Plenty of room for Rudd's souffle

Galaxy's latest poll, which either shows we are all on Mars or David Briggs' outfit is polling the Andromeda system, provides just a dribble of sustenance for those Liberals bravely clinging to the-historic-16-seat margin argument as a reason why Labor will not win.

It is true that 16 seats is a very large buffer to make up. But it is by no means unprecedented. Labor oppositions have traditionally come off shockingly low bases, hence they have needed two steps to get close enough to win power. Whitlam won 18 seats in 1969 with a 7% swing. Hayden, while winning only 13 seats in 1980, did so from an appalling position. He received a 4.2% swing, mainly from minor party voters swinging behind him.

Hayden's result would give Rudd a statistical tie - 51.5 to 48.5 is the exact point on the pendulum where there is no clear majority. Whitlam's result gives Labor a 54.4to 45.6 win - in short a landslide. This is also almost exactly the current average of the four major polls.

History shows that when the opposition gets an insufficient swing to govern, the average swing since 1949 is 2.25%. That swing would give Labor 49.6%. Clearly, this is not your average election. Rudd's standing and perceived competence is daylight compared to Latham and he is on track to at least pinch votes from the Liberals. A conservative estimate would be a swing of 4.5% - and even that includes 1.8% for the anti-Latham swing, 2.25% for the average swing and only 0.5% for other factors.

Latham's result in 2004 was appalling. Labor achieved just 37.6% on primaries. Interestingly, because of the post-modern third party politics era, that awful primary left Labor at 47.3% of the two-party preferred vote. The Liberal-National vote cannot go much higher than its 2004 position. Labor can thus move from a terrible position to a very good position with a relatively small change in primaries.

The minimum primary vote swing from the polls is 4.4% (Galaxy) ranging up to 10.4% (AC Nielsen). Using the unscientific approach of avergaing these results gives a 7.4% swing - i.e. 45% on primaries. That is in line with a 1969-style swing.

Both in polling and qualitative terms, this election's trend looks more like 1969 than 1980. Rudd is not taking votes solely from minor parties - in fact he may be losing some of them back to the Greens. We know that 35% of unionists voted for Howard last time - bet they will not do that after being labelled thugs. We also know that there is a big swing among mortgage holders who may well switch straight from one major to another. This points to Labor gaining the majority of its new votes from the Liberal-Nationals and putting it in the box seat to take advantage of Green preferences to win marginal and safe seats alike.

On this basis, I predict that Labor will get around 45% of the primary vote, the Liberal-Nationals around 40.5% and the Greens around 9%. Labor to win 54.7-45.3% on two-party preferred around 90 seats.

Will 'Lindsay-gate' be gold for Labor in Goldstein?

Andrew Robb, Liberal Minister for Mudslinging, appears to be suffering from a political case of papal infallibility. Not content with making unsubstantiated allegations that twelve Labor candidates has not properly resigned from their 'offices of profit under the Crown', he has now attempted to bury the disgusting leaflet distributed by Liberal party operatives in Lindsay.

Robb has point blank refused to withdraw or apologise for his earlier allegations, which even the Herald Sun were a 'glitch' to the campaign. In fact, he even repeatedly demanded Penny Wong, Labor's campaign spokesperson, apologise for stating the widely reported suggestion that a member of the NSW Liberal executive was involved in the leaflet scandal. He does not seem to realise that his seat of Goldstein is mentioned in numerous dispatches as one reliant on true liberals maintaining their allegiance to his party. Even with a margin of 10.1% he is not safe. Just ask Joe Hockey and Michael Johnson.

If the false allegations which eleven of the candidates promptly refuted were not bad enough, Robb has two scandals to contend with. Both of them try to make political currency out of the Bali bombing.

In the Melbourne seat of La Trobe, the high profile Labor candidate, Rodney Cocks won the Medal of Conspicious Honour for acts in the aftermath of the Bali bombing. Anonymous Liberal sources contacted The Age to offer 'discrepancies' between Cocks' account and a journalist's report on his actions.

The extraordinarily inflammatory pamphlet distributed in Lindsay thanked Labor for supporting clemency for the Bali bombers. The lame defences of retiring MP, Jackie Kelly, suggest she either has an extremely nasty sense of humour or other intentions. Somehow I do not think that the Bali bombing is a source of humour.

It is blatantly obvious to anyone viewing the demographics and politics of Western/Southern Sydney seats such as Lindsay, Macarthur, Greenway, Banks and Hughes that they have low proportions of non-English speaking residents, high proportions of identified Christians, high votes for One Nation and swung higher than average behind Howard in 1996 and 2001. It is also known that there is currently a considerable controversy surrounding a proposed Islamic school in Camden. The area is under one of the highest levels of mortgage stress in the country and polling puts Lindsay as a lost Liberal cause and Macarthur and Greenway in Labor's sights.

It does not take Einstein to make the correlation that pushing an anti-Islamic barrow might be worth a few votes for a desperate government. After all, the loss of seats like Macarthur and Greenway would be a total repudiation of Howard's economic program and undermine the fostering of religious and cultural intolerance.

With the news that the Labor candidate for Dobell, Craig Thomson, is now being accused of being of bad character because of evidence he gave in an industrial hearing a decade ago, it seems that Robb is leading a counter-offensive, seeking to knock Labor's national issue-based campaign off-balance by putting local candidates on the defensive on dubious character grounds.

The question is whether any of the tarnishing of Labor candidates in marginal seats will be offset by a true liberal backlash of Robb's mendacious behaviour. Will he become the poster boy for sleazy attacks in the same way Joe Hockey is paying as the face of workchoices?

King Canute and the Lucky Country

Our language is peppered with unique phrases harking back to other times. Fossilised imprints of ideas remain in the collective mind long after the actual knowledge they represent has died away. Often the intent of the phrase is ironic. Language is a subtle creature where the merest tilt of a word can provide sufficient wiggle room to squirm out of most predicaments.

The caretaker (or possibly undertaker PM judging by the tenor of the anti-union scare campaign) PM has attained the status of a Jedi knight for his use of lexiconic gymnastics. As a tribute to this virtuosity, I offer two such allusions which demonstrate the fragile nature of meaning: King Canute and the Lucky Country.

King Canute was a Danish king of England during the 11th century. He is best remembered for attempting to hold back the tide. The tide was not so obliging. A Canute in common parlance is one who resists the bleeding obvious to no avail, possibly involving a spectacularly conceited act of hubris. Only it does not really mean that at all. The whole point of Canute's placing his throne on the beach was to demonstrate to his sycophantic courtiers that there were limits to the king's power. The real cautionary tale is lost by losing the edge of meaning. It is a lesson that rulers of whatever colour forget at their peril. This is clearly the case with the aforementioned PM's contemptous treatment of workchoices and climate change.

The expression 'the lucky country' was popularised after the historian Donald Horne's book of the same name was released in the 1960s. Horne warned that an Australia blessed with agricultural riches should not be complacent and rely on utopian (or perhaps for Kevin Rudd, brutopian) abundance. The warning tone of the message seems to go missing at times, the title seen as a note of thanks or an observation that 'she'll be right' on a national level.

The current context of the 'lucky country' phrase relates to economic prosperity, particularly in relation to securing the future post the China/India boom. The binary opposite popularised in the 1980s was that Australia should become the clever country, an idea that seems to have collapsed on the Howard watch. Clearly a student of Horne's true meaning would advocate upskilling our students to function in an information economy and have a forward planning approach to issues such as climate change.

When next you hear one of those obscure allusions like Canute and his penchant for paddling consider the true meaning behind the easy phrase. It will surely be more enlightening than listening to 'working families' and 'union bosses' repeated five hundred times.

The Gore Election

Al Gore may have seemed something of a historical curiosity to most Australians when he was in power. As Vice-President, he did not seem particularly remarkable beside the charismatic Clinton. He achieved minor notoriety for allegedly claiming to have 'invented the internet'. At that stage, it seemed far fetched he may play a defining role in an Australian election.

The first stanza of Gore's influence is now fairly well-known. Gore's Oscar/Noble Prize winning An Inconvenient Truth, not so much polemic as persuasive pleading, crystallised the mist of concern Australians have long felt on climate change. Suddenly the issue became mainstream and Howard's economic colossus was left stuck with feet of clay. There is a major revolt on from true liberal voters, so much so that Howard is launching all manner of warnings of the 'red-green menace'. Undoubtedly, Gore played a key role in turning climate change into a mainstream issue.

What has previously not been apparent is the relevance of the flipslide of Gore's career. The reason Gore got the time to pursue climate change is because he lost the 2000 election to Bush in highly controversial circumstances. The Florida outcome came about because of the closeness of the election.

If one reviews the polls here, at first glance it looks like a rout. Look closely and Labor's vote is staggered, ever so neatly to give it enough seats to construct a decent majority. Seats like Bennelong (margin 4.5%), Robertson (6.9%) and Leichhardt (11.1%) could all conceivably fall to Labor by about one percent. The closeness of these contests creates a question of legitimacy, and if legal grounds can be found to challenge that election, Liberals playing from the Republican playbook are sure to find them. In the regard, the conservatives best friend is section 44 of the Constitution.

Under section 44(iv) no person occupying 'an office of profit under the Crown' can nominate for election. The key time is the time of nomination. The only problem is precisely what that means.

We have already seen this with the furore over George Newhouse's slipshod nomination in Wentworth. According to the Herald Sun, 13 other Labor candidates may be ineligible. This begs two questions: firstly, assuming it is correct, why are so many candidates so bad at crucial paperwork and secondly is the Liberal party planning to go quietly into the night or quietly into the Court of Disputed Returns. I find it highly unlikely that these Labor candidates did not resign from their positions or that they held them without seeking legal advice on the nomination requirements.

It beggars belief that so many candidates, at least seven of whom are in very tightly contested seats, could have made invalid nominations. The Parliamentary Library has expressed concern that using these provisions in an 'unduly technical manner' leads to costly by-elections which only return the original winner.

Either this does not bode well for the propriety of Labor MPs or it does not suggest the Liberal party will be overly keen to accept the umpire's verdict.

Either way, Al Gore and the two heads of his political career may have a big bearing on the outcome of the election.

The real election contest

Kevin Rudd's Labor juggernaut has all but dispatched John Howard's spluttering Liberal machine (with unhinged National caboose) to the annals of history. However, Rudd's success is not total. The same political shift to the right that has facilitated Rudd's centralisation of Labor has opened up a new contest: with the Greens. Whereas Rudd has been fighting his battles on the right flank, neutralising Howard's wedges and attempts to posit him as economically irresponsible, the Greens have been agitating to be both the true believers on climate change and the 'third party insurance' in the Senate.

Labor lost a large number of disgruntled voters to the Greens at the last election, mainly disenchanted with the parties' incompetence as much as environmental policy. Under Beazley Mark II, Greens preferences elevated a pretty ordinary 40% primary vote to a stratospheric two party-preferred lead. Rudd's ascension consolidated Green defectors into Labor's primary vote. The Greens suddenly found an electorate focussed on water and climate change issues poised to turn away from it. On a micro level, this perplexed position may have given them something in common with Liberals facing annihilation in 2001.

The Tasmanian pulp mill - and specifically Garrett's forced acquiescence - is akin to the Tampa boarding for the Labor/Green dynamic. It focussed attention back on a physical environmental issue rather than the perception of Labor's competence. Just as in 2001 when children overboard reventilated the Liberals' Tampa show of strength, Rudd's perceived repudiation of Garrett's 'sign-first-and-ask-questions-later' approach on climate change solidified concerns on the Labor/Green faultline and caused Labor's credibility on environmental issues to fall.

The result is starting to show up in marginal seat polling. In Tasmanian seats, the pulp mill issue is felt most keenly. The seat of Bass has turned from Labor winning on primaries to heavily reliant on Green preferences. However, the real key may be on the mainland. Climate change is consistently rated among the top issues with Liberal voters, particularly in seats with a high proportion of 'tree/sea changers' such as Eden Monaro, Corangamite and Richmond. Seats such as North Sydney, Wentworth, Ryan, Sturt and Stirling have a high number of true liberals flirting with crossing the line to Labor.

It has been assumed that these voters are frightened to move across the 'Green barrier' on economic grounds. This may be the case, but the primary source of their disillusionment is inaction by Howard on climate change. If Rudd is seen as not a lot better, then it is possible that Liberal voters may go halfway and vote Green but preference their local Liberal. This probably won't affect the result: Howard's stocks with the 'battlers' are at an all-time low. However it might turn a potential annihilation into a close defeat. A primary swing of 4% from Labor to Green will cost Labor 1.2% of their margin in each seat, and in seats with big margins to make up that may be the difference between winning and losing.

In any case, a government elected heavily on the back of Green preferences will have to take serious notice of Green policy proposals across the board.

Market failure: Wood demonstrates inadequacies of economy-based approach to climate change

The Australian's Economics editor, Alan Wood, is a champion of the free market. His latest article targets the issue of clean energy targets and how they contradict the philosophy of an emissions trading market. In the process, he demonstrates precisely why a market approach to alleviating climate change will not work if its sole ally is economic principle.

He first makes the common mistake of eliding Howard's clean energy and Rudd's renewable energy targets. Clean energy encompasses clean coal and nuclear. As Guy Pearse has demonstrated, the locked in funding for coal companies means that the entire Howard clean energy target is subscribed to clean coal. This mistake is equivalent to allowing cordial as a substitute for fresh fruit.

Wood then makes the claim that the chances of meeting Rudd's target of 20% renewable energy by 2020 without 'massive taxpayer subsidies or a technological miracle' are negligible. The current market share for renewables is a tick over 9%, mainly contributed by hydro. In reality, the required scale-up is then 11% over 13 years. My understanding of Rudd's definition incoporates natural gas, which could feasibly be scaled up to provide equivalent baseload power in the required time. That aside, I will assume that on face value emissions-laden coal power is significantly cheaper than renewables.

The key phrase being at face value. Wood's analysis assumes that coal operates without subsidies from government as compared to renewables. Greenpeace estimated that the average annual subsidy to coal, oil and gas companies is $9 billion, whereas renewables receive $330 million. Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane justified this state of affairs on the principle of proportional representation, saying that renewables did very well for the share of power they produced.

Wood's premise is that the coupling of emissions trading schemes with renewable targets amounts to triple taxation of energy consumers, paying first for the cost of carbon through trading, then through higher renewable energy costs and finally being hit by having their income tax spent subsidising the renewables. Renewable energy targets pick winners which is by definition undesirable.

First, an emissions trading scheme adjusts the price of carbon. Renewables produce lessening levels of carbon and hence become more competitive in such a scheme. Secondly, as renewable market share increases, the cost of production decreases for consumers. Thirdly, if the true subsidy position is considered, taxpayers get a much better deal from renewables with future potential compared to a coal industry which will inevitably contract. If anything, propping up an industry by reducing competition and innovation is uneconomic and ultimately counterproductive.

Wood then has two further objections to the policy framework. He questions the efficacy of emissions trading altogether and then, telling, suggests that haste is not desirable as emissions can be stabilised at 650-700 parts per million. He may well have a point on emissions trading, which is susceptible to problems such as an inconsistent or inappropriate carbon price and integrity in monitoring emissions.

However, the 650-700 ppm is a dangerous theory which smacks of an unawareness of his material. Although past emission records are imperfect, current carbon levels exceed those of any of the interglacial periods during the most recent geological era. The IPCC has estimated that they exceed anything seen since prior to the most recent pattern of Ice Ages (20 million years ago). Nobody is quite sure when the carbon levels were last at 650-700 ppm, but the dinosaurs might have done fairly nicely in those conditions and they were cold blooded.

The argument that abatement will cost 'trillions of dollars' fails to recognise the level of subsidies given to fossil fuels and the ability of renewable energies to do a lot when given a bit of support by governments. It merely takes government allocation of trading permits, calculates their monetary value and adds them together, then factors increased fossil fuel prices across the economy. In other words, it misinterprets the starting baseline, leaves out the benefits, manufactures negatives and then extrapolates them unreasonably.

It is bad science dressed up as bad economics. The market does not have all the answers, but it at least needs to have all the information at its disposal to work properly.

The gap between self image and reality

John Howard was quite willing to stand before his entranced party on Monday and proclaim 'love me or loath me, the Australian people know what I stand for'. In light of this, I checked out the Liberal party's website for what the party publicly states it stands for. The website cites eight core beliefs which define Liberal party values:

1. We believe in the inalienable rights and freedoms of all peoples; and we work towards a lean government that minimises interference in our daily lives; and maximises individual and private sector initiative.

* Except we don't recognise the rights of Aboriginal people to self-determination which is why we abolished ATSIC and latterly the permit system and consistently attacked High Court decisions (Mabo and Wik) on native title.

* Except we have introduced the most draconian legislation to control payments to the unemployed, including single mothers and the disabled, where failure to perform fifteen hours of work a week can lead to losing payments for eight weeks.

2. We believe in government that nurtures and encourages its citizens through incentive, rather than putting limits on people through the punishing disincentives of burdensome taxes and the stifling structures of Labor's corporate state and bureaucratic red tape.

* Which is why we introduced the GST and Workchoices, two of the most hideous complicated legislative programmes in history. Not content with that we introduced the ad hoc fairness test with no guidelines as to what constituted 'fair compensation' for lost conditions.

* Into the bargain, we turned remote NT shopkeepers into micro-accountants, quarantining support payments based on printouts sent from Canberra.

3. We believe in those most basic freedoms of parliamentary democracy - the freedom of thought, worship, speech and association.

* Which is why we accept donations from the Exclusive Brethren which was implicated in interference in the NZ election, forcing the resignation of the opposition leader.

* Which is why large sections of the party actively discourage involvement by people from non-European backgrounds or anyone who has views contrary to those of the so-called Christian right.

* Which is why we are trying to destroy the remainder of the union movement by making it almost impossible for union organisers to visit workplaces and involvement akin to social death.

4. We believe in a just and humane society in which the importance of the family and the role of law and justice is maintained.

* Tell that to Izhar Ul Haque.

* As long as you are not actually suspected of either being involved in anything remotely close to terrorism or being disorientated from a non-Anglo Saxon background (Cornelia Rau or Vivian Solon).

* Families are so important we made it easy for workers to lose their penalty rates so they didn't have to be together on weekends.

5. We believe in equal opportunity for all Australians; and the encouragement and facilitation of wealth so that all may enjoy the highest possible standards of living, health, education and social justice.

* But if you did not have equal opportunity to start with, bad luck. University education should be confined to those who will use it responsibly and not flirt with radical ideas like postmodernism.

* Education should be about the 'three rs'. Nothing else, and Australian history.

* We really believe that the highest possible standard of living involves buying lots of stuff whether you can afford it or not.

* We believe everyone should get the best health care so long as it's private and the drug companies get a fair go at getting their R&D budget back.

6. We believe that, wherever possible, government should not compete with an efficient private sector; and that businesses and individuals - not government - are the true creators of wealth and employment.

* We really believe that there is no such thing as an inefficient private sector. All private sectors are by defintion efficient. Some just need support against public sectors.

7. We believe in preserving Australia's natural beauty and the environment for future generations.

* We like whales but we don't really think the environment is that important compared to the economy.

* We don't think climate change is a problem, but if it is, little old us can't do anything anyway. Windmills kill birds. If we need to protect the Barrier Reef, we will cover it in shadecloth.

8. We believe that our nation has a constructive role to play in maintaining world peace and democracy through alliance with other free nations.

* Except through anything that looks like the United Nations. National interest is the only way to go and we can only do that through other forums.