The patterns of the vote estimates for the Greens since the 2004 election are rather interesting, showing a considerable upswing late in 2007 that carried through the election into 2008 to settle own at what looks like a new base level.
If we use the Newspoll quarterly aggregations to track the Greens vote since the 04 election (we unfortunately can’t go back any further since that is as far back as the records go with Newspoll), the pattern stands out:
The Greens vote had been sitting up around the 6-7 point mark until Rudd became leader, where a large chunk of Labor voters that had been parking their vote with the Greens raced back to their old voting home. That points to a danger for the Greens – the historical soft nature of their support.
Yet, in the 2 months leading up to the last election, a lot of those voters appeared to come back to the Greens in a pretty significant upswing, where by election day, they ended up outperforming their lead-in poll estimates.
What’s interesting here is the way that swing continued on into the Rudd administration and has since stabilised around the 10 point mark.
If we break these vote estimates down further – by State, age and gender/geography – a few things pop up:
Firstly, while Qld has been the relatively historical poor State performer for the Greens, since the 2007 election Qld has actually provided the Greens with the largest state swing towards them of 3.4%. NSW on the other hand – the historically middling Green performing State – has been the only cohort where a swing away from the Greens has occurred over the last 18 odd months. Although, the vote in NSW has retreated by a miniscule 0.2%, so saying that the vote has stood still would be a more accurate assessment.
While the Greens vote has improved across all demographics except NSW since the last election, the big move has been among the 18-34’s, where that age group has moved towards the Greens by 6 points.
The problem here for the Greens is that this is the same cohort that proved so fickle in early 2007 and moved away from them and back to Labor at a greater rate than any other demographic – again, a 6 point move away from the Greens when they bottomed out with this demographic in October 2007.
So we have the Greens new stabilised vote level running at it’s highest ever at 10 points – although it’s held up by a demographic that has proved enormously volatile over the previous two and a half years or so, and where that demographic tends to move between Labor and the Greens.
So the big question here is whether this new Greens vote level is a sustainable base leading into the next election, or should we expect some of these demographics to run back to Labor?
The alternative – that the Greens get another upswing leading into the next election – is always possible, but the question that would need to be answered is just where those additional votes would come from?
57 Comments
Pages: « 1 [2] Show All
Oz
No, and I didn’t say they were. I asked where the young people who SHOULD (demographically speaking) be voting Liberal had parked their votes. I pointed to the well known truism (don’t know if it IS true) that younger voters tend to vote along family lines. I also implied that, with a growing privately school educated cohort, one would expect a growth in the young Liberal vote.
I admit I shifted the argument a bit – from ‘prior Liberal voters who now vote Green’ to ‘putative Liberal voters who vote Green’. And yes, there are lots of good working class youth who vote Green (and Liberal).
And I’ll admit I’m being a bit playful and exploratory, because that’s how you tease out ideas.
But on the other question – whether Hamerite Liberals are more likely to vote Green than Labor – yes, they are. I speak to lots of these kinds of Liberals. When they became frustrated with Howard, they never ever suggested voting Labor (and would never) but they toyed with Green. I would assume that they would switch back to the Liberals if the Libs became more Hamerite (I’m assured that I should talk of ‘Hamer Libs’ and not “Menzies Libs’ in this context).
So my argument (and it is just playing, so play with me) is that, if there is a movement away from the Liberals to Greens by young, private school educated, leafy suburbs types and by ’soft’ Liberals (the type who support Georgiou) than a reinvigorated Liberal (not necessarily conservative) party might lure them back.
Zoomster,
It is ‘true’ that most people vote the way their families do (I wrote an essay on it at Yewni years ago). It seems to be a tribal thing, at least until some major event happens to destabilise this automatic allegiance.
I’d agree with you that those Coalition-babies might be ripe for the Greens, at the point when they start to actually think about policy issues, rather than just doing knee-jerk voting. On an anecdotal level, I have spoken to quite a few such young voters, both those still voting Liberal, but firmly in the Greens demographic, and those who have made the switch.
I still don’t think it is a huge effect, though, simply because IMO most voters do not really ever consider changing their vote (is this my political fatalism speaking?)
I know a few people who grew up in Liberal voting families in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria, whose parents painted a “teh unions are scary” picture and the kids voted Liberal in their first election. after which started a fairly quick move to the left and now vote Green.
Tad – Your suggestion that Rudd et al. are implementing the CPRS simply because of appearances misunderstands a) how policy is developed and b) the international situation.
Second, it is simply false to state that there is “no logic” in an emissions trading scheme. While I’ll accept that there is little currently available evidence of emissions trading schemes, the early EU experience is certainly not as flawed as many commentators point out.
The CPRS legislation is not perfect, but the alternative (a grab bag of regulation and cash) is far worse. I’d love to see some ‘rigorous analysis’ which shows how you plan to get emissions down to anywhere near 15-25% (as per the CPRS) below 2000 AND get it through Parliament.
As an additional aside, the 5% target is never going to happen. There will be an international agreement in Copenhagen its just a matter of how strong. So the CPRS should be seen with a minimum (albeit still too low) target of 15%.
Michael, the problem with even “pure” cap & trade is that it starts from the idea that the market can be used to solve this problem. You are right to suggest that in terms of mainstream politics the CPRS is a politically very saleable option. But I would contend it cannot make more than small inroads into the problem. Here are 3 reasons I think so:
(1) Empirically, the experience of carbon trading has been awful. The European ETS, for example, failed chiefly because it gave so much leeway to the carbon-producing industries that the carbon price collapsed very quickly, rendering any caps meaningless. It is now politically very difficult to jack up that price. I think the Australian equivalent of this is the raft of concessions and givebacks Rudd is giving the polluters. Furthermore, after the subprime fiasco do we really want to create a new complex derivatives market to guide our society to a *cough* bright future?
(2) There are many loopholes in the current CPRS–including such things as international leakage of pollution rights and lack of reward for mitigation efforts–that mean that any target is unlikely to have much force. And are the penalties so severe that polluters will change their ways if they break the rules? Indeed, how severe would they have to be to actually cut into profitability enough to cause behaviour change?
(3) Most important, the science indicates we need relatively rapid and deep emissions cuts or risk a “butterfly effect” in terms of melting arctic ice, etc. But the world economy is based almost entirely on carbon emitting energy sources and that means massive structural change in how energy is produced and used. Market penalties for emitting carbon may mitigate some of it, but what can drive investment in renewable energy sources that are (currently) considerably more expensive than traditional carbon-based sources? Only massive state investment, perhaps to the detriment of the polluters’ economic interests, can be reasonably expected to solve this problem in the timeframe we have. Not only things like building of solar-thermal power plants while decommissioning coal powered energy, but building mass, heavily-subsidised new public transport while markedly limiting car use (and banning it in many urban areas).
Surely the experience of neoliberalism’s recent and very spectacular failure should alert us to putting such heavy faith in markets. It is a sign of how deeply neoliberal ideology has penetrated that even committed environmentalists and parties like the Greens can come to accept the market logic embodied in cap & trade. It would be a tragedy if the global financial crisis led to only one type of government intervention being legitimised–that used to bail out bankers.
The very “reasonable” and “pragmatic” views of those who support market mechanisms seem much more like dangerous utopian thinking to me when the scale of the problem is seriously considered.
PS A relatively conservative Keynesian view of what is needed is provided by Nordhaus & Shellenberger. Their work can be read at http://www.thebreakthrough.org/blog/PDF/EmergingClimateConsensus.pdf or for a brief summary http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8966
Some North QLD anecdotal stuff,..handing out Green HTV’s at the Cairns campus of JCU in 2007 a young female uni student said to me in a serious and polite way, “no thanks, my Dad’ll tell me how to vote”. I was so shocked I didn’t even try to engage her in conversation. make of that as you will, but I do believe parents influence the youth vote.
On the other hand while hammering in Green signs early in the morning for the last State election in our Southern “working family” Suburbs every morning I was getting friendly beeps and “good onya”’s from men in utes setting off to work between 5-6am ( the supportive yells averaged between 2-6 every morning in the last week of the campaign)
Cheers, Steve
Tad – You might want to be careful citing Shellenberger and Nordhaus to back up anti-ETS arguments. I’m going to back Joe Romm over those guys any day.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/05/22/waxman-markey-offsets-breakthrough-institute-shellenberger-nordhaus-media/
You also overstate the possible impact of mass transit on transforming car use in Australia from both a cost, technical and social perspective. PT is certainly part of the solution, but not to the extent that you seem to be suggesting with a notion of “banning cars” from urban areas.
Hi Michael, thanks for continuing the debate, although I’m not sure if Possum’s site is the ideal place to do it!
Joe Romm strikes me as a nice, well-meaning, middle-of-the-road believer in the market whose views exhibit the kind of “utopian pragmatism” I referred to in my previous post. I chose Nordhaus & Shellenberger because they were conservatives (obviously my own views are well to the left of theirs), but at least ones who recognise how pitiful the effects of market approaches are in comparison with the scale of the problem. I certainly don’t agree with everything they say.
The problem with Romm and people like him is that they just have faith in cap & trade simply because they believe markets work for this kind of thing. But markets don’t and won’t.
A good analogy is to imagine leaving the US’ WWII effort to the market–imagine a 1941 cap & trade system on car and mainstream industrial production in order to coax US big business to militarise! Luckily we have a bit more time to make the massive economic changes we need, but not really a huge amount more.
On mass transit… banning car use in some areas may be needed once it is in place in order to make sure we cut car use. But banning cars before it is in place would obviously be a disaster.
Pages: « 1 [2] Show All