One of the great frustrations for Australian men (particularly), is that all that football watching, panel show listening, and sports page perusing, amounts to bugger all in the office tipping competition. Jenny from Human Resources, who proudly claims to know nothing about football, is just as likely to pick the winners on the weekend.
Plausible explanations include the reality that predicting events yet to play out is inherently fraught, and that casual followers of the game, often glean as much useful information at a glance â and less useless detail â as people applying themselves more diligently. In fact, those whose selection turns on nothing more than a generalised sense that Hawthorn usually wins and so they pick the Hawks each week, are probably using a better measure than those who clutter their judgment with last week's away form, or the insider news that a key on-baller is out injured.*
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Turnbull grilled over 'Australian values'
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull defends his announcement on a tougher citizenship regime in a testy and cheeky interview with ABC's Leigh Sales.
In other words, you can get too close and lose the big picture. This is true of governments as well. The flaw in the methodology is essentially the same: determining the outcome of events that haven't played out yet; making too much of what details are obtainable; and ascribing behaviours and responses to actors (voters) on the basis of these judgments.
For underperforming governments there is the added variable that even good policy decisions might fail to win credit if voters have stopped listening, or suspect selfish motives.
![Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton.](/web/20170423061901im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/o/9/1/j/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gvph8p.png/1492924354906.jpg)
Indeed, voters by and large are like Jenny from Human Resources
I was reminded of this midweek when an erstwhile colleague â now ensconced in Perth â gave me his "take-out" of Canberra's recent travails.
As members of the political class attempted to deconstruct a series of Turnbull government announcements designed to rebuild its political stocks â first on skilled migration visas, known until now as 457s, and then on Australian citizenship, this observer was inclined to see the bigger picture.
His withering assessment as a Canberra "outsider" â albeit a well informed one â boiled down to utter astonishment that the moderate Malcolm Turnbull appeared to have ceded control on immigration and citizenship to the Abbott-esque hardliner Peter Dutton, while on the economic front, his government, now just weeks from a post-election federal budget, has completely failed to frame the problem it is addressing, much less explain its solutions.
In scenes oddly reminiscent of last year's on-off debates about GST increases, superannuation changes, and negative gearing restrictions, the government has both inflated and deflated expectations on housing affordability, inviting the opposition to waltz in with its own proposals.
On Friday, after weeks earlier signalling a "significant" housing package would be the budget's centrepiece, Turnbull and other ministers were hosing down expectations of serious measures to address the affordability gap.
All of this as the Coalition struggles to rise above the almost daily instalments of its preternaturally noir, Turnbull-Abbott soap opera.
Leaked Liberal Party polling on Thursday showed Turnbull had been forced to act decisively in the dying stages of last year's desultory election campaign to shore up Coalition seats, including Abbott's North Shore stronghold of Warringah.
The leak surfaced in The Australian Financial Review on the same day as it and other papers carried the Prime Minister's bold new Australian values focus, replete with extra hoops migrants would be asked to jump through to gain full citizenship.
This unfortunate timing alone was enough for some Canberra insiders to decry suggestions the Turnbull camp had leaked the clearly damaging material, because, self-evidently, it had cruelled the PM's tough-on-borders citizenship message.
But then, perhaps that was the intended cover? One thing was certain, it hurt Abbott and he hit back.
Until now, Liberal MPs have taken some comfort in the fact that while the rivalry bears uncanny similarities to the politically lethal Rudd-Gillard dynamic, there is a key difference. Abbott, unlike the benighted Rudd, remains solidly on the nose with voters, whereas Rudd had been broadly popular and remained so even as he plotted his return. This made him more dangerous to Gillard.
But that argument ignores the contemporaneous effect of this stoush on the government and, further, assumes the only damage Abbott can do to Turnbull is if he is in a position to replace him.
Now, a chilling realisation is slowly dawning among senior figures: contrary to Labor's crippling Rudd-Gillard standoff, the destruction of this prime minister would leave the Coalition with no popular alternative.
At the last election, political insiders told themselves the government was safe despite the main evidence available â public polling â which showed it was neck-and-neck. Many swallowed their story that the aggregate polls were wrong and that the Liberals were doing much better on the ground in the marginal seats that mattered.
Now we know they were not only wrong, they were lying. What is also clear is that at this time the polls are significantly worse.
And that's the big picture.
*Mind you, they'd be in trouble this year with the Hawks registering zero wins from the first four games.Â
Mark Kenny is Fairfax Media's National Affairs Editor
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