “...their grumpy army can still NOT BELIEVE that the Coalition was voted out.” HillbillySkeleton said something similar “Their criticism of 'Debt and Deficit' appears predicated on a complete denial of the intervention of the GFC into the economy over the last couple of years (an almost farcical, 'Don't Mention the War' posture), and the subsequent actions of the Rudd government, by going into Deficit, to ameliorate the worst effects of it on our country, appear to them to just be a socialist government showing its true colours.”
Denial seems to be a central component of the Liberal mindset. This piece suggests it underlies the ‘grumpiness’ that Bushfire Bill described so well.
I have written several times on TPS about this attitude of denial, and I’m not referring just to the current theme of denial of climate change. It permeates the thinking of many senior Liberals. In several pieces I’ve argued that Tony Abbott was, and I believe still is, in a state of denial about the validity of the election of the Rudd Government and the Coalition’s defeat in 2007. “We were such a good Government”, Abbott laments, the implication being that it did not deserve to be thrown out, especially during such prosperous times. He still has not grasped the essence of the defeat, acknowledging only longevity of the Howard Government, WorkChoices and the Coalition’s attitude to Climate Change as the prime factors, and now that he’s leader he’s even resurrecting elements of WorkChoices, despite proclaiming the title dead, and his climate change position continues to reek of denialism.
A 'denialist' is defined as 'one who excessively denies the truth.' That descriptor seems to fit the Liberal Party. And it’s not a recent thing; it’s chronic. ‘Denialism’ is defined as ‘choosing to deny reality as a way to avoid an uncomfortable truth. It is the refusal to accept an empirically verifiable reality. It is an essentially irrational action that withholds validation of a historical experience or event.’
In his book To the Bitter End, Peter Hartcher points to the layers of denialism in the Howard Government leading up to the 2007 election. Despite the gathering evidence, to the point of it being overwhelming, “Howard used every moment before election day to shake up the sense that the outcome was a foregone conclusion, to demand that voters reconsider. He tried every possible device and stratagem, thrashing around in a desperate series of twists and turns, prepared to try anything to win. Anything, that is, short of breaking solidarity with George W. Bush [about not signing Kyoto and on Iraq] or handing power to Peter Costello.” Howard, perhaps understandably, was denying the inevitability of defeat, but more significantly was denying the negative impact on the voters of his unshakable allegiance to George W. Bush.
Ideologically driven, Howard continued to deny the negative effect on voters of his WorkChoices legislation, until, when it was already too late, he introduced the ‘Fairness Test’ in an attempt to assuage the anger of the electorate. The voters saw it as the cynical exercise it was. Likewise, when facing defeat in his own seat he started to pay attention to his electorate, his denialism showed again. He turned up to events, such as the Granny Smith Festival, that he had never ever graced with his presence. The electors saw him as ‘on the make’. Again, as was his habit, he tried to buy votes with massive handouts ‘in the national interest’ which too often were nothing more than pork-barrelling. His state of denial obscured the fact that his actions were no longer effective – the people saw through them. But he persisted.
With the Reserve Bank continuing to raise interest rates, even during an election, an event Howard in his mind denied could or should happen, as Hartcher put it, “Howard misread the changing times – he misread the economics, he misread the way the Reserve Bank would react to the economics, and he misread the politics.”
His obsession with holding onto his Prime Ministership, his denial of the adverse effects of this on his party, hastened his downfall.
Enough of Howard’s denialism – he’s gone – what about his ministers, many of whom still adorn the Opposition benches? Howard seems to have instilled in them the same denialist mindset.
Tony Abbott, the new leader, is denialist-in-chief. He still bridles at the reality of the Coalition’s defeat by a sleepwalking electorate. He still believes that the electorate will sooner or later wake up to the 'hollowness' of Kevin Rudd – 'all talk and no action' – and will return the Coalition to its rightful seat of power.
In the lead up to the election Howard ministers denied the adverse influence Howard was having on their election chances. Even those who saw this put it aside and took no effective action to replace the man inexorably leading the Coalition to defeat. The debacle around APEC time where several ministers thought Howard should go was another example of denialism, or at least the gutlessness of some of them to insist that he went. Denialism in the sense: ‘How could this man who had led them to four successive and increasingly strong victories lead them to defeat?’
Every time Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott or Joe Hockey uttered the ‘debt and deficit’ mantra they were denying the reality of the GFC and the need to take radical action at the time, even if it incurred debt. They must have believed that repeating that mantra often enough, Goebbels-style, would wake up the electorate to the Government’s 'profligacy'. Abbott’s and Hockey’s unwillingness to give appropriate credit to the Government for its actions, actions that just about every unbiased observer now accepts saved Australia from recession, rapidly rising unemployment and business failure, is denial at its most flagrant. And the Government’s contribution to consumer and business confidence and retail sales too is denied. Even The Australian, which has not been a conspicuous supporter of the Government, this past weekend named Kevin Rudd as its ‘Australian of the Year’, and cited his efforts in combating the effects of the GFC as the main reason for its selection.
Joe Hockey is in denial when he asserts that the three interest rate rises in the last few months are not due to the buoyancy of the economy and the threat of that to inflation, but instead due to the Government’s ‘reckless and unnecessary spending’.
The sustained attack on the Schools Stimulus program by Malcolm Turnbull, Joe Hockey, Tony Abbott, Christopher Pyne and just about any other Coalition member who could get a word in, was an unseemly exercise in denialism. The fact that only about sixty problems arose in the 24 000 projects in 9 500 schools was enough for the Coalition, and it must be said parts for the Murdoch press, to deny the beneficial effects to thousands of schools, the children and their parents.
Tony Abbott, Julie Bishop, Scott Morrison and many others are in denial when they discount the ‘push factors’ that have influenced the recent boat arrivals, insisting that it is only the ‘pull factors’ – ‘Rudd’s failed border protection policies’ – that are operative.
Just this morning Peter Dutton, talking about the Government’s ‘failure to deal with the nation's ailing health system’, said “That's the crazy part about Kevin Rudd's spin on health - he just keeps promising the same thing over and over again but he delivers absolutely nothing." ‘Absolutely nothing’ mind you. Dutton thereby completely denies the existence of the Rudd Government initiative – the most comprehensive report on health care in Australia for decades, prepared by the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission. The report was the culmination of ‘16 months of discussion, debate, consultation, research and deliberation by a team dedicated to the cause of strengthening and improving our health system for this and future generations of Australians.’ It contained over a hundred recommendations. The Government insists implementation of them will begin this year.
Climate change of course is a hotbed for denialism in the Coalition. Tony Abbott’s ‘absolute crap’ comment about climate change is likely close to his real beliefs, not that it’s easy to dig them out as he oscillates from ‘pass the ETS and get it off the table’, to fighting it tooth and nail in the Senate, to his declaration that he’s always been an environmentalist and wants a Green Army, to his promise to devise a scheme that will effectively mitigate Australia’s carbon emissions without a ‘Great Big New Tax’, a mantra faithfully followed by his ministers. All this is camouflage for not wishing to address climate change frontally, which would require him to confront the denialism of Barnaby Joyce, Ron Boswell, Nick Minchin, Wilson Tuckey, Dennis Jensen, Andrew Robb, Cory Bernardi, and many others in his party. Abbott and Co deny that the ETS is a tax on the polluters, not the public, most of which will be compensated for any resultant increase in costs.
They deny the need to do much about climate change, and the need to do it soon.
When a Liberal as senior as Nick Minchin was prepared to state his highly sceptical position on climate change on last year’s ABCs Four Corners program, how can Tony Abbott, wearing his own scepticism, his own brand of denialism, like an albatross around his neck, ever be taken seriously by the public when he talks about the need for carbon mitigation, and his plans for it.
Denial is just across the road from untruthfulness, the stock in trade of many politicians. Sometimes it’s hard to know which is which. Sometimes the two blur into each other. Sometimes denial leads to untruthfulness, sometimes it’s the other way around.
Whatever its genesis, I trust the examples given above will support the thesis of this piece: that denialism is the root cause of the Coalition’s demeanour, of its grumpiness, of its ill temper. Thus the extension of Bushfire Bill’s label to ‘The Grumpy Old Denialist Party’.
Until the Coalition collectively, and members individually accept the stark reality of its defeat and more importantly the reasons for it; accept the reality of its current parlous state and the reasons for that; until denial is put aside as an almost reflex response to every Government initiative; until rational thought, deliberation and balanced dialogue is substituted for it, it will continue to languish in the polls and in the eyes of the electorate. Denialism is political death.
What do you think?
- Posted by Bushfire Bill on January 22, 2010
What is it with Julie Bishop, the she feels she always has to spit her words out? There's a feeling of permanent anger, or barely concealed contempt, of 'Mrs Bitch' in everything she says.
This morning on the radio she was still rabbiting on about the Schools Stimulus. Its success in preventing a haemorrhaging of jobs in the trades during the GFC seems to have mollified her crankiness not at all. Other countries are dealing with high unemployment still, but Julie and her party seem to despise the fact that the Australian workforce has been sustained, in most part at least, as a viable economic unit.
Perhaps the Liberals are annoyed that avoiding unemployment has also avoided a sort of Bosses' Paradise, where employers can freely pick and choose who will work, and pay appropriately lower wages? I wonder what miseries WorkChoices would have brought us in that situation, had it still been around? Thankfully we will never know for sure.
Perhaps Julie and her colleagues are just annoyed that the incompetent, inept (their words) Rudd government had a success, by NOT taking the Liberals' advice to cut spending and go the low road. Bishop (on ABC's AM this morning) was still pounding the desk about how the Rudd government had not built major infrastructure - ports, highways and airports presumably - but had instead constructed jerry-built school halls and fences around playgrounds.
Put aside fact that the $16 billion spent on schools would have built about one airport, or a paltry 100km of dual-lane freeway - in one location, leaving the rest of the country to wallow in recession - or that the plans would likely not even be off the drawing board yet for such major projects (so little real work would have been generated), Julie chose to be angry that thousands of trades people and their families and the businesses that depend on their custom managed, in this country, to struggle through an economic downturn that has brought even the US to its knees economically. Why they are angry about this is hard to tell, unless it's just pique.
Julie Bishop is not the only one. When was the last time anyone heard or read an optimistic word on any subject from Joe Hockey? Even his cherished Republic is now a poor choice for a referendum. Tony Abbott is legendary for his blue language. It seems Tony can get away with expressions like 'toxic bore', or 'shit-eating grin' all day long, while Rudd's words never get a fair shake of the sauce bottle from commentators (they are either too bland or too harsh). Perhaps Abbott is given special leave by the commentators to use marginal language because that is what they expect of him. They, and perhaps the people too expect Tony Abbott and his party to be angry. Maybe that's what is seen as their role in society: anger. If so, I think the portents are bad for the conservatives.
The Liberals have become the Grumpy Old Party of Australian politics. Backed up by grumpy, whingeing shock-jocks and their grumpy, whingeing audiences - today expressing anger at our 'Tourist Prime Minister', or high taxes, tomorrow back on about how easy it is to get a job if you're prepared to work for low wages - they have brought grumpiness back into the political scene.
We all know someone who is permanently grumpy. Nothing is to their satisfaction. Everything is broken, or falls short in some way. Life is unfair to them. Minor annoyances send them up the wall. If only they ruled the world.
Of course, we avoid these people. Sure, a little anger is appropriate on occasion, but the permanently grumpy person is a turn-off. You know you're never going to get a pleasant or positive word passing their lips. There's always the chance they will turn on you if you don't tread carefully. It's all negative, all the time with the Grumpies.
So, how can Abbott, Bishop, Hockey and crew hope to impress voters whose jobs have been saved, who are expressing confidence in the economy in record percentages, by grumpily complaining that we should have all done it tougher, for much longer? Do they think that a sour demeanour in the face of economic sunlight and optimism is a 'good look'? Can the Liberals really believe they are going to capture and hold the imagination of the Australian people with chronic ire?
- Posted by Bushfire Bill on January 19, 2010
This afternoon I heard Christopher Pyne on ABC afternoon radio in Sydney, going on about how spending $16 billion on the Building The Education Revolution schools program was a waste. As usual, I became hot under the collar listening to him, because the guy has figured out how to breathe through his ears whilst keeping up the patter. At the moment (and forgive me for the delay in this first post for AA) I am suffering from chronic dizziness due (I hope) to blocked ears, and I envy Mr. Pyne greatly for being able to inhale (and presumably exhale) through his own set of orifices. Chris can talk incessantly. The other two guests got in nary a word once he started up. In short, Pyne hijacked the program (as usual).
Chris’s thesis was that the Rudd government would have better spent the billions if they had put the money into training more teachers, upgrading curriculae, and in general looking to the long term. Putting aside my confident prediction that if Rudd had spent the money on teachers Chris would have been screaming he had caved in to the ugly face of entrenched unionism by aiding them in a grubby self-perpetuation scam, or that if he had formed an advisory group (employing, maybe, 20 people) to look into improving school curriculae around the country, it would have been yet another chapter of the Culture Wars whereby the lefty, latte-sippers were seeking to inculcate our kids with all the wrong kinds of ideas (and anyway, wasn’t the GFC response all about “Jobs! Job! Jobs!”?),
I thought to myself that for someone who had steered his country through the worst financial crisis in living memory, leaving Australia as just about the best of the best as far as the OECD is concerned, Kevin Rudd hasn’t done too badly. A plethora of chippies, sparkies, brickies, security engineers, fencers, concreters, plumbers, draughts-people, drivers and all the rest of the tradies who found themselves staring into the abyss when the GFC pall came down had a lot to thank Kevin Rudd and his government’s prompt school’s-based anti-rescession action for. Schools provided ready planning access, mostly ready-to-go projects (needing only finance), and few complications to get in the way of a quick start to proceedings. Almost any other field of infrastructure stimulus could have (and would have) become entangled with red tape, naysayers and do-gooders wanting something, anything else to be done as a matter of their own priority.
Sure, we started off from a solid economic base, left to us most recently by the Howard government, and before them the Keating and Hawke governments, but the fiscal ball could still have been dropped. We could have reined in spending, tightened the belt (as they say, and as Turnbull, Hockey and Nelson suggested vehemently) and trying to ride out the storm, with the inevitable middle class workers taking the hit on behalf of Big Business. But instead, Rudd “Spent! Spent! Spent!”, borrowing a small amount (and getting smaller as things improve) to do so. We are now better placed than almost any other country to profit from the global upswing around the corner.
Then I thought of how the Liberals had told us gravely, in early 2009, about “The Rudd Recession” and all its negative charms. After that I remembered that the latest Lib theory from the geniuses who run it was that there had been no recession, and that it was all a concocted sham for Rudd to make himself look like a hero. And then – something was nagging me - I thought how irritating Julia Gillard sounds when she utters the mantra “The - Building – The - Education - Revolution”, which everyone else calls the “BER” (as she should, if she had any sense).
That’s why Rudd, and his government sometimes annoy me. Chris Pyne’s little rant on ABC Sydney 702 this afternoon highlighted why I do like the Rudd government and also why I sometimes despair of them: they don’t need to spin as much as they do... but they just can’t help themselves.
In spouting mantras like “The - Building – The - Education - Revolution”, they treat us like fools. They are repetitive in their spin, sounding almost (and I shiver when I find myself agreeing with Glenn Milne, even glancingly) “Stalinist”-like in their incessant sloganeering. It’s as if they believe everyone reads only the Daily Telegraph (or the Courier Mail, the ‘Tiser or the Herald-Sun) and that we’re all so thick we need to have the times-tables drummed into us, like so many ADD schoolkids, until we get the message. Somewhere, in the heart of government, there is a media office that tells Rudd and Gillard, “Don’t think. Just repeat... ad infinitum”. This media office sucks.
The rest of them, the other ministers, most surely receive this message too, but some of them have enough imagination to use their own words. Anthony Albanese always entertains. Craig Emerson is another. Lindsay Tanner has something cogent and informative to say on every occasion.
But Rudd and Gillard are, to me, plodders in the public relations stakes. One would not go as far as to say they are “toxic bores”, but sometimes one finds one’s self shouting at the television, “Just bloody say something out of your own damn mouth for a change, will you !?” when listening to the two most senior members of the government.
This is not to say that I am as annoyed by Rudd and Gillard’s verbal ineptitude as I am by the prattling Pyne, or the noxious Abbott, or the lamentably ham-fisted Joe Hockey (and let’s not leave out the scolding Bronny Bishop and the irritatingly cocksure Sophie Mirabella in the round up of Liberal bloviators), but I do feel a certain disappointment whenever our Prime Minister and his Deputy come on to the telly to speak, or rather, chant platitudes and litanies, no matter what the question, no matter what the subject.
The Rudd government has done a fine job of steering this wonderful country through a potentially disastrous financial period, reacting with aplomb and decisiveness, and not taking the many baits offered to them to go along the more conventional course the Liberals put forward as the only way out. For this they are rightfully rewarded by solid, high polling figures and a virtually unbackable prospect of re-election. But I wish, in my heart of hearts, that just occasionally its most senior members would throw away the prepared script and speak plainly for themselves, instead of recanting mindless spin put in front of them by paid hacks, with even less imagination.
I’m sure readers may have other annoyances, but the incessant (and here’s the catch: the unnecessary) spin of the Rudd government is my own pet irritant.
I hope you can convince me I’m wrong, or that it doesn’t matter, but spin is what gets stuck in my craw, and I’m just about fed up with it. Not enough to change my vote, but enough to switch off completely and just let things take their (seemingly) inevitable course.
What do youse think?
- Posted by Ad astra on January 8, 2010
First, welcome to The Political Sword 2010 at the beginning of an election year that promises to be even more frenetic than the last.
During January, while Ad astra takes a break, Bushfire Bill, who has made many penetrating and witty contributions to this and other political blogs, will be a guest contributor to The Political Sword.
His contributions begin next week. Watch for them.
- Posted by Ad astra on December 20, 2009
As the Rudd Government begins its third year, it seems an appropriate time to review its first two. As a mental exercise let’s imagine the words or phrases that might best describe the progress of the Government towards its stated goals, and similarly those that characterize the performance of the Opposition.
For me, the words that reflect the Government’s progress are ‘complexity’, ‘cautious and careful planning’ and ‘effective emergency action’. Regrettably the words that come to mind for the Opposition are ‘denial’, ‘chaos’, ‘division and dysfunction’, ’lack of due diligence’ and ‘oppose everything’..
The Rudd Government
During election campaigns general principles and aspirations are promoted; detail is avoided. Kevin Rudd advanced the need to address climate change, “...the great moral challenge of our generation”, and as part of that, the restoration of the distressed Murray-Darling river system; he spoke of the need to review the ailing health care system and troubled federal-state relationships; he promoted himself as an ‘economic conservative’ committed to prudent spending and surplus budgets, but conscious of the need to overcome ‘infrastructure bottlenecks’ that had accumulated over the previous decade, aware of the requirement for a national broadband network and mindful of the need to lift productivity; he elevated to top priority education at all levels, from preschool to university, the so-called ‘education revolution’, and he promised to reform industrial relations and eliminate WorkChoices. He said he would ratify the Kyoto protocol and say ‘sorry’ to the indigenous people. There were other aspirations, but these dominated the election campaign.
Complexity
Tackling these tasks in Government has exposed the enormous complexity of almost every one of them. In each there are countless people involved; a plethora of different opinions, instincts and values; self interest and conflicts of interest; many areas of turf to be protected or enlarged; power brokers determined to advance their position or those they represent even at the expense of the national interest; and a mountain of data, some of it incomplete, inaccurate or of uncertain validity. There has not been much acknowledgement of the need for collaboration in the national interest. This is systems theory in action, in all its chaotic complexity. Few are oriented to such complexity or equipped to understand and manage it. Most prefer simple, linear, cause-effect thinking, despite the fact that it is incapable of explaining the intricacies of complex adaptive systems, or managing their inherent complexity.
Cautious careful planning
It is in recognition of this complexity that the Rudd Government has undertaken several reviews, something that has attracted trenchant criticism from the Opposition and unthinking journalists who take the simplistic view that as Rudd said he would ‘fix’ these problems he should just get on with ‘fixing’ them, as if that was as simple as fixing a broken-down car. As the reviews have unfolded, the extraordinary complexity of the issues have emerged and slowed the process of resolution. This is why there has been such cautious, careful planning in addressing, for example, such complex issues as climate change and all its sequelae for human health, families, agriculture, industry, business and employment. There was the Garnaut Report, the Green and White Papers and the CPRS legislation, developed over several years, but to date with an outcome frustrated by a hostile Senate.
Since in the health field similar levels of complexity exist, the Government has carried out an extensive review via the National Health and Hospital Reform Commission. The Commission has reported and has made over one hundred recommendations that the Government is considering. Impatient Opposition health spokespeople and journalists want immediate action, but should rapid action result in unfavourable outcomes, the Government would be accused of rushing in and bungling.
The same caution has been applied to federal-state relationships where fiefdoms so often act in their own, rather than the national interest. Progress is occurring but slowly, too slowly for the critics, who want the problem fixed at once. ‘Abolish the states’, ‘place decision making close to the action’, ‘drastically cut the number of bureaucrats’ – are just a few of the simplistic solutions offered by armchair experts who themselves don’t carry the responsibility for the outcomes.
Since the election, the Henry Review, a comprehensive review of the tax and transfer system, a recommendation of the 2020 Summit, has been undertaken. Its recommendations will be more far reaching than the tax changes arising from the GST, and will be implemented over several years. There has also been a defence review and a Defence White Paper that is for implementation provided sufficient funding is available.
So not surprisingly, complexity and cautious planning have characterized much of the Rudd Government’s first two years.
In my view, the inexcusable paucity of understanding of complexity is one of the greatest impediments to good governance and the critiquing of government action. I despair that commentators will ever come to grips with the reality of complexity in so much of what government does.
Effective emergency action
It may have come as a surprise to those who criticized the Government so roundly for ‘hitting the ground reviewing’, that it acted so unfalteringly, or to use the Government’s favourite word, ‘decisively’, in managing the global financial crisis with all its forbidding momentum. The bank guarantee, the stimulus package starting with cash bonuses (which almost all journalists delighted in calling ‘the cash splash’ or ‘splurge’) and the first home owners’ grant extension; the ‘shovel-ready’ infrastructure, mainly in the schools program; and finally big ticket infrastructure items – road, rail, ports and the NBN, much of which is still in planning. The Government’s fiscal policy worked in tandem with the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy to produce the outcome we saw.
The Government was criticized at every turn by the ‘experts’, the economists and the economics correspondents, who always found some fatal flaw, predicted calamity, and advised a different, and of course more rational course of action. The fact that most of them were consistently wrong in their predictions and advice never deterred them from unremitting criticism. Indeed some, such as Michael Stutchbury and Warwick McKibbin, still persist with their censure of the stimulus package despite the fact that most economists, reinforced by the IMF, have lauded it as the principal reason why Australia avoided recession. The Australian mounted a fierce campaign of denigration of the schools program notwithstanding the fact that most of the 24,000 projects in 9,500 schools were carried out without complaint. This has now fizzled.
The Government was advised by Treasury to ‘go early, go hard, and go households’. It did and the result is there for all to see – recession avoided, unemployment restrained, retail activity sustained, business and consumer confidence rising, school infrastructure in place. Even Joe Hockey had to admit its success, although he has four other and presumably more cogent reasons for the outcome. The debate has shifted to how the stimulus should be wound down, a subject that still gives columnists something to write about with misplaced authority. The ‘debt and deficit’ mantra, the ‘$315 billion Labor debt bomb’ trumpeted so loudly by Malcolm Turnbull, and carted around on his ‘debt truck’, has faded as the debit and deficit promises to be much lower than so direly predicted.
So for those who labelled the Rudd Government as indecisive, ‘all talk no action’, ‘all spin no substance’, its handling of the GFC confounded this characterization. Only those whose mouth is set to automatic still utter these tired, inappropriate mantras.
The Opposition
Denial
TPS has commented many times about the denial that afflicts the Opposition, the chief purveyor of which is the current leader, Tony Abbott, who has always maintained that ‘the Howard Government was such a good government’, and did not deserve to be removed. This belief has been reinforced recently with Abbott’s return to some of Howard’s IR precepts and border protection policies, and his appointment of previous Howard ministers to his Shadow Cabinet. He is determined to return to Howard policies – because they were good – determined to preserve the Howard legacy.
No better evidence need be advanced to support the attitude of denial.
Chaos
There is no need to look beyond the regular change of leader – Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and now Tony Abbott, with Joe Hockey waiting in the wings for Abbott to implode – to see the chaos that has afflicted the Coalition since it surprisingly elected Nelson instead of Turnbull in the first place. The conservative elements were covertly instrumental in that outcome as they were overtly in Turnbull’s downfall. Add to that the dissonance in the Coalition between the Nationals and the Liberals, particularly over climate change, and you have another layer of chaos.
Surely no one would challenge the ‘chaos’ label.
Division and dysfunction
This is the product of chaos. The Nationals and the Liberals are divided. Some Liberals are divided from other Liberals, over issues such as climate change, immigration policy and the ‘alcopops’ legislation. As a result, the Coalition is dysfunctional. The conservatives are in a power struggle with the small ‘l’ liberals and are now in the ascendancy. Turnbull is threatening to disrupt the Coalition with his verbal interventions, particularly about climate change issues, and just might consider forming a breakaway grouping.
There is no debate about the savage divisions that simmer just below the surface, always ready to erupt damagingly, and the consequent dysfunction that so cripples the Coalition.
Lack of due diligence
The Grech OzCar affair exposed Turnbull’s lack of due diligence, something not to be expected from a past barrister. But it was consistent with his impetuous character, and his ‘crash through or crash’ approach. He crashed and put paid to his leadership, finally destroyed by his support for the Rudd CPRS, an anathema to the conservatives.
Could there have been a more convincing exhibition of lack of due diligence?
Oppose everything
Tony Abbott quotes Randolph Churchill who said ‘Oppositions should oppose everything, suggest nothing and kick the government out.’ That is precisely what Abbott is saying he will do, as the last post ‘The pugilistic politician’ argues. He talks of creating alternative policies and has promised one on climate change mitigation by February, but I note already he is making noises that cast doubt on whether we will really see a policy that can be readily dissected and appraised. He intends to ‘give the Government the fright of its life’, and ‘take the fight right up to the Government’. So far every utterance is consistent with that intent, but whether anyone in the Government or for that matter anyone in the public is listening is speculative. The latest Morgan face-to-face at 59/41 suggests not too many are.
‘Oppose everything’ looks like being the Coalition pattern while Abbott remains leader.
In summary, these last two years have been ones that have shown what this Government can do, what it is made of, how it operates, and what future it is likely to have. 2010 is likely to be a year of implementation of recommendations of several of the reviews now underway or completed. Substance will replace the words, hopefully to the long term benefit of the nation. The stated intent of the Government is to be a reforming government; 2010 will provide it that opportunity in abundance.
It would be better for our democracy if one could record that the Opposition, while holding the Government to account, which is its responsibility, produced a profusion of attractive alternative policies, collaborated with Government when that was in the national interest, and opposed only when it honestly believed the proposed legislation seriously needed amendment, instead of opportunistically opposing simply for the sake of opposing. Idealists may wish for this, but shouldn’t hold their breath hoping.
What do you think?
This is my last post on TPS for 2009. I will post again in early February when parliament resumes. You will be delighted to know that during January, Bushfire Bill, one of the most admired contributors to The Political Sword, The Poll Bludger and other blog sites, will make guest posts on TPS. Watch for them.
May I take this opportunity of thanking the many visitors to this site and the regular contributors who enrich this site immeasurably with their thoughtful, insightful and often humorous posts. I look forward to your company again in 2010.
In the meantime I wish you the compliments of the season and a restful end-of-year break from the tumult of federal politics; there will be plenty more next year.
- Posted by Ad astra on December 10, 2009
Tony Abbott’s recent threat to ‘give the Government the fright of its life’ is code for the new leader’s real metaphor – to give the Government the fight of its life.
Have you noticed how aggressive and combative Abbott has become since his election? He has always had a reputation as a pugilist – his boxing exploits during his Rhodes scholarship at Queen’s College, Oxford are legend. But he seems to have kept this tendency under control pretty well while in the Howard Government, except of course when Howard used him as his attack dog, and while relaxing comfortably with a less-than-arduous portfolio of Shadow Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs while in opposition. Then suddenly, and for most unexpectedly, he became Leader of the Opposition last week, and found himself thrown into the spotlight, with nothing much in the ledger but opposition to almost everything the Government was trying to do, trenchant opposition to the Government’s ETS leading to its defeat, a heap of political baggage, a mediocre team, a disgruntled ex-leader, and very poor popularity ratings in the opinion polls.
So what did he do? He reverted to what he knows best – pugilism. For some he may appear like a threatened animal trapped in the hunter’s spotlight, and that his ‘fight to the death’ approach is merely reactionary, merely a strategy for survival. That may be partly true, but it seems more likely that fighting is his natural response to any challenge.
His assertiveness came out in his Channel Nine interview with Laurie Oakes last Sunday, where, after a calm start, he bristled at being asked if he believed in creation, insisting that his religious views were private and not relevant to politics. Of course that statement is not consistent with his behaviour over the years when his religious beliefs have been on open display over several issue – abortion is just one. In that interview he went on to challenge Oakes to ask Kevin Rudd the same questions, asserting that Rudd has expressed religious views often enough, and has done doorstops in front of his church most Sundays. He was on the same theme on Lateline when he queried Tony Jones why Kevin Rudd was seldom on his program, and challenged Jones to invite him. Both interviewers seemed taken aback by Abbott’s demands and his foray into their programming.
In both interviews Abbott’s aggression lurked just under the surface until some provocation brought it out into the open. In Oakes interview, Abbott became angry when near the end Oakes accused him of spouting three or four policy ideas a day, (without reference to his colleagues but all the while claiming he would be a consultative leader). Abbott’s annoyance was obvious, and the look on his face as the interview concluded one of palpable displeasure. The Jones interview, the day he announced his Shadow Ministry, bordered on overt aggression throughout. The video is here.
Another sign of Abbott’s aggression and combative approach is his Shadow Ministry, resurrecting as it does several back-bench Howard ministers, and including the always combative Barnaby Joyce as Shadow Finance spokesman. It’s as if he is saying ‘I don’t give a fig for what you think of this lot, this is the group I want to fight the next election.’ In fact he made a point of saying that many were ‘good street fighters’. He demoted Sharman Stone from Shadow Immigration because she was not tough enough, despite looking pretty tough on the asylum seeker issue to most observers. So Abbott wants a fight on border protection. In fact he wants a fight on everything.
Abbott intends to criticise everything the Government does, to fight everything it attempts to do, to refuse to collaborate on anything, and to decline to reveal any policies until the last moment, except his climate change policy which he promised by February when parliament resumes. He probably regrets this promise now; he will be severely criticized if he misses the deadline he has set himself, but expect something less well developed than the Government’s CPRS; expect fuzzy edges to a policy full of vague promises unsupported by hard evidence, accurate costing and definite timelines. He will rely on the line: ‘we can do it cheaper, at little cost to the voters, but achieve the same mitigation targets’, which will be hard to counter as the public is so disengaged from the detail. The Government may have to fall back on the well tried campaign of scare and uncertainty, painting Abbott’s policy as unworkable, untried, costly, full of holes, economically flawed and environmentally unsound.
So to what can we look forward? If one can judge from Abbot’s demeanour and performance during the last week, from the look in his eyes, from his aggressive attitude, from his determination to fight in hand to hand combat, we are in for a ruthless, cruel, bare-knuckle fight with no holds barred. This week Abbott reminded me of the familiar scene before a prize fight when the combatants line up – hairy-chested, jaw-jutting, throwing punches in the air, loud-mouthed, asserting their prowess, and promising to knock their opponent out early in the bout. The only difference is that the other party to the fight, Kevin Rudd, is not there flexing his muscles, and even Abbott is conceding he may not win: "If we win the election I’ll be regarded as a genius, if we don’t win I’ll probably be political road-kill..." He’s even calling his team ‘Abbott’s warriors’. Like many a prize fighter he is signalling that he is throwing caution to the wind and will come out swinging in the first round.
So how should Rudd counter this? By doing what he’s now doing – ignoring him. Except for rejecting Abbott’s demand for a debate on the ETS on the grounds that the Coalition had no policy, Rudd has studiously paid little attention to him, something Opposition leaders loathe. Rudd has simply got on with the business of Prime Ministership, attending to domestic and international responsibilities while Abbott has been thrashing around seeking attention through provocation. Rudd has left it to a couple of ministers to make some remarks about Abbott’s team, one reincarnated from back-bench former ministers and radical conservatives.
But after the end-of-year break, the Rudd Government will need to marshal its forces and its publicity machine to counter the barrage of negativity that the Opposition will hurl at the public. It will need particularly to counter the scare campaign about the ETS, one that is already in motion. Although a clear majority of Australians want action on climate change, they might be conned into believing the Coalition can mitigate carbon pollution easily and without much cost – who is not attracted to a bargain! Simple, easy-to-understand material is needed, in many formats, via many media. And there needs to be blanket coverage of the entire population. Without this the Opposition will rely on the Goebbels truism – ‘tell the people a lie often enough and they will believe it’.
Until the election, which Rudd seems likely to postpone until at least August, we can expect Abbott, the pugilistic politician, to attack Government policies and actions incessantly and relentlessly, to keep Coalition policies under wraps as much as possible to avoid having to defend them, and to exhibit venom, vitriol and vituperativeness the like of which we have not seen in politics in Australia for a long while. It will be unremittingly ugly. What a prospect for 2010!
What do you think?
- Posted by Ad astra on December 8, 2009
Dear Dennis
Just when we thought you’d got the knack of interpreting Newspoll results objectively and rationally, you disappoint us by reverting to your old form of squeezing the very last drop of positive news from the figures to boost the Coalition, omitting reference to aspects of the poll that don’t fit your pre-determined script, and extrapolating from the flimsiest of data to predict glory days ahead.
Many were impressed with your analyses of Newspolls during the dying days of Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership. We saw headlines such as ‘Newspoll blow for Turnbull’, ‘Coalition attack fails to ignite’, ‘Malcolm Turnbull up but still far behind PM Kevin Rudd’, ‘Besieged leader loosing traction’, ‘Turnbull strategy out of control’, and so on. It seemed as if you had given up on Turnbull, decided that he couldn’t lead the Coalition to victory, needed removal, and Newspoll provided some of the ammunition needed to do so. So in retrospect, it seems as if your calling of the results in a negative way for Turnbull was not just sound analysis, but grist to the mill in extruding him. We didn’t realize that at the time. We said ‘Dennis has finally got it’, and you got quite a lot of laudatory comments on your blog. We started to say ‘Good old Dennis’.
Then along came Tony Abbott. I bet your were as surprised as most others, but being stuck with him now as Coalition leader, probably until the 2010 election, you felt moved to do your bit to support the Coalition cause. While Turnbull was there it seemed as if you felt your best contribution was to urge his removal so someone more promising could be installed.
Then out came Newspoll, less than a week after Abbott was elected leader, but in your mind giving sufficient time for the public to have made some judgement about his suitability. So your search for promising signs began, and, judging from your headlines, you were not disappointed: ‘Voters switching back to Coalition’ and ‘Abbott gamble pays off for Libs’. Reading these pieces, I looked for the evidence on which such stark headlines were based. Of course you quoted the two by-election results which you said showed a swing to the Liberals. Even acknowledging the distorting effects of Labor not fielding a candidate in either, that was true in Higgins where, according to Antony Green the swing to the Liberal candidate is 0.8% as of today, but in Bradfield the swing is 3.3% against the Liberal candidate. So only one seat shows a swing to the Liberal candidate, and adding the swings in the two seats gives a net swing of 2.5% against the Liberals. Now we know it’s a bit silly to add them together, but if you are going to make assertions about a ‘swing to the Liberals’, at least give us the evidence. And let’s not confuse ourselves by talking about the TPP when the field did not include one of the major parties which always feature in TPP figures.
But let’s leave the by-elections and look at the Newspoll results. What is the evidence for the header ‘Voters switching back to Coalition’? Near the end of your article you say “The Liberal vote rose four points to 34 per cent after dropping to 30 per cent during the mess over the ETS and the leadership.” Correct, but your header said voters were switching back to the Coalition. Now the truth is that the Liberal primary vote went up four points to 34% because it took one point from The Nationals, one from The Australian Greens, two from ‘Others’, but none from Labor, which remained on 43%. The Coalition primary vote went up by three points, not four, to 38%. Yet ‘four points’ seemed to be the message you wished to transmit. You did it again in ‘Abbott gamble pays off for Libs’. Yes, it’s a bit pedantic to argue such points, but if you’re quoting data to make political points why display it a way that could deceive the less analytical reader?
In the first-mentioned piece you did not reveal the Newspoll TPP of 56/44, which was little different from the previous week’s 57/43, and the same as the poll before that. You did mention it in the second piece but made no comparison with previous polls. 56/44 has consistently been the average TPP for a couple of years now, so I’m sure you’d have to agree that nothing has changed despite Nelson, Turnbull and now Abbott.
The other stat you seized upon was the PPM ratings, on which you seemed to place great store – you even started the ‘Abbott gamble pays off...’ piece with “Liberal Party support has bounced back and Tony Abbott has cut into Kevin Rudd's lead as preferred prime minister within a week of the newly elected Leader of the Opposition spectacularly reversing the Liberals' stand on climate change and rejecting Labor's ETS”. We all know the reciprocal relationship between the PM’s score and the Opposition Leader’s score on the PPM – as one goes up, the other goes down (except if the ‘Uncommitteds’ change). If in the public’s first assessment of the new leader his score was better than his predecessor’s at his lowest ebb, we ought not to be surprised, and of course that will bring the PM’s rating down commensurately. You did not point out that Rudd was still sitting on a 60% figure, only that he “..fell five points...” and that Abbott had “...a rise of nine points compared with Mr Turnbull's 14 per cent the previous weekend.” although all Abbott could muster was 23%.
But is it as good for Abbott as it might superficially look to you? No doubt you’ve now had the benefit of reading Possum Pollytics: Newspoll Tuesday – No Bounce Edition where he displays all the ratings for mid-term leadership changes and comments “Abbott gave not only the worst debut result of any Opposition leader that has taken control of the party mid-term, but was also the second lowest Uncommitted result of any new Opposition leader (including those that took control immediately after an election defeat). Only Beazley Mk 2 had a lower level of Uncommitteds, suggesting that Tony Abbott is a significantly known quantity in the electorate, meaning there isn’t much fat in the figures.” Aristotle too quotes the figures in Oz Election Forums and likewise concludes “The change to Tony Abbott has resulted in no significant change in voting intentions, and his Better Prime Minister ratings are the lowest of all new mid-term Opposition Leaders. This doesn't augur well for 2010. Tony Abbott always had the lowest poll ratings of all potential Liberal leaders and those low poll ratings, measured against his own colleagues, are now colliding with the stratospheric poll ratings of Kevin Rudd. The result is the poorest start for any new mid-term Opposition Leader.”
Clearly your enthusiasm and optimism is not shared by competent statistical analysts using the same data set. Maybe you know something they don’t, something none of us know.
You also made a play about Abbott being preferred over Turnbull, by a whopping 28% of those polled, but you didn’t point out that 62% thought he would be ‘worse or no different’ than Turnbull (21% worse, 41% the same). Surely that is the most telling statistic. But you did point out that Abbott’s strongest endorsement was from Coalition supporters – 45% over Turnbull 10% – hardly a remarkable finding at a time of leadership upheaval, but of course compatible with your views about the two men. You went on to elaborate how Abbott had outperformed Turnbull in almost every category. It would be alarming indeed if the newly elected leader was not well in front of the previous leader who was at his lowest point, and during the very week of his extrusion.
Look as I did in both articles, I could find no reference to another Newspoll result – the satisfaction/dissatisfaction rating of the PM; no mention of the fact that it rose four points during the very week that Abbott, according to your assessment, did so well. How could the PM’s popularity go up while Abbott’s was soaring so spectacularly? I wondered why you didn’t give it a mention – it was the only stat you left out.
So, Dennis, what should we conclude from your latest foray into Newspoll interpretation? You will recall with chagrin the comments that your interpretations of Newspoll in the last Howard year evoked, the angry criticism of what so many saw as your seriously biased reporting. You will remember the article you penned criticizing the impertinent bloggers who had the temerity to question your analyses; you will recall the angry editorial in The Australian demeaning bloggers, suggesting they were not journalists’ bootlaces, and should get a real job. Yet after that you seemed to be more circumspect in your analyses, and latterly you have been applauded for your frankness in calling the results correctly no matter if damaging to the Coalition and its leader. Then along comes Abbott and it feels like we’re back to the Howard days of biased interpretation, selective use of results, and omission of those that don’t fit your script.
Please don’t disappoint us again. Stick to the facts, all of them, analyse them objectively, report them without fear or favour, interpret them with statistical integrity, and once more the plaudits will flow.
There’s no need to be fearful of Uncle Rupert – he’s always been a stickler for the truth.
POSTSCRIPT
In case you can’t imagine what an unbiased analysis of the last Newspoll might look like, try this:
Coalition makes small gains in latest Newspoll
A Newspoll taken from 4 to 6 December, at the end of the week Tony Abbott was elected Leader of the Opposition, the Coalition’s primary vote rose by three percentage points to 38% at the expense of The Australian Greens (one point) and ‘Others’ (two points). Labor’s primary vote was unchanged on 43%. In two party preferred terms, Labor was 56% and the Coalition 44%. The Newspoll last week was 57/43 and the poll before that 56/44, the average figure over the last two years.
In the Better Prime Minister stakes Kevin Rudd was on 60%, down five points from the last poll, while Tony Abbott in his first poll rated 23%, nine points above Malcolm Turnbull’s last and worst poll.
No satisfaction/dissatisfaction rating was done on Mr Abbott as he had been in his new job only a few days. Mr Rudd improved his rating by four points to 58/32, with 10% undecided.
In response to the question ‘Will Abbott be a better leader than Turnbull?’ 28% said yes, 21% no, and 41% said ‘about the same’, giving a total of 62% who feel Abbott will be worse or the same as Turnbull.
The poll was on 1152 phone interviews and the margin of error was estimated to be 3%.
The Coalition has clearly made small gains in its primary vote at the expense of the Greens and ‘Others’, the TPP is virtually unchanged, and Mr Abbott has polled better than his predecessor in the Better PM stakes, narrowing the gap in the last week from 65/14 to 60/23. Kevin Rudd's personal popularity has increased marginally.
Not very exciting Dennis, not headline grabbing, but at least factual and honest, and certainly not endeavouring to score political points.
- Posted by Ad astra on December 4, 2009
Was Tony Abbott the most astonished person after last Tuesday’s ballot for Leader of the Opposition? If one can judge from his performance over the last few days, he was not only astonished but also seriously unprepared for such high office.
But if you look at what he’s said and done since his ascension to Opposition Leader, nothing should have caused surprise.
This is the man who from the time Kevin Rudd became leader of the Labor Party and started to show up well in the polls, insisted that the electorate was ‘sleepwalking’, unaware of how hollow Rudd was. This is the man who after the Coalition’s election defeat, repeated ad nauseam that the Howard Government was ‘such a good government’, and consistently implied it did not deserve to be replaced. This is the man who has done more than any other to defend the Howard legacy.
This is the man who was prominent in promoting Howard’s WorkChoices legislation, the only concession about which he is willing now to make is that ‘it went a little too far’! He says that the name ‘WorkChoices’ is dead (for obvious political reasons) but that the nation must have flexible workplace arrangements and that individuals ought to be able to make separate workplace agreements with employers – in other words have AWAs. He wants to re-introduce full exemptions from Labor’s unfair dismissal laws for small business with fewer than 20 employees.
This is the man who recently told a meeting that climate change was ’absolute crap’, so why should anyone be surprised that he desperately wanted to defeat Rudd’s CPRS legislation. He’s an acknowledged climate sceptic.
In the few days since his election this man, despite trenchantly criticizing Malcolm Turnbull for his unilateral policy declarations and his lack of consultation with colleagues, has been making his own unilateral declaration that he would bring down a policy to mitigate climate change without a tax being imposed. This despite being confused about his party’s emissions reductions targets. Already, CEO of the Australian Industry Group, Heather Ridout, has expressed concern about Abbott’s quickly-announced proposals for climate mitigation and the uncertainty it has provoked; others will follow. Only the most outrageous rent-seeking polluters will applaud.
Abbott has also wandered into the nuclear power issue, saying he would welcome a debate on the use of nuclear energy in this country, and then ventured into the vexed question of selling uranium to India, a sticky diplomatic matter, by saying that he could not see why this was not already being done. Again, without consultation with colleagues! Paul Kelly rightly accused Abbott of what Abbott so delights in accusing the Rudd Government of, ‘making policy on the run’.
Somehow he got into a debate about oil and revealed that he had not heard the term ‘peak oil’! Where has he been? Such ignorance in a political leader is not just amazing, it is dangerous.
He is now saying that he will raid the unspent stimulus package money to fund his election promises; presumably some schools promised new or upgraded buildings would not get them. He says he would scrap the NBN to save money. He would stop the Rudd Government’s home insulation program and the social housing initiative. He is talking of a federal takeover of some functions of the states, particularly the hospitals. He accuses Rudd of mismanaging federal-state relations, which presumably he will fix with a unilateral takeover.
All these ideas have fallen from his lips in the first three days, even before he has selected his shadow cabinet, before there has been a chance for policy formulation. So much for his criticism of Turnbull’s lack of consultation! He says he will be consultative, yet announces policy initiatives every few hours, all in pursuit of differentiating the Abbott Coalition from the Rudd Government.
He has already announced he will include Barnaby Joyce on his front bench, and Joyce has indicated he wants finance. Although Joyce is more suited to vaudeville than serious politics, he looks like getting an influential position as reward for the support the Nationals have given him in defeating Rudd’s CPRS. Abbott has indicated that Kevin Andrews will be elevated to the front bench – the resurrection of a failed Howard politician. Don’t be surprised if more Howardites are elevated.
This is a return to the policies and the personnel of the old, tired, discredited and defeated Howard Government, which Abbott has always insisted was unjustly removed by an ignorant electorate. The revisionism though promises to be even more extreme than during the Howard years – Howard at least had an ETS, not all that different from Rudd’s – Abbott will not; he will have a no-tax scheme! Rudd has described his approach as ‘magic pudding’; we’re awaiting the details that Abbott promises will emerge by next February. What genius will create in just eight weeks what it has taken the Government three years to complete?
Abbott has a reputation for unpredictability and is seen as a maverick. His first few days do nothing to alter that reputation. Despite the Coalition cheerleaders such as Dennis Shanahan and Peter van Onselen predicting that Abbott will ‘take the fight up to Rudd’, and ‘provide a real contest’, who but the Coalition’s rusted-on supporters and fellow travellers will take him seriously?
His Rhodes scholarship is touted as a marker of his intelligence, but his inarticulateness makes one wonder. His umming, aahing and ahahing, and his hesitancy is painful enough, but not as serious an indictment as his willingness to turn turtle on policy, as he did on the ETS, saying only a short time ago that it should be passed into law and got off the agenda, but then saying it must be defeated.
Abbott comes with much baggage, about which no further elaboration is needed. He is a supremely combative political pugilist who believes an opposition must always oppose, must not help the Government with its legislation, and must make life as difficult as possible. It seems never to have occurred to him that the Opposition too has a responsibility in the governance of the nation. ‘Holding the Government to account’ is a phrase oppositions love to mouth, and of course they should, but that does not mean obstructing at every turn, opposing everything, holding up indefinitely legislation vital to the nation, and defeating it whenever possible. For all his faults, Malcolm Turnbull did collaborate with the Government to fashion a revised ETS, which his party agreed to pass, only to have the extremists force it to Welsh on the deal. Abbott sees no fault in this.
After just these few days, I predict a chaotic time ahead for Abbott and the Coalition, and a systematic dismembering by Rudd and his ministers of the adversarial and unsound policies Abbott promotes. Like all new leaders, he may enjoy the honeymoon period his cheerleaders anticipate, but if it does occur at all, it will be brief. It’s not as if this man is an untried politician who ‘should be given the benefit of the doubt’ and the traditional Aussie ‘fair go’ as some suggest. We all know Abbott well. We know he is unprepared for this new office, we know how much time he spends on bicycles, surfboards and swimming. If he had paid more attention to contemporary political issues he might have been better equipped.
We know he is a political thinker and has put in writing his philosophy more than most of his colleagues, but that is no substitute for depth of knowledge across the wide range of national and international issues about which his knowledge is dangerously deficient. That could be overcome by attention to detail, thoughtful reflection, wide ranging consultation, careful policy formulation and articulate exposition of policies to the public. If one can judge from the headlong, injudicious and aggressive way Abbott has thrown himself into the fray in the first few days, the prognosis for this occurring, and for resultant political success, seems extraordinarily poor. And even as he tries to make headway, he can expect no respite from Turnbull who will systematically repay him for his treachery in replacing him.
How the Coalition can again throw up what seems destined to be yet another dud defies comprehension.
What do you think?