The victory of Cameron’s Conservatives in Britain was surprising and a challenge to opinion pollsters. One recent analysis of the post-election British Election Survey has these findings on the Conservative victory: Polls had almost without exception shown that 2010 Lib Dems voters that had switched to one of the two larger parties had overwhelmingly […]
Abbott & Hockey as neoliberals
Considering Joe Hockey’s farewell to parliamentary politics. How are we to explain the close alliance between him and Tony Abbott? Hockey after all was Turnbull lite in the eyes of the media with a charmingly multicultural background. Hockey supported the Republic against Abbott and continues to provide tepid support for this cause. My view is […]
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 […]
Abbott and Chifley, Salisbury & Spencer
Two comments about the Great Depression by one future Prime Minister and one aspirant to be Prime Minister. In 1944 Ben Chifley declared: In my electorate, I witnessed the freedom that was enjoyed by 2000 men outside a factory in an attempt to secure the one job that was offering…the freedom to starve and live […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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: