Reading the hidden economic text

Peter Hartcher (and no doubt a bevy of conservative-aligned columnists) has seized upon the results of an AC Nielsen poll to argue that there is a glimmer of hope for a Howard recovery. The poll offered respondents three statements:

The statements, and the results, were:

■ The Liberal/National parties are better economic managers - 40 per cent agreed.

■ It makes very little difference which party is in power, economic performance would be the same - 43 per cent agreed.

■ The Labor Party is the better economic manager - 12 per cent agreed.

Strikingly, among people who said they intended to vote Labor, 11 per cent said the Coalition was the better economic manager.

The commentariat, looking for an orthodox narrative, looks at these numbers and sees an opportunity for Howard to convert them back by pressing his economic credentials. Let's take the postmodern approach and see what the text says from the ALP point of view:

55 per cent of the respondents either said that the Labor party is the better economic manager or it makes no difference.

Strikingly, among people who said they intended to vote Liberal/National, almost 20% said either the Labor party is the better economic manager or it makes no difference.

Do those numbers look familiar? As an aside, Rudd leads Howard 48-38 on the question of who has the better vision for Australia - almost identical to Newspoll's preferred PM ratings.

Hartcher makes the heroic assumption that Howard could convert the entire 7% of the electorate favouring either the ALP or the Greens to switch back to where their hip pocket tells them they should go.

Granted he says it would require something 'drastic'. The problem with this analysis is that with Morgan's 'heading in the right direction' question, it does not tell us how important these voters consider the economy nor whether they can be swayed. For Howard to have a snowflake's chance in hell of hanging on, he needs around 48% of the 2PP vote. Not one poll has put him at that level all year. He can forget about the 2% of Greens as they must be pretty hard core to not have gone over to Rudd. That means Howard needs 80% of possibly wavering ALP voters to defect in order to scrape home, and he needs to engineer a movement in the polls of seismic proportions having had them hardly budge for six months.

Voters appear to be telling pollsters that they are thinking beyond the economy, they are thinking about society. It is entirely possible that the ALP could even close the economic management gap during the campaign, given Rudd has apparently neutralised the issue for an election year.