"Abyss" Piece Is Another Shanashambles

 

There is something badly wrong with the op ed sector of the Australian media.  Many outlets continue to pay for articles that are factually shoddy and that reinforce the prejudices of partisan readers rather than helping their readers to actually understand politics.  It's perhaps a vicious cycle in which some outlets think there is no market for anything better than an echo chamber, and by offering a bad product ensure they'll never find out otherwise.

The latest hopeless offering by Dennis Shanahan (screenshot above) is an example.  To be clear, nobody should deny that the Albanese Government has been shedding public support rapidly in recent months. Anyone in Labor's support base who is not at least a little bit concerned about this is a fool. 

Honeymoon polling has worn off after a very good run, and the government is struggling with a deeply negative electorate annoyed and stressed by cost of living rises.  The Prime Minister wasted political capital by putting a poorly designed Voice to Parliament proposal to voters at a time most likely to cause it to lose by heaps, and the ministry has been caught off-guard by an adverse High Court ruling on indefinite detention and predictably owned by the Coalition on the issue.  

The most recent Newspoll saw the government fall out of the 2PP lead (albeit to 50-50) for the first time in this term.  In aggregated polling Labor has lost over 4% 2PP since early July (see graph below), a drop that closely followed a big rise in voter pessimism in Essential's and Morgan's mood trackers in June.  We're starting to see the odd poll with the Coalition just ahead on 2PP; it's possible we will see more.

The Prime Minister's own approval ratings are heading south, some polls are finding he's now more unpopular than Peter Dutton is, and nobody knows yet where the bottom is for all of this.  But for the moment, Labor's polling isn't bad by historic standards, it is just mediocre.

This doesn't stop Shanahan declaring that this is a "first-term abyss" and going on to claim it is an example of how "Bad first terms are not unusual for governments – indeed, there are more bad starts to first terms than good ones – " Huh?  The Government was consistently 53-47 or more (often a lot more) ahead in aggregated polling and in Newspoll for its first seventeen months straight and yet it had a bad start to its first term?  How does that work?  How can Shanahan say there are "more bad starts to first terms than good ones" when virtually every federal government elected from opposition has in fact received a sustained large polling lead to begin with, the only real exceptions being Abbott and Whitlam (who were both out of honeymoon phase within their first six months)?

The only first-term-in-government PM whose polling so far ever clearly qualified for "abyss" standards was Abbott.  Eight months after he was elected, the Coalition crashed to a string of 45-46% 2PPs following the 2014 stinker Budget (the second worst received in Newspoll history after 1993).  Worse was to come in February 2015 when, following the announcement that Prince Philip would be knighted and the LNP's shock loss in the Queensland election, Abbott's government plunged into the deep dark chasm that was 43% 2PP. Only two other first term governments have ever been seriously behind at all - Whitlam's and Howard's both at times briefly got down around 46 2PP.   It's debatable if those were ever abysses, but 50-50 is most certainly not, and nor is being 1.6% down on a previous election primary vote in mid-term.  

Majority Mismeasures

Shanahan goes on to construct a narrative of John Howard's 1998 win and the GST that includes this statistical howler.  "It seemed like madness and a political death wish, but Howard argued a GST was necessary and he had a majority in the House of Representatives of 45 seats. Albanese has a majority of two."  Here Shanahan cannot even maintain the same incorrect method of counting a majority from one sentence to the next.  

Howard had a "majority" of 45 seats if one subtracts the 49 won by Labor from the 94 won by the Coalition.  By the same standard Albanese's "majority" is not two seats, but rather was 19 seats (77-58) after the election and is 23 now (78-55).  This is not just a pedantic objection; the point is that Albanese's government is not teetering on the edge of defeat because of the size of the crossbench.  It might well lose its majority but even that would not necessarily mean a repeat of the Gillard years when it needed the Greens' vote in the House of Representatives.

Or, if one applies Shanahan's two-seat "majority" to 1996, Howard's comparable "majority" might have been 19 seats or 20 seats (depending on whether the two seats is meant to be the maximum number that could change while still having a majority, or the minimum number that if changed would cause loss of floor majority.)  Or perhaps Shanahan has forgotten about Aston.  Who knows?  He certainly can't remember when the election before last was: "and last year Scott Morrison, who won in 2020 [sic], lost the election."

(To be clear the best definition of majority is government seats minus all others, which was 40 seats for Howard, and was three for Albanese after the election and five after winning Aston.  All other definitions create problems for the reasons discussed here.  But majority is not a useful comparative metric because there is a much bigger crossbench now).  

Rewriting Rudd

We are also told that "Rudd’s difficulties also began 18 months into his first term after he failed to deliver on his climate change promises and illegal boat arrivals undermined public faith in Labor."  But this is not accurate.  There was a minor dip in Labor polling during mid-2009 (see aggregated chart here) but Labor remained way ahead and Rudd's net satisfaction got no lower than +23.  The dip was affected by the Ozcar affair, which spectacularly blew up in the Coalition's face in late June 2009, followed by another surge in Labor support.  Boats and climate may have had something to do with this minor dip but it was not even remotely comparable to the current government's loss of support.  

The real climate crunch for the Rudd government and its leader came in the late April/early May 2010 Newspoll, when the announcement that the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme would be deferred resulted instantly in a 5 point loss in 2PP, a 20 point loss in Rudd's netsat and a 9 point loss in Rudd's lead as Better Prime Minister.  And rightly so: Kevin Rudd had told Australia that climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our generation, but he lacked the courage to take it to a double dissolution.  Suddenly he was just another politician.  

Shanahan has got this timing wrong before, writing in October this year that "[Rudd's] campaign went badly, he didn’t get it through parliament and in April 2009 [sic] backed away."  

... and Howard hagiographies ...

Shanahan also paints Howard's 1998 victory as being different from the fate of the string of five once-elected PMs since because Howard's decision to campaign for a GST supposedly in present tense "ensures that the public and political debate is about nothing else, and so retrieves the agenda and momentum for the government of the day."  

But this is in fact the reverse of what occurred!  Yes, John Howard ran into polling troubles at about the same point we're at now, losing the 2PP lead sharply in October 1997 (although Newspoll didn't routinely publish 2PPs in those days).  But by April 1998 he had recovered.  In May 1998 it became clear that Howard was seriously canvassing taking a GST to an election, and the response was not a boost or new momentum but a relapse.  Indeed Howard ended up with a lower 2PP (the Coalition lost the 2PP 49-51) than his government had been running at before it canvassed adopting the GST.  

Howard didn't adopt the GST because he was ailing in the polls and thought he needed to dictate the terms of debate to recover.  Rather he did so because his government was likely to win the election anyway (given its marginal seat advantage from wiping out so many Labor MPs in 1996, for starters) and it was a good time to spend some capital and set his party up for future terms.  

Dennis Shanahan has been writing this nonsense and getting away with it for even longer than I've been covering polling.  The Australian hired Peter Brent for online blogging for a while, which brought understanding and perspective to its coverage of electoral matters, but let him go. Yet Shanahan shambles on in a kind of inverse Darwinian evolution where the least adapted animal survives.  The Australian demeans itself, insults its readers, damages its brand and does a disservice to its many quality news journalists and the outstanding poll it commissions by continuing to print innumerate gibberish about polls and electoral history.  It is way past time for a spill of its commentary positions.