stoush.net

The rubbish that comes out of The Australian’s editorials day after day should cease to amaze, but doesn’t. After all, the various attack dogs or attack dogs in training. But there are times like this morning where I can’t help but feel disbelief.

The editorial is arguing that this week’s Newspoll shows that Labor should be remaking its IR policy in ‘moderate, modern and reformist’ terms. Subtext: Stick it to the unions or else. This is the clear message that a drop in Labor’s primary vote is sending to the Opposition Leader. Apparently…

Let’s start with the poll – there is a 6% drop in primary vote. Absolutely true. The drop is from 52% to 46%. That’s a big drop.

But let’s unpack this as well - if the Labor Party were to win 46% of the primary vote, and the resulting 56% of the two party preferred vote, they would absolutely romp it home.

On the back of the 8.6% swing, Labor would win some 94 seats to the Government’s 53. Peter Costello would survive by the skin of his teeth, trimmed to 0.13% margin, or about 100 votes or so. So a 46% primary result would be a stunning result and an enormous thumping for the Government.

But it’s not the poll but the trend that you should look at, I hear you protest! Oh, quite right. Looking at just the move from the last poll is a bit weak though – the last poll was at 52% primary vote, but the one before that was at 47%. One of these was probably a rogue poll. I’d guess the 52% was well on the high side of what’s actually going on out there. It’s even possible that the 46% is on the low side.

We won’t really know til a little way down the track. But as you can see at OzPolitics, while there is a trend back from the peak of the honeymoon in March, it’s slow. It’s not a 6% swing in a fortnight type of thing.

So we’ve got a drop, but it’s not 6% in a fortnight. But this trend is back from a peak of 62% 2PP, and Labor is never going to win an election by 20 points in 2PP terms (and the 120 odd seats that that would have delivered) so there was always going to be a trend back, it’s just a question of how far and how fast.

And the ACNielsen poll out yesterday as well (2PP – Labor 57:43 Coalition) indicates that this poll is pretty well on the money. That 57% figure is also well higher than you could expect in an election. If Labor polls higher than 53% in 2PP terms (or lower than 47% in the case of a loss) I’d be very very surprised.

But in the same paper as this editorial predicting doom and gloom unless Labor beats up the unions is another set of poll questions from the same poll as reported yesterday that indicates people are pretty happy with their voting choice and aren’t for moving in a hurry – 52% say they aren’t going to change, another 33% are unlikely to change and only 13% are 50-50 propositions. 1% apparently won’t vote for who they say they will vote for, so that’s a bit odd…

So people aren’t parking their votes for a while, they’re starting to lock them in. there are a smaller than expected number of votes still being contested. And people made up their minds to vote the way they did with Labor’s stance, in particular on IR, clear and unambiguous.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that if Labor were to backflip and decide to beat up on the unions, the people who until now are looking very seriously at voting Labor may not be so keen.

And even if Rudd does, he still won’t win the support of the News Ltd. attack dogs and the editorial page of The Australian. He could promise statues of Rupert on every street corner and I’m sure he wouldn’t get support.

Sometimes it’s better to just keep on doing what you’re doing because you know it’s right, rather than trying to win friends you don’t need and losing the ones you’ve got.