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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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…
- 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!!
[textblock style=”7″]
Like what we do at The AIMN?
You’ll like it even more knowing that your donation will help us to keep up the good fight.
Chuck in a few bucks and see just how far it goes!
Your contribution to help with the running costs of this site will be gratefully accepted.
You can donate through PayPal or credit card via the button below, or donate via bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
[/textblock]
