According to the media Anthony Albanese will follow his Marrickville home base from the electorate of Grayndler to Barton. The boundaries of the electorates have been changed and Marrickville is now in Barton. Grayndler now includes Balmain which is currently in the electorate of Sydney held by Tanya Plibersek. At the 2013 election Labor easily […]
Shorten, historicism & Whiggery
I have just published a review of David Marr’s Faction Man in The Conversation. I write these opinion articles very quickly which is a good discipline for academics. So some supplementary comments on my background thinking. I discuss how Shorten is an untroubled Labor loyalist unlike many intellectuals to whom political allegiance is a matter […]
Regional variations & personal votes at the 2010 Victorian election
With the Victorian election almost upon us there are many guides to individual seats available. To add to these I have developed a simple regression model to predict the 2010 Labor primary and two-party preferred votes and the 2010 Green vote in each electorate from the social composition of the electorate as revealed by the […]
Corruption & machine politics
I have an article in the Conversation about the trade union and home insulation Royal Commissions held by the government. The article doesn’t imply any judgement about the significance of the matters that they investigate. Actually I think that trade union political funds (I refuse to use the meaningless term ‘slush funds’) are a notable […]
From the Rudd legacy to the Gillard wars
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 […]
Mark Latham political seeker
For last year my online commentary focus has been The Conversation. I am relaunching this blog. Today I have a review of former Labor leader Mark Latham’s recent book Not Dead Yet at The Conversation. With seven respondents to Latham’s opening essay it is difficult to cover. Some additional points. The popular Labor party reform […]
Labor’s problem: workers or the self-employed?
Using the Australian Election Survey and logistic regression to estimate impact of becoming self-employed on the votes of male manual workers. I have also included deunionisation (a likely consequence of self-employment). This chart shows predicted Labor vote 1993-2010. Summary self-employment has a negative impact on Labor vote but this impact has actually declined slightly since […]
Queensland Labor’s lessons for state politics
Why is Labor’s era in Queensland coming to an end? The short answer is that Queensland is a naturally conservative state. I argue that different states may have a natural propensity to support Labor or the Coalition, levels of unionization, manufacturing employment, educational levels and ethnic diversity are significant here. However this does not imply […]
Labor without heartlands?
Been looking over Antony Green’s recent report (pdf) on the 2011 NSW election and inspired by comments from Penny Sharpe thought it was interesting to consider what it reveals about the disappearance of Labor’s heartlands and how 2011 compared to Labor’s most severe previous defeat in 1932. For 2011 Green provides lists of the best […]
Why the 1967 referendum would be defeated in 2013
Recent analyses of public opinion In the United States have confirmed the significance of racial resentment for evaluations of Barack Obama. The report of the committee on the constitutional recognition of indigenous people has revived discussion of the lessons of the 1967 referendum. Unfortunately this discussion has ignored the significance of racial resentment in Australian […]