I have an article in The Conversation about Kevin Rudd’s legacy. In the next Overland I will have a longer article on Rudd and Gillard. I don’t find Rudd particularly interesting. Even his parliamentary supporters such as Richard Marles can only tell us he was a nice bloke, at least some of the time. The […]
From Communists in 1951 to refugees in 2011: Labor & the High Court
The federal Labor government of Julia Gillard struggles with the issue of asylum-seekers, the government’s rigid position is widely unpopular among Labor activists and party sympathizers and many were pleased with the High Court’s decision on the Malaysian solution. Caucus leaks to an extent akin to that of the Scullin government. We can see how […]
Rudd-Gillard and the end of old New Labor
How are we to explain Australian Labor’s woes? Some hints in an examination of British New Labour’s economic record by Duncan Weldon. He highlights how Labour’s model was unsustainable: Remember the campaign posters in 2005? How the issue of the economy was dealt with? A near endless repetition of macroeconomic statistics – the longest period […]
Julia Gillard and the 1960s
Julia Gillard’s recent declarations of cultural conservatism are curious and hardly worth taking seriously, apparently gay marriage is an enemy of ‘thrift’. It is part of a pattern of some on the centre-left imagining a mythic socially conservative past for the left before the 1960s appeared. It is quite fictitious if we consider the Curtin-Chifley […]
Class and region in the 2010 election
On one level the 2010 Australian election was a remarkable one. But on another level it was an election in which very little changed: the patterns of 2007 persisted with a regional overlay. In 2007 class alignments shifted as Labor won back the support of many working-class voters who had supported the Coalition in 2004 […]
Obama and Gillard’s prospects compared
2010 was a difficult year for the Australian Labor Party and the American Democrats. Media coverage goes in waves; it was slow to catch up with Labor’s woes and perhaps has overstated Obama’s difficulties. Much was made of the Democrats’ poor performance in the Congressional elections. Little attention was given to the fact that they […]
The two-party preferred vote criticised
The national two-party preferred Coalition vote is probably artificially high and this should be noted as both parties cite this vote as justification for their claim to form government.
Polls & predictions
Elections encourage an outbreak of ‘poll fetishism’ every poll or hint of one is racked over obsessively. But polls are not a magic time tunnel to the future but a summation of frequently unclear voter responses that reflect views held with varying degrees of intensity. Too often poll watchers fail to see the forest for […]
Will the election campaign make any difference?
Election campaigns attract fascinated attention. In fact I doubt the election campaign will make much difference either way, before it started the likely outcome was a narrow Labor victory. The evidence is that American presidential election campaigns made little difference as Brendan Nyhan noted just after Obama’s victory:
The left and public opinion
Many on the left in response to Labor’s rightward shift on asylum-seekers have argued that Labor is engaging in unnecessary panic. Eva Cox: