And so say all of us

Happy Birthday

Snooze

And so this is Christmas?

Well wow.

Just wow!

What an extraordinary weekend.

It still feels a little unreal. In fact so unreal that I keep remembering all over again, like a goldfish with a two second memory. And it's wonderful.

I go about my business, doing this and that and then something bubbles to the surface: VSU; Kyoto; Andrew Bolt; Kevin Andrews; Work Choices; Phillip Ruddock; AWB; Alexander Downer; Teh History Wars !1!!; Caroline Overington, Piers Ackerman and Dennis Shanahan; and the little devious prick himself, John Winston. Oh the wonderousness. I remember that they're gone, or silenced, or humiliated and a little beam of sunshine peeps into my life.

Sure it's uncharitable. I'm quite content to admit I'm not being particularly gracious. But quite frankly, fuck that. We've put up with it for eleven and a half LONG years. And with EVERY ONE of the conservatives' four consecutive victories, we of "The Left" have had to stay silent and absorb the gloating, accept the scorn, remain quiet as we are reminded that nobody (in fact) likes us, and that perhaps we should consider eating some worms.

So I'm going to enjoy it for at least a week. I think I'm entitled.

I've thought for some time that we had it in the bag and even on Saturday my deepest suspicions were that we'd get home comfortably, but that didn't stop the terror of those final polls.

And then for it to unfold the way it did - slowly at first with only narrow margins in Bass and Braddon, the smirk on Nick Minchin's face creeping back onto our screens once again in an echo of 2004, then with growing pace as the swing swept through Victoria delivering the seats we weren't supposed to win at all. Then NSW: Robertson, Page, Linsday. And then here comes Eden-Monaro the true-to-form bellwether and Bennelong! Sweet Bennelong.

Anthony Green was getting angsty as QLD lagged in the counting, and as we waited with bated breath, our confidence growing with the list of gains, in came Kingston and Wakefield in SA.

And then the final cavalcade. The Queensland booths began to roll in. First the smaller, more conservative rural polling places - something wonderful was happening. The wave grew. Nick Minchin began to look ashen. Eleven years I have waited to see that smirk wiped off his face! Oh joy!

A dash to a nearby election party, we squeezed into a heaving room packed with True Believers just in time to see Maxine McKew take to the stage. How astonishing.

And then as the minutes ticked on we heard the news. Howard had called Rudd to concede!!!!

I woke yesterday with a hangover that couldn't dint the happiness. And then went Costello. And today went Vaile. Mal Brough is gone already. Howard has lost not just the election but his own seat as well.

Even the fact that I'm currently sitting at home nursing a large hole in my head whence a wisdom tooth was ripped this morning cannot effect my mood. I am, as one might say, ebullient.

Congratulations Australia, or should I say Comrades. You have done the country proud!

And so we turn and watch and wait and hope that a new era is about to begin. But I'm in no rush. Who knows if Rudd will deliver what many of us hope for and quite frankly, at this point, who cares? Howard is gone and with him his deceitful, selfish, mean-spirited Government.

Woot!

UPDATE: And so it begins...

I love the smell of democracy etc.

I have ceased to enjoy it. Yesterday's polls spooked me. Now I just want it over and done with.

My ballot paper now nestles among it's friends in a ballot box at the North Fitzroy Primary School waiting patiently for the moment it cascades onto a table in the closed polling centre to be placed on a pile. 1 for the good guys.

Standing in the line waiting to vote we were surrounded by people of all shapes and sizes and all political bents. Snooze and I shared a laugh at the ludicrously type-cast Liberal staffers - girlfriend and boyfriend we hypothesised, both in their early twenties. She dressed in short shorts, blonde perky ponytail, big gold-adorned sunglasses and fake tan. He in iron-free tan chinos (FFS!), navy polo shirt (collar up) and the obligatory boat shoes.

The bechilded couple in front of us clutched two how-to-vote leaphlets: one for the Liberals, one for the Greens. Only in North Fitzroy.

As we stood there quietly in the sunshine, I was overcome with a sense of solidarity. I couldn't hate those people behind us voting Liberal. I may not agree with them, I think they're horribly wrong, but they're doing what they feel is right - just as we all do. The Family First woman handing out their how-to-vote cards is doing it because she feels as strongly about her view as we do ours.

There is something truly extraordinary about getting up in the morning with every one of your fellow countrymen, all around the continent, wandering down to the local primary school and voting out a Government before heading off for a bite of breakfast.

Regardless of the outcome this evening, the act of voting has, as it often does, restored my faith in the system. If John Howard is returned as Prime Minister I will be genuinely devastated, but I can't escape the fact that if it happens, it will be because more people disagree with me than not. It doesn't get much more representative than democracy.

And with that offering to the karma gods, let me now say this. Come on Australia. Don't lose your nerve. Not now. It's hard to kick out a Government, but you can do it. I have faith.

Vote the bastards out!

2 More Sleeps!!1!!!

This is actually fun.

I am actually enjoying myself.

However, for those of you not wishing to be complacent, take a walk down memory lane courtesy of Antony Green and the ABC Election website. Nothing will make you pull your head in faster than watching "highlights" from the last four election campaigns.

In other news, Jackie Kelly, are you for serious?!

CHRIS UHLMANN: Was your husband involved in the distribution of this pamphlet?

JACKIE KELLY: Well, I've read the alleged pamphlet and when I first read it I had to laugh because I think everyone who reads it has their first instinct is to laugh, pretty much everyone who's read chuckles in terms of the parody it does make of various things that have happened during the campaign.

So my view is that it's a bit of Chaser-style prank that an ALP goon squad, which I understand was is led by some unionists, have chased down and hunted down and tried to intimidate and I understand there was even a fight, so yes, I think it was all a very…

CHRIS UHLMANN: But just to establish it, your husband and two colleagues were handing out this pamphlet?

JACKIE KELLY: Well, my understanding is they were letterboxing…

CHRIS UHLMANN: This pamphlet?

JACKIE KELLY: Well, I don't know. Well, I don't know, allegedly. Allegedly.

CHRIS UHLMANN: And this pamphlet says it comes from an Islamic organisation that doesn't exist? It says the ALP wants the Bali bombers forgiven and supports the construction of a mosque in western Sydney. What's funny about that?

If you want to see this defence from Kelly getting the treatment it deserves, watch this reaction from Laurie Oakes on Channel 9 this morning (about half way through the video at the top). I couldn't agree more.

And how's this for a set of numbers?? Primary vote figures: Coalition 40% ALP 47% with TPP: Coalition 45% to ALP 55%. Blessed be the cheesemakers!!

And just cos I find him hi-larious, let me leave you with some beautiful election-summing-up cartoons from First Dog on The Moon. Click for bigger.

Oh boy... so close...

Alright kids, here we go.

Five sleeps to go and the Psephos are going to town.

Things are looking good. Very very good.

For those of my readers who remain unconvinced and keep muttering about marginals and the like, feast your eyes on this...

Possum's Big Prediction (Anthony Green in disguise?)

So how good is [my] model using previous elections?
In 1998, the model predicted an ALP TPP of 50.82 whereas the actual result was 50.91
In 2001 the model predicted an ALP TPP of 49.15 whereas the actual result was 49.07.
In 2004 the model predicted an ALP TPP of 47.23 whereas the actual result was 47.20.

So what is the forecast for the election?

An ALP two party preferred result of 55.15%

And again.

The message is clear - the game is over.

That is what makes it so dangerous.

The polls are consistent, the fantasy of “Liberal strategists” being able to hide under the petticoat of fictitious marginal seat polling because “they’re closer than the national polls suggest” now looks like the façade it actually always was. The media have picked their winner, Uncle Rupert has moved behind Rudd in The Oz to match what has in reality been happening with his Tabloids and the Smage for weeks. This very morning Centrebet blew out to $4.60 - reflecting that even the punters are starting to get it, punters which haven’t got very much at all over the last 5 months.

There is risk and plenty of it over the next 7 days to E-Day, but it’s not downside risk for the ALP vote, it’s the risk of a collapse in Coalition support.

Simon Jackman - Professor of Political Science at Stanford University

We’re looking at almost a 7% swing, in 2PP terms, which would make it one of the biggest “swing” elections in Australian political history as well (Labor got a 7.1pp swing in 1969, but failed to win office; Labor suffered a 7.4pp swing against it in 1975; Howard won office with 5.1pp swing in 1996).

...

We see evidence of a trend away from Labor from September 1 onwards, reaching its peak in the first week of the campaign, at which point Labor has shedding about 0.05pp of 2PP vote share, or about a percentage point every 3 weeks. It looks like that trend is continuing, but the evidence for it is weaker later in the campaign. And in any event, 1 percentage point every 3 weeks, or 2 percentage points over the course of the campaign isn’t enough to bring the election back for the government.

Barring something amazing in this last week, or a marginal seats miracle, Labor will win, and win comfortably.

And finally, Geoff Lambert - Medical researcher and statistical gun. [pdf]

History shows the polls don’t lie. That was a title of an article I wrote for the Australian Financial Review in the lead-up to the 1996 election, in which I predicted a50-seat majority for John Howard. After this duly occurred, the AFR asked me to explain how I did it and this duly appeared as Maligned opinion polls got it right.

...

The perception that the polls lie arises from a selective reading of immediate pre-election polls at past elections. Although the vagaries of sampling error are routinely acknowledged, they are often forgotten when pundits look at the polls which emerge on the Thursday before the election.

...

In the 24 elections from 1946-2004, projections made from the aggregated polls produced an average overestimate in predictions for the ALP TPP of 0.6% (graph below). In the worst case (1987), the error in the TPP was 3.8%. In half the elections, the error was less than 1%. There are differences among pollsters (the “house effect”), but these tend to cancel one another out, so that the average of all pollsters has nearly always proved to be the best estimator.

...

...“elections are won and lost in the marginals”. In theory this again is true but, in practice the average swing in the marginal seats rarely differs from the nation-wide swing. ... Thus, if campaign effort has been concentrated in the marginal seats over the years, then the efforts of both sides must have cancelled at almost every election. Only 1998 bucks this trend.

...

The bottom line is that the weighted national swing is likely to be about 8.2% and the final national TPP about 55.5%- this would give a most likely number of seats for the ALP of 97. The different methods contributing to the weighted results give projected TPPs of 53.8% to 57.3%, and seat numbers ranging from 94 to 102, which is not symmetric about 97 seats, mainly because the clustering of seats on this part of the pendulum is not homogenous. In this region of the pendulum, every 1% swing can produce a 14-seat majority change.

Monte Carlo simulations based on the weighted data show that about 19 out of 20 elections conducted under these conditions would produce a TPP of between 54.7% and 56.3% (55.5% is in the middle of this range) and a 95% confidence limit for the number of ALP seats of 87-104.

...

It would take a political sensation of biblical proportions for the Coalition to win from here or, as Antony Green has said, the greatest come-from-behind victory in history. The chance of the Coalition pulling the ALP TPP vote back to Tiger Territory in the region of 50.6% in the absence of such a sensation, or in the absence of the statistics going pear-shaped, is ridiculously small.

Come on Psephos! Don't let me down. I've come to love you all over the last few months and if you're wrong it will be utterly devastating. This isn't just the election you're predicting here - it's our relationship!!!!

The furry oracle

There are many things I like about Possums Pollytics, but probably the most impressive is the fact that he not only clearly knows what he's talking about, but that his predicitions seem to be uncannily accurate.

Have a look at this post about today's Newspoll.

Honestly, if you're not regularly reading this blog during the election, then you should take a good hard look at yourself.

Exactly who's in charge?

From this morning's AM. Chris Uhlmann interviewing Andrew Robb, Vocational Education Minister.

CHRIS UHLMANN: This argument on experience, this argument on experience, saying you can't replace experience with inexperience is a self-annihilating argument. If you argue that then you would never change governments, would you?

ANDREW ROBB: But people need to look long and hard at, you know, at what the circumstances, the economic circumstances are that are there.

Labor is promising to scrap our industrial relation laws which will only remove the checks and balances on inflation and risk an interest rate break-out.

Now, when, the thing is, when you look behind Labor's slogans, when you peek behind Labor's, there is nothing there. Nothing but what they've copied from us.

The rest of it, they have not done the policy work, they have not made a case for taking over government. And people do face a choice in an election.

Governments do change, but, but when they change the Opposition should have made a case. They should have established a set of policies, an alternative program and shown that they've got the ability to carry that through…

...

CHRIS UHLMANN: But again, you can't argue that they have copied you, and that things will be radically different under them, can you?

ANDREW ROBB: No, they have, they have just parroted our policy programs…

CHRIS UHLMANN: So if it's the same, then why should people worry?

ANDREW ROBB: But they do not understand how to structure those policies. They have never done the work which has put those policies together, haven't got the experience to deal with and manage the economy, to find that mix of policy responses in difficult international economic times.

We are confronting, we are confronting some serious issues across the United States. We are confronting a booming economy. We've got a drought of major consequence. Now all of these things, all of these things, make if extraordinarily difficult to maintain strong growth.

CHRIS UHLMANN: And all are beyond your control.

ANDREW ROBB: This could all be put in jeopardy, Chris, by a Labor government which is union-dominated, which is inexperienced, which is, with a prime minister that would have to be beholden to a union movement that's put $30-million on the table to buy government in this country.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Andrew Robb, thank you.

I do like Chris Uhlmann.

Now apart from a fairly ordinary performance by a second-rate Government minister, complete with foot-tangling and slogan-pushing, this got me thinking.

Chris Uhlmann was quite rightly calling Robb on the ludicrous Government line that you can't trust inexperience and hence the Government should, in effect, never change. Andrew Robb's weak response is predictable, but utterly nonsensical: "But they do not understand how to structure those policies. They have never done the work which has put those policies together, haven't got the experience to deal with and manage the economy, to find that mix of policy responses in difficult international economic times."

Ignoring the inconsistencies, why is it that on these matters, no one ever points out that the economy is actually run by bureaucrats? Does anyone for a moment believe that Peter Costello is personally responsible for the running of our economy and that he receives no assistance at all from the vast and complex network of public servants whose professional existence keeps this country operating?

Do you think that to be a Treasurer you really need to have any idea about fiscal policy, or do you, like me, suspect that Kyle Sandilands would probably do as good a job as long as he took the advice of those paid to actually know what they're doing?

Under the Howard Government, the Public Service has been turned into a kind of blame absorption device. The cavalcade of I-wasn't-tolds that tumble from the lips of Ministers when things start to go dodgy is a testament to this. Yet while they're perfectly willing to crucify a public servant when things go bad, never is a mention passed their way when things are going well.

Have you ever heard ANYONE say that the good management of a particular Government Department (let alone the economy) is thanks to the people who actually work there? No, it's always the Minister and only the Minister. There's a reason bureaucrats are often called faceless.

And yet what happens if the Labor Party wins the upcoming election?

Peter Costello, Dolly Downer, Kevin Andrews, John Howard (all our favourites!) will empty their desks, tuck their butchers paper under their arms, clutch their whiteboard markers and shuffle out to less dignified offices down the way and Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan, Peter Garrett, Linsday Tanner and Kevin Rudd will move in. The wallpaper will get changed, the unseen bits behind the filing cabinets dusted for the first time in eleven years, new pictures, new plants, maybe a new set of cubicles for the apparatchiks. A wave of change.

And in the meantime, thousands of Australian public servants, the same ones as before, will continue to show up every day, doing their thing, organising their bit of the country, actually ensuring it doesn't all fall apart and why? Because that's what they do. It's not Joe Hockey who runs Industrial Relations in this country, it's his Department - he's just the tip of an enormous iceberg, the puppet who stands up and says what he's told by people who know better.

Whether the policy is heinously racist, or staggeringly compassionate, it's the same people who write it. Sure they get their instructions from someone different and that's where that difference comes from, but it's still the same Department, the same staff that has always been working at the Department of Immigration.

I think you see my point (I've certainly laboured it enough).

Which brings me back to Chris Uhlmann and Andrew Robb.

The Government line seems to go thus:

a./ the Labor Party has copied our policy;
b./ this is bad because they didn't write it and consequently don't understand it;
c./ unless you understand it, you'll fuck everything up.

Even if this WAS the case, it's completely irrelevant because the people who wrote that policy in the first place, the people who actually deal with it's minutiae every single day, the ones who enact it's suggestions, who see it's programs through, will be exactly the same under a Rudd Labor Government. They are the same people! If the policy is the same, why would they suddenly forget how it works?

It's a stupid argument and I think the Government knows it.

Today's interest rate rise has boxed Howard and Co into a very awkward position and I expect we'll see a lot more of this ludicrous logic over the next few days.

I for one intend to just sit back and enjoy it and in the meantime, raise a glass to those wonderful Public Servants who actually do all the work.

Can we just get it over with

From today's Crikey.



Click to embiggen.

FRIV returns? Or just lazy blogging?

Here you go, a Friday present.

EVERYONE loves a cat video!!






Off to see the Sydney-siders for the weekend. Won't THAT be fun.