View From The Couch - 21/Apr/2016

Where Political Spin Comes From

A couple weeks back I got called in to a focus group to chat about political ads. Predictably there were some hardcore partisans in the room even though they look for people who can be persuaded one way or another. Anyway, this one guy who ran a trucking business, was a Coalition voter and started rabbiting on about how the Labor party "spends like crazy" because it's "other people's money". You know the type. So as any sane person wouldn't do, I called him out on it.

"You realise that it's all other people's money right?"
"What do you mean?" he responded.
"I mean, right now the Coalition is in government, spending money from the same pot. Is it their money? Of course not. They're spending 'other people's money' too."
"Yeah, but they spend it more carefully."
"How do you get that? Since they've been in, they've spent more and they've driven up the government debt, and for all the talk of infrastructure they made, they haven't exactly built anything."

At that point the moderator intervened, but you get the picture. The average guy that gets called in to a focus group, that happens to have an axe to grind doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.
And this is the really weird thing. The focus group would have fed into one or the other major party paying for it, who would then go and bang together some policy pitch based on the ramblings of a group of people who basically don't know what the fuck is going on. It tells you a lot about just how thin the material that goes into political campaigning is; and given that there's like 70-odd days to 2nd of July, it's going to be a long parade of ill-formed ideas cobbled together form the ramblings of people who don't know, can't think, but have ornery opinions.

Really, it's quite pathetic.

The Election Is (Allegedly) On

Here is a laugher.

In fact, the government seemed loath to even accept it was in election mode, with senior ministers starting the day merely talking about having a trigger for a double dissolution, as if unwilling to go into full election mode. And in a media conference conducted mid-morning at a building site in suburban Canberra, Malcolm Turnbull — introduced by local far-right zealot Zed Seselja — spoke about how successful the previous day’s Senate sitting had been. When pressed on the election, Turnbull hemmed and hawed and used lawyerly language that observed the constitutional niceties about requesting the dissolution of both houses of Parliament. 

It was a bizarre contrast with how election announcements are usually made — from the prime ministerial courtyard, complete with flags and “most important election in a generation” boilerplate, with the PM identifying the key themes of their party’s campaign, attempting to set the narrative from the outset, using the slogans and keywords of the weeks to come. Instead, we had a Prime Minister on a building site, explaining “I just want to be very clear that we are governing. We have a lot of decisions to make,” and leaving it slightly vague as to whether the country would indeed be voting on July 2.

It's a classic rant from Bernard Keane.
The Turnbull government hasn't exactly looked all that different in substance from the Abbott government. I think the earliest person to predict that Turnbull replacing Abbott would have no palpable effect on the setoff policies espoused by this government was Helen Razer. Right back when we were deep in despair at Tony Abbott's seeming list of stupid policies and polls kept telling us how much more popular Malcolm Turnbull would be as the alternative Prime Minister.

As it turned out, Malcolm had to make deals to get in the PM's office which effectively neutered his appeal to the electorate.

If anything, the Coalition must now be regretting that he didn't call the election earlier.
And Turnbull wanted the election to be about a confrontation with the unions. Fighting the unions is one of the only issues that reliably unites the Liberals. The Senate has given him that too. 

And the Prime Minister wanted a double dissolution election to maximise the Coalition's chances of winning more seats in the Senate and wiping out the obdurate crossbenchers. The Senate has granted him that, too. 

But Turnbull, his advisers and his party have done a remarkable job of damaging their own best electoral asset – the popularity of Turnbull himself. 

He remains preferred over Labor's Bill Shorten in every way. He is preferred prime minister by a margin of two to one. 

Turnbull is still the Coalition's best electoral asset and, on any analysis, he is still likely to win the election. 

But where the Turnbull of half a year ago would have devastated Labor in his image as a visionary leader with the promise of social reform and economic rejuvenation, he will now have to fight an election as just another politician.
If he wins, it will not be because he is loved or admired. He will win because he will force the electorate to choose the least worst option. He will campaign as the leader perceived to be a better economic manager and the leader better at fighting the unions.

Given just how much dithering there's been with Malcolm Turnbull as PM, it's not going to be a great advantage for him to claim better policies or judgment or economic management. It's actually not all that surprising that as the election date came into focus, the ALP fortunes in the polls began to rise.

Right now as we speak, the Coalition's main pitch to the electorate is that there have been five prime minsters in five years. Voting in the ALP would make that six in six years, and so for the sake of 'stability' we the electorate should vote them back in. It's deeply ironic when Turnbull himself makes that pitch because he himself instigated the dramatic change to become that fifth Prime Minister in 5 years - it's actually a self-defeating ontology.

Today I met somebody who thought that Bill Shorten and the ALP had a good shot at unseating this Coalition government. They weren't quietly optimistic so much as reading the public mood that is out to punish the Abbott-Turnbull government for lying to them. Given the magnitude of the Coalition's victory in 2013, it doesn't look that likely that the ALP would win, yet scenarios for another hung  Parliament are being discussed. All of a sudden Malcolm Turnbull looks like a lame duck.