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 […]
The end of Catholic reconservatism: reblogged from 2010
The appointment of George Pell to a position in the Vatican (as a budget-cutting manager) reminds us of the interminable debate about the power of Catholic conservatism in Australia. Back in 2010 I wrote the following for this blog (and it was published on a Deakin site that has since disappeared). Events since then have […]
Australian society in 1985
Recently read Graetz & McAllister’s Dimensions of Australian Society based on the National Social Science Survey of 1984-85 and other survey data. This is Australia before market liberalism and the transformation of the ALP. How did the patterns describe anticipate the future? Can we see signs of John Howard’s later ascendancy? Some interesting observations:
Facts on the 2010 election
The 2010 election and Labor’s near defeat have been endlessly discussed by the media but until now we little clear evidence as to exactly what happened. After each federal election a comprehensive survey is undertaken by the Australian National University. The dataset for the 2010 survey was made available in late December. However it was […]
Following in the footsteps of the CPRS?
Labor is showing the signs of becoming obsessed about the Greens the same way they became obsessed by John Howard. Labor ministers have a point when they criticise the Greens for voting against the Rudd government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme but they sound rather like Greens complaining correctly that voters wildly overestimate the significance of […]
Indigenous claims and the Constitution
Discussion of the proposed amendment of the Constitution to acknowledge aboriginal occupancy prior to 1788 occasionally evokes the memory of the high support for the 1967 referendum to enable aboriginal people to be counted in the census and to include them in the race power. Legislation for the Constitutional amendment was not opposed in Parliament […]
Have Australians become more conservative?
Interesting debate at John Quiggin on whether the election revealed a rightward shift by Australian voters. Left-inclined posters keen to deny this, but the evidence seems irrefutable. Consider two key issues: immigration and greenhouse policy. Conservatives have long been anxious about the decline of Anglo-Australia particularly since the 1970s when non-Anglo immigrants became assertive and […]
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 […]
The election for Americans
Wrote below for US site The Monkey Cage:
Tony Abbott and the end of Catholic conservatism?
Much attention has been given to Tony Abbott’s proclaimed Catholic conservatism but in fact this election campaign provides further evidence of the demise of Catholic conservatism in Australia.