Interesting debate at John Quiggin on whether the election revealed a rightward shift by Australian voters. Left-inclined posters keen to deny this, but the evidence seems irrefutable. Consider two key issues: immigration and greenhouse policy. Conservatives have long been anxious about the decline of Anglo-Australia particularly since the 1970s when non-Anglo immigrants became assertive and [...]
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Discussion of the emerging era of minority government has ignored the 1901-10 period when neither of three parties: Labor, Free Traders and Protectionists (sometimes almost 4 parties when the conservative protectionists acted independently) had a majority and when Alfred Deakin, as Prime Minister three times, dominated Australian politics. The national two-party preferred Coalition vote is probably artificially high and this should be noted as both parties cite this vote as justification for their claim to form government. One argument made by conservative commentators in the aftermath of the inconclusive 2010 Australian election is that the three rural independents should support the Coalition because a majority of voters in their electorates support the Coalition as demonstrated by the Senate vote. Discussion of the three rural independents has given little attention to their past political records apart from them all having been once members of the National Party. Bob Katter is the only former minister. He served in the Queensland National Party governments of 1983 to 1989. These were single-party government formed after the coalition with [...] I was very critical of the JWS marginals poll. However it performed better than I predicted, the R-Sq between their predictions and the outcome (using the ABC figures from the close of election night) was 0.58. However it predicted five ALP victories wrongly and 3 Liberal victories wrongly. However the average Labor across all the [...] Elections encourage an outbreak of ‘poll fetishism’ every poll or hint of one is racked over obsessively. But polls are not a magic time tunnel to the future but a summation of frequently unclear voter responses that reflect views held with varying degrees of intensity. Too often poll watchers fail to see the forest for [...] Since the British ‘church and king’ mobs of the French revolutionary era, Disraeli’s 1880 election victory and Henry Maine’s discovery of the referendum conservatives have sought to present themselves as true representatives of the people vs. liberal elites. Conservative rhetoric has often been successful in annoying the left, but despite the hyperbole conservatives have sometimes [...] |
   
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Copyright © 2010 Geoff Robinson - All Rights Reserved |
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