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Showing posts from July, 2010

Can't get rid of Kevin - Coalition wins again

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As a rough rule the ABC and the commercial television networks tend to give each side equal time on their news bulletins which is why the parties work so hard at devising photogenic events that will tell a story they want told. Which is all very good in theory but it only works if there is virtually no alternative to showing the day's party line. Unfortunately for Julia Gillard, the Labor leader, Kevin Rudd has been a major distraction on many days this week that the journalists find far more interesting than anything she has to say. Yesterday at the start it was not anything that Kevin was quoted as saying but a story in the Sydney Morning Herald  saying he had to been asked to take a more important role in a wavering campaign. Not as vicious a background briefing as the one earlier in the week but Ms Gillard felt obliged to comment that she knew nothing of it. Then, after being rushed off to hospital for a gall bladder operation, Mr Rudd. through his spokesman, struck again with

Niall Ferguson as ‘poseur’: the case for the prosecution from "Though Cowards Flinch"

Another interesting piece about the skills of Niall Ferguson's as an interpreter of economic history, this time from the Though Cowards Flinch website. It puts the debate between Paul Krugman and Ferguson into this context: If the Ferguson camp can make him into the leading public figure economist on both sides of the Atlantic , conservative fiscal policy will win the battle of economic policy, and the future will be grim for millions. It’s that serious. The whole article titled Niall Ferguson as ‘poseur’: the case for the prosecution is worth the read. This particular extract follows nicely from my earlier post this week on the flexibility of the Ferguson views: In the Los Angeles Times in October 2005, Ferguson stated: ‘Parties out of power usually tell themselves that sooner or later the incumbent will be tripped up by the economy. That was indeed the pattern throughout the 20th century. Yet this is to overlook four things. First, economic volatility has declined markedl

A cartoon to put television political reporting in context

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At the risk of offending Laurie: From the excellent xkcd website

An oddball candidate

I'm sure that in the list of candidates for the Australian election of 21 August there are some pretty odd ball people but I wonder if any can compare with  former Marine, Basil Marceaux who is running dead last in a four-way race for Tennessee's GOP gubernatorial nomination. Yahoo News reports that l ast week, as they have done with the other candidates, a Chattanooga TV station gave Marceaux a few minutes on air to pitch his campaign platform , which includes planting grass on vacant lots to "sell it for gas" and a plan "to stop traffic stops." He may or may not have been drunk. Judge for yourself The Yahoo report commented: Marceaux is running at just 1 percent in the polls, according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press. But he's getting way more attention than his rivals, including Reps. Zach Wamp, who has suggested that Tennessee should secede from the union , and  Ron  Ramsey , who has questioned whether  Islam is really a religion . Come to t

Change the names and perhaps he's describing Australia

From NY Times columnist Paul Krugman this week : Why does the Obama administration keep looking for love in all the wrong places? Why does it go out of its way to alienate its friends, while wooing people who will never waver in their hatred? ... The point is that Mr. Obama’s attempts to avoid confrontation have been counterproductive. His opponents remain filled with a passionate intensity, while his supporters, having received no respect, lack all conviction. ... Just to be clear, progressives would be foolish to sit out this election: Mr. Obama may not be the politician of their dreams, but his enemies are definitely the stuff of their nightmares. But Mr. Obama has a responsibility, too. He can’t expect strong support from people his administration keeps ignoring and insulting.

A blatant courting of popularity

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Having noted that reality television is much more popular than political television I am stooping to expand the scope of the Crikey Election Indicators to encompass the next big ratings hit --  Dancing with the Stars.

An honourable man

You can choose your own Brutus, Marc Anthony and Caesar in the current Australian political play called  Kevin Rudd is an honourable man.  I suppose it is one of those occasions where, if the cap fits, wear it. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it. Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest-- For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men-- Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral. He was my friend, faithful and just to me: But Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man. He hath brought many captives home to Rome Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill: Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: Yet B

Five winning days in a row for the Coalition

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This is getting serious. For five days in a row by my assessment Labor has lost the media battle of words and pictures. The prime minister just cannot seem to get away from talking about Kevin Rudd -- a subject she would love to ignore. Yesterday Julia Gillard continued her macho woman approach by making a threatening, but completely hollow, promise to sack from a future Gillard Cabinet any minister naughty enough to leak details of a Cabinet meeting to a member of the press. It might sound wonderful but the trouble about leaks is that ministers do not put their hand up for making them and do not confess if and when confronted. Proof of disloyalty will be hard to get unless Gillard is prepared to resort to the good old days when the Country Party's Deputy Prime Minister John McEwen called on Prime Minister Harold Holt to have ASIO tap the phone of his Cabinet rival, Treasurer Billy McMahon, to get proof that Billy really was leaking to then newsletter publisher Max Newton for whom

Getting depressed watching television

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Early today the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its  2009   State of the Climate   report drawing on data for 10 key climate indicators that all point to the same finding: the scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable. More than 300 scientists from 160 research groups in 48 countries contributed to the report, which confirms that the past decade was the warmest on record and that the Earth has been growing warmer over the last 50 years. Tonight on ABC television's 7.30 Report the spokespeople on climate change for the Government and the Coalition waffled away about who was planning to spend how much on what and how well without giving the data the merest mention.  If you need a reason to be depressed about our political system and missed the program live, catch up with it on the ABC website as Penny Wong and Greg Hunt avoid any discussion of the real issues. And when you are finished with that spare a moment to look at least at the

Big ear lobes DO matter

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The impact of physical attractiveness on voting behaviour is not a subject the oh-so-serious commentators like to take seriously. The tut tutting that’s followed people writing about ears in this election campaign — the size of Julia’s lobes and just the enormous size of Tony’s — is proof of that. Yet all the evidence available on the subject suggests good looking people tend to beat ugly ones. So Julia Gillard’s wonderful picture spread in the  Women’s Weekly  is likely to have more impact on this election result than those pictures of a stripped Tony Abbott parading on the beach. The contrast between her beautifully styled red hair and his considerable body hair makes it a no contest. Now before I am condemned by outraged readers for being flippant, sexist or something even worse, I present to you the latest research on this important subject in the form of an  advance copy of a paper soon to be published in that most reputable of academic journals, World Politics. MIT News  reports

The daily winner.

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It was a Coalition win again but no thanks to anything the Coalition said or did. Their performances were rather lacking in lustre actually but it's hard to have a losing day when your opponents are fighting among themselves while looking for leakers. It would have been far worse for Labor than the one point loss that I have on my score card if Julia Gillard had not given such a spirited commentary on the story of what she did and did not say in Cabinet meetings. This she said he said business does not register with casual observers anywhere near as much as it does with journalists and probably the issue has had little or no impact on likely voting behaviour. What the researchers must be finding that  is  having an impact is the contradiction between the Coalition criticising Labor for putting a tax on miners while themselves planning a tax rise on all businesses to finance a parental leave proposal. Tony Abbott is desperately looking for a way out of this particular "bit ne

Now this is a knife!

No sooner did Labor turn its attention to law and order, promising to crackdown on weapons such as knives and knuckledusters if it wins the next federal election, than Tony Abbott was doing his “I can be tough on crime too” imitation. Perhaps Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor was really just reacting to a Coalition promise earlier in the week to finance a new array of security cameras in marginal electorates. Whatever the reason, the government planned on toughening weapons controls across the country in a bid to quell crime. “Under the new approach, stricter controls will be imposed on a range of weapons with no legitimate domestic or commercial use in Australia,” he promised. “For example, knuckledusters, certain items adapted for warfare, electronic shock devices and flick knives.” Don’t you worry about that, responded Opposition leader Tony Abbott this morning. Not only would the Coalition extend the list of banned knives but it would introduce “tougher” uniform penalties for

Still where I started.

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At the very beginning of this election campaign I speculated that if there were no opinion polls to guide us in a different direction, pundits such as me would be basing their assumptions about who would win the election on economic conditions and on that score would have Labor most likely. Well since then, opinion polls aplenty have come and gone without doing anything but confuse so I’ll stick with my belief that “It’s the economy, stupid” is still the most important matter. And with the chance of a further interest rate rise having gone with yesterday’s inflation numbers the economic outlook is benign enough to suggest that a majority of people will not be angry enough with this government to actually throw it out. The market now has no change as an 87% chance

A welcome bit of passion but …

Wonderful to see the redhead firing up a little at her press conference yesterday but it would be nice if the new-found passion extended to a few matters of policy too. All the politicians seem to be getting excited about in this campaign is telling us what they will not be doing rather than what they will be doing.

What about me?

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Some glorious and delightful examples this morning of the ingratitude and jealousy that can strike a political party when it gets the parish pump working during an election campaign. In a blatant attempt to gain votes in some marginal Brisbane elections, the Prime Minister announced a $1.15 billion grant to fund the long-waited for Redcliffe railway line. So how did the local  Courier Mail  greet this piece of electoral largesse? With this headline above a churlish story saying that now the state government was going to be slugged $300 million for its share of the project plus, for some reason that is not altogether clear to a casual reader such as me, $8.2 billion for the Cross River rail project. Just a bit down south the  Gold Coast Bulletin  was in no mood to give Labor any merit marks. It lamented all over page one the fact that Labor was ignoring the need for the Coolangatta railway extension! But the best “what about me?” for the day clearly went to the Sydney Daily Telegraph 

One big worry out of the way

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At least one thing has gone right for Labor this week. The consumer price index figures released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics should put an end to any thoughts the Reserve Bank board might have had about putting up interest rates. Inflation by all the measures is on the way down rather than up and safely inside the range the bank has as its policy goal. The inflation measures the Reserve puts most emphasis on in its deliberations are shown in this chart from its website, which I have updated with today’s ABS numbers. All three measures are now inside the preferred two to three per cent range.

Who won the news cycle? Coalition the clear winner

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It was a campaign day when nothing seemed to go right for Labor and the Coalition coasted by with barely a problem at all. Watching and listening to the television and radio news bulletins and current affairs shows was to witness a lead disappearing. The saboteurs within the Labor camp keep coming up with ammunition and Laurie Oakes is, sensibly, very happy to fire it. And when you avoid all serious content who can blame the rest of the media following along with enthusiasm. By my count it was the easiest win any side has had in the campaign so far and takes the Coalition to the overall lead for the first time. A few more days like this one and we really will have a contest. Even the Crikey Election Indicator has stirred to narrow the gap slightly between the two sides.

The election form guide

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If you are really beastly careless about what happens on election night but still want to put some excitement into those hours in front of the tele at the  Don’s Party  equivalent you feel you have to attend then there are a couple of solutions. The first and easiest one is to put an entry into the  Crikey  Election Tipping  contest and watch with excitement as the results are declared in the 20 marginal seats where you have to pick the winners with $5000 going to whoever does best. For all you wise subscribers to the  Crikey  Daily Mail this has the advantage of not costing you anything to be able to stand around at the end of the night saying “if only the Liberals had won …” and “why didn’t that stupid Labor mob spend more of their campaign in …” That’s half the fun of election night. The second approach is to treat election night as the equivalent of one big horse race meeting with lots of individual contests to have a bet on. Now I feel a little bit like a John Laws declaring an i

The Daily Winner - Tony should thank Margie

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There’s no more difficult role to play during an election campaign than that of the party leader’s spouse. You know you are just along side as a sideshow with no real role to play apart from appearing supportive. It is such an unnatural role that it’s easy to look embarrassed and awkward. So the opportunity for the Liberals to show that Tony Abbott really does have women in his life was well chosen yesterday. His wife Margie Abbott is a director of a Sydney child care centre and she has, as she explained to the media, a passion for early learning which meant she was happy enough to be the “and friend” when the would-be Prime Minister launched his child care policy at Brisbane’s Kippa Ring centre. She looked natural and relaxed in the environment as the television cameramen jostled for position while she listened to the children reading. And her spouse looked surprisingly at home playing king of the kids too. For the party apparatchiks it was as good a made for television appearance as

Changing opinions of a CIS guest

Niall Ferguson , MA , D.Phil., is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School . He is a resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University , and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University . He writes a column for The Financial Times of London and made a television series for the BBC All-in-all a very important and, perhaps, influential fellow. He is in Australia at the moment to give a lecture for the Centre of Independent Studies which probably allows us to put him in the non-Keynesian economists camp. But as people settle down to hear him deliver tonight's (Wednesday) John Bonython Memorial lecture in Sydney they might like to consider which particular Niall Ferguson they are listening to for he is clearly an economic historian capable of more than one viewpoint on the important