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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
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