Ok, I’ve been watching the breaking news where we’ve seen the Prime Minister’s car drive along a predictable route to the Governor-General’s residence. In further news, we saw Morrison have the door of his car opened by his chauffeur and a handshake or two as the group entered via the door.
Inside, we were told, the Prime Minister and the Governor-General will have a cup of tea, which was predicted to last about fifteen minutes and then, we’ll see the PM return to Parliament House where he’ll hold a press conference and announce that the election date is May 21st.
We also treated to an explanation of how the Coalition will try to win the election. Apparently, in 2019, much was made of Scott Morrison in the campaign but now that we’ve got to know him, their tactic will be to emphasise the Opposition Leader. The slogan “Better the devil you know…” has been rejected because it was considered too accurate a description. The emphasis, according to the media, will be on the fact that Anthony Albanese is not the PM and has never been the PM and has never held an economic portfolio and has never appeared in public and nobody knows who he is or what he’s up to and how he’s completely changed his image… which none of us are meant to know anyway.
The Liberals will yet again tell us that they have a plan without telling us what it actually is, before holding up yet another booklet which they’ve been doing since Tony Abbott held up his Real Solutions book. People seem to have forgotten that this is the same government just because all the major players from that election have since departed.
Yes, it’s going to be a strange election campaign. There’s a lot of discussion about how Labor are well ahead in the polls but the polls were wrong last time so let’s just ignore them.
Let’s be quite clear here: Nobody has cast their vote yet, so anything is possible, BUT polls all tell us that they have a three percent margin of error. If you look at the polls in the weeks IMMEDIATELY before the election, the polls were within that three percent. The other point that’s rarely mentioned is that it was mainly Queensland that didn’t follow the trend and pretty much everywhere else went as predicted with a couple of seats throwing up a surprise.
Because of the “miracle” win last time, people are saying that anything is possible. Actually, I did find it funny to Morrison declared his belief in miracles after his 2019 win. Did he think it was a miracle that anyone would vote for him?
But the trouble with the unpredictable is that it makes us start ignoring the likely. For example, on “Insiders” this morning, Casey Briggs looked at the trend of the polls from the actual 51.5/48.5 result all the way till now. He and his offsider pointed out that polls in previous elections had overstated the Labor vote by a couple of percent. This, Briggs concluded, meant that the Labor vote was closer to a figure that was wrong in 2019. In other words, he was saying that if you take off the two percent overstated Labor vote and then presume that the polls are overstating the Labor vote by two percent again, it’s nearly fifty/fifty. This is like saying that we’re only seven goals behind and the wind has been worth four goals, so that puts us three goals behind and as we’re kicking with the wind, why that’s four goals so we’re in front.
Yes, the election may throw up an unpredictable result. But I think it’s probably worth remembering two things:
- Ninety-nine percent of everything is predictable and that’s why the unpredictable throws us.
- Most statistics are made up.
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