The ABC is meant to be unbiased…

Well, it’s meant to be even-handed and to present a diversity of views… on some things, anyway. I mean, if we have a news item about a house burning down, nobody expects the ABC to interview someone about what a great opportunity this is for Harvey Norman when the family have to purchase new appliances…

So I have been quite shocked by the terrible bias the ABC have shown against the Coalition. For example, when Peter Dutton was holding a press conference recently, an ABC journalist had the temerity to ask him: “How do you know the vast majority of the public in Collie support the plan?”

Quick as flash, Dutton responded with: “How do you know they don’t?” which reminded me of my younger days when I’d hit my primary school colleagues with a witty insult and they’d reply with, “I know you are, but what am I?” It’s really hard to counter something like that.

Anyway, Mr Dutton went on to point out that the journalist could have an advocacy position but not when she was asking him questions which were difficult to answer and when she showed her bias by indicating that she’d spoken to people in Collie but he hadn’t been prepared to meet them. This is not the sort of neutral journalism he’s come to expect from the rest of the media who show no bias by asking even-handed questions like, “Is it too early to expect any detail on this policy?” or “How do you take your coffee?”

Clearly the ABC has been running an agenda to make the Coalition look atrocious for some time now. Just look at the number of times they quote exactly what Mr Dutton has said. It’s obviously an attempt to make him look bad and to get the audience to a point where they just wish the man would go away. This is the sort of thing that happens with elected leaders: the constant pushing of their face on camera and their endless photo ops make the public wonder if that other guy – what’s his name, the one who’s taken over from the previous leader when they lost the election – that one – he could be a breath of fresh air and how bad can he be? (A question that Tony Abbott answered so quickly after being installed as PM that his own party got rid of him…)

Not content with trying to ruin Mr Dutton’s chances with endless quotes, they’ve also tried to sabotage the National Party by inviting Barnaby Joyce as a guest on any number of programs. While the publicity shy Mr Joyce accepts these invitations as a public duty, I’m sure that the other MPs in the National Party would rather that the public isn’t reminded that Mr Joyce is still a sitting member. Barnaby lost a little bit of credibility when it was discovered that he was so much in favour of family values that he’d started a second family.

At least, Scott Morrison had the good sense to ban Craig Kelly from appearing on QandA before he could show us all the depth of his belief in the latest conspiracy theory. I should add that this was before Kelly added all the Covid conspiracy theories to his collection. It was also before he left the Liberal Party to become leader of the UAP, as well as being before he joined and left One Nation. I have not confirmed the rumour that Mr Kelly wants to ensure that he sets a record by joining even more political parties than Mark Latham.

Anyway, if the ABC wants to ensure that people see them as fair and unbiased then they have to stop pointing out factual inaccuracies and to avoid putting to air any Coalition MPs who may demonstrate a lack of attention to detail and/or a complete lack of understanding of any aspects of the topic beyond what they were briefed on in the minutes before the show went air. This, of course, leaves Angus Taylor and most of the front bench with plenty of time on their hands so maybe they could take it in turns to ensure that nobody spends too much time at the Parliamentary bar.

A few days ago, my wife and I had lunch in a Fitzroy pub. She happened to comment that the problem with living in a place like that would be that you’d never get a park. In spite of the fact that we had – in fact – just got a park, I agreed. Then, in a strangely serendipitous moment, we walked past a two-storey terrace house with parking for two cars. Naturally I looked up the price and it was only a touch over two million…

“Let’s buy it,” I suggested.

“We haven’t got two million,” my wife pointed out, leading me to do some quick calculations and point out that, after selling our home, we’d only need to borrow a figure significantly less than a million dollars. And, while my wife was of the opinion that having recently paid off our mortgage, she didn’t want to go into to debt in order to buy a house which had more room than we needed.

Anyway, we did a list of pros and cons:

I suggested the following pros:

• It had off-street parking
• It was only a matter of metres from the pub.

She suggested the following cons:

• It added thirty minutes to her journey to work every day.
• It added thirty years to her working life in order to pay off the mortgage.
• It was only a matter of metres from the pub.

In any event, we’re not buying the house even though compared to Mr Albanese’s it was very cheap at less than half the price. I mean, what was he thinking? At $4.3 million his purchase may be more than Malcolm Turnbull paid for his house… although Malcolm purchase his some years ago. Anyway, it’s worth more than the apartment that Peter Dutton sold for $3.7 million last year, so while we can praise Mr Dutton for selling such an expensive property, Albanese stands condemned because…

Well, it’s not that he’d done anything corrupt. It’s just the optics, isn’t it? When people are suffering because of a cost of living crisis, then it doesn’t look good for the PM to be splashing money around and it’s all about how things look, isn’t it? Phil Coorey even went as far as to suggest that this was Albo’s “Hawaii moment”, comparing the house purchase to an attempt to hide the fact that Morrison was on holiday while Australia was burning… Ok, maybe just the east coast but that’s the important bit that contains the Canberra bubble, Sydney and Melbourne…

Take the recent budget surpluses. Labor have been using them to retire debt. This has attracted a certain amount of criticism because they shouldn’t have a surplus when so many people are struggling… Of course, if they were to spend the surplus helping with the cost of living, they’d attract criticism because the spending is putting pressure on inflation thanks to more people being actually able to afford things and the RBA has been raising interest rates in order to discourage people from buying things due to higher house repayments and not having a job any more.

While I do think that Labor could be using the money more effectively, I am aware of the conundrum that Labor always face. If they have a deficit, then it’s because they can’t manage money while any Coalition deficit is the result of the previous Labor government. On the other hand, if they have a surplus, the Coalition would have had a a bigger one because they wouldn’t have wasted money on unspecific things, and anyway, shouldn’t they be helping people by giving them tax cuts instead of having a surplus?

In a rather interesting development, the Queensland Labor government was accused of plagiarism by the Greens. A number of policies introduced by Steven Miles were policies that Labor had argued against when Anna Palaszczuk was Premier, leading Max Chandler-Mather to argue that this is why a Greens MP was needed, which is strange because surely Labor can steal their policies even if they’re not elected. Jarrod Bleijie, the LNP deputy agreed, telling us: “They have pinched a Greens policy that the Labor Party in parliament voted against not long ago!”

I guess this sums up the change in the Greens over the past few decades. When Hawke was elected and he saved the Franklin River, nobody complained that this was Greens’ policy. Now, even when Labor pinch their policies, instead of saying that Labor have done the right thing for once, they complain that this was their idea as though the thing shouldn’t be done unless they’ve been given credit and a release of copyright.

I mean when Labor approves coal or gas mines or when they fail to raise the rate of Jobseeker nobody in the Coalition complains, “Hey, this is what we do!”

Although they do complain when the Labor PM buys an expensive house without once using the phrases “class warfare” or “politics of envy”.

There’s a bit of a tall poppy syndrome in Australia where we shoot down people more successful than ourselves, so I must say that I find it odd that people should mock Liz Truss who, after all, did manage to become Britain’s PM for a whole two months… Ok, it wasn’t quite two months but it was certainly closer to two months than two years and I think we have to all admit that none of us have been Prime Minister of any country for that long…

So, let’s hear it for Liz and give her a big slap on the back and congratulate her for taking it on the chin and not going into a foetal position. She’s out there giving advice on how Australia can avoid making the same mistakes that Britain made… no, not the one about letting her take over from Boris… and no, not the one about making party boy Boris the leader… and no, not the Brexit one.

No, none of those. The one about getting too woke because we all know that it’s this woke thing that keeps us awake at night when we’d be better off sleeping like Britain seems to have done since it ruled the waves…

For those of you unfamiliar with our history, Britain once ruled the sea. The waves doesn’t refer to those Mexican ones that have been banned at certain arenas. A thing that happened before Trump told us how bad Mexicans were. In fact, the original second verse of our national anthem goes:

When gallant Cook from Albion sail’d,
To trace wide oceans o’er,
True British courage bore him on,
Til he landed on our shore.
Then here he raised Old England’s flag,
The standard of the brave;
“With all her faults we love her still”
“Britannia rules the wave.”
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance, Australia fair.

For reasons that are probably part of that woke agenda, we deleted that. (Note to self: let Sky After Dark know so they can launch a campaign to have it restored!)

Anyway, for those who are unaware:

• Cook is James Cook who was a seafaring man
• Albion is an alternative name for Britain. I don’t know why Britain needed an alias, but it may have been so people didn’t associate her with past crimes. Possibly that’s what’s being referenced in the line “With all her faults we love her still”!
• The word “still”, I presume, refers to the fact that we haven’t changed our minds, not a device for making moonshine… Although the early convicts probably did love anyone’s still.
• I don’t know the difference between “British courage” and the regular kind but if someone can find out I’d be grateful.
• I also find it confusing that he raised the flag of “Old England” and not the newer British one, which suggests that there may be some confusion about the whole claim and we may need to test this in the High Court.

Whatever, I guess it’s lucky that Liz is here in Oz so we can pose some of these questions to her. Looking forward to her answers…

One thing you have to admire about Greg Sheridan is that – like Donald Trump – he sticks to his ideas and doesn’t allow them to be influenced by reality.

Of course the whole reality thing is subjective… so much so that people can hold one view on a topic while holding a totally contradictory view on a different topic.

Take the concern about people waving Hezbollah flags at a recent demonstration. They shouldn’t be doing this because Hezbollah is a banned, terrorist group. What determines who and isn’t a terrorist group? Well, there are many different views on this and some people would tell you that the United States is one, but such people have no official status and it’s government’s who have the power to determine which ones are worth banning and which ones are able to bomb people with impunity.

I don’t have a problem with this because we can’t let groups who are aiming to cause mayhem and who are spreading propaganda trying to radicalize people just have a free hand. And I was all for banning swastikas and other Nazi symbols.

However, it seems that some people who are calling for Albanese to be tougher and insist that the police prosecute these people are also the same ones who have a serious problem with any sort of misinformation laws.

Now, I’m not asking you to agree to letting terrorist flags fly or to agree to a totalitarian government shutting down all dissent as misinformation. I’m just pointing out that there IS a bit of a different reality going on when you warn of the dangers of too much government power while insisting that the government prosecute certain people for waving a flag.

Take Peter Dutton. Please. I certainly don’t want him and I’m pretty sure Australia doesn’t need him as PM when he doesn’t understand the basic principle of the separation of powers which means that while the government may make the laws, they’re not the ones who are in charge of enforcing the laws. When you don’t have a separation of power the path to corruption is pretty obvious: “Yes, it’s true that the Minister misappropriated several million dollars but we’re not prosecuting because he’s in our party and anyway he’s the brother-in-law of one of our biggest donors. Besides it’s not like the recent prosecution of the Leader of the Opposition who fraudently removed a pen from Parliament House without permission!”

Given he was once a policeman, it’s probable that Dutton does understand the separation of powers and he just that he finds them an unnecessary impediment to the administration of “justice”. Of course it’s also likely that any criticism of Albanese is just to make a political point and not because he actually thinks that government should be telling the police who to charge… And, as I wrote the other day, that’s the trouble with politics today: too much focus on making the other guys look bad and not enough focus on trying to find solutions.

I mean I recently saw a post from Dutton which said that we needed a STRONG leader in these troubled times. That seems self-evident because I can’t think of a time when anyone needs a weak leader, but there was no extra information about what this strong leader needs to do. I seem to remember that when Tory Tony was Opposition Leader, we had a lot of similar rhetoric about needing a strong leader because Julia was PM and, obviously a woman, so we needed someone who could strip down to their speedos and fight a fire but Dutton is a little less clear on the need for strength…Exactly what is required for this strong leader to do? Apart from be strong, of course. Do they have to lift weights or arm wrestle? Or is he talking about mental strength and suggesting that he’s exactly the sort of leader that we don’t need.

Whatever, that’s the problem lately. Even when the Greens say we need to make changes to negative gearing, they’re not suggesting a specific change, so it means that Labor doesn’t want to negotiate because they’re afraid that, if they agree to any change, the Greens will say either that it’s good and it’s all thanks to us OR it doesn’t go far enough and we’re going to vote against it… leaving the door open for Dutton to say that if we had a strong leader like him, there’d be no agreeing to anything and he’d stand firm and insist that he was right and everyone should just agree… which, according to some, is what Albanese is doing, except in his case, he’s just being stubborn.

It would be nice to think that politicians of all sides could get together and admit that nobody has any simple ideas about how to solve particular problems and we should be thrashing out possibilities until we come up with something worth trying.

And yes, I am ignoring Matt Canavan in saying that. He has lots of simple ideas!

David Littleproud was spruiking the idea that the excise on beer should be frozen… unlike those English bastards we like our beer cold so just using the words “frozen” and “beer” should have been a vote winner. However, it seems that this was just a thought bubble from the Nationals leader which had no support from the rest of the Coalition, even if a couple of them praised the man for actually having a thought, which is quite an achievement for a Nationals MP.

It was interesting that they shut down the idea without further discussion. Although when I say “interesting”, I actually mean typical of the goings-on in Canberra lately. It was Otto Von Bismarck who said that politics was “the art of the possible”…

Actually the full quote is: “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.” This leads me to believe that – like much of what happens these days – Otto had just been rolled and that he had to adapt his plans without looking too much like a loser…

Whatever led Von Bismarck to say that, I suspect that he wasn’t having as bad a time as the Labor Party recently.

The Coalition grew concerned that the changes to Reserve Bank would enable Labor to stack the interest rate setting part of the Bank with their mates because, after all, that’s what the Liberal Party would do. Why would it be terrible to have an interest rate setting group composed of Labor sympathisers? Well, we politicians all agree that interest rates are putting pressure on households and that they should come down but if you had too many comrades making decisions then they might come down before the election and then Peter Dutton would have no hope of being able to win, even with his promise to bring down power prices once he gets his nuclear plants up and running in 2035.

There was the suggestion that Labor could negotiate with The Greens but this is even harder than trying to work with the Liberal Party. Lately the tactics of The Greens seems to be to announce that they won’t let something through because it’s a bad policy but, in spite of it being a bad policy, Labor should negotiate so that they can claim credit if people like it. Their most recent tactic is to add something that is almost impossible to do but sounds good.

For example, the demand that Jim Chalmers override the RBA and lower interest rates has a number of problems. First, it completely undermines the independence of the Reserve Bank. This is a problem because they make decisions without considering whether they’re popular or not and this has its advantages even if they occasionally get it wrong. Secondly, if the Treasurer did use his power to lower interest rates, he’d have a political problem because the next thing would be that he’d be attacked for doing it, as well as being attacked for not doing it sooner. Yes, this is illogical but you only have to remember that, in 2019, Bill Shorten’s policy on negative gearing was going to raise the price of houses for buyers and lower the price for owners. Finally, if he lowered them once, there’d be speculation after each RBA decision whether he’d do it again which would mean that economists would be interviewed even more often and I think that we can all agree that the less we see of economists the better…

To be perfectly fair, there are some good economists but I can’t think of many because they rarely get interviewed. I mean, I often wonder what’s the point of interviewing a disciple of the free market capitalist economic theory when all they’re going to tell you is that the market knows best and there’s no need for any government interference. If that’s right, then why do we need the economist to advise us when we can just leave it to the market?

Whatever, I think that we need an election so we can get a boost to the economy from Clive Palmer’s advertising spending.

Ok, if I make the various links you can probably put the whole conspiracy together for yourself, but then you’d have no reason to read on and Facebook would have no reason to ban this like they did my last post… which, by the way, has nothing to do with that bugle thing they play on ANZAC day.

Before I start though, I’d like to say exactly how confused I am by the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Apparently – according to some people – it was a staged event designed to win him popular support. And – according to the same people – the last one was too. This is confusing because I can’t see how anyone would be silly enough to agree to be part of a staged attempt to kill Trump after what happened to the last guy who played the role of pretend assassin. I mean, you’d have to have no memory and you’d be almost as brain dead as… well, I guess Trump may have a few supporters like that, but still!

Of course, the alternative point of view is that it’s part of some Deep State to kill Donald. Sounds plausible, until you ask yourself – with all their deep statey control of things they can’t find a marksperson as accurate as Lee Harvey Oswald or even, Jack Ruby, and why they keep stopping the person before they’ve completed the job.

Whatever, I’m moving on to the whole Paul McCartney thing and I’m prepared to give you a series of unverified facts which I believe that I’ve heard over the years. When it comes to the world we currently inhabit, I understand that this is what’s called: DOING YOUR OWN RESEARCH!!

1. Paul McCartney released a song called “Give Ireland Back To The Irish” which was such a radical concept that it was banned in the UK. Or maybe the BBC just refused to play it… either way, he was annoyed at the censorship in the same way that Matt Canavan is annoyed at the proposed misinformation bill because he knows that it will stop him from posting 98% of the things he writes.
2. In response, Paul released his version of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” which became the sort of hit that could be compared to his time as a Beatle but not in a good way.
3. With Paul taking the sort of political action that was as effective as John and Yoko lying in bed for Peace, he was obviously someone who needed to be nobbled.
4. Princess Di accidentally pressed a button which called for an ambulance or something. The speeding police motorcycle hit Heather Mills who lost her leg in the resultant accident. (Check this, it’s true. I promise. Do your research, people!)
5. Because of her accident, she met Paul and this led to him marrying her and ceasing to write any songs that encouraged us to do anything leading to a complete breakdown of all that promise of the sixties when we were promised that all we needed was love… although I must say that I think it’s to the credit of whoever owns the rights to “The Beatles” songs that we didn’t get someone singing “All You Need Is Gloves” in order to sell disposable ones.
6. I’m not suggesting that the incident in the tunnel with Di and Didi was so that she didn’t reveal her role in all of this because it’s too soon and there’s no link but I think you can draw your own conclusions…

And I guess that’s the problem, isn’t it? There are all these events happening in the world and people are just drawing their own conclusions and when the facts don’t suit these conclusions, well, then the facts must be made up or… or… we can find alternative facts and we can have things that are true as well as their opposite being true as well. For example, we have – according to Elon Musk and others – “socialist billionaires”… which I find hard to believe because I’m yet to find a billionaire who actually believes in the redistribution of wealth. (Obviously, they wouldn’t be a billionaire if they did!!!)

I’m often torn between different points of view because, as a Gemini, I can see both sides. Mind you, I don’t actually believe in astrology, but that’s typical of Geminis.

So when it comes to legislation preventing misinformation and disinformation, I can see that some would want such laws in order to prevent people spreading dangerous propaganda which makes us all less safe. I can also see that there’s a problem in deciding exactly what constitutes both misinformation and disinformation because one person’s lie is another’s truth.

Of course, we don’t want people able to publish information that is blatantly incorrect in order to scam their money or to get them to vote against their own interests. On the other hand, who’s to say that what’s actually in someone’s interest? I mean, it seems wrong for a person to be robbed of their life savings through a scam, but then maybe it teaches them resilience.

Granted, the proposed laws are more concerned with political information and that’s where it gets hard. If Donald Trump were to appoint the arbitrator then anyone who said that the election wasn’t stolen would be prosecuted for misinformation, but if I’m the arbitrator, then only things that are clearly misinformation would be banned… like just about everything Donald Trump says!

Ok, some of you might argue that I’m the one being biased but you clearly haven’t been listening to Trump’s recent rambles which seem to be as disjointed as a James Joyce novel. I’m fine with a stream of consciousness, but in Trump’s case it seems more like the sort of stream that he was accused of enjoying in Russia.

Speaking of Trump, when I had a momentary lapse in memory this morning about something which I can’t recall, my wife accused me of having a “Trump moment” rather than a senior moment, which I thought most unfair. Then I started to wonder how long before the phrase, “I’m just having a Trump moment” becomes synonymous with forgetting how your sentence started before getting to the end of your attempt to explain what it was that was so good about what you started to explain before you started to talk about how Sleepy Joe wouldn’t have been able to… I mean it was just so unfair that he was… where is he, by the way?

And, also speaking of Trump, I have seen several memes of him grabbing a kitten and/or a duckling. While this is obviously a reference to the alleged crimes in Springfield and trying to portray Trump as a protector, I can’t help but wonder how long it’ll be before someone adds those “locker room talk” comments about grabbing a certain body part that could be a substitute for the word “kitten”…

Anyway, the accusations of about those Haitians stealing pets is one of those things that may or may not be considered misinformation. However, when you’re repeating it without any basis beyond you heard that it was true and there are people saying that it’s not, then we enter this sort of world reminiscent of primary school where all sorts of fantasy were shared and believed until some nasty bully laughed and shattered the dream with a harsh dose of reality. The difference being that grown people have more resilience and often refuse to listen to the nasty person pointing out inconvenient facts because, well, they don’t have to and it’s a free country and I’m entitled to believe what I want and how dare you call Peter Dutton a racist just because he doesn’t want foreigners coming into the country…

So the problem with any mis/disinformation laws is the problem of how to ensure that it’s only genuinely incorrect things without taking away both people’s right to think differently and people’s right to repeat whatever nonsense makes them happy. How can a misinformation regulatory authority apply the law without reducing most of the Murdoch papers to a few ads and the footy scores?

Yes, it’s a hard one. But it does intrigue me that certain people just presume that they’ll be the ones being targeted. Do they know something about what they’re saying that they’re not sharing?

As I said the other day, it’s easy to make predictions; getting them right is the hard bit.

So, I approach any future event with the supreme confidence that – barring something unforeseen – I’ll be 100% correct. If I happen to be wrong, well, that was because of something that I didn’t predict, but apart from that, everything else was right… or close to it!

Anyway, I notice that some people on social media are just as confident that Labor will lose the next election and that Peter Dutton will be Prime Monster. Some are overjoyed at the prospect at getting rid of this communist mob, while others are Labor supporters who can’t believe that the party hasn’t raised the rate/asked a Census question/declared war on Israel/refused to allow any fossil fuel projects.

Albo, it seems, is incapable of winning the election. Watching a couple of his political stumbles recently, I’d have to say that I’d be a brave man to predict the next election, but then I seem to remember that I thought the same when he was Opposition leader. In fact, I remember many Labor supporters posting on social media that he needed to be replaced and that anybody they replaced him with would have the advantage of not being him.

But the election is a long, long way off. No really. If a week is a long time in politics then several months is an eternity. And, of course, there are several things in Labor’s favour which don’t seem to be uppermost in people’s mind.

1. Peter Dutton. It’s true that some people are very upset with Labor’s response to certain issues, but when it comes down to who gets that final preference in a number of seats, the fact remains that Dutton’s position is even less acceptable to those upset with the current government. After all, if you think that Labor isn’t being critical enough of what’s happening in the Middle East, are you going to prefer Dutton’s fulsome support of Israel? If you thought that Labor didn’t go far enough with the changes to the Stage 3 tax cuts, are you going to vote for the Coalition because they’re going to give those on $140k plus, the cut that Labor stopped. If you voted for an Independent candidate because you didn’t think that the Liberals were doing enough about climate change, are you going to be won back by Dutton’s we need to slow up renewables because we need to build nuclear plants in due course?
2. They are the government which enables them to actually do things that make them popular rather than just promise to do them. Not only that, a handful of voters tend to swing back to the government on election day. There are more examples of governments surprisingly getting back in than surprisingly losing. Think 1993 and 2019 for the biggest shocks.
3. Queensland will probably elect a Coalition government. After several months of the new government cutting services and doing all the things they promised not to do, Labor may be less unpopular in that state by the time the federal election date arrives.
4. Inflation is on its way down. This won’t be much of a plus unless interest rates start to come down too, but the poor state of economic growth does leave some room for the government to argue that in order to prevent a recession we need to give people certain things which I won’t call bribes but I’m sure someone will. This may put them in conflict with the Reserve Bank who seem to believe that the economy is going well because they haven’t been sacked yet and nobody has suggested cutting their pay.

Of course when it comes to the Reserve Bank, I have to wonder if being devoid of empathy is a job requirement. Certainly, both Phil Lowe and Michele Bullock have made the sort of statements that make one wonder.

However, I found Bullock’s statements this week to be confusing on both empathetic and economic grounds!

According to the RBA head, we need higher interest rates, even if that means slow economic growth, higher unemployment and people selling their homes. Persistent inflation could lead to a recession, and we don’t want a recession. Why not? Well, recessions are bad because they lead to higher unemployment, slow growth and people being forced to sell their homes.

Yeah, makes sense to me too.

Whatever, the most obvious result is that Labor will lose some seats but not enough to give Dutton a majority. There’ll be enough Greens and Independents to lead to speculation about who they’ll support and the Greens will only agree to support Labor if they introduce something that they don’t have the Constitutional power to do which will be interesting right up until one of them suggests making Peter Dutton PM, at which point Dutton says that he won’t be held hostage to such a radical party but they do have some ideas worth listening to… like him being PM. At this point, we’ll all lose interest and Labor will limp on till Albo announces that he’s going on his honeymoon and someone will tell him that the honeymoon is over and Jim Chalmers is going to take over as leader.

Like I said, I’ll be right about everything except the bits that aren’t!

Yep, apparently it’s all bad news for Labor with their leader, Anthony Albanese only leading the preferred PM stakes by a mere 45 to 37…

Now, I know some of you will remember that I’ve always maintained a few simple rules about opinion polls:

1. The preferred PM question is interesting but, in the end, means nothing. Frequently the incumbent leads and it’s really all about the two party preferred vote, so I would have thought that the 50/50 two party preferred was more important.
2. The two party preferred vote means very little for an individual poll because the margin of error is so great that almost all elections fall within the margin of error so that even if a party was leading 52-48 and the end result was 49-51 the poll was still within the margin of error even though it went from a comfortable win to a loss.
3. Country-wide polls can be misleading because the election is decided by individual electorates and every election has the potential to throw up a handful of out-of-kilter results that save or damn a government. A case in point is Chisholm in 2016 which saved Turnbull even though the Liberals were so sure that they’d lose it that they picked Gladys Lui to stand…
4. Because 90% of polls are done well before an election, they’re virtually useless because most people aren’t paying attention and it’s only when the election campaign starts that people suddenly decide that the government isn’t so bad because it just gave them a tax cut or that the opposition are worth a go because they’ve just promised to get rid of the great big tax on everything which will bring their energy bills down by $500.

Having watched the way the electoral cycle works for over half a century, I’d suggest that what happens is that – after a period where the Liberals are in power, people eventually realise that when they say that they’re good at economic management what they mean is that they’re good at managing to steer money into the pockets of their supporters and that they couldn’t give a stuff about most voters – people eventually vote Labor into office. This usually coincides with some economic problem such as the stagflation of the 70s, the GFC, or the recent runaway inflation. Hawke and Keating may have had a recession but that wasn’t as bad as any of the other shocks. After a couple of elections, people become disappointed in Labor and start saying things like: “They’re no better than the other mob and at least the other mob didn’t cause the GFC!” At this point, the other mob is voted in and people gradually start to remember that, while Labor may be no better than the other mob, the other mob are somehow worse than Labor. After a period where the Coalition use the excuse that they’re fixing Labor’s mess, people suddenly remember exactly why they threw them out in and put Labor back in to have the whole process start again.

When it comes to economics, of course, no government can ever win. At best they can convince people that this is good for them in the long run and all their decisions will pay off if you’ll just be patient. This worked for Malcolm Fraser and his treasurer, John Howard, who convinced people that they were working to contain the inflation and unemployment that Whitlam caused by creating a world-wide oil crisis, but eventually people started to notice that inflation, unemployment and interest rates were all worse than when Fraser came to power.

If we take the recent argy-bargy over interest rates and the poor state of growth, we have the rather interesting scenario of a Reserve Bank raising rates with the idea of curbing growth and putting downward pressure on inflation, only to have some commentators suggesting that the poor rate of growth in the economy may land us in a recession and that the government should do something but not anything that adds to inflation… which is potentially anything which goes against the RBA’s policy of trying to rein in inflation by suppressing growth. Of course, anybody paying attention to economic data would notice that the rate of inflation has gone down significantly. This doesn’t mean that prices aren’t going up still; they’re just not going up by as much as they were a couple of years ago and they may even hit the target range by the end of the year. Unless, of course, something happens and they don’t!

For example, to end winter we had the rather interesting weather patterns of record high temperatures up north and extreme winds down south. As yet I haven’t heard Chris Uhlmann explain that the winds were caused by South Australian wind farms causing the weather to be blown into Victoria and Tasmania. Whatever, this was not one of those times that Dutton likes to talk about where “the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow”… (On a side note, has anyone ever pointed out that the sun is always shining and that it’s only not shining on a particular spot because it’s night-time or cloudy. I mean it’s the height of egocentricity to suggest that the sun isn’t shining just because it isn’t shining on you…)

Anyway, economically speaking days like that make the cost of electricity so cheap that it’s not profitable to run your coal-fired power station but it’s too expensive to temporarily shut it down so you have to keep it running even though you’re losing money. As more renewables come into the system, coal has more and more days where it’s not profitable, so we need to restrict renewables in order to make coal viable or else we won’t have power if the sun ever explodes and there’s no more solar energy. This means people could argue that renewables are too expensive because soon they’ll lead to a situation where we need to subsidise coal-fired power stations in order to keep them going. While I’m not sure that you’ll agree with that, it’s basically the argument that Peter Dutton is using when he suggests that we need to halt their spread and that the government should build nuclear power stations to replace coal and that the government needs to do it because the market can’t raise the sort of money that would enable a nuclear plant to make a loss on a long term basis.

See, economics means that there’s never an easy answer for a government!!