oh DER...of course it is....FMD.....

but i reckon Matt and Afro are in there.....

IT was a 7.52% swing away from the Greens and Labor in the popular vote to which people are referring.

You got me. I'm actually Chas Licciardello.

coming from THE Strawman i take your comments as a compliment....;) :cool:

you always default to personal attack, anyone who dares to challenge your position....
and attacking me because i run a business,or i have livestock ETC ETC....

if that's the guy who was stoned on election day .....no worries...

A non vote for Labor is as good as a vote for Liberal because the margin between Liberal and Labor is widened. If five voters who typically vote Labor give their vote to the green or palmer party the Liberals stretch their lead by 5 points, so it's as good as a vote for the Liberals.

I urge you to rethink that point.

2 party preferred mate. That's where the business is. Forget the primary vote.

This isn't the work of Liberal if the other parties seem more appealing than they do though. It says it all about the state of politics in this country that "I don't care, just don't vote for *THAT GUY*" is perceived as good political strategy in this country.

After all, Liberal can't extend their lead by 5 points if they don't have people voting for them.

But it indicates voters aren't preferencing Labor either.

Well they can extend their lead without attracting any new voters, so long as the other party loses votes, either way it's a net gain in votes. You might not like the strategy but a good political strategy is one that gets you into office.

No, it's NOT a good political strategy. It's the kind of political strategy that leads to negative, boring and cynical campaigns that bore voters, uninspire politicians and generally stall the progress of the country. Not to mention sees the highest number of informal votes since the 1984 election.

If Labor became so on the Jose that people just wanted to kick them out they only have themselves to blame.

What you're saying isn't quite right...

If Labor loses its votes to, for example, the Greens... then they could lose a massive, massive number of votes (perhaps up to 49% their original vote) and still win a seat IF the majority of Greens preferences flow back to Labor.

This is why Rudd's PNG solution worked... people who hated it would vote Greens, and then their preference would flow back to Labor resulting in no total loss. On the other hand they would get a 'net gain' from swinging voters.



This loss of primary votes doesn't directly hurt a party unless either the opposition picks them up, or a third candidate gets enough to finish ahead of them thus removing the original party from the 2-party-preferred count. Labor rarely suffer on this matter (except for example Melbourne and Denison where Brandt and Wilkie respectively got enough votes to get ahead of the ALP and then win on ALP preferences - if ALP hadn't lost so many primary votes they might've won a seat on Green/Wilkie preferences).



The story of the election is that the seats that Gillard held in 2010 due to strong support in Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia were finally lost in 2013. Apart from that, the swing towards the LNP was quite small and not nearly enough to call it a massive victory for Abbott.

The Senate results show a wider trend away from the 2 major parties plus the Greens and towards 'new voices' whether it's micro-parties, Palmer, Family First or Xenophon.

Nah mate, a good strategy is the one that gets you into office. PM's don't have to be inspiring and exciting, this isn't the entertainment business, they just have to govern competently. The progress of a country is borne in its citizens and business leaders not its bureaucrats.

There was a substantial number that did. The Primary vote went down quite a bit but they got most of it back on preferences.

They didn't get all of it back nor did they gain, that's why they lost.

Well the Liberals actually gained in their primary vote so the trend away is actually more oriented towards the greens and Labor and the whole left side of politics.

You're right it wasn't a massive victory in terms of upswing for the liberals but it was a massive reaction against Labor which was at least in part if not wholly masterminded by the Liberals.

So why do we even need them if they're not a leader? If they don't lead the country and develop and inspire ideas then what are they there for? Other than soaking up tax payer dollars and expelling hot air.

Your understanding of the political landscape is laughable. Little wonder political discourse in this country is doomed when you come out with gems like "a non-vote for Labor is a vote for Liberal" and firmly believe that the Liberal party is responsible for the Labor party shooting themselves in the foot.

or the informal votes are as high as they are as Labor voters can't bring themselves to vote for any other party other than labor????? at any cost.....;)

That doesn't even make any sense.

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS SOOOOOOOOO MUCH.

People don't really care what they voted for, they just voted for the 'other guy'.

This country has been stalled in terms of policies and progress for a while and under a Liberal govt we just going to halt.

Liberals did pick up their primary but the argument that it was smart of them to target loss of votes of the ALP has a lot of potential for short-term-gain for long-term-pain (and possibly even short-term-pain).


The loss of ALP votes to groups other than the LNP is potentially going to turn Australia away from the current political duopoly... Greens got smashed but still get more than 1 in 20 primary votes for the HoR. Palmer gets about the same and independents/minors get about the same as well.

In total about 20% of votes went away from LNP+ALP... with Katter, Palmer, Wilkie, McGowan and Bandt in with good chances in their relative seats. And all this in spite of the predicted rebellion against independents due to the hung parliament "debarcle" in 2010.


Throw in what's happened in the Senate (massive votes for Xenophon, Palmer, Family First plus minor parties) and there's a strong case to say that the negative politics employed by Labor and Liberal have been rejected by Australia... and now Abbott faces a future where he doesn't get to just fight Labor but has to fight to actually justify the LNP position (a good thing in my opinion and why I love seeing as many minor parties as possible doing well).

Where it is going to manifest itself immediately is in the Senate... Abbott's anti-ALP strategy may have won him government, but it may also be directly responsible for the number of minor party candidates in the Senate. And if Abbott struggles to deal with them it'll be a problem of his own making.

Palmer is still contesting with Libs for a seat in Tasmania... and Family First are a chance for a second as well in NSW I think.


Because it's largely based on exhaustive preference allocations, the results can change quite a lot even as a small number of extra votes are added to the count.

Xenophon really looks to me like the hero of this election... standing up to the Greens and endorsing Labor+Liberal on principle ahead of their extreme policies AND managing to get 25% of the South Oz vote doing it (Libs and Labor both getting roughly the same result).

Makes me wish I was from Adelaide.

The Liberals brief is pretty much to be anti-Labor. Tony Abbott has taken this philosophy to the extreme and will be interesting to see if he and the party can adjust to a different political climate.

sorry edited to make sense.....have to much happening in the office at the moment

Edited by batfink: 11/9/2013 04:21:44 PM

Edited by batfink: 11/9/2013 04:22:21 PM

Well leaders don't have to be a rock star to lead effectively. All leaders of political parties have some element of charisma and ability to inspire their members, but more important than that is a sound policy platform and the talent for putting ideas it into practice and not just talking about them. That was one of the problems with Rudd, he had some grandiose ideas and talked big but delivered very little so people tired of him very quickly. He was cool for a bit but once the novelty wore off the party was over. Gillard was as boring and uninspiring as they come but gave us the NDIS and Gonski reforms, she was batshit but actually but at least she did some work rather than just take selfies.

You're also putting words in my mouth , clearly you are not being intellectually honest with yourself. You seem to be very bitter the Liberals won, you would have to be a strange person to think the Liberals didn't affect the election outcome , that they just fell into power by sheer fortune. You present as a typical leftie in contempt of the facts.

Rock stars do drugs, make music and fuck about. They aren't leaders. Your metaphor is as usual, deeply flawed. :roll:

You're voting for a person to lead the nation, to encourage ideas, to bring people together and have a grand vision for the country. This "vote for me because I'm not the other guy" politics abandons ALL of that and it's pathetic.

A much more succinct way of saying what I was trying to get across :d


I'm not going to go as far as to say I think Abbott struggle, but he certainly has the potential to when it comes to the likely new Senate... and that's a bed he made for himself.




Quote of the election actually came on Monday QandA with George Brandis in response to a question about economic reforms now that the Libs are in power...

(along the lines of) "This is going to be a government with no secrets. This is a government with no agenda."

Of course he went on to correct that there was no HIDDEN agenda, but I got a good laugh out of it! Summed up the zero-sum-game the Libs played against the ALP.

I think the best one was "How do you explain the likes of Palmer United being so successful?"
"Queensland."

I know I agree :)

On Xenophon, despite being from a conservative background he's done a very good job of staying in the centre and working with parties on policy. One of my guilty pleasures is to listen to talk back radio and laugh/shake my head at the old conservatives complaining about everything.

This week there have been quite few callers complaining about Xenophon not supporting the Liberals direct action policy and how they were "duped" into voting for him. Puts a smile on my face :lol:

Abbott is a new man, but the left can't see it

September 12, 2013

Despite Labor's case against him, the new PM is more likely to be populist and pragmatic than right-wing and reactionary.

The opposites of rash, aggressive, impulsive, and frenetic are probably things like calm, consultative, methodical and steady. Unsurprisingly, these latter words are the ones Tony Abbott wants you to attach to his new government. Abbott is building a public relations case for his administration against the negative backdrop of the ''chaos'' he replaced.

Clearly, the Rudd and Gillard incarnations of Labor were notable not just for their poisonous divisions but for their desperate attempts to rev up the news cycle. In their adolescent plea for friendship, they were prepared to backflip on just about anything. Be just about anything.

No surprises then that the idyll of an ''adult government'' was mentioned a few hundred times in the campaign - straight from the focus groups that one.

But Abbott's insistence on taking it slow and steady has as much to do with presenting an antidote to his own reputation as it does Labor's.

For Abbott to be successful, he needs to turn around a persistent view of him as a jaw-jutting political bovver boy - a divisive, ideological green beret, gifted at destroying things but with no aptitude for nation-building, for governing. Abbott in week one of his 2013 government is actually running against himself - or at least that version of himself. The slowness of his start is almost jarring. Not one post-election press conference and no cabinet named or sworn in. So much for all the emergencies on the borders, in the budget, in the economy. He even wants politics off the front pages in favour of sport.

Abbott had actually been standing on the brake pedal before he won, such was his momentum towards office. The signs were there if you looked. Softening the rhetoric, toning down the outrage, winding back the expectations. Witness his surplus promise, which does not even match Labor's four-year path. It paid dividends. Abbott's singular aim once the campaign was on was to reassure voters they could switch - that there was a safe alternative.

The story of Abbott's stunning success is inseparable from his political maturation. Yet the case against him has been set in aspic. The political left's fascination at his surprising one-vote victory over Malcolm Turnbull in 2009, the oft-cited proof of his shaky internal mandate and his capacity to divide his own MPs.

Yet as George Brandis points out, Abbott's internal support is unrivalled. It is not that he won by a single vote that's important, it is that he turned that tiny edge into genuine authority, unifying his team to a greater degree than thought possible and forming a spearhead aimed right at Labor's belly.

Those clinging to the view that the country's new prime minister is some kind of one-dimensional throwback to the 1950s simply haven't been paying attention.

Labor's case against Abbott suffered from this very misconception, which goes a long way to explaining why it has serially underestimated him.

It may be one of the larger ironies of Australian politics that on the socially divisive issue of marriage equality, for example, it is the Catholic conservative Abbott, rather than the atheist progressive Julia Gillard, who eventually delivers, by allowing an unfettered conscience vote among his MPs and, perhaps even, by dropping his previous objections.

The left's answer to the Abbott challenge so far has been to assume deceit. To posit that Abbott remains every bit the right-wing ideologue but has hidden his real desire to fully deregulate the workplace, wind back advances for women, re-oppress Aborigines and hand over the environment to big oil and big coal.

The idea that the Abbott offered in 2013 was not the ''real Tony'' was not merely soft thinking, it informed various overreaches of the Labor case - from the working assumption that, in the end, Abbott was unelectable to the embarrassing claim in the penultimate week of the campaign that Abbott had enacted a $10 billion fraud on voters.

A tweet during the ABC's Q&A program on Monday summed up the confusion on the political left as people try to reconcile long-held views of Abbott as a hardliner with the reality they see before them.

Abbott, it was asserted, was economically dry and socially wet.

Business worries that the reverse is true, pointing to his taxpayer-funded direct action plan to replace Labor's market-based emissions trading scheme and his taxpayer-funded, gold-plated paid parental leave scheme.

Neither could be described as ''dry''. Rather, they are entirely political, showing Abbott's propensity to shape-shift and go beyond his programming to hold the centre.

The truth is, Abbott in government is likely to be populist, political and pragmatic, rather than right-wing, reactionary and regressive.

And the longer the left takes to understand this, the longer it will take it to come to terms with its own failings.

Mark Kenny is The Age's chief political correspondent.



Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/abbott-is-a-new-man-but-the-left-cant-see-it-20130911-2tkl3.html#ixzz2eaLJkR15