Continuing on from the charts the other day where we looked at the family tax benefit and aged pension composition of electorates, it’s probably worthwhile to split them up into their respective party status.The charts below are identical in terms of their scale to make it easier to compare.
Notice the Liberal seat of La Trobe sitting way out yonder all by it’s lonesome on the Family Tax Benefit axis?
That seat probably shouldn’t be held by the Libs.
UPDATE:
We’ll add the FTB Part A vs ALP two party preferred swing at the last election as well, again with identical scaling and by party status, as well as throwing in a regression line for Labor and Liberal seats (not enough Nats seats to bother with – which is something one hears a fair bit these days 
)
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More great graphs.
I was thinking a bit more about this compensation issue over the weekend, and wanted to get your thoughts.
I read the GM article you linked to on the other post, about reform and compensation. In it, he makes the point that the Hawke-Keating governments made little attempt to compensate households and firms for the reforms they undertook.
In response to that, I guess I would make a few points.
First, the nature of the reforms were different. Reducing tariffs, for example, was stricly welfare enhancing. Their was no need to offer tax cuts because a tariff reduction IS a tax cut for most housholds. Tariff reductions hurt two groups – car manufacturers and allied industries (although that is only for those firms that are not able to raise their productivity enough to compete in the less subsidided environment) and workers that lose their jobs as a result of companies exposed to greater competition downsizing or going out of business altogether. Now, the first group definitely were compensated in the form of ongoing subsidies to help with structural adjustment. But the second group almost certainly weren’t compensated enough – and I think one could argue that the failure to do more to help those displaced by structural reform was one of the reasons why the Hawke-Keating governments eventually became unpopular.
In the case of the ETS, the reform actually is imposing a new tax to correct an externality. The aim was NEVER to raise the overall tax burden in Australia. The problem with what Labor has done with this policy is to offer excessive compensation, in the sense that they will probably spend more to compensate than the scheme will actually generate in revenue.
In my view, the introduction of the ETS was an opportunity to undertake broader tax reform. Indeed, an ETS can be thought of as tax reform – an opportunity to shift the burden of taxation away from distorting taxes on capital and income and toward economic activities with social cost. It hasn’t been sold in that way.
All that said though, the government has recognised that building a political coalition around reform is difficult. To ensure broad support for their policy, they have made sure that important political constituencies have the income to maintain their purchasing power, but still face a new set of relative prices that give an incentive to change behaviour.
We can argue about the means the government chose to deliver this outcome, but if governments had thought more about the political economy of reform, perhaps we wouldn’t still have an automotive sector in Australia sucking up resources that could more usefully employed elsewhere?
In the ALP FTB A/Pension graph, there is a cluster of seats where the Greens have been getting closer to second part in TPP. These seats are mostly in the inner city new wealth zones. The demographics are quite similar to those in the bottom left of the Liberal seat graph. The only real difference I can see is that the Liberal seats in this cluster are Liberal because of a traditional Liberal vote. Where there is no traditional of voting Liberal, the natural conservative vote is slipping to the Greens. Perhaps we are starting to see the rise of the Greens as the true conservative party of Australian politics, taking the noblesse oblige that has traditionally belonged to the Liberal side.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige
While I can’t agree with the bizarre suggestion that the Greens are the new conservatives, I too noticed that cluster of seats on the ALP graph that could be marked “vulnerable to the Greens in the next 20 years”. In seats like Fraser, when the current sitting member retires a significant chunk of their personal vote is likely to shift to the Greens.
It’s becoming more apparent that the real merger talks should be between the ALP and the Liberals… they are virtually identical these days anyway.
LO,
Most of the Hawke/Keating/Walsh reforms also happened with the Accord running in parallel, so in some respect the compensation came along not at the household level directly, but via greater social expenditure to make up for the effective real wage freeze to get rid of the wage overhang. Because so much was going on in the 80’s all at once, I find it difficult to separate the individual programs and wonder whether we can or should if they were at least partially designed at the time with a policy eye on the other reforms already operating or about to be implemented?
I too would have liked to see the ETS released in conjunction with the Henry Review – from a broader economic perspective the two programs should be inseparable and their results working hand in glove rather than the foot in mouth we’ll probably end up with!
I’ve never figured out the Oz car industry – on the one hand we have great design teams such as that which worked on the Zeta platform at Holden, but then we also have the Mitsubishi dramaverse. In an ideal world the industry would adapt to become more like the Holden design teams filling a global niche (and the government would force them by withdrawing the unproductive gravy train) – but if the Howard government couldnt politically carry such a reform when it was openly hostile to unions, then the ALP probably never will.