I’ve been a bit hesitant to write anything over the fiasco of this week – when Kevin Andrews calls for a spill to run for the leadership and over 40% of the party room supports him, the time for any sort of rational analysis has long since bolted.
The other problem here is that good info is hard to identify because most of the political sources that are speaking are doing so to bolster their own side of the split – usually contradicting other leaking politicians.
Consider the info being spruiked so far: Abbott has the numbers, no Hockey has the numbers, no Turnbull has the numbers, no Hockey has the numbers if Abbot stands aside and gets the Treasury, no there’s not a majority willing to call for a spill because a critical number of people don’t trust who would actually end up running in any head to head contest etc etc.
What we do know however is that Turnbull is right when he says that a Coalition diving head first down the climate denialist shute would get their arses kicked six ways to Sunday in any election. The Newspoll analysis in The Oz today says as much and is completely consistent with what we’ve seen come out of Morgan and Essential Report over the last 6 months or so.
What is an interesting piece of food for thought is that the seats likely to be lost by the Coalition in any swing against them are more likely to be held by broad moderates than broad conservatives. If we nominally label each Coalition member as either moderate or conservative and look at what happens to the ratio of conservatives to moderates in the Coalition party room as the swing against the Opposition increases, this is what we get:
As the number of seats the Coalition would lose at an election increases (based on the standard pendulum), the proportion of the remaining party room considered conservative increases.
It’s mostly moderates that hold fair dinkum contestable swing seats – because median voter theorem pretty much dominates the demographics of those types of seats.
The problem with the hard conservatives taking over the party and losing an election as a result of their hard conservative views (such as climate change denialism) is that the members left after a defeat are themselves most likely to be hard conservative – making it difficult for a Party to escape from their ideological rut and to bridge the gap between the views of their base and the views of the wider electorate.
It’s the political equivalent of disappearing up ones own fundament.
We’ve seen this in action over the last week. The “flood” of correspondence flowing in to the offices of Coalition Senators and Reps members demanding that they not pass the ETS didn’t come from normal people. It came from their ideological base – a euphemism for folks whose views on any given issue are usually two standard deviations removed from the national mean.
Labor experienced a similar thing over the Tampa legislation in 2001 – being inundated with correspondence from true believers that simply wasn’t shared by a majority of the electorate.
Anyway – the whole thing is just getting bizarre and we won’t really know how it’s playing out in the public until early next week when the polling rolls in.
UPDATE: Here they are – Newspoll and the cracker of a Nielsen with questions up the wazoo.
In the meantime, since rationality seems to have completely flown the coop in the Liberal Party – what is the most bizarre possible outcome you can imagine occurring next week?
Considering what’s already happened, it’s probably a fair bet.
Elsewhere (deep breath): The Stump, Pollbludger (comments), Larvatus Prodeo, Christopher Joye, Piping Shrike, Andrew Elder, John Quiggin, Jack the Insider, Political Sword, The Tally Room, Grog’s Gamut
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Is there anyone at all who thinks Aquaman will see this one thru? The commentariat have written him off.
Personally, I think he is doing mostly alright. Anyone who goes to war against the conservative dinosaurs of the liberal party is alright in my book…
Josh says: “Regardless of one’s own personal belief in Global Warming it does seem an extremely strange strategy to have a big public fight over your denialism when we’ve just had and are continuing to have a November of record high temperatures and bushfire risk.”
In Vic, Tas and SA, not to mention the interior, there’s been heavy rain. On top of a wet winter and spring, with a 4 week dry period late Oct/Nov.
The Bureau has done it again- after getting the 3 month forecast for the South East wrong all winter, they predicted a hot dry summer. Until now. They’ve reversed that forecast. As I keep saying, climate science is, ummm, emerging. Weather is much less of a problem.
Peter J. Nicol, after Turnbull, presuming they do roll him, (and I’m not 100% sure they will), anyone else will be a complete let down, a weakened and compromised creature of the lunar right. I’d see a succession of failures stretching out for years as the forecast of our very own, and able, NostraPossum comes to pass: Liberals will become a conservative rump from another epoch, left to die out on the Darwinian battle grounds of political relevance.
Turnbull’s stature is rising by the minute, across the broad spectrum of Australian opinion, but the Minshiviks have become obsessed with re-enacting their former glory, when they could ‘chuck babies overboard’ and scare the electorate. Those days are gone, as we’ve just seen with Rudd fumbling the refugee issue and still coming out untouched in the polls.
No, climate change is a far bigger and scarier issue than any terrorist in a leaky boat, any dog whistled xenophobia or victimisation of homosexuals or single mothers or dole bludgers or any of the petty and silly issues that worked under Howard.
The Minishiviks may just become the Bolsheviks, but their fate will be sealed: cast into the political gulag of their own making.
Yes it has rained in Victoria, but it is still heading for the fourteenth consecutive year of below-average rainfall. The previous record was five in a row.
Possum, is it possible to have an educated guess about the polls regarding which voters are for/against an ETS, and then build a map of which Liberal members are closest to the edge? And perhaps of those that stand to gain (presumably in the country).
I’d particularly like to know where Hockey stands
I’d hope that the Libs themselves are also doing the math.
Rocket Rocket: “Yes it has rained in Victoria, but it is still heading for the fourteenth consecutive year of below-average rainfall. The previous record was five in a row.”
Rocket if there is one thing I’ve learned from reading blogs is that climate change deniers always cherry pick the data they use to support their position. It is their raison d’être.
To me the whole issue boils down to what are you willing to believe. Either all the world’s scientists are involved in a great big conspiracy in which they refuse to criticise each others work in this area (because scientists are well known for the fact that they always accept without investigation what other scientists postulate and publish /sarc) or that the evidence for man-made climate change is overwhelming and common sense dictates that if the available evidence shows that you’re civilisation’s actions are changing the planet’s environment in a significant and potentially highly detrimental way then the logical and moral thing to do is to modify your behaviour to prevent a possible global catastrophe.
I think it’s indicative of where the reality relies when you see that most of the denialists are also your one world government type kooks.
Whilst I lean left of centre in my views I am actually a swing voter come elections and voted for Howard’s government twice. Once because he acted against his party’s hardline base to reduce the number of firearms in our community and once because the Labor party thought Mark Latham was a suitable person to be Prime Minister.
If the Liberal Party becomes the party of an anti-science rump then I can’t see myself ever voting for them again and I know I’m not the only one.
One final point that I really don’t get is that by and large the strongest deniers tend to be far right conservative christian types (now I suspect Al Gore plays a large part in conservatives being opposed to it because his involvement with his doco in their minds made it a political issue rather than a scientific one). It’s a while since I was a kid at my catholic school but I seem to remember that the bible was pretty big on man having dominion over the earth and it’s creatures. The implication and expressed bible teaching of that dominion being that man was to be the custodian of the planet. It’s in my humble opinion pretty unchristian to be actively trying to undermine efforts however paltry to prevent destruction of many of your God’s works on this earth.
Yes Josh and some far-right Catholics are leading the charge – even though their Pope and the Vatican are heading in the opposite direction -
see for the Pope
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/pont-messages/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20090924_summit-climat-change_en.html
and for the Vatican’s “carbon neutral and solar policies”
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/secretariat_state/2008/documents/rc_seg-st_20080212_climate-change_en.html
Hmm picture Minchin as leader… Joe sighs in relief, Malcolm offers to be deputy (unsuccessfully hiding his dagger), Abbot has a tantrum, then everyone laughs and dances the cancan. Months later, the public vote them out as a disgrace and Minchin forms the F*ck Off We’re Right Party.
A big question for me in all this – what the hell is Alan Stockdale doing?! Do Federal Presidents of parties just go to lunch with the GG or something?
if you haven’t read Bob Ellis’s mournful spray (linked to on the Crikey home page) then it is well worth doing so.
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